US Continues Dangerous Escalations in Ukraine, Sprinting Toward Catastrophe. Plus: Saagar Enjeti on Ukraine, Anthrax/COVID, GOP Race, Tucker Carlson, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #87
In this episode, Glenn continues to explore the dangerous war in Ukraine and its escalations. Could we be running towards catastrophe with this outlandish money-grabbing war? Saagar Enjeti looks into Ukraine, Anthrax/COVID, GOP Race, Tucker Carlson, etc. Click to find out the full details and listen here!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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, more major escalations in the U.S.
proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces step up their incursions over the border and attacks inside of Russia.
All of this occurs as the Biden administration continues its bizarre, unstable, and dangerous pattern.
It first insists that it will not send a particular weapon or military system to Ukraine because doing so would be far too risky for escalating the war and dragging the U.S.
further into that conflict, including risking direct military confrontation between the U.S., the country with the world's second largest nuclear stockpile, and Russia, the country with its largest, only for Biden to then turn around Months later and announced that he will in fact send exactly that same weapon system they emphatically said they could not supply to Ukraine due to the serious dangers.
They first did this with Patriot missile batteries which Biden said at the start of the war he would never send to Ukraine.
Only to announce suddenly in December of last year that it would in fact send them.
The same thing happened with Abrams tanks.
Biden spent all of 22 adamantly rejecting Ukraine's pleas for them.
Only to reverse himself at the start of this year by announcing the U.S.
would send 31 tanks just to start.
And it just happened again, this time with F-16 fighter jets, which easily have the capacity to fly deep into Russia and bomb Russian targets.
Biden was particularly emphatic that sending some of the U.S.' 's most potent and complex fighter jets would create far too large of a risk of major escalation, including their use to bomb Russia.
Yet last week, Biden once again reversed himself, telling President Zelensky those jets were coming and that the U.S.
would begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them.
This is the living, breathing embodiment of creeping out of control escalation.
What is declared unthinkably dangerous and risky one month becomes official government war policy the next.
On this path, it seems far more likely than not now that the U.S.
will find itself in some sort of direct military confrontation with Russia.
How would the U.S.
react if a neighboring country was repeatedly striking American soil using missiles, tanks, and fighter jets supplied by China, Russia, or Iran?
As has been the case since the start of this war, the question continues to be what U.S.
interests, or benefits, possibly justifying trifling with these increasingly dangerous risks, especially given Washington's position for two decades under both parties that Ukraine was never and never would be a vital interest to the United States.
We'll evaluate the question once again in the context of these latest war escalations.
Then, for our interview segment, we'll speak with one of the most impressive success stories in independent media, Sagar Anjeti, host of the wildly popular Breaking Points program, which successfully broke away from the corporate media outlet where it was born under a different name, The Hill, to find an even larger audience and greater influence as a fully to find an even larger audience and greater influence as a fully
We'll talk to Sagar, who got his start in journalism, working with Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, about Ukraine and the increasingly significant role of the U.S. in that war, the state of the GOP primary, and whether Ron DeSantis represents an ongoing breakaway from the GOP establishment government or an attempt by that establishment and whether Ron DeSantis represents an ongoing breakaway from the GOP establishment government or an attempt
We'll discuss the program we did here last night on the various mysteries of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the light it shines on the current attempt to determine dispositively the origins of the COVID pandemic.
And we'll talk about the nature of independent media, including the recent decision by Tucker Carlson, once he was fired by Fox, to put his show, at least for now, onto Twitter.
This being Tuesday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour show live here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback, something we do every Tuesday and Thursday night.
To obtain access to that aftershow, where we respond to your feedback, address criticism and the like, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community.
The red button is right below the video player.
Here on the Rumble page, you'll have access to that aftershow, along with the transcripts we post and other Written journalism.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on every major podcasting platform including Spotify and Apple.
Simply follow us there and post 12 hours after our show broadcasts live here on Rumble and rate and view the show which helps the show's visibility.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There is a lot to say about the war in Ukraine, and particularly what has now indisputably become the U.S.
proxy war with Russia using Ukraine as the sacrifice or as the platform.
Observing that the U.S.
was intending to use Ukraine as a proxy war with Russia was once taboo to say.
Anyone who said it Was immediately branded, needless to say, a Russian agent or a pro-Russian propagandist.
And yet now nobody disputes that characterization.
How can you?
It is, as every hallmark of a classic proxy war.
And there are some really serious escalations taking place right as we speak.
Escalating numbers and types of Ukrainian attacks into Russian territory using American weapon systems, including weapon systems the Biden administration repeatedly vowed not to send, only to send them.
And at the same time that there are greater incursions by the Ukrainian or Ukrainian allied forces into Russia, striking Russian targets, killing Russian people with American weapons, The Biden administration reversed its most emphatic decree that it would never send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, given their capacity to strike deep into Russian territory, by having Joe Biden announce to President Zelensky that in fact the F-16s are on their way and that the U.S.
will begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them.
I think the most striking part of this war, and we will talk about a lot of this with Sagar and Jetty when he comes on in just a little bit, is that there has been no campaign of propaganda and disinformation that even compares to the ones surrounding the war in Ukraine, at least since the war in Iraq.
We spent last night devoting our entire show to just the prong of propaganda that led to that war in Iraq, the effort to falsely and through lies link the Iraqi government to the anthrax attacks, which the FBI, seven years later, said came actually not from the Iraqi government, but from the American government, from a U.S.
Army lab in Fort Detrick, where as it turns out, according to the FBI, the U.S.
government was working with highly sophisticated, deadly strains of anthrax.
Something it had long claimed it never does and something it still continues to claim it does not do.
This propaganda is hard to overstate.
There were just outright lie after outright lie after outright lie emanating from leading political figures and US media outlets from the very start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine a year and two months ago.
And to underscore that, I want to show you a interview that was recently given by Jeffrey Sachs, whose establishment resume is way too long for me to recite.
Basically, he became a very well-known and well-regarded economics professor at Harvard in the 1980s, where he became renowned for helping countries avoid or solving hyperinflation.
He became very close to a lot of governments, including in Bolivia and Poland and then in Russia.
He's been at the center of some of the most important historical events.
In the last 40 years, he often was hosted on the most establishment television programs.
He still manages to appear on Morning Joe, despite the fact that he has become a real heretic when it comes to US foreign policy and even the COVID pandemic, where he originally was asked to lead a COVID task force because of his views that the U.S. government mostly had it right, only to then begin questioning a lot of the core pieties.
And here he is talking about the role the U.S. media has played in...
In disseminating a level of propaganda that is at least as severe and glaring and flagrant as the propaganda that led us into Iraq, and he's specifically talking about the role the Washington Post has played in that, in the context of the obvious lies that our government and our media have spread in order to avoid having Americans realize the obvious.
That when Nord Stream, the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, One of the worst environmental disasters in all of human history, an act of industrial terrorism.
It was a pipeline that connects Russia to Germany to allow Russia to sell cheap natural gas to the Europeans, something that the United States has long wanted to terminate because it will then force the Europeans to buy natural gas from the United States.
When it was blown up, it was so obvious it was done, at least with the consent of, if not led by, American soldiers, American military.
And yet, not only was that instantly denied by the corporate media, they actually tried convincing people of something so preposterous that nobody should be able to say it with a straight face.
Namely, that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline.
A kind of false flag claim, a conspiracy theory that when it comes to the United States is completely impermissible to entertain and yet it's constantly asserted when it comes to Russia.
The same thing was said when a drone attack took place over the Kremlin at the time that President Putin was inside the Kremlin and released what appeared to be a bomb near the Kremlin and we heard, oh that was just Russia launching a false flag operation against itself.
They attacked itself just like they blew up its own pipeline.
Here's Jeffrey Sachs.
Again, somebody whose life has been immersed in establishment sectors at Harvard with economics and macroeconomics, somebody who has been given access to mainstream media outlets.
We're going to have him on our show very shortly.
He has an extremely interesting history, lots of misperceptions about his ideological trajectory, which we'll cover.
But listen to what he says about the role of mainstream media outlets in this war in Ukraine.
I should say he's talking here to Bob Wright, who is a critic of the war in Ukraine, has a show called, I think it's still called Bogn Heads, it's been about 15 years, it was one of the early pioneers of the Bogn Era, where we'd have people on in this split screen format to debate each other.
Listen to what Jeffrey Sachs says. - I had a, Nord Stream was blown up.
I had a chat with a long time friend and actually a classmate of mine from Harvard from decades ago, who's a senior reporter in one of the most important newspapers.
I said, you know what?
I think the U.S.
did it.
And he said, of course the U.S.
did it.
Who else?
And I said, hmm, maybe your paper could mention something like that.
And just today he said the Russians did it.
He said, oh, come on.
Jeff, come on.
I said, are you kidding?
Couldn't we have a serious discussion of this?
And he said to me, you know, the editor's not so interested in that.
And I said, this is a friend from decades.
I said, you know, when I was young, I turned to your newspaper because of Watergate, because of the Pentagon Papers, and I loved it.
And he said to me, that paper is So dead and gone, Jeff.
You have to understand that.
And I cannot imagine... You know, this is a really talented guy.
Lead columnist.
Lead journalist, I should say.
And he's telling me the paper that I love is dead and gone.
If you ask me why, I really cannot figure it out why a paper doesn't want to beat the government over the head when it tells ridiculous stories like Nord Stream was blown up by six people on a boat.
Like they tried for one day.
Okay, come on.
This was put out by serious media because it was almost a joke from the intelligence agency.
Why these media are so in line with official narratives, I don't fully understand.
I know all the theories, money, advertising, power, many other things, but the truth is it's dreadful compared to what it was 40 years ago.
Dreadful.
And it's gotten a lot worse.
Yeah.
I think that is the key point when it comes to understanding the role of these media outlets is, as he said, why are they so in line with official narratives?
People often debate what is the ideology of the media.
I've talked about this before.
For decades, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh would insist that the media was biased in the sense that they were liberals, they were Democrats.
I think it tells a part of the story when it comes to things like the culture war, for example.
They're clearly biased in favor of American liberalism.
These are people who went to East Coast colleges.
They're no longer people who come from working class backgrounds, primarily.
It's not a working class profession any longer at the national level.
So these are cosmopolitan people who go get educated on the East Coast.
They live in New York.
They live in Washington.
The national media does.
So they have the cultural views and biases of their environment.
But when it comes to foreign policy, it's not really so much being biased in favor or against the Democratic Party or American liberalism.
After all, it was the New York Times.
And as we've showed you, Jeffrey Goldberg at the New Yorker and so many other leading liberal institutions, foreign policy writers at liberal outlets that took the lead role in selling the Iraq War to the American people.
Their primary overarching fidelity is not to a particular political party or ideology, at least when it comes to foreign policy, that is instead, and they are completely in servitude To the US security state, to the foreign policy community.
That is what on foreign policy and war they exist to do, is to propagate whatever these institutions tell them to say.
That's where Russiagate came from.
That is where so many of the frauds that we have suffocated under, including all the lies from COVID came from.
This is what they exist to do, as he said, reflect the ideology and the propaganda of establishment institutions.
Now, from the very beginning, there has been, as you probably recall, a series of lies told about the war in Ukraine.
I would have to devote an entire show to listing them.
But we have a series of tweets that you may recall from the then congressman, Nominally, Adam Kinzinger, who is now a CNN commentator, who from the start of the war just began outright lying, spreading complete campaigns of disinformation.
And in a way, we've chosen this example because of how ridiculous it is, but in another way, because of how blatant the lie was.
It was a reference to the ghost of Kiev.
Some supposedly heroic Ukrainian fighter jet pilot who had managed courageously to shoot down a huge number of Russian planes all by himself.
And he got turned into this hero called the Ghost of Kiev.
Here you see Adam Kinzinger's tweet in February of 2022, right at the start of the war, where he falls for an internet scam.
This is a picture of somebody who is constantly used for all sorts of internet fakes, Sam Hyde.
And Adam Kinzinger fell for it, like the idiot that he is.
The Ghost of Kiev has a name, and he has absolutely owned the Russian Air Force.
Godspeed and more kills, Samuel.
The Ukrainian version of the name for Sam Hyde, who is constantly used by AlrightSite and other scam sites in a kind of frivolous way to create fakes that this moron fell for.
But here he is, spreading it even more seriously on the same day.
To the ghost of Kiev, we raise a glass.
Here is to even more.
Now there have been fact checks since then that there is no such thing as the ghost of Kiev.
There were similar lies told about the Russian battlefield being told to go fuck yourself by a group of very heroic Ukrainians who fought to the death on an island when in reality they were safely captured.
The whole thing was a complete fairy tale.
He spread that as well.
And what amazes me is that this person who we know deliberately told lies to spread campaigns of disinformation, while a member of the US Congress, to support a war just like was done at the start of the Iraq War and for years after, after being exposed for spreading lies and propaganda on purpose, got hired by CNN.
Where he now works as a commentator.
The network that incessantly tells you that they're there to combat disinformation.
That you have to trust them to decree true and falsity because you and independent media cannot be trusted to do it.
This is not the first known liar they've hired.
They got hired James Clapper, President Obama's senior national security official, after he got caught lying to Congress three months before we began the Snowden reporting by telling the U.S.
Senate, falsely, that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans, when in fact, three months later, we showed that the NSA is doing exactly that.
So there was another proven liar inside the government that CNN went and hired.
Probably the most prolific chronic liar of the Trump era when it comes to media is a woman named Natasha Bertrand who was a hardcore Russiagator who promoted every single fraud that became part of Russiagate from Trump and the Alpha Bank to Russian bounties in Afghanistan to the Steele dossier.
And every time she lied, she got promoted.
She went from Business Insider to MSNBC.
Then she ended up at The Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg, who's now the editor-in-chief after telling his lies that led to the Iraq War, got promoted.
Then she ended up at Politico, where she was the first to break the lie, the CIA lie, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
She, too, got promoted or hired to CNN after getting caught lying.
These people are not getting Hired by CNN, despite the fact that they're liars, they're getting hired precisely because they're liars.
It's a requirement for the job.
That's what these media outlets exist to do, as Jeffrey Sachs just said.
They're there to say whatever's necessary to be in alignment with and promote the agenda of the establishment, the US security state.
Even if it means outright lying, like trying to convince you of the absurdity, the facial absurdity, that Russia blew up its own pipeline.
Now, Let's take a look at what I referenced earlier as the overarching question here, which is, why is it?
The United States is willing to risk and trifle with these incredibly grave dangers.
With the world's largest nuclear stockpile, we're getting closer and closer to direct military confrontation.
You now have Ukrainian soldiers with highly offensive weapons, highly sophisticated weapons, enabled by the United States, supplied by the United States, going into Russia and bombing and killing Russians inside Russia.
And they're now going to have F-16s sent and delivered by the Biden administration after a series of bizarre reversals that shows how unhinged this war policy is.
And what is particularly bizarre about this, and I want to talk to Sagar about this when he comes on, because I genuinely think it's mystifying in a way, is that for at least a decade in Washington, bipartisan Washington, The view of the bipartisan class in Washington and the foreign policy community was that there is no vital interest for the United States in Ukraine.
This doctrine of vital interest is crucial.
It says, where are we willing to go to war?
For what are we willing to go to war?
Which countries are vital enough to our interests to risk justifying military confrontation?
And there's nothing in Ukraine That has ever been considered a vital interest to the United States to the point where in April of 2016, that very same Jeffrey Goldberg who rose to become the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic after getting caught telling multiple lies while at The New Yorker, he was one of President Obama's favorite journalists, this neocon.
And Obama sat down with him to discuss what Jeffrey Goldberg titled in this article, The Obama Doctrine.
The U.S.
President talks through his hardest decisions about America's role in the world.
And one of the things Jeffrey Goldberg badgered him about was Obama's refusal to do more for Ukraine.
To arm Ukraine, to do more to punish the Russians for taking Crimea.
And Jeffrey Goldberg kept saying, why didn't you do more to protect Ukraine?
Why didn't you do more to arm Ukraine, to use Ukraine to hurt Russia?
And here's what Obama said, quote, Obama's theory here is simple.
Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one.
So Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
Quote, the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do, Obama said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
Quote, it's realistic.
But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.
And at the end of the day, there's always going to be some ambiguity.
He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him in order to knock it down.
Quote, I think the best argument you can make on the side of those who are my critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn't exploit ambiguity enough.
He doesn't maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, wow, this guy might be a little crazy.
Which is what Donald Trump said he liked about having John Bolton at his side.
Quote, there is no evidence in modern American foreign policy at Obama that that's how people respond.
People respond based on what their imperatives are.
And if it's really important to somebody, and it's not that important to us, they know that, and we know that.
There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not.
Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we should consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, And Obama describes it that way because it's facially absurd that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Obama said they should speak up and be very clear about it.
He wanted them to say that.
These militarists in the Republican Party like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio who were attacking him for not doing more to confront Russia, he said, stand up and say, if you believe it, that we should risk war with Russia over Ukraine.
Quote, the idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.
In other words, it's so absurd That we would go to war or risk war with Russia over who rules eastern Ukraine, that Obama was daring his critics to stand up and say it because of course they didn't want to say, I'm willing to risk war with Russia over Ukraine.
And yet that's exactly what US policy has become.
We are risking war with Russia, undoubtedly, indisputably, over nothing more than the question of who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine.
The reason Obama didn't go to war with Russia or didn't really take strong action against Russia when it annexed Crimea was because he knew that the people of Crimea wanted to be under Russian rule, wanted to be under Moscow rule.
Just like the people of Kosovo wanted independence from Serbia.
And the precedent we set was if the people of this province want independence enough, they should have it.
That's why Kosovo is now an independent country.
And it's indisputably true that Crimea and the people in it consider themselves far more Russian than Ukrainian.
It's long been true as well of the people of Eastern Ukraine.
And so why would we possibly continue to trifle with, war with a nuclear-armed power over any of this?
Now it wasn't just Barack Obama who thought this.
There was a president after him, named Donald Trump, who thought the same thing.
In fact, when Trump saw the Republican Party's platform when it came to Ukraine, it seemed like it was written by neocons and John McCain and Marco Rubio and that crowd, Lindsey Graham, basically saying, we will always arm Ukraine, we will stand by Ukraine.
Trump thought that was insane.
Just like Trump thought it was insane that the U.S.
was trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and risk confrontation there through the CIA, and Trump's position was, why would we try and change the government of Syria?
We should cooperate with Russia and Syria to kill ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Why would we want to change the government of Syria?
He thought the same thing about Ukraine.
He expressed it in Trumpian ways, but it was the same position Obama had, which was risking war with Russia, or harming the United States to protect Ukraine from Russia is insanity.
And so he had the GOP platform changed, and amazingly, and this is when I really began realizing how insane the establishment had become when it came to Russiagate, They used the change in that platform, which just reflected Trump's view of pragmatism and the desire to avoid wars that weren't a direct threat to the United States, to claim that this was proof somehow that Trump was in the Kremlin's pocket.
That he took the same position Obama did, which is there's nothing in Ukraine worth going to war with Russia over, from the Washington Post, July 18, 2016.
There you see the headline, Trump campaign guts GOP's anti-Russia stance on Ukraine.
Quote, the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won't call for giving weapons to Russia to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.
Oh, perish the thought.
Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington have been so correct about everything, you would never want to contradict them.
This was a major prong of Russiagate, the fact that Trump basically adopted Obama's view against the GOP establishment, against the Democratic establishment, that said Ukraine is not a vital interest to the United States, we should not risk anything, much less war with Russia, in order to care about what happens there.
What changed in Washington?
That we have now gone from, we will never send Patriot missile batteries, we will never send Abrams tanks, we will never send F-16s, to one after the next, sending all of those.
Back in March of 2022, at the start of the war, the establishment figure Neil Ferguson wrote an article in Bloomberg that expressed a view that at the time was considered evil.
Which is basically that the United States only has one goal in Ukraine, which is not to protect the Ukrainian people, the inspiring script, the moralistic narrative, the fairy tale we were fed.
Just like we were told we were going to Iraq to deliver democracy to the Iraqi people, we were going to war in Libya to bring democracy to the Libyans, we were going to try and take out Bashar al-Assad with the CIA secret war because we wanted to help the Syrian people.
We're not in Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people.
Neil Ferguson said after talking to both British and American senior foreign policy officials that the real reason we're in Ukraine was the opposite.
It was to sacrifice Ukraine.
To destroy Ukraine.
In order to bleed Russia.
The country suffering most from this war, really the only country, is Ukraine.
Their entire country is being destroyed.
Their people are dying in huge numbers.
Their buildings are all being blown to bits.
At least in the parts where this war is.
And the people who are benefiting most is the West.
The elites in the West.
They have a new war for their arms manufacturers.
Pundits get to feel Churchillian and purposeful and strong, writing in favor of this war from a safe distance.
But this is what Neil Ferguson said at the very beginning, was the real goal was to sacrifice Ukraine and Ukrainians and not protect them.
So unfortunately, American officials are divided on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars, like the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan, can be applied to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
David Sanger reported for the New York Times on Saturday.
According to Sanger, who cannot have written his piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration, quote, seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a border conflict with a nuclear armed adversary or cutting off potential path to de-escalation.
CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials.
Reading this carefully, I conclude that the U.S. and the U.S.
intends to keep this work going.
The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft stingers, anti-tank javelins, and explosive switchblade drones.
It will keep trying to persuade other native governments to supply heavier defensive weaponry.
The latest U.S.
proposal is for Turkey to provide Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 anti-aircraft system with Ankara purchased from Moscow just a few years ago and expected to go the way of the scuttled plan for Polish MiG fighters.
Washington will revert to the Afghanistan after 1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war.
I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this.
Quote, the only endgame now, a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month.
It's the end of Putin's regime.
Until then, all the time Putin stays, Russia will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations.
I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms.
There is a belief that, quote, the UK's number one option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.
Again and again I hear such language.
It helped explain among other things the lack of diplomatic effort by the U.S.
to secure a ceasefire.
It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.
And that indeed is exactly what ended up happening.
The reality is the only identifiable U.S.
interest was achieved in the first month of the war, which was when the U.S.
Coerce Germany and then Europe to cut off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to start buying natural gas from the United States.
Everything else after that has been trying to do to Ukraine what the United States did to Syria, leave it in ruins by bleeding out the war just long enough In order to weaken Russia.
That is what everything is about, why we're sending $100 billion in weapons there, depleting our own stockpiles, and most dangerously of all, increasingly risking all sorts of new escalations.
Now we have for you the articles that show how Biden would one month declare he refuses to send the weapons system I mentioned, and then months later send the rest.
As I told you, the last week brought the worst reversal of all, the most severe, and by no means necessarily the last one.
We're right now giving them fighter jets, F-16 fighter jets.
And of course, the Ukrainians are supposedly promising not to use it to strike deep in Russia.
They've repeatedly violated those promises in other ways, using American weapons to strike Russian targets inside Russia.
And there are few greater expletory dangers than that.
And as always, the question becomes, who is benefiting from this war?
It is definitely not you.
As American infrastructure crumbles, But the CIA is benefiting.
Arms manufacturers in the West are definitely benefiting.
And it's hard to tell who else beyond that.
But what is for sure true is that the core doctrine of Washington, of bipartisan foreign policy in Washington, has radically changed, seemingly overnight, when it comes to the question of Ukraine.
And the only real explanation I can find Is that the Democratic Party fed for so long an anti-Russian animus as a result of Russiagate, they really became convinced that what they regard as the greatest and most cataclysmic event in recent U.S.
history, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the defeat of Hillary Clinton, was due to interference by Moscow.
And this is payback for that.
We seem to be willing to risk blowing ourselves up Over the question of who rules provinces in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass, where the people of that region have always clearly had greater loyalty to Moscow than to Kiev.
And whatever the motive is, ultimately, and ultimately it was very hard to tell the motive in Iraq.
People had different motives for why we invaded that country and occupied it for over a decade.
You can see what escalation is unfolding right before your eyes.
Never with congressional debate, let alone debate of the American people.
In fact, the Republican Party before the midterms, Kevin McCarthy, trying to win the speakership position in the midterm, sent signals that he would impose limits on the flow of money from the United States to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe.
And as soon as he won, and the Republicans won that election and he got to be the speaker, all of that stopped and he's now aligned with the biggest hawks and warmongers in the Republican Party.
Saying I've always been on the side of Biden when it comes to the war in Ukraine and I always will be.
We stand with Ukraine until the very end.
So we have a great guest for you.
I want to end there, and we will bring him on right after this.
All right.
There he is, Sagar and Jetty.
He came on a little bit prematurely.
I thought we were going to have a little break.
Sagar knows as anybody the hazards of this sort of format.
So I've already heat praised on you, Sagar.
I told the audience who you are.
For those who didn't know you, and I'm sure that's very few people, you spent years harassing me and forcing me to go on your show, and it's now payback time.
So I'm delighted to have you.
Welcome to our show.
Well, thank you so much for having me, Glenn, and I just want to say you're an inspiration and you're a courageous man, and I really appreciate you having me right now.
Absolutely, I'm excited to do that.
So, I'll send you the introduction we had for you that your premature appearance prevented me from reading.
I'm sure you'll be delighted.
It's kind of like a Hallmark card.
You know, you got to hear some of my monologue, probably more than you expected to.
I'm not very prompt in our show structure yet.
So let me just ask you, in terms of these most recent escalations, not just in the war itself between Ukraine and Russia, but also the role the U.S.
government is playing in that war, now sending F-16s after we vowed forever not to do that.
What do you make of this escalating war and the escalating role of the U.S.
in it?
Yeah, I repurposed a line from Fight Club to just say, on a long enough timeline, Zelensky gets whatever he wants.
I mean, the F-16 is the perfect example.
Just four months ago, President Biden ruled this out in an interview with CBS News' David Muir.
He said, no, they don't need them.
He laid out a major strategic case as to why the risk of World War III, and he said that privately.
But then again and again and again, the Ukrainians and frankly, their media allies constantly, people like Jim Acosta and others, are airing Ukrainian pilots and Zelensky's pleas for F-16s.
There's a direct CNN interview that CNN actually deleted.
We had to go back and find it where President Zelensky pleaded with President Biden live on Wolf Blitzer's show from just a few months ago.
Please send the jets.
Please send the jets.
And increasingly, we are basically being propagandized by our media by not giving anybody the counter case or laying things out in exactly the way that you did, Glenn.
I mean, we are being told that this war is about democracy and obviously that ignores many of the democratic problems that have are ongoing in Ukraine and prior to this invasion.
You mean little things like Zelensky banning opposition media outlets even before the war, banning churches since the war, banning opposition parties since the war, essentially doing every single thing possible that is anti-democratic in nature?
You mean things like that?
Exactly.
And none of this is to say, yeah, he deserved to get invaded.
It's, should we risk nuclear armed conflict over a scrap of the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine?
When you put things that way, or actually not even nuclear war, should we pay $3.50 or $4 a gallon in gas?
Should we have trillions of dollars that we're spending in terms of our lost economic opportunity, sanctions, the global financial system?
All of it was blown up over something which we are told over and over again is so important for democracy.
But when you strip away that language that the media is constantly feeding us, then we have a very, very different picture of what's going on here.
So you had a tweet earlier today.
You had a couple of them.
Let's go to the second one, where you talked about the kind of financial chicanery taking place, just in terms of the money that is necessarily flowing from the United States coffers into Ukrainian coffers to keep this war being fueled.
We're, of course, yet again, by far the biggest spender when it comes to this war.
And you said, quote, the Pentagon used an illegal accounting gimmick To circumvent Congress and send 3 billion more to Ukraine.
Now it seems like every 2 or 3 weeks Biden stands up and announces another 3 billion dollars here, another 800 million there, another 40 billion dollars here, another 22 billion dollars there.
What illegal accounting gimmick are you referencing here?
This is a very important point, Glenn.
What the Biden administration has done is they realize we are going to be tapped out of the legally appropriated aid by Congress sometime in October.
Ukraine poured tens of billions of U.S.
provided ammunition and artillery into the Battle of Bakhmut, which they just lost.
This is why when people are discussing, oh, Zelensky is some sort of strategic genius, He is acting as if he has limitless resources.
And if you look, I guess, at the behavior of the U.S. Congress, maybe that's why.
And this validates exactly what the problem is.
We have decided to go back and change the accounting of the way that we have Ukraine's aid.
Now, let me explain.
Prior to this, the way that we accounted for Ukraine's aid was we made it priced on the replacement cost, as in the replacement cost to the U.S. technology.
taxpayer whenever you take weapons that you have in your stockpiles and give them to somebody else.
What we have now done, because we realize that there's no way they're going to get by, even on the $100 billion or so that we've already appropriated them, is gone back and backdated and depreciated a portion of the $40 billion of military aid that we have appropriated to Ukraine thus far.
Here's the crazy part, though.
They have said this is only the first $3 billion or so they've been able to find.
There are guarantees that they are very likely to go back and be able to do what they want.
This is like what real estate billionaires do on their taxes.
They hire depreciation consultants and change something from a five-year to a 30-year so that they can accelerate depreciation and write off cash losses.
All of it is madness because this is an organization Which has failed an audit five years in a row that has made no progress that can account for only 39% of the $3.5 trillion in assets under their management.
And they really want us to believe that in this particular case, they are so spot on in their accounting.
This is a joke magic organization whenever it comes to their numbers.
And the U.S.
taxpayers are the only ones who are really mating or are the butt of the joke.
In this instance, Glenn, and the reason why I called it illegal is because Congress has the power of the purse.
Clearly, replacement costs is the way that all aid to foreign countries should be calculated.
There's no absolute reason why it shouldn't be that way, since we already do have the intention of replacing it, as was explicitly written in the legislation.
We are the ones who are on the losing end here.
We've never done this in history.
And the biggest problem for this in the long run is this gives the executive even more power on congressionally appropriated aid.
How do you and I know that this isn't immediately going to be used for Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, any country for any president to prop up any conflict?
that they want.
This only makes the imperial presidency even stronger.
And yeah, it just makes democracy, really democracy even weaker.
The limited democratic checks we had in Congress have only gone down since this time.
Yeah.
You know, and I think, you know, one of the reasons is because Congress actually has given up that authority, in part because they don't want the responsibility for things like war.
I remember Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2006 running on a pledge to cut off funding for the war in Iraq.
And when they won, they immediately turned around and said, of course, we're not going to cut off funding for the war in Iraq because they wanted to run in 2008 against the war in Iraq, which is what Obama did and won.
And yet we were still in Iraq by the end of his first term.
You know, and I think it is so interesting because there's almost no more efficient way to make huge amounts of money disappear than to bring together on the one hand, the Pentagon.
And then on the other, Zelensky and the Ukrainians.
I mean, there's almost no two pairing of a duo that could burn through money with less accountability than that.
You might remember Rand Paul stood up at the time that the Democrats unanimously voted with the majority of the Republican caucus to send $40 billion to Russia, to Ukraine.
Rather, all he was trying to do was to attach a few safeguards, oversight and accounting provisions.
Mitch McConnell snidely referred to him as a Kremlin propagandist.
That was the end of that.
And it not only passed, but passed with no safeguards, which I think gives you a lot of insight into the motive behind the war.
And that's what I want to ask you.
You know, I think you probably heard Obama was really adamant through his presidency that there's nothing in Ukraine that justifies going to war over it that makes us consider it a vital interest.
Trump said the same.
That was why the GOP platform changed, not because Vladimir Putin had sex tapes on Trump, but because Trump consistently had said, it's not worth going to war over these places unless we're being directly attacked.
So you had this bipartisan consensus, even going back to the Clinton and the Bush years, where you would see C.I.A.
Director is writing memos saying it is insanity to try and expand NATO up to the Ukrainian border.
That is an absolute red line for not just Putin but everyone in Moscow and we have no reason why we would do that and risk war with Russia over it.
So this is the question.
The whole point of figuring out a vital interest in advance is, as Obama said, you need to tell the rest of the world what you're willing to go to war for and what you're not.
And our position has always been, Ukraine is something we're willing to write off that's not in our sphere of influence.
We don't care about it.
Here we are depleting our own stockpiles.
Literally, we have oftentimes shortages in weapons for ourselves.
$100 million increasing risks.
Overdoing exactly that which the bipartisan class in Washington said was insanity for so long to do, which was risk war with Russia over Ukraine.
Why do you think this has changed and the bipartisan majorities now in Washington support doing exactly what Biden is doing?
I think unfortunately, Glenn, Obama was an outlier at the time.
He was attacked viciously by the blob.
Ben Rhodes and Barack Obama famously actually attacked them in that Atlantic article with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Now, he was viciously turned on specifically over that issue with Crimea.
Trump too, we shouldn't forget.
Well, but that in Syria, that in Syria, which was the same thing, right, Obama?
That in Syria.
Kind of far, but never far enough to really take out a side.
And the foreign policy class hated Obama, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham, and that whole crowd, Marco Rubio, but also the hawks in the Democratic Party, over exactly that.
Obama's refusal to confront Russia in Syria, and Ukraine, and then Trump did the same and got called a Russian agent for it.
Exactly.
They never forgave him for not doing a no-fly zone over Syria.
Then he applied his same restraint logic whenever it came to Ukraine.
On his way out, Trump also is most at odds with the elites in his own party over Russia.
It was the one issue Where he represented, frankly, a majoritarian view, I'm sure, amongst the GOP base, but not amongst the brainwashed GOP elites.
The best thing that ever happened to the GOP elites was the marginalization and the loss of Donald Trump so that they could return to the Russia policy that they previously had long loved.
I mean, don't forget, there's that famous Mitt Romney moment in the 2012 debate where he says that actually Russia is our biggest national security threat.
Obama actually ridicules him.
And of course, that moment was actually celebrated both by Democrats after 2016 and by Republican elites.
It was a joint.
It was basically a joint agreement.
See, Romney was actually right.
Russia was our biggest national security threat.
And this is where we can't give Trump too much credit.
At the end of the day, he caved and did what Obama refused to do.
He sent the Javelin missiles to Ukraine, to this conflict, and pumped even more weapons into it, specifically so he could have some idiot talking point, Glenn, about how, no, actually, he was tough on Russia.
And that's how the media and the elites get you, is they say, oh no, Mr. President, if you want to show the media that you're not soft on Russia, go ahead and send weapons into this morass and it'll make a difference.
What happened?
Well, we already know it actually precipitated even more conflict and a war.
So at every stage, the Washington elites have failed on Ukraine policy.
And I would even dispute that.
Unfortunately, we didn't make clear that Ukraine is not something of a vital strategic interest.
We're the ones who basically invited them into NATO in 2008.
You can blame our great George W. Bush for that one.
Uh huh.
And that, you know, Moscow, they have long memories.
Putin was literally president at that time.
I've heard a famous story that Bush was once lecturing Putin about democracy.
And Putin, he actually speaks perfect English, looked him in the eyes and he said, we don't want the same democracy that you gave to Iraq.
And that was one of the big splits in their relationship.
And it didn't have to be this way.
Vladimir Putin is the very first leader to ever speak with President Bush after 9/11.
And he said, hey, don't worry about it.
You know, don't worry about our response.
You do the response that you need to.
He visited the Crawford Ranch November 2001.
one.
There was touted as some sort of strong security relationship.
Things went off the rails specifically because of the neocons who were in power and because our invasion of Iraq put Gaddafi and Putin and Kim Jong-un.
That's actually another great story.
North Koreans, every single time we tell them to give up their nuclear weapons, what do they always say?
They said, look what you guys did to Gaddafi.
You think we're idiots?
They're never going away.
People outside of the Western bubble, they have much longer memories than the Western press does.
And unfortunately, decades of U.S. policy and hubris is exactly the result of what has happened in Ukraine.
I love the way that you did your monologue.
At the end of the day, that country and its millions of people who are being basically fed into a meat grinder and burned to the ground in some of their cities, they are suffering more than anybody.
And anybody who cares about humanity or any of that would want that to stop as soon as humanly possible.
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, this creeping kind of escalation combined with the short-term memories we're conditioned to have as a result of social media, but also just, you know, the passive time makes people forget.
I think we've really lost sight of how insane it is, the idea that we would expand NATO right up to Russia's border, when You know, the Soviet Union fell.
Obviously, the greatest threat to Russia in the 20th century was a powerful Germany.
They twice invaded Russia.
They, in World War II, caused 20 million Russians to die.
And both times that invasion happened through Ukraine.
That's the most sensitive part of the Russian border.
And so when the Soviet Union fell, and the United States and the West wanted to reunite Germany, Obviously, Russia was traumatized by that idea.
The idea of this kind of very powerful German state has been almost existentially deadly to Russia.
And they said they would accept it.
Gorbachev said he would accept it based on the promise that NATO would never extend one inch eastward beyond Germany.
Because now you have East Germany joining the NATO alliance as a result of the unification of Germany.
And that was the promise.
And now, you know, almost immediately, When Clinton gets into office, they're starting to expand NATO further and further closer to the Russian border.
And so the idea of putting Ukraine in NATO, you know, there's this sense now that that really wasn't the reason for the war, that Putin doesn't mind having, you know, Victoria Nuland picking the president right on that side of the Russian border, the most sensitive part.
That would be so provocative toward anybody, which isn't a way of justifying the Russian invasion.
I've long said it's both illegal and immoral to invade another country like that, but there were all kinds of ways to have resolved this war if you wanted to beforehand.
Tulsi Gabbard and Tuck Karlsruhe were probably the two most vocal people with the big platform urging that to happen, and they were instantly branded Russian agents.
And that shows you how radically this has changed.
Now, let me ask you, you mentioned, you know, Trump's infuriating the Republican establishment, very similar to the way Obama, to a much lesser extent, did, but at least did with Ukraine and Syria.
Your show, you know, the success of it, I've always seen it as being, like, mostly due to the fact that you really tapped into this rising anti-establishment sentiment.
The kind of format of your show was you had somebody more associated with the left, which is Crystal Ball, and yourself, who came from the Daily Caller, more associated with conservatism, but you kind of found this intersection of anti-establishment sentiment.
It clearly transformed the Republican Party far more than the Democratic Party.
After all, Trump won and Bernie was twice crushed.
So I want to ask you about the kind of goings on now inside the Republican Party where you see Trump with this gigantic lead.
The establishment forces have aligned behind Ron DeSantis.
He, kind of for his own survival, has had to depict himself as this anti-establishment How do you see Ron DeSantis?
Do you see him as a kind of modernized, sleeker, more controlled and disciplined version of Trump's anti-establishment?
you know, Tim Scott and good luck to all those people, Chris Christie.
How do you see Ron DeSantis?
Do you see him as a kind of modernized, sleeker, more controlled and disciplined version of Trump's anti-establishment?
Or do you see him as this kind of Trojan horse that the GOP establishment is using to take back control of the party?
I know, Glenn, I don't think it's clear yet.
And I'm Unfortunately for DeSantis, he's trying to be all things to all people.
Now, I immediately had suspicions raised after he gave an answer to Carl Sagan's editorial dispute and then turned around and caved to media pressure in his interview with the Times of London and said, no, of course, I don't really believe that and also Putin is a war criminal and it's immediately because I've always thought he is just really in a very impossible situation.
very upset and very ideologically opposed to Tucker Carlson, to the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party.
So, DeSantis, I've always thought he is just really in a very impossible situation.
How do you win over the small contingent of maybe other than Trump Republicans with never Trump Republicans, which does not equal 50, on top of people who love Trump, believe in Trump, and agree with him?
Some of it is dispositional in terms of personality, but a lot of it is your willingness to say, screw you, to the established powers.
And with DeSantis, of course, on cultural policy, and, you know, I mean, I think that there's, I guess, a link to that in terms of affection amongst Republicans.
They like him, certainly, for that.
But Trump is in another league.
of his ability to operate truly of any of these forces.
In other words, when I think Trump is being a hypocrite, it's because he wants to be a hypocrite, or he is being a hypocrite, not because someone is telling him he's going to be doing something or the otherwise.
And unfortunately for DeSantis, voters can smell that.
So I am going to withhold judgment.
I think he said some good stuff on Ukraine.
I also think he's set some really bad record on Russia and all that is incredibly standard cookie cutter.
And I do think he needs to subject himself to a hell of a lot more interviews.
I am very much hoping that our mutual friend David Sachs really gives it to him on Ukraine and asks him and gets him to lay something out specifically in his announcement.
Because it's go time now.
Like, he has a very real shot at being the GOP.
Well, I guess more real than anybody else than Trump.
And we need to get him on the record.
And is it all?
Yeah, I'm sure you probably have thought about this if you haven't already done it.
I haven't yet started, but I definitely intend to start seeking an interview with DeSantis in large part because I feel the same way.
He hasn't commented much on foreign policy over the last four years, which is completely justifiable.
He was the governor of Florida.
He was running Florida.
You expect him to kind of stay away from foreign policy.
His record in the House?
is, you know, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, although there was a couple of what you might call positive signs, including when he deviated from people like Mark Pompeo and refusing to support the dirty war in Syria that the Obama administration was pursuing.
So I, too, am going to be open-minded about it.
But, you know, at the end of the day, it is really true that this democracy we have is so weird because in order to win, you have this tiny little audience you have to placate that are the huge funders in your party You see Peter Thiel, for example, saying, I'm not getting anywhere near these Republican candidates because of their obsession with the culture war, which I am not on board with.
And then you have other, you know, high level Republican operatives who just want Trump and Trumpism and populism gone and there's no way to satisfy them, which DeSantis has to do since that's his advantage, funding, and at the same time create an authentic appeal for Republican voters.
They're just too sophisticated for that at this point.
I think Trump has changed the party and he's in a very hard place.
Let me just switch topics in the little time that we have left because I really want to ask you about a couple other things.
We've been planning the anthrax program we did last night to kind of walk through and remind people of exactly what that attack was, why it was so significant, but also the multiple mysteries embedded within it.
And out of the blue, without knowing I was working on it, you came to me and said, I've kind of fallen into this anthrax rabbit hole.
And as a result, I've run into a lot of the stuff that you had written about, because I wrote about it almost nonstop for two years in 2008, 2007, 8, 9.
Tell me what it was that kind of attracted your interest to it.
Like, what has made you so fascinated by this topic?
You know, Glenn, for me, it was LabLeak.
I mean, at the very beginning, you know, of course, we've done our best to try and dig as deep into LabLeak as possible.
So at the very beginning, you start with the Wuhan lab.
So obviously we have the Wuhan lab.
I think at this point, it's basically, I mean, I don't really know anybody who doesn't believe that it came out of there.
If we can rehash that evidence at a later time.
I'll show you some people.
I'll show you some people if you want to find them.
But you're, I mean, anybody rational does not believe that any longer.
Yes, there is a tremendous amount, an overwhelming amount of evidence to say that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Okay, then you peel back one layer.
That's almost boring now at this point.
And we look at the U.S.
funding.
We have Dr. Fauci, Dr. Peter Daszak, and EcoHealth Alliance.
All of that is now well established.
I wanted to keep going back even more layers.
So then we go to the overall arc of gain-of-function research.
Then, I decided to go even higher than gain-of-function research and say, where the hell did this vast amount of money being pumped through the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, even come from?
That leads me to the 2007 review.
Government Accountability Office about specifically the bioterrorism initiatives that were sparked by the anthrax attacks of 2001.
And what I realized, Glenn, is that the 2001 anthrax attacks opened the door and changed completely the way that we handled dangerous, not just here in the United States, but all across the world.
And our dirty fingers and all over gain of function, research opportunities, all over funding people who are going into caves, which they never would, no human being ever would be in in the first place, getting covered in bat poop, and then getting bitten, going back into a getting covered in bat poop, and then getting bitten, going back into a lab hey, we found this one thing and tried to develop a vaccine for it just in the audience that somebody ever does go into that.
And And instead, we now have actually vast and ample amounts of evidence, not only the COVID leak from the Wuhan lab, Actually, it looks like Ebola.
There's a very good case to say that the Ebola outbreak in the mid-2010s also came from the lab.
Then you go back even further.
And so really what I became interested in is your reporting specifically around the anthrax attacks, because the more I realized that it all started with anthrax, and the fact was, and I was a normie on it.
I was like, oh, well, they solved that one, right?
No, actually, not at all.
The FBI investigated it last year.
They accused the wrong man.
The person that they pinned it on, they just blamed no due process.
At this point, I think you have to be an idiot to think that Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for the anthrax attack.
I mean, many of the people who were even involved in the investigation would tell you that.
And that's actually, and I can't, I was, I was saying, I can't believe Glenn has been so right for so long.
It was really, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, in 2007, 2008, 2009, the country had moved on.
People did not want to hear about the anthrax attacks.
And, you know, I went through the same thing.
You know, I mean, I remember it at the time.
I'm roughly your age.
I think you're a couple years older.
But I remember, you know, living through the anthrax attacks.
And it was only when I started looking first at the media angle, the way ABC News and Brian Ross spent a full week Getting completely played by high-level sources by telling the world that they had found bentonite in the anthrax, that it was a telltale sign of Saddam Hussein, when it's really nothing more than the clay that's used to keep cat litter together from dispersing.
The whole thing was such an incredible scam and then the more you look and then the FBI finally announced that it quote-unquote solved the case.
They blamed a dead guy The evidence, the circumstantial evidence was, I mean, it was laughable if you looked at it from the perspective of a lawyer, would never have gotten convicted.
There were at least a hundred people or not more with access to that flask.
And the FBI said, oh, we eliminated them all through two other police records.
It's such a joke.
But I think the most interesting part, and this is where it relates to COVID, is that if you believe the FBI's version, And you can, you know, Fauci has been around for so long.
He's at the center of every controversy involving biological agents and the like and viruses.
At the time in 2001, he was one of the people saying, it is shocking how sophisticated and weaponized these anthrax strains are.
And it turns out, according to the FBI, that they were developed in a U.S.
Army lab.
So this is biological weapons developed and stored in the U.S.
Army Lab and so you then have to start wondering when Fauci says we don't do things like we don't do gain-of-function research, we don't manipulate viruses to become more dangerous, the anthrax case shines so much light on whether he was telling the truth.
Exactly.
That's King.
Not only did he lie about anthrax at the time, he became... My parents are in academia, so I really viscerally understand this.
The man who controls the money controls all of academia.
He controls the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation.
These granting organizations control and make or break the professors' careers.
This is part of why none of the truth around LabLeak or even on COVID vaccines, even if you want to talk about that because the dollars are all tightly controlled by a very few select group inside the United States government.
And because of that, all of that money has come from the anthrax attacks from 2001.
And it's important to underscore what you said.
If you believe the original version around anthrax, you're like, oh, well, that was a one off.
Whereas when you have suspicions about it, the fact that we've only had previous lab leaks before even the anthrax attacks, I believe that Lyme disease almost certainly came from that Plum Island Research Facility very near East Lyme, Connecticut.
I believe that they have covered multiple anthrax problems at Fort Detrick and at many other US research facilities, there is new evidence, even one as recent as 2019, that when you begin to understand that and how all of these coverups are specifically done to keep people from asking questions about this type that when you begin to understand that and how all of these coverups are specifically done to keep people from asking questions about this type of escalating research over and over again, which are resulting in not only dangerous pathogens released, but the most deadly pandemic that the
And of course, what is the response of Fauci and of the scientific community to COVID?
We did research, the Global Virome Project.
They want to spend $50 billion more.
They want 10 times the amount of existing labs going and doing the exact type of research in Thailand, in Vietnam, all over Southeast Asia on bat coronaviruses.
It's complete madness.
And the very group, EcoHealth Alliance, has gotten a new grant from Fauci from the U.S.
government to continue the very same types today.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, that's how Fauci was able to take these leading virologists and epidemiologists who in the first couple of weeks of the pandemic are writing to him saying, Obviously this didn't naturally occur.
This clearly came from a lab leak and turned them two weeks later into people willing to sign a Lancet letter saying anybody who believes this came from a lab leak is a crazy conspiracy theorist.
We know for sure it was naturally funded because if you don't have Fauci's approval, if you're not on his good side, your career as a researcher basically ends.
That's how much monopolistic power he has over the budgetary power that the United States government controls.
The other ironic part, Sagar, is that The motive attributed by the FBI to Bruce Ivins for why he decided just sitting there alone one day to go and attack the nation using anthrax in his flask was because he wanted to scare everybody about anthrax so that the money would continue to flow and not just continue to flow but increase and actually that is what happened as you said of course when something like an anthrax attack or a pandemic happens the money
Not only continues to flow even more greatly, but it also enables all kinds of new areas of research, including things that used to be limitations that now become justified as necessary.
Let me ask you, just before I let you go, as I said, I think you are, you know, a kind of success story, one of the best and most inspiring success stories when it comes to independent media.
You kind of developed your own independent media while still connected to a corporate outlet at the Hill, and you ran into a lot of problems and conflicts, as always happens.
And then when you went independent, you found an even bigger audience, you're even more successful.
I'm wondering what you make of this, to me at least, somewhat mystifying decision of Tucker Carlson, who I think was also trying to do some pretty independent things at Fox News, Way more subversive than a lot of people realize, but he obviously ran into major problems with management because of that.
I think that absolutely is the reason, at least a big reason, why he's gone.
It just did no longer fit into the ideological profile of Fox.
And he had every single conceivable choice that he could have pursued, and he announced that he was taking his show to Twitter, and then days later, Elon Musk announced he was hiring a new CEO, Linda Iaccarino, who just so happens to be a high-level executive at NBCUniversal.
So theoretically, if Tucker takes a show to Twitter, He's on some level working within a corporate structure, now managed and directed by an NBCUniversal executive.
What do you make of that whole kind of migration of Tucker taking his show to Twitter?
Personally, it's not the move that I would have advised, Glenn.
That said, you are the lawyer here and I'll let you parse the contract law in which, as I understand it, Tucker had the provision in which he had control over his personal Twitter account and feels like he may have more legal cover in launching a show or in doing something new on Twitter when it comes to his contract non-compete.
And now I have, again, no idea how the enforcement and all of that works.
It is possible.
I do want to say it is certainly possible that it could work.
That said, you and I are here on Rumble for a reason.
Rumble is a video-designed platform.
I do my show on YouTube, and it is also posted on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, wherever else, because these platforms are built for long-form media consumption.
And there are a lot of little things, right, Glenn?
Like your ability to watch something at two times speed, to come back, to clip at a certain point.
Twitter video has long, I would just say, not been the best product.
Consuming it is very annoying.
Your ability to come back, it doesn't save your place of where you're at.
Will you have comments?
I mean, you and I know this too.
I have comments very mean to me sometimes.
But, you know, I believe in free speech and I think they should be allowed to exist.
Well, you know, are you going to be able to build in not just replies to a video, but visual comments and then replies?
There's actually a hell of a lot of engineering that goes into it, and that really is the one YouTube alternative, and you and I are really talking on it right now, and it's because it takes a lot of money and a lot of effort.
Now, can Elon accomplish that?
I think it is possible.
I saw today that Daily Wire's Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and all of them will be streaming their show live on Twitter.
But, you know, there's a big difference between simulcasting something on Twitter and then making it your primary platform.
I don't think Twitter is ready for prime time just yet.
It's just my current, you know, like my current assessment of the land.
Yeah, I've always been a little constrained, you know, when talking about Tucker because he's a friend of mine.
So some things he tells me, you know, in the context of our friendship that I don't want to then use in my public commentary, but I can't not talk about it as well.
So it has been publicly reported that his contract essentially prohibits him from Going to work for any competitor of Twitter and maybe bringing his show to Rumble or bringing his show to any other place that would pay him for his show could be seen as a violation of that, whereas nobody could argue that talking on Twitter using his social media could be a violation of a non-compete clause.
No one, no court would enforce that and say that you can't be heard anywhere, including on social media.
So I think that might be part of why he decided to go on Twitter, whether though Twitter Is a platform that can sustain a show like that, whether people will get accustomed to watching long-form shows on Twitter, I think, you know, it remains to be seen.
It's very uncertain.
I hope Elon follows through on his free speech values.
I think that's a really important thing, even though we have Rumble.
The more free speech platforms we have, the better.
And I certainly hope Tucker finds an audience for that show, because I think that show is very important as well.
We'll see whether, if he gets out of his Fox contract, he changes changes his mind about where he wants to go.
But, yeah, it's all a little confusing.
I wanted to see what you may make of it, I think.
At the very least, you know, Tucker joining independent media can only be a good thing for independent media.
And to me, there's almost no more important goal than strengthening that because you just can't, as you saw at the Hill, have independent media within a corporate structure.
You will eventually run into constraints on what you can say and do.
I completely agree.
That's actually the very first thing that I said to him after he was let go.
I didn't even know he'd been let go, but I just said, hey man, I just want you to know I've always believed that you would be a hundred times more powerful after you left.
And I still believe that.
I think you will be much better off.
And listen, I mean, at the same time, Tucker, he doesn't need to worry about necessarily about some of the same things that we do.
If he wants to just get his voice out there and post two minute videos from, you know, from his place, that's not a bad life either.
And they can all absolutely have I need to see it.
all the idiot media reporters to write think pieces, you know, in a single sentence, an interview and just tweet it out.
And he could definitely compel the same thing and uses the influence on the Republican Party.
So if this is the only way they can get his voice in the GOP primary of 2024, come on.
We literally have never needed him more than ever, especially DeSantis Tucker.
I need to see it.
I need to see it yesterday.
As you said, though, Glenn, not going to stop me from also trying to go get. -Oh, yeah, I'm gonna have Ron DeSantis on my show.
But you know, it is just so funny if you talk to you, if you talk to me, if you talk to Megyn Kelly, if you talk to anybody who did it, it is such a cause of encouragement and optimism that everybody who leaves corporate media and goes the independent route
Not only says they're happier, that's a given, but you find a bigger audience, your influence actually increases and what you see is the more people in the corporate media express their bitterness and jealousy and rage and try and malign what you're doing, the more you see how irrelevant that is and all of that is so positive that the place of...
Sagar, thank you so much.
This is not going to be the last time you're on my show.
I can promise you that.
I will harass you until you come back, but I'm thrilled.
It was the first time.
Better both on kind of like for the country, but also just for my own personal enjoyment and entertainment than watching that part of the media rot away and die.
It's way overdue.
Oh, yes.
Amen to that.
Sagar, thank you so much.
This is not going to be the last time you're on my show.
I can promise you that.
I will harass you until you come back.
But I'm thrilled it was the first time I really enjoyed talking to you, and I appreciate your coming on.
Glenn, you're one of the strongest people I know.
You're an inspiration.
I appreciate your work so much, both Crystal and I do.
Thank you, not only for having me, for always being so kind and coming on our show and your support.
You mean the world to me, and yeah, I'll just leave it there.
Otherwise, I'm gonna start crying here, but you are truly an inspirational man.
You're one of the strongest people I know.
I really appreciate that, Sagar.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, sir.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, this being Tuesday night, every Tuesday and Thursday we have our live after show on Locals that's designed to be interactive.
We take your questions, comment on your feedback and criticisms, take your suggestions for what we should cover and who we should interview.
To have access to that show, it's for subscribers only, simply click the join button and become part of our Locals community.
That also helps the show and the journalism we're trying to do here.
For those of you who have been continuing to watch, we are very appreciative.
Remember, we're in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform where you can follow us.
That also helps the show's visibility.
Thank you so much for watching.
We will see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
