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Feb. 6, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

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Week in Review: Omar Ousted, AOC’s Oscar-Worthy Performance, CJR's Russiagate Fallout, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #34

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	Good evening, it's Friday, February 3rd.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Over the last few weeks, we have been effectively turning our Friday night shows into a kind of week in review, covering a variety of topics and episodes over the prior week, rather than delving very deeply into just one or two as we do on most shows.
	We decided to somewhat formalize this approach At least to the extent that we formalize anything on this show by using Friday nights from now on as an opportunity to a bit more informally examine multiple subjects and how they interrelate.
	Assuming there's no major breaking news items on Friday, such as a gigantic spy balloon sent from China that appears to be taking a nice and casual tour of the United States mainland while the Biden White House observes it all with great tranquility, we'll start using Friday night shows as this kind of week in review survey starting tonight.
	And tonight we'll begin with what became the circus of the House's removal of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as the bizarre new method of speaking which Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for some reason, decided to contrive while defending her.
	And we'll also look at the substantive arguments, such as they were, that were raised both in favor and in opposition to removing Congresswoman Omar, to do so, we'll also take a look at a couple of recent free speech controversies on college campuses to ask whether some on the right are now insidiously adopting some of the same debate-suppressing tactics that have long defined the worst parts of the woke left.
	Then we'll speak with the independent journalist Michael Tracy about the fallout from the Columbia Journalism Review's four-part indictment of the corporate media's serial lying that drove the Russiagate scandal from the start.
	The media has almost entirely ignored that.
	And we'll also talk to him about growing calls for escalation and even more against both Russia and China seemingly at the same time.
	Tonight, as soon as we're done with our one-hour show here on Rumble, we move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
	To obtain access to our aftershow, simply sign up as a member of our Locals community.
	The red button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	So as all of you undoubtedly have heard, the House of Representatives spent this week accomplishing the first real action under the speakership of new House the House of Representatives spent this week accomplishing the first real action under
	They devoted the week not to speaking about foreign policy in Ukraine and the ongoing war there or to what the U.S. approach to China ought to be, nor did they talk about how to manage problems with the United States economy or the fentanyl crisis or anything else, but instead the entire week was devoted, nor did they talk about how to manage problems with the United States economy or the fentanyl crisis or anything else, but instead the entire week was devoted, or at least three full days, was devoted to whether or not Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Democrat from Minnesota, should or should not
	There was a lot going on as part of this debate that I think is really worth taking a look at, even though the stakes of that singular decision are not particularly high.
	I don't think anyone, including the people on the left, indignant that she would be removed or people on the right who thought it was some kind of urgent priority that this be done could possibly name a single thing that Ileana Omar has actually done on the House Foreign Affairs Committee or how it might be different the country or the world or that committee if she were not on it.
	It's very similar to the debate that happened over whether Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar should be removed From their committees, whether or not Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell ought to be removed from theirs.
	But I do think it's actually important to note that right before Ilhan Omar was removed by what became a party-line vote in the House of Representatives, there were two other members of Congress who were also stripped of their specific membership on a committee.
	Adam Schiff was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
	He was poised to become the ranking member of that committee with the Republicans now in the majority.
	And House Speaker Kevin McCarthy fulfilled his promise to ban him from membership on that committee, arguing, I think very validly and persuasively,
	Not that Adam Schiff expressed political views that were disliked by Republicans or by a majority of the country, but rather that Adam Schiff serially abused his power as the chairman of that committee by constantly leaking classified information for his own benefit, but more so by using the credibility that many people believe that position has to vest all kinds of obvious lies, particularly regarding Russiagate, with the credibility that comes from that position.
	That is a clear abuse of power.
	The arguments about Eric Swalwell were not as persuasive to me, the fact that he seems to have become involved in some way, very personally or otherwise, with someone who turned out to be a Chinese spy.
	But clearly, in part, there was an element of political retaliation and vengeance, namely that the Democrats, under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had created brand new precedents.
	Ones that never existed before in the House of Representatives, including, as I said, removing both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, not due to any claims that they abused their power or engaged in ethical improprieties, instead that they had said things that Democrats disliked.
	In the case of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, things that she said before she was even elected to Congress.
	And people at the time warned that if Democrats are going to create these brand new precedents, she also, Nancy Pelosi, did for the first time in the history of the House, rejected the minority leader's nominees to sit on a committee, the January 6th Select Committee.
	She rejected two of them, and that had never been done before.
	People said at the time, if you're going to create brand new precedents that never existed before, Especially all the while that Democrats and liberals and historians and journalists and the whole resistance crowd are venerating norms, the sacred norms that can never be deviated from.
	And they would spend all their days typing, this is not normal, to try and denounce the fact that something differently was being done.
	At the very same time, Nancy Pelosi was radically revising The way that the House of Representatives has conducted because she wanted to satisfy the resistance base by banning members of Congress from committees that liberals hated.
	And people told her, if you're going to do that, obviously, the Republicans are not going to let you create a standard that only you get to use against them.
	They're going to use it against you.
	Clearly, the effort to remove Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar from their various committees was, in part, an effort to take this precedent and apply it to Democrats, which is a completely fair game.
	Nobody believes in the justness or acceptability of having one political faction create rules that they get to force everyone else to live under that they don't have to live under themselves.
	Of course, if Democrats want to have that be the principles that guide the House, that you get removed from your committee assignments, if you express political views disliked by The party that then becomes the majority, obviously that's going to be used against them as well, as soon as they're in the minority.
	People said that at the time.
	That's part of what this was.
	But in the case of Adam Schiff, I think there was a genuine Reason, like a very valid reason why he should not be sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, namely that he clearly abused his power.
	We devoted an entire show earlier this week to chronicling his serial lying and his ethical transgressions, and so I think that case has been made very validly.
	What made Ilyan Omar's situation different was that nobody was claiming she had engaged in any ethical transgressions.
	Obviously, there's a bunch of internet claims about things she did with her family.
	We interviewed Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was in favor of removing Congresswoman Omar, and she alluded to some of those, but that wasn't really part of the case against her.
	The argument was that, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, Elia and Omar had said things That Republicans and many other people found offensive political views, that the Republicans specifically were claiming were anti-Semitic.
	Exactly the same thing, by the way, that Democrats are saying about Marjorie Taylor Greene, that she had made anti-Semitic comments as well, so the parallel could not have been more perfect.
	And to their credit, there were a lot of Republicans in the House Caucus, including Matt Gaetz.
	We showed Congresswoman Greene this video where Matt Gaetz in an interview said, obviously I'm totally in favor of removing Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from these committees, but in the case of Ilhan Omar, I'm really undecided because I'm very uncomfortable with the precedent that says we will remove you from your committee assignments not because of ethical rules you broke, but because of political opinions you expressed.
	And Marjorie Taylor Greene, when I confronted her with that video, or showed it to her and asked her to respond, did respond, and then at the end she said, and by the way, I bet you're gonna see that at the end of the day, Matt Gaetz goes along with us and ends up voting to remove Ilhan Omar, and she proved to be correct about that.
	But there were multiple House members who were uncomfortable.
	On the grounds that that's a bad precedent, even though Nancy Pelosi herself said it, the Democrats said it, we don't want that to be the precedent going forward.
	And so a lot of them were not going to vote yes unless they were given compromises and changes to the House rules that make it more difficult going forward to remove members of Congress from House committees because of their political views.
	So I think if Congressman Gates were here right now and we hope to have him shortly here to talk about not just that but many other things, he would likely say the reason why I ended up voting yes despite my concerns was because Kevin McCarthy and the House caucus agreed that in the future the rules will be such that this precedent will be severely narrowed.
	It'll be much more difficult in the future to punish people for their political views.
	But I do want to examine a couple of aspects of the debate that emerged because I do think there's some interesting parts of it.
	And I just absolutely have to begin with the video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's, I guess you can call it a speech.
	It's a speech in the most literal sense of the word, in the sense that she stood up and used a microphone and moved her mouth to speak.
	And I'm really mostly starting with this because if I don't, the whole time I'm going to be thinking, When can I get to the AOC video?
	And so I might as well just get it over with so I can then pay attention to the rest of the arguments.
	But this is just a remarkable video on so many levels.
	So let's just let it seep in and talk about it as we watch it.
	Thank you.
	Now, as also as a fellow New Yorker, I think one of the things that we should talk about here is also one of the disgusting legacies after 9-11 has been the targeting and racism against Muslim Americans throughout the United States of America, and this is an extension of that legacy.
	Consistency?
	There is nothing consistent with
	Okay, this is an extension of the anti-Muslim sentiment that has arisen in the wake of 9-11 21 years ago, she's saying, about the removal of Eliane Omar from this committee, even though, as I just got done explaining, the two members of Congress who had been previously removed literally days earlier by the same Republican majority were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, neither of whom I believe with great confidence
	So it seems already like AOC's off to a bad start in terms of the substance of her argument by doing the only thing AOC knows how to do, which is strongly implying every time she opens her mouth that anyone who disagrees with her is speaking from a place of bigotry and racism.
	That's all that was, but it makes no sense.
	Let's continue.
	The Republican Party's continued attack except for the racism and incitement of violence against women of color in this body.
	I had a member of the Republican caucus threaten my life and you all and the Republican caucus rewarded him with one of the most prestigious committee assignments in this Congress.
	She has one minute to speak about her colleague, who she thinks is being unfairly treated, and she devotes a good amount of that time, of course, speaking about herself and her victimhood.
	It's hard to know who she means by threatening her life because you may recall that during the really interesting episode where a bunch of subredditors had decided to invest in stocks that hedge funds had been shorting in order to drive the price up to make those hedge funds lose billions and billions of dollars on their short positions.
	They were doing it just for that reason, and they were having fun while they were doing it.
	It was a remarkable shift of power where, for once, the people manipulating the stock market weren't the Wall Street barons.
	It was a bunch of idiots on subreddit.
	I say that with the greatest love.
	That's how they were describing themselves.
	Their tagline, in fact, was, we can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent.
	It was a really interesting dynamic that was happening there.
	It showed kind of the casino-like nature of Wall Street, how the people who get rich from it aren't getting rich because they're making good investments or helping the country, but because they're just manipulating the casino rules.
	And then at the last minute, the app that purported to be on the side of the little people, Robinhood, intervened and made it impossible any longer for those stocks to be purchased over their app because they wanted to prevent people from driving the price up further seemingly to protect those hedge funds.
	And there was a lot of anger about this and the O.C. went on Twitter, which is where she does all of her work, and she said, "I think this needs to be investigated what Robinhood was doing." And Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, responded to AOC and said, AOC, you know what?
	We're obviously not usually in agreement, but in this case, I think you're right.
	I would love to work with you on investigating whether or not Robinhood ...engaged in illegal or improper conduct in protecting hedge funds at the expense of small investors.
	And instead of saying, well, Senator Cruz, that would be great, I'm really interested in finding corruption on Wall Street, she instead immediately made it about herself in exactly the same way, and she said, I'm willing to work with people, but not people who tried to have me murdered!
	And she was referring to January 6th.
	Now, to this day, no one understands why AOC believes that January 6th somehow became about her.
	You may remember that on January 6th, she emerged after like eight hours and she just typed a tweet that said, I'm okay.
	I'm okay.
	I'm okay.
	You don't need to worry about me.
	I'm beaten up.
	I was put through the wringer.
	You know, they were looking for me, of course, but I'm okay.
	And then she proceeded to claim she was almost murdered.
	And then it turned out that she was actually nowhere near the building where the riot was actually happening.
	She was in a completely separate building.
	She was locked in her office.
	And someone knocked on her door, a security guard, to try and escort her to a safe place.
	And she thought that they were coming to her office to kill her.
	And that's where all this melodrama came from.
	And it turned out none of it was true.
	It was all by product of her neurosis and her need to victimize.
	So anyway, it's just amazing, is it not, that in the middle of this debate over Ileana Omar, a different human being than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she purports to stand up In defense of Ilhan Omar and the minute that she has, already it's, oh, someone tried to kill me, people are trying to murder me.
	Why would anyone try and murder AOC?
	She's completely harmless.
	What has AOC done in Congress that has threatened anyone in power?
	Absolutely nothing.
	But anyway, it's kind of amazing how she always works that in.
	Alright, let's just go a little bit back, because this is my favorite part.
	I just want to go back a little bit here.
	Go back a little.
	I just want to go back a little bit here.
	When you have a member of the Republican caucus who...
	Go back a little.
	She's already kind of doing it, but she's about to spend the last 30 seconds using a manner of speaking that is not how she speaks.
	It's never been how she speaks.
	She grew up in Westchester.
	Everybody knows how AOC speaks.
	She went to Boston University.
	I interviewed her.
	She doesn't talk like this.
	And she has all new, she's clearly, let's just be honest, she's clearly mimicking, in the most condescending way possible, the speaking style of a black preacher from the South.
	As though she's, like, in a Baptist church in South Carolina.
	And it would be one thing if that was actually how she spoke.
	If that's how she expressed herself, then that's fine.
	There are people who speak like that.
	Some are very effective at that.
	It is a real speaking style.
	It's just not hers.
	She's, like, putting on a costume.
	And it's bizarre to watch.
	She's, like, raising her hand like this, like she's in a church, like a black church.
	But she's not any of that, and no one has ever seen her speak this way before.
	So why did she just suddenly decide to wake up and adopt a completely new manner of expression that actually, under the norms of the left, when they talk about things like cultural appropriation and blackface and the like, this is right up to that, if not diving directly through it.
	But anyway, let's just watch.
	I mean, you can see her there.
	She has that hand gesture up like this, kind of, cheers while Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman sit behind her, like, in a pew, kind of, cheering for her as she does it.
	It's really extraordinary to watch.
	And the Republican caucus rewarded him with one of the most prestigious committee assignments in this Congress.
	Don't tell me this is about consistency.
	Don't tell me that this is about an abdic- a condemnation of anti-Semitic remarks when you have a member of the Republican caucus who has talked about Jewish space lasers and an entire amount of tropes and- Okay.
	She's referring there to Marty Taylor Greene.
	She's saying, don't tell me this is about consistency when you have Marjorie Taylor Greene who has spoken of Jewish space lasers.
	There are certain things that, certain lies that once they get disseminated by enough people, it really is true.
	This was Joseph Goebbels who first observed this, that once a lie is repeated enough times, it turns into truth.
	So, most people will believe, and will go to their graves believing, that Marjorie Taylor Greene once wrote about, quote, Jewish space lasers.
	Even though she never uttered that phrase in her life, she did write about space lasers, and in another part of the passage she talked about the Rothschilds, but she just didn't say Jewish space lasers.
	And AOC also went on CNN and made the same claim.
	It's just a false claim.
	It's the same way that people are going to believe until they die.
	that the Pulse Massacre in 2016 was driven by anti-gay animists, even though the only people who have actually done reporting on that case, specifically the trial of the killer's wife, she was acquitted, the evidence was overwhelming and conclusive that he had no idea that was even a gay club, let alone what was motivated by anti-LGBT animists, but it's too valuable of a lie to ever let, to allow people to ever let it go.
	Same thing here.
	Until Marjorie Taylor Greene dies, it's probably going to be the first paragraph of her New York Times obituary that she once raised, created controversy by talking about quote, Jewish space lasers, even though she actually never uttered that phrase.
	It's just, it's impossible to get this out of people's brains.
	Let's watch the end of this.
	Jewish space lasers and an entire amount of tropes and also elevated her to some of the highest committee assignments in this body.
	This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America.
	This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America, such as Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who days before were also removed from their committee assignments.
	We're nearing the end.
	Women of color in the United States of America, don't tell me because I didn't get a single apology.
	My life was threatened.
	Thank you.
	Banging on the podium.
	She took that notebook, she banged it on the podium.
	And, of course, she ended by talking about herself again.
	She got no apologies, but her life was threatened when people hired hitmen to go and have her murdered for all the radical politics that she does.
	But what's amazing about this is that this became incredibly viral in large part because obviously people were mocking, I mean, even Hillary Clinton's fake Southern accent, which if you haven't seen, I really encourage you to go on YouTube and watch.
	It's, you know, she grew up in Illinois.
	She went to Yale and then Yale Law School.
	She went to Wellesley and then Yale Law School.
	That's where she met Bill Clinton.
	And then when they moved for like a few years to Arkansas, she was there for like two years, and Bill Clinton ran for Attorney General.
	She just started adopting this completely, completely fake Southern accent, like very deep.
	And she gave that interview in 1991, when Bill Clinton's affairs first surfaced, and she obviously wanted to get to the White House desperately, she's Hillary Clinton after all, and so she went on to this interview, I think it was with Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters, and she said, I'm not the kind of woman who's just gonna stand by my man.
	I mean, it's a completely fake accent that she put on, but it was actually more convincing, even though Hillary grew up in this Presbyterian, upper-middle class neighborhood in Illinois, and then went to Wellesley and Yale Law School, never went near the South in her life until she went to Arkansas for a couple years and started speaking that way.
	This is really out of nowhere.
	I mean, at least if you're Hillary Clinton, You can make the argument that, well, she's been in Arkansas, maybe people do start picking up speech patterns of those around us.
	But AOC, she never got near this kind of speaking before.
	It's just stunning.
	But I think the substantive part of it, to the extent that there is, is just like this reflex that automatically you wind up Democrats and Liberals and AOC, and they just start immediately insisting that everyone who's against them in whatever debate they're having is motivated by racism.
	It's not because Ilhan Omar is black.
	Republicans actually recruited a Somalian Republican to run against her, or even, I believe, a Democratic primary challenger.
	Ilhan Omar almost lost her Democratic primary challenge this year.
	She won by one and a half or two points.
	And her opponent was a black woman.
	I think the Republicans did recruit a black woman to run against her.
	That's not the reason.
	We're not targeting women of color.
	We all know why Ilhan Omar was targeted, and that's because she said things about Israel that are outside of the balance of what is permissible to speak, and that many, many people truly believe is anti-Semitic.
	That's why Ilhan Omar was chosen, sat alongside the other women of color like Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
	Now, there is another thing that AOC said today that I think is also so interesting about Democratic Party politics, and it was first pointed out By Nick Cruz, who's been on this show a couple of times and always has his eye on what's going on in Democratic Party politics.
	He said, quote, AOC and the squad are publicly happy about being in the minority in the House because there is less pressure on governing and more opportunity for useless red-blue political theater.
	Seriously, look at what AOC says here at WTF.
	I wish I knew what WTF was, but I believe it's a vulgarity and therefore not something that I would ever use or know.
	And he points to this article.
	Believe it's from the New Republic, and the title of it is, The Squad is Out of Power and Relishing a New Fight Inside the Progressive Flank's Plans to Regroup Under the Republican House.
	And here's what AOC says, quote, I actually feel good about all of this, meaning being in the minority.
	Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told me in early January, quote, I think there are certain aspects here where we can flex our muscles even more sometimes than under a Democratic majority.
	How is it that you can flex your muscles more when you're in the minority?
	Ocasio-Cortez argued that being in the minority, quote, allows us to propose and work on legislation in ways that are just simply difficult when you're a governing majority and there are literally fires that you are putting out every single day.
	So, when AOC was in the majority, the problem was there were literally, not metaphorically, literally fires that AOC and her Democratic colleagues were putting out every single day.
	It's exhausting!
	Have you ever tried going around putting out fires that are just breaking out all over the place?
	You have to like, with a fire extinguisher, literally put them out the way AOC did?
	Now that she doesn't have that responsibility anymore, she's freed from governing our country, she can work on things like completely empty Resolutions, condemning people as racist, and having fights on Twitter, which is what she loves to do most.
	She's now relieved from the opportunity to govern.
	That's what she's saying here.
	She says she prefers to be in the minority.
	So presumably, this is the kind of thing that she wants to do.
	Earlier today, Marjorie Taylor Greene went onto Twitter and said to AOC, I have repeatedly asked you to debate me, but you have been a coward and can't even respond.
	But you go on CNN and lie about me.
	And what she's referring to there is what I just said, which is AOC went on CNN and tried to justify Eleonora's comments by saying that Marjorie Taylor Greene was the real anti-Semite because she talked about Jewish space slaves.
	A total lie.
	Marjorie Taylor Greene never said that.
	I just went over that.
	So Marjorie Taylor Greene is understandably upset.
	She's saying, let's have a debate.
	When are you going to be an actual adult and actually debate me on policy instead of run your mouth like a teenage girl?
	And I've heard this about AOC a lot from Democrats in the House.
	People who say, oh, behind your back, she'll talk all tough.
	And she threatens you with primary challenges.
	And she talks critically behind your back.
	But then when she's in front of you, she's extremely timid.
	And people don't respect that.
	People who are willing to run to the safety and comfort of Anderson Cooper and say things about their colleagues in the House, but then when they actually meet those colleagues in the House, they get very, very to kind of crawl into this little womb.
	I've heard that from Democrats and Republicans about AOC.
	I mean, people will say about Bernie Sanders and even Ellie and Omar.
	Obviously, I don't agree with them, but they really are, like, very strong in their beliefs.
	They'll stand around and look you in the face and confront you and talk to you, but AOC does exactly this.
	I've heard this from many people, and this is what AOC responded.
	Hey there!
	Hey there!
	In case you forgot, we sit on the same committee, which debated for the first time this week.
	I don't blame you if you forgot.
	You spent almost no time there in the few minutes you did show up.
	I mean, she's like coddling on Marjorie Taylor Greene for not paying attention in class.
	You spent almost no time there in the few minutes you did show up.
	You claimed one elementary school got $5 billion to teach CRT.
	This is pathetic.
	This is like professional wrestling.
	This is what AOC wants to do.
	She got, we don't show it, but I think 15,000 retweets, probably over 100,000 likes.
	This is the kind of thing AOC wants to be doing all the time.
	That's why she's happy not to be in the majority and not have to be literally putting out fires every day so that she can be the social media star that she wants to be.
	That's what so many of our members of Congress actually want to be.
	Now, I want to just talk about the substance of the Eliane Omar thing before we bring in Michael Tracy, who's very patiently and happily waiting, I'm sure, while he listens to my monologue, along with all of you.
	Because there was an interesting aspect to it, and I also had a connection to the thing that Eliane Omar first said that got her in trouble as an alleged anti-Semite.
	It actually began with a tweet of mine, From February of 2019, what had happened was Kevin McCarthy had threatened to punish Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib because they had been criticizing Israel.
	He was saying they should be stripped of committee assignments back then, they should be reprimanded or in other ways sanctioned in part because no one, he didn't specify what the comments were.
	Rashida Tlaib had just a month before said she supported a boycott of Israel.
	I believe Ilhan Omar had done the same.
	But it was unclear, but here was a leader of a Republican, the Republican caucus in the House, again, not threatening to punish people for ethical transgressions, not threatening to punish people for supporting boycotts of American states, as we've gone over before.
	Republican governors and Andrew Cuomo, people like that, are totally fine if you Boycott Indiana or North Carolina over their bathroom laws or gender, or if you boycott Georgia over their voting rights laws.
	That's totally fine.
	You can boycott your fellow citizens, but you can't boycott Israel.
	And Kevin McCarthy threatened them with punishment.
	And I said, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib over their criticism of Israel.
	It's stunning how much time U.S.
	political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if that means attacking free speech rights of Americans.
	That is amazing to me how much time Israel takes and how Even someone who's supposedly running the Republican Party in the House, with all the many problems that people in our country have, takes time out, just like the Republicans did today, to sanction and punish people for what they have to say about, whatever you think of Israel, a foreign country.
	It's actually a foreign country.
	You're allowed to criticize the foreign country.
	And in response to my tweet, Ilya Nomer said, it's all about the Benjamins, baby.
	And that was what led to this entire claim that she was anti-Semitic.
	Now, it is true that there is a kind of longstanding trope about Jews, that Jews think more about money than other ethnic and racial groups, that they're more driven by money.
	It's obviously something that has been used as a pillar of anti-Semitism for a long time.
	The way that every group has tropes.
	There are tropes about black people, there are tropes about Latinos, there are tropes about gay people, and there are tropes about Muslims, and there are tropes about Jews.
	But it's also true that in Washington, things do run by well-funded lobbies.
	That's how Washington works.
	And you never get in trouble if you say the reason why the House just protected Goldman Sachs is because of how much money Wall Street pours into lobbies.
	And you never get in trouble if you observe correctly that one of the reasons why gun control legislation is difficult to pass through the Congress is because the NRA is a powerful and well-financed lobby.
	It is.
	And you don't get in trouble if you say that about Big Tech, or about the arms industry, or about other groups, because that is how Washington works and everyone knows it.
	If you have a well-financed lobbying group, which is absolutely the right of everyone to have, if you believe in policy you have the absolute right to form lobbying groups and political activism, including using money to Influence members of Congress, you get in no trouble for that.
	And she was saying the reason why Republican leaders, or US politicians in general, care so much about Israel, even though it's actually not part of our country, is because there's a very well-financed group, AIPAC and related groups, that have a lot of power in Washington.
	That's just true.
	That's just true.
	Trying to ban that, a discussion of that on the grounds that it's anti-Semitic, it's like trying to ban debates over police policy on the grounds that it's racist to do so, trying to ban a discussion of the efficacy or dangers of hormone-blocking pills or medications for teenagers on the grounds that that's transphobic.
	It's just a way of trying to suppress debate about a true fact by using allegations of racism to do it, even though, as Ilyan Omar acknowledged, There is an element of an anti-Semitic trope in here as well that Jews are connected to money.
	So it's difficult when navigating this, but it certainly has to be the case that a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is entitled to criticize the state of Israel, and it certainly has to be the case that all of us are entitled to observe that one of the reasons policies get made in Washington is because they have well-financed groups behind them.
	Gun control lobby, the abortion lobby, Wall Street, big tech, the arms industry, and the Israel lobby.
	There's many other examples as well.
	That can't be off-limits to you to say.
	Now, in case you think it is off-limits, here is a tweet from Kevin McCarthy from... We don't have the date here.
	I believe the date is... Maybe someone can get the date for us.
	He deleted the tweet, and I think you're about to find out why.
	He said, quote, this is what was when Kevin McCarthy was in the minority.
	He said, we cannot allow George Soros, the Jewish entrepreneur and financier, Tom Steyer, the Jewish billionaire who ran for president, and Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish media entrepreneur.
	We cannot allow these three Jews to buy, in all capital letters, this election.
	Get out and vote, Republican November 6th.
	Hashtag MAGA.
	Now, if you ask me if there's anything wrong with this tweet, I'm going to tell you no.
	Because George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg are actually billionaires who spend enormous sums of money to influence elections or to buy elections.
	And the fact that all three of them happen to be Jews doesn't change the fact that they all do that.
	But if you're really that sensitive with such a hair-trigger sensitivity to memes lurking within arguments, anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism lurking with arguments as a result of their relationship to longstanding memes,
	I want someone to distinguish for me this Kevin McCarthy tweet about three Jews trying to buy an election, all of whom are billionaires, primarily on Omar's observation that a reason why a lot of American political leaders spend so much time on Israel is because there's a powerful and well-financed lobby behind it.
	You can't distinguish these.
	If your radar is really that hair trigger when it comes to anti-Semitism accusations.
	And for me, that's the concern when it comes to Iliana Omar, is that just like the woke left, over and over, uses kind of exaggerated or invented or very kind of dubious interpretations to accuse everyone of being racist or misogynistic or transphobic or homophobic as a way of shutting down debate.
	You can't question whether or not trans women should compete in male sports.
	Without that being accused of transphobic, you can't question whether or not you should get more funding for the police without being accused of being a racist.
	You can't question whether there's been inadequate due process for people accused of sexual harassment without being accused of being a misogynist.
	Those are all terrible debate-suppressing manipulations of bigotry accusations.
	You also can't limit debate over Israel And you have support for it or for the reality that a lot of people spend money to influence elections, some of whom happen to be Jewish, by accusing everybody who does that of being an anti-Semite.
	I see a huge parallel here.
	And then I also see a parallel in how amazingly the left grants to itself license to use arguments to defend people against bigotry accusations that in every other context in the left would be unacceptable.
	So here is a Tweet from Jeremy Slevin, who is a senior aide to Ilhan Omar, who obviously is trying to defend her from anti-Semitism accusations.
	He went onto Twitter yesterday, and here was his defense.
	Quote, no matter how many lies, smears, and hate come her way, this Jew is proud to be a part of Team Omar today and every day.
	And got a lot of Twitter love.
	So, I don't know, I would not recommend trying this at home if you're on the right.
	If you get accused of racism and being a racist, which I'm sure you have if you're on the right, since as Aoshi showed, that's the instinctive tactic people use whenever they're engaged in debates, if you're on the left, to accuse people of being a racist, try this, or don't try this, actually.
	Do not say in response, how can I be a racist when it just so happens that I actually employ a lot of black people?
	Or a lot of Latinos, or a lot of gay people.
	Or that one time I actually had a business and hired a trans person, so how can I be transphobic?
	That would not be taken well by the left.
	But apparently when offered in defense of Ileana Omar, he's essentially saying, how can Ileana Omar be an anti-Semite when she gave me a job and let me work for her and I'm a Jew?
	It's just everything switches when it comes to debates over wokeism and bigotry accusations and the like.
	The left and right take completely opposite sides when it's racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, over here, and then antisemitism over here.
	And I think that's part of what you were seeing in the Eleanor Omar debate and part of what bothered me about what that happened.
	So I want to talk a little bit about developments with Russia and China, but I want to actually delve a little bit more into this question of whether or not there seems to be a shifting standard when it comes to racism accusations, when it comes to Israel and anti-semitism and the left and the right and how they wield them.
	And to do that, let's bring in Michael Tracy, who is very patiently and happily waiting, and I'm going to show him a few things and get his reaction.
	Hello, Michael.
	Are you there?
	Good evening.
	Maybe we need to make sure that the audience can hear Michael.
	I caught everybody by surprise.
	So I know, Michael, we're going to get you up there, but I actually want to show a couple of articles because no one needs to stare at your made-up and beautiful face while I do that, but you can just listen and then I'm going to get your reaction.
	I want to propose to you the following, which is that oftentimes when... I'm hearing Michael in my ear.
	I don't know if the audience can hear him or not, but let me... Michael, are you there?
	Yeah, I'm here.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, I can hear you now.
	Very good of you to be with us.
	Thank you.
	I couldn't respond to your witty insults for the audience to evaluate.
	I had a lot to make sure.
	I just needed the stage to myself, but I'm now happy to...
	Before I forget, the ironic thing about AOC having that melodramatic spiel on the floor of the House is, I vividly remember, because I actually had a Twitter exchange with her myself about it at the time, in February of 2019, when you got the ball rolling on Omar being delus with accusations that she was trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, quote-unquote.
	AOC was one of the first out of the gate to tacitly concede What Ilyan Omar had said.
	What Ilyan Omar had said.
	AOC was the first to concede.
	AOC acknowledged what Omar said was anti-Semitic, so she threw her under the bus right away.
	She was one of the first.
	She kind of let down the guardrails so everybody could say, look, even AOC acknowledges that Omar caused such pain and needed to apologize for her using that song quote in a tweet.
	So AOC herself is one of the chief actors responsible for actually allowing that narrative to congeal that Omar was guilty of anti-Semitic trope.
	trafficking and needed to apologize and needed to repudiate all the pain she had.
	Well, that's because, unfortunately, the United States, 20 years after 9-11, has still not repudiated its anti-Muslim sentiments.
	And that's one of the reasons why AOC was willing to throw Ilyan Omar under the bus.
	And also, there is a campaign to strip women of color, such as Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilyan Omar, from their committee assignments, and as part of that, that was another reason why AOC was so willing to ratify this idea that Ilyan Omar had spread anti-Semitic tropes.
	But, Michael, let me show you a couple of instances, recent ones and one that was a little bit in the past, About how anti-Semitism accusations emerge in college campuses that I find a little bit ironic and I want to get your views on this because the critique of the right of woke leftism, one of the critiques which I share, is that people who use wokeism on the left
	Do so by concocting or having a very hair-trigger sensitivity to bigotry that they claim is lurking within all of their opponents.
	And they will accuse people of being racist or misogynist at the drop of a hat because they'll claim that things are lurking, that they used a trope inadvertently like they did with Billy and Omar.
	He didn't actually say anything.
	And that this is an unfair way to smear people's reputations and to shut down debate.
	are Jewish.
	They say the things she said raised the prospect had some kind of lurking, hidden within it anti-Semitism and that this is an unfair way to smear people's reputations and to shut down debate.
	That it's a way of saying you can't debate police policy, you can't question trans dogma because if you do you stand accused of these bigotries.
	And yet I would suggest that whenever it comes to anti-Semitism in Israel very similar tactics are used by parts of the right in order to achieve the same aim.
	So let me show you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.
	One was from 2014.
	Here the article you're going to see is from the New York Times.
	The headline is, Professor's Angry Tweets on Gaza Cost Him a Job.
	And let's review what happened.
	Quote, the trustees of the University of Illinois voted on Thursday to block the appointment of Steven Salatia, a Palestinian American professor who had been offered a tenured position last year following a campaign by pro-Israel students and Pro-Israel students, faculty members, and donors who contended that his Twitter comments on the bombardment of Gaza by Israel this summer were anti-Semitic.
	And here's what the people said to justify this professor's firing or the removal of his offer, his tenure offer.
	to teach at the University of Illinois to justify it.
	Quote, hate speech is never acceptable for those applying for a tenure position.
	Incitement to violence is never acceptable.
	Josh Cooper, a college senior who collected 1300 signatures on a petition against the appointment, told the trustees before the vote, in other words, speech is literal violence.
	The student, a former intern for AIPAC, Added that, quote, there must be a relationship between free speech and civility.
	The lack of civility itself is a mechanism for silencing alternative views, he said.
	Speaking after the vote, the university president, Robert Easter, endorsed that contention of pro-Israel students, saying, quote, Professor Saleh's approach indicates he would be incapable of fostering a classroom environment where conflicting opinions would be given equal consideration.
	In a blog post written last month, the Chancellor insisted that her decision to stop Mr. Salesha from taking up his post, quote, was not influenced in any way by his positions on the conflict in the Middle East nor his criticism of Israel.
	The issue, she said, was, quote, the uncivil tenor of his comments and concerns expressed by pro-Israel students who said they would feel intimidated by the professor.
	We're talking here not about third graders being taught things that make them uncomfortable or make their parents uncomfortable.
	We're talking about adults, college students.
	And their argument is, we feel intimidated by this professor because he has very strong views on what he regards as the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
	Quote, what we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois, Ms.
	Weiss wrote last month, are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.
	This is what Noah Feingold, a member of the pro-Israel student group, told The Forward, quote, It's about feeling safe on campus.
	He wants safe spaces.
	It's about feeling safe on campus.
	This is a professor who tweeted that if you support Israel, you're an awful person.
	Now, that sounds a lot to me like what woke professors and students do when demanding that conservatives be fired from colleges because they've made anti-gay statements or comments that are regarded as racist, that it makes African-American students or other people of color who are students and adults feel uncomfortable in the classroom.
	Here is a Daily Mail article that just from this week
	is about a similar controversy, I won't go through it all, I'll just summarize it for you, where an Arab student was expressing, an Arab professor, rather, was expressing criticism of Israel, and she had also invited to speak pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli speakers to college, where she teaches adults, and numerous Jewish students at George Washington University, the university where she teaches, complained that they feel unsafe,
	...that they feel intimidated, that they feel like they're not allowed to be heard as a result of this psychology professor's views on Israel.
	Now, I went to George Washington University as an alma mater.
	Certainly back then, it was dominated overwhelmingly by upper-middle class Jewish students, largely from New York, from Long Island, but also from South Florida.
	The idea, it's situated in the middle of Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House.
	The idea that adult students are going to feel unsafe or uncomfortable because an Arab professor is making some very harsh criticisms of Israel seems to be exactly the kinds of arguments that are made by woke students on the left when they want to shut down debate.
	And just to underscore the point, I just picked a random Effort on the part of left-wing students to punish a college professor for expressing right-wing views.
	Here from the Texas Tribune in July of 2022, the title is, quote, UT students condemn UT Dallas professor for homophobic tweet about monkey pox.
	So these students, these left-wing students, want to get a professor at the University of Texas Dallas fired because he said his tweet about monkeypox was homophobic.
	Quote, Robert Aden Longren, the student, went to high school in Waukesha, and remembers a class in which students held a debate about whether transgender people should even exist.
	Incidents like these led Longerin, who identifies as non-binary, to enroll at the University of Texas at Dallas to get away from the homophobia and transphobia that surrounded him growing up.
	I don't know if the paper is misgendering this person or not.
	He says he's non-binary.
	Maybe he uses him as pronouns.
	Who knows?
	UT Dallas is often listed by websites that provide college rankings as one of the few LGBTQ-friendly universities in the Southwest, and Longerin said that in his first two years as a student there, he experienced an open and welcoming environment.
	He loved UT Dallas's gender-inclusive housing option and got involved with the university's many LGBTQ-plus student organizations.
	But he said he felt like he was back where he grew up in Waukesha when he saw a homophobic tweet from UT Dallas computer science professor Timothy Farage about the recent monkeypox outbreak, which is predominantly spread among gay men.
	Farage's tweet suggested the virus is sexually transmitted and asked, quote, can we at least try to find a cure for homosexuality, especially among men?
	Now I have to say I don't particularly like that comment.
	I find that comment stupid.
	But I would not feel scared or intimidated as an adult having a professor who tweets those things at my college.
	Health officials say one of the main ways monkeypox spreads is through prolonged physical contact.
	I can't do that again.
	I can't go through that again.
	I just can't.
	I can't.
	the student said, quote, "I came to this university to escape homophobia in my town, and now I've encountered something that puts me right back there," Longeran told the Texas Tribune.
	I can't do that again.
	I can't go through that again.
	I just can't.
	I can't.
	I can't.
	I did a little bit of dramatic license, but that was basically the tone.
	The incident, which was first reported by the student-run newspaper on campus, The Mercury, has sparked an outcry among LGBTQ students and allies, and allies, not just LGBTQ plus students, but also their allies, "For demanding UT Dallas administrators take quote, "substantive action," meaning punishment, "against the professor and reaffirm that the university "is the bastion of inclusivity that it touts to be." UT Dallas says it is investigating the complaints about the tweet.
	Now, Michael, these sound very similar to me.
	That the case of the non-binary student wanting this professor fired because the professor said something offensive about gay men and monkey pox is making very similar arguments and using very similar language to the language being used by Jewish students and defenders of Israel, also adults in college, to try and get professors fired who are Arab or Palestinian, who made criticisms of Israel,
	Well, forget even examples from college campuses.
	Let me read to you a quote that was uttered yesterday by Congressman Mike Lawler, freshman congressman, Republican from New York.
	And tell me what kind of political tendency you would ordinarily associate this style of rhetoric with.
	Quote, individuals who hold such hateful views should rightly be barred from that type of committee.
	Words matter.
	Rhetoric matters.
	It leads to harm.
	And so the Congresswoman is being held accountable for her words and actions.
	Now that seems just like knee-jerk, standard fare, Liberal rhetoric when they're making an identity-based complaint about the rhetorical excesses of somebody that they regard to be... That was about Omar, right?
	That was about Omar, yeah.
	That was Mike Lawler, the Republican congressman, justifying why he voted to oust Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday.
	And he's appropriating, I don't know if it's consciously or not, almost virtually the exact same rhetoric that you'd associate with these kind of moralizing, jargon-infused liberals.
	But all of a sudden, on this one particular topic, meaning Israel slash anti-Semitism, that same jargon is just freely adopted by Republicans left and right.
	Maybe they're trying to do one-upsmanship.
	Maybe they don't fully believe it.
	No, but that's the thing.
	I think that's an important point.
	Because if that's what this were, kind of like, Part of what the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilian Elmar was about was to do a tit-for-tat saying, okay, if you're going to strip people of their committee assignments because of things they said that you don't like, we're going to do the same.
	If that's what this were, kind of like almost satirically mocking the left's use of safe spaces and I need to feel safe in my college campuses or in my classrooms, if they were They're purposely appropriating that language just to make the point or to say, if you're going to make us live under these standards, we want you to live under them too.
	I wouldn't have a problem with it.
	That's not what this is.
	This is earnest.
	They are really saying that if you go too far in your criticism of Israel, it is anti-Semitic, Or if a professor feels too strongly about Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians, that makes it unsafe for Jewish students to speak.
	They're not making a kind of satirical or mocking appropriation of this woke rhetoric.
	This is what bothers me, is that when it comes to every single form of Bigotry accusation.
	Oh, you're a racist.
	You're a misogynist.
	You're a transphobe.
	You're a homophobe.
	You're an Islamophobe.
	The whole list.
	People on the right will mock it often as a kind of obviously cynical way to destroy the reputation of critics and shut down debate.
	The minute, though, the accusation becomes anti-semitic their antenna go up and they have the exact sensitivity to tropes and hidden meanings and and all kinds of you know uh like unintentional ways of expressing animosity towards a group that they constantly mock when the left does it on every other form of bigotry the roles completely reverse yeah
	if you read the text of the resolution that republicans passed yesterday, it doesn't read as satirical.
	It reads as deadly earnest.
	They're saying Omar brought dishonor upon the house by virtue of, among other things, the quote tweet that she did of your tweet in February of 2019.
	And the House Republican majority, one of their first actions apparently is to rush to defend the honor of AIPAC four years after she did a particular tweet that is so just embedded in their memories and left such a scar on them that they have been waiting all this time to ensure that they could exact appropriate retribution for it from Omar.
	So, they're actually using this as a substantive means by which to declare that Omar, in various comments of hers where she supposedly does quote-unquote false equivalency, that's in the text of the resolution, to besmirch Israel, That means that she ought not to be able to serve on this particular committee.
	So there's nothing satirical or tongue-in-cheek about the invocation of this kind of rhetoric in the actual text of the resolution that they passed.
	It seems like they at least are purporting to have a firm belief in the quote-unquote harm that is caused by Omar's rhetoric.
	And remember, this is not an identity-based grievance that they're making.
	They're saying that it is rightfully being alleged that Omar has actually caused people to become frail and fragile and hurt and emotionally wrecked by virtue of her rhetoric.
	Whereas in many other cases, often with good justification, They would dismiss the legitimacy of those identity-based grievances to stifle debate, but here they openly embrace it because it often has sometimes short-term sort of partisan benefit for them to demonize certain Democrats that they regard as overly, you know, I don't know, maybe too left-wing.
	And also it has the dual purpose of obviously demonstrating how unwavering they are in their commitment to the eternal
	Yeah, and at the end of the day, you know, it was interesting, I don't know if you saw it, but when I interviewed Congresswoman Taylor Greene on, when was it, I think Tuesday, when I asked her about her view of Ilhan Omar, the argument I presented to her was like, look, Israel is actually a foreign country.
	It's not the 51st state.
	In America, and it has to be, even if you don't agree with the criticism, it has to be possible for a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of all committees, to be able to question or even dissent from the policy of the United States that says we're going to give billions and billions of dollars of aid to Israel every year.
	And she was having none of that.
	She said, I don't think, you know, I think that this crosses over into anti-Semitism.
	And then when she explained her opposition To U.S.
	support for the war in Ukraine, she said Ukraine is not the 51st American state.
	It's actually a foreign country.
	Why should we in the United States, with all the suffering that I see in my constituents with fentanyl overdoses and the inability to stay at home and take care of your kids if you're, you know, a working couple, you have to have both parties going to work.
	These people in these countries that we're giving aid to have better standards of living.
	She could see that for Ukraine, but wanted to nonetheless keep Israel off limits from debate, or at least say if you go too far, it's anti-Semitic.
	Because at the end of the day, even if somebody does go too far, the votes on Israel in the Congress and the Senate are something like 412 to 13 in favor of Israel.
	Every time that it comes up, it's not as though if you have one or two people dissenting on the question of Israel, then somehow the Israeli-U.S.
	relationship is going to be in jeopardy.
	But any kind of dissent has to be immediately crushed and demonized as anti-Semitic, much like the left does when it comes to other kinds of bigotry accusations.
	But unless you have more on that, why don't we go ahead and talk about Russia?
	Well, just very quickly, another irony is that for years the number one recipient of U.S.
	military aid was Israel.
	Only in the past year has it been supplanted by, guess who, Ukraine.
	So, you know, given this logic apparently that Marjorie Taylor Greene and maybe other Republicans buy into, until 2022-23, The number one recipient of U.S.
	aid was off-limits from any criticism that might be seen to go a little bit overboard or be seen to be invoking certain tropes.
	But now that it's been supplanted by Ukraine, apparently we're all allowed to express those criticisms without fear that we're going to get labeled bigoted.
	And by the way, that amazingly record-setting aid package was negotiated with Israel, not by George W. Bush or Donald Trump, but by Barack Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
	that's who signed the deal giving Israel this record-breaking amount of aid.
	And if you are a country giving enormous amounts of aid to another country, you absolutely, as American citizen and member of Congress, have the right to question that policy without being smeared as a bigot and anti-Semite, just like all these other policies should be subject to debate as well without being called a racist and misogynist and the rest of it.
	All right, let's talk about this amazing report that came out from the Columbia Journalism Review, One of the real bastions of mainstream journalism It's connected to the Columbia Journalism School, the most mainstream and prestigious journalism school in the country.
	It's part of that.
	It's part of that school.
	People in the mainstream media take it very seriously.
	It's a four-part investigative expose that was written by someone who's like the living, breathing embodiment of mainstream media, who has spent 30 years inside Jeff Gerth, who has spent 30 years inside the New York Times, won a Pulitzer in 1999 for his investigation of how the U.S.
	is allowing technology to fall into the hands of China.
	It doesn't get more of a mainstream journalist than that.
	And he basically publishes a four-part, 24,000-word indictment of NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post for their serializing and exaggeration of recklessness when it comes to Russiagate.
	We did an entire show a few days ago going through the revelations.
	There you see it on the screen, knowing that the media was going to ignore it.
	And basically, the media did ignore it.
	The only person in the media who Bothered to answer was David Corn of Mother Jones.
	David Corn just so happens to be the first journalist to mainstream the Steele dossier, which turned out to be a total fraud, by writing a couple of months before the election in 2016 that the FBI has in their hands, as do many people in Washington, a document that suggests that there's untoward relations between Trump and the Kremlin.
	He was talking about the Steele dossier.
	His colleague with whom he's written books, Michael Isikoff, became the first person to kind of take that dossier and describe it in further detail.
	So David Corn was the only person in media to even respond to this Columbia Journalism Review.
	And of course, he called it the big fail.
	It published 24,000 words on Russiagate and missed the point.
	And Matt Taibbi said, one of the first reporters to get beat on the Steele dossier story has the nerve to call the Columbia Journalism Review's excoriation of Russiagate coverage, quote, A big fail.
	Now, you kind of see it took a few days, but they know they can't completely ignore this.
	This is not published in Grayzone or like by some YouTuber.
	It's published in the journal that they regard as the most kind of mainstream.
	And so here today, you see, here was the The article itself is in the Columbia Journalism Review.
	We went over all of its key revelations, but let me get that David Frum tweet up, and I just want to show you this, Michael, and then ask you about this, because David Frum is now one of the people who is Rising to speak up about it.
	Here I have it on my screen, so if we can put it on the screen there.
	David Frum this morning said, referring to this Columbia Journalism Review piece, though not mentioning it by name, quote, Russia helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
	Trump welcomed Russian help.
	Trump's intimates sought even more help.
	Trump's campaign manager shared information, all repeatedly lied about it.
	In office, Trump supported Russian policy goals, saved you 24,000 words.
	So, the fact that the only people responding to this is David Cornyn, first mainstream to steal dossier, and the main sponsor of the worst hoax from the prior generation, which was Iraqi WMD's David Frum, and he was a speechwriter for the Bush White House, he's now the one standing up in defense of Russiagate, and against the Columbia Journalism view, I think reveals a great deal.
	What do you make of all this?
	The fact that they took them a few days to even acknowledge it, and now this is how they're responding.
	Well, remember, David Corn didn't even just mainstream the Steele dossier.
	He's the one who passed a copy of the Steele dossier to his longtime pal, James Baker, who was the FBI General Counsel, and then later on, as we learned from the Twitter files from Matt Taibbi, was intimately involved in the decision-making at Twitter, where he was hired To carry out that censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story linked to the New York Post.
	So, David Corn was intimately involved in engineering the Steele dossier as becoming a major story within the American media ecosystem.
	So he wasn't just some bystander, he was actually a participant.
	And, you know, Corn has been somebody for a long time who has just been very snidely dismissive of any critiques of his coverage of this story.
	And he always attributes it to some sort of right wing sort of conspiracy cabal rather than actually addressing the merits of the critique.
	But, you know, I guess that's neither here nor there because he's never really been held accountable.
	If we want to talk about accountability and harm that's caused.
	Well, lots of harm was caused by that Russiagate narrative and very few people in positions of influence who peddled it have made been made to pay any price for their failings.
	You know, one thing that stands out in that David Frum tweet Where he's purported to just summarize the 24,000-word article so you don't have to read it yourself.
	You could just listen to him, and he'll give you the full scoop, right?
	As he's world-renowned for doing.
	I mean, you hear David Frum, and you're like, oh, he's the one who tells you the truth.
	Right, so David Corn says, among other things, that Trump just supported Russian policy goals while in office.
	It's funny, there's this new BBC series out called Putin vs. the West that interviews a lot of officials from different countries in Europe and the US about the, basically, relations with Putin and Russia since 2014.
	And in the third installation, which I just happened to watch, there's this portion where you could just tell that they're longing They're desperate to be able to link Trump to Putin in some sort of nefarious way.
	fashion to kind of as part of this history leading up to the Ukraine war.
	So they talk about how there were allegations that dog Trump of Russian interference.
	But then when they're going through certain of the policy actions that the Trump administration actually took toward Putin, they can't help but be honest and say that among other things, I mean, the two items that they mentioned are the abrogation of the INF Treaty, which Trump and John Bolton carried out, which Putin was incensed which Trump and John Bolton carried out, which Putin was incensed by, in which they portray as having motivated Putin to kind of become more and more antagonistic toward his erstwhile partners in the Western security
	carried out, which Putin was incensed by, in which they portray as having motivated Putin to kind of become more and more antagonistic toward his erstwhile partners in the Western security establishment.
	And then on top of that, they actually go through that 2008 incident where there was a purported chemical attack on these Russian agents or former Russian agents in the UK, the Skripal attack.
	And then on top of that, they actually go through that 2008 incident where there was a purported chemical attack on these Russian agents or former Russian agents in the UK, a Scripo attack,
	and they go through which countries cooperated with the UK and expelled and they go through which countries cooperated with the UK and expelled a bunch of Russian diplomats or Russian state agents in the country as to signal their solidarity with the UK, which had supposedly been victimized by this
	Trump expelled 60 Russian officials from the country to signal his solidarity with Theresa May in the UK government, whereas other countries like France and Germany expelled four each.
	So the BBC, you could tell, is just pained that it can't kind of connect these actions to some sort of collusion narrative that would implicate Trump in somehow abetting Putin and setting the stage for his launching of the Ukraine war in 2022.
	But they have to go through the actual factual record and show that Trump actually was totally divergent in so many different key respects.
	- Michael, Michael, if I could say-- - Russian policy-- - Yeah, I mean, this is, if you ask me, like, which is the part of the Russiagate conspiracy theory that drives you crazy, I would absolutely say this.
	I follow David Trump from on Twitter, and I do so because I think he's incredibly valuable because he's such a brazen liar.
	He's, you know, like an old-school neocon who will just lie without the slightest compunction.
	And that's why he was writing, you know, speeches for George Bush with no problem in 2002 saying, Things that were completely false about WMDs.
	Here he says, in office, Trump supported Russian policy goals.
	Beyond the examples that you just mentioned, the two most important ones for me are, you can, I think, argue very persuasively that Trump didn't just attack Russian interest.
	He attacked the two most important vital interests of Moscow.
	One is Ukraine.
	Anyone who knows 20th century history knows that that part of Ukraine is an incredibly sensitive part of the border for Russia because it's the part where Germany twice attacked Russia in two world wars through Ukraine came from came from the west and attacked Russia through Ukraine and Ukraine has always been of incredible interest, vital interest to Russia.
	That's what Obama used to always say, that of course Ukraine's always going to be a vital interest to Russia, but never will be to us.
	Trump flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons.
	He sent lethal arms to Ukraine to help them defend against Moscow, something that President Obama refused to do, provoking all kinds of claims that he was insufficiently Top on Putin.
	So that's one thing that Trump did.
	He flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons.
	If Trump were a puppet of the Kremlin, or were supporting Martian policy goals, the last thing you would do is give lethal arms to Ukraine.
	It's incredibly provocative to Moscow.
	But the other thing that even is maybe more important is the Russian economy depends on natural gas.
	Everybody knows that.
	It's a, you know, it's basically a gigantic gas station.
	It sells natural gas in large quantities to Europe in particular and to Germany especially.
	And Trump was always warning Germany, you shouldn't be so dependent on Russian gas.
	You should stop buying Russian gas.
	You should buy it from the United States instead.
	He also was, you know, badgering Germany, saying, we pay all this money for your defense through NATO, and then instead of buying our gas, you buy Russian gas.
	Trump was obsessed with sabotaging the relationship between Berlin and Moscow, and particularly the ability of Moscow to sell large amounts of cheap natural gas to Western Europe through Germany.
	He wanted to sabotage Nord Stream 2 more than anything.
	Months humiliating and badgering the Germans in public and in private saying if you don't get rid of this Nord Stream 2 pipeline and start buying our gas instead we're not going to defend you anymore with our money through NATO and keep military bases in your country.
	Why should we protect you if you're not going to then do something for us?
	So On the two key Russian policy goals, Ukraine and being fortified against lethal arms in Ukraine and being able to sell natural gas to Western Europe, the key pillar of the Russian economic growth, Trump subverted And yet they still are able to say Trump was a Putin puppet, the Kremlin dictated everything Trump did, Trump in office served Russian policy goals.
	It's like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists that no matter how much evidence you show them that negates their conspiracy, they're totally immune to any kinds of evidence.
	Yeah and I have to say there is sort of a mirror image misconception about this that you often see at times among the more pro-Trump crowd, let's say, where they'll likewise have this belief that Trump sought to buck the establishment consensus on this issue around Russia, or he was subverted by nefarious actors within his administration and forced to take a harder line on Russia.
	Or for some reason, there's something instinctual and just essential within him that if he had his way, he would have done some sort of more...
	He would have brokered a detente with Russia, or he would have pursued his real instincts and not done these belligerent policy moves.
	Now, that may or may not be true.
	It's hard to say.
	Yes, there were elements within his administration that clearly had sought to sort of wield influence and kind of subvert Trump's desires in certain respects.
	But at the same time, he was the president for four years, which is the most powerful position in the world, and we have four years' worth of a record to examine.
	So we don't have to just do this, like, pure speculation about his instincts anymore.
	Now, that all being said, who knows?
	Maybe it's possible, what he's saying now, that he would want to be some sort of mediator for peace talks.
	But, you know, there is, at the same time, like an actual data set that we can look at and evaluate to understand what the Trump administration actually did with regard to Russia.
	And the fact is, and a lot of pro-Trump and anti-Trump people are kind of similarly resistant to acknowledging this.
	If you go and look at what the grievances with the U.S. that Putin cited in his speech, just as he was launching the invasion on February 24th of last year, most of the U.S. actions that he cites were actually undertaken by Trump, or many of them.
	Let's say a plurality, a good chunk of them that you might not expect if you just bought into the popular narrative, whether you're pro or anti-Trump, is actually attributable to stuff that went on during the Trump administration and informed these grievances that Putin was citing that led him to launch the invasion, or at least were contributing factors to his rationale for doing so.
	Yeah, I mean, I think the policy of trying to tell Germany, "How dare you buy gas from Russia instead of from us when we're spending all this money to protect you," that's classic Trump.
	The idea that the United States is always getting shafted, that in a deal you have to be tough with your counterparties, that if the United States is spending all this money to protect Germany, they owe it to us to buy it.
	Pure Trump.
	And you can see Trump doing that.
	But in the process of doing that, he is not necessarily, that's not his goal.
	His goal is to get Germany to buy natural gas from the U.S.
	He's not trying to wreck the Russian economy.
	That's not his goal.
	His goal is to help the U.S.
	economy.
	But in the process, he is undermining a core Russian asset, which if they had blackmail control over him and could force him to do whatever they want, if they would use it for anything, it would be for that.
	And on the issue of Ukraine, I think there were times that Trump just threw indifference Trump kind of let his administration and the neocons in it like Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley and John Bolton, people like that, kind of just do their own thing and he was more interested in Twitter a lot of times.
	But at the end of the day, you're right, Trump was the president and the policy of the Trump administration was not just subverting Nord Stream 2 but also arming Ukraine, making it insane, insane to say that he was some kind of a Russian asset.
	Just on this last issue with this Columbia Journalism Review, and if you haven't watched our show, I really encourage you to, or go read the four-part article because it has some genuinely devastating critiques of what the media did, and he approached it as an investigative journalist.
	He spent months calling around, doing interviews.
	This is what a correspondent who often sends me ideas had to say about this Columbia Journalism Review article.
	And I'm going to keep this person anonymous because their job requires that.
	But it's not like an anonymous source.
	They're not purporting to have any special knowledge of anything.
	They're not purporting to have credibility.
	It's just their analysis.
	And I'd rather not claim it for myself and steal it.
	So I'm just quoting what they sent me.
	I'm interested in your response to this.
	Quote.
	Ray the Russiagate piece in the Columbia Journalism Review.
	This is how the Western media class operates.
	In order to maintain a semblance of legitimacy, whenever propaganda campaigns are concluded, they admit that it was all bullshit and some random marginal article that is widely ignored by everyone, but then used as evidence that there is true freedom of speech and objectivity and neutrality in Western media.
	You see, they admit when they're wrong.
	The point of that piece isn't to do some reckoning or whatever, and the guy who wrote it is also not interested in that.
	The point of it is to legitimize the broader media class and its status as, quote, journalists.
	So they're basically saying, why did it take three years for an article in the mainstream press to finally do what you were doing, and what Aaron Maté was doing, and what Matt Taibbi was doing, and what Chuck Ross was doing, and Molly Hemingway, and myself, which was in real time Dissecting the lies and recklessness that drove Russiagate, this person is basically saying it's safe to do it now.
	You do it three years later.
	You dump it into an article that no one's going to read.
	Everybody's moved on.
	But then you get to say, oh, look, we did actually do some accounting.
	There is space in the mainstream media for open debate.
	What do you think of this theory?
	I'm not sure I'd necessarily buy that theory, actually.
	Hey, you scrunched up your face in this really weird way that shows nausea over it.
	I like to be, I like to show my emotions through my facial expressions.
	Yeah, that was a tight one.
	Go ahead, Seth, tell me what you think about that.
	Well, I mean, this journalist, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, is sort of an older gentleman who's been around the block, spent decades at the New York Times.
	I get the impression that he's at least in his 60s or 70s, right?
	Yeah, I think he's 78.
	So he's in retirement, he's almost 80.
	Right, so I mean, he's not the type of person who you'd necessarily expect to just be naturally rebutting each individual sort of fallacy that comes out in Russiagate coverage over Twitter in real time.
	You know, maybe he just had a different way of investigating the story and set out to do kind of a long-term
	I mean, I don't know that I would necessarily just assume that it was because of some function for the wider sort of media landscape that he did this project, or even that that's the utility of it.
	It could just be that he genuinely saw flaws in how the narrative was kind of constructed in hindsight and wanted to do a journalistic interrogation of it.
	I don't know if I would read much more into it than that.
	Yeah, but at the end of the day, I do think there's at least a little bit of the fact that it's a lot safer to do it now.
	And people have moved from Russiagate.
	They moved on.
	And it's kind of like the way that the New York Times and CNN— Well, it may not be.
	I mean, there's a—it may not be.
	Trump is technically running for president right now.
	Yeah.
	There's a war, a hot war raging in Ukraine where Russia is the main enemy that everybody's supposed to be fearful of 24-7.
	So you could be now accused of associating yourself with or trying to excuse a genocidal regime that's obliterating Ukraine.
	So there are some potential risks there.
	Yeah, that's fair enough.
	But at the same time, it reminds me a lot of how, you know, back when everybody was saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation in the weeks before the election, those of us who stood up and said, this sounds like bullshit, there's no evidence for it, the evidence suggests that it's authentic, you get viciously attacked because it matters so much.
	But then a year later, the New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post all come out and say, oh, you know what?
	Actually, these materials are authentic.
	We were able to authenticate them.
	No one gets mad at them because it's just a less intense environment.
	It becomes a lot easier to do it.
	I think publishing an article like this in, say, 2018 during the Mueller investigation or right after is a lot more difficult than publishing it in 2022 or 2023 when people are able to kind of safely ignore it.
	But I take your point.
	It doesn't need to be a big concern.
	Maybe some, but remember a lot of the material that he cites in that series of articles, or I guess in the article, is drawn from, you know, court cases that only happened within the past year or two.
	So there's information that wouldn't have been available for him to report on in 2018 or 2019, but now that he has access to it, sheds additional light on the malfeasance that the media is guilty of over the course of its sort of real-time Russiagate coverage.
	You know, I guess I'm just not inclined to Yeah, I'd rather have it than not have it.
	But I can't help notice though that there was a deliberate attempt to black out from any mainstream media spaces to the point where they would not put people on the air or in their pages who were critics of the Russiagate narrative and now it's allowed to kind of Poke its head up.
	But I agree with you, it's better than not.
	Let's just, as the last topic here, I'd be remiss if I did not ask you about this Chinese balloon that seems to be on some kind of a bizarre sightseeing tour around the United States.
	I'm a little surprised that the Pentagon seems That the Pentagon seems so casual about the fact that there's actually a Chinese spy balloon just kind of making its way around looking at silos, looking at military bases.
	But it's taking place in this broader context where there clearly are increasing calls and increasing militaristic discourse There's clearly people who are saying we need to ramp up and get ready for war with China.
	There was a general just this week, an American general, who said, I think it's highly likely that by 2025 the US and China will have a direct military war.
	And I want to show you this insane video from this British MP who's the chairman of the British Parliamentary Defense Committee, Tobias Elwood, who's a British Tory, who put on his Churchill costume and went on British television and listen to what he said. who put on his Churchill costume and went on British
	We need to face Russia directly.
	Let me start that again.
	We are now at war in Europe.
	We need to move to a war footing.
	We are involved in that.
	We've mobilized our procurement processes.
	We're gifting equipment.
	We need to face Russia directly rather than leaving Ukraine to do all the work.
	No, Michael, if I'm the Kremlin and I'm sitting there listening to somebody like this in that accent from Britain say, let's go to war in Russia, like real war, let's go have like a real war with them, I'm not exactly worried.
	Because this is what the British love to do.
	They really have nothing left, British elites, other than this kind of posturing.
	At the same time, the fact that it's just acceptable now, and we've had this from the beginning of this war, British generals and then Western pundits increasingly saying, not that we should be in a proxy war, but a direct war with Russia over Ukraine.
	At the very same time, you now hear explicit statements As this kind of Chinese balloon floats around the United States, what do you make of all this?
	with China, certainly a Cold War, maybe even a direct war, as this kind of Chinese balloon floats around the United States.
	What do you make of all this?
	What is it that you think is the important takeaways from these events?
	Well, first of all, Tobias Elwood, that particular British MP, and I reported on this around in April of last year, Well, first of all, Tobias Elwood, that particular British MP, and I reported on this around in April of last year, has been consistently trying to cook up schemes whereby the UK military would somehow lead the way in escalating the Ukraine war into a direct military confrontation has been consistently trying to cook up schemes whereby the UK military would somehow lead the way in escalating the Ukraine war into a direct military confrontation with Russia, and then the US would be forced to follow along because the UK finally is reliving and
	So that's been his shtick for quite some time.
	But it's not just people rhetorically calling for some sort of confrontation with China.
	The US published its Nuclear Posture Review last October.
	And in that Nuclear Posture Review, which is the Pentagon's statement of policy in terms of how the US would will be operating its nuclear arsenal and under what circumstances the U.S.
	would actually deploy nuclear weapons, it says that the U.S.
	needs to have the capability to wage simultaneous nuclear war with two powers at the same time, without those being China and Russia.
	So there's actual governmental mechanisms coming into place to prepare for this eventual confrontation.
	It's not just people kind of mouthing off about it on social media or cable news.
	There's actual policy mechanisms that are coming into place to prepare for this supposed eventuality.
	With the Chinese spy balloon, it's very strange because Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, just canceled what had been apparently his long planned trip to China, where the Secretary of State has not visited since 2018, and he was going to meet directly with President Xi, And it was going to be at least somewhat indicative of maybe a slight thaw in relations between China and the U.S.
	after there had been peaks of tension over the course of the past several months, maybe culminating with Pelosi's sort of harebrained trip to Taiwan in August of last year.
	And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, because of this emergence of this mysterious Chinese spy balloon, Blinken cancels the trip.
	Which is odd in terms of like what diplomacy is supposed to be for.
	you would think that if this Chinese spy balloon was really such a grave encroachment upon American sovereignty, was really a big problem in any respect, that that's exactly the time that you would want the top diplomat of the United States government to be going to China and to be broaching the issue and kind of coming to some sort of diplomatic resolution. that that's exactly the time that you would want the But instead, he's now saying this warrants canceling the entire trip.
	It's very strange.
	The New York Times, in its just main account of this whole saga, says that according to Pentagon sources, there have been numerous instances in the past several years of surveillance balloons of this sort entering into American airspace or coming onto U.S. territory in some fashion. there have been numerous instances in the past several years But what makes this different is that it, quote, has lingered for much longer than has happened in the past.
	So apparently that lingering effect, that excess lingering justifies totally just discarding any kind of diplomatic contact with China, this supposed emerging superpower that we all need to be ready for nuclear war with.
	And oh, by the way, is also tacitly providing support for Russia.
	I mean, there's constant reports in the media even now about how the U.S. is warning China over and over for exporting potential technologies or other sorts of supplies or other sorts of resources to Russia for use in the war with Ukraine, even if the U.S. is not overtly making that accusation there's constant reports in the media even now about how the
	Clearly, the idea is that those two countries are increasingly wedded to one another and form this joint enemy behemoth that we all need to be orienting our political systems and societies around the need to combat.
	Yeah, I mean, the U.S.
	has this phrase called evading sanctions as though that's a crime to try and have other countries try and figure ways around U.S.
	sanctions.
	Like, you can't do that.
	When we issue sanctions, you need to just suffer until we lift them.
	You're not allowed to find ways around them to keep your economy going and to keep your people with a good quality of life.
	But on the subject of China and Russia and this kind of pursuit of militarism, I find it really interesting.
	In that, on the one hand, you clearly have this populist sentiment that we pursue too many wars, we're too militaristic as a country, you ask the population if they want the United States to serve as the world's policeman, meaning being the one who has to go and punish bad governments or enforce international law, and overwhelmingly, in both parties, people will say absolutely not.
	Donald Trump ran on this America First foreign policy ideology, which he himself described as, we should no longer keep pursuing wars and keep pursuing conflict unless the United States and our interests are directly implicated by another country, meaning they're about to attack us or will, because it doesn't actually benefit the United States.
	It's a huge waste of money and time.
	It puts our people in danger.
	And the only people who are served by it are the U.S.
	security state and weapons manufacturers.
	Which has been a longtime view on the left as well, of course.
	When I had Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene here, I asked her to reconcile this America First ideology, which of course she believes in.
	She's a part of the MAGA movement and identifies as America First ideologue, which I believe she is.
	But I asked her to reconcile how is it that you can How can you reconcile that worldview that says the United States should put itself first and not go to war to fix other countries?
	We shouldn't go to war with other countries with whom we can instead be trading unless our national security is directly at stake?
	With, for example, giving huge amounts of aid to Israel.
	And she didn't have a very good answer for that, but she had a great answer on how that means we shouldn't go to war in Russia over Ukraine.
	It's not up to the United States government to fight over who should be ruling the Donbass or other provinces in eastern Ukraine.
	That is not A sufficiently important American interest to justify not just going to war there but sending tens of billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons.
	And that makes a lot of sense to me that America First ideology would say we're not going to go to war with Russia or risk war with Russia over who rules Ukraine, a country that for decades the United States has said is not a vital interest.
	And then when I asked her about China though I said But if you think the United States should be unwilling to go or risk war with Russia over who rules Ukraine or whether Ukraine is free from Moscow's influence, why are you willing to go to war with China in order to protect Taiwan?
	Why is Taiwan, and whether Taiwan is ruled by China or ruled independently, a vital interest to us?
	And she actually had a good answer for that, which was, And this is something I've heard from many people I respect who won a hard line against China, which is they say, unlike Ukraine where there's really no vital interest, although there are some important minerals and stuff there, Taiwan really does have microprocessing plans on which most of the United States economy depends.
	Our computers can't run without them, and we are not yet sufficient and independent enough.
	We can't produce, we don't have factories to produce microprocessing plans.
	Anywhere near enough to feed the needs of American industry.
	So if Russia or China were to invade Taiwan, it would either mean they could control the microprocessing industry, on which we're completely dependent, or a war in Taiwan could actually cause the destruction of those factories, which keeps the United States economy afloat.
	And that's the reason why we have a vital interest in Taiwan.
	And then I asked her, Well, if we were to get independent of that dependence on microprocessing in Taiwan, would then that be our concern?
	She pretty much said no.
	Then we would really not care as much anymore about who ruled Taiwan.
	What do you think explains that on the one hand we have the success of this political ideology that calls for less American wars, less American confrontation, unless a country is attacking us, and then on the other hand, two examples where people seem willing to be going to, wanting to go to war with two of the largest militaries in the world, two nuclear armed powers, seemingly at the same time, even though neither country is threatening to attack the United States.
	What do you make of that, that seemingly paradoxical development?
	So there's this claimed ideological commitment to the idea that the United States cannot be the policeman of the world.
	It can't be engaged in perpetual wars.
	It has to be just mindful of its own people's needs rather than meddling in the affairs of other countries.
	And yet there's a giant exception carved into that whole axiom when it comes to a country that has a certain number of computer chips in its manufacturing base.
	I mean, does that make sense to you?
	Because, I mean, maybe Marjorie Hiller Greene is sincere there in her explanation as to why she has this militaristic view of what American policy should be with regard to China vis-a-vis Taiwan.
	But you got to think that, at least for many of the people who have that same exception, it's layered with these ideological grievances that they have with China.
	Because they believe in this kind of clash of civilizations narrative similar to with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, where the U.S. and China have this irreconcilable systems of government and the natures of their society where the U.S. and China have this irreconcilable systems of government and And so there has to be one victor between the two of them.
	And, you know, because China is supposedly expansionist and is supposedly trying to broaden its influence across the world, the U.S. has to combat that in the name of preserving Western values.
	I think that basically is the overarching sort of ideological imperative for why it is that they're willing to make this...
	or carve out this exception in their general claim to be opposing these policing of the world strategies that the U.S. has undertaken in the past.
	I don't know, I just kind of doubt that if all of a sudden we were told that the U.S. is not as reliant anymore on Taiwan for providing microchips for U.S. consumer goods, then we could just say, "Oh, okay, have your way with Taiwan, China.
	We don't care anymore." I think the people who claim to care now would probably still care for similar reasons because they have this deep-seated antipathy toward China on ideological grounds.
	That's why they're always chanting Chinese Communist Party and emphasizing the word communist and trying to wild people up with the invocation of that word.
	And, you know, so, but even leaving that aside, it's, you know, If we don't, if the idea is to no longer police the world and to look more inward and to not spend excess monies and American resources overseas, so does that mean that Marjorie Taylor Greene, I shouldn't even necessarily fixate on her, but others of this general mindset are in favor of what the Biden administration just announced it's doing this week with Lloyd Austin having gone to the Philippines
	Which is just south of Taiwan and announced this new kind of, you know, precedent-setting deal, or this new sort of threshold-crossing deal in terms of U.S.-Philippine relations, where this former colonial subject of the U.S.
	is now allowing it to have access to nine bases throughout the country, including at the tip of the Philippines, which is just south of Taiwan, across the South China Sea, for the purposes of just containing China.
	How is that expenditure of resources consistent with the idea of just keeping everything within the American remit for once and not doing these foreign misadventures with the misallocation of funds?
	I don't know.
	It costs a lot of money to house these American troops and to build up armaments and so forth in anticipation of some forthcoming war.
	And also, I mean, think about the war that they're envisaging as the US potentially containing through its deployments to the Philippines.
	This is a war against China, which has a massively growing military.
	Its nuclear arsenal expanding, at least we're told, at a huge rate.
	This is a potential world war cataclysmic scenario.
	So even if you're claiming that microchip processors in Taiwan are like the thing that should be dictating the American national interest now, how about the American national interest in not getting embroiled into an unfathomably destructive global conflagration with China and Russia simultaneously? how about the American national interest in not getting embroiled Maybe that would override the computer chip thing, but I don't know.
	Or to tie this up, when I first started paying a lot of attention to this debate over China and why the United States needs to consider it not as a competitor but as an actual enemy or an adversary, I was skeptical of that argument argument that I regarded as a pretext.
	We always have some pretext about why our vital interest is at stake and some more.
	And so I assume that this idea about Taiwanese microprocessor chips was pretextual.
	And the more I looked into it, the more I read about it, the more I learned about it, the more I've concluded that it's actually genuine.
	That it is true that our computers and everything we use to kind of Maintain the American economy flowing, all of our computers and hardware and air traffic control systems, all of it needs these microchips that are currently I think 85% or 90% produced in Taiwan.
	So if That is genuine and I think that's a genuine concern given how cataclysmic it would be for the United States to end up in a war in China.
	You would think that the number one national priority would be to spend huge amounts of money making ourselves Independent from Taiwan and no longer dependent on Taiwan, which we have the technological capability to do.
	The United States knows how.
	We have some factories, actually, that produce those kinds of microprocessing chips.
	We have the ability.
	It's just nowhere near enough factories.
	So you would think that would become the number one national priority to put all resources into developing microprocessing independent so that that reason for caring so much about Taiwan that we would go to war over it would no longer exist.
	I don't mean to focus on Marjorie Hale-Green.
	She just happened to be here a couple days ago.
	She actually surprised me.
	I mean, who knows what would really happen.
	But, you know, she did say, I asked her that, and I felt like it was pretty convincing.
	I said, you know, is that the only reason?
	If it weren't for that fact, would you still be interested or so willing to confront the Chinese?
	And she said, no, that's the reason.
	But I agree with you that they're clearly, more broadly, is this ideological idea that, you know, just like we fought the Soviet communists, we now have the Chinese communists to fight.
	And even absent that argument about Taiwan, that dependence on Taiwan, there's like embedded in the United States this need to always have an existential enemy, to always justify why we have to keep pouring huge amounts of money into our military to be on war footing.
	I mean it should be shocking that that general said it's highly likely by 2025 we're going to be at war with China and yet... Imagine if a Chinese general said that about the United States.
	Exactly.
	It would be a massive scandal.
	Exactly.
	And that would show how aggressive they are and how expansionist they are.
	Or imagine if Russia said, like you had that Tobias, what's his name?
	Tobias Elwood, saying, I think we need to go take our fight directly to the West.
	We shouldn't have a proxy war over Ukraine.
	But it is interesting to me that you do have these positive developments that I think are authentic and genuine on the right, especially the MAGA right, the populist right, when it comes to the idea that, you know, they're proud of the fact that Trump was the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
	They consider that to be an accomplishment.
	Trump's proud of that.
	And at the same time, any suggestion that we should somehow be finding ways to get along with China, cooperate with China, have diplomacy with China, regarding them as an economic competitor, that's obviously the case, but not an enemy, somehow is still very anathema in right-wing discourse.
	And, you know, you're seeing now that Democrats are getting on board with this, too.
	Like, just this week, you know, you had Democratic senators saying, yeah, we also believe that TikTok should be banned from American soil and are trying to pressure Google and Apple to kick TikTok out of their stores so that it can no longer be downloaded.
	So that's what happens is when one party starts to get very nationalistic and on a war footing about an enemy, The other party doesn't want to look like they're sympathetic and that's how these things spiral out of control.
	That's what happened in Iraq.
	That's what happened in Vietnam.
	That's what happened in the Cold War and the War on Terror.
	And while we're in the middle of war already with one nuclear country to be preparing for Or how about this?
	If the idea really was to preserve unfettered access by the U.S.
	should be doing in the sense of like the Pentagon having war plans, but talking openly about the wisdom or desirability of going to war with China seems like madness to me and very alarming madness at that.
	Or if the, how about this?
	If the idea really was to preserve unfettered access by the U.S. to Taiwanese microchip plants, then wouldn't the idea be to ramp down tensions, tamp down tensions with China so that war doesn't break out in tamp down tensions with China so that war doesn't break out
	Rather than building up military installations with the expectation that war with China is inevitable, you know, encircling, further encircling China with American military might, forging even closer sort of military ties forging even closer sort of military ties with Taiwan so
	So even in the past NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act that was passed in December, it's now authorizing these larger than ever joint military exercises between the U.S. and Taiwan.
	And more and more money is going to be pumped into Taiwan to bolster it with arms.
	And if this sounds familiar, it's eerily similar to what the U.S. did with Ukraine from 2014 onward, supposedly in the name of deterrence, meaning to deter Russia from invading Ukraine.
	And how did that work out?
	Anytime you, and supposedly now, you know, again, Expansions of American military resources such as was announced this week with the U.S.
	now going to be getting access to nine new military bases in the Philippines with the idea of providing a deterrent against China.
	Again, all this is now being done in the name of deterrence where you could just as easily substitute the word provocation or instigation for deterrence and it would probably be more accurate.
	So if the U.S.
	was really that sincere, or if these politicians were that sincere about wanting to preserve, again, the ability of the U.S. to access these markets for microchips, their actions don't really appear congruous with that aim because they're making it more and more likely that there will be some sort of military conflict with their actions don't really appear congruous with that aim because they're And if a war does actually break out, what, we're all just supposed to assume that the
	is going to be perfectly able to maintain its trade routes for its microtrips in Taiwan?
	It seems like a war actually might be a bit of a hindrance to that.
	So it doesn't really add up logically.
	It just seems like it's another one of these just kind of grand ideological projects to instigate China to have this clash of civilizations.
	And the microchip thing, although you can provide a bit of substantiation for it empirically in terms of the reliance on those chips for American products, I do think it is still arguably a bit of a pretext because it gives this like sense of raw American interest invested in instigating I do think it is still arguably a bit of a pretext because it gives this like sense of raw American interest invested in instigating this conflict when it
	Yeah, there's a group of people in the United States on the American right who argues on the one hand that it's a form of madness to risk a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, a position I know both of you that you and I share.
	But then, on the other, that we should, of course, be willing to not just risk war, but pursue war with China over Taiwan.
	And not just Taiwan, but the entire region around China that, for some reason, we believe it's important we, rather than they, dominate.
	And I think a lot more work needs to be done by that faction to explain how those two views can Coexist.
	I mean, microchips in Taiwan might get you some of the way there, but by no means anywhere close to all of the way there.
	Well, Michael, you use so much of our airtime and talk so much that we're going to have to cancel our after show on Locals tonight as a result of your inability to confine your answers to a little bit shorter of time.
	But we're nonetheless always happy to have you here and to talk to you, and I'm sure Our audience feels the same, and they will be seeing a lot more of your mug over the next coming weeks and months, and we look forward to that.
	Well, my sincere condolences, and I apologize for the trauma that any sane person would experience by having to look at my mug for, like, an hour straight.
	Yeah, we were getting reports that a lot of people for tonight, for some reason, are listening to the show rather than watching it.
	We have no idea why that might be.
	But Michael, thank you so much.
	Have a great weekend and we will be seeing you shortly.
	All right, have a nice night.
	So that concludes our show for this evening.
	As I said, and I wasn't actually joking, given how much time we took up, though I think it was worth it to talk about those topics, particularly Russia and China, we don't have time for the after show on locals.
	We will come back.
	I believe we're working with the premise that our normal local show will be Monday and Thursday each week, twice a week, immediately following our show.
	So we'll be back here First for our Rumble show at 7 p.m.
	Eastern as always and then following that our interactive live show on Locals immediately following that.
	Thanks everybody for watching throughout the week.
	We hope you have a great weekend and we will see you back on Rumble on Monday.

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Week in Review: Omar Ousted, AOC’s Oscar-Worthy Performance, CJR&apos;s Russiagate Fallout, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #34

Week in Review: Omar Ousted, AOC’s Oscar-Worthy Performance, CJR's Russiagate Fallout, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #34