Kick: The Degenerate Streaming Site Luring Youth Into Gambling. Plus: Nick Cruse & Michael Tracey on Ukraine, AOC/Biden, Liberal Media & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #115
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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, a new streaming service called Kik.
is offering tens of millions of dollars, in one case $100 million, to some of the world's most popular streamers to leave Twitch, the Amazon-owned platform that has long been the industry leader.
The extraordinary amount of money that Kik is lavishing on these content creators is enabled by the fact that the platform is owned by Stake.com, which has numerous shady interests, including a major interest in online crypto casinos, where people around the world gamble their paychecks on blackjack, roulette, and other games of chance where people around the world gamble their paychecks on blackjack, roulette, and other games of chance as All of this would be somewhat ordinary and banal.
All sorts of sports celebrities and other influencers are now frequently paid by gambling sites to encourage their followers and fans to gamble their income online.
I personally think that adults should have the right to decide how to spend the money they earn, including gambling, if that's what they wish to do.
But what makes Kick so uniquely pernicious, even kind of creepy and repulsive, is that the popular creators they are lavishing with many millions of dollars in order to stream are known for having very young audiences filled with young adults and even teenagers under 18.
And what many of these creators are doing, and the contract often requires it, is spending hours streaming online to very young audiences while they engage in online gambling at the crypto casino owned by Kick's parent company.
And thus, intentionally or otherwise, luring all sorts of their young followers, many of whom are under 18, into a life of gambling and online casino addiction, which can, and has often, destroyed people's lives.
Now, there may be more shameful and degenerate ways to earn a living than getting paid tens of millions of dollars a year to influence young people, including minors, to become gambling addicts.
But if there are more shameful and degenerate actions than that, there aren't many.
This site is now booming.
It is becoming a major player in the world of online streamers, many of whom have enormous amounts of fame and following similar in size to those of pop stars or A-list Hollywood actors.
And so, this company needs some light shined on it and some journalistic scrutiny, and we're gonna start tonight with laying out the basics of what we know.
Then in 2018, a very radical leftist shocked the political world when she launched a successful primary challenge to one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Joe Crowley, long touted as Nancy Pelosi's heir apparent due to his talent in raising lobbyist money.
And he was expected to become House Speaker when Nancy Pelosi finally retired after exhausting herself with successful stock trades.
The challenger's name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her 2018 campaign was primarily predicated on a vow to undermine and subvert the dastardly, oligarchical Democratic Party establishment.
A mere five years later, AOC has grown up, and she has become one of the earliest endorsers of Joe Biden's re-election bid, not even pretending to consider other candidates running against him, or even pretending to extract any promises in exchange for her support for the incumbent president.
Symbolizing the complete subservience of the left wing of the Democratic Party, generally led by Bernie Sanders and AOC, Politico recently heralded AOC for being a great, quote, team player.
We'll talk to one of the best and most independent left wing commentators, Nick Cruz of the Black Revolutionary Network, about the current state of the Democratic Party and the mainstream wing of it that calls itself the left and the implications for how these two factions have all but merged entirely.
After that, NATO just concluded its annual meeting, pledging more unity than ever in support of Ukraine and its war against Russia, and even committing, in a deliberately vague way, to NATO membership for Ukraine, which would essentially guarantee endless war, eternal war, with Russia, given that Russia has repeatedly said that NATO membership on its border with Ukraine is a red line for it that it will never accept.
We attempted to obtain press credentials for that conference so that the independent journalist Michael Tracy could report on it for our show, but that application was rejected under very cryptic circumstances.
We'll talk to Michael about that process as well as the latest developments with the U.S.
role in the proxy war in Ukraine, which, although the media barely talks about it, is now going on a year and a half with no one in sight.
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As a programming note, we want to remind you that we will be off tomorrow and then all of next week.
My family and I are taking a much-needed and I think much-deserved vacation.
Our intention was to have a show tomorrow night, which we would have taped today, but we were unable for logistical reasons to do that, so we'll be off tomorrow night and then all of next week, and we'll be back the following Monday at our regular time at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
And for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
The report we're doing tonight is a bit off the beaten path from the sort of topics we typically cover, but we decided nonetheless to do it because we think the topic merits a lot of intention.
There is this entire world that most journalists don't know about, primarily because they're too old to pay attention to it.
Even though the people who dominate the world in terms of influence and the like are infinitely more famous and therefore influential than virtually anybody that journalists do pay attention to, and that's the world of online streaming.
Many of these people have millions and millions and millions of followers and fans all over the world, typically within the age group of 12.
To 24, and so they often fly under the radar of what corporate media pays attention to.
The most famous among them are on the level of pop stars or A-list Hollywood actors in terms of the amount of fame that they wield.
And yet, most journalists who are over 30 don't even know their names, let alone know anything about this world, and it receives very little attention.
Although given the influence it wields, it deserves to.
And one of the sites that is one of the newest players on the scene has exploded very quickly because of enormous amounts of money behind it.
And his name is Kick, which has become a streaming competitor of Twitch.
Twitch for a long time was by far the leading platform for people who spend all day streaming.
They play video games.
They talk about politics.
They talk about culture.
And millions and millions of teenagers and young adults all over the world watch these people.
They're talking about tens of millions of fans.
Twitch is owned by Amazon and it has become increasingly repressive like a lot of big tech has.
And so it's driven away many of its top stars.
And a lot of them are now going to this platform called Kick, which is offering enormous sums of money.
In order to lure these very well-known and influential content creators to their site.
And because Kik has such sketchy and I think repellent practices and is really doing a lot of damage in the world, I just want to bring your attention to some of those practices.
And it's something that we intend to report on as we dig more into it.
So first of all, Kik really became known to corporate media outlets just recently.
In fact, within the last month, here you see a New York Times article On June 16th of 2023, reporting on one Twitch star, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, who goes by the name XQC, he signed a $100 million deal with Kick, a rival platform to Twitch.
And that $100 million, obviously, is the kind of contract that major NBA players get.
Here's what the New York Times said in the sub-headline.
The deal signed by Felix Lengyal, known as QXC, matches traditional athletes' contracts and is another sign of Twitch's tense relationship with its top streamers.
Felix Lengyal, a Canadian known online as QXC, is signing a two-year, roughly $70 million contract That's $35 million a year he's getting paid, with incentives that could push the total to about $100 million, said his agent Ryan Morrison.
Mr. Glengill's deal, about as large as the two-year contract extension signed by the Los Angeles Lakers' LeBron James last year, could shake up the economics of the online entertainment world.
Now, the obvious question is, even if he brings with him millions of Viewers, as he's almost certainly certain to do, his audience is enormous.
I'm certain they will follow him wherever they go.
How will Kick possibly monetize his audience enough to justify a $100 million contract over the two years?
And the answer is they can't.
They won't.
There's no way they will.
The most generous explanation is that this is just a loss leader, that sometimes new sites pay very influential people to come and produce content for their site in order to bring attention to it, to bring new users to it, and they know that they're going to lose money on that individual, but the game plan over a long term is to win that money back, gain that money back by having these people grow the site.
The problem is that they're paying.
Many of these people, maybe not $100 million, but others $50 and $60 and $70 and $80 million, people whose names you probably don't know if you're over the age of 30, and yet people whose fame is off the charts for younger people and who wield enormous influence.
They stream all day long, six hours and eight hours and 10 hours a day, and these kids just sit and watch them and are obviously influenced by what they do.
That's why they command so much money, not just because they bring eyeballs with them, because they can influence people's behavior in all sorts of ways.
The issue has arisen that a lot of these people are making a lot of money because they are encouraging their viewers, including very young people, to go and use online gambling sites.
This has been going on not just at Kik, but even before that at Twitch.
So here you see a Washington Post article from December of last year reporting on this tension, and it reads, Top Twitch Creator Endorses Platform Connected to Crypto Gambling Site.
And this is about This person who was on Twitch, one of the top creators with millions of followers, who now is going to kick.
And here's what the article says.
TylerTrainwrecksNicknam is a gamer and gambler with 2.1 million followers on the live streaming platform Twitch known for his sense of humor, honesty, and occasional controversy.
Nicknam31 says he wants to eventually launch his own live streaming platform that would let content creators keep 95% of revenue while the company keeps 5% and told The Post he has investors who believe in his vision.
In Monday's statement, Nicknam said he would be advising Kik.com, another streaming platform in a non-ownership role.
He linked users to his Kik account, which accrued 8,000 followers overnight.
In a message to The Post, Nicknam confirmed a connection between Kik and Stake, the crypto gambling website.
Nicknamuses on a stream.
So, Stake is a company that owns a crypto casino.
You take your Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency and you go to this casino and you gamble your digital currency online.
Again, if you're an adult, have fun, have at it, that's absolutely right.
But the idea clearly here is to take this young audience and monetize them by turning them into gambling addicts.
So you have people being paid 20, 30, 50 million dollars.
To encourage 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds to take as much money as they can get their hands on and spend it playing blackjack all day or other games of chance.
The post continues.
He said that Eddie Craven, whom he described as an owner of Stake, was an investor in Kik.
He added that the people behind the site liked his ideas and his Twitch following, so he was able to join as an advisor.
Kik confirmed the news in an email, writing that Craven, quote, is involved in Kik, though Stake itself is not an investor.
No comment, but a hundred more questions, Graham said, when told Nicknam had confirmed Stake and Kik were connected.
For now, Kik.com's community guidelines confusingly say they don't allow gambling, quote, with other users.
Nicknames said the site hasn't been updated with the real terms of service yet.
Now, there has been some talk within these kind of digital outlets that cover this world.
And again, I want to stress, I know if you haven't heard of this site, if you haven't heard these people, this might seem trivial.
It's anything but.
This is a huge industry.
Of many hundreds of millions of people influencing kids in all sorts of ways that do fly under the radar precisely because most journalists are too old to have heard of any of these people or pay attention to any of what's going on here.
So here's one of those digital sites called Analytics Insight, which in March of this year had this article entitled, Is Kick.com Just a Vehicle for Stake's Online Casino?
And it reads, quote, what sets Kik.com apart from other live streaming platforms is its close relationship with the online casino Stake.com.
As mentioned earlier, Trainwreck and Ed Craven are popular names linking the companies.
However, many have raised concerns that the success of Kik.com is not solely based on the quality of its platform, but also Stake.com's financial interests.
They believe Kik.com may be merely a vehicle for the online casino to reach a wider audience.
First, there is no denying the connection between Kick and Steak.
Trainwreck confirmed the same in his Washington Post statement, saying that Ed Craven has invested in the newly formed platform.
Like any other company, Steak.com is using Kick.com as an advertising channel.
Steak sponsors streams on Kick, with the streamers paying chance-based games on its site.
Of course, given Steak's reputation in the marketing sector, you can understand the critics' concern.
Ed Craven's company has been very aggressive in his marketing strategies.
So let me just show you a little bit of what this looks like in actual practice.
So one of the most, I guess you could say, famous and influential streamers is someone by the name of Eden Ross, who is a Jewish kid who was raised in the suburbs and yet has adopted this kind of posture of hip hop and developed and cultivated relationships with a lot of black athletes and hip hop artists and has become enormous, has a gigantic following.
Of young people.
And he went to Kik from Twitch earlier this year or late last year for a contract that is in the tens of millions of dollars.
And what he does for most of his time, or much of his time, is he sits online and he plays Blackjack at this crypto casino that's owned by Kik.com.
So he is getting paid enormous sums of money.
Tens of millions of dollars.
To have his young audience watch him play casino games with cryptocurrency while he obviously is very excited by it and influences and encourages others to use it.
So let's just take a look at just one excerpt of hundreds of hours that you could watch of him doing this.
Because I know a lot of you guys that watch me, you like literally don't have jobs and shit.
And like, no, listen, because they're kids.
You guys are moms.
No, they're kids.
No, no, no.
You guys are kids.
Like, you guys are in high school and shit.
I didn't have a lot of job in high school.
And for anybody who doesn't know who's new to the streams, 10% of whatever Aiden ends up with.
So, Chad, I'm going to let you guys talk to me, bro.
Because, Chad, I'm trying to get you guys to 150 so I can get you guys mad.
Listen.
Listen.
Damn, man.
So that's him talking about his audience, and you hear him saying there that they're kids, they're people in high school, and yet he's being paid by a crypto casino tens of millions of dollars to stream to exactly who these people are.
Now, recently there was another influencer who was offered a kick contract.
His name is...
His name is RiceGum and he's probably one of the most famous streamers on the internet.
And here he is describing the fact that the contract that he was offered by Kik requires him, he rejected this contract, but it requires him to spend hours online gambling at the crypto casino owned by Kik.
That's what these contracts are for, according to him.
I had the Kick deal in front of me, I had the Rumble deal in front of me, and the Rumble deal just looked better, bro.
Maybe they spent all their bread on XQ and Aiden, I don't know, but like, they wanted me to gamble like 30, oh well, like, I could stream, but in order to make the most possible on Kick, they wanted me to gamble like 30 days or something, I don't know.
Whereas Rumble, they just want me to make content, they can, like, you can actually post videos.
Now, there are some legal issues here that I don't want to opine on too definitively since I haven't seen many of these contracts, although I've seen a couple, which...
include what he just described, that they require this kind of gambling.
I don't know if that's true of everyone, including the people I've named.
I haven't seen those contracts.
But what I do know is that these creators get tens of millions of dollars.
They then go on to kick.com, and they spend hours gambling in front of their young audience.
There are definitely legal issues in terms of whether an influencer is in the United States and promoting online gambling or engaging in online gambling while on U.S. soil.
That can create all kinds of legal issues.
Here is the kind of content where he's actually in personally a casino, Aiden Ross is.
You can go to his page on kick and just watch, just select any kind of stream, and he's usually playing Digital crypto gambling.
I don't know if we have any of those videos or not where he's doing this, but this is him in a actual physical casino.
I know, I know you did, I know you did.
What the fuck am I looking at?
Every time you have a blackjack he has it.
Yo!
How fucking mental is this?
4-5.
Come on.
Come on, this is it.
This is a big one for us.
Bro, please, bro.
Right here.
10 right here, right here, right here.
Bust.
Bust.
What?!
Oh my God, bro.
We just pushed on another fucking 21.
I can't believe this shit.
That was $120,000 right there.
We just pushed on again.
Kids, don't gamble.
Nah, this is bad.
Yeah, this is bad.
- No gamble.
It'll fucking melt your brain.
What the fuck is going on? - So there you say, I mean, of course, they know that there are a lot of kids That's the point of what their popularity is for.
Now, just to conclude some of this reporting because I Like I said, there's some things here that are kind of unclear, and then there's other parts of it that seem very clear.
Here was an article from the Michigan Daily that was headlined, Aiden Ross sets bad precedence for Twitch gambling, and it talks about how even prior to going to Twitch, he would frequently promote cryptocurrencies and also promote gambling to his audience, he would just sit there and play online gambling for his young audience.
There's all kinds of talk about how various things influence children, how gender ideology and woke ideology are influencing young people.
Whatever you think is the worst thing that you've heard, this is something that is at least in that category.
And the fact that there's tens of millions of dollars being paid and this kind of money being passed around to obviously lure children, kids and even young adults into a lifestyle of Gambling addiction, I think, is something that's sketchy and ethically grotesque at best and repellent and legally questionable at worst.
We're still filling in some of the gaps on what this is, but here you can see, this is from this week, there's a report that Stake, which is the owner of Kik, the crypto casino, is currently running ads on the Reddit page of XQC, the content creator they just paid $70 million the content creator they just paid $70 million to, as a guaranteed amount, up to $100 million to lure people into these crypto casinos.
They're advertising directly to his Reddit page to his audience, which is filled with young people, even though he himself has denied that his contract requires him to try and convert his audience into gambling addicts.
Certainly that's a major risk, a major danger, and at least in some of these cases, according to that streamer we showed you, an actual part of the contract.
Namely, they're getting paid with a requirement to spend hours online gambling, potentially in the United States, as it seems many of them do, which raises all kinds of legal issues.
So this is a really seedy part of this industry that has the attention, way more so than a lot of the cultural products you may be focusing on in terms of television and films and music.
That has the attention of huge numbers of...
America's youth.
And as I said, for me, if adults want to waste their life and go into debt gambling, that's their choice.
To me, it's like drugs or alcohol or anything else.
It's something we might want to discourage them from doing, but at the end of the day, it's something they have the autonomy to do.
But when you're talking about trying to, through money and through influence, lure young adults or even minors into a lifestyle of gambling addiction, Which is utterly degenerate and destructive.
That definitely becomes something worthy of journalistic scrutiny and because of the fact that this world is something that most people As I said, over 30 or even over 25 simply don't know about.
It has gone under the radar for way too long.
So we intend to keep our eye on that, need to report on it, especially as we get a hold of some of these contracts and find out whether or not a lot of these contracts raise some legal issues in terms of paying people tens of millions of dollars in order to purposely influence people into a life of gambling. especially as we get a hold of some of these
Thank you.
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Nick Cruz is now a frequent guest on our show.
You can call him a friend of the show if you like.
I guess that's what we call him, at least some of the time.
Other times we say better things about him than that.
And he can be heard on the outstanding and very independent-minded Revolutionary Blackout Network that is, I'm happy to say, now available on Rumble.
These are the real kinds of leftists, the kinds that are genuinely anti-establishment and harbor contempt for the Democratic Party for all the right reasons.
And we're always happy to welcome him here to talk about the latest degradations among Democratic Party politics and especially its progressive wing.
I'm not sure if we have his video available.
I'm not sure if I think we have only his audio.
There's something wrong with his camera.
So we're going to put his photograph on the screen so you can imagine him speaking.
We're going to hear his voice and most importantly his insights.
Nick, good evening.
Thanks so much for joining us tonight.
We're always thrilled to have you.
I'm not hearing Nick.
So we're going to have Nick on hopefully in a second.
We should-- so we're going to have that gone in just a second.
We have a couple of technical issues on his end that we're working out.
So one of the things I wanted to ask him about is that the congressman from Queens and the Bronx, who ran in 2018, by waving the banner of taking on the Democratic Party establishment and waging war from inside the Democratic Party against his piety and imperialism.
Can you hear me now?
Militarism has just endorsed Joe Biden.
Okay.
I want to talk to Nick about that.
I think we have Nick now.
Can you hear me now, Nick?
Yeah, can you guys hear me?
I apologize about that, Glenn.
No worries, no worries.
We're happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, it's great to be on.
I think I heard you talking about the progressives endorsing Joe Biden earlier before.
Let me just show for people who haven't seen it the fact that not only did AOC decide to endorse the sitting incumbent president for President for re-election Joe Biden, even though there are two primary challengers that she has, that he has, Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr., as well as a third-party candidate who's running, Cornel West,
who supposedly espouses ideas that AOC at least once pretended to believe who supposedly espouses ideas that AOC at least once pretended to believe in, much more so than she pretended to believe in the ideology of She not only endorsed Joe Biden without even waiting to see who would be running against him, it's still possible there could be other primary challengers that he has.
She didn't even pretend to extract any promises from him.
Remember when the right wing of the Republican Party, when Kevin McCarthy needed their support to become House Speaker, they very openly refused to give that until they extracted all kinds of promises about how power would be wielded in the House in a much more diffuse way.
She didn't even pretend to do that.
And then to add insult to injury, the place she chose to unveil her endorsement is the podcast Pod Save America, hosted by Obama administration national security officials who are complete and steadfast loyalists to the Democratic Party.
You wind them up and they heap praise on not just the Democratic Party but it's on all of its leaders.
It's basically a place where the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosi's of the world go to talk to their loyal flock.
So let's look at Her doing this and I'm going to just, I don't even have to ask you a question, Nick.
You're going to be all ready just to spout all sorts of things once you hear this.
So I'm going to subject you to this one more time and I apologize in advance.
But for anyone in our audience who did not see it, here is AOC formally endorsing the current Democratic incumbent president, Joe Biden.
The president's only primary opponents are Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Haven't been any rumors about anyone else even thinking about jumping in.
Will you be supporting Joe Biden for re-election?
I believe given that feel, yes.
I think he's done quite well given the limitations that we have.
He's done quite well, Nick, given the limitations that he has.
So let me just go on.
I just needed to stop that there and note that.
I do think that there are ebbs and flows, as there are in any presidency.
There are areas that I think were quite strong when he came right out of the gate with the American Rescue Plan, and of course the Inflation Reduction Act was a massive step in terms of our climate agenda, but there are also areas that I think Did you hear how she phrases her criticisms?
There are things that could have gone better, meaning he, I will admit he's not perfect.
Alright, let's just finish this.
issues in this country.
I think it starts with the United States Senate.
And I think that until we have senators that are willing to stand up and stare the filibuster in the eye and stare a lot of structural issues about the Senate, the United States Senate will be what holds back this country from an enormous amount of progress.
So she was willing to admit reluctantly that Joe Biden is not in fact perfect.
There are things that could have gone better, but she very clearly added that it's not his fault in any way.
It's the fault of the Senate, particularly Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
And it's the Senate that needs to be fixed for Joe Biden to be perfect.
But he's certainly extremely good and therefore merits her endorsement.
What is your reaction to that, Nick?
That shows how AOC's job is just to do PR for the Democratic Party because she's head-faking to the legislative branch, as if the left's biggest criticism of Joe Biden is what he has not done.
Our biggest criticism is the fact that he's about to start World War III because of AOC.
And AOC used to stand for abolishing ICE.
Now you have Joe Biden who's funding ICE $6 billion more than Donald Trump, deporting more people than Donald Trump.
Now this is not an issue she cares about.
She pretended to be a climate activist for clout for years, and now she endorsed a president who has spanned out the Willow Project, who is a fracker, who actually did more public drilling than Donald Trump.
But she's not a climate activist when a Democrat is in charge.
She's a climate activist only when a Republican is in charge.
And I think this shows how weak Joe Biden is right now.
Because in the last election, they had to make a progressive task force to head fake and pretend that they're going to get progressive policies.
There's none of that now.
And there is zero excuse for anyone to endorse someone with a horrific record Like Joe Biden, a year and a half before the election, their job is to lead workers off a cliff and undercut our negotiation power.
Now is the time where we have the most negotiation, and AOC's seen how weak Biden is in the polls, also because of RFK and Dr. Cornel West, who is already polling at 6%.
So they can't even play around.
They was given the order to endorse immediately, which shows how weak Joe Biden is that she had to do this.
Do you remember that time in 2018 when she picked out a really striking outfit, all white, it was very dramatic, and she put it on and then she went down to the border and she posed in front of a camera that was wielded by her staffer in front of that fence overlooking a parking lot, but it was eventually, if you traversed that parking lot, you arrived at
The place where migrants were held and she posed in these very pained and anguished ways because she was so deeply moved as a human being about the cruelty of the border.
Nothing has changed at the border.
Absolutely nothing has changed about the border.
And she has not even gone down there or even barely mentioned the border.
And the thing I genuinely don't understand is how people don't end up being offended by this.
The fact that they just so blatantly trifle with people's emotions in ways that prove so completely inauthentic.
And that's the argument that we make at Revolutionary Blackout.
Who's really worse, Glenn?
Joe Manchin, we know he's an asshole.
He stands on yachts and shout down protesters.
I don't know if you've seen that famous video where he was on a yacht shouting down protesters.
Openly takes millions of dollars from big oil and all these corporations.
So his mindset is if you vote for him as a leftist or as a worker, it's kind of your fault because he's not hiding who he is.
I will make the argument that it takes a special kind of evil and maliciousness to do what AOC and Bernie Sanders has done.
And the professional managerial class, for the most part, has protected them from the reckoning that is going to come.
This reckoning, and you see the increased anger about AOC and Bernie.
Even Jacobin now has the balls to criticize AOC and Bernie Sanders now, just because there's overwhelmingly dislike over her.
And her politics has failed.
It's just a fact.
If you look at how she is as unpopular as Kamala Harris, even though she quote-unquote support popular policies, That's because her politics and her willingness to be just a PR agent of a Democratic Party while stealing working class people's money has grossly offended the real left.
And she knows this.
That's why she had to go on Pod Save America.
She can't even go on social Democrat-like channels.
She has to go full establishment because she lost any support from the left.
Even people that are to the right of me had enough of AOC.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting point.
That gaslighting nonsense.
And my friend, Comrade Missy, predicted that she's going to be the next Nancy Pelosi.
And that's exactly what's going on.
When you look at her pro-war votes, when you see how she's whipping support for the Democratic Party, that's exactly what her role is right now.
She's completely abandoned the left.
And anyone on the left who's propping her up, they're just being willful idiots.
And she's not even trying to appeal to them anymore.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting point.
She did used to go on kind of left-wing shows, on shows that were still loyal to the Democratic Party, but did that kind of like pretending to be angry about neoliberalism and the like.
And she wouldn't even show her face there anymore because she can't get asked one critical question.
She can find herself now to the studios of CNN and MSNBC and these Pod Save America type podcasts where she's treated.
Basically, she already, the transformation is complete.
She basically is Nancy Pelosi now.
Politico welcomed her to the fold just a few months ago with an article entitled, you know, the evolution of AOC and the sub-headline was something like, she went from being an outsider to the ultimate team player.
The thing that I find so sickening about it is that in reality, she and Bernie, who convinced people they were waging a war against the Democratic establishment, as you say, If you turn on Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes or Anderson Cooper or read the op-ed page of the New York Times, you know what you're getting.
Those are people who are hardcore partisans of the Democratic Party.
They're speaking to hardcore partisans of the Democratic Party.
They're not hiding who they are.
They're exactly who they say they are, which is they want you to vote Democrat all the time.
What makes AOC and Bernie so Yes.
insidious is that in a lot of ways they've become the most important weapon of the Democratic Party establishment, its most valuable asset.
At the same time, they were pretending to undermine it because you don't need to convince Rachel Maddow fans to go and vote Democrat.
They're going to vote Democrat no matter what.
What you need are the kind of younger people who don't really like the Democratic Party, whose self-identity depends on keeping the Democratic Party at a distance, who may not vote, who may vote for Cornel West as a protest, and And AOC and Bernie are the ones who lead those people, the ones you really need to get out their asses and go vote every two years and to vote for the Democratic Party.
Without fail.
So at the same time they're telling people and collecting money based on the fraudulent image that they're enemies of the Democratic Party establishment, they in fact are its most important instruments.
And it really makes me upset because I was part of the Bernie campaign.
And I don't know if you remember the Bernie Sanders rallies.
And I remember there'd be a lot of seniors or any person struggling with disease or anyone struggling with poverty.
These people give their testimony at these Bernie rallies.
I don't know if you guys remember this.
And they were talking about how we were bankrupt.
I'll just give you an example.
They were talking about how they're bankrupted because they don't have Medicare for all.
They would be, damn, they're crying.
And the whole crowd would be crying to Bernie Sanders.
And Bernie Sanders and AOC would look these people right in their eyes and say, we will fight for you.
We will fight for your health care.
Meanwhile, Medicare for All is dead.
They're endorsing a guy who said they would veto Medicare for All.
That's absolutely disgusting. - He said he would veto it.
He would veto it, even in the past. - Yes.
Even if somehow Bernie and AOC did a miracle and got it in the past, Biden would veto it.
And AOC, they're not putting even any pressure on them.
In fact, Biden helped privatize Medicaid and helped kick millions of people off their insurance.
I'll give David Sirota a lot of props for reporting on that.
So Biden kicked off millions of people off of healthcare, and the healthcare champion Bernie Sanders endorsed that guy.
After looking at a cancer patient in the eye, and look at YouTube, I'm sure all of them are still up.
Look, all these people in the eye said, we will fight for you.
These people with medical debt.
I got family that suffered medical debt.
They looked me in the eye and said they're going to fight for us.
And now they're completely capitulated to the worst neoliberal war criminal scumbags.
Once again, the reckoning just started.
They don't even know what's coming.
He's going to continue.
You know, speaking of that, people with medical debt and people who are really struggling economically, there's this, you know, polls show that one of Biden's vulnerabilities, his main vulnerability is the perception that he's just too old to run.
But a secondary vulnerability that's very significant is the fact that people do not perceive the economy as healthy, as producing benefits for their lives, which ultimately is all that matters.
And you have this new cottage industry of very wealthy people like Chris Hayes with his Comcast contract that's worth many millions of dollars a year and writers at The Atlantic who now are kind of – you can see how these scripts form.
Nick, I know for a fact they all talk to each other all day.
They're on the same list.
There used to be that journalist list that was run by Ezra Klein that when it was exposed kind of became a scandal because journalists aren't supposed to be spending all day colluding with one another and collaborating with one another and speaking to and for each other.
But that's exactly what they were doing.
And obviously, if you're on a list, it creates this kind of pressure to conform to the – The orthodoxies of the liberal establishment, which is the worst possible thing you can have for journalists, but they still have these lists, they still have these group chats that they're all in, and you see these scripts emerge.
And the new script is, Americans are dumb for thinking the economy is bad, because in fact the economy is good.
And it's being done and said by people for whom the economy is very good, like Chris Hayes, who doesn't have any medical debt or any kind of debt, but in fact many millions of dollars a year is in a contract to host an MSNBC show for one hour a night.
You've been talking about that and about this thing you're calling Bidenomics.
What do you mean by all of that?
So the campaign strategy of Joe Biden in order to win over Americans on the economy is to have millionaires like Joe Scarborough tell Americans to quit whining and everything's okay.
I think there's an estimate that he makes around $50,000 per episode and that's before bonuses.
He gets bonuses for rating.
So he gets $50,000 per day.
And his wife is by his side making her own major contract.
Absolutely great point.
So this is the strategy for Democrats to have millionaires tell working class people that they're struggling.
And this is why even when you look at Democrats, only 25% of Democrats strongly approve of Joe Biden's economy.
40% of Democrats don't like Joe Biden's economy.
And that number is way worse.
He's the worst president on the economy in the modern era, based on polls at this point.
And there's shocking numbers, and this is why you're seeing a new era of black leftists like RBN, like Black Power Media, and Black Gender Report, and many others that are calling out the truth on the Biden administration, and Bidenomics that's failing us, because there's a shocking number that you will never hear on Morning Joe, that ever since April, black Americans make up 90% At an unemployment surge.
So Biden is for white bourgeoisie liberals.
It's not for us and the workers.
The Democratic Party is the party of Wall Street.
They're the party of suburbia.
And that's why it's even more shameful that people like Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman is turning their back on the hood, even though Barack Obama and Joe Biden is responsible for the surge in racial income inequality.
Despite being 13 percent of the homeless population, black Americans make 40 percent of the homeless populations.
And look at how blue states like California It's handling that.
We have my brother from Revolutionary Blackout, CJ, he volunteers at Skid Row every month feeding these people.
I was feeding homeless people in Kansas City, and this is a problem that Democrats are horrible on because they are bought off by real estate developers and landlords.
So when people like AOC and Bernie Sanders, despite this fact, keep calling these people the lesser evil, it shows that they are deeply unserious.
And that's just scratching the surface of economics, Glenn.
Scratching the surface.
I want to talk to you about something I don't think we ever talked about this before either, so I don't fully know your views on this or really know your views on it at all, which is something I've been starting to notice a lot more.
I think it's actually getting worse, or maybe I'm just focused on it more, which is the complete predominance of culture war issues when it comes to left liberal discourse.
I have spent my career talking about a kind of set of issues that is about things like the evils of the U.S.
security state, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, spying, privacy, free speech, corporatism, the capture of government and regulatory processes by large corporations.
Those are the issues on which I have focused most.
I've never thought that that meant that those were the only issues that matter.
I know there are issues on which I don't focus, including, say, health care policy, which I don't focus on because I'm not, I don't know very much about it.
I don't have, you know, an expert level understanding to offer.
But certainly those issues have always been very important to left liberal politics.
I mean, all those years when I was focused on them, I was considered as part of the left, as being on the left, precisely because those issues have been so important.
If you know, go and watch or listen to kind of the leading independent left liberal media outlets.
I'm not talking about Revolutionary Blackout Network, which is the real left.
I'm talking about the part of the left that identifies as the left, but still kind of the AOC Bernie left, all the things that you just described about them.
It is really almost culture war issues and trans issues and those sorts of things to the exclusion of almost everything else.
There's currently this kind of cancellation campaign underway aimed at the Young Turks and in particular Cenk Aygar and Anna Kasparian, the two hosts.
Because largely, they started in some way because they started talking in kind of a right-wing way about crime and homelessness, because sort of the standard, oh, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.
I guess Anna was walking down the street and started getting bothered by homeless people, and started ranting and raving about crime, and they endorsed Rick Caruso.
But really, the true precipitating event was Anna Kasparian's heresy on not trans issues in general, where I would say she supports the kind of general trans agenda of legal rights and the like for trans people, 95%, probably more than most Americans do.
But, you know, some of these kind of turf talking points about language that gets used for female reproductive parts that she's offended by and things of that nature, the sports issue, And what really amazes me is, you know, for me, the Young Turks has for years taken all kinds of positions that should be totally anathema to left liberal politics.
I mean, Anna Kasperian, in what looked like a paid interview for NATO, interviewed Madeleine Albright, one of the worst warmongers in the world, and he preys on her for like an hour straight.
Nobody cared, no one resigned from the Young Turks over it, because these issues of like imperialism and militarism and corporatism almost have no weight at all in a lot of left-wing discourse now.
In fact, if you talk about those things, they almost code as being on the right.
And I'm just wondering what you make of that.
A, if you agree with that analysis that the culture war is kind of drowning out these other issues, I think in part because it's just so much easier and lower-hanging fruit to take on.
But also, if you do agree with it, what do you make of it?
Why is that happening?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm going to avoid mentioning names here, but there's so many people on the fake left that they take their cues of leftism based on the Democratic Party, whether they would acknowledge that or not.
And so their biggest issues are whatever Nancy Pelosi is tweeting about.
And they may take a further left position for that.
Nancy Pelosi, she would tweet about the importance of the Supreme Court, and they would say, we need to expand the Supreme Court.
Or they would talk about abortion rights because Democrats took these things out.
And obviously the transit issue is another one.
And that's how they define their leftism.
And they play a game with the right.
And this is where the red blue game is fraudulent in a lot of ways, where they push out the culture war.
And both the left and the right are both massively guilty of this, because I do not think it's a coincidence in an era where Americans are more class conscious than ever, where Americans are ready for a third party, where Americans want health care, where they want actually living wage, where they want actually economic reforms where they want actually living wage, where they want actually economic reforms that now they now in the end to endless war and an end to endless war Yes.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
In our generation, because I grew up during the Iraq War, and that's why I focus on foreign policy first and foremost on RBN, we get radicalized the entire generation.
So to distract people from war, which the Democratic Party escalated on, and to distract from the homeless issue they're complicit with.
with the growing police state that we're being surrounded by.
They have to push culture war issues.
And I think there is legitimate concerns if you're from the trans community or from any community to fight for your rights.
That's a legitimate struggle.
My question is, why is there a random white guy in Kentucky where there's like three trans people within a 500-mile radius who's tweeting about this issue every single day?
And it's because he's being programmed by the media, the right-wing media and the left-wing media that's more than happy to do the dance with them.
See, now, at Revolutionary Black Girl, we define the traditional left values of challenging and implementing reforms on the government and actual social revolutionary reform as leftism, challenging empire as leftism, addressing material reality as leftism, which is why the fact that anyone gave TYT credibility before was absurd, was absurd.
When you look at an anticon-sperience, insane anti-homeless takes, when you look at the fact that they pretty much support the Democratic Party's push for every single war.
And there's many other left bourgeoisie commentaries like Sam Seder, who famously said in a debate with Jackson Hinkle that he don't care about how much the police is funded more.
So these actual real issues on the role of state and government power in the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex, it pales in comparison whenever an anticon-sperience says something that's right in the middle of the road, where I'm from in Missouri, Glenn.
And now this is a question I propose for these leftists that are freaking out over TYT, Anna Kasparian, and the ilk.
Do they realize that if you go to Brazil, there are many black evangelical socialists and communists who support Lula, who are very economically left.
Many of them are socialists and communists.
And they are evangelical.
And they do not have the standard position of other liberals regarding gay rights and the such, and abortion and the such.
So who are you guys actually fighting for?
Are we not fighting for these people?
They are very good people.
I know in the Midwest they may have ignorant takes.
So are they being canceled?
Are we fighting for Medicare for All?
Or Medicare for only the people with good takes on the trans issue?
Now, I think we should take any time when we're movement building to educate people, and that's why I do.
I stand in solidarity with my trans and gay brothers.
I know a lot of them.
I've got a lot of great friends, so I stand in solidarity.
I try to educate people away from bigoted views, but you do that while building a movement to address people's material needs, because that bond is how you break those ignorant cycles.
But Glenn, what do they do?
They canceled.
They shut down discourse.
They don't want debate.
They don't want people to get together and learn from each other, even correcting each other and organizing against the establishment.
So people like TYT and many other liberals who's going after them right now, their job is to pick the culture war and divide the workers just like the establishment won.
Just in a nutshell.
You know, I think the last point is such an important one.
I mean, I do want to say, like, I also think there is a commercial motive to it, which is, I can tell you for sure, you know, I almost never cover trans issues on this show.
Again, it's not because I don't think they're important.
I think for a lot of people they're important in ways that you alluded to.
But I'm just telling you, you know, if I did it once or twice a night, It's the easiest content in the world to do.
You know you just kind of connect to some like controversy about like some athlete or someone using the bathroom or some like male prisoner and a female who got put into a female facility or whatever.
People get really riled up by it.
You don't have to do much preparation.
It doesn't take much research.
The view count goes up.
I think it's one of the reasons, but I also think the main reason is that it's one of the very few places where the Republican Party and the Democratic Party actually have a difference.
I think that's why these kind of right-wing polemicists who are obsessed with anti-trans rhetoric are kind of in a codependent relationship with the people who are on the left wing who are just as obsessed with it.
They kind of need each other because it is an easy way out to avoid talking about Ukraine or militarism or the control of the internet by the CIA and the FBI and this judge court ruling that just happened.
The persecution of anti-establishment voices on both the left and the right, including that case of the black radicals who are now prosecuted by the Biden EOJ as Russian agents, which almost nobody in the left liberal media even bothered to cover, let alone denounce.
It's kind of like an easy way out.
I think you're exactly right as well.
You know, the reason why the gay and lesbian movement ultimately ended up successful is not because activists in the movement went around demanding that everybody who uttered a heretical view got fired or banned or ignored or whatever.
There were a lot of people who were potential allies of the left, including a lot of African Americans who were very religious.
who were taught that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful.
And the ability to engage with people and to engage in dialogue with them and to work with them ultimately is what convinced people that a lot of these demonization images that they had been given about gay men and lesbians were wrong.
It was through engagement and interaction and like a respectful, engaged dialogue.
And ultimately, it was really about nothing other than, as you say, kind of just interacting with people in a normal, healthy way without bashing them over the head or telling them they were irredeemably evil people.
And this seems to be exactly the antithesis of what a lot of left-wing politics is about I think in a lot of ways it's because, again, it's the easy way out.
If you get to denounce people, if you get to call people evil, you get to sit back and say, God, I've done my job.
I'm a really good person.
And that is politics to them.
Yeah, that's how they convince themselves they're good people, even though they may have gotten their wealth through ill-gotten means.
How many videos have we seen from Raytheon talking about their diversity?
Wall Street, who plundered and destroyed black wealth, talking about how they got diversity programs to get black women in high positions of power.
Remember the CIA ad about the woman who was like with various forms of mental health pathologies and you know a first-generation non-binary immigrant and this is the CIA touting this.
Yeah, and they replace actual liberation of the working class and improving material needs for these suburban, bourgeoisie issues, to be frank.
And that's how they sleep well at night, even though they support Blue Dog Democrats, even though they vote for Joe Biden, who is escalating war, escalating World War III, that's how they sleep at night.
Now, I want to go back kind of to the social war issues as well, because I feel like there are a lot of people who are taught to skip steps.
And maybe that benefit the Democrat Party, maybe you can make the argument, but a lot of them have adopted this authoritarian mindset that is not helpful, even Even if I agree with you guys on the premise of the social issues, having this authoritarian mindset where we're not going to have a community built where we're educating people the way every single social movement ever works.
Instead, you guys said we're going to rely on the government stranglehold over Twitter and social media to censor people.
Cut people off for community and ban people from organizing together.
The best way to have a real empathy-based working class is to have one that is willing to have a conversation and grow from each other.
And that comes from us acknowledging each other's material needs.
And that is not what the liberal, bourgeoisie class that supports Joe Biden has in common with us.
So what do they do, Glenn?
They peddle in nonstop culture war nonsense.
Anna Kasparian, for example, since we've mentioned her before, is a multimillionaire who never worked a real honest day in her life.
So what does she have to connect herself to the worker that makes it like they're on the side?
It's just nonstop red, blue, culture war nonsense.
And that's what it is.
Absolutely. - Absolutely.
Nick, we have Michael Tracy standing by for a few minutes, and the control room told me that, as he always does, he's getting quite bitchy while he waits, so we don't want to get him on and have him be even more petulant than he normally is.
But I really enjoyed the conversation with you.
I really want to encourage people to watch your videos.
You're now on Rumble, is that correct?
Are you guys putting all of your content on Rumble?
So, I hope people will watch you there.
You're obviously on YouTube, which I hope people will not watch you there.
I think Rumble is a much better platform, but either way, I hope you watch.
We've had, obviously, Savion, and there's still a couple people from your network I want to have on my show because the content is uniformly thought-provoking.
It's always very informative, and I think people who don't share your ideology will have a lot to learn by listening, so I hope you will Yeah, we've been censored and throttled on YouTube a lot, so we are on Rumble now.
And we've been greatly enjoying our time on Rumble, so check us out on Revolutionary Blackout on Rumble.
And we're also on RBM.
We stream almost every single day.
Last night I had Aaron Good and David Tabud on, and we were talking about RFK and JFK and the assassination.
And one thing that we were talking about that I know you talk about all the time is how liberals became the pro-CIA party and how even though Trump talked about the deep state, there is actually a legitimate permanent state that the left must engage and must have as their number one priority, which AOC and the left, they don't do at all.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
It's great to talk to you.
We will definitely talk to you again shortly.
I do give them a lot of credit regarding calling out the deep state, the CIA, and intelligence agencies.
Because if you don't, you're deeply unserious.
But anyway, it's always fun, Glenn.
It's always a very thought-provoking show.
It's very cathartic as well.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
It's great to talk to you.
We will definitely talk to you again shortly.
Have a great evening.
All right.
So we will now get to our not always well-behaved guest, but someone who generally brings a good deal of insight and independence and thought-provoking analysis to not everything that he talks about, but to many things that he talks about.
And that, of course, is Michael Casey, another friend of the show in this parlance of the podcast.
Good evening, Michael.
It's great to see you.
I hope you're doing well and a little bit in a better state of mind now that you're actually on the air, not waiting any longer.
I've taught myself some breathing exercises just to make it through those very laborious waits.
Don't you insult my guest.
All right, so let's start with the NATO conference that just took place in Lithuania.
And before we get to the substance... Summit.
They call it a summit.
Very pompous.
Yes, it was a summit where people from all over the world come together.
You have covered, I don't know if you covered the NATO Summit previously, but you've covered similar NATO meetings.
Yes, you covered the NATO Summit last year.
One of the things we wanted you to do was to go this year and cover the summit for our program where you could be a journalist who has credentials to attend the press conferences and the like and report on what's happening.
For our program, you've made an application to get your credentials, tell the audience what happened.
Yeah, so last year I did cover the NATO summit held in Madrid, Spain as a credentialed member of the media.
I was actually a bit surprised that I was allowed to attend last year, given my track record of taking a fairly skeptical line on NATO policy, especially vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine.
And so, you know, it was pleasantly surprising that they did allow that.
And so I got a fair amount of access, you know, I was able to Interview slash question everybody from Erdogan to Canadian officials and all kinds of European diplomats and so forth.
And it was it was it was useful and I have it in my sub stack and published it elsewhere.
And so the idea this year was that Given that your show launched last December, and I'm a fairly frequent guest, I might do some reports for your show on the NATO Summit first hand.
So I had plans to travel to Lithuania, where the summit was held, and was going to be a correspondent of sorts.
And then at the last minute, my application for the media accreditation process was rejected.
And I was told by NATO specifically that no explanation would be provided.
So before I had even asked for an explanation as to why I had been rejected, they went out of their way to tell me in no uncertain terms that they were not going to provide an explanation, so don't bother asking for one.
Which is odd that you would kind of make that disclaimer out of nowhere without even being prompted to do so.
And now, can I say with Absolute certainty that it was a function of my putting in the application that I was going to be operating, at least in part, as a correspondent for Glenn Greenwald's system update show on Rumble.
No, I can't say that that was the decisive variable that led to the rejection, but I think it's probably a fair inference or a fair surmise that that might have had something to do with it, because The accreditation process for media is actually run with the host country in conjunction with NATO.
Lithuanian authorities were participants in the accreditation process to approve or deny certain media.
And whereas, I guess, in Spain, they might have had a more laissez-faire approach.
In Lithuania, which, as you might know, is kind of a bastion of the more hard-line sentiment within NATO to take increasingly more bellicose action toward Russia, to basically cut off all remaining ties as minimal as they are with Russia, they seemingly to basically cut off all remaining ties as minimal as they are with Russia, they seemingly apply that same mindset to
So there was at least one fewer person there who had anything like a skeptical attitude toward the proceedings and could maybe take a more critical approach.
And I think that's to the detriment of everyone who wants kind of a robust media and a robust accountability imposed on people in positions of huge power, which I think definitely applies to the NATO summit.
Absolutely no and my reaction when you told me that you had been rejected and that you were rejected under these circumstances was I had said I was not only unsurprised I would have been surprised had you gotten these credentials because not only you but also myself obviously are outspoken opponents of the U.S.
involvement in Ukraine in the broader attempt to fuel this proxy war something that is extremely important to NATO probably the not probably certainly
The leading foreign policy priority of the alliance of the CIA and particularly the Eastern European states who, as you say, tend to be even more fanatical about it, perhaps for valid historical reasons, but they most definitely are these hardline anti-Russia states that are vehement in their support for Ukraine and contemptuous of anybody who raises dissenting voices.
And I think The prevailing ethos in the West very much has become this idea that dissent simply is not tolerated.
You know, one of the first things that EU states did, or the EU did when the Russians invaded, was ban any platform from hosting Russian state media, even if they think that people should hear from them.
You're no longer allowed legally to provide that.
So this kind of Crushing of dissent, this prohibition of dissent, including denying credentials to any journalist that might actually ask hard questions, is very much aligned with the mentality.
Now, let me ask you about the substance.
One of the things that was on the table is NATO membership for Ukraine.
That, of course, is one of the things Vladimir Putin cited as the reason why Russia invaded.
It's been a kind of It's a known fact for years in Washington that, as that famous memo by the current CIA director Bill Burns to Condoleezza Rice put it, when the Bush administration was thinking about expanding NATO into Ukraine, that he said everybody in Moscow, not just Putin, but anti-Putin liberals, consider Ukrainian membership in NATO to be a red line, something they would go to war in order to prevent.
When Joe Biden was asked shortly before the summit if he was ready to give Ukraine membership in NATO, he said, not yet.
I don't think they're ready.
But eventually, I think that is something that should happen.
The consensus seemed to be that once the war is over, Ukraine should get membership.
You've made the point, though, that in a lot of ways, it almost is like a technicality, that in reality, NATO has already subsumed or absorbed Ukraine.
So what is your view on NATO membership?
And why do you think that in kind of in a de facto way, NATO has already swallowed up Ukraine.
Yeah, Newsweek actually asked me to write a piece exactly on this that came out a couple days ago so people can look that up if they're interested in further detail.
But the short of it is whether or not Ukraine ascends to formal NATO membership status now is almost a red herring.
It's almost a way in which the Biden administration in particular can say, oh, we're taking a moderate, measured approach in contrast with, let's say, some of these more hardline Eastern European states, whether it's the Baltics or Poland, who want immediate in statement of Ukraine as a full-fledged formal member.
Because, bear in mind, one of the benefits that comes with full-fledged NATO membership is that there's this collective security guarantee that kicks in, whereby countries are treaty-bound, in theory, to come to the defense of any country that's attacked, that's a member of the alliance, to come to the defense of any country that's attacked, that's
But never is it spelled out exactly how that is supposed to work or like what precise obligations are operative that are applicable to the NATO member states in the event of some country being attacked.
So the only time this was invoked was after 9-11 on behalf of the United States when NATO did initiate Article 5 proceedings.
And then all that led to, for a lot of countries, was sending a handful of maybe advisors or whatever to Afghanistan for this kind of NATO subsidiary mission in the Afghanistan war.
So it very easily could be the case that Ukraine is already receiving what would effectively be the benefits of full-fledged NATO membership, given the incredibly expansive weapons funneling operation and combat operation given the incredibly expansive weapons funneling operation and combat operation participation that NATO and the U.S.
are already engaged in Ukraine.
So, it's a bit of a distraction or a deflection.
In the aftermath of the summit, what you're seeing people say is, oh, NATO betrayed Ukraine because it was dangling membership over their heads and then pulled it away.
Whereas in reality, if you read the communique that they put out and if you look at the substance of what was actually offered to Ukraine in terms of increasing the incorporation of Ukraine into the structures of NATO, Ukraine is even more absorbed by NATO than it's ever been. Ukraine is even more absorbed by NATO than it's ever It's historically far more integrated into the infrastructure of NATO than it's ever been.
So, in other words, as you mentioned, the process that Vladimir Putin cited as a precipitating factor for why he claimed that he launched the invasion in the first place, that process has drastically accelerated with or without NATO conferring formal membership status.
And so the bottom line is that the formality of the membership bestowal is kind of a moot point, because more and more what is being done is that Ukraine is being gradually integrated, drastically more than could have been conceived two years ago, into the firmament drastically more than could have been conceived two years ago, into the And that's really the trend that's underway.
And to dismiss that as not amounting to full membership status, therefore that's a betrayal, it's a misunderstanding of what the substance was that was actually offered and what's underway in terms of integrating NATO into the security architecture.
Okay, so first of all, here's the Newsweek article that Michael wrote about that exact topic, about why effectively NATO has already swallowed Ukraine.
There you see it on the screen, Should Ukraine Join NATO?
Don't kid yourself, it already has.
That's by Michael Tracy at Newsweek, so you can read that.
He essentially makes the argument he just explained.
Here, I wanted to ask you something, Michael, about the kind of psychology of this war in the West in particular.
I recall in the first couple of weeks, I wrote a couple of articles and made a couple of videos, and I could see a lot of this coming where the energy and the emotion was of such intensity when the Russians invaded.
The kind of reaction was so visceral across the entire West.
Even if you go and look at the people who ultimately came to be skeptical of the war, voted even no on the authorization in those first few days, the things they were saying were so homogenized that you could just anticipate that this war was going to be very difficult to wind down Never!
Without defeating the Russians because the rhetoric was so maximalist about the moral component of this war.
And one of the things that has surprised me is that the pundit class in the West has been, I think, more aggressive about this war than even the war in Iraq, certainly the other wars in the West, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan.
The American network television devoted more blanket coverage to the initial phase of the Ukraine invasion than it did to the initial phase of the invasion of Iraq.
I'm very comfortable in saying there's no question that there was less dissent included in the coverage in the West about the war in Ukraine for those first few weeks than there was about the war in Iraq, even though the war in Iraq was notoriously propagandized in the sense that Let's find all your old friends.
or relegated to the back pages of the paper, if they could even make it in at all.
There were at least mainstream figures questioning and even opposing that.
Paul Krugman in The New York Times is one example.
Half the Democrats in the Senate, in the Democratic caucus, voted against authorizing that war.
Russ Feingold, your old friend.
Who?
Your old friend, Russ Feingold.
Yeah, my old friend Russ Feingold was against the war.
There were a lot of people who were against it, way more so then in Ukraine.
And this has really become the animating The spiritual mission of the West is to get greater glory and victory for the Ukrainians.
I mean, the way people speak of this war, especially when I hear Germans speaking about how Russia must be defeated and this war will never end until victory is ours while the German tanks roll to the Russian part of the border for the third time in basically 110 years, I find deeply alarming.
And I do think there's a very psychologically potent component to this war, which is that if you remove religion and other kinds of spiritual, organizational missions from people, they will search for spiritual fulfillment in the form of politics, and especially war.
And Adam Smith wrote about this.
In 1776, I've cited this before, but I want to read it because it's amazingly applicable.
It was in The Wealth of Nations, and this is what he wrote about the dangers of people cheering war, especially when their country or they themselves don't have to fight in the actual battles.
He wrote, quote, In great empires, the people who live in the capital and in the provinces remote from the scene of action Feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war, but enjoy at their ease the amusement of reading in the newspaper the exploits of their own fleets and armies.
To them, this amusement compensates for the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war and those which they have been accustomed to pay in time of peace.
They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace.
They are commonly dissatisfied with their turn of peace, which puts an end to their amusement and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
And if you look at the way in which Western pundits and the British are particularly pathological about this, they love nothing more than to don their Churchill voice and talk about the glories of war.
Not only is there no dissent over this war, there's no intention or desire to see it end diplomatically.
There's no pressure at all, not at all, to talk about how this war can end.
I just want to, along those lines, show you this video of Jamie Dimon, who is the insanely wealthy head of J.P. Morgan.
He was President Obama's favorite banker.
Here he was talking about-- - Isn't he toying with running for president? - He was running, I think he was toying with running for president in 2016 when it was Hillary versus-- No, I heard he's toying now.
He's toying this year.
I wouldn't be surprised.
He's the kind of person who definitely has that high of an opinion of himself.
And here he is giving an interview on Ukraine and listen to his comments.
By the way, this is somebody who has several children, none of whom have ever fought in the military or fought in war.
He has never fought in war.
He's been a supporter of every war, even though he's never gotten near the front lines.
And this is what he's saying about the current war in Ukraine.
There was a bipartisan support for American engagement, for American global leadership.
Now, if you look suddenly at the Republican Party, there's a growing isolationist wing in that party, and it's not at all clear what a future President Donald Trump might do in terms of American leadership.
If you're outside America, if you're, you know, I live in London, we're worried about this.
I would worry about it.
Just to be clear, what she's worried about is that there are people in the Republican Party, including potentially President Trump, who don't support endless warfare in Ukraine.
She asked him whether he's worried about that too, and this is what he said.
We're worried about this.
I would worry about another Trump presidency too, by the way.
But I think there's always been an isolation element.
It took a lot to get us to World War I. It took a lot to get us to World War II.
But I think if you go to Washington, D.C., when it comes to Ukraine, it's been pretty tight.
Republicans and Democrats.
So when it was needed, it was there.
And I think the other thing we have to explain to the American public is we're doing it for America.
So of course you have America first, meaning, you know, can you imagine someone running for president saying America second?
But we're doing this for America.
If America gets isolated, you know, if autocratic nations kind of cherry-pick the world on security and food and economics and development finance, you know, if the Chinese are all over Latin America, which they are, and Africa, and we're not there, that's a huge mistake for America.
So America should be doing this for itself.
We have to explain to the American public.
So he's not wrong that at the end of the day, the Republican and Democratic parties always come together and provide whatever support is needed, even when there's growing anti-war sentiment in one of the parties that there is now, as he points out, in the Republican Party.
But what do you think about this psychological aspect of this providing such an important sense of purpose and strength to a Western culture that otherwise lacks it?
Yeah, well I think even the location of the NATO Summit this year itself, meaning Vilnius, Lithuania, that it was held there in the first place is an indication of where the spiritual moorings are coming from that undergird this sprawling war effort.
Remember, it was almost unthinkable not too long ago that the faction calling the shots of NATO overall would be these more kind of bellicose Eastern European statelets, and that it would have been taken away from, you know, France and Germany as to who's calling the shots, really.
But now the members of NATO are very explicit often that they are happy to transfer over kind of the spiritual leadership of NATO to these Eastern European states and Poland in particular, which is becoming perhaps the most strong military or most well-equipped and most heavily resourced military in NATO overall, in Europe anyway.
And so...
Yeah, that just tells you what kind of a transformation has been happening.
Macron, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, a month or two ago gave a speech in Prague where he said that
Europe is making up for its past historical wrongs or the past historical injustices that it's inflicted upon Eastern Europe by conceding this quasi-leadership spiritualistic status to the Eastern European flank of NATO and handing itself over to their prerogatives as to how to handle a conflict like Ukraine.
I think that kind of gives Part of the European establishment, the security establishment anyway, this sort of sense of historical correction that they're undertaking by taking on this far more belligerent attitude toward Ukraine.
And going to what Jamie Dimon said, think of how just genuinely repugnant that is to totally neglect The actual real world impact of what this policy has done, which is produce, you know, the estimates vary.
But at the very least, what we can say is there have been tens of thousands.
And sorry, there's mayhem going on outside my window at the moment.
I have no air conditioning, so I'm sweating like a pig at the moment with the windows open.
At the very least, what we know is that there have been tens of thousands of, you know, 20-something Ukrainians and Russians that have been conscripted by their respective governments to just be obliterated on the killing fields of the Donbass.
And to Jamie Dimon, you know, that's something that's just great for the American national interest that we should, you know, press forward with no regard for the human toll of that Insanity.
I mean, it's genuine barbarism to look at that level of death among your most, kind of, potentially well-resourced, your most precious assets, which are people in the prime of their lives, being shipped off to just kill each other in, like, World War I-style trench warfare, and Jamie Dimon looks at that as some sign of optimism as to what America can gain out of this conflict.
Yeah, I mean, no, it shows that they have, they've supplanted any genuine sense of the suffering that's being wrought by this with this abstraction of whose interests can be advanced.
Well, if your interests are advanced by that level of death and destruction, then maybe you ought to recalibrate what your interests even consist of in the first place.
Yeah, I think, I mean, first of all, the reality is that the war in Ukraine has incredibly undermined American standing in the world.
It has caused this confederation of countries to unite increasingly behind China.
The Chinese marched into the Middle East, the traditional region of American influence, and negotiated a peace deal between the two leading regional superpowers, the Saudis on the one hand, the Iranians on the other.
And with all this attention and energy and resources devoted to who's going to rule the Donbass, it's opened up the world for China to engage in all sorts of things.
I mean, you have that, but you also have, for example, the prime minister of Japan making the first ever war zone visit of a Japanese prime minister since 1945 and going to Ukraine and affirming their steadfast allegiance to American priorities in Ukraine.
And you have the establishment of a block alliance between the Obviously, the Japanese are worried about China.
That's obvious.
It's not uniform one way or another with America losing or gaining prestige.
It's been a mixed bag.
I would encourage you, if you haven't already, to read the speech by Fiona Hill.
Who is a fanatical supporter of a hard line for both China and Russia.
He's essentially saying that the entire world, other than Western Europe and a couple of allies outside of it, are uniting against the United States because they've long viewed American military action through this prism of imperialism and aggression and a lack of consistent standards, but they had to swallow it previously and now they no longer have to.
Of course, there are, it is true, some geostrategic benefits in terms of NATO uniting, the Eastern Europeans being way more pro-American than they ever were previously because of their support for the war, but I think that even if- I mean, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, you can write them off as just insignificant outlier countries, but even they are now integrating into the NATO security- They were before out of fear of China.
Their issue is not Ukraine or Russia, their issue is China, and they want protection from China.
Yeah, but New Zealand and South Korea have always been an ally of the U.S.
New Zealand is in the Five Eyes alliance with the U.S.
The U.S.
has had bases in South Korea since the end of that war.
It's not like these are new allies rushing into American arms.
But in any event, my point was that I was trying to make before you interrupted on multiple occasions was that even if it were the case that we did have benefits to you strategically from this war, it is an incredibly sociopathic way to sit there in this like designer suit, knowing that your family is never getting it is an incredibly sociopathic way to sit there in this like designer suit, knowing that your family is never But I think even in those terms.
And by the way, the real casualties, the real casualties of the warring party that your taxpayers are supporting are just suppressed or kept in a black hole as if the U.S.
can't marshal its intelligence resources to figure out a reasonable casualty estimate for the Ukraine military at this point.
It's just too much of a hurdle.
And so you don't even get a full sense of the destruction that you're directly wreaking.
Yeah.
And obviously the people paying... We've been told this far and we can't even figure out how many dead bodies have piled up as a result of the weapons that we're pouring in.
Absolutely.
And I mean obviously Russia's paying a price.
They are losing incredible amounts of lives.
They are losing a lot of resources.
There are parts of Russia being attacked.
But the biggest country by far, paying the biggest price, is Ukraine.
That is where the most destruction is, enormous amounts of death.
It's going to take a generation at least to even get back to the level that they were at.
There's going to be international vultures swooping in to profiteer off of the destruction.
BlackRock is openly boasting about that, as are other uh, vultures in the financial industry.
And just, it's a very tragic war.
And to sit there and just so glibly talk about it as something positive with a smirk on your face is revolting, but that is the sociopathy of the American elite class.
Michael, we're on the verge of taking a week off.
We're going to be off next week.
I'm going to be traveling with my kids.
We're going to be off tomorrow night as well.
And so this was a relatively short but very sweet segment with you.
I really appreciate your coming on and offering your insights.
No segment with the two of us is ever sweet.
It was sweet.
It was short but sweet.
It was just my way of putting a little positive adjective on the fact that it was short.
Have a nice evening, Michael.
We will talk to you shortly.
Bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As I said, as a programming note, we will be off all of next week because of my traveling with my family.
And we will be off tomorrow night as well in preparation for that trip.
As a result as well, even though it's Thursday night, we will not be able to do our locals program after the show because we need to go back home and get everything ready.
Any of you who have traveled with kids before understand what I'm talking about.
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