How Endless War Bankrupted the US While Inflicting Mass Suffering at Home. Plus: Macron Threatens Internet Shutdown & Update on US Govt’s Private Data Purchases | SYSTEM UPDATE #111
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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, is there any connection between the U.S.
posture of endless war on the one hand and the declining quality of life for Americans at home on the other?
Put another way, If the U.S.
government every year transfers hundreds of billions of dollars to the arms industry, to the CIA and the Pentagon in order to fuel and fight wars overseas, as the U.S.
is now doing in Ukraine and has been doing non-stop for the last 25 years, will that have any negative effect on the ability and willingness of the U.S.
government to provide more opportunities and better living conditions for its own citizens?
Until recently, those questions need not even be asked.
Its truth was glaringly obvious.
That Americans had to choose between guns and butter became such conventional wisdom that its original authorship is not even certain.
It's typically attributed to Secretary of State William Brian Jennings, who resigned as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State in 1915 in protest of Wilson's obvious desire to involve the U.S.
in the European war that became known as World War I, and in particular, in protest to the exploding cost of military spending, which he argued would destroy the American way of life at home.
Yet, somewhere along the way, it became controversial, almost taboo in establishment discourse, to recognize this connection.
And it seems deliberate.
Last week, a pro-war outlet that alternates between neoliberalism and its close cousin neoconservatism called the New Republic attacked Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the podcast host Jimmy Dore, and myself.
For arguing that one reason to see spending so much money on the proxy war in Ukraine, aside from the grave dangers of escalation between nuclear-armed powers, is because the massive amount of money the U.S.
is spending could find much better uses to improve the lives of American citizens, instead of trying to fight over who will rule certain provinces in eastern Ukraine.
According to that New Republic article, our attempt to connect massive war spending in Ukraine And elsewhere, with Americans' quality of life made us, altogether now, Kremlin propagandists.
What doesn't do that these days?
But the article and this attack reflects the growing refusal to acknowledge that massive, endless spending on the American war machine drowns the country in debt, which in turn limits the government's ability to attend to the needs of American citizens and to improve the conditions of their lives.
Just today, the New York Times A newspaper which has steadfastly supported Biden's proxy war spending in Ukraine.
Tens of billions of dollars going out the doors.
The New York Times cheered that paper today, published an editorial warning as the headline announced, quote, America is living on borrowed money.
As a result, said the paper of record, Americans must brace for what the billionaire owned paper called, quote, painful choices.
Namely sharp cuts and the benefits most important to them.
The paper wrote, quote, Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth, should be on the table.
Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.
The one issue not mentioned in this editorial about how the US government is drowning in debt and how we have to rein in spending?
Whether the U.S.
government might want to consider a break from endless warfare and from spending on the military more than the next 14 countries combined.
The idea that there is a connection between the wars cheered by the New York Times and its comrades in the liberal establishment and the quality of life of ordinary Americans, of the kind rarely seen by the paper's editors, is not only ignored but rendered taboo.
We'll examine this question further tonight.
Then, French President Emmanuel Macron is responding to unrest and protest in his country the way Western governments these days do.
By plotting to roll back basic freedoms and civil liberties, including internet freedom.
Yesterday, the French president warned that the country would shut down all social media in the event of similar protests of the kind that swept the country last week after a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed by police while driving without a license.
And today, French lawmakers authorized its domestic spying agencies to start using cell phone tracking data to track the population.
Specifically, reports Le Monde, quote, by remotely activating the camera, microphone, and GPS of their phones and other devices.
We'll examine these developments and the dynamic they raise.
And then finally, several weeks ago, we reported that the U.S.
intelligence community, the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and the rest are purchasing what it calls, quote, commercially available data en masse about Americans, information that is deeply invasive, enabling the collection of dossiers about our lives that are remarkably intimate and comprehensive.
Tonight there's an update to that story.
There's now a bipartisan bill pending that would ban the U.S.
security state from doing this.
We'll tell you all about that.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Warnings about how much debt the United States is actually in typically are issued whenever the establishment in Washington starts plotting to try and cut benefits that will affect the quality of life of American citizens.
A quality of life that is declining, not by all metrics, but by many.
And yet, typically, whenever those warnings are issued, whenever the preparations begin to tell Americans that they need to expect cuts to the few benefits that the government actually gives them, things that place them barely at sustenance level, including America's senior citizens, the argument is rolled out that while we're drowning in debt, somehow the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on foreign wars, including the ongoing and seemingly endless war in Ukraine, is never mentioned.
A classic in this genre came today from the New York Times editorial board, a newspaper that has cheered the war in Ukraine every step of the way, applauded while the Biden administration pours huge amounts of money into the arms industry and the CIA and the Pentagon to keep that war going.
And yet today issued an editorial, the headline of which, quote, America is living on borrowed money.
And here's a bit of what the newspaper said, speaking as always for the establishment of Washington, quote, borrowing is expensive.
A mounting share of federal revenue, money that could be used for the benefit of the American people, goes right back out the door in the form of interest payments to investors who purchase government bonds.
Now, let's just stop there for a second.
They are acknowledging the core premise, which is that all the money that the United States spends on servicing its debt or building up that debt could instead be used, in the words of the paper, for the benefit of the American people, but instead were paying interest rates on bondholders.
The paper goes on, quote, Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy, the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.
By 2029, the government is on pace to spend more each year on interest than on national defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
By 2033, interest payments will consume an amount equal to 3.6% of the nation's economic output.
Before the pandemic, a decade of very low interest rates meant that even as the federal debt swelled, interest payments remain relatively modest.
Measured as a share of the national economy, the federal debt was roughly twice as large at the beginning of 2020 as it was at the beginning of 1990, but the burden of interest payments was barely half as large.
The era of low interest rates has ended, however.
The cost of living on borrowed money is rising.
It is imperative for the nation's leaders to chart a new course.
So what is this new course now that we're saddled with unsustainable levels of debt?
Is it that we should stop maintaining military bases all over the world that let us rule the world by superior military force?
Is it that we should stop trying to change the governments of other countries and install governments that we like better?
Is it that we should stop Pouring hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars every year into the coffers of Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics and the CIA and the Pentagon in pursuit of these wars that we are constantly fighting, unlike any other country in the world.
So that we can instead enjoy what was once called the Peace Dividend in the 1990s, the thing we were promised when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union collapse that never actually came because immediately the security state, even in the 90s, found excuses to continue wars.
They found a war in Haiti, they found a war in the Balkans, and then 9-11 happened and the next 20 years was spent on waging more warfare than ever.
And finally, when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, the last major remnant of the War on Terror, six months later, not even, regardless of whose fault it is, the United States government, the security state, and the arms industry, which they serve, found a brand new war, the one in Ukraine, that has been a goldmine for The arms industry at the expense of the American people.
So when the New York Times says it's time to chart a new course, given the debt in which they're drowning, is that what they mean?
No, that is not what they mean.
They don't even mention.
Any of the items I just referenced.
Instead, they say, quote, both parties say they understand the need for larger changes.
Quote, we're going to do even more to reduce the deficit, President Biden declared in a speech from the Oval Office after Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, acknowledging that the legislation didn't amount to much, said after the vote that he intended to form a bipartisan commission, quote, so we can find the waste and we can make the real decisions to really take care of this debt.
The paper says, any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue, meaning increased taxes, and reduced spending, not least because any politically viable deal will require a combination of those options.
Both parties will have to compromise.
Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed and of imposing taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats must recognize the changes to Social Security and Medicare.
The major guarantors of a quality of life that's just minimally decent for people who work their entire lives and then become old and they're living longer and longer, the paper says we need changes to those programs because they are, quote, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth should be on the table.
Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.
That will require what the paper calls painful choices.
Not painful for the owners of the New York Times, nor its editors or reporters.
Painful for the vast majority of the American people who are living way below middle class standards, whose quality of life has been steadily declining.
The paper concludes, the failure to make those choices also has a price and the price tag is rapidly increasing.
Here's a paper that has been cheering A hundred billion dollars authorized and counting on a war in Eastern Europe.
That is in a country that President Obama has long said is not a vital interest to the United States, that long was viewed by Washington policymakers as being nowhere valuable enough to be worth risking a war with Russia, and that is exactly what we are now doing.
A year and a half into it, the United States is the primary sponsor of one side of this proxy war, and there's no mention of that at all, or any of the vast military spending.
In this manifesto, the New York Times issued today, warning people that the thing that keeps them eating and being able to have medical access in their old age needs to be cut because of how much debt the United States did.
Now, Jeffrey Sachs, who is somebody we interviewed about a month ago, who is most certainly one of the world's most influential economists, he has guided countries out of their debt crises, including Bolivia and Poland, and then attempted to do so in Russia.
And has become a vocal establishment critic after spending much of his life inside the establishment at Harvard and at the World Bank and other financial institutions.
Wrote an article in May of this year warning that there's no way to get out of this debt crisis unless we begin to cut spending on the U.S.
war machine.
This is what he wrote, quote, in the year 2000, the U.S.
government debt was $3.5 trillion, equal to 35% of the gross domestic product.
By 2022, the debt was $24 trillion, equal to 95% of the GDP.
The U.S.
debt is soaring, hence America's current debt crisis.
Yet, both Republicans and Democrats are missing the solution.
Not a solution, the solution.
quote, stopping America's wars of choice and slashing military outlays.
Suppose the government's debt had remained at a modest 35% of GDP as in 2000.
Today's debt would be $9 trillion as opposed to $24 trillion.
Why did the U.S. government incur the excess $15 trillion in debt?
The single biggest answer is the U.S. government's addiction to war and military spending.
According to the Watson Institute of Brown University, the cost of U.S.
wars from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2022 amounted to a whopping $8 trillion.
$8 trillion just on our foreign wars!
More than half of the extra $15 trillion in debt.
Now let's just think about those wars for a second that constitute the bulk of this increased debt.
We had a war in Afghanistan that lasted 20 years and killed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
And by the time the United States left, what had been accomplished?
Absolutely nothing.
The minute the United States left, the Taliban marched right back into power as though we were back in 2001 and as though nothing had happened.
I suppose Iraq is different in the sense it's no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein.
But to put it mildly, it's nowhere near the kind of Jeffersonian democracy we were promised, let alone one that would spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
In fact, the main effect, the two main effects of the invasion of Iraq was, number one, that it strengthened Iran by empowering the Shiites who were their allies inside Iraq, and number two, destabilized that region and gave rise to ISIS.
Even Tony Blair admits that it did that.
And then you have all the other bombing campaigns and changes of government in Yemen and Libya, where the change of government in Libya, the NATO war that President Obama promised would not be a regime change war, and yet clearly from the start was designed to get rid of Gaddafi, caused anarchy and slavery and ISIS and a huge migrant crisis in Europe as a result of our destruction of Libya from the air.
So it would be one thing if you had a mountain of benefits that you could point to from this extraordinary amount of war spending, trillions and trillions of dollars, $15 trillion in debt from the last 20 years of war.
There is no benefit.
There are none.
There's just costs.
There's just harms.
Just like there is from the war in Ukraine where the war faces, according to Joe Biden, The greatest danger of nuclear annihilation since at any point since 1962.
And what is the United States, the American people I mean, not the United States government and the establishment.
I mean the American people which is increasingly different.
What are the American people going to get?
If it's President Zelensky as opposed to some ethnic-speaking Russian leader and separatist who ends up ruling the Donbass or Crimea, what difference does that make in the lives of American citizens other than the fact they have to hear from the New York Times speaking on behalf of the establishment?
that they need to prepare to lose the few benefits that they have because the United States can no longer afford to provide it to them because instead U.S. leaders in both political parties constantly opt for war that does enrich their arms industry donors at the expense of everybody else.
Sachs goes on, quote, "The other $7 trillion, you have $15 trillion from foreign wars, The other $7 trillion, and there's excess $23 trillion in debt, arose equally from budget deficits caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
America's annual military spending is now around $900 billion, roughly 40% of the world's total.
The United States is roughly 5% of the world population.
of the world population are Americans.
And yet, if you take all the military spending in the world, 40% of that comes from one country, the United States.
And it's greater than the next 10 countries combined.
US military spending in 2022 was triple that of China.
A country that is not settled in the kind of debt the United States is.
According to Congressional Budget Office, the military outlays for 2024 to 2033 will be a staggering $10.3 trillion on current baseline.
A quarter or more of that could be avoided by ending America's wars of choice.
A quarter of that could be avoided by ending America's wars of choice.
Closing down many of America's 800 or so military bases around the world and negotiating new arms control agreements with China and Russia.
The United States has 800 military bases around the world, many of which are militarily encircling China.
Do you know how many military bases China has outside of China?
Depending on how you count?
Either one or two.
One and a half is how RFK Jr.
describes it.
So it's one or two.
That is the choice that the United States government and the establishment wings of both political parties have been making at the expense of all American citizens.
And yet when the New York Times goes to tell people, get ready to lose your Social Security and Medicare or have it severely cut, even though you're barely surviving on that right now, as you enter your golden years after spending your entire life working, they don't even mention this because this is what the establishment never wants people to understand.
It's that's where the money is really going.
Here is that Brown University study entitled The Cost of War that Professor Sachs referenced from 2021.
There you see it on the screen.
The title of the paper is Cost of War.
And this is what the relevant section reads.
Quote, through fiscal year 2022, the United States federal government has spent an obligated $8 trillion on the post 9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This figure includes direct congressional war appropriations, war-related increases to the Pentagon-based budget, veterans care and disability, increases in the Homeland Security budget, interest payments on direct war borrowing, foreign assistance spending, and estimated future obligations for veterans care.
Remember, this was before the war in Ukraine.
This total omits many other expenses such as the macroeconomic cost to the U.S.
economy, the opportunity cost for not investing war dollars in alternative sectors, future interest on war borrowing, and local government and private war cost.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing.
All of these wars are paid for by borrowing money.
The U.S.
doesn't have this money to fund these wars.
It goes into debt to fund them.
This borrowing has raised the U.S.
budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects such as raising consumer interest rates.
Unless the U.S.
immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments.
We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s.
Spending on the wars has involved opportunity costs for the U.S.
economy as well.
Although military spending does produce jobs, spending in other areas, such as healthcare, could produce more jobs.
Additionally, investment in non-military public infrastructure, such as roads and schools, has not grown at the same rate as investment in military infrastructure.
Brown University did update the study in June of 2023.
It released it.
And the headline here is, We Get What We Pay For, The Cycle of Military Spending, Industry Power, and Economic Dependence.
And I'm about to read this.
But as I do, I want you to think about what the framework here is.
If it were the case that the United States were facing all kinds of threats, threats directly to the security of American citizens, people wanting to invade our country, Attacking U.S.
interests abroad, that would be one thing.
Of course, every country would go to war in self-defense to ensure that citizens could live safely.
Absolutely nobody thought, or even bothered to argue, that wars in Syria to remove Bashar al-Assad, or Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi, or this Saudi destruction of Yemen, or this war over who rules eastern Ukraine, Has any remote connection to the safety of American citizens as they go about their lives.
These are completely discretionary wars.
Here's what Brown says in 2023.
Quote, the United States consistently allocates most of its federal discretionary budget to the military.
As a result, the military industry continues to gain disproportionately large amounts of power in the US economy and political sphere, which in turn ensures continued growth in the military budget.
Let's stop there for a minute.
And we played this speech before that Dwight Eisenhower, not exactly a pacifist, he was a five-star general in the U.S.
Army and widely credited for playing a major role in the victory of the Allied powers in World War II and then became president throughout the 1950s, a decade of prosperity and growth in the United States, had 15 minutes on network television when leaving office in 1961 to make way for the new president, John Kennedy, And he chose to devote several minutes of that speech to warning Americans about the anti-democratic menace posed by the military-industrial complex, as he called it.
This union of state and industry devoted to endless war, that need endless war in order to grow their power and their profit.
Now remember, this is before the war in Vietnam, the war that consumed the next 12-13 years, Obviously, before the War on Terror, before 9-11 happened, and even back then, in the 1950s, at the end of the 1950s, President Eisenhower was warning, not just about the economic costs from the military-industrial conflicts, but more so about their growing influence and power in what he called every sector.
They dominate Washington, they dominate the media, they dominate academia, and as a result, the United States is becoming a militarized country more and more, he said.
It's a cycle.
The more the arms industry grows, the more powerful they become.
The more powerful they become, the more budget is devoted to the military.
The more budget is devoted to the military, the more powerful the arms industry becomes, and so on and so forth.
And that is exactly what happened.
And that is why we're at the point where no one even wants to talk about this component of our spending because this industry is so powerful.
And our wars are such an important part of our self-identity.
The New York Times has continuously congratulated itself and the West and the United States and Joe Biden for this noble war in Ukraine while at the same time telling Americans they need to prepare for cuts to their most basic benefits.
The study goes on, quote, this is the effect, the growth of military sector in the United States has the effect of squeezing out the resources and power of other sectors and weakening the United States' ability to perform core functions such as healthcare, infrastructure, education, and emergency preparedness.
All you have to do is travel around the United States and then travel around the rest of the world.
And C, the infrastructure collapsing in the United States.
Our airports are an embarrassment.
Our roads are an embarrassment because it's all collapsing because it's being neglected in favor of endless wars all over the world.
The Chinese produced a two minute social media video when the U.S.
left Afghanistan, mocking the U.S.
for spending $2 trillion in Afghanistan.
And it showed this super high technology, high speed rail the Chinese had built during the time we were occupying Afghanistan for less than half the cost.
The Chinese don't spend their money on occupations and invasions and bombing campaigns and regime change operations, and as a result, have that money to spend on improving the lives of their own people, which is why China has seen such economic growth and transformation over the last several decades.
The study goes on, quote, for fiscal year 2022, more than half the discretionary budget went to national security spending.
Of the money allocated to the Department of Defense, about half went to military contractors.
About 30% of that went to the big five alone.
Five companies got the vast bulk of our discretionary spending.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
Exactly the companies that are now profiting from the war in Ukraine.
A lot of them are just getting rid of their old weapon stocks, selling it to the United States, which gives it to Ukraine.
As a result, the United States is depleting its own stockpiles and has to buy more from these companies, which means they get richer.
And as they get richer, they get more powerful in Washington.
Their lobbyists are more numerous.
They can donate more money to PACs.
As they do all that, it becomes even harder and harder to resist their agenda.
And we're now at the point when we talk about debt.
It's considered virtually taboo to mention that the reason for it is because of roundless wars, including the war in Ukraine.
And if the New York Times editorial that I showed you from today is not enough to demonstrate that, let me show you this article from this neoconservative slash neoliberal outlet called the New Republic.
And it's always had neocons like Jonathan Chait, who are part of the Democratic Party, who cheered the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria and Yemen.
And the New Republic specializes in smearing anybody trying to assassinate the character of anybody who questions U.S.
war policy.
Back in 2002, they constantly ran articles accusing anybody who opposed the war in Iraq of being a pro-Saddam apologist.
David Keyes, people who opposed the proxy war, the CIA covert war in Syria of being pro-Assad.
People who opposed the war in Libya.
I remember Jonathan Shade actually wrote an article that included me when I opposed the regime change war in Libya, accusing us of being pro-Qaddafi.
It's the standard tactic used over and over.
David Frum was one of the people who perfected it.
He wrote an article in 2002 in the New Republic called The Unpatriotic Conservatives about the conservatives who opposed the war In Iraq, people like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, who were incredibly prescient about the things they predicted would happen.
And they got labeled unpatriotic.
That's exactly what war propaganda does.
So here you have an article in the New Republic from about 10 days ago.
I hadn't mentioned it until now.
It's by Alaric Diamant.
And we researched him.
He seems to be just somebody who's written a couple of articles for the New Republic.
He's very passionate about the war in Ukraine.
And the headline is, The Con Artist Who Blamed Ukraine Aid for America's Social Problems.
So apparently, if you point out what that Brown study and what Professor Sachs just, in detail, documented was true, namely, that one of the costs of the war in Ukraine, the proxy war in Ukraine, is that the United States spends enormous amounts of money that it could instead spend to improve the lives of American citizens, it makes you a con artist, if you try and draw this connection.
And here you see in the sub-headlines, we're not just con artists, but we're Putin apologists.
This is what the sub-headline says.
RFK Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S.
support for Ukraine.
And the argument I want you to focus on is the argument I just laid out for you.
Which is that even if you love the war in Ukraine, even if you think it's incredibly noble, even if you want to make sure for some reason it's so important to you to consolidate the rule of Vladimir Zelensky over all of Ukraine and deny the right of separatists who want autonomy from Kiev the right to have their own independent province like Kosovo got, if for some reason that's really important to you,
It's important at least to acknowledge the cost, which is that we're spending enormous amounts to empower President Zelensky and ensure that the Donbass is subject to rule by Kiev instead of Spending that money on improving the lives of American citizens, that is absolutely a choice that you cannot deny.
And because we point out that there's a choice there, and ask the question, how do Americans benefit from this endless proxy war in Ukraine, that makes us Putin apologists and con artists.
Because apparently this connection, according to the New Republican people like them, Is a false one.
It's an illusory one.
Apparently we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the war in Ukraine, and it's supposed to have no effect on the lives of American citizens, even while the New York Times tells you to get ready for your parents, Social Security, Medicare, or for years when you get there, to be eliminated.
A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino's, quote, This is America.
A caption reads, quote, while American citizens live on the street and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia.
That's true, right?
That is factually true.
There's a larger number of Americans than ever living on the street addicted to drugs, especially opioids, which numb pain, while all mental health indices in the West show that mental health pathologies are increasing, addiction, suicide, depression, anxiety disorders.
Huge numbers of people, we're going to do our show on this very soon, throughout the West and the United States are on antidepressant medication.
Something has gone clearly wrong with the American way of life.
You just have to look at American cities and streets and infrastructure to see it.
And we are at the same time choosing instead of fixing that problem to fund a proxy war with Russia and Ukraine.
That is a true statement.
The article says, quote, while a graph at the bottom mentions that the U.S.
has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
This is supposed to be an example of the kind of thing that you're supposed to hate and think is Kremlin propaganda.
The video on TikTok is but one of the countless posts across social media that convey the same underlying message.
By helping Ukraine defend itself from bloody subjugation by Russia, the U.S.
is depriving its own citizens of critical aid.
Of course that's true.
That's true by definition.
The pernicious narrative.
He doesn't say it's false.
It's pernicious.
The pernicious narrative has spread in part thanks to fringe yet popular media and political figures.
Can I just stop there and ask about this phrase?
We are fringe yet popular media and political figures.
How is it that if we are popular and sufficiently influential to warrant an article, an angry article, are we at the same time fringe?
These things are contradictory, but this reflects the liberal mindset that is subtle and yet deeply authoritarian that's worth taking note of, which is, if you're not somebody that Wolf Blitzer or Joe Scarborough thinks should be heard from because they don't invite you on their shows that nobody watches, if instead you confine yourself to much larger audiences in independent media on podcasts that are watched by far more people than watch those programs,
It means you're fringe, that you have no credibility.
The only way in the liberal mind to have credibility is if you are an employee of a major corporate media outlet.
And if you don't, you're somehow fringe and lacking credibility because you don't have the imprimatur of massive corporations.
That's how they think.
That's the authoritarian mindset.
That if you don't get the approval of corporate authorities to say what you want to say, if instead you reach a large audience by being independent, you are a fringe figure even though you're popular.
So we're fringe and yet popular and we have been, according to him, quote, we have a history of littering the discord with Kremlin-esque talking points and are now weaponizing and monetizing the perception that the U.S.
has been too generous to Ukraine and too stingy to its own people.
Even if you don't think that's true, the idea that massive military spending on wars and The military comes at the expense of the lives of ordinary citizens has been foundational to American politics for a century.
I talked in the beginning about William Brian Jennings who resigned as Woodrow Wilson Secretary of State in protest of exactly that point.
That by spending a massive amount of money on new weapon systems that were incredibly expensive because the Pentagon has no accountability, they have failed every audit to which they're subjected, and trying to bring the U.S.
into World War I, the lives of American people will suffer.
And that's exactly what happened.
This has been basic to liberal politics forever, and yet now it's depicted as Kremlin propaganda to point that out.
Among them, these popular but fringe media figures spreading Kremlin-esque propaganda is Glenn Greenwald, Who's Substack has more than 300,000 subscribers.
By the way, I haven't been on Substack for about nine months, so there's not very good fact-checking here.
Andrew's online talk show, System Update, draws hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions.
In December, on Tucker Carlson's since-canceled Fox show, Greenwald said, quote, I've been asking since February, in what conceivable way will the lives of American citizens be materially improved?
How will you or your family's lives be protected or fostered by sending tens of billions of dollars, now in excess of $100 billion, for the war in Ukraine?
That is my question.
This article does not answer that question.
It only says that you are a Russian propagandist for asking it.
The article goes on, and then there's Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer, running a longshot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination.
In his campaign announcement speech, Kennedy contrasted the, quote, $113 billion committed to Ukraine with the, quote, 57% of Americans who can't put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency.
One quarter of Americans who go to bed hungry and homeless veterans.
Again, these are true statistics this article does not contest.
Quote, but are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America's downtrodden?
Or are they bad faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator?
The evidence is unfavorable to them.
Oh, that is so upsetting.
The evidence is unfavorable to our motives.
We're not really opposed to endless war and advocating for a better way of life for Americans, even though we've all been arguing for and advocating this for decades.
No.
Our real goal is to defend a psychopathic dictator in Vladimir Putin.
What is the basis for that?
Quote, Jimmy Dore regularly parrots Russian canards like the claim that Ukraine's 2014 Revolution of Dignity, that's what he calls that regime change coup that Victoria Nuland led, the Revolution of Dignity, Jimmy Dore claims it was a U.S.-backed coup, a flat-out lie that the Kremlin lobbed as a false accusation up to the revolution and that has since become a pro-Russian propaganda talking point to discredit Ukraine's government.
We all heard the video of Victoria Nuland picking the Ukrainian leader that was removed with U.S.
support before his term ended democratically under the Constitution of Ukraine because the United States wanted him gone.
Greenwald in a video last month said, quote, We're not in Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people.
The real reason we're in Ukraine is to sacrifice Ukraine, to destroy Ukraine, in order to bleed Russia.
Exactly.
It's a bizarre article.
It just keeps repeating the points we're making in, I think, a pretty honest way.
I think he's picking very persuasive quotes.
Doesn't bother to refute them because it cannot be refuted.
These things are undeniably true.
These claims are undeniably true.
It just calls us a Kremlin agent over and over.
Quote, George Greenwald's and Kennedy's willingness to parrot Kremlin disinformation designed to justify an unprovoked invasion exposes the disingenuousness of their economic populism.
I've never defended the Russian invasion.
In fact, I've always said the Russian invasion was unjustified.
RFK says the same thing.
In fact, I got yelled at on my show once by Norman Finkelstein for not defending the Russian invasion and for saying I thought the Russian invasion was wrong even though it was provoked.
The question that I want this article to answer, or anyone to answer, is how do the lives of American citizens get improved by fighting this proxy war in Ukraine?
This is a question to which you will never find an answer, not here, not anywhere.
Quote, they're projecting Russia's imperial aims onto the West by characterizing the invasion as a US, quote, proxy war, and portraying Ukrainians as mindless puppets of the West.
No, I think Ukraine actually does want to fight Russia.
I don't blame the Ukrainians for wanting to fight Russia.
I don't have any objection to the Ukrainians wanting to fight Russia.
My objection is with my government for pouring huge amounts of money into a war, the intention of which is to bleed Russia at Ukraine's expense, and in the process depriving American people of the resources that are rightly their own.
Now, the idea that only Russian propagandists call this war what it is, which is a proxy war, And it's preposterous for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that it is a classic proxy war.
The Ukrainians are completely dependent on their Western sponsors and their American sponsors.
This war would not be able to go on if we weren't funding their weapons acquisitions and the financing of this war.
That is a classic proxy war.
We're on one side with the West, Russia's on the other, and Ukraine is in the middle.
But even U.S.
national security officials Such as President Obama's former Pentagon Chief and CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that this is a classic proxy war because there's no way to deny that.
Listen to what he said.
And so, you know, I think we are engaged in a conflict here.
It's a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not, that effectively is what's going on.
So is he a Russian propagandist for pointing out the truth?
These people want you to lie or you get stand accused of being a Russian apologist.
And I just want to make clear that this is, again, the tactic in every war.
Go back and look what the New Republic was saying about opponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
It was exactly the same kind of rhetoric.
This is what neocons do in every case.
Now, let's go back to this article, which unleashes all of the standard tactics.
And I'll pick up where I left off.
Quote, a look at what Russia is actually doing to Ukraine exposes the American charlatan's moral hollowness.
Putin's armies have invaded a sovereign country, enthusiastically committed atrocities worthy of the Axis powers of World War II, destroying civilian infrastructure like apartment buildings and dams, committing genocidal massacre, kidnapping children, and castrating Ukrainian prisoners of war to render them infertile.
That's what happens in war.
War is really terrible.
All those things are what the United States and its Western allies did in all the wars it fought, too.
That's why we shouldn't be funding wars.
We should be trying to stop them diplomatically.
It has nothing to do with my argument.
Quote, it's all to fulfill the fantasies of a revanchist dictator who, contrary to excuses one hears about NATO expansion, has telegraphed his intentions for years, denying Ukrainian statehood, comparing himself to Peter the Great, and lamenting the 1991 collapse.
Of the Soviet Union, as quote, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, and the end of quote, historical Russia.
In this context, attempts to paint the West and Ukraine as the aggressors in the war, and then undermine support for aid to Ukraine through phony economic arguments are downright despicable.
But it's also disingenuous, or betrays a misunderstanding of how the government actually works, to suggest that money spent in one place necessarily could have been spent anywhere else.
That is how money works.
If you have a billion dollars to spend and you choose to spend it on buying tanks and missiles for Ukraine to fight Russia instead of spending it to build American roads or fund American social programs, it means you no longer have that money to spend on those domestic priorities.
That's why so much of our debt is due to these wars of choice.
He says, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates we sent $76.8 billion in military financial aid and humanitarian aid to Ukraine between January 24th, 2022 and February 24th, 2023.
$46.6 billion of that was military aid, as the aforementioned TikTok video got that part right, at least.
It got every part right.
You notice none of these claims are being disputed.
Quote, yes, that's a huge sum of money.
Yes, indeed, it's a huge sum of money.
That could go a long way to addressing some of the nation's most pressing social problems.
Exactly, it could.
Unfortunately, the money's not here to do that because the money's in the coffers of President Zelensky and his minions instead in the country that has long been described as the most corrupt in all of Europe.
That is exactly the point.
It affirms our argument and doesn't refute it.
Instead, it tries to make it seem as though it's improper or immoral even to Bring it up, to mention it, to point out that there's a vital, significant cost to the American way of life from fighting these endless wars overseas.
It's designed to render taboo this connection so Americans don't know about it by accusing anyone who raises it of being a Kremlin propagandist.
Now, this connection, again, has been so foundational to American political discourse that it used to never even have to be debated.
Here is George Carlin, who was a comedian, a very famous comedian, but also a liberal political activist.
He is beloved by the left.
Ask any leftist what they think of George Carlin, the ones who know him, and they will heap praise on him, and deservedly so.
If you haven't ever taken the time to go watch George Carlin shows that are political in nature, especially in the last 15 to 20 years of his life, I really encourage you to go do so.
He's brilliant.
And he was a leftist in the best sense of the word.
Freed from dogma and ideology, just drawing these connections about who benefits from policies and who pays the price for them.
And here's just one of countless examples of Carlin in 1992 making the argument that the New Republic now says makes you a Kremlin propagandist to point out, namely, that the people who benefit from endless wars do so at the expense of everybody else.
Big holes in other people's countries.
I hate to be repetitious, but God, we are a warlike lot, you know?
We can't stand not to be fucking with somebody.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
Just couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over so we could go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go play with our toys in the sand.
And when we're not invading some sovereign nation, or setting it on fire from the air, which is more fun, then we're usually declaring war on something here at home.
Did you ever notice that?
We love to do that, don't we?
We love to declare war on things here in America.
Anything we don't like about ourselves, we have to declare war on it.
We don't do anything about it, we just declare war on it.
We got a war.
It's the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving a problem.
It's called declaring a war.
We got a war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on litter, the war on cancer, the war on drugs.
But you ever notice there's no war on homelessness, is there?
Nah.
No war on homelessness.
You know why?
There's no money in that problem.
There's no money in that problem.
Nobody stands...
It's true.
Nobody stands to get rich off of that problem.
You can find a solution to homelessness with a corporate swine and the politicians could steal a couple of million dollars each.
You see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty goddamn quick.
I'll guarantee you that.
I will guarantee you that.
And it's so basic.
If you deny that, if you deny the choices that get made by American elites The ones that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.
You know nothing about politics.
Nothing!
You don't know the first thing about how Washington works.
One of the most important moments in American history that took cognizance of this fact was a genuinely remarkable speech, probably my favorite one he ever gave, by Martin Luther King on April 4th, 1967.
It happened to be exactly one year to the day before he was murdered.
He gave a speech in the Riverside Church in Harlem.
And the title of the speech was Beyond Vietnam, a time to break silence.
And the silence he was talking about was his own.
He had come to this speech and basically in order to apologize for what he regarded as his failure over the course of the 1960s to do much to oppose the war in Vietnam.
And he explains that his rationale for that was he wanted to focus on racial and economic justice here at home and he wanted to bring together a coalition in order to do that because he knew he was speaking for a minority group and minority groups need majoritarian approval which they win through persuasion.
Or other means, whatever tactics, but you do need to convince the public of the justness of your cause.
And he was concerned that if he took a position on the war in Vietnam that would alienate potential supporters for his other causes, namely racial and economic justice at home.
And then he came to realize that that was erroneous, that rationale, because you can't separate those Two issues.
You cannot make progress domestically, he concluded, without first defying and subverting and destroying the American war machine.
Precisely because if the United States is a country on an endless war footing, whose priorities are not the lives of the people at home, their citizens who they're supposed to be serving, but instead fighting foreign wars abroad, Which, as George Carlin said, is something you do because there's a lot of money in that.
For a lot of elites, you will never make domestic progress.
And he went in the speech to apologize for his failure to oppose the Vietnam War by realizing that these two issues, American imperialism on the one hand and the lives of American people on the other, can never be extricated.
American imperialism dictates the lives of Americans.
Americans at home.
It degrades it in so many ways.
And he gave this speech opposing the Vietnam War.
It was the first time after he did this that the liberal establishment, the New York Times, the Washington Post, started attacking Martin Luther King.
They basically published editorials, which I've written about before, that you can look up, that essentially said, right after this speech, look, you stick to your little racial justice issues.
As long as you do that, we're behind you.
This speech was very unfortunate, they said, because you defamed the United States and the people who are fighting this war, and in doing so, you jeopardized your own cause.
They basically warned him, stay away from foreign policy and American imperialism and the war machine, if you know it's good for you.
According to R.K.
Jr., his uncle's refusal to do that is what got him killed.
He also believes that his father's assassination came at least after a lot of anger toward RFK for opposing the war in Vietnam, and exactly a year to the day that Martin Luther King gave his most vigorous anti-war speech, he was murdered.
But I want to show you what he said about this connection, because this is now what is being rendered taboo in liberal discourse when it comes to American endless wars and the war in Ukraine.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departure from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path.
At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud.
Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King?
Why are you joining the voices of dissent?
Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say.
Aren't you hurting the cause of your own people, they ask?
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened.
For such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest they do not know the world in which they live.
Then came, as he went through with his history, then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program, this domestic program, broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.
And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as an adventure like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
This is what the New Republic calls conman populism.
The idea that if we continue to spend money on wars of choice, the way we've been doing for 25 years, remember the Obama administration bombed eight different countries.
We changed the governments of others, we invaded others, we occupied others.
And even with the war on terror basically over, with the withdrawal of Vietnam, we now have this other brand new war that just coincidentally provides the CIA and the Pentagon and the arms industry with everything that they need and want to profit at the expense of everybody else.
We're now being told we cannot notice or mention that one of the reasons Americans have such a declining quality of life is because we choose instead to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on war.
And I guess you can decide whether you're a person Who wants to be cowed into silence over that fact because they will call you a crime on that propaganda, so whether you laugh at that and don't care...
Because as Martin Luther King said, there is no way to improve Americans' lives unless you confront and face and ultimately uproot and destroy the American addiction for endless war.
And right now that addiction is finding expression in this utterly discretionary war in Ukraine that has no one in sight, either in terms of our military or our economic commitment.
Earlier this month, or rather at the end of last month, the nation of France was engulfed by almost two weeks of very tumultuous protest in multiple cities around the country where the...
largely Muslim population, the poorer population in France, rose up in outrage because a 17-year-old French citizen, a boy of 17 years old who was of Algerian descent, was killed by two police officers, shot in the head by one, after he was stopped unarmed while driving a car without a license.
And the poor people and the Muslim community and the immigrant community in France viewed this as expressive or representative of a disregard for the lives of the immigrant population in France and of poor people in France and they protested in a way that made the George Floyd protests look pretty peaceful and pretty timid.
And for a while, Macron and his senior officials in that government seemed to, if not sympathize with the protesters, at least they were willing to condemn the shooting.
If you look at the videos of it, they're online, not even debatable in terms of whether they were an unjust use of force.
They absolutely were.
Macron said so.
His government said so.
The police officer has been charged with murder.
And yet these protests continue, and they're obviously a byproduct, as protests usually are, not just of this particular incident, but of long-standing frustrations with people's lives and the way they're being treated by the establishment.
So these protests have now largely subsided, the violence has been put under control by the deployment of police, and yet The French government seems eager now to exploit the anger and the fears over these protest movements to engage in some genuinely extremist and authoritarian behavior that I think is an important warning sign
For us in the United States and the West more broadly about how Western governments are so adept at exploiting any kind of unrest or threats or villains or fears to destroy our basic liberties.
You may dislike those protests in France the way you disliked the George Floyd protests or you might have thought they were justified expressions against injustice but either way What the French government is now doing in the name of stopping these protests in the future is, I think, genuinely alarming.
Let's look first of all at The Guardian from July 5th this week, which was Wednesday.
It says, the title is, Macron accused of authoritarianism after threat to cut off social media.
The French president insists that Macron's aides insist the French president is not advocating general blackout as ministers say rioters are using platforms to organize violence.
So they immediately blamed social media and Macron warned that in the event of future protests they might just entirely shut down media in the entire country.
This is what the article says, quote, the president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organizing and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week.
Quote, we need to think about how young people use social networks in the family, at the school, the interdictions there should be.
And when things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them or cut them off.
Macron told a meeting of more than 250 mayors whose municipalities were hit by the violence on Tuesday.
A quote, above all, we shouldn't do this in the heat of the moment and I'm pleased we didn't have to but I think it's a real debate that we need to have in the cold light of day, Macron told the mayors in a video obtained by BFM television.
He's saying we have to seriously consider shutting down social media or severely restricting it in the event protest movements in the future happen like this.
Imagine what Joe Biden might have done with this power when the so-called insurrection, the three-hour riot at the Capitol on January 6th took place.
They immediately blamed social media for that.
Remember AOC and Ro Khanna and other Democrats succeeded In pressuring Google and Apple to remove Parler, which became the number one social media app after President Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook, got them kicked out of that store and then got Amazon, pressuring Amazon to remove them from their web services and Parler was crippled and never recovered.
That's one social media site.
Think about the power to just shut down social media every time you decree that there's unrest or protest in the country and blame social media for it the way Social media was blamed for January 6.
Quote, critics said considering such measures would put France alongside authoritarian countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Varon said the government had made a quote, firm request to social media platforms to take down material encouraging violence as quickly as possible and remove the anonymity of those possibly breaking the law.
Quote, a young person should know he cannot sit behind his screen and write, organize, or do whatever he wants.
A young person should not think he can sit behind his screen and write, organize, or do whatever he wants.
Anonymity in terms of offenses doesn't exist.
You have to understand this can have consequences, and the consequences can lead to punishment, Veron said.
Now, it seems like some people are somewhat sympathetic to the French government in this case, so I'm going to ask you instead to imagine that happening in the United States.
Not with the protest of people you are opposed to, but of people that you sympathize with.
That is what happened in the United States in the wake of January 6th.
They did get very extreme about social media.
They banned President Trump.
They destroyed Parler.
And that was when a much more rigid system of censorship has been implemented.
Now remember, the EU is way down that path.
At the start of the Russian invasion, the EU Enacted a law making it illegal for social media platforms to allow Russian state media like RT or Sputnik to be heard.
So if you're an adult in France or Germany or Italy and you want to hear what the Russian government is saying, you can't really easily access those social media, those media outlets because they've been made illegal.
Rumble is not available in the entire country of France.
This show is not available in the entire country of France.
Unless people use VPNs, but by law it's not because the French government ordered Rumble, even though it doesn't operate in France, to remove RT from Rumble.
And when Rumble refused, it instead said, we'd rather not be available in France than obey your censorship orders.
We'll sue you in court over this, but we're not going to comply and Rumble is not available in France.
Brazil has banned multiple social media outlets at various times for failure to obey its censorship orders.
So the point is not, do you like these protests?
Do you sympathize with the protesters?
Do you think they had a just cause?
Did the protests get out of hand?
That is what they want you to focus on so that you acquiesce to their authoritarianism and their extremism when it comes to demanding powers to control the flow of information.
The question is, do you think governments should be able to shut down social media whenever, on their own accord, they decree that doing so is necessary to preserve social stability?
Today, according to Le Monde, it's not just the power to shut down social media that the French government is claiming, but also allowing people's cell phones to be used against their will as spies on them that feed their data directly to French spying agencies.
We're talking about French citizens.
Quote, France set to allow Go back to that headline, France said to allow police to spy through phones.
The article reads, quote, French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone, and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5th.
Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and right defenders as an authoritarian snooper starter.
Though Justice Minister Eric DuPont Moretti insists it would affect only, quote, a dozen or so cases a year.
Covering laptops, cars, and other connected objects, as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crime is punishable by at least five years of jail.
Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, not convicted of or even charged with, suspected of terror offenses, like plotting a protest on January 6th at the Capitol that turns into what the government calls an insurrection.
and as well as delinquency and organized crime.
The provisions, quote, raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties, Digital Rights Group, La Quadrat, wrote in a May statement.
It cited the, quote, right to security, right to a private life, and to private correspondence, and, quote, the right to come and go freely, calling the proposal part of a, quote, slide into heavy-ended security.
This is the dynamic that we constantly urge you on this show to be mindful of.
The effort to constantly get you afraid of things so that you're more sympathetic to the government's demand for power.
That was how we got the Patriot Act.
That's how we got the surveillance state in this country, in the United States.
We just saw an example of that where the government leaked all sorts of things incriminating about the social media app TikTok in order to claim that it wanted to shut down TikTok, but instead the law that was passed went way beyond that.
to allow the Biden administration to shut down any social media site owned by foreign governments simply by decreeing that they pose a threat to national security, meaning the only social media companies that is American you would be allowed to use are ones that would be subject to the rule of the U.S. security state.
That's the kind of fear-mongering and dynamic that you constantly have to watch out for.
Now, on a riveted note, we said we wanted to do a follow-up to a program and a report that we gave you on June 13, 2023, about a spying program, a domestic spying program that was unearthed when the director of national intelligence a domestic spying program that was unearthed when the director of national intelligence sent to Congress at its demand and and you're not going to be
About the ways in which the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, Homeland Security, have been purchasing on the open market from all kinds of firms, extremely incriminating information that designs them to maintain comprehensive dossiers about your life.
And the argument of the CIA is that this is commercially available information and we are just buying it on the open market even though the U.S.
security state admits That it would be barred from collecting it on their own.
They could not collect it on you without a warrant.
It would be illegal for them to do so, but instead they're just buying it and claiming that because they're buying it, it makes it justifiable for them to maintain this information about your lives.
According to Wire Magazine, there is now a bill pending, a bipartisan bill that we're going to keep an eye on.
There you see U.S.
spies are buying Americans' private data.
Congress has a new chance to stop it.
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would forbid government entities from buying American search histories, location data, and more.
And it says, quote, a must-pass defense bill, meaning this bill has to pass.
So if you can attach amendments to it, it automatically becomes law.
Wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country's highest court has said police need a warrant to seize.
Though it's far too early to assess the odds of the legislation surviving the coming months of debate, it's currently one of the relatively few amendments to garner support from both Democratic and Republican members.
Introduction of the amendment follows a report declassified by the Office of National Intelligence.
That's the one we reported on.
The Nation Stops By, which last month revealed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been buying up data on Americans that the government's own experts describe as, quote, the same type of information the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 sought to shield against warrantless seizures and searches.
A handful of House lawmakers, Republican and Democrats, have declared support for the amendment submitted last week by Representatives Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, and Sarah Jacobs, a California Democrat.
The bipartisan duo is seeking stronger warrant requirements for the surveillance data constantly accumulated by people's cell phones.
They argue that it shouldn't matter whether a company is willing to accept payment from the government in lieu of a judge's permission.
Quote, warrantless mass surveillance infringes the constitutionally protected right to privacy, said Davidson.
The amendment, he says, is aimed chiefly at preventing the government from, quote, circumventing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing, quote, your location data, browsing history, or what you could look at online.
We'll certainly keep an eye on this bill as it kind of winds its way through the House process.
Frankly, I would be surprised if it passes because the restriction on the U.S.
security state's powers typically fail.
Go back a little bit and we'll look at a couple of the members who are supporting it.
Quote, Republican member Nancy Mace.
Just go back to that paragraph where it lists the people who are Supportive of it, it starts with Republicans Nancy Mace, just so we can get a sense for who's supporting it.
Republicans Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, and Ben Kline of Virginia have backed the Davidson-Jacobs Amendment according to the House Rules Committee website.
They're joined by Democrats Pramila Jayapal, Zoe Lofgren of California, and Veronica Escobar of Texas.
So that is a pretty representative cross-section of left and right and the Republican and Democratic parties.
We'll see if a bipartisan coalition can actually emerge.
One of the very rare times that might happen to roll back and restrain rather than augment and increase the powers of the U.S.
security state to spy on Americans.
That was the report we did about a month ago.
If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to watch it.
This is a far more nefarious spying program than at first glance it seems to be.
Because of how invasive it is, because it would otherwise be illegal for these spying agencies to collect this information, and because the U.S.
government should not be in the business of collecting spying data on American citizens who have done nothing wrong.
That is mass warrantless surveillance of the kind Edward Snowden revealed and the kind that is still going on.
And in every case where it happens, it is a grave violation of the privacy rights of American citizens.
And so we will keep an eye on that for you as that bill hopefully continues to gain more approval.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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