Dems’ New Star—Manhattan Billionaire Heir Dan Goldman—Fiercely Defends Security State. Plus: Jeffrey Sachs’ Break w/ the Establishment on Ukraine, COVID, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #88
In the latest episode of System Update, Glenn covers the Democrats' new star: Dan Goldman. The Manhattan billionaire heir who loves to defend the security state of the US. Another rich Congressman in the hand of the Democrats. Plus, Glenn looks into Jeffrey Sachs' break with the establishment on Ukraine, Covid, and more. Click here and listen to another insightful episode of System Update!
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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...
You can tell a lot about a political party by the elected officials its followers most venerate.
Since 2018, one of the Democrats' most popular stars, if not the most popular, has been Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of gentrified Queens and parts of the Bronx, whose unique talents in creating viralized social media content for Twitter and TikTok, such as her AOC in white Oscar-worthy performance as a pained activist staring at a parking lot at the border, is beyond dispute.
Even if her influence over actual policy and lawmaking is close to zero.
You never see Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema going viral on Instagram with endless discussions of their various traumas.
You only see them wielding their power to determine what the outcome of laws will be, something you never see AOC doing.
That's because they seem to like being lawmakers while AOC really enjoys life as a cultural celebrity and influencer, and it shows.
But whatever else you think of her, AOC's special brand of identity politics, her passion for calling every Republican a white supremacist and a fascist, and her completely harmless theater kid gesturing at the most banal and comfortable form of gentrified lifestyle socialism, really did capture the zeitgeist of post-George Floyd, Trump-obsessed, left-liberal online sentiment.
AOC, whose star began to fade when her gaudy appearance at the Met Gala, surrounded by masked servants who prepared her hair and nails and feet while she and her unmasked boyfriend blatantly enjoyed their pampering, A Bridge Too Far, a mass-dropping moment that could never be unseen even by her most devoted loyalists, now has a competitor.
The billionaire heir of the Levi Strauss fortune, Daniel Goldman, who through a combination of his family's friendship with the Sulzberger family, which won him an endorsement from the New York Times, an endorsement that only matters in Manhattan, where, lucky for him, he was actually running,
Along with a huge spending advantage caused by his own family's unearned wealth and the fortunes of his dad's friends, was elected in 2022 to represent New York's 10th congressional district, which covers wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods and the most gentrified parts of Queens.
AOC has the most gentrified parts of Queens.
While Daniel Goleman has Brooklyn.
That Goleman's videos, as posted by the Vox video duns Aaron Rupert, are now going routinely viral is the opposite of surprising.
One can barely imagine a more perfect avatar of what the Democratic Party now represents.
A billionaire heir who, even at the age of 47, has lived on his family's wealth and never worked outside of government, who reveres the FBI and views criticism of the U.S.
security state as immoral or a sign of bad character, Who promised to put his assets in blind trust if he was elected to Congress and invade against members like Nancy Pelosi, profiting off stock trades, only to now continuously enrich himself through stock trades in the very industries on which he most focuses.
There's really no better way to understand the modern day Democratic Party than by taking a relatively fast, but still, I'm sorry to say, painfully deep look at Dan Goldman, his charmed life, and his rotted ideology.
So that's what we're gonna do.
Then for our interview segment where I'll talk to someone whose work I've increasingly admired and whose voice I believe is now one of the most impressive and important in U.S.
political discourse, Jeffrey Sachs, who has spent his life compiling a mountain of impressive establishment credentials and working at the belly of the beast of establishment power only to become a full-scale Increasingly vocal and what might say radical critic of establishment dogma narratives from Ukraine, Russia to COVID and well beyond.
We're excited to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Update.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form.
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Follow us there.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the things I've learned in the just few months that I've been hosting a nightly show about journalism and politics is sometimes you actually have to be grateful for the people who make your job easier.
And that's definitely how I feel.
That's one of the many feelings I have toward the newly elected representative for Manhattan and its lower Manhattan districts that are among the wealthiest in the country, along with the most gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Daniel Goldman.
It is almost impossible for me to equate or match in words and analysis what he reveals about the Democratic Party just by himself and looking at how Democrats are reacting to him.
He really has become one of the most popular Social media stars in Democratic Party politics.
Just today, the longtime neocon Jen Rubin, the blogger at the Washington Post, whose enthusiasm for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign was so extreme that it actually reached restraining order levels.
It became really creepy how enamored she was of Mitt Romney.
She hasn't changed a single view Since her obsession with Mitt Romney in 2012, but she now recognizes correctly that the Democratic Party is the most hospitable vehicle for her neoconservative ideology.
And just today, she heralded Dan Goldman as the single best freshman member of Congress after seeing a video that we're going to show you.
That he posted just yesterday of a speech he gave in Congress where essentially he condemned Republicans for daring to criticize the FBI and claimed the only reason anybody would dare criticize the FBI is because they themselves are a criminal and are afraid of the FBI catching criminals.
The same thing I heard When we were doing the Snowden reporting and revealing the mass spying system implemented in secret by the NSA when I heard constantly that the only people who would be worried about NSA spying are criminals and terrorists and pedophiles because after all no good citizen has anything to hide and wouldn't care if the government was reading their emails and knowing everything about what they were doing in their lives.
A very similar sentiment that a decade later is found at the heart of the Democratic Party.
Now I think it's worth Examining quickly Dan Goldman's trajectory and most of all his ideology to understand why he's resonating so passionately with the Democratic Party's core base.
He had a very common life for someone who is born into a billionaire family with generational wealth.
His family, his great-grandfather was the founder of the Levi Strauss chain.
His grandfather was the one who turned it into a billionaire entity.
And so basically his father, just like he, was born as an heir.
Somebody who never had to work a day in their lives and yet who had the life of somebody drowning in all kinds of extreme wealth.
He, of course, went to the Sidwell Friends Prep School in Washington, which is where the top Washington elite who can afford $60,000 a year for the second grade, more than most people in the working class make in a year of doing actual labor.
That's where he went to school.
He then followed that up by going to Yale, then by going to Stanford Law School, and then becoming a federal prosecutor.
So he never has actually worked in the private sector a day in his life.
He has not rejected the wealth that was handed to him, but instead has lived a very lavish lifestyle as a result of being an heir.
And I want to say you can't control Where you're born.
You can't control if you're born to people who have committed crimes.
You can't control whether you're born in extreme poverty.
You can't control whether you're born to a family that lavishes you with billionaire wealth that you never actually had to earn, making you an heir to a fortune that you had nothing to do with creating.
That's why in the West we don't hold a parent or grandparent's sins against the child.
That's a moral precept to which I definitely subscribe.
So it's not as though Dan Goldman has done anything wrong by being born as a billionaire heir to a fortune that was the result of someone else's work.
But what you do with that life, with the paths that lay before you, is highly relevant of the character that someone has.
You can either work very hard to shed the insulated privilege that shapes who you are, the fact that you're constantly being told that you're the smartest and the best person, constantly surrounded by sycophants who praise you because the only people with whom you ever deal are people who work for you and you work for your family, people who want favors from your family, people at these private schools who are trained to teach these children, treat these children like members of royalty,
You can work hard to shed all of that, to avoid it, to become a humble person who has values of decency and compassion and empathy.
Or you can become, and I've seen this many, many times, as somebody who was born with no financial privilege at all, but someone who ended up working my way into elite sectors.
I've seen all kinds of people who grew up like Dan Goldman.
Maybe not as wealthy as he, but close.
And more often than not, those people end up with serious entitlement syndromes as smug assholes with a superiority complex who look down at everybody else who has less than they do, even though those people actually had to work for everything they got.
Because he's convinced that he has more by virtue of his own merit, even though he did nothing to obtain it.
And it reeks out of every pore in his body for every single video and every time he opens his mouth.
And we're going to show you a few of those.
But far worse and more revealing to me is the ideology he represents, what he has brought to the Congress.
And it's the reason why he's become, more than anything, so popular.
So the fact that one of the most popular, if not the biggest, rising stars in the Democratic Party is a billionaire heir to a fortune who has spent his whole life ensconced in the most extreme forms of East Coast insularity and privilege, who looks down at his nose at working class people, As we're about to show you, who don't have the same ideology as he, and most important of all, are eager to weaponize the U.S.
security state to criminalize his opponents and to create a precept that it is inherently unpatriotic and immoral to criticize the FBI and the U.S.
security state makes him the perfect vehicle, the perfect symbol for the defining values of the Democratic Party, and that's why he's worth taking a look at.
Now, beyond that biography, the way in which he ended up In Congress itself reveals so much about the predominant, the prevailing ideology in Democratic Party politics and the values that party now represents.
As I said, he was somebody who never had served even in elective office before getting elected to Congress.
He served as a federal prosecutor and he really came to public view because he was selected by the House Intelligence Committee to be one of the lead prosecutors in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
The impeachment trial even more absurd than the second one, which centered around Trump's supposed withholding of weapons to Ukraine as though it's a moral obligation of a president of the United States to lavish Ukraine with our weapons because he wanted the Ukrainian investigators to determine whether or not Joe Biden and his son had committed crimes in using Joe Biden's influence as a vice president
As many newspaper reporting and now many investigations suggest he may have done in order to determine whether or not there was actual corruption.
So he became this kind of resistance star.
It led to an MSNBC contract.
But even then, running for Congress in the highly competitive sector of New York politics is a very difficult thing to do.
He ran against several people who had worked their way up the political ladder by running for local office at city council and then state assembly and state senate.
There was a range of ideological choices from people on the AOC left and the more centrist Wings of the party, he was running against a black, gay incumbent, Mondaire Jones, who had been elected in 2018, beating a significant field of primary challengers and had to run in a new district, a redistricted, different district than the one to which he got elected because Sean Maloney, the head of the Democratic
campaign committee was desperate to get reelected and he decided he was going to run for Mondaire Jones's seat, forcing the black new congressman into this district.
So Dan Goldman had a ton of competition.
So how did he win?
How did this person who had no elected office and his background, had never even tried to run at the age of 47, had never done anything besides work as a federal prosecutor, won?
The first way is that his dad and his granddad We're very good friends of the Sulzberger family, who, lucky for him, happens to own the New York Times.
Owning control of the New York Times.
And while a New York Times endorsement now means basically nothing, you may recall in the 2020 election in the Democratic primary, they jointly endorsed Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.
Because they were just insistent that a woman be the nominee, but they just couldn't decide between these two brilliant women.
And after that endorsement, both of them collapsed even further.
Neither of them ever made a serious bid.
A New York Times endorsement at this point is a joke, except for...
Within among Manhattan voters in rich, wealthy, affluent Manhattan districts, which is by a great coincidence for him, the exact voters who we needed to win elections.
So here you see the New York Times endorses Dan Goldberg for New York District 10 in August of 2022 and they Newspaper owned by his close friends and his family's close friends, the Salzburgers, other Manhattan billionaires, reads, quote, Mr. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, has lived in lower Manhattan for 16 years.
Oh, I bet he has.
That's where Soho is.
That's where the wealthiest and chicest districts are, where people buy lofts and penthouse apartments for $7 and $8 million.
They're trying to turn this into some kind of like he's the neighborhood kid.
He lived in lower Manhattan for 16 years.
His uncommon experience?
Oh, I'd say it's uncommon.
Not many people grew up as billionaire heirs.
Particularly his knowledge of congressional oversight and the rule of law could prove especially valuable in Congress in coming years.
Quote, I have been on the front lines leading the fight in Congress against Donald Trump and the Republican Party and trying to protect and defend our democracy and our institutions and our rule of law, he said in an interview with the editorial board.
Like, they quote that up top as though that's some kind of, like, unique, compelling insight when it's nothing but the most banal expression of liberal sentiment.
Although he lives in the district, much of which is affluent, so he's perfect for the Democratic Party, as is that district, Mr. Goldman would need to use his first term to convince the large numbers of low-income and middle-class Americans he would represent that he understands the issues facing these constituents, especially the need for more affordable housing and better public transportation.
Oh, I'm totally sure that Dan Goldberg understands the issues facing those middle class and working class constituents.
I mean, I'm sure he spent his whole life thinking about affordable housing and public housing and better public transportation if he has ever once been on the subway.
But that was the New York Times attempt to convince Manhattan voters, because the Salzburgers were close friends of the Goldbergs, that this is who they should vote for.
And they obediently, as they so often do, followed the New York Times advice and elected him.
But another major reason he was elected is because he had unlimited amounts of funds to pour into his campaign.
And for a low voter turnout Democratic primary in New York, Millions of dollars makes all the difference.
Here from Bloomberg in July 2022 is a story on just how vast his wealth is and the advantage that it would likely play and provide.
Quote, Dan Goldman, Congress's richest... Actually, the headline is, Levi Strauss heir would join Congress's richest with the New York City win.
The Levi Strauss heir.
That's exactly what he is.
Dan Goldman, who served as the lead Democratic counsel in former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, would be among the richest members of Congress if he's successful in his bid to represent a newly redrawn district in New York City.
It's no secret that Goldman, 46, an heir to the Levi Strauss Company fortune, is rich.
But financial disclosure forms shared by his campaign with Bloomberg showed the extent of his wealth.
He has a net worth of between $64 and $253 million from over 1,700 assets, which would likely place him among the top 20 wealthiest members of Congress if he were to be elected in November.
Goldman's assets include a broad range of stocks and holdings in a wide variety of industry sectors, including oil and gas, large pharmaceutical companies, meaning big pharma, health insurers, big tech, Military contractors and major commercial blanks.
In the last federal campaign filing, Goldman said he raised $1.2 million for his congressional race, for which he has yet to spend any of his own personal fortune, although he hasn't ruled out doing so if necessary.
Well, just a few weeks later, Politico on August 11th reports he decided it was necessary.
There you see the headline, Money to Burn, Goldman Pumping Millions into Television in New York 10 Contest.
That includes hits during Nightly News, Late Night Talk Shows, and Daytime Soaps, Federal Communications Commission record show.
The Levi Strauss & Co.
heir, who has gained national television exposure as counsel to House Democrats during their first impeachment trial of President Trump, is raking in campaign cash and pumping an unusual amount into TV advertising in the race for New York City's Open Tenth Congressional District.
Goldin, a federal former prosecutor and one of several front runners in the race, has dropped $2.8 million on broadcast and cable spots since announcing his run on June 1st, according to data from Ad Impact.
That includes hits during the nightly news, late-night talk shows, and daytime soaps.
He spent more than three times what rival candidate Congressman Mondaire Jones, the only other competitor on the airwaves, and far beyond typical House primaries in New York City, the outside spending on a tool more often employed by city and statewide candidates showed just how much money has flowed into Goldman's war the outside spending on a tool more often employed by city and statewide candidates showed just how In particular, Goldman was able to tap into a network of family and friends connected to the Levi Strauss & Company fortune, to which he is an heir, to raise more than $200,000.
And over the weekend, his campaign filed paperwork with the FEC showing that Goldman gave his own campaign $1 million.
Should he win, he'd be one of the richest members of Congress.
Now, as I said, he's become a social media star.
Here you see-- here was a Politico article that was, I believe, from 2022 as well.
And I just like this headline, which was, Denim Dynasty Cash Among New York 10 Contributions Flowing From Outside the District.
The money, the familial money flowing to Dan Goldman is part of a large current of money from outside the newly drawn 10th Congressional District Public Records Show.
And it talks about how all of this money is flowing because of his family's link to all kinds of other family fortunes.
Now, as I said, here's his social media profile on Twitter.
You see he has close to a half a million followers.
When he began running, he had a few thousand, maybe 20, 30,000, something like that.
So he has skyrocketed into social media fame.
And the reason is because his ideological positions and the way he expresses himself is so connected to the id of the modern day Democratic Party.
And I just want to show you a few of them because it doesn't just shed light on Dan Goldman, it sheds light on The Democratic Party itself.
All of these videos were promoted by the supreme partisan videographer Aaron Rupert, who used to work for Vox and now is on his own.
And they really embody not just Dan Goldman's ethos, but the ethos of the Democratic Party.
He couldn't pick a more perfect avatar of Democratic Party politics than a billionaire heir who hates working class people and who reveres the U.S.
security state.
That's pretty much the Fullness of his agenda.
So as you probably recall, we reported it several times when it happened and after.
Matt Taibbi along with Michael Schellenberger appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to be questioned by members of that committee about the Twitter files reporting which showed that the US security state, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security had been exercising extraordinary amounts of influence Homeland Security had been exercising extraordinary amounts of influence over Twitter's decisions about what views and what people can and cannot be heard online.
In other words, the US security state is directly involved in censoring our domestic political discourse and every Democrat on that committee, literally every Democrat, not only defended and heralded the importance and virtue of them doing so, but attacked Taibbi personally for the crime of revealing that which they wanted to be kept but attacked Taibbi personally for the crime of revealing that which they wanted to be kept And one of the people who was most scornful against the journalist, remember when insulting journalists used to be a grave press freedom crisis back in 2017, 2018, 2019?
Now Democrats are giddy With ecstasy and arousal when they watch Dan Goldman do it.
Let's watch what he did to Matt Taibbi about the Twitter files.
About Twitter.
Twitter!
And even with Twitter, you cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship of any lawful speech.
And when I say lawful, I mean non-criminal speech, because plenty of speech is non-criminal.
I'll give you one.
The gentleman's time has expired.
I'd ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the following email from Clark Humphrey Executive Office of the Presidency, White House Office, January 23rd, 2021.
That's the Biden administration, 4.39 a.m.
Hey, folks, this goes to Twitter.
Hey, folks, wanted to use the term Mr. They use the term Mr. Mr. Goldman just used.
Wanted to flag the below tweet.
And I'm wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it Removed ASAP.
Boom.
That is... Could you read the below tweet?
And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre, that would be great.
This is a tweet on the very issue that Thomas... So they go on to argue about what this tweet is, whether or not it should have been censored.
So Dan Goldman went from saying there's never an instance in which the Biden administration or the U.S.
security state tried to influence Twitter to remove lawful speech.
He then went on to acknowledge, because Jim Jordan forced him to, that in fact that does happen, and then went on to justify it.
The examples Jim Jordan first chose were ones where Hunter Biden's laptop was used to reveal things about Hunter Biden's personal life, and then others were more generalized about all kinds of censorship that Twitter did at the behest of the FBI, which was the heart and soul of the Twitter files, and Democrats cheered it and explicitly praised it.
Now, at a recent immigration hearing, a journalist whom I know, whose work I've followed for quite a while now, Julio Rosas, who started as a, comes from a humble, working-class family, and who has really done just standard, classic, on-the-ground, courageous reporting at protests that have been dangerous, and specifically reporting on the border, appeared before the committee on which Dan Goldman sits to testify
And Dan Goldman spoke about him like he was dirt on the ground.
Someone whose credentials were so pitiful that he could barely even utter it in his mouth.
It really reveals so much about his character but about the Democratic Party's class-based view of the world.
Listen to what he did and how he treated this journalist.
Gaslight us up here as if Antifa, which Mr. Rosas, apparently the expert now in organized terrorist activity, has overruled the FBI director.
Who says, there's a headline, says Antifa is an ideology, not an organization.
No, no, no.
Let's not listen to the FBI director.
Let's listen to, sorry, what's your title?
Senior writer at Town Hall, who is going to tell us that the FBI director is wrong.
And I'd like to introduce, there's no question.
No suggesting that the FBI director is wrong.
What kind of person would do that?
Would dispute a claim from the FBI?
This is disgusting!
And especially when it comes from some writer at Town, what's it called?
Town Hall?
Didn't even go to Sidwell Friends, never stepped foot on Yale's campus, didn't go to Stanford Law, never worked in the federal prosecutor's office, didn't come from a billionaire family, just some loser whose name he can barely remember and whose credential it makes him sick to even reference.
And the biggest crime of all was the fact that he would dare Based on his years of reporting on Antifa protests on the ground to characterize it differently than the way the FBI director does.
No criticizing the FBI.
Now if you think that is in any way an overstatement, listen to what Dan Goldman said yesterday in which he ranted and raved.
against the audacity of the Republican Party in arguing that the FBI is what it has always been and what the Democratic Party and the liberal left sector of it has always maintained it was until about six years ago which is a fundamentally corrupt organization.
Now Dan Goldberg, Dan Goldman believes that saying that about the FBI is a Reflection of bad moral character.
Listen to this rousing defense of the FBI that went viral all over Twitter as liberals cheered.
So why are my colleagues trying to undermine the FBI?
Why are they asking to defund the FBI?
Oh, no undermining the FBI.
How can anyone want to undermine the FBI?
Every year, literally, since I've been writing about politics, we've gotten reports from the Inspector General's Office of the FBI, the Inspector General's Office of the Justice Department, independent investigations like the Horowitz Report, like the one John Durham just submitted, a 306-page report, detailing at great length the severe a 306-page report, detailing at great length the severe abuses that the FBI commits of their power for political ends.
They still work in what is called the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
That is the name of their headquarters.
J. Edgar Hoover, who they couldn't dislodge from the FBI for 60 years because he famously kept dossiers on every major political figure in Washington, and everyone was petrified of him.
The FBI under Hoover, which encouraged Martin Luther King to commit suicide upon threat of revealing the evidence the FBI illegally obtained through surveillance of Martin Luther King's adulterous relationships.
That's the FBI that Dan Goldman is here to say nobody should dare ever undermine.
It is not because the FBI is not doing its job.
It's because the FBI is doing its job.
And the problem they have is that the FBI is doing its job in investigating their dear leader, Donald Trump.
And if you can undermine the investigator, if you can undermine independent journalists doing investigative reporting, Then you can undermine our entire system of democracy.
That is the authoritarian playbook 101.
You attack the democratic institutions.
You attack the independent, objective individuals who provide checks and balance in a democracy And then, rather than follow the law and the rules, you can violate the law and the rules because there's no one with any credibility who can hold you in check.
So do you want to know the reason why the FBI Is going down in its credibility?
It's because it's being attacked by people on the other side of the aisle.
And that has to stop.
Did you know that the FBI, you may have thought the FBI, if you've listened to any Democratic Party senator over the last 60 years, like Frank Church who led the investigation into the U.S.
security state in the 1970s and uncovered systemic abuses that shocked America, you may have thought the FBI was actually a menace To democratic values.
That's what John Durham just concluded.
They launched an investigation in the middle of the 2016 election with no evidentiary basis of any kind into Trump's fictitious collusion with the Russians in order to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election.
They've repeatedly got caught abusing their spying powers for all kinds of improper ends.
An FBI lawyer pled guilty in a federal court to lying to the FISA court.
To get search warrants to spy on Carter Page when he was just out of representing or working with the Trump campaign.
And here's Dan Goleman to tell you the FBI is critical for safeguarding our democratic values.
And if we criticize them, if we erode their credibility, that is how our democracy is threatened.
Not from them abusing all their powers and spying on Americans for improper ends.
But by people having the audacity to criticize the FBI because of their abuse of political power.
If you look at polling, and we've shown this many times, and I'm about to bring Jeffrey Sachs on.
I'm excited to do that.
So we're going to talk to him about all of these things.
But I just want to show you this as the last graph here.
Here's a Pew survey from March of 2023.
So often people say to me, Or Matt Taibbi or others.
What happened to you guys?
We used to love you.
You've really changed.
This shows what has actually changed.
Overwhelming majorities of Democratic voters, overwhelming majorities, now view the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security favorably.
While majorities of Republicans, or pluralities, view them skeptically and critically.
And so when Dan Goldman gives this rousing homage to the greatness and integrity and importance of the FBI, he is speaking on behalf of Democratic Party voters, and that is why it resonates.
That has become the core ideology of the Democratic Party, that the U.S.
security state is here to protect our democracy, to protect the United States through its great integrity and honor and commitment to democracy.
And that anyone who criticizes it is unpatriotic, probably a Russian agent, or somebody who is a criminal.
Why else would you criticize the FBI unless it was because you wanted to hide your own crimes?
Right at the same time, as this Pew poll in August of 2021 shows, overwhelming majorities of Democrats favor the internet being censored not only by tech companies, by big tech, But also by the state.
They want the U.S.
government to take steps to restrict information on the grounds that the U.S.
government sees that it's false, even if it limits freedom of information.
That's 65% of Democrats that want that.
It has skyrocketed since 2018.
And 76% of Democrats want big tech to do it.
They want to unify state and corporate power to censor the internet.
And the U.S.
security state is the North Star.
of Democratic Party politics, which is why they're in an alliance with almost every major neocon that now correctly perceives that the Democratic Party is their best vehicle for advancing the neoconservative agenda.
In the last week, Dan Goldman has made almost $10 million in stock trades.
After promising to put his assets in a blind trust and saying that he should never, that no member of Congress should ever trade stocks.
This is who has become the rising star, the most popular new member of Congress among the online liberal left and the Democratic Party.
And it's hard to imagine a better avatar, a better, clearer representative for what this party has become.
I have been wanting to speak to our next guest for quite a while, as I have become increasingly interested in his trajectory and admiring of his multiple harsh criticisms of establishment dogma, all amazingly, as I have become increasingly interested in his trajectory and admiring of his multiple harsh criticisms of establishment dogma, all amazingly, while Not an easy feat for someone intent on exposing its deceits and even subverting its agenda, but that's what
Jeffrey Sachs has managed to do.
Back in 2012 I was working on a book about long time MIT professor and fierce establishment critic Noam Chomsky and I ended up not finishing it in part because this person named Edward Snowden disrupted my life and the materials he provided me ended up consuming my journalistic life for the next three years.
But one of the critiques I had developed about Chomsky In the context of my overall admiration for his work and the way it influenced me, was what I regarded as his failure, in my view, to do more to avoid being marginalized.
Chomsky insisted marginalization was an inevitable outcome for any establishment dissident, that establishments by their nature are designed to exclude and silence, or if necessary, destroy effective establishment critics, but I developed the view that While nothing ever justifies compromising one's core integrity in exchange for access, there are small compromises one can make to ensure access to, and thus influence an establishment, venues.
Whether it's gestures as trivial as what clothes one wears, or developing and maintaining a relationship with TV producers, To ensure you can be heard, or learning the way to speak in the way demanded by the constraining format of television.
All things that are necessary to prevent your full-scale disappearance.
And that if one really believes in the value of what one is saying, trying to find ways to ensure access and platforms is really an obligation.
And that is what is attracting me most to Sachs' work.
All while he is vehemently condemning not just US policy in Ukraine, but the narratives that support it.
Suggesting the plausibility not only that COVID came from a lab leak but a lab leak at a U.S.
facility.
Supporting Trump's opposition to the CIA's top priority regime change war in Syria.
Views as threatening to establishment dogma and interests as it gets.
He has simultaneously managed to maintain access to some of the most influential political and media precincts.
That doesn't happen without adept and determined strategizing.
Now, to say that Sachs has an establishment pedigree and has long been welcomed in the highest levels of establishment circles is to understate the case.
He's long been a Harvard professor of economics, has been senior advisor to the UN Secretary General, an economic advisor to governments around the world, someone who personally witnessed some of the most historic events of post-Soviet Russia, twice named the Times list of the world's most hundred influential people, and now a professor of economics at Columbia.
At the start of the COVID pandemic, he was appointed by the then prestigious medical journal Lancet to serve as chair of its task force.
So Sachs is clearly somebody who has been in positions of establishment power for a long time.
He rose very quickly to become a full professor at Harvard by the time he was 29, and then received international attention by helping Bolivia navigate its way out of hyperinflation and convince the international financial community to cancel a large part of its debt.
That led countries like Poland and others in Eastern Europe to similarly seek his service.
And then finally, both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in post-Soviet Russia asked him to come and help them manage their post-communist economy.
The New York Times in 1993 called him, quote, probably the most important economist in the world.
And it was in Russia where he developed a label or a reputation for being kind of a consummate neoliberal.
Somebody who represented what the leftist writer Naomi Klein would come to call in her best-selling book, The Shock Doctrine Disaster Capitalism.
He vehemently disputes that narrative.
We're going to talk to him about that and about much, much more, including all of the views that he has come to develop after a lifetime of seeing some of the most important historical events up close and personal.
I'm very excited to welcome him to his debut episode on System Update.
Here's Jeffrey Sachs.
Professor Sachs, good evening.
It's great to see you and have you on my show.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
I'm a huge fan, so I'm delighted to be with you.
It's mutual, as I just said.
So let me begin.
I do want to talk about some of the issues involving the work that you've done in the past, some of the kind of perceptions surrounding that work, and just a little bit.
But I want to first begin in Ukraine.
We did our show on Ukraine last night, in particular what seems to be the never-ending increase in escalation.
We now have a lot of More aggressive cross-border incursions by allied Ukrainian forces into Russia, along with Biden reversing himself yet again and saying he would send F-16 fighter jets after refusing.
How do you assess the actual danger of escalation in terms of the possibility of some direct U.S.-Russia military conflict, even as an episodic misperception, and ultimately the longer-term risks of things like all-out war between the West and Russia?
Well, the risks are extremely high because we have a very determined Biden administration that wants to keep escalating.
Russia's absolutely determined to prevent NATO from enlarging to Ukraine for understandable reasons, in my view.
It's a 1,900 kilometer border of Ukraine.
Russian Russia does not want The U.S.
military alliance on its border.
And so as long as the Biden administration and the media that are absolutely supporting it and disguising the basic facts continue to push this NATO enlargement, we're going to have an escalating war.
This war was completely avoidable.
The party in this conflict that actually sought diplomacy repeatedly was Russia.
Not something you'd read in the New York Times, actually, but the fact.
And it was Russia that put on the table On December 17th, 2021, a draft U.S.-Russia security agreement to forestall the war.
I actually called the White House.
Soon afterwards, I said, you've got the basis to negotiate.
Avoid this war.
And I was told, no, we're not going to discuss NATO enlargement.
That's our business.
It's not Russia's business.
And I said, are you kidding?
This is going to cause a massive and very dangerous war.
No, this is our policy and so forth.
You know, you could ask the question, if they did a little thought experiment, how would the Biden administration think about Russia establishing military bases in Mexico?
Probably not thrilled.
They probably wouldn't say, well, that's Mexico's choice.
What are we going to do about it?
So a little bit of thinking and empathy might have gone a long way.
But we have heard almost nothing about it in your expertise, which I'm just amazed at day by day how the New York Times and other mainstream media twist all of this.
I recently asked an assistant of mine, please do a scan for the last two years of the editorial pages of the New York Times.
26 times The idea of unprovoked invasion has been raised by the New York Times in its editorials, in its opinion columns of the New York Times columnists like Tom Friedman and others, and in the invited op-eds.
And you just can't get a word in.
Otherwise, you can't tell that readership you were just describing in Manhattan, where I happen to live, what's really going on.
So this is the Frightening part.
And we're also told, Glenn, which is pretty damn weird, don't worry about nuclear escalation.
Don't be blackmailed by this.
My advice is worry and worry a lot.
And if you have been around these issues for a while, and I have for decades, and I wrote a book about the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy's successful quest to negotiate a Partial nuclear test ban treaty with Nikita Khrushchev?
You know, if you're not worried, you just don't get it, because you better be worried.
And I'm very worried about this administration not getting it.
You know, it was such a staple of Cold War culture, Cold War policy, that avoiding nuclear war was the single greatest priority as we were going around the world with these proxy conflicts against the Soviet Union.
We managed never to directly engage them militarily.
And even then, Misperception, miscommunication did bring the world close to nuclear annihilation at least on two occasions between the Soviet Union and the United States and yet it really does amaze me that we seem to have just kind of through I don't know inertia or lethargy or historical ignorance come to view the risk of nuclear war as basically a fiction as kind of assigning zero value to it or even this kind of macho attitude that we're not going to be deterred by
The country having nuclear weapons.
Talk a little bit about, you know, in the time that you've been working and all the things that I discussed in these kind of geopolitical framework, even from an economics perspective, the specter of nuclear war and how it used to be kind of important for people and policymakers in deciding what they would and wouldn't do.
You know, there was one moment when Biden was caught on tape saying, you know, we're on a path to Armageddon.
I this is I think it was the fall of twenty twenty twenty one.
If I remember right.
Twenty twenty two.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
Twenty twenty two.
Excuse me.
You know, he was excoriated by the press the next day.
Rather than anybody reflecting, oh my god, the President of the United States is saying this, he was excoriated.
How dare he say this?
You know, he let a tiny glimmer of the truth in.
And then, of course, the whole idea was shut that up, don't talk about that.
Well, anyone that knows some history, and by the way, if you want to know some history, the most wonderful book written about this by a great historian is a book called Gambling with Armageddon by a late, great historian, Martin Sherwin, who wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the whole Atomic Age, in fact, and the book is terrifying.
Because we came so close 60 years ago, actually 61 years ago now, to nuclear annihilation and almost every one of Kennedy's aides would have pushed us to that.
We fortunately had a president who
had the sense to avoid the ultimate disaster but almost none of his aides had that sense and what Sherwin recalls and what we've learned from Dan Ellsberg and from so many others is how close we've come and how easy it is to come close because there's so many stupid people in our government believe me this is something I can tell you absolutely people who don't think who are
Extraordinarily lacking in basic common sense, who believe that power is the only coin of the realm, who believe you really do have to be tough on whatever it is and nuclear war will see them down.
And all of this is extraordinarily reckless and we're really in it now.
And it's of course Not just Ukraine.
It's Nancy Pelosi flying to Taiwan.
It's us doing whatever we can to humiliate China.
It's having an absurd G7 meeting last week in Hiroshima, of all places, that the U.S., of course, bombed with the first nuclear atomic bomb.
Yeah.
spending the whole G7 in essence to attack China and Russia.
They think maybe they think it plays politics.
They think it's a game.
It's extraordinarily reckless and extraordinarily dangerous and extraordinarily predictable what's going on.
Yeah.
Because the real diplomats inside the U.S. have been warning about this for decades.
We're only finding some of it out by WikiLeaks and by disclosures such as Bill Burns, their CIA director, who was in 2008 the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
And he sent a memo that everybody should read.
To Condoleezza Rice. - I also need.
Yeah, he explained, my God, this NATO enlargement business is absolutely dangerous.
And of course, George Kennan, a decade earlier, and George Kennan was absolutely brilliant and understood already in the 50s how we could have gotten out of the Cold War.
But certainly in 1997, he wrote, an op-ed in the New York Times when they still ran such op-eds, that this whole NATO enlargement business was absolutely reckless.
And what's interesting, when Kennan was writing that in 1997, I hadn't actually realized it until I went back and saw a reference to an article in Foreign Affairs by Zvig Brzezinski that I didn't remember, writing in 1997, laying out almost the precise timetable for how we laying out almost the precise timetable for how we were going to incorporate Ukraine into NATO— Now, this is years before Putin's president.
This is when we're not having any war with Russia.
People tell me, oh, yeah, well, they have to be a NATO.
Look at Putin, you know, madman.
But this is well before and Brzezinski lays out Basically, to the year, the sequence of how it's going to be the first row of countries, which was Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, then it's going to be the next row, then Ukraine by 2005 to 2010, he writes, they're going to have their invitation.
It turned out to be 2008.
Our ambassador to NATO in 2008 was none other than Victoria Nuland.
If you want to know what deep state means she's been in every administration, she's been almost every night.
Except when Trump was elected.
That's the only way apparently to get her out of the government.
Except Trump.
Yeah.
So she was Cheney's advisor.
She was ambassador to NATO when we asked Ukraine to come in.
She was the point person on the U.S.
engagement in the violent overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, which started the war in Ukraine.
And she is now promoted for all of this, bringing us ever closer to And by the way, putting Ukraine in the classic place in a proxy war guaranteed to destroy that country, which is exactly what it's doing.
You know, the thing that struck me so much about that Bill Burns memo in 2008 when he was warning Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration about the insanity of this plan was he said, it isn't just Putin.
You go and talk to every single person of influence in Moscow, even Putin's liberal critics, and it's all for every last one of them, a huge red line to be mucking around in Ukraine for the last, in part because of the history of the 20th century.
That's what I wanted to ask you.
You gave this interview in February of 2023 with Isaac Chatner of The New Yorker, who has become this hero to the liberal establishment because of these adversarial interviews he purportedly does.
A lot of it is based on how transcripts get edited, how much he gets to say, how much the guest gets to say.
I've done a couple of those with him, so I know firsthand.
What a low-life approach to journalism.
Completely, completely.
I mean, mine, I felt, ended up being pretty fair, but I've seen him done incredible hatchet jobs with others, including yours, because one of the points you kept trying to make was that the premises of his questions embedded in them, they were almost like, when did you stop beating your wife questions, were so misguided because when did you stop beating your wife questions, were so misguided because he was distorting the history of the conflict, in part by thinking the war began either in 2022 or even in 2014 with Crimea, and you kept pointing it out, actually, when they just started the war, is 2013 with this change of government
actually just started the war is 2013 with this change of government that he was shocked you called a coup or even before with NATO expansion, even before it got to Ukraine.
So talk about those parts of the history that the New York Times, the New Yorker editors didn't allow you to have included in that article and why you think that history is so important to understanding how we're being propagandized about the conflict now.
Well, it's a little amazing to be the New Yorker of all places.
OK, maybe I shouldn't say of all places, but Remnick's New Yorker is absolutely neocon, beginning to end.
The New York Times is completely neocon.
I don't know if they would be, by the way.
I can't figure it out if it's just anti-Trump, pro-Biden, or they really believe the stuff.
that they say, but they're absolutely unwilling to listen or to learn a fact.
The thing that surprised me about Chotner was just how he knew nothing and kept making aggressive assertions.
And when you try to say something, it was just snark.
So it was a really weird, weird experience. - Boy's playing to that audience that loves it.
Like, you know, they assume all of his assumptions that he's getting from the New York Times.
That's the full extent of their worldview.
He kept trying to inject an alternative historical understanding, but it never made it into the article, which is why I'd love for you to offer it now about the importance of 2013 and that change of government, and even kind of going back to when NATO started expanding after the reunification of Germany eastward toward the Soviet, or toward Russia.
Well, you know, I posted a piece on Common Dreams, which people can take a look at to get a lot of the hyperlinks and a lot of the underlying data and evidence.
But this story really goes back 34 years.
It goes back to 1989, 1990.
The U.S.
and Germany were both very clear to Gorbachev, who was a godsend for the world, by the way, because he really was a man of peace and I was profoundly honored to Try to help him on the economic side, though the White House was having none of it at the time.
But in any event, Gorbachev believed in peace, and he unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet-side NATO.
And Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, repeated Time and again to Gorbachev and in many, many different forms and so did the NATO Secretary General and others.
We will not move NATO one inch eastward.
We won't do it.
Now, I spoke to a wonderful historian who is working on this right now who tells me that in the archives he's come across in 1992 Not only the plans for NATO expansion, but Ukraine already on the list for NATO expansion in 1992, when supposedly in the public there is no such thing as NATO expansion at all.
But remember 1992?
That was Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld.
In the Bush senior administration, I thought, what could be worse?
Well, we kept learning.
Things can get worse.
And in the Democratic Party, the love affair with the so-called liberal hegemony, I don't know what the liberal part is, but I know what the hegemony part is, that has been Newland's thing and, of course, her husband Robert Kagan's thing for decades.
This has been underway since the early 1990s.
Now, the Russians have been saying, and Gorbachev said, don't move eastward.
We want peace.
We want openness.
I was actually advisor to Gorbachev.
I was economic advisor to Yeltsin.
I was economic advisor to Leonid Kuchma, first president of independent Ukraine.
I've seen all of these people.
You know what they wanted?
They wanted normal life.
They wanted to stop the Cold War.
They did not want crazy things.
They wanted normalcy.
And we wouldn't give it what we said.
Normally, yeah, that's U.S.
hegemony.
That's U.S.
indispensable power.
That's U.S.
we do what we want, anywhere we want, when we want it.
And that has been the story all along.
And frankly, I couldn't imagine it at the time because I was watching with my own eyes as a young guy.
Suddenly, the world had a chance for peace.
And peace didn't mean US global hegemony.
Peace meant normal cooperation.
But we couldn't accept the deal of just being normal and cooperative.
We had to say, now we lead on everything.
And that's been the story since the beginning.
There are many steps to it.
Clinton was the first violator of the promises, and Clinton's so inconsistent on everything, but this is one of the things he was inconsistent on.
So, the first NATO expansion took place under Clinton, and that was Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic.
The next NATO expansion, seven countries by Bush Jr.
in 2004, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea.
So you had the Baltic states, you had Romania and Bulgaria, you're starting to, you know, right up against Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Now, Putin says in 2007, stop, already stop.
He says it in a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
We don't listen at all.
2008, Bush says NATO is going to enlarge to Ukraine.
The European leaders, by the way, were aghast.
And one of the European top leaders at the time called me, said, what is your president doing?
Of course, European leaders don't say any of this publicly, but they say privately, this is crazy.
This is so dangerous.
But of course, they were quiet.
Bush pushed this through in 2008.
Then there was a reprieve for Ukraine.
The reprieve was that the president, Viktor Yanukovych, said, look, we're in between two giants.
We don't want to be smashed in the middle.
We take neutrality.
But neutrality was a red flag for Victoria Nuland and her friends.
And so at the end of 2013, when demonstrations against the decision that Yanukovych had made to postpone signing an agreement with EU started protests, believe me, the US Covertly and overtly and every other way stirred that up massively.
But in January and February 2014, they supported a violent insurrection that overthrew Yanukovych.
And of course, notoriously, Nuland was caught on tape.
Something we don't talk about, but anyone go listen to it.
She picked the next leader.
She picked the new leader.
She's planning the government weeks before the overthrow, calling exactly who would be the Prime Minister, by the way.
It's amazing.
But the whole thing is amnesia.
Don't talk about any of this, though it's so obvious.
And I had a weird experience personally, which was that When the government was overthrown and Yanukovych fled and Yatsenuk was prime minister, just as Nuland said, I got a call.
Yatsenuk wants to meet you.
It's a deep economic crisis.
OK, you know, I actually respond to those things when a government says we're in a very deep financial crisis.
So I flew to Kiev and I What an NGO bragged to me about the role they played in the overthrow, and it was ugly.
It left me shaking.
It was, you know, the kind of thing you just want to wash that off.
Don't tell me this awful stuff.
You had no business being part of a violent insurrection.
But that's the role we played.
I went home.
I didn't go back.
I was disgusted by the whole thing.
But it was obvious then.
We were on a path towards war.
This didn't start with a quote unprovoked invasion February 24th 2000 uh 22 21 sorry uh no 22 excuse me uh this started in February 2014 and it started with the U.S.
participation in a coup.
Now one thing I can tell you Glenn you know I've been in international finance and working never with the US government, always with basically poor countries and trying to help them.
I've seen so much now of the U.S.
destabilization of other countries.
It's disgusting.
And it's just not covered.
And by the way, just to give you another journalistic weirdness, I was friendly with Aristide in Haiti.
I liked him.
I wanted to help him.
He said to me, Jeff, they're going to get me.
I thought, oh, come on.
No, they're not going to get you.
I'm going to help you.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
It's going to be fine.
No, no, they're going to get me.
And OK, I didn't get it.
Then, of course, Bush stopped all World Bank loans, IMF loans, Inter-American Development Bank loans.
They used the usual financial squeeze to break him.
But he remained there, and he remained popular.
So they eventually threw him out in a coup.
And they landed a plane with an unmarked tail, and they stuck him in the plane, and they flew him to Central Africa.
OK.
I knew a bit about what was going on, and I called the New York Times reporter.
I said, there's a coup in broad daylight.
Would you cover this?
And you know what I was told?
The editor is not interested in that.
A coup in broad daylight and the editors not interested in covering that.
That's actually how it went down.
And then I testified in Congress a few days later to a committee where everyone swore how much they loved Haiti.
And boy, it was so good that the Aristide was taken out of harm's way that the United States saved him.
Saved him by flying him out.
You know, you can say anything in this country right now.
I mean, our government can say anything in this country, that six people in a yacht or a rowboat blew up Nord Stream.
You say anything, and the New York Times sucks its thumb and says, yeah, that's what an unofficial senior official said, unnamed senior official in the United States government said, and that seems right.
And that's how we are right now.
No one's talking.
No one's thinking.
I want to ask you about that specific media part.
Before I do, let me just, on the substance of Ukraine, a lot of times people say, I don't understand what they're really trying to do is make some rhetorical point about something not making sense.
That's not the way in which I mean this.
I genuinely don't understand the following.
Neocons obviously were kind of catapulted into a position of power in Washington after 9-11.
All their dreams, invading Iraq and having regime change plans for the broader Middle East were all being empowered.
And with the disaster that they ushered in that everybody recognized, the foreign policy community kind of said, all right, we're done with these crazy people for a while.
The second term of the Bush administration kind of reigned them in.
Obviously, Obama was elected on a promise to reject neoconservatism.
And for a long time in Washington, it wasn't just people like you or like Noam Chomsky, but I mean like very sort of middle of the road, centrist, mainstream people like Bill Burns, like President Obama, like Donald Trump, whose view was like President Obama, like Donald Trump, whose view was Ukraine is not a vital interest That vital interest doctrine always being central to how we formulated our foreign policy, what we were not willing to go to war for.
That it's always going to be a vital interest to Russia, but not to Ukraine.
That was what Obama eloquently argued.
That was what Trump also argued in his own kind of Trumpian way.
Biden was part of that Obama administration that was clearly the position of the Biden administration, of the Obama administration.
Now here we are, to the extent that I could discern any interest that we might have had in provoking the Russians into that war, it was accomplished in the first week or two when we got the Europeans to disassociate themselves from Nord Stream and start buying our own natural gas.
That was mission accomplished.
And yet here we are a year and two months later, a year and three months later, there's clearly no attempt, none, on the part of the U.S.
government to try and negotiate a peace deal.
In fact, they block them when they emerge.
And we seem to be getting deeper and deeper and deeper involved into this war, which at the end of the day is about nothing more than who will rule certain provinces in eastern Ukraine or what will be their status.
What changed in Washington that has made bipartisan Washington, not just neocons, but the vast majority of the establishment wings of both party and the Biden administration so committed to this war with seemingly with no one in sight?
Yeah, Glenn, I think the part that can help on this is that the neocon part never went away, and it was core to the Obama administration.
It wasn't foreign to the Obama administration.
And let me just illustrate, nothing was really reined in.
Remember 2008, the last year of Bush Jr., was when the commitment of NATO made at the Bucharest NATO summit that NATO would enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia, by the way, was made.
So nothing was reined in at the end of the Bush administration.
People should look on a map, by the way, Georgia, and not Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia and the Caucasus.
What's Georgia doing there, for heaven's sake?
Well, if you look at the map, the plan is to surround Russia in the Black Sea.
Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia surrounds Russia in the Black Sea.
That's the idea.
So that was there consistently from the early 1990s.
Big Brzezinski explained it in 1997.
It continued to be U.S.
Brzezinski explained it in 1997.
It continued to be U.S. policy in 2008.
Then comes the Obama administration, but Obama supports lots of war, and this is not well understood.
But it's not well understood.
You had Hillary, of course, who, I don't know, I don't know if she ever saw a conflict she didn't want to get more deeply into.
But, for example, Syria.
It's never been explained to the American people.
Syria was not a civil war.
Syria was a U.S.
CIA-led regime change operation that went terribly wrong.
And we actually, in our mainstream press, say, Russia came into Syria.
How dare they do that?
We were in Syria in 2011 with CIA to overthrow Assad.
I happen to know, again because of my role in diplomatic circles, that in 2012, there was an agreement to end the fighting in Syria, but it was blocked by one party.
You know who that was?
That was the United States.
I was gonna guess.
Everyone else.
Everyone else agreed to a framework that was being put together by the highest diplomacy.
The US blocked it.
The mediator talked to me at one point.
Jeff, you cannot believe it.
It's one government.
It's the U.S.
which insists Assad must go the first day.
Everyone else wanted to do something pragmatic to stop the fighting.
The fighting ended up going on many years.
At the end of that year in 2011, there's NATO.
bombing and ending up driving to his death and creating another decade of real civil war and outside war, Libya, killing Muammar Gaddafi.
It was the Obama administration, Victoria Nuland, as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs in February 2014 that participates in the violent overthrow of Yanukovych.
Obama, he had some important good sense in 2014, said, "I don't want to get more deeply into it, but it was his administration, That played the role that triggered this thing.
And how much analysis have we had from the New York Times, and I may come back to my favorite newspaper over my lifetime, nothing, no word about any of this, how this really played out.
So the odd part is Trump It stops in this weird way.
I don't even know what those years meant exactly.
So weird.
But there were no new wars.
Biden comes in, and it's important to understand, you know, in 2014 when Newland is caught on the tape, What does she say?
How's this deal going to close?
She says, I got the VP waiting, and she's talking about Jake and the VP.
So the team, which is Biden, Sullivan, and Newland, they each had one rung lower on their jobs in 2014.
You had a vice president.
Jake Sullivan had the same job as national security advisor to Biden, but Biden was vice president, not president.
and Newland was assistant secretary, not undersecretary, but it's the same group.
So the underlying continuity is the main point.
And really something I've basically learned over time, because I didn't get it, these ideas and plans actually go back 30 years.
That's weird.
But, you know, when a historian tells you, oh, no, no, no, Ukraine's already on the list in 1992.
And you have in the wonderful memoirs of Bill Perry, written, I think, 2017, 2016, 2017, when he says, I thought about resigning from the Clinton administration because I really oppose the NATO enlargement.
That's all the stuff that, you know, we're just not brought into, except after the fact.
This is not democratic deliberation.
This is, you try to somehow parse these details and you get snippets of it or you happen to be in circles that someone explained something to you or you see something or you hear something, but you can't figure it out.
The new Hitler.
anyone is saying on the surface, because this stuff is not for the American people to understand.
They're just supposed to understand that in February 24th, 2022, there was an unprovoked war by a crazy megalomania. - The new Hitler. - The new Hitler. - That's the only thing we're supposed to understand. - So here's the, so this really does lead into the media component, and I just wanna ask you about that because I also wanna so this really does lead into the media component, and I just wanna ask you about that because I also wanna
But we played a video of you last night actually with Robert Wright where you were essentially expressing shock that the media has become such an arm of the U.S.
security state That they're even willing to say things that are laughable on its face, like trying to convince us that Russia blew up its own pipeline, just like they wanted to convince us that Russia drone bombed the Kremlin.
You know, everything's a false flag when Russia does it, but you can never suggest the U.S.
did anything as a false flag, or you immediately get relegated to the sector of being a crazy conspiracy theorist.
My main reason why I started writing about politics in 2005 was because I had perceived the corporate media was way too subservient and deferential to the narratives of the U.S.
security state when it came to the war on terror.
That was a big criticism of mine from the start.
It's gotten so much worse now.
In 2004, the New York Times came out with a pretty historically significant mea culpa saying, hey, we know we helped sell that war in Iraq and it was because we were too uncritical about what the security state was telling us and we're never going to make that mistake again.
They're in another universe now in terms of their willingness to write down whatever the CIA tells them to say.
Even when they know it's false and I want to understand why.
My hypothesis is that Trump really did change everything.
His election made a lot of people in elite media circles believe that we were facing this kind of singular threat, this new Hitler.
I think they Talked themselves into that and that anything and everything became justified in the name of stopping Trump and his movement because nothing is more dangerous.
And they saw correctly the CIA, the FBI, the U.S.
security state as allies in the war against Trump because they perceive Trump as very valuable.
That's where Rushgate come from.
And they, in that alliance, became so deferential, way more so than ever, that they're willing to say almost anything.
And yet here you have, you know, a very serious war by all accounts no matter where you fall on the side of it.
And I don't even think Iraq was as drowning in propaganda as the war in Ukraine is.
It's not just propaganda, it's just completely false narratives to the point where they say laughable things like that pipeline example.
I know these questions of why this institution get corrupted, why are they like this is always hard, you're talking about a lot of people, there's probably mixed motives.
But what is your view about why these media outlets, almost to the point where you can ask a lot of people inside of them who will admit that it's happened, become completely abdicating in terms of their supposed core mission of being adversarial to these agencies?
That's why I listened to you to try to understand this, because it's not a grown-up thing.
And I had the strange experience just after Nord Stream was blown up that I ran into a classmate and friend and someone I really like, a top journalist in the U.S.
Okay, a New York Times journalist, because I mentioned it.
I don't want to mention his name, but a friend.
And I said, hey, you know, I think the U.S.
did this.
And he said to me, of course the U.S.
did this.
Who else?
And I said, yeah, but your paper said this morning it was Russia.
He said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I said, come on.
This is serious stuff.
And he batted it off again.
And I said, you know, it's really serious.
And when you and I were at school together decades ago, we had the Pentagon Papers.
We had Watergate.
I lived on The New York Times every day, you know, loving it.
That's how I grew up.
And he said to me, that paper is so dead and gone.
I wish it's so depressing to hear that from one of the leading journalists, because this is this guy's very talented guy.
But the fact of the matter is, they would not cover this Nord Stream story until today.
And, you know, the joke of it was when Cy Hirsch made his piece and perfectly sensible, explained a lot.
And by the way, explained that this madcap thing of blowing up the pipeline was so stupid and so reckless that top intelligence people turned to Hirsch because they thought this is crazy what the White House is doing.
So even that is perfectly sensible.
And there's no other way anymore to get their their their their dissent out.
No one will print it.
The New York Times.
The New York Times would not even mention.
Cy Hearth's story.
And then, of course, it was, I don't know, months later that they had some absolutely absurd—it wasn't even a 12-hour news cycle—of a few people in a boat.
And a few people in a boat that couldn't even have an anchor when the water is 270 feet So the whole thing is so completely absurd, but they played that story.
But I think, you know, one of the things, Glenn, that impresses me about all of this is it doesn't really Fool many people.
It's not like this is believed.
The confidence in the media is rock-bottom.
It just gives something to avoid talking in some way.
It's not that they say, God, we really got them now.
They really believe this absurdity.
And today, I think it was today, you had Roddick Sikorsky, who tweeted just after Nord Stream was blown up, thank you, USA.
And he's walking through an airport and a reporter shouts out to him, hey, why did you tweet thank you USA, you know, with the picture of the pipeline?
And he smiles.
And they call again and he smiles because the truth is they don't need to discuss this.
This is just arrogance.
They're laughing at their ability to deceive the public.
They're laughing at the fact that they can simultaneously admit it and then continue to deny it.
You know, Ted Cruz was openly giggling with Victoria Nuland at a Senate hearing about how happy they were that this is now a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.
Biden and Nuland explicitly threatened that they were going to do this multiple times.
And I do think on some level, part of the power that they enjoy is their ability to sell the most preposterous stories because they don't even have to be bothered with trying any longer to answer to anybody because the media will never insist that they do.
Yeah, and it doesn't matter whether anyone believes it or not, so they're not even trying to sell clever stories, they're just selling stupid things, or smiling.
We don't have to answer anything, but how is it, and I need to ask you, in the White House newsroom, how come there isn't somebody there That's calling out real questions.
Is it just that they don't get called on or that to be in the pen or whatever it is, the pool, I should say, that you don't stay there if you actually want to find out something?
Yeah, I think a big part is, you know, one of the things that really struck me is during Russiagate, when I was questioning a lot of those original stories and a lot of the stories overall, I was getting lots of messages from journalists inside every single one of these major newspapers and major digital outlets saying thank you so much for what you're you're doing and it was so striking that they weren't doing it even though they had the platforms to do it and i think the reason is this kind of this media industry except for independent media
now is collapsing and And if you step out of line, if you're one of the people who ask an off-key note, all the people in that room who may someday be the people who have to evaluate whether you get the one open spot at a new network, and if Twitter one time calls you a Russian agent or makes fun of you or mocks you, it's an easy way to throw away Your resume, there is no more space within corporate journalism for that kind of individuality, for that kind of difficult personality.
Conformity is what fuels the advancement of careers, and I think that kind of herd mentality is a big part of it.
Let me just move on to COVID.
I could talk to you all night.
I'm going to force you to come back on my show, so we're going to have time to talk about other things, even though we run out of time now.
At the beginning of the pandemic, as we now know because of emails we've seen from Dr. Fauci, some of the world's leading epidemiologists and virologists were writing to him saying, Look, it's extremely unlikely this was naturally evolving.
This almost definitely came from a lab leak based on DNA analysis and all sorts of other claims.
And within three weeks, some of those very same people became part of the consensus signing the Lancet letter saying that only crazy conspiracy theorists think that this was a lab leak, something that three weeks ago they were telling him in private they thought they were almost certain of.
You have now become somebody, despite having been chosen at first to be this head of the Lancet Task Force on COVID, who has openly said, we don't know the answer, but it's clearly plausible that it might've come from a lab leak.
And you have even suggested it may not even come from a Chinese lab leak, but from a US lab leak.
Has your views on that question evolved over time?
And what is your rationale for thinking it may have come from an American facility?
Yeah, well I learned a lot in the process of being chairman of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
So when I was asked, I have a fair amount of experience in public health.
I helped to organize originally the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.
chaired a commission for WHO and had worked on epidemic diseases.
So I was very familiar with the community.
And I was friends with Fauci, by the way, going back to 2001.
I wrote him a memo why we needed a plan that eventually became PEPFAR, even with the number that I gave right at the beginning that we needed $3 billion a year plan.
And I went to brief him and Condi Rice and so forth in the first weeks of the Bush administration.
So, OK, I was very honored to take on the assignment of chair of the commission.
And I listened around and I thought, well, the scientists have said in an article in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that this was natural.
Basically, they said irrefutably so essentially.
And I thought that was plausible because that's what pandemics are.
They are zoonoses that that means they go from animals to humans.
And that's what SARS was and on and on.
So I actually hired the guy.
It was absolutely fascinating.
I didn't hire him, there was no money involved, but I asked Peter Daschig of EcoHealth Alliance, which is in the center of the... The villain of the COVID pandemic for a lot of people, yeah.
I said, Peter, why don't you be chair of our task force, not of the commission, but of the task force working on the origin Because you know a lot about it.
You know what's going on in China.
You know about bat viruses and so forth.
Okay, that's stepping into it, so I did.
I stepped into it, and we started.
And I started to get a bit of hate mail towards the end of 2020, which is not so unusual.
But, you know, Sachs, why did you put this guy in?
And, Republican congressman, this is disgraceful.
And I wrote back saying, look, I'm sorry.
Completely open mind, and I've given the assignment to them, find out the truth of what this is, and if it's from a lab, we're gonna, and if it's possible, we're gonna track that down, and believe me, he doesn't make the judgment, there are 28 commissioners, I'm in charge of this, and so forth.
Okay, so, you start seeing, because of the relentless work of The organization you started, The Intercept, and U.S.
Right to Know, we start getting strange things coming out.
But it took a long time just to get those first FOIAs coming out.
And things start dropping that are a little weird.
And then I got a wonderful briefing by a top scientist who explained to me Jeff, it's, you know, it's not what is being said.
Let me explain to you the research that was going on.
And I was like, oh my God.
You know, he explained gain-of-function research to me for the first time in two or three hours of pretty detailed technical work.
And he said, go read the NIH proposals.
So I went online afterwards and I read that aim one is to test these chimeric viruses in the following way.
And Oh shit, I gotta figure out what's going on.
So I went to Daschig the next day and I said, Peter, I need to see your full research proposal.
And his line to me was, no, my lawyers say I can't share that with you.
I said, are you kidding?
We're in a commission that is a transparent public commission.
No, no, no.
My lawyer said... The most significant pandemic in almost a century.
So I said you're off the task force.
Forget it.
We're not going to have that.
But all of that's a long way to say Things started to be peeled back in a most remarkable way.
I give huge, huge credit to The Intercept and to U.S. Right to Know and to a whistleblower who posted the decisive document, which is the DARPA diffuse research proposal that was posted by a whistleblower which is the DARPA diffuse research proposal that was posted by a whistleblower that is almost a cookbook how to make
Well, this became rather a fascinating, fascinating thing, because the more we knew, the more we could see that what those scientists had written was phony.
That's first of all.
Second, that Fauci had been lying.
That was absolutely clear.
And third, I have to correct you, Glenn, it wasn't three weeks, it was three days After the February 1 conference call where they said, I can't figure out how this could have come out of nature.
Right, right.
Three days later, they have the first draft of a paper that's called Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2, which is the one that says it's definitely natural.
And you know what?
And then anyone who thinks otherwise is a malicious disinformation agent and conspiracy theorist.
Right, and by the way, so the bottom line, this is a long story, it's absolutely fascinating, but the bottom line is the following.
First, there's a weird part of this virus called a furan cleavage site.
It's four amino acids which make the virus highly infectious and deadly.
Second, That was a target of known research.
Third, it was the target of the DARPA Diffuse Project.
Fourth, it was a major target of University of North Carolina in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's obvious there's something to explain here.
Maybe It's a weird coincidence.
Maybe, and I think more than likely, it's part of the research gone awry.
But not only did Fauci hide this, and also the public, as usual, didn't learn that already in the spring of 2020, the Department of Energy, because it's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, I'm getting a bad echo right now, Glenn.
Energy was one and another.
The FBI.
Had already found that there was a good chance that this was coming out of a lab.
Right.
And no one was telling us anything.
I'm getting a bad echo right now, Glenn.
Oh, we're going to try in and fix that right now.
Yeah, so they're going to work with that.
But I just want to say, go ahead.
Glenn, if I could just go.
Go ahead.
You finish your answer.
You finish first.
Just to give you the bottom line, to this day, No Democrat in Congress will touch this.
It's the weirdest thing.
The Republicans say we need to investigate.
I was just with Senator Rand Paul.
He's done a great job of saying we need to find out what this is.
He can't get Democrats on this because protecting Fauci or protecting Biden, I don't know what they think they're doing.
How the heck did the origin of SARS-CoV-2 become a partisan issue?
That is so weird, so strange, so unpleasant, and yet that's how our politics has basically Disintegrated.
It's bizarre.
Even totally, what used to be totally apolitical questions, like a scientific question about the origin of the most significant pandemic in a hundred years, whether we played a role with good intentions or otherwise in causing it to happen, is something that has just become completely polarized along left, right, or Democratic versus Republican lines.
And I just want to emphasize For me, the most amazing thing about all of this wasn't so much that there were key facts the government knew that we subsequently discovered.
And I do, I've obviously, I've become a big critic of the Intercept and I do think they deserve credit there.
My hypothesis is that they did that FOIA request with the expectation that it would debunk a lot of the claims about EcoHealth and Peter Daszak, and they got this material and it's the opposite.
And to their credit, they published what they got.
Good for them, but it was the most valuable contribution to understanding this.
It wasn't just that this information was kept hidden.
People were banned by big tech policy from questioning Fauci's narrative about the origins of the COVID pandemic until the Biden administration itself came out and said, We also are uncertain about this, and we're going to investigate.
And only then did Facebook and then Twitter and Google say, we're now going to permit a discussion of this.
It wasn't just that the government hid information.
They prohibited any questioning of it on our primary means of communication.
All right, let me ask you.
To conclude what I now officially consider to be part one of our interview and our discussion, but I do want to give you this chance to talk about this because it's something, you know, you and I had the chance to discuss.
I then went after our discussion and read a bunch of stuff and found where this is coming from and it is not obscure sites, but as I said, the New York Times, I think the headline of the profile about you that I quoted was something like,
The Dr. Shock Doctrine or something like that or, you know, the idea that you were this leading ideologue of neoliberal cruelties, that you took distressed economies and forced the majority of the population to suffer for the benefit of the elites of those societies and international capital, that you are the avatar of neoliberalism and cruel disaster capitalism and the Shock Doctrine.
It's something so embedded in so many narratives, we had an opportunity to talk about why you regard that as a misperception.
So I don't necessarily want to walk through the whole history just for the sake of time, but I do want to give you a chance, since I have trifled with this belief in the past, something I absorbed uncritically, to go ahead and address why you think that's an unfair assessment.
It's not just unfair, it's completely silly.
Completely silly.
I wanted to read something that I said in September 1989.
In the New Yorker interview.
Interview with New Yorker, I don't know if you saw that.
I did, yeah.
I said, look, I'm no particular fan of Milton Friedman's or Margaret Thatcher's or Ronald Reagan's version of the free market.
In the United States terms, I'd be identified as a liberal Democrat, and the country I admire the most is Sweden.
Okay, this is... I was a social Democrat from being... from a kid.
A social Democrat.
So, this whole idea of... Now.
I was trying, the main thing I was trying to do, and succeeded in doing with Poland, and completely failed with Russia, was to try to get some financial help to a country in crisis.
Because as we discussed, I had imbibed what I really regard as a wonderful and correct view, and I practiced it in my career successfully, a view of John Maynard Keynes in 1919 and the economic consequences of the peace, where he basically says, "Be nice to the country that's in distress, because otherwise you can really "Be nice to the country that's in distress, because otherwise you can
And of course Keynes wrote that book in protest of the Versailles Treaty and said the way that the Versailles Treaty is going to squeeze Germany is going to lead to the rise of horrors in the next generation unless we do something different.
Very prophetic, and I took it very deeply, and that's why even in my first outing as an economic advisor, my main pitch was cancel Bolivia's debts because it's in hyperinflation.
Stop squeezing this impoverished country.
That's how I came to be an advisor to Poland, because they looked, said, oh, can you help us with our debts?
And I said, absolutely, I can.
And I said to the White House, cancel Poland's debts.
And lo and behold, they said, yes, absolutely.
And I thought, God, I'm really so clever.
They follow just what I said.
And then on to Russia.
And And then on to Russia, and I said, OK, we see how it works.
Cancel Russia's debts.
Hell no.
Are you crazy?
And so I didn't understand.
I said, I gave good advice.
I showed, you know, you stabilize, you restore economic growth, you get But with Russia, nothing that I said was accepted.
It had nothing to do with shock this and private as I wasn't even part of that stuff.
I was trying to mobilize a debt standstill, which means you stop paying because you ran out of money.
and permanent relief and an emergency ruble stabilization fund and finance for, even I think in that New York Times article for healthcare, that's where I was spending my time on.
We gotta make sure the clinics are functioning.
So everything that was said afterwards is so weird, but one that pinned it on me was actually the Clinton administration, which did nothing.
And then Stroke Talbot, in his clever line, said, too much shock, no therapy.
And you know what?
God damn it!
He gave no therapy!
He was in the government!
I was having them do some therapy!
Help!
And they were doing absolutely nothing.
And by the way, I just printed out, in November 1991, This is before there's independent Russia.
I said, now the Cold War and the collapse of communism have left Russia as a prostrate, frightened and unstable, as was Germany after World War I and World War II.
Inside Russia, Western aid would have the galvanizing psychological and political effect that the Marshall Plan had for Western Europe.
Russia's psyche has been tormented by a thousand years of brutal invasions stretching from Genghis Khan to Napoleon and Hitler.
That was my job, was to try to help get some relief.
And this got weirdly conflated with all sorts of things, but the opposite of what I believed.
Completely the opposite.
And I quit early on, as I told you, in the end of 1993, because I was having no benefit from...
I could not get the United States to do anything.
Neither the Bush administration or the Clinton administration.
They were...
Because already the neocons were in full sway, but I had no idea.
Let me read you what I wrote in 2014 in BBC.
and wanted a weak cripple Russia to expand further.
Go ahead.
Yeah, let me read you what I wrote in 2014 in BBC.
NATO's continued desire expressed again just recently to add Ukraine to its membership, thereby putting NATO right up on the Russian border, must be regarded as profoundly unwise and provocative.
And then I said in 1914, 1989, 2014, we live in spread of NATO and by US bullying since 1991.
Come on, this has been my position all along.
You help a country in distress or you face consequences, but this country became nastier and nastier in its politics because Our domestic political system went completely plutocratic, and our foreign policy went completely hegemonic.
And this is a disaster for us.
This is where we are today.
We have a plutocracy at home, and we have a wannabe hegemonic rule abroad.
Of course, it's so anachronistic, the whole world other than A small part of the world, which is the European Union, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
Those are the only ones on our side.
All the rest of the world say, stop!
We don't want a hegemon.
We want normal cooperation.
But we've lost it in this country because the politics are so damn corrupt at home, all driven by money, including the military-industrial complex, which is a major lobby pushing for NATO enlargement, NATO weaponry, everything.
And then abroad, the Newland administration, foreign policy, which is expand everywhere and overthrow governments that don't like where you want to expand.
It is remarkable just how the continuity of these policies, while we keep hearing these elections are the most important in our lifetime, the parties are so radically different they can't agree on anything, and yet there is this remarkable continuity, and that's the first thing I observed when I started writing about the Bush and Cheney administration, and I was moved by President Obama's passionate vow to uproot it all, and then I watched him not only uproot none of it, but expand and enlarge virtually all of it, and that was my sort of coming-of-age lesson.
I really want to thank you.
My wife and I love a biography, a documentary of Gore Vidal that was filmed towards the end of his life.
And he's sitting in his villa in Italy.
on the night of Obama's election, and they announce on the screen Obama's won, and the cameras go up to Gore Vidal, aren't you excited?
And he completely, no, I'm not excited.
Why aren't you excited?
He says, because by the time you've gotten to be president, you've sold your soul so many times, it makes no difference. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, he was somebody who, you know, used to be enamored of Democratic Party politics, a friend of the Kennedys and the like, and then he finally saw enough, and he became a super interesting figure by the end of his life.
Again, thank you so much.
This was definitely as enlightening as I expected and knew it would be.
I'm very much looking forward to at least part two, and we'll see how much we get through the other questions I had and the topics I wanted to discuss.
But I really appreciate your time, and I hope to see you again shortly.
Great.
Phenomenal.
I'm going to hold you to part two because it's a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot from you.
So it's great.
Mutually.
Thank you so much.
Have a great evening.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
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