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April 4, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:11:28
WaPo "Fact-Checker” Proves Title Is a Fraud, Cheering the Terror Attack in Russia, Marco Rubio & Sanctions

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Good evening, it's Monday, April 3rd, 2023.
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, the so-called fact checker of the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, suffered one of the most extreme and justified humiliations of any journalist in quite some time.
On Saturday, the Fact Checker published an article purporting to assign three Pinocchios to the claim by Donald Trump and other Republicans that the candidacy of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the Democratic District Attorney who just oversaw Trump's indictment in New York, was backed by mega-financier George Soros.
Assigning various Pinocchios is the infantile method the Post Fact Checkers use to claim that certain statements are lies.
The one slight problem?
Kessler's own article proved, and even implicitly acknowledged, that it is absolutely true that Bragg's candidacy was supported with lots of money from George Soros.
And indeed, there's no denying that this is true.
As a result, the new feature on Twitter called Community Notes, designed to fact-check various claims made by journalists and others, twice fact-checked the post Fact Checker.
First, when he posted his original claim that three Pinocchios were warranted for saying that Bragg's candidacy was backed by George Soros.
And then again, when he complained about the Community Notes fact-checking him and misdescribed what the Community Notes said.
The entire episode, aside from being genuinely hilarious, sheds a great deal of light on the corporate media's fact checking fraud, as well as Kessler's petulant response and the way it revealed a great deal about how the employees of media corporations see the world and all of you, and we will examine as well as Kessler's petulant response and the way it revealed a great Then an absolutely horrific terrorist attack this weekend was carried out at a cafe in
Petersburg, Russia, killing the person who appeared to be the intended target, the pro-war Russian journalist, Vladimir Tatarsky, and injuring at least 19 others that were in attendance to hear him speak.
The Russian government suggested that they believed either Ukrainian intelligence or radical groups inside Russia may have been responsible for the blast, so the investigation is ongoing.
Last August, a car bomb killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist, and even the U.S.
government said it believes that Ukrainian intelligence agencies were responsible for that terrorist attack.
Well, look at the amazingly brazen way that many American supporters of Biden's war policy and proxy war in Ukraine are overtly cheering and praising and justifying this classic act of terrorism.
And then finally, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida today bitterly complained that other countries such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia are now carrying out international trade without using the U.S.
dollar, something that he said will prevent the U.S.
from using sanctions to strangle populations as punishment for having leaders Rubio dislikes.
We'll examine the implications of Rubio's comments and the sanction regime that the United States continues to use generally.
As a reminder, every episode of System Update is now available in podcast version, 12 hours after we aired the show live here on Rumble.
So if you want to follow us on podcasting, in a podcasting form, you can follow us on Spotify or...
Apple or any other of the major podcasting platforms.
As a reminder as well, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have a live after show following this show, which is on our Locals community.
To join that, simply click the join button.
We often have written journalism there as well, including an exchange that I posted this morning with a critic and a longtime reader who had emailed me about his stance and mine on trans issues.
And we posted that debate on the Locals platform.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Media corporations know what you think of them.
They are very well aware of the fact that they have completely lost the trust of almost everyone in the American population, which harbors nothing but contempt and loathing and, above all, mistrust for everything their employees say.
Every time there's new polling data, That fact only becomes more visible.
The status of the American media only gets worse every time there's more data that shows what the American public thinks about it.
So here, for example, from Axios last July is a headline that really tells the full story.
Quote, trust in news collapses to historic lows.
Maybe we can bring that up on the screen.
And the article in a chart, there it is, a chart accompanying that article, shows that only 11% of Americans, 11% now say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in television news, while 11% now say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in television news, while 16%, only 16% of Americans say they have a great deal
There you see the chart that has steadily and radically declined from 1995, when more than 45% of Americans said they trusted newspapers, and over 30% said they trusted television news.
Those were not great numbers, but at least they were certainly higher than now, where these numbers have plummeted, plummeted.
To where only 11%, barely 1 out of 10 Americans find what they hear on television news trustworthy, and just a little bit more, 16% say they find what they read in newspapers to be trustworthy, either a lot or quite a bit.
So this is a radical collapse in how media corporations are understood by The American public.
Almost everyone in the American public distrusts and hates the media.
And this is something that polling data has repeatedly shown.
And as I said, every year it gets worse.
Now, they know this and you would think that if they were actually interested in doing something about it, there would be only one question on their mind.
Namely, what is it that we have done to cause the public to lose trust and faith in us?
Why does the public no longer believe anything that we say?
Why are they willing to go almost anywhere else and find their news because they no longer believe a single thing we tell them?
That would be the obvious question that they would ask.
If they had any kind of minimal integrity, if they were in any way intending to rebuild faith and trust in their product by digging into the substance of why the American public now hates them, but you will never hear them do that.
They complain a lot about this.
They lament it.
They express anger toward the public that distrusts them.
The one thing you never see them doing is looking in the mirror and saying, what is it that we did to cause this extraordinary collapse in the amount of faith and trust that people have in us?
Instead, what they have decided to do, upon seeing that nobody trusts them any longer, that nobody trusts their employees who bear the human resources title of journalist, is they've decided to simply change the title.
You can imagine news executives sitting around looking at that data that I just showed you and saying, well, the public no longer trusts us.
What is it that we should do about this?
And then some other executive, some other genius in one of these media corporations that has lost all faith and trust by the public says, I have a good idea.
Let's take the same people the media hates and just have human resources give them a new title.
And that way we can pretend that these people are now something different than what the public came to hate before.
Even though it will be the same exact people, Doing the same exact things, using the same exact techniques, if we just find something else to call them besides journalist or reporter, maybe we can get people to believe that these people are something different.
So essentially what they've done is they invented two brand new titles that are designed to try and convince you that these are now people who aren't the same as the journalists and reporters you already know constantly lie to you.
One of those titles, which we've covered extensively on our show, is Disinformation Expert, a brand new and completely fictitious and fraudulent title that they bestowed on all sorts of people funded by the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state, and often cited by U.S.
media outlets as the experts Who you're supposed to believe are now apolitical.
These are experts.
They have no role in politics.
They're not reporters.
They're not journalists.
They're experts.
They've gone to Harvard and Yale and they've studied disinformation even though nothing at Harvard or Yale or any other university offers a diploma in disinformation because it's a fake field of discipline.
It's a fake expertise.
And just this week, one of the best articles ever written on the topic of the fraudulent disinformation industry was published in Tablet Magazine by Jacob Siegel, entitled A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation.
And it's really interesting.
I am under a book contract.
And I've been for several years.
I haven't started the book yet, though.
And I've been thinking about devoting my book to exactly this, the history of how the government created this brand new fake expertise called disinformation, this brand new concept that never existed before.
And is now trying to use it to pretend that it's some objective science that determines truth and falsity.
And only people trained in this complex field of discipline are qualified to pronounce what is true and false or valid information and disinformation.
And once it's disinformation.
That means that the government can justifiably censor it.
It can instruct big tech to censor it.
That's ultimately what it's intended to do, is to convince you that there's now this new group of people, now that you've already realized journalists and reporters lie to you constantly, that you can trust instead, called disinformation experts.
We'll have Jacob Siegel on the show tomorrow night to talk about this opus that he wrote.
It's very long, but extremely worth reading.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
And we will have him sometime this week, maybe tomorrow night, maybe later in the week, depending on the news.
And we will also talk a lot about this article.
But we've certainly covered a lot about this fake expertise.
So that is one way that they've tried to just give new titles to these employees that you know lie to you constantly.
The other way, the other tactic, was to create a new human resource title called Fact Checker.
They're fact checkers.
These are not reporters or journalists.
These are people who sit above that lofty path.
They reside above all of us.
They're apolitical.
They have no vested interest in the discourse.
They're just there to call balls and strikes.
They just tell you what is true and false.
They just check facts and then they just pronounce, this is true, this is false, this person told the truth, this person lied.
And now all of these newspapers and TV outlets employ fact-checkers.
As I said, they're the same exact people who, three years ago, before this fake title was invented, were just the same reporters and journalists.
But they feel like if they just paint them differently, just call them a different name, you'll be fooled.
Oh, I hate reporters and journalists, but that's not them.
These are fact-checkers.
That's totally different, like disinformation experts.
These are objective people trained in this very complex field of discipline to analyze very carefully and meticulously and scrupulously to distinguish truth from falsity.
These are people whom you can trust because they have a different title.
One of the fact checkers, the lead fact checker, the senior fact checker for the Washington Post, imagine how much integrity and reliability you have to have not just to be a fact checker for the Washington Post, which is already an incredible amount of integrity, but the senior fact checker, the which is already an incredible amount of integrity, but the senior fact checker, the chief fact checker for the Washington Post,
On Saturday, purported to analyze the truth and falsity of the claim being made by Donald Trump and other Republicans that the candidacy of Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan who has overseen the prosecution of Donald Trump, is funded by George Soros.
Now, we covered this exact issue on the show on the night that Trump was indicted because it's very easy to prove exactly what happened.
It's absolutely true that Alvin Bragg's candidacy was supported using George Soros' money.
Here's what happened.
It's all public Here you see a PAC called the Color of Change that is a PAC that supports district attorney candidates who vowed to institute a progressive criminal justice reform agenda of not using cash bail, of not seeking prison for drug offenders, of not seeking prison
Unless, in the most extreme circumstances, not seeking lengthy prison sentences is based on the view that America imprisons too many people for too long a period of time, and we need district attorneys committed to using prison less frequently, and this Color of Change PAC collects huge amounts of money to support candidates who vowed to do that.
Alvin Bragg was such a candidate, is such a person.
He is a progressive district attorney and lawyer who vowed to institute the criminal justice reform that this Color of Change PAC supports.
And as a result, on March 8, 2021, there you see they endorsed him.
And as part of that endorsement, they vowed to spend a million dollars getting Alvin Bragg elected.
Where were they going to get that money from?
A million dollars is a lot of money for a PAC.
Well, fortunately for them, six days later, after they announced that they would spend a million dollars on Alvin Bragg's candidacy, lo and behold, George Soros, who has as one of his main causes supporting PACs that Worked with people like Alvin Bragg, gave a million dollars to the Caller of Change PAC.
There you see it right here.
It came six days later on May 14th, so six days after this PAC announced that they were going to support Alvin Bragg, spend a million dollars towards Soros, send that exact amount, a million dollars, to Caller of Change.
And Color of Change then actually used almost half of it, $500,000, to help elect Alvin Bragg.
So the fact that Alvin Bragg's candidacy was supported using George Soros' money is an indisputable fact.
Any fact checker qualified to evaluate that claim would instantly conclude that it was true.
Now, Glenn Kessler, the chief fact checker for the Washington Post, set out to evaluate these claims from Donald Trump and others, and to determine whether or not it's actually true or not.
And he published this article on April 1st, 2023.
It was not intended as an April Fool's joke in any way, although it could have been.
And the headline was, the incendiary claim that George Soros, quote, funded Alvin Bragg.
And there you see it.
It's called, right there, Fact Checker.
You see it right here.
This is what tells you that it's actually something to really be trusted.
It's a fact checking.
It's not just like any other article.
And already in the headline, You can see there that it's already saying this is an incendiary claim.
Why is that an incendiary claim?
All the fact checkers should be telling us is whether or not it's true or whether or not it's false.
So already they're signaling to you that for some reason you should not believe this.
This is an incendiary claim that George Soros, quote, funded Alvin Bragg.
Now here's, if we can go to the next slide, The next screen.
Here are the two statements that Glenn Kessler, the fact checker, is purporting to fact check.
First, there you see a statement from Donald Trump on his indictment on March 30th, quote, Manhattan D.A.
Alvin Bragg, who was handpicked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace.
His next Quote that is being fact-checked.
Quote, I knew the price I'd have to pay for running a campaign that promised to take on the deep state, the open borders lobby, and the Soros money machine, Trump in a fundraising appeal March 31st said.
So these are the two statements that our fact-checker is now going to tell us whether true or false.
And let's look at what he said, quote, from the moment it appeared that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would indict Trump after hearing evidence of his role in hush money payments to an adult film star.
Now, just before I get into the substance, that claim is itself false.
It's not Alvin Bragg who indicted Trump.
Alvin Bragg brought the charges or sought an indictment of Trump.
It's the grand jury that voted to indict Trump.
He has suggested that Bragg is operating at the direction of liberal billionaire George Soros, who he claimed had given more than $1 million to Bragg.
Now, let's just stop there for a second.
This is how he's describing what Trump claimed.
He's saying, Trump said that Bragg is operating at the direction of George Soros, And that Soros had given Bragg more than a million dollars.
Now let's look back at the two quotes that he's purporting to fact check from Trump and see if that is an accurate summary of what Trump claimed.
Here's the Trump statement from March 31st.
I knew the price I'd have to pay for running a campaign that promised to take on the deep state, the open borders lobby, and the Soros money machine.
I don't see any claim there that Bragg is operating at the direction of George Soros or that George Soros gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars.
Here is the first statement from March 30th where he says, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was handpicked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace.
That quote also does not claim that Alvin Bragg takes direction from George Soros, or that George Soros gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars.
So the description of the fact checker, Glenn Kessler, about what Trump claimed is itself a lie.
Trump didn't say either of those two things.
He didn't say that Alvin Bragg takes orders from George Soros, nor did he say But George Soros gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars.
And that's a preposterous thing to think that Trump said because George Soros could not give Alvin Bragg directly a million dollars.
And everybody knows that's not how campaign finance works.
Campaign finance laws restrict how much an individual like George Soros could give to Alvin Bragg.
Of course, George Soros didn't just hand Alvin Bragg a check for a million dollars.
That's not how rich people fund candidates that they support.
It's true that George Soros' son, Jonathan Soros, and his wife each gave $10,000 to Alvin Bragg, the maximum of what you can actually give.
But the way, if you want to give in excess of that limit, like a million dollars, the way you do that is you give it to PACs, like the Color of Change PAC, that you know will support that candidate.
So you don't give it to the candidate, because you're not allowed to.
You give it to a PAC, like the Color of Change PAC, that then goes and uses your money, the million dollars, to take out ads against your opponent, to run ads in favor of the candidate.
And that's exactly what George Soros did.
So when Trump says he funded Alvin Bragg, that's exactly what happened.
He didn't say he gave Alvin Bragg a million dollars the way Glenn Kessler falsely said, claimed that Trump said, in order to claim that Trump was lying, nor did he say anywhere in here that Alvin Bragg took orders directly from Donald Trump.
So do you see what has happened here?
What Trump said is entirely correct.
There's no doubt about that.
But Glenn Kessler, his whole existence in life is to accuse Republican politicians of lying to please the liberal audience that reads the Washington Post.
So in order to be able to accuse Trump of lying here, even though Trump is telling the truth, he had to twist and distort what Trump said in order to then go on and say what Trump said isn't true.
I'm going to give it three Pinocchios.
Let's watch how he did that.
So there you see the claim.
Trump has suggested that Bragg is operating in the direction of liberal billionaire George Soros, who he claimed had given more than $1 million to Bragg.
That is not what Donald Trump said.
Then he goes on.
The theme has been picked up by other Republicans, with many House members in tweets calling Bragg, quote, Soros-backed, or Soros-funded, or even Soros DA.
Well, that's actually true.
The DA, Alvin Bragg, is Soros-backed.
He is Soros-funded.
Because he was elected by virtue of a $1 million check that George Soros gave to Collar of Change, which then used roughly half of that.
To promote Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
It goes on, Trump's presumed main rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, referred to Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney in his statement saying he would refuse an extradition request.
So, he's now piling up what are supposed to be these lies.
DeSantis called him Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney.
That's exactly what he is.
He was backed by George Soros in his race by George Soros' contribution to the Change of Color PAC, which then campaigned for Alvin Bragg.
Fox News, which has long focused on Soros' support for left-wing causes, has repeatedly mentioned Soros' name in its coverage.
Why wouldn't they?
One of the biggest funders by far, probably the single biggest funder, promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy was George Soros.
So if you're going to talk about Alvin Bragg and explain to the public who Alvin Bragg is, of course you're going to mention his biggest funder.
That would be journalistic malpractice not to mention that.
But here's what Glenn Kessler says about that.
Quote, but the intense focus on Soros is misplaced.
Soros never directly funded Bragg, but instead contributed to a group that supported Bragg and other liberal candidates seeking to be prosecutors.
Let's go back a little bit.
Listen to what he admits happened.
He says, the intense focus on Soros is misplaced.
That's an irrelevant statement.
He's not here to tell media organizations what they should and shouldn't focus on.
That's not within the realm of the expertise of a fact checker.
I personally want to know, when I'm being told about a politician, who their main funder is.
I think that's extremely relevant.
But here's what Glenn Kessler says, here's the meat of his fact check, quote, Soros never directly funded Bragg.
No one claims he did, because as I said before, that cannot be done under the law.
But instead, Soros contributed to a group that supported Bragg.
That's exactly correct.
Soros gave a million dollars to the PAC That promised to spend a million dollars on Bragg's candidacy, for some reason only spent half that, or a little less, $430,000.
But the fact that George Soros gave them a million dollars six days after they endorsed Bragg and said they would spend a million dollars on Bragg's candidacy, of course, makes it completely not just permissible, but necessary to point out that Bragg was elected using George Soros' funding.
This fact check goes on.
Moreover, the repeated mention of Soros plays into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Soros, a Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor, is a wealthy puppet master who works behind the scenes to manipulate elections and further his goals.
The Anti-Defamation League found in 2018 that Soros figures in a number of anti-Semitic tweets.
Let's just think about this for a second.
George Soros is the single biggest funder in American politics.
Nobody donates more money to elect candidates and promote causes than the multi-billionaire George Soros.
It's not illegal to do it.
He's an American citizen.
He apparently throws around millions and millions of dollars in accordance with campaign finance law.
But it's nonetheless highly relevant.
And do you see what they're trying to do?
They're first trying to say that it's a lie that Soros backed Bragg's candidacy even though the evidence is indisputable that he did.
And even the Washington Post fact checker admits that.
But then they're trying to insert, and again this is well beyond the purview of a fact checker, the accusation that if you mention That Donald Trump's prosecutor was elected with the use of funds provided by George Soros, you are an anti-Semite.
You're not allowed, you're not allowed to talk about, says the Washington Post.
George Soros, even though he's the single biggest funder of liberal causes and Democratic Party candidates in the entire country, you're a bigot.
It means you hate all Jews.
If you talk about this billionaire who happens to be Jewish, he's off limits from conversation.
That's what the media is trying to do.
They're trying to trivialize and manipulate anti-Semitism accusations to suppress this fact That Democratic candidates rely on this billionaire.
Now, we showed you last week when we covered this the first time it was being done.
It was when Mehdi Hassan, who is not Jewish, Went on this show of Joe Scarborough, who's also not Jewish, and the two of them, these two non-Jews, declared that anyone who mentions the fact that Alvin Bragg was elected using George Soros' funds hates Jews, is anti-Semitic.
That's what these two pronounce.
Listen to them do that.
Talk about how off they are trying to paint this DA as some tool of a Jewish international banker.
Yeah, it's become kind of fact on the right, but as so many facts on the right turn out to be, they're not factual at all.
And we did some digging on my show into this nonsense.
You heard Stefanik say he got a million dollars from George Soros.
None of that's true.
Alvin Bragg, just hear the facts, Joe.
Alvin Bragg announced his candidacy for DA in June of 2019.
In May of 2021, a PAC called Color of Change said, we're going to spend some money promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
Do you see what he did there?
He said, the color of change said, we're going to spend some money promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
That's not what they said.
They said, we're going to spend a million dollars promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
But he had to leave out that fact because he doesn't want you to know that they said we're going to spend a million dollars on Alvin Bragg's candidacy and then six days later they got the million dollar check from George Soros.
Let's listen to the rest.
George Soros a few days later gives them a million dollars.
They end up spending a half a million dollars on Alvin Bragg's campaign.
They don't give the money to Bragg.
It's their own ads promoting Bragg.
No money changes hands.
Why does that matter?
Why does that matter?
Whether they gave the money directly to Alvin Bragg, which they're not allowed to do, or they spent money promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
They put ads on television telling people, vote for Alvin Bragg, don't vote for his opponent.
That's how campaign finance works.
And they did it using George Soros' money.
And there's no getting around that.
So the fact that it's true is something they won't admit, even though they have to implicitly acknowledge it in saying what really happened.
And that's why they then have to go on and say, but the real point is anyone who talks about this is an anti-Semitic bigot.
Listen to this.
Color of Change gave no money to Alvin Bragg.
George Soros gave no money to Alvin Bragg, not even indirectly.
No million dollars, no half a million dollars.
We reached out to the Soros people.
George Soros, they say, has never met with Alvin Bragg, never spoken to Alvin Bragg, never phoned Alvin Bragg, never emailed Alvin Bragg, never been on a Zoom call with Alvin Bragg, never given a dime to Alvin Bragg.
So in what world, in what world is Alvin Bragg a Soros DA or a Soros-backed In the world in which Alvin Bragg's candidacy was promoted using a half a million dollars provided by George Soros.
That is the world in which Alvin Bragg is a Soros-backed candidate.
...in the fevered imagination of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists who now dominate the American conservative movement.
By the way, Joe, quick point.
Republicans say they love money No one's saying it's illegal.
money is speech.
So even if he did give money to Bragg, which he didn't, what's wrong with that?
What objection could they have to the Jewish billionaire Holocaust survivor?
I can't possibly imagine.
No one's even saying there's an objection.
No one's saying it's illegal.
It's notable that the person who just got an indictment, the first ever in American history against the next president and the current GOP frontrunner is somebody whose election was due in large part to a million dollar donation from George the first ever in American history against the next president and the current GOP frontrunner is somebody whose election was due in large part be.
This is a really despicable use of anti-Semitism by these two people here.
And it's so transparent what they're doing.
They don't care about antisemitism at all.
At all.
They don't care about it at all.
They only care about it as a toy to slap on your forehead if you talk about things they don't want you to talk about.
Namely, this donation from George Soros.
The idea, the very suggestion that it's antisemitic To talk about the largest single donor in American politics is despicable.
It's despicable.
And yet this is the framework.
You can watch them do it in real time.
They have the same talking points.
They all lay it out together.
So here you have The liberal host of MSNBC, Mehdi Hassan, who happens to be saying the same exact thing in the same exact words using the same exact tactics as the apolitical fact-checker for the Washington Post.
And believe me, you can look at every single fact-check that Glenn Kessler publishes, and that would be true of almost every fact-check he publishes.
It's exactly the same verbatim.
That's what you hear every time you turn on MSNBC because that is because fact-checking is a complete scam.
It's an absolute fraud.
Now, let's look back at the Washington Post article where we left off, which is here.
The Trump campaign defended Trump's focus on Soros.
The Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chung said in response to the Washington Post's inquiry about whether it's anti-semitic, quote, it's not anti-semitic to point out Soros funded/supported brag.
What world are you living in?
Exactly, what world is this fact checker living in, in which it is anti-semitic to talk about a billionaire getting people elected?
Quote, this is the Washington Post now, Soros has been a boogeyman for conservatives ever since he spent $27 million to oppose President George W. Bush's re-election in 2004.
Much as the vast spending on right-wing causes by the Koch brothers have been a source of consternation for liberals.
Okay.
Exactly.
Liberals constantly focus on the big money donors of the Republican Party like the Koch brothers, who by the way are not Jewish.
Why then is it suddenly anti-Semitic when Republicans focus on and talk about the biggest donor in Democratic Party politics?
Just because he's Jewish that now means it's anti-Semitic and you can't talk about him?
So liberals are free to talk about the Koch brothers?
But it's off limits to talk about the billionaire who was the biggest funder to Democratic Party politics.
That is toying with anti-Semitism, not combating it.
That is trivializing it and mocking it and nothing else.
Now, the other thing that's amazing about that is, and we showed you this the other day, is that Not just liberals, but Mehdi Hassan himself, the person who just told you that it's anti-Semitic for you to mention George Soros funding Alvin Bragg and liberal candidates constantly, I don't mean once or twice, I mean constantly depicted the Republican Party as the puppet
of the Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who, until he died a couple of years ago, was one of the largest funders in Republican Party politics, just like George Soros is in Democratic Party politics.
Mehdi, Hassan, and liberals generally constantly depicted Sheldon Adelson as the puppet master that used his huge amounts of money as a billionaire to make the Republican Party support Israel.
Here in November of 2018, Mehdi Hassan said, after Donald Trump said, Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.
Mehdi said, guess who turned out to be Adelson's puppet and gave his wife the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
There is always a Trump tweet in the archives.
So Mehdi felt free, Mehdi Hassan felt free.
To claim that Donald Trump was Sheldon Adelson's puppet by virtue of the Jewish billionaire's funding.
That's who's now telling you it's anti-Semitic to mention George Soros.
Here is Medhi in 2016.
Who wrote, quote, those of you on the left who foolishly thought Trump would be, quote, neutral on Israel should ask why Sheldon Adelson is giving him $100 million.
In other words, Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish billionaire, according to Mehdi Hassan, only gives money to Republican politicians so long as he can make them be pro-Israel.
Here's another tweet from Mehdi.
I told you I could do this all night.
From 2015, where he says, quote, we have really tried to promote Trump as pro-Israel, the source said.
He always wanted Adelson money.
So, here's Matty telling you, the only way you can get money from the Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson is if you prove to him that you love Israel.
If anything are playing with anti-semitic tropes, it's this.
Although I have to say, I think it's totally valid for Democrats and Liberals to talk about the role Sheldon Adelson played in Republican politics, even though Sheldon Adelson is a Jewish billionaire, because he gave a ton of money to Republican candidates in order to get them to support his cause.
That's how campaign finance works.
So for the same people Who constantly promoted that anti-Jewish trope, that the Republican Party was the puppet of Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish billionaire, to now turn around and say that you're anti-Semitic.
If you mention the role George Soros plays in getting Alvin Bragg elected, it's disgusting.
It sickens me to my core.
Now, let's pick up where we left off from this fact check, which is right here.
Someone's going to help me find that right here.
Bragg, who in 2021 narrowly won the Democratic Party primary candidate against a much better funded candidate, would be the type of prosecutor favored by Soros.
He never made a contribution to Bragg, though New York state election records show Soros' son and daughter-in-law each contributed a little more than $10,000.
Soros' Democracy PAC also made no contributions to Bragg.
Here's why Republicans claim that Soros funded Bragg.
Quote, Bragg was endorsed on May 8th of that year by the political arm of Color of Change, a progressive criminal justice group.
In a statement that highlighted Bragg as the only black candidate in the race, Color of Change said it planned to spend, quote, over $1 million on an independent expenditure campaign for Bragg, such as sending, quote, eight robust waves of direct mail through Manhattan in May, and then more direct mail in June, highlighting early voting.
On March 14th, six days later, Soros sent $1 million to Caller of Change, Federal Election Records Show.
In any case, Caller of Change never met the $1 million goal.
Notwithstanding its news release, state election records show that it spent less than half of that amount, $420,000, on independent expenditures for Bragg.
That amounted to about 9% of the group's total spending in the election cycle, according to FEC records.
A Bragg advisor said that the candidate raised $2.4 million before the primary.
So the primary is everything in New York politics, so he raised $2.4 million.
$400,000 or $500,000 was spent by the Colab change, which is essentially 20% of the overall Bragg spending.
Of course that came from George Soros.
He then says, in the primary, Bragg defeated Tali Faridi and Weinstein, who had funded her campaign with $8.2 million of her own money by 34.3% to 30.7%, a difference of just 9,000 votes.
So he won the Democratic Party primary by only 9,000 votes over this extremely rich Jewish opponent, as the Washington Post said, who spent millions and millions of dollars of her own money.
Now, he won by 9,000 votes.
Of course it's completely rational to suggest, we'll never know for sure, but it's certainly viable that the reason he won is because Color of Change had a million dollars of George Soros money that it used half of that to flood Manhattan with direct mail advertisements urging votes for Alvin Bragg.
Of course Alvin Bragg was funded by George Soros.
He is a Soros-funded candidate.
Here's what we come with the Pinocchios.
Quote, the Pinocchio test Republicans are being slippery here.
This is the Pinocchio test.
Republicans are being slippery here.
Claiming Soros funded brag is simply false, but many rely on the more ambiguous phrase of fact, which is technically correct.
What is that?
The Republicans are saying that he was backed by George Soros.
And what does the Washington Post fact checker call that claim?
Technically correct.
By several degrees of separation.
And here's how he finishes.
But it's still misleading and therefore worthy of three Pinocchios.
He gave it three Pinocchios.
There they are.
This adolescent, infantile, moronic way that the Washington Post calls people liars.
The whole article did nothing but prove that the statements are correct.
They lied about what the statements were in order to claim that they were lying, and then said, really, most of all, anyone who even talks about this hates Jews.
Whatever this is, it is not apolitical.
And it is most definitely not different than the kind of journalism you've all correctly concluded was worthy of nothing but your contempt and distrust.
It's just the same thing with a different title.
Let's look at what happened to Glenn Kessler as a result of all this, as a result of the community notes on Twitter that is intended to fact check claims that people post on Twitter.
It's an innovation of Elon Musk, I believe.
It may have existed before he bought it, I don't think so, but in any event, it's become very prominent.
So here you see the first tweet by Glenn Kassler promoting his own Fact Check article.
He says, New Fact Check!
The incendiary claim that George Soros funds Allen Bragg and he linked to his article and it was immediately appended with a community notes Note that said, quote, Soros donated $1 million to the Color of Change, the largest individual donation it received in the 2022 election cycle, days after it endorsed Bragg for district attorney and pledged more than $1 million in spending to support its candidacy.
And it links to a CNBC article saying that.
So the fact checker for The Washington Post had his claim fact checked by the public, by all of you.
It's not easy to get a community notes claim or context or fact check added onto a tweet.
A lot of people have to agree with it and it has to be backed up by facts.
There's a community notes team that determines whether or not it's a valid note and they determine that it was.
So he got his own tweet, the fact checker did, fact checked by the public.
Once he saw that his fact check was fact checked, he went back to Twitter to complain in the most petulant, bitchy, condescending, obnoxious way imaginable, and this is what he wrote.
Meaning the people who fact checked him.
Twitter trolls, who posted a quote, community note to this tweet, apparently have not read the actual fact check.
Click the link and you will find that Colar of Change did not spend $1 million in independent expenditures on Bragg, as people often claim.
So he's trying to say that these losers, all of you who fact-checked him, Twitter trolls, not him.
He's a senior fact-checker for the Washington Post.
He's very, very important.
Anyone who disagrees with him or dissents from what he's saying are losers.
They're worthless losers.
They're the dirty masses, Twitter trolls.
He said the Twitter trolls got it wrong because Color of Change did not spend a million dollars on independent expenditures on Bragg.
The community notes went back and fact-checked this tweet as well, so we got fact-checked a second time.
And it said, quote, the original community note says that the Color of Change PAC pledged $1 million.
Soros donated $1 million to the PAC days after it endorsed Bragg and pledged more than $1 million in spending to support his candidacy.
The PAC ultimately spent $420,000.
So he also lied about the fact check.
The fact check didn't claim that Color of Change spent $1 million.
It only claimed that they pledged it, which is absolutely true.
So you look at this tweet, and it now has two different fact checks on it.
Because the fact checker for the Washington Post is a fraud.
Because the entire concept of fact checker is a fraud.
They're just the same partisan hacks.
And activists that you already came to hate who got this new title.
Just like disinformation expert, it is a fake title that means nothing.
And the fact that he essentially got humiliated twice by Twitter and then came back and showed his scorn for the public shows you how they think about the public.
Do you see now why they're so eager to censor the internet?
Why they're so desperate to maintain control over who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak on the internet?
Because they know that if free speech is allowed on the internet, their lives will be exposed.
They know that the only way to shield their propaganda from correction and dissent, as just happened to him, is to silence people who disagree.
To call the people who disagree with them agents of disinformation.
And one of the things they hate most about Elon Musk is that, although far from perfect, at least so far, he pledged to bring more free speech to the platform.
And one thing he has done is he's evened the playing field so that the kind of people who now want to contest the lies that come from the Washington Post fact checker are no longer booted from the platform, are no longer silenced, are no longer algorithmically hidden.
But instead are heard.
This is why they hate independent media.
This is why they run articles demeaning platforms like Rumble, the minute it starts to get big enough to challenge them.
And it's why they want to censor the internet.
Because if they don't, their lives get exposed.
The only way their propaganda works is if they maintain control over who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak on the internet.
And this episode documented that like almost nothing else has.
So let's move to a separate story now, which is a genuinely horrific terrorist attack that took place in St.
Petersburg, Russia over the weekend on Saturday.
There was a journalist who was giving a speech at a cafe in St.
Petersburg.
He's a journalist who is known for being a supporter of the war in Ukraine.
He's a supporter of Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
He has written and advocated that the war be prosecuted more aggressively.
He's been a critic of Putin, in fact, for not supporting it aggressively enough, just like a lot of American journalists advocated, for example, the war in Iraq.
And criticize the Bush administration for not aggressively supporting it enough, just like American journalists are advocates for proxy war in Ukraine, and criticize Biden for not doing enough.
He's a Russian journalist who supports the war in Ukraine.
He's from the Donbass region.
He's on the grounds that he visited the Donbass region a lot.
He believes there's a lot of neo-Nazi militias in the Donbass region, like the Azov Battalion, that are a threat to Russia and that this war is necessary to protect the Russian-speaking people and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
That was his view.
He was having a speech, an event, and at this event, someone hand-delivered him a package that was purported to be a present.
Instead, it was a bomb, and it blew up, and it killed him, and it injured at least 19 other innocent people who were at this cafe to hear this journalist speak.
A classic terrorist attack.
Now, we have video of inside the club, and I just want to warn you, it is a little bit graphic, so if you don't like watching these things, then you should turn away at least at the end when the bomb goes off.
But I think it's important for you to see the kind of event that it was, to see the faces of the people who were blown up.
And who were severely injured, because I think it's important to see what happened here, especially since there are so many Americans, prominent American commentators, who are cheering the terrorist attack and justifying it in all sorts of ways and ways I think are quite illustrative of what this proxy war really is about.
So let's watch The video that was taken by a member of the crowd, the New York Times linked to this video.
They said they couldn't verify it, but there's enough verification around in a lot of different ways to know that this is the journalist who was blown up and this is the cafe in which he was speaking on that day.
Let's pull this video up here.
Wow!
What a handsome guy!
Come on, come on.
Here.
Just, well... Golden.
Yes.
That's it.
Golden head.
The gold.
Yes, the gold.
Great.
Well, thank God.
Yes, but these are just cubes.
All right, that did, that was, that was footage from the event before the explosion.
Let's look at the other video.
So this is him having received the package.
Let's go ahead and play the rest of the video.
Yo, show that.
There you see the explosion inside the cafe.
There you see the address of the cafe.
We also have a video from inside of when the video exploded.
Let's put that up.
It is graphic, so I think, as I said, if you want to turn away, you should turn away.
Let's get that video up of what happened inside this cafe.
There you see the aftermath, including the journalist who's blown up and dead, and there you see the wounded people on the floor as well.
So that's terrorism.
That's what happens with terrorism.
You target a journalist whose crime is to advocate a war.
The Russian government says that they are investigating the involvement of Ukrainian intelligence agencies or anti-government activists inside Russia, including those linked to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident in prison.
But they're not making any claim yet.
There was a similar terrorist attack in August where the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist had her car blown up and even the United States government said that they had concluded that the Ukrainian government was involved in that terrorist attack.
Now, there's all kinds of people who have been justifying this by saying that this is a journalist who supports the war.
This is somebody who is close to Vladimir Putin.
And so let's take a look at a couple of those justifications.
Here you have Joyce Karam, who is a political science professor at George Washington University.
Here she says, just an explosion in St.
Petersburg, Russia, at a cafe where Russian military blogger Vladimir Tatarsky was speaking.
Footage here, Tatarsky was reportedly killed, according to Russian outlets.
And then in her next Tweet, and I realize there's some plausible deniability here.
She says, he is seen as pro-Putin, pro-Wagner, pro-Russia invasion of Ukraine, smeared opponents.
So to me, if you take somebody who's the victim of a terrorist attack on the day that he's killed, start pointing out his character flaws.
That's at least highly likely, if not intended, to offer justification for what was done.
Oh, you should hate him, he's pro-Putin, pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine and he smeared his opponents and therefore he deserved to have his head blown off.
Now, in these cases, the reason why I think these are important to look at and interesting And here is a variety of tweets from Michael Weiss who used to work at CNN.
He's worked at a variety of American media outlets as well.
It's an entire timeline of him essentially mocking the Explosion, quoting some of his more provocative tweets.
He presents a few Ukrainian memes, essentially saying, celebrating the fact that he was killed.
Here you see, this meme must go.
Who must go?
There's the picture of him dead.
And there's somebody, a Ukrainian official smiling.
If you are somebody who actually thinks this is justified, and I would suggest to you that this really illustrates what this war is about.
We are arming Terrorists, we are arming neo-Nazi militias in Eastern Ukraine.
These are the people to whom we're giving money, to whom we're giving weapons that they're going to have for a lot of time after this war is over.
We're sending $100 billion into the most corrupt country in Ukraine, where for a decade U.S.
media outlets or Western media outlets warned were dominated by actual Nazi militias, including the Azov Battalion, but not limited to them.
These are the sorts of things they do.
They carry out terrorist attacks.
And then the very same people who told you for 20 years that we have to wage a war on terror against Al Qaeda to banish terrorism from the globe, who built a huge spying system that got turned on the American people, and a gigantic U.S.
security state that constantly interferes in our politics in the name of fighting terrorism, are absolute terror supporters.
If it's justified to murder a Russian journalist on the grounds that he supports the war in Ukraine, would it have been justified in 2005 if David Frum or Ann Applebaum or Bill Kristol or Liz Cheney We're speaking at a cafe in Brooklyn about the war in Iraq, all of which they urged and justified.
If an Iraqi came there and blew up the cafe and murdered them and whoever else happened to be in that cafe, we would call that terrorism, right?
We would condemn that as terrorism.
If, right now, some Russians wanted to go and murder American journalists who are supporting the proxy war in Ukraine, Would that be justified?
Would that be okay?
If Libyans wanted to come and kill Samantha Power or Nick Kristof, who supported the war in their country, is that justified as well?
These are the kinds of questions that always have to get asked.
You need standards that apply to everybody, not just that we apply to other people, but that we apply to ourselves as well.
And I think it's actually important if we are now supporting people who blow up the daughters of Russian nationalists or who blow up cafes in order to murder journalists because of their position on the war, that we at least be aware what this war is really about.
Who it is we're arming, who the people are who are cheering it, and what their values are.
We're sending $100 billion and counting To a war that even Joe Biden has said has brought us closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1962.
The propaganda is very sweet.
It's very inspiring.
It's very nice.
It's about these feisty Ukrainians defending their feisty democracy.
But the reality is actually this.
And I think the more that we see of it, the clearer it all becomes.
Now, just for the last segment, I want to talk about comments that were made today by Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican of Florida, who is extremely angry.
He went on Fox News to complain that other countries, including Brazil, as well as Saudi Arabia and India, are now entering into international trade transactions in which they're using currencies other than the American dollar.
And he's angry about that, he says, because if that's permitted, then the American dollar will no longer be the reserve currency of the world, and that in turn will prevent us from sanctioning whatever countries we want to sanction.
Let's listen to what he says here in his complaint.
Let's listen to how he describes Brazil.
Because he's not just angry that any country entered into a transaction without using the U.S.
dollar.
He's particularly angry that Brazil did it.
Why is it particularly offensive for Brazil to do it?
Let's listen to how he describes Brazil.
Because he's not just angry that any country entered into a transaction without using the US dollar.
He's particularly angry that Brazil did it.
Why is it particularly offensive for Brazil to do it?
Listen to why.
Today, Brazil, in our hemisphere, largest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Where is Brazil?
In our hemisphere.
Brazil's in our hemisphere.
We have a doctrine that goes back 200 years called the Monroe Doctrine that says that continent of Latin America belongs to us.
There's only one sovereign over Latin America and that's the United States.
That's our backyard.
It's Ukraine has, Russia has no legitimate interest in Ukraine, right on the other side of its border, but the United States rules all of South America and Latin America.
That's our hemisphere, Marco Rubio said.
Brazil is the biggest country in our hemisphere.
And this is what they've done.
Cut a trade deal with China.
They're going to from now on do trade in their own currencies.
Get right around the dollar.
They're creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States.
We won't have... Oh my god!
These other countries are creating their own economies independent of the United States.
They're not dependent on the United States any longer.
If this keeps up.
If they're allowed to do this.
Right in our own hemisphere.
Countries in our hemisphere are doing this.
And here's why he's particularly angry about this.
Okay, so that's one of the main reasons why he's angry and he's right about that.
countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won't have the ability to sanction them.
OK.
So that's one of the main reasons why he's angry, and he's right about that.
The reason why-- we hear all the time, the United States goes around and tells the world, these countries are off limits for you to trade with.
You cannot trade with Venezuela.
You cannot trade with Syria.
You cannot trade with Cuba.
Iraq was under sanctions for many, many years.
There's that notorious video where Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes and was asked about the sanctions regime the Clinton administration imposed on Iraq that, according to UN estimates, caused the death of 500,000 Iraqi children.
Because when you sanction a country and prevent trade with it, you immiserate the country.
You cause starvation, you cause a lack of medication, you never harm the government.
It wasn't Saddam Hussein who was being harmed in any way or his family by those sanctions.
You always end up strengthening the government by weakening the population.
And she went on 60 Minutes and she was asked, according to the UN, the sanctions that you supported and imposed on Iraq as a way of punishing Saddam Hussein killed 500,000 Iraqi children.
Was that worth it?
And she said, I absolutely think it was worth it.
Later on in life, she tried to backtrack a little and claim that was out of context.
But it is true that the sanctions regime imposed by the United States on Iraq killed 500,000 people.
Syria just had a horrific earthquake.
And yet it was very, very difficult for anyone to provide aid to Syrians, not to Bashar al-Assad, he was fine, to the Syrians who suffered in this earthquake because the U.S.
has told the world you're not allowed to give any money to Syria.
Syria is under sanctions.
We do the same to Venezuela.
We talk about how their country is rife with starvation.
People eat dogs, that's the claim.
But usually, it's not mentioned that they have been embargoed and stranglehold by U.S.
sanctions because we're trying to change the government of that country.
That's U.S.
official foreign policy is to change the government of Venezuela.
As you probably remember, for a long time, it was the joke that the United States went around recognizing as the legitimate president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, even though we had never received a single vote by any Venezuelans for that position.
He was in charge of nothing.
It didn't work.
When Biden had to go beg Venezuela for oil because the prices were so high and Russia was benefiting, he didn't go to Juan Guaido.
He went to Nicolas Maduro, knowing that Nicolas Maduro is the person who actually runs Venezuela.
So the whole idea of America First foreign policy is supposed to be that we don't go around changing other countries and their governments.
That's for them to do.
That's for them to decide.
And one of the ways that America First foreign policy is articulated by Donald Trump and his supporters has expressed that view is we shouldn't go and do regime change wars in other countries.
We don't go to Libya to take out Gaddafi to help the Libyans.
For one thing, it doesn't help them when we do that.
It didn't help Iraq when we got rid of Saddam.
It didn't help Libya when we got rid of Gaddafi.
It caused chaos and slavery and it brought back ISIS and caused anarchy and a migrant crisis.
It was horrific.
It was terrible.
It was devastating for Libya, like it was for Syria.
We didn't take out Assad, but the regime change war there cost Americans billions of dollars and devastated Syria.
So, if you're opposed to going around the world and trying to change governments through war, why would you support a sanctions regime against Venezuela or Cuba or Syria to change the government of those countries?
Why is it your business, as an American citizen, who runs Venezuela or Cuba or Syria or Iraq?
And these sanctions regimes that Marco Rubio was so desperate to maintain does nothing other than make the population suffer.
The people who were supposedly trying to help In the name of trying to take out the regime.
It never uproots the regime.
It makes the regime stronger.
So Marco Rubio has a lot of interest in running other countries.
He cares a lot about who the government of Cuba is.
He cares a lot about who the government of Venezuela is.
He constantly wants to do regime change wars in places like Libya and Syria.
Very, very involved in all these other countries.
And willing, apparently, to spend tons of money Sending all this money to other countries to change their government, like he's doing now in Ukraine as well.
But this anger that the US dollar is going to get overthrown as a currency reserve, which will mean that we can no longer sanction other countries, is actually a good thing.
We shouldn't be sanctioning these other countries.
That's not our role, to make these other countries suffer in a widespread way, because we decide we don't like their government.
That's for them to do.
And if you really want to uproot the government of Venezuela or Cuba or Syria, the way to do it isn't by making the population suffer with starvation and misery and have their children dying.
That weakens the population and makes them more dependent on the government.
The way you would do it is to allow trade to flow.
Why are American governments prohibited, American companies prohibited from trading with these countries, from buying oil from Venezuela, or trading with Cuba, or sending aid to Syria?
It makes no sense.
So, to an American ear, this seems normal for Marco Rubio to say, the American current dollar has to be maintained as the supreme currency because we need to be able to rule the world through sanctions.
Why do you think other countries like Brazil and India are so eager to trade in other currencies?
Because nobody wants to be ruled by a single country that dictates to the rest of the world who your government can be and with whom you want to trade.
This is the reason there's so much anti-American sentiment.
This is why these other blocs are now forming.
It's why China is able to lure other countries away from our realm of influence, because this is how we use our influence.
Again, I told you this story before about Brazil, just since that's the example Rubio used.
In 1964, Brazil had a center-left, not a left, a center-left, democratically elected government.
They were desperate to stay neutral in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.
And the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration told Brazil, if you continue to implement liberal economic policies in your country that you campaigned on and that your voters and citizens approved of, like rent control and land reform, we will conclude that you're moving too close to Moscow and you will pay the price.
And when the government of Brazil, the second largest country in our hemisphere, Said, we're going to continue to implement the economic reforms to get rid of income inequality and wealth inequality in our country, since that's what is causing our citizens to suffer most from.
The Johnson administration carried through on its threat.
They engineered a queue through the CIA.
They got and funded right-wing generals in the Brazilian military.
They overthrew the democratically elected government of Brazil.
And they imposed a military regime on Brazil that lasted for the next 21 years.
In which dissidents were imprisoned and killed and tortured, and journalists were murdered, opponents of the regime were forced into exile.
It took Brazil 21 years to redemocratize in 1985.
They had their first presidential election only in 1989.
So anybody who is the age of the current president Lula da Silva, or even a little younger, all lived through that.
They understand exactly what it means to have to live under the thumb of the United States.
Would you seek ways, alternative ways, to create a world if you were a Brazilian who lived through the CIA coup in your country that overthrew your democracy because it didn't like the economic policies of your government and implemented a military regime that ruled as a dictatorship for 21 years?
That is why Marco Rubio and people like him are why there's so much of a desire to create an alternative economy and to get away from the hegemony of the United States.
And if you're somebody who believes in America first foreign policy, at some point I would like to hear an explanation about why you're only opposed to regime change wars, but not opposed to sanctions regimes that are designed to do the same thing, change the governments of other countries, particularly but not opposed to sanctions regimes that are designed to do the same thing, change the governments of other countries, particularly since they don't When Al-Qaeda attacked the United States, it had three reasons it cited for why it did it.
One was the fact that we had troops on Saudi soil, which they regarded as heresy.
Another was, which most people regard as a pretext, was our support for Israel over the Palestinians.
No one really believed Osama bin Laden cared much about the Palestinians.
But the third reason was the fact that we were sanctioning Iraq and it's called 500,000 Iraqi children to die.
Obviously if you go around the world doing what Marco Rubio has spent his career doing and still wants to do, this message that people hear, of course they're going to move to China or India or other powers and try and undermine U.S.
hegemony.
We, as Ron Paul, probably the best advocate of all who has articulated this, although Donald Trump took that baton and saw this sentiment in the Republican Party and built on it and capitalized on it, which is why neocons in the establishment hate him so much, that we should stop going around the world trying to fix every other country and instead focus on ourselves.
If that were our posture, There would be a lot less anti-Americanism in the world.
Just because we're the most powerful country in the world and the richest country in the world with the biggest military doesn't mean we have to rule every other country.
Spending all our money to try and topple governments through wars and through sanctions.
So what you're seeing here with Marco Rubio, who never was on board with the America First foreign policy, is completely aligned with neoconservatism.
Neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum have always thought Marco Rubio.
This is the split in the Republican Party that has to be reconciled because that mentality that you just heard has nothing to do with stopping wars, stopping endless wars, no longer interfering in other people's countries so we focus on our own citizens instead.
This is the opposite of that.
And a lot of times foreign wars and regime change wars get attention, but I hope you'll start thinking about sanctioned regimes and how they serve the similar purpose, but even worse, because they cause more suffering and are less effective.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
Those are three pretty hefty topics.
As I said, we will have Jacob Siegel on some point this week.
I'm going to delve very deeply into that great article that he wrote that I encourage you to read in the tablet.
about the greatest hoax, as he calls it, of the disinformation regime.
He really reviews and documents the history of how it was built.
We'll have him on maybe tomorrow, maybe later on in the week, depending on the news.
If you want to support the show, you can become a subscriber on Locals.
Join us at greenwald.locals.com, where the links are in the description.
It gives you access every night to the transcripts of every episode, which are published After the show airs the following day.
Also, all of my written journalism has indicated we have a new article up today, which is an exchange between myself and a reader who emailed me with criticism of my posture on the trans debate, and I responded to him, and that exchange is available there as well.
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