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March 11, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:20:48

Week in Review: Bipartisan Populists Unite Against War in Syria, China Brokers Historic Iran/Saudi Arabia Peace, & More, w/ Michael Tracey

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	Good evening, it's Friday, March 10th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight, being Friday night, we will have our now quasi-traditional week in review segment As we examine some of the most significant yet under-discussed stories of the week with the roving independent journalist Michael Tracy.
	We begin with a rather remarkable and actually unexpected development today.
	A major diplomatic breakthrough reached between longtime enemies Iran and Syria spearheaded and engineered by China.
	The deal unto itself has sweeping consequences for the region.
	For the increasing influence of China in the Middle East, the fraying U.S.-Saudi partnership and the competition for the U.S.
	always fixated on various wars, and China seemingly always fixated on increasing its influence with other countries.
	We'll examine the implications of this new agreement.
	Congressman Matt Gaetz had a bill this week to require the withdrawal of all troops from Syria.
	Yes, for some reason, the U.S.
	still has close to 1,000 combat troops in Syria, despite Congress having never authorized war there in the first place.
	The resolution failed to earn a majority of the House members, and thus failed.
	Yet, it attracted four or five dozen yes votes from each of the two parties, leading one to see, at least far in the distance, a long-promised coalition between left-wing and right-wing populists, at least when it comes to reining in the U.S.
	posture of endless war.
	We'll talk about that.
	We'll also examine the very revealing spectacle at yesterday's House hearing, at which Democratic lawmakers and their followers praised CIA, Homeland Security, and FBI for censoring for our own good, cheered Debbie Wasserman Schultz, remember her, For, quote, bodying journalists.
	And found a new star in billionaire heir and former Mueller investigation lawyer Dan Goldman.
	And we'll talk about several other issues of note as well.
	As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and most major podcast platforms.
	It's posted roughly 12 hours after the episode first appears here live on Rumble.
	For now, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	It's hard to overstate the importance of a news event today that seemingly came out of nowhere, despite the fact that it is receiving very little attention or coverage from most mainstream media outlets despite the fact that it is receiving very little attention or coverage from most
	And in fairness to them, it is seemingly difficult to analyze in great depth, given how surprising it seems, given how, as I said, out of nowhere, it seems to have appeared.
	The Middle East has basically been driven over the last at least six years or seven years by a seething animus between two major countries in the region, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
	The tensions obviously have religious overtones in that one is a Shia country, one is a Sunni country.
	But there's also a lot of geo-strategic considerations, especially given the fact that the United States has sided so heavily with Saudi Arabia, one of the U.S.' 's longtime partners.
	It is what has driven, among other things, the war in Yemen, as the Iranians fund and arm the Houthis in Yemen, against whom the Saudis have been waging a very vicious War for a number of years beginning under the Obama administration, a war supported by both the United States all the way back to Obama as well as Great Britain.
	So the potential for these two countries to be brought together and to have a cooling of tensions and to even re-establish diplomatic relations which appears to be what happened is of immense consequence For that region, but also for the United States and for China, given the fact that it was China that engineered this agreement.
	So let's begin first with the Wall Street Journal account of what took place.
	There you see it on the screen, the headline Saudi Arabia and Iran restore relations in a deal brokered by China.
	Quote, Iran and Saudi Arabia Agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations Friday in a deal mediated by China, ending 70 years of estrangement and jolting the geopolitics of the Middle East.
	The deal signals a sharp increase in Beijing's influence in a region where the U.S.
	has long been the dominant power broker, and could complicate efforts by the U.S.
	and Israel to strengthen a regional alliance to confront Tehran as it expands its nuclear program.
	It comes as the U.S.
	has been trying to broker a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
	An effort now clouded with uncertainty.
	China in recent years has built closer economic ties with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which are important suppliers of oil to the world's second largest economy.
	But this bridge-building effort is the first time that Beijing has intervened so directly in the Mideast political rivalries.
	It comes at a time when relations between the U.S.
	and Saudi Arabia, long allied with Washington, For Iran, it's about escaping diplomatic isolation.
	For China, it's about deepening their engagement in the region and showing it's not just an energy consumer.
	And for the Saudis, it's about the Americans, said Roy Tayak, an Iran expert at the Council of Foreign Relations and former State Department official and former U.S.
	diplomat.
	The article goes on, quote, China's role in the talks marks a watershed moment for Beijing's ambitions in the region, a part of the world where the U.S.
	has waged war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in providing security for allies.
	Along with Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war, China's diplomacy is another sign of the U.S.' 's waning influence.
	China has stepped up its relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran in recent years as it became a major buyer of Middle Eastern oil, but its ambitions had long appeared commercial, with little interest in involving itself in the region's messy disputes.
	Beijing has provided a lifeline to sanctions-hit Iran, becoming its main remaining crude buyer since the U.S. pulled out of a nuclear deal in 2018.
	But it has also sought closer ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional rival, for which it is the biggest trade partner and a top loyal buyer.
	Riyadh has also started importing sensitive missile technology from the Chinese military.
	Just a little more important detail on this, we'll get to in just a second from CNN.
	I do just want to note quickly, however, that when it comes to major news events like this, I do think of all the largest news outlets, the Wall Street Journal tends to be the most reliable.
	It's the one to which I turn first.
	It's far from perfect, but it does seem to be less driven by and shaped by overt partisan objectives, the way, say, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and certainly CNN is, We're nonetheless about to show you an article from CNN because it contains an interesting tidbit that I wanted to include.
	There you see it on the screen.
	The headline is Arch-Ivo's Iran and Syria Agree to End Years of Hostilities in Deal Mediated by China.
	The CNN article states, quote, Friday's announcement is also a diplomatic victory for China in a Gulf region that has long been considered part of the US's domain of influence.
	Talks have been ongoing since March 6 in Beijing between Iranian National Security Chief Ali Shakamaki, Saudi Regional Security Advisor Mossad bin Mohammed al-Abin, and China's top diplomat Wang Yi, according to Iranian state media, and an apparent pushback To American influence, Wang said that, quote, the world is not limited to the Ukrainian issue, while emphasizing that the fate of the Middle East should be determined by the people of the Middle East.
	So there you see the Chinese perspective, or at least the Chinese public messaging, Chinese propaganda, however you want to see it, but it's a very bold and significant move by The Chinese in what, as both articles indicate, has long been the domain of the United States.
	Let's bring on Michael Tracy, who has been roving around very glamorous and fancy capitals of Western Europe, reporting on things like various NATO conferences and defense conferences.
	Unfortunately for him, he's now back where he belongs in New Jersey, frequenting his pizzerias and supermarkets and the like.
	Michael, thank you for taking the time to be with us tonight.
	It's great to see you, as always.
	Yeah, I've been camped out inside a bagel shop since I arrived back in New Jersey, as you can probably infer.
	Yeah, we always have to return to our roots, and your roots are not Paris or Munich or anything like that, but Newark or wherever you are in northern New Jersey.
	Where the Sopranos' roots are.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So, a couple of things strike me about this.
	I find this story really fascinating.
	I have to say, I did not expect it.
	I had not seen indications it was coming.
	From what I can gather, very few people in the West seem to have anticipated this as well.
	Let's begin with the fact that, and we're going to talk about this in just a minute with the Matt Gaetz resolution to withdraw troops in Syria that of course failed because the establishment wings of both parties united to block it, so we're keeping troops in Syria, we're continuing to wage war in Syria, the United States of course notoriously waged war
	In Iraq and in Afghanistan and in Libya, in Syria, it has poured huge amounts of money into all kinds of military operations in the region, including by helping the Saudis in their brutal war against Yemen that has brought huge numbers of Yemenis, including children, to the brink of starvation, only for China to kind of float in
	without having to spend any of that money on endless warfare and imprint a massive footprint in the Middle East, why do we keep hearing about Biden's diplomatic brilliance?
	What do you make of all of this in terms of the China-US perspective?
	Well, - Well, one of the key planks of Biden's supposed diplomatic brilliance is how he's been able to marshal this coalition, or this emergent coalition, against China by tying it ineluctably with Russia, which China against China by tying it ineluctably with Russia, which China has been intensifying its ties with, to be clear.
	But supposedly, Biden has exemplified this very adroit diplomatic acumen by trying to bring together this, again, fledgling coalition to diplomatically array itself against China, which is this key adversary, or the term in foreign policy jargon that's which is this key adversary, or the term in foreign policy jargon that's used about China, is Pure competitor.
	And therefore the United States needs to make sure that it's always, it always has its eye on curtailing its growing influence.
	And so here we have China apparently brokering a fairly breakthrough diplomatic accord.
	Again, I'm just going based on the public statements like you are.
	I don't know the full background or details and maybe there's some skepticism that should be applied as to its full scope or what have you.
	But at least in terms of what's been reported, this would be a gigantic diplomatic Remember it was only in 2019 that Iran was accused of drone bombing a Saudi state oil facility.
	Remember that?
	And that Mohammed bin Salman, who is this, you know, basically operating or had operated as this lackey of the United States for a while, assuming that the unbridled support of the U.S.
	for Saudi Arabia would continue in perpetuity, had labeled the Ayatollah of Iran the new generation's Hitler.
	So he really sprung for a novel historical analogy there and likened the Ayatollah of Iran to Hitler.
	And so for now, apparently, China to have an integral in mediating some sort of detente between these two bitter regional
	Adversaries would be a kind of diplomatic breakthrough that has eluded the United States for quite a long time, or maybe eluded is the wrong term, because it doesn't seem like the United States has really been interested in attempting to broker very much diplomacy lately, despite this reputation that's showered on Biden and Blinken and all these other people in the administration as very serious adults who are interested in
	You know, leveraging the hegemonic power of the United States to have a glorious diplomatic kind of arrangement the world over.
	It seems more like, at the United States' behest, diplomatic relations with major powers and smaller powers has frayed.
	I mean, if I had told you two years ago that both Saudi Arabia and Israel would be actively bucking the United States
	In the United States' chief demand, at least in terms of its current geopolitical interest, which is to unite against Russia in terms of the war with Ukraine, would you have believed me that Saudi Arabia and Israel would have been, ironically, united in their refusal to acquiesce to those demands of the United States?
	That would have sounded rather implausible, right?
	Given the resources that have been poured by the United States into maintaining and cultivating those relationships.
	And yet that has been what's transpired over the past year, and it's really just solidified now, with apparently Saudi Arabia moving even closer into the orbit of China.
	And you said that you were surprised by this arrangement.
	I can't say that I would have predicted it necessarily that those would be announced.
	But it is true that Saudi Arabia has been making movements to try to potentially even enter this BRICS formation that includes both Brazil, as you are familiar with, and China, which is kind of this counter- And Russia and Russia.
	Yeah, and Russia, right?
	And India and South Africa.
	That's BRICS.
	Right.
	So they may have to change the acronym now because there are lots of countries that want to enter this new formation, including Saudi Arabia and including even potentially Argentina.
	So, to have that momentum behind an almost explicitly counter United States diplomatic or international multilateral arrangement would maybe give you some indication that perhaps The United States' diplomacy is maybe not as sterling as we've been led to believe, and yet I don't know if this new accord that was announced today is really going to change that narrative, which of course is very self-apprehensive.
	Let me just interject what we know.
	And first of all, there's a few, or more than a few, very compassionate and generous people inquiring about what seems to be some sort of eye problem that I have.
	I do have some just minor eye irritation.
	It's been dry for the last couple of days.
	Days and I'm using the airdrop, so I appreciate your concern, but I don't think it's anything serious that my kids have had a great time mocking me over the last two days for what they think is pink guy.
	I don't think it is that.
	They're hoping it is.
	Anyway, just so... You should do the show blindfolded.
	Yeah, or just like with like Groucho Marx glasses.
	You know, just to give a couple of the details about what we do know about this agreement, and this is the reason why it does seem significant, is at the very least one of the things that's going to happen is both countries are going to open up embassies and consulates that have been closed for at least seven years.
	There was an incident after the Saudis had murdered a couple of leading Shiite dissidents where their embassy in Tehran was violently attacked.
	And ever since then, they've had no diplomatic connection or relationship at all.
	So that's going to be reopened.
	There seems as well to be part of this agreement.
	A pledge by the Iranians to cease funding the Houthis in order to continue the war in Yemen and by the Saudis to stop bombing the Houthis as well.
	So if that actually takes place and that is part of the deal, That would be very significant.
	One of the things that strikes me about this, and it always goes back to the primary question I raised about our obsession with Russia, and in particular the war in Ukraine, is from the beginning I've always been asking, what is it about Ukraine That would justify our being willing to risk a nuclear war in order to protect or determine who rules parts of eastern Ukraine.
	I've often referenced the fact that it was common conventional wisdom in Washington, including articulated by President Obama, that Ukraine is not and never will be a vital interest to the United States, but it always has been and always will be a vital interest to Russia.
	And so we spent the last year obsessing on Ukraine.
	We poured gigantic amounts of money into fueling the war there.
	We've depleted our own weapons stockpile.
	And meanwhile, China enters this region that is obviously a vital interest to everybody for all kinds of reasons, starting with the oil.
	And then you add Israel and the importance of these Gulf state countries to various economic deals.
	And China waltzes in because they've been able to manage to maintain a distance from the war in Ukraine.
	They may be helping Russia in some indirect way, but by nothing, nothing even close to the level of obsession that the United States has.
	And it really, again, provokes the question of why is Ukraine so important to us, and why are we willing to be so heavily involved in a region that offers nothing to us to use strategically or in terms of resources, while China is doing what they're very good at doing, which is advancing their interests while China is doing what they're very good at doing, which is advancing their interests by always
	Well, William Burns, the CIA director who famously wrote in 2008 when he was the ambassador to Russia, The U.S.
	ambassador to Russia in the Bush administration, and this quote got resurfaced once the war started last year and became fairly common knowledge, but of course he sent a memo back to Condoleezza Rice, who was then the Secretary of State, telling her in no uncertain terms that it wasn't just Putin who viewed the potential accession of Ukraine into NATO as a, quote, red line, but it was pretty much everybody he had ever talked to in the Russian governmental apparatus, from liberal critics of Putin
	To the hardline, hawkish opponents of Putin.
	Everybody in between, including Putin himself, were in firm, unswerving agreement that for Ukraine to join NATO would be this unambiguous red line that would precipitate Russia taking some sort of drastic action.
	Remember him?
	Remember him saying that?
	Well he was just testifying this week before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees We have these videos, and I want to get to that in a second.
	Let me just finish the point on the question that you raised.
	Yeah.
	Okay, sorry.
	But he was asked exactly this.
	Why is it that he was asked about Russia's strategy in Ukraine?
	And he actually repeated this conventional wisdom that Obama had once articulated, which is that Ukraine is always going to be far more in the vital interest of Russia than it is the United States.
	Burns repeated that and said that that's part of Putin's strategy in that he's trying to ride the wave out here, to use a confused metaphor, or basically protract the war such that the United States and the West lose his interest and realizes that Ukraine or basically protract the war such that the United States and the West lose his interest and realizes that Ukraine is actually And what Byrne said was that the West, led by the U.S.
	of course, has to prove him wrong, meaning has to prove to Putin that Ukraine is just as much in the vital interest of the United States as it is Russia.
	Which is an amazing change.
	This is why none of this makes any sense with regard to Russia and Ukraine.
	And by the way, while you were speaking, Michael, we featured one of my canine co-hosts who usually appears only on our Locals After Show.
	His name is Sylvester.
	I thought that might have been some subliminal message to me or something.
	No, the audience celebrated the fact that for a few minutes they were relieved from having to watch you and they got to instead watch Sylvester.
	I mean, I would rather look at a dog than myself in the mirror, to be frank.
	I think that's a unanimous consensus.
	But no, the point I was going to make is that...
	The whole issue with vital interests, and I think sometimes people have a hard time understanding this, is the reason you define vital interests.
	So one country says, this is our vital interest here, and this is not a vital interest.
	And the United States says, this is our vital interest, and these are not our vital interests.
	Which is what countries do, is to signal to the rest of the world, we would be willing to go to war Over this but not this.
	And we acknowledge that this is your vital interest but not ours.
	That's the whole point of this doctrine is to essentially internally amongst yourselves and then communicating to the rest of the world what you are and are not willing to go to war over because obviously war is a very serious matter and you should do that only when your vital interests are at stake.
	So this new formulation Which is that we have to keep... So Putin's thinking to himself, which is very rational, the United States has always acknowledged that Ukraine is not in their vital interest.
	Why would it be?
	It's obviously in ours.
	It's right on the other side of our border, the most sensitive part of our border, where twice during the 20th century the Germans invaded.
	Why would the United States and Europe be willing to subject their citizens to all kinds of suffering, to enormous high gas prices, to freezing in the winter, to massive inflation, to funding a gigantic war over a region that is not important to them but is to us?
	That's the rational way that great powers have always looked at international relations.
	And so to say, well, we have to pretend or act as if Ukraine is a vital interest to us.
	Just to prove Putin wrong is madness.
	It overturns the entire framework on which international relations among great powers have long been based.
	And we're now starting to see the price of that beyond the actual price, meaning the price tag and the hundreds of billions of dollars we're going to be transferring to Raytheon and General Dynamics and the CIA before this is all over.
	The price tag in waning influences, well, we're obsessed with this war that nobody cares about.
	And meanwhile, China is running rampant through the regions that actually matter.
	Well, the rational self-interest calculation dissolves in the face of what I think is actual, genuine ideological zeal on the part of the people who are running the foreign policy apparatus.
	I think that can be easy to overlook, meaning that we hear these platitudinous speeches delivered by Biden or Blinken or Victoria Nuland or, you know, whomever Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and just assume that it's this kind of cynical show that they're and just assume that it's this kind of cynical show that they're putting on to sort of mask some other ulterior motive that they're not being
	Whereas I think it stands to reason at this point that they actually believe their own rhetoric in terms of the sort of high-minded, highfalutin significance that they ascribe to this conflict on ideological grounds, not on just raw, self-interested grounds, because if that's what they were limiting themselves to, then because if that's what they were limiting themselves to, then it would just be obvious that clearly, just by dint of geographic proximity, Ukraine would be far more in the vital interest of Russia than it is the United States.
	But if you actually have invested Ukraine with this meaning of it being this last bastion of democracy, or that it actually is the case that Putin is the next incarnation of Hitler, and if the United States and NATO were to relent in Ukraine, then he would be allowed to blitzkrieg throughout the rest of Europe, and it would collapse the entire global order
	over which the United States presides and dictates the terms of, then I actually do think that if you believe in that rhetoric, remember we always talked about what are the actual implications of if these people who are opponents of Trump actually believe their own rhetoric about him being this Nazi tyrant and presiding remember we always talked about what are the actual implications of if these people who are opponents of
	Oh, if you actually believe the rhetoric that's being espoused day in and day out by the people who are trying to justify this policy in Ukraine, then it makes sense that they would be so hell-bent on perpetuating the status quo policy-wise here.
	Yeah, so let me just get on that.
	On the one hand, it doesn't make sense from a rational, in terms of a rational, self-interested calculus, but if you look at their ideological calculation, it does make sense, but that kind of brings it out of the realm of rationality.
	Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot going on there.
	And, you know, again, one of the things that I think is important to note is that the only opposition to the U.S.
	role in the war in Iraq is coming from the kind of Trump populist wing of the Republican Party.
	The role in Ukraine, the U.S.
	role in Ukraine, is coming from the kind of Trump populist wing of the Republican Party.
	Unfortunately, it's a minority.
	The overwhelming majority of the Republican establishment is united with every single Democrat.
	Yeah, still in support of this war.
	But if you look at why that is, I think if you look at the Republican establishment, why they're so supportive of Biden's war policies and are saying, we need to fight until the very end in that maximalist rhetoric, even though their own base is increasingly questioning the wisdom of that.
	You know, why are we spending so much time, attention, and money on a region that doesn't actually infect our lives?
	I think for them it's just kind of this instinctive foreign policy doctrine that the US rules the world, that we should rule the world, that Russia is our enemy for some reason that nobody can articulate, that was Trump's point, and we have a chance to weaken Russia and for some reason should do that just I'm not sure why, but they always want to weaken U.S. adversaries.
	That's their view of the world.
	But I actually think that while Democrats also share that fundamental foreign policy, a major reason, I would say the predominant reason, why the core and crux of the Democratic Party is so willing to be so devoted to Russia's destruction is because of their residual anger over their why the core and crux of the Democratic Party is so willing to be so devoted to Russia's destruction is because of their residual anger over their perceived role that Russia played in defeating Hillary Clinton
	They inculcated every Democrat and every liberal in the United States into hating Vladimir Putin, not for any reasons that are geopolitical, but because that's who they blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat, something which they have not even gotten close.
	to getting over.
	Now, speaking of this kind of- - Glenn, really quick.
	I had a prominent Democrat whose name you would know, but I'm not gonna stay here because I'm saving it for something I'm publishing down the line, right?
	But a prominent household name Democrat told me directly, almost unprompted, that that was a chief motivator, meaning residual grievance over the role that Russia purportedly played in the 2016 election to deprive Hillary Clinton of the presidency.
	That was a principal motivator in why they were so zealous in insisting on the maintenance of this current foreign policy in Ukraine.
	I hadn't heard it in such blunt terms expressed to me.
	Or express anywhere, as I did when I heard this recently.
	So that's going to be out in the public domain at some point.
	Yeah, I mean, there's so much of that shaped.
	You know, we started our show last night talking about why the Democrats are so obsessed with censoring the internet, and it was because after 2016, they blamed free speech on the internet and quote-unquote disinformation, and realized they can no longer tolerate free speech on the internet.
	If you ask why they're so insistent on keeping Julian Assange imprisoned, It's because of the role they perceive he played in defeating Hillary Clinton.
	And if you ask why they're willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, a country that a few years ago none of them could even place on a map, let alone explain why it was important, I think the same thing is true.
	That 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to power at Hillary Clinton's expense was such a cataclysmic trauma for US political elites that so much of the fallout of what we're dealing with still comes from that Original sin.
	Now, let me move on, Michael.
	It all comes down to John Podesta's Gmail account.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It really is amazing.
	So I mentioned that Matt Gaetz had a resolution that he offered to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria.
	I think a lot of people don't even know that the U.S. still has troops in Syria.
	And they're not just kind of stationed there hanging out the way they are in South Korea or Germany.
	They are often involved in direct combat.
	They're bombing things.
	They're still having shootouts occasionally with various forces running around Syria.
	We're basically still in kind of a war with Syria, a war that in the first place was never authorized by Congress, of course.
	It really was a CIA regime change operation that Obama did the worst of all worlds with.
	He neither stopped it nor gave it enough money to succeed.
	He just kind of let the CIA go there and hand out enough money and weapons to destroy Syria, but without actually ever removing Assad, who's more entrenched than ever.
	So here you have Matt Gaetz, not Alexander Ocasio-Cortez or any of the anti-war, self-proclaimed anti-war parts of the Democratic left, but instead Matt Gaetz, offering a resolution to require the withdrawal of all U.S.
	troops from Syria, and it did fail.
	Here from the Hill, you see the headline, Gaetz Resolution to Withdraw U.S.
	Troops from Syria Fails in the House.
	Quote, a resolution to force the withdrawal of U.S.
	troops from Syria within six months failed to pass the House.
	On Wednesday, the resolution sponsored by Congressman Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, and emphatically backed by several more conservative lawmakers, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona, was rejected on a 103 to 321 vote.
	So a pretty lopsided defeat.
	It lost by 219 votes. - 218, I think it's the same.
	Alright, thank you Michael.
	The resolution was supported by 56 Democrats and 47 Republicans.
	While 150 Democrats and 171 Republicans voted against the resolution, roughly 900 U.S.
	troops remain in Syria where they carry out operations to counter ISIS.
	Although the U.S.
	designated terrorist group has lost much of its territory, it still has a presence in Syria and maintains sleeper cells.
	On the House floor, Gates said American troops in Syria were trapped in a, quote, hellscape of war and meddling from various foreign nations and the American counterterrorism operations of the country have no end in sight.
	The Florida lawmaker also argued the ISIS forces in Syria do not represent a serious threat to the U.S.
	And so the soldiers should be withdrawn.
	Quote, so often we come to the floor and we debate frivolities.
	This is one of the most important things we can be talking about, Gates said.
	How can we use the credibility of our fellow Americans?
	How can we spill the blood of our bravest patriots?
	We have stained the deserts in the Middle East with enough American blood.
	It is time to bring our service members home.
	Opponents of the legislation, meaning the establishment wings of both parties, said it was vital to review the U.S.
	presence in Syria, but that withdrawing from the country would threaten Americans by allowing foreign terrorist groups like ISIS to strengthen.
	Some House members noted the chaotic withdrawal of Afghanistan in 2021, which led to the swift takeover of the Taliban.
	Apparently we're back to the idea that we didn't stay in Afghanistan long enough.
	Congressman Jeffrey Meeks, a Democrat of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said he does not support an indefinite presence in Syria.
	Perish the thought, Michael.
	They're not saying they want an indefinite presence in Syria.
	It's just that nine, ten years is not enough.
	But the resolution was, quote, premature and will leave partner forces out to dry.
	That was what they always said about Afghanistan.
	We all want to get out of Afghanistan.
	It's just premature.
	It's not time yet.
	That argument was backed, that argument by Jeffrey Meeks, the Democrat from New York, was backed by the Republican, what?
	Get the dope's name right.
	Gregory Meeks.
	People should be able to Google him and send him nasty tweets.
	Totally.
	That argument from Gregory Meeks, the Democrat of New York, was backed by Congressman Joe Wilson, the Republican of South Carolina, beautiful bipartisanship, who said a withdrawal would lead to a, quote, much larger, more complex problem at a higher cost and threat to Americans worldwide.
	We don't need to repeat 9-11, Wilson said.
	Peace is best maintained through strength.
	That's the best, because the United States, maybe Joe Wilson was never briefed on this, but I seem to recall the United States ending up funding Al-Qaeda and arming Al-Qaeda in Syria and then rebranding them as moderate rebels or whatever, freedom fighters, because it would seem a bit odd to most Americans that 10 plus years after 9-11, we're actually funding and arming and supporting an offshoot of the same group that knocked down the Twin Towers.
	Yeah, I don't think you could really argue that prior to 9-11 the U.S.
	had insufficient interventions in various countries in the Middle East.
	In fact, Al Qaeda cited the constant U.S.
	interventions in the Middle East as one of the reasons why they felt the United States was a valid target for attack.
	The left-wing Anti-war foreign policy group called Just Foreign Policy, I've known them for a long time, they're definitely on the left, posted a tweet that read the following, quote, thank you to Congressman Matt Gaetz for leading the largest number of House Republican members to vote yes on a War Powers Resolution since Dennis Kucinich's 2011 Libya War Powers Resolution.
	And what they're referring to there is a very interesting event from history.
	In 2011, Obama wanted to involve the US in the regime change war in Libya.
	The House effort to vote no was led by Dennis Kucinich, the left-wing congressman from Ohio.
	And he mostly got Republican votes for it.
	The authorization failed.
	The House refused to authorize the military involvement of the US in Libya.
	Obama ignored that.
	And went to war in Libya anyway.
	The tweet then goes on, thank you as well to Ilyan Omar, U.S.
	progressives, and Ambassador Ford's 58 for bringing along an even larger number of House Democrats.
	Now just to conclude this story, which I think is really interesting in terms of the breakdown, former Congressman Justin Amash, who has been on our show before, Said the following.
	He was obviously, he would have been one of the people voting yes to withdraw troops from Syria.
	And he said the following, quote, I don't know if you have this tweet.
	We do have this tweet.
	There you see it on the screen.
	Quote, think about the insanity of voting no.
	There's not even an authorization for troops to be in Syria.
	And still these members of Congress refuse to bring them home.
	And I just wanted to highlight what I thought is the very interesting breakdown of some of the votes that Matt Gaetz was able to attract in support of his resolution.
	It included every member of the squad who voted with Congressman Gaetz, Alexander Acosta-Cortez, Elian Omar, Rashida Tlaib.
	It also included Ro Khanna and several of the More liberal or left-wing members of Congress, including Priscilla Jayapal, the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus.
	And then on the right, it attracted some of the most impressive foreign policy experts in the House, like George Santos, the Republican from New York, but also Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Thomas Massey, Lauren Boebert, Congressman Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
	So what you see here... Richie Torres, your good friend.
	Richie Torres as well.
	And so what you see, Michael, is, I know you're all kind of jaded about this, but at least in this particular case, and I'm the first to acknowledge that the squad was willing to vote no, only when it's sure,
	That their votes won't matter and the Democrats will get what they want, so I understand that in one sense it's kind of illusory, but at least we have here an example, a concrete, in-the-real-world example of members of the more left-wing or more populist left
	Wing of the Democratic Party joining with the MAGA right-wing anti-war populist led by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey and Lauren Boebert coming together in a coalition that though it failed did actually get more than a hundred votes in favor of a war powers resolution requiring the withdrawal of troops from Syria.
	Is this just some trivial illusion or theater or is this something reasonably significant and encouraging?
	I think it's rather illusory and trivial, frankly.
	I mean, not to diminish the efforts of people who might want to work toward securing votes for resolutions like this, but...
	I guess if I'm jaded, it's because I've seen enough partisan fluctuations on these sets of issues at this point that it's not really my inclination to ascribe a whole lot of significance to them.
	So for example, in 2019, so this is after Trump had been in power for two plus years, When the Republican Party had supposedly undergone this great realignment and the populist quote-unquote anti-war segment had been empowered or what have you, I just looked it up now just to refresh my memory just to make sure I was recalling this correctly.
	Only 16 Republicans voted in favor of a war powers resolution to remove troops from hostilities with regard to Yemen in the Saudi war that the U.S.
	was funding and orchestrating the combat operations of for at that point over four years.
	And almost all Democrats, I think actually all, all 231 Democrats voted in favor of this resolution under Trump in 2019.
	So what explains the unanimous Democratic desire, apparently, to invoke the Congress's War Powers Authority in 2019 to withdraw American military engagement in that particular conflict?
	versus today when the partisan balance has shifted somewhat.
	Well, it's just that.
	Probably partisanship is the main driver.
	And so, given that these votes tend to be very predictable on the basis of just sheer partisanship, being who controls the White House, goes back to even Libya in 2011, which you referenced, when Republicans were a lot more desirous of voting against war powers authority, when it was Obama who was going to when Republicans were a lot more desirous of voting against war powers authority, And then, when Trump was wielding the war powers authorities, Democrats were much more desirous of trying to restrain his ability to engage in that warfare.
	I mean, it's just hard to really characterize this as some sort of bonafide ideological transformation, when it really just does fluctuate back and forth on the basis of partisanship.
	I know people think you can't go back any further than like 20 years or something, because 9/11 was this watershed moment, which it was.
	But people don't even, don't recall, I think, or maybe they never knew, that in 1999, when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia, and, you know, under the guise of some sort of humanitarian mission as usual, the House never approved that action.
	That was similar to Libya when Obama just defied Congress there as well, and just continued dropping bombs on Libya despite the lack of congressional authorization, Similarly, Bill Clinton had never had authorization to bomb Syria.
	You know why?
	Because the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, including John Boehner and the most establishment of establishment Republicans at the time, Names who I can't even recall off the top of my head because they're so banal and bland, but you know, Bob Ney, remember that name?
	They all voted in unison against authorizing Bill Clinton's ability to bomb Serbia.
	And I'm sorry, was that because there was just...
	some grand ideological coalition that the Republicans had cultivated against war in 1999?
	Or was it because of, like, fundamentally some sort of partisan grievance?
	I think probably more of the latter.
	You know, I mean, I get this argument, and I think it's undeniable that partisanship plays a role in everything that takes place in Washington.
	Nonetheless, it's true that there are still four or five, four dozen, five dozen Democrats in the House who voted no, notwithstanding the fact that this is President Biden, whose war powers they were willing to restrict.
	It's also true that there has always been a strain in the Republican Party That has been isolationist pre 9-11.
	There was the sense that the bombing of Yugoslavia, of Serbia, and this whole obsession with Kosovo was about distracting Americans from the Lewinsky scandal.
	The reason why Ron Paul was able to have such remarkable success in 2008 and 2012, going deep into precincts in Iowa and South Carolina that were very far to the right and denouncing the war on terror and urging that America stop funding the military industrial complex is because there has going deep into precincts in Iowa and South Carolina that were very far to the right and denouncing the war on terror and A lot of this emerged during the Trump presidency and even the Trump campaign.
	He was the one who ran against things like the CIA war in Syria and even questioning the viability of NATO.
	And it was Trump who negotiated the withdrawal deal with the Taliban of troops from Afghanistan.
	I remember very well watching Matt Gaetz in the Trump presidency arguing vehemently in the House that the best day to get out of Afghanistan was the first day.
	The second best day would have been the second day.
	And the best day we have now is today.
	And it was Liz Cheney and the kind of pro-war Democrats he united against the coalition he was trying to build in order to block that from happening.
	So of course, there is a partisan element to it.
	There might even be a significant partisan element to it.
	But I think that it's simply kind of in this jaded way snidely dismiss all of these movements.
	No one argues that this anti-interventionist populist movement on the right is the dominant force in Republican Party politics.
	That's why Mitch McConnell- I deny that.
	I'm sorry.
	Nobody argues that they're the dominant force.
	Everyone acknowledges there's still a minority wing in the Republican Party.
	That's why Mitch McConnell is still the Senate Minority Leader.
	Why Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House.
	Yeah, why Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House.
	Exactly.
	Exactly, and why you saw Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and the rest withholding their votes from Kevin McCarthy, because they know that the establishment still is the dominant force in Republican politics.
	Everyone gets that.
	But there have been incursions made that are evidenced in polling data among Republicans, that are evidenced in where the no votes come from in terms of war, that maybe are explainable in some way bipartisan.
	Loyalties and the like but not only and I think this vote is a good example of people who have come together because they do have more isolationist bent to them and I think they most of them will have this bent and have had this bent regardless of which party controls the White House.
	I just question how sizable or significant those supposed incursions are, because if you contrast this with that 2011 Libya vote, which the Just Foreign Policy Group, which is run by people who I also like, There was greater Republican opposition in 2011 to the Libya war than there was today to the continued authorization of the Syria intervention.
	So if anything, Republican anti-interventionist sentiment has declined relative to 2011.
	In 2013, When Obama was proposing this idea of bombing Assad, remember he was saying we're going to go before Congress and they're going to have to authorize it before we actually press forward with this?
	I went around myself to town hall meetings that were held over, I think it was Labor Day that year, and there was mass opposition to the authorization of that potential war that Obama was potentially going to initiate.
	And what ended up happening was that the administration withdrew the vote, or It ended up not even being put up for a vote in Congress in part because there was overwhelming Republican opposition in the House and in the Senate, including from people like Marco Rubio, who is not really seen as an anti-interventionist but nonetheless concocted an argument as to why he was not going to vote to authorize that particular intervention.
	So, compared to 2013 and 2011, there's less anti-interventionist sentiment that's observable within the Republican Party today, at least if we're going to use this vote as a point of contrast.
	I don't think you could just group every single one of these.
	operations under the guise and make no distinctions.
	I mean, for example, the attempt to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya had no bearing at all, even arguably, on the security of the United States.
	That was a war that the British and the French wanted because they needed Libyan crude and Gaddafi was threatening to nationalize Libyan oil and to use the resources, not for the benefit of Western Europe, but for Northern Africa.
	And that was something that the French and the British desperately wanted to do under David Cameron.
	And I forget who the French president was at the time.
	Sarkozy.
	Yeah, it was Sarkozy.
	Exactly.
	And then it was Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, who convinced a very reluctant Obama to get involved.
	Whereas the current justification for why we have troops in Syria is that there's still a presence of ISIS in Syria that's part of this kind of war on terror that a lot of Republicans support, not on the kind of grounds of liberal interventionism, but on the grounds of just sort of basic not on the kind of grounds of liberal interventionism, but on And as long as there's Al Qaeda and ISIS forces anywhere, the United States should be going after them.
	So I mean, you can't just take every single one of these proposed wars and treat them as exactly the same.
	Some appeal to people more as a self-defense war than an interventionist war.
	But at the end of the day, Michael, for people like us, what you wanna do is to take these changes, and I don't think it's possible to deny We can argue about the extent to which they've thus far succeeded, and encourage them to provide growth to them, and water them, and provide nutrients to them, and not kind of dump all over them and deny their viability.
	I mean, the argument that you're making, which is that It's not yet big enough to matter.
	I think the response to that is to say, let's make it bigger.
	Let's encourage it to thrive, not to try and demean it as something artificial or non-existent.
	Okay, but what does it tell you, then, that Republicans were near unanimous in opposing, in 2019, the invocation of their War Powers Authority with regard to Yemen?
	Why wasn't this anti-interventionist revolution apparent then, and why are we supposed to all herald it now, if not partisanship?
	And the reason why I'm dubbing on it is not because I'm just cynically trying to, you know, stand in the way of these Cross partisan coalitions, but because there's a sick cycle here and there's this cyclical evidence of just kind of circumstantial partisanship that I think if it's allowed to be kind of mischaracterized as some sort of genuine ideological alignment, and I'm not realignment, I'm not denying that there are certain actors who might have actually had a genuine shift in their views.
	That's probable and almost certain to have happened.
	But in the aggregate, if the main variable here that explains the difference between that 2019 vote and this vote today is just partisanship, then why should we pretend that it's something of greater weight than it actually is?
	Yeah, and I think there's two things going on in Republican politics that are the primary impediments to having this anti-interventionist sentiment take hold in a comprehensive way.
	One of them is Israel and the fact that whether for political reasons, namely that Republican politicians are eager to please their pro-Israel constituents, meaning both Jewish voters as well as evangelical voters, and therefore anything involving Iran, including, meaning both Jewish voters as well as evangelical voters, and therefore anything involving Iran, including, for example, the involvement of the United States in Yemen, which was all about Iran, and trying to weaken and defeat Iran in the same way that we're in Ukraine in order to
	Anything involving Israel will automatically be a hot-button issue when it comes to Republican politics.
	They'll be very reluctant.
	To support non-interventionism if it's perceived that an intervention is necessary to promote Israeli interests.
	That is a huge hurdle.
	But I do think, I think you mentioned, what is it?
	There were 16 Republicans' votes, even under Trump, in favor of limiting his war powers to remain in Yemen.
	That is the foundation, and I'd be willing to bet that they were people who were more of the kind of MAGA crowd of at least some legitimate principled presence.
	And given the fact that these are the people who tend to have the most influence and trust and weight with Republican voters, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and those people, I think that that provides a significant opening to convince Republican voters, even more so even when it does involve Israel, that this I think that that provides a significant opening to convince Republican voters, even more so even when it does involve Israel, The other impediment is the question of China.
	And I did want to show you something that you actually flagged.
	These are two big impediments.
	I agree they're big impediments.
	So let's look at this video that you flagged that is from Congressman Tony Gonzalez.
	He's from Texas, is he not?
	Yeah, he represents Uvalde and was involved in issues around that.
	Exactly.
	So here he is.
	It's from the House Intelligence Committee risk assessment hearing this week.
	No, no, sorry.
	The committee from which this clip derives was actually the Oversight Committee on Homeland Security, a subcommittee within that committee.
	I know you love committees and being very precise with the nature of the individual committees.
	All right, well, let's listen to what he said, regardless of which subcommittee in which he said it.
	Though, I appreciate your attempt at accuracy.
	But, you know, in support, I guess, of your argument that, look, there are very severe limits on this alleged non-interventionist revolution within the Republican Party, let's listen to what Congressman Gonzalez had to say about China.
	My first question is for you, General.
	I just got back from a trip from Taiwan.
	It's the second trip to Taiwan in the past 14 months.
	I spent 20 years in the military, as my good friend August Fluger pointed out, our chairman pointed out.
	I know what war looks like.
	We're at war.
	I mean, this is a war.
	It may be a cold war, but this is a war with China.
	The People's Republic of China, every single day, are invading Taiwan via their cyberspace.
	Not only that, but the question I have for you is, in particular, your expertise is in air.
	I spent five years as an air crewman flying against China.
	I know exactly when they come out and they intercept our aircrafts.
	They're doing that every single day.
	And there's a danger in that, right?
	Because everything is fine until there is an accident, a spark, if you will, that turns a cold war into a hot war.
	Can you speak just to some of the dangers in which playing this game of chicken brings up, in particular, to Taiwan?
	Absolutely.
	China has demonstrated significant aggression in the air by penetrating Taiwanese airspace and it is a violation of Taiwan's sovereignty.
	So let's just leave aside all the craziness about how dare the Chinese intercept American airplanes flying right close to their country, as if the US wouldn't do the same to the Chinese.
	We had a week-long meltdown of hysteria over what might have been a weather balloon, what might have been an intelligence-gathering balloon flying over the United States.
	Everybody celebrated at the great heroism of the US military when it went and shot it down.
	that we all got to watch on tv videos of people on the beach chanting usa in south carolina when the fighter jet went and shot down a balloon an unarmed balloon that we spent like a trillion dollars a year on a military on um and we proved that we could shoot down an unarmed balloon and people celebrated over this remarkable display of violence showing that people really do love watching their governments blow up things which is concerning but for all this talk about how much of there's this is kind of anti-interventionist let's stop our in los pastros war
	you have the majority of the republican party supporting joe biden's war with russia which is what that is in sirius It's a proxy war with Russia.
	Absolutely supporting that.
	And then you also have a much larger part of the Republican Party.
	Even people in the Republican Party who are against the U.S.
	war in Ukraine seem to be in support of rhetoric like this, which basically declares that the United States is at war with China.
	So if we're at war with Russia, A proxy war with Russia, and we are simultaneously at war with China, which is what Congressman Gonzalez said, or we're willing to go to war with China over Taiwan or over incursions into the South Chinese Sea and other parts right close to the Chinese mainland, very, very far from the United States.
	It seems pretty close to what you would define as World War III, is it not?
	Yeah, I mean, it's at the very least the contours of what I think could only be described as World War III, or some sort of global conflict that is reminiscent of what one would anticipate a World War III to look like.
	I mean, you almost resist even trying to envision what the full character of that potential conflict would be, because it would be so unfathomably cataclysmic.
	But yeah, that sounds about right, and what Tony Gonzalez said there, correct me if I'm wrong or tell me if you disagree with this, his rhetoric with regard to China and the proclamation of a war against China already being underway, according to him, is not really Defined by association with, like, just the Republican establishment, right?
	You would expect to hear very similar rhetoric, even identical rhetoric, across virtually all factions of the Republican Party as it stands today, meaning that there's not some kind of easily definable distinction in terms of rhetoric on China that separates the, quote, MAGA anti-establishment wing and the Kevin McCarthy whomever establishment wing.
	I don't even really accept those as significant distinctions at this point, really, or like a meaningful kind of demarcation between these different factions.
	But let's say you do kind of buy into those factional differentiations.
	That rhetoric would not be associated with one or the other wing, right?
	It would be, if anything, a unifying force within these allegedly disparate forces within the party.
	forces within the party.
	Yeah, and just to add to that as well, just to be a little bit more grim about it at all, is that at least over the last six to nine months, I think what you've seen is a significant escalation in the eagerness of the Democratic Party and its leaders to demonstrate that they are not in fact, quote unquote, I think what you've seen is a significant escalation in the eagerness of And there has been an aggressive escalation in the rhetoric coming from the Democrats as well.
	Yeah.
	They're kind of playing catch up.
	They now, for example, support the banning of TikTok from all of the United States on the grounds that we need to protect ourselves from the nefarious Chinese Communist Party.
	There is, I think, an emerging bipartisan consensus that China needs to be talked about.
	China needs to be treated as a long-term enemy.
	I don't think anyone except the most kind of deranged people are ready for a hot war with China.
	Though people have increasingly said, led by Joe Biden, that if the Chinese were to make incursions into Taiwan, we would have a hot war with China.
	But I don't think anyone wants that, but at the very least there seems to be an emerging bipartisan consensus that it's time for, at the very least, a cold war with China.
	And that's the reason why I began with this story about China engineering this diplomatic breakthrough between the Saudis and the Iranians because the United States has nowhere near the diplomatic weight to sustain that.
	It couldn't even really unite the democratic world behind isolating and sanctioning Russia.
	Major democracies in the world like South Korea and Indonesia and Brazil have refused to sanction Russia or side with the United States behind Russia.
	All of these countries in Africa and Latin America, in the Middle East have all kinds of critical ties with China.
	Where is this Cold War going to come from?
	You know, you have the Chinese also playing this peacemaking role with Ukraine as well.
	I mean, they just recently created a kind of outline for what a peace plan would look like.
	How is the United States possibly going to simultaneously fight a war with Russia and do a 30 to 40 or 50 year sustain cold war against China when China is doing nothing but growing and developing allies and relationships and the United States can't even clean up chemical spills and chemical explosions in Ohio?
	Well, I wouldn't be too complacent about this being limited to some sort of manageable cold war, right?
	Because there is this huge intractable consensus emerging across pretty much every faction of the American political scene.
	So let me give you one example of that.
	So when the United States last August voted to approve, the U.S.
	Senate voted to approve the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO, there was one senator, a grand total of one senator who voted against that.
	It was Josh Hawley.
	Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, everybody all voted totally unanimously in favor of expanding NATO, including to hundreds of miles along the border with Russia, with respect to Finland.
	But Josh Hawley did vote against it.
	But his rationale for voting against it was telling.
	Because he had voted for previous rounds of NATO expansion that people don't even know happened, like Montenegro and North Macedonia and so forth.
	He was in the Senate for at least one of them.
	And he voted in favor of it, but he did vote against this.
	And his rationale was that, look, "Look, the resources that might be expended in Europe "vis a vis this expansion of NATO "would be better expended in East Asia "to prepare for what inevitably is going to be "not just a cold war, but a hot war with China." And I'm paraphrasing there, I don't know if you used that exact phraseology, but that was the thrust of the message.
	So, when you talk about how nobody wants a war with China, I don't know, I mean, they seem to be doing a lot of what you might expect to precipitate a war with China.
	Whether they consciously, intentionally want it is like, almost like a weird psychological question that we can't really fully know unless we get access to the interior monologue of some of these people.
	But they're doing everything in terms of action that you would expect them to do if they did, in a sense, want it.
	And that intractable consensus I think is very necessary to dwell upon because one reason why the Ukraine policy was able to proceed with so little dissension and so little debate was because basically debate was almost circumvented And there was this air of inevitability around the policy and around this just sort of inescapable confrontation with Russia that we all had to buy into that allowed for debate to basically just be bypassed.
	I think they're doing a similar thing now, they, in this kind of royal sense with China by just making it seem like it's this inevitability and it's unavoidable that there's going to be this hot war eventually with China, or at least that hot war needs to be something that the U.S. is actually preparing for, whether it's regarding Taiwan, whether or at least that hot war needs to be something that the U.S. is actually preparing for, whether it's regarding Taiwan, whether it's these new bases they're establishing in the Philippines or these new defense
	I mean, and on and on and on, they're preparing for it in a way that would, I think, force you to conclude that they do, in a sense, want it, even if they wouldn't articulate it in quite those terms, because it's incredibly jarring to just contemplate this idea of being in a hot war with China, which is a global superpower, because it's incredibly jarring to just contemplate this idea of being I mean, it would be a nightmarish, a nightmare like beyond comprehension.
	The thing that alarms me the most is, I recall during the first and second week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, And I did, I wrote articles about this and I did videos about this as well.
	You could see in real time this kind of intense hate session against Vladimir Putin in Russia being disseminated and almost everybody being consumed by it.
	Instantly, overnight.
	Everybody who wanted to remain in good standing in both the Democratic and Republican parties, with a very few number of exceptions, was- Including Donald Trump, who supposedly leads this, you know, anti-interventionist insurgent movement.
	I mean, you could find clips of Donald Trump going on Sean Hannity's show and declaring that Putin was guilty of genocide.
	It's just kind of the way I roll my eyes.
	But he's also been for a long time now outspoken about the recklessness of having the U.S.
	be involved in the proxy war.
	I know you're obsessed with proving that there's no real changes in the Republican Party.
	Politicians in that moment You know, don't stand in front of freight trains.
	It's the reason why when there was a time to vote in the House and the Senate on what turned out to be a disastrous policy, which was authorizing the war in Afghanistan, every single member of the House and Senate, except one person, Barbara Lee, stood up and voted yes, and she had
	In those moments of intense consensus, which is what I'm arguing, it is almost impossible to prevent this kind of unleashing of this very instinctive tribalistic war fervor
	That quickly gets out of control and I said early on that all of the limits that the United States was insisting it would abide by in terms of its refusal to get too involved in the war in Ukraine were likely one after another going to fall because you could see that when people join in we're still, you know, shaped by our DNA and our tribal evolution.
	That when you just get in this kind of tribalistic mindset of feeding on hatred of a foreign enemy, an external threat, anything becomes possible.
	And that's why we're now on the verge of actually sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine after sending tanks and long range missiles and all these other things we swore we would never do.
	So if you look now at what's happening in China, which is, again, and I'm sure there are people in our audience right now who are feeling this and who think this, when you start connecting into this kind of unlimited, irrational sense of hatred where the only thing that one is permitted to say about another country is they're evil, they're our enemy, they're trying to destroy us, we have to destroy them, you're unleashing these very powerful, instinctive impulses
	That can very easily lead to horrific outcomes that are not intended in the first instance.
	Not just that, the claim is that China is trying to corrupt the United States from within via TikTok, via the purchasing of farmland, via all this subterfuge and ideological subversion that That's very similar to what Democrats spent four years saying about Russia.
	That Russia was infiltrating our country, that they were taking it over.
	That's the same rhetoric that came during the Cold War.
	And when you convince people of that, That there's no reasoning with those people, there's no diplomatics possibility, that there's no way to treat them as just a competitor or an adversary.
	They need to be treated as an enemy.
	Very dangerous things can happen.
	All right, Michael, just as the last topic I just want to touch on quickly with you because we're running out of time.
	We did our entire show yesterday on the utter absurd spectacle of how the Democrats behave themselves at the hearing on the Twitter files and their treatment of the journalist who, two of the journalists who had the reporting, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger.
	So I don't want to go over all of that, but there was this emergence of this person that a lot of people were unaware of.
	And I think one of the things, the reason they were unaware of is because she's not actually a member of the House of Representatives, even though she calls herself Congressman Stacey Instead, she's just a delegate representing the Virgin Islands.
	She's not considered a member of the House.
	She's not even allowed to vote.
	On bills, and yet they pretend that she's some sort of congresswoman, they give her these... The defenders will clarify very quickly that she can vote within committees on bills, so like on procedural votes within committees, but she can't vote on the floor of the House, which is like a crucial distinction that they'll make sure that you're aware of when you continue to study her... Right, but the idea of having these delegates, Washington DC has a delegate as well, that for a long time was Eleanor Holmes Norton,
	The idea is you need somebody there to advocate for the people who live in these places that don't have full representation like Washington, D.C.
	or the Virgin Islands and Guam.
	Puerto Rico.
	Exactly, Puerto Rico.
	So you give them kind of a voice.
	And yet she never uses her voice, it seems, to advocate for the people of the Virgin Islands.
	She uses her voice to build her social media stardom as some sort of resistance, slay queen, hero.
	And not only was she incredibly obnoxious and tyrannical... Yeah, a taxi partner of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
	Exactly, so yeah, she was incredibly obnoxious yesterday and you were the one who reminded me that she was a house manager for the second impeachment proceeding that, I don't know, doesn't seem to have a great deal to do with the people of the Virgin Islands, right, against Donald Trump.
	Here she is in February 2021 giving this unbelievably unhinged speech.
	Let's listen to what she said about Donald Trump and January 6th and the rest of it.
	When I first saw this model that was created for this, I thought back to September 11th.
	I know a lot of you senators were here.
	Some of you might have been members on the House side.
	I was also here on September 11th.
	I was a staffer at that time.
	My office was on the West Front of the Capitol.
	I worked in the Capitol and I was on the House side.
	This year is 20 years since the attacks of September 11th.
	And almost every day, I remember that 44 Americans gave their lives to stop the plane that was headed to this Capitol building.
	I thank them every day for saving my life and the life of so many others.
	You don't believe that she spends every day for the last 21 years thanking the 44 people on the plane who saved her?
	Let's listen to the rest.
	Wait, let's go back.
	For saving my life and the life of so many others.
	Those Americans sacrifice their lives for love of country, Honor.
	Duty.
	Just, by the way, this is about January 6th, just so everybody understands.
	All the things that America means.
	The Capitol stands because of people like that.
	This Capitol that was conceived by our founding fathers, that was built by slaves, that remains through the sacrifice of service men and women around the world.
	And when I think of that, and I think of these insurgents, these images, incited by our own President of the United States, attacking this Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election, She's actually almost more melodramatic than AOC.
	What was the term insurgents predominantly used in American discourse in reference to?
	It was in Iraq when the U.S. military was fighting what were called insurgents who were attacking U.S. soldiers and needed to be- Yeah, they were Iraqis.
	They were Iraqis.
	They were Iraqis defending their country against the foreign invasion.
	That was also used for people in Afghanistan doing the same.
	But the hearing yesterday, Michael, was just so extraordinary because there should not be this intense partisan divide on whether or not the CIA, the Homeland Security, and the FBI should be playing an aggressive and active role in trying to censor and the FBI should be playing an aggressive and active role in trying to censor the Internet when I mean, I understand that there's going to be some disagreement on that.
	But the idea that every single Democrat found this reporting deeply offensive, infuriating, and enraging, she, this woman, called Matt Taibbi a direct threat to American citizens who disagreed with him.
	And one after the next, they all stood up and defended the U.S.
	security state, saying that the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are censoring Not for nefarious reasons.
	They said you have to be a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist to believe that this is some deep state plot to control our discourse.
	These are the men and women of our U.S.
	intelligence agencies who want to keep us safe, who are censoring in order to keep us safe from dangerous speech and to protect our democracy.
	That is the view of the Democratic Party, that the U.S. security state, including the CIA and FBI, censors the Internet for the good of the United States.
	And they were enraged that this censorship regime was brought out into the open by these two journalists on whom they spent the day heaping all kinds of vitriol and hatred.
	Well, again, I mean, just go with the heuristic that I'm increasingly inclined toward, which is believe that the rhetoric that's being espoused by these people, unless you have evidence to the contrary, is reflective of their genuine beliefs.
	If what that woman, Stacey Flaskett, said when she was a House manager during the impeachment trial in 2021 of Trump, if that is reflective of her genuine beliefs, that her overriding imperative in life is going to be warding off these dangerous insurgents, As she called them, meaning right-wing interlopers who are looking to destroy the American constitutional order.
	And, you know, given her background as someone who grew up not in the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, but in New York City, and then basically carpetbagged in the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, she could get some elected position somewhere in Congress and, you know, gallivant around and act like she is this era's, like, leading melodramatist.
	You know, If this is what she actually believes, then it makes sense why she would view someone like Taibbi as a, quote, threat to her interests, at least her interests insofar as they amount to perpetuating this narrative which she articulated during that impeachment trial, and which is this, like, of cosmic, massive importance on which the entire fate of the United States supposedly hinges.
	So if she's viewing Heidi in his exposure of information related to the security agencies as antagonistic toward her pursuit of that goal, you can see why she would denigrate him and call him a so-called journalist.
	Yeah, I think this is the key to everything.
	or a threat.
	Well, he is a danger/threat, but it's to the perpetuation of her preferred narrative, which I think is not really something happening.
	Yeah, I think this is the key to everything.
	You know, I've been heavily involved in the controversy and the debate here in Brazil about a similar censorship regime that was imposed not by the Brazilian intelligence services, but by the judiciary.
	And I kind of appreciate the Brazilian left who hate me here in Brazil, because they're much more honest in their arguments, where they don't pretend even to believe in free speech.
	They say, yes, we don't actually believe in free speech.
	We think that's a fascist value.
	We think censorship is urgent.
	And the censorship imposed by this Judge Noble Where's the United States?
	You can't just like outright denounce the First Amendment.
	Right.
	You have to pretend that you believe in free speech because it's been inculcated in us since birth.
	So they say we want censorship.
	We believe it's necessary because the people we're fighting against are fascists.
	They're so evil and threatening that anything that we do is justified in the name of stopping them.
	That was what made that Sam Harris clip where he defended the lies told and the censorship about the Hunter Biden laptop.
	To be justified on the grounds that the evil of Trump is so much greater than any of these evils, that anything and everything that you can do to stop Trump, including lying and censoring, is justified.
	That's what made it so important.
	This really is the mindset of the Democratic Party now over the last six years, which is that Donald Trump and the Trump movement are such a singular and existential evil That anything and everything that you can do from censoring to denying due process, denying political rights, to allying with the CIA and the FBI and the Homeland Security to interfere in U.S.
	politics is justified and in fact not just justified but morally necessary in the name of stopping this greater evil.
	So the fact that she compares The riot of January 6th and the people behind it to those who perpetuated 9-11 or to quote-unquote insurgents absolutely reveals this incredibly dangerous mindset that these Democrats have which is that they're basically in a war
	This is what the Brazilians were saying too, that this is a war on terrorism, that the people who broke into those government buildings on January 8th are terrorists like the people who attacked the US on 9-11.
	We all know what happened after 9-11, which is civil liberties were destroyed in the name of stopping this existential threat, and every time that authoritarians want to wield authoritarian power.
	That's what they do is they create a narrative that we're fighting the terrorists and now the terrorists are our fellow citizens who support Donald Trump.
	She considers them similar to, if not worse than, the people who did 9-11 and therefore all the things that we did after 9-11, the destruction of civil liberties, the denial of privacy rights,
	the implementation of censorship, probably the institution of the implementation of censorship, probably the institution of torture, which has kind of been what's done to the January 6th defendants in a way of keeping them in prison without trial and in solitary confinement and harsh conditions, that everything and anything is justified in the name of stopping the Trump movement.
	That really is the view of the Democratic Party and that's why they're allied now with these security services who see things the same way. - Okay.
	Oh, and by the way, per this narrative, guess who is aligned with Trump in attempting to promulgate this insurrectionary fervor the world over, whether it's South America, Europe, or North America?
	That's right, Vladimir Putin!
	And so, the foreign policy status quo must be upheld because that's just another front on which this Absolutely, Michael.
	Thanks so much.
	You were on the top of your game.
	I think it does you well to be where you belong in New Jersey.
	It's where you always clearly seem to thrive most, so try and stay there for... Yeah, if I stuff my fat face with enough bagels ahead of the appearance, then it really gives me like a superpower for like low-key Exactly.
	It really enlivens the most authentic part of you.
	So, thank you so much for joining us, Michael.
	We're going to say goodbye to you, finally, thankfully.
	And we're going to say goodbye as well to our audience.
	That concludes our show for this evening.
	Thank you so much, as always, for watching.
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