Rep. Dan Goldman Spins Hunter Biden Lies to Jake Tapper, Bill Kristol Sponsors Pro-Ukraine War Propaganda, & Sohrab Ahmari on Right-Wing Populism | SYSTEM UPDATE #133
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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, when it comes to the censorship regime, the primary conceit on which it all is based is that we are blessed to have major institutions of power who can be trusted to discern what is true and what is false.
And we can therefore trust them to censor in order to keep us safe from other people's disinformation, meaning that which they have decreed to be false.
Among these benevolent institutions that have only our best interests at heart and which are steadfastly devoted to ridding our society of the scourge of disinformation are the nation's largest media corporations, the U.S.
security state, Big Tech, and the leadership of the Democratic Party.
These are the power centers that have united to set the bounds of what is and is not permissible speech.
And as polling data demonstrates, they have persuaded a large majority of Americans, particularly American liberals, to support their efforts to keep the Internet safe from false claims through their benevolent censorship power.
One of the problems with this inspiring tale is that absolutely nobody lies more frequently, more glaringly and more deliberately than those very institutions.
One major focus of this censorship program, or rather of this program, System Update, and of my journalism generally, is to identify and deconstruct the lies and disinformation campaigns that they routinely disseminate.
Doing so is necessary precisely because they deceive so many people with that nonstop tsunami of falsehoods, but also because it is vital to understand what the real functions of these institutions are.
When they lie, It is not because they have deviated from their mission or committed some sort of error.
The opposite is true.
They do that because they are fulfilling their mission.
The reason that those who lie most with inside corporate media or the U.S.
security state are the ones who are most rewarded within those institutions is because their institutional mission, their institutional mandate is to propagandize, deceive, and thus control the thoughts and then the actions of the American population.
Their lies are provable and clear, though sometimes they do require some time to demonstrate, because oftentimes one must wait for the relevant evidence to emerge from the dark where they've hidden it in secret, as happened with the Pentagon Papers, or the WikiLeaks publications, or the Snowden reporting, and the Twitter files, and so many other instances where we had a sense that they were lying but couldn't yet prove it journalistically because they sufficiently hid the evidence, often making it a crime
For the evidence of their lying to be disclosed.
Rarely, though, is a lie so blatant and immediate that one can show it the minute it comes out of their mouths.
That, however, is what happened this week when the new rising star of the Democratic Party, Congressman Daniel Goldman, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, who is from Manhattan, who was part of the Mueller team, and who got elected because his family is good friends with the Salzburgers, and who got elected because his family is good friends with the Salzburgers, the other billionaire heirs who controlled the New York Times, and he happens to have run for Congress in the one place the New York Times endorsement still matters, which is Manhattan, and that's
He went on CNN this week and was interviewed by CNN host Jake Tapper, and the lie that Daniel Goldman told was so obvious, is so easily provable, and is so undeniable that even though it's not necessarily the greatest and gravest and most consequential lie ever, we want to begin the show by showing it to you so that you can see just how we want to begin the show by showing it to you so that you can
And because I know for certain that nobody at CNN will ever correct or retract this lie, no matter how dispositive the proof is, no matter how many times they see it, and I know they will, yet again illustrating that their real function And the other fraud of their claims about who they are and what they do will become so evident.
They don't lie by accident.
They lie on purpose.
They don't lie in isolation.
They lie systematically.
Then a new and genuinely excellent book was released this week that illustrates the crucial ideological conflicts taking place within the Republican Party and our political system generally.
It illustrates a lot of the debates taking place, the vibrant debates within Western politics generally, and it also powerfully documents the way in which corporate power is being aggressively centralized and then weaponized To both impose a very menacing form of tyranny, as well as to abuse and repress America's working classes.
Written by Saurabh Amari, who was a former editor with the Wall Street Journal and who ran the op-ed page for the New York Post, and now he's the founding editor of Compact Magazine, which is designed to explore what I think is the ample common ground between political populists of all types.
The book is entitled Tyranny, Inc.
How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do About It.
The way in which corporatism, along with militarism, is becoming the defining ideology of the American ruling class.
It's been that way for decades, but it's gotten so much worse in the past several years.
In the process, crushing both core political liberties and the American working class is easily one of the most important developments of the last couple of decades.
I was excited to blurb the book when I read it.
When it was first in its draft stage, and now I'm really looking forward to talking with Sohrab, who I consider one of the most interesting and independent mind of voices around, about this book and his worldview in general.
And then finally, time permitting, we will look at a new fraudulent political activism group started by Supreme Neocon Bill Kristol that he is calling Republicans for Ukraine.
Even though Bill Kristol is not a Republican any longer, he is for good reason.
A person who overwhelmingly identifies to the Democratic Party and who continues to engage in all kinds of activism for Joe Biden's re-election and the re-election of Democrats all over the world.
But he still uses this branding of him being a conservative because that's what enables him to propagandize.
Oh, I'm a conservative and yet I agree with liberals.
That shows how powerful their view is.
And the purpose of this new group That has $2 million in funding already is to run television ads during next week's Fox News Republican primary debate that is aimed at Republicans who polls now show are turning against Joe Biden's support for endless war in Ukraine.
It's designed to make a Republican argument.
It's very patronizing how it does it.
That Bill Kristol thinks will get Republicans to come back on board supporting his latest war.
We will examine the question of who gave Kristol this $2 million and why they're doing that and why Democrats continue to find themselves in bed with the very same neocons who just 10 years ago they were regularly calling fascist and racist and bloodthirsty Nazis.
As a programming note, next week, as I indicated, the Republican primary debate, the first of the election cycle, will be held in Milwaukee.
It'll be held next Wednesday.
Fox News is the television outlet that has the exclusive rights to air that debate.
It will be hosted by two Fox hosts, Brett Baer and Martha McCallum.
But Rumble has the exclusive rights to stream the debate online.
That is, I think, a watershed moment for independent media and independent journalism.
The fact that the Republican Party did not turn to Google or Facebook or Twitter to exclusively stream the first presidential debate, but instead it gave it to Rumble.
And as part of Rumble's coverage of that debate, we will be going to Milwaukee, uh, We will be covering the debate live, both before and after.
We hope to be interviewing a lot of the people present there, presidential candidates and others.
So look for our program next week.
It may likely mean that we will be on the air at different times or more times than we normally are.
So we hope that you will tune in for that and That's a good segue to the fact that we are encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app, which works either on phones or smart TVs, because that way you can follow our program there.
And if you enable notifications, which we hope you will, it will notify you the minute we start broadcasting live on Rumble at any time.
That means if we do it at a time that's out of the ordinary or we're a little late, you don't have to wait around.
It'll be directly sent to however you ask it to be sent.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form.
You can follow the episodes 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
If you rate and review the show, it helps spread the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Whenever there's incriminating stories about Joe Biden, the practice of the corporate media is simply to ignore it, just to pretend that it doesn't exist.
That has happened in so many instances where new reporting has shed light on the corrupt actions, not of Hunter Biden, but of Joe Biden, with regard to the international business deals that Hunter had pursued in the name of the Biden family.
We've showed you so many times when that has happened, and it's true for other incriminating stories as well.
But there are times when the corporate media simply can't ignore it.
If Congress is holding hearings on it and then going around on other shows that put them on talking about it, they do have to sometimes talk about these stories.
They can't completely ignore them.
And when they do, when they're forced to, the reflexive practice is just to lie about these stories to immediately defend the Democratic Party and defend Joe Biden.
And that is the case with the emerging scandal involving Hunter Biden where the Biden Justice Department gave Hunter Biden such a remarkably generous deal That the minute it was subjected to judicial scrutiny, it instantly crumbled.
Both sides, or rather the prosecutors, denied that they were offering to Hunter Biden what Hunter Biden's lawyers, I think credibly, claimed that they had in fact offered him.
And then the deals fell apart.
And as we know, Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel who just so happened to be the very same prosecutor, David Weiss, who presided over this debacle in the first place.
We spent an episode last week exploring All of that.
Now, one of the key witnesses who the Republicans were able to get to testify is Devin Archer, who was a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden, and he was able to say many things, including the fact that Joe Biden was absolutely aware of and had spoken with Devin Archer about the deals in which Hunter Biden was involved, not necessarily on a granular or detailed level, but he was clearly indicating his happiness that those two were working together
despite years of denials, vehement, emphatic denials from Joe Biden and his White House that he was even aware of or had ever spoken to Hunter about these business deals, something they're now forced to acknowledge.
Now, as you know, the core of the scandal, or at least one prong of the scandal, is that There was a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that paid Hunter Biden $80,000 a month in order to sit on its board.
Nobody thinks it was because Hunter Biden has any expertise in the energy industry.
Even if he did, he knows nothing about Eastern European energy.
He was obviously paid for one reason, namely that he was promising access to an influence from his dad, who happened to be the Vice President of the United States.
Now, obviously, the question is, Why does Joe Biden have influence in Ukraine?
Ukraine's supposed to be a democratic country, a sovereign country, remember all that?
And the answer is because Joe Biden was the person who was running Ukraine, along with Victoria Nuland, under the second term of the Obama administration.
That was when Victoria Nuland and the State Department had succeeded in removing the democratically elected president from Ukraine, who the United States was getting angry at because they thought he was too close to Moscow.
And they replaced him with a puppet government that the United States was able to control.
And as a result, Ukraine essentially became like a colony of the United States.
Joe Biden was running Ukraine on a granular level to the point that he was even deciding which prosecutors should stay and which prosecutors should go.
And we know that Joe Biden intervened in Ukraine and demanded that the anti-corruption prosecutor, Victor Shonkin, be fired because Joe Biden boasted about it on video.
Exactly what Donald Trump was impeached for in that first impeachment trial, namely threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine unless Ukraine did what he wanted.
In the case of Trump, all he wanted was for Ukraine to provide information about what Joe Biden and his son were doing in Ukraine.
In the case of Joe Biden, however, he was threatening to withhold loan guarantees unless the Ukrainians fired their anti-corruption prosecutor.
And the argument has always been that Joe Biden did nothing corrupt there because the Ukrainian prosecutor that he wanted fired was not actually prosecuting or pursuing Burisma, the company paying his son, but was failing to prosecute Burisma.
And therefore, when Joe Biden demanded the firing of this prosecutor, it wasn't actually a favor for Burisma.
It was instead something that was bad for Burisma, a reasonable like the fact that there was this corrupt prosecutor.
That's the Democratic Party's version of events, and therefore that's the media's version of events as well.
Of course, there was a line.
So Devin Archer emerged as a critical witness, and he went to testify before the House Oversight Committee that was investigating, that is investigating, all of these business transactions between Joe and Hunter Biden in China and Ukraine and elsewhere.
And Devin Archer was asked about Burisma and about this prosecutor.
And Daniel Goldman, who has now become, I think, the most popular Democratic member of Congress with the possible exception of Adam Schiff.
He's always on cable news, on CNN and MSNBC.
He's a social media star.
They love Dan Goldman.
Dan Goldman is the heir to a billionaire fortune, the Levi Strauss fortune.
He has spent his entire life in private schools in Manhattan.
Exactly the kind of life that you would think that he had.
And so, of course, it's natural the Democratic Party, which is the party of the professional managerial class, Revere somebody who has spent his whole life as a billionaire, just living off the unearned wealth of his dad.
And everything about Dan Goldman reeks of that kind of life, in terms of how he speaks, how he conducts himself, the entitlement and arrogance that he oozes from every part of his body, and just the way in which he's willing to just blatantly lie.
He lies almost as much as Adam Schiff is willing to lie, and just sociopathically.
And so, in a lot of ways, Dan Goldman, who also was on the Mueller team, he's just right in the G-spot of Manhattan liberal voters.
A billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, on the Mueller team, constantly going on MSNBC to talk about Donald Trump and collusion with the Russians.
It's not easy to, it's not difficult to imagine why Daniel Goldman won in Manhattan despite running against many serious and professional politicians, including Mondaire Jones, the African-American congressman who was elected to his first term in 2018, who he defeated, as well as multiple others.
He also benefited from the endorsement of the New York Times, run by the Sulzberger Boys, who are also billionaire heirs to unearned wealth that they did not earn.
And the New York Times endorsement matters nowhere except in the Manhattan district where Dan Goldman is running.
You remember hilariously the New York Times in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign co-endorsed Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
So that shows you the value and the weight of the New York Times endorsement, except in this district where Dan Goldman was running.
So the path was paved for him by a combination of his family wealth, being a key part of the Russiagate fraud, and then having his friends, the Salzburgers, endorse him.
Anyway, he went on CNN, specifically with Jake Tapper, to talk about the question of whether Joe Biden intervened in Ukraine to help Burisma while it was paying his son.
And, in particular, the testimony of Devin Archer, who is being held out by Republicans as proof that Joe Biden was actually corrupt and did, in fact, intervene.
I want you to listen to what Dan Goldman said, because what he said is a blatant, easily proven, and deliberate lie.
And once you hear what he says, I'm going to show you the evidence that easily demonstrates that.
In fact, what we do know is that the only official action the president took related to Hunter Biden's business interests was detrimental to Hunter Biden's company business interest.
It was detrimental to Burisma as Devin Archer, this new star witness for the Republican said because The Burisma had the corrupt Prosecutor General, quote, and I quote the witness, under control and that that was a good thing for that Prosecutor General to be in office and yet Joe Biden urged Ukraine, the Ukrainian government, to fire that Prosecutor General.
That's the only connection that President Biden had with any of Hunter's business dealings.
Okay, so that was a pretty straightforward and easy to understand claim.
There's two components to the claim.
Number one, when Joe Biden intervened in Ukraine to demand the firing of this Ukrainian prosecutor, it redounded not to the benefit of Burisma, but it prejudiced their business interests because this prosecutor was somebody that Burisma had under control.
They didn't want him fired, according to Daniel Goldman.
And then the second prong of his claim is what he says is the substantiation of that assertion, which is that Devin Archer testified, said Daniel Goldman, that Burisma had this prosecutor under control.
So Dan Goldman went onto CNN and said to Jake Tapper that Devin Archer testified that there was no reason for Burisma to want this prosecutor fired because this prosecutor was under Burisma's control.
Now let's look at the transcript of the testimony that Devin Archer gave that Dan Goldman is referencing, where Dan Goldman was present and actually questioning him for part of this testimony, and so he knows what Devin Archer actually said, which is why I say he's deliberately lying.
So we're going to put this testimony on the screen and you see there the key parts which are already highlighted.
This is testimony that Devin Archer gave on August 4th.
So it's not like there's a time memory lapse issue.
We're talking about just a couple of weeks ago.
And the question that Devin Archer was asked was the following.
Are you aware that Vadim had told Blue Star that one of the issues or pressures that he was facing was related to Shonkin and the investigation into Burisma?
And here's what Devin Archer said.
Quote, so yes, I was.
The narrative that was spun to me, quite frankly just to be, and I remember this because obviously it's the narrative that was spun to me.
Was that Shoken was under control.
And that whoever the next person that was brought in was, you know, the fact that he was, this is the total, this is the narrative spun to me that Shoken being fired was not good because he was like under control as relates to my cola.
I have no way to verify that.
And that was spun to me from various folks in DC, not Hunter specifically, but that was what I was led to believe.
Whether it's true or not, I cannot speculate.
The purpose of what Devin Archer testified to, and he said it six times in that one answer precisely to prevent scumbags like Dan Goldman from twisting and distorting his words, was that the spin that was being created in Washington to justify what was that the spin that was being created in Washington to justify what Joe Biden was doing, the spin that was given to me, was that having this prosecutor fired was not good for Burisma, but instead was bad for Burisma because was that having
He even goes so far as to say, I have no way to verify that.
And here you see it, just to emphasize the point.
How many times Devin Archer tried to prevent Dan Goldman from lying this way?
He said, the narrative that was spun to me, again he says, the narrative that was spun to me was that Shonkin was under control.
And then he says, this is the narrative that was spun to me.
He said it a third time there, that Shonkin being fired was not good because he was like under control as it relates to McCullough.
And then again, Dan Goldman said, rather, Jonathan Archer said, I have no way to verify that.
And then for the fourth time, he said, and that was spun to me from various folks in DC.
Whether it's true or not, I cannot speculate.
Couldn't that be any clearer?
Now, when Dan Goldman got to ask Devin Archer a question, he tried to twist his words so that Daniel Goldman could justify going on to CNN and other places like it and lying about what Devin Archer said by claiming, oh, even Devin Archer admitted that the prosecutors being fired was not good for Burisma, was bad for Burisma because they had the prosecutor under control.
That's the only way to defend Joe Biden here.
And then to be able to say, even Hunter Biden's best friend and business associate, even the star witness of the Republican Party said, That Victor Shokin was under control by Burisma, or rather, yeah, Victor Shokin, the prosecutor, was under control by Burisma and therefore firing him was not good for Burisma, would be a pretty significant weapon for the Democrats to use to defend Joe Biden.
The problem is, Devin Archer didn't say that.
He went out of his way four times to say that wasn't what he was saying.
And so then Dan Goldman went back and asked, thinking he was a clever lawyer, Remember he was one of the stars of the Mueller team, the Justice League, the prosecutors that Robert Mueller had assembled, the A-team?
And so Dan Goldman tried again.
He said, let's talk about legally.
I think just to pivot to that, because you had said earlier that I believe the direct quote is that Burisma felt like they had Shoken under control.
Mitch Archer said, correct.
And then Mr. Goldman said, Dan Goldman said, what did you mean by that?
And Devin Archer again went back to say, don't go after this interview and lie about what I'm saying.
I'm not saying Burisma had the prosecutor under control.
So don't say I'm saying that.
He went and again said, that was like, that was a narrative that was told to me by various of the DC teams that the firing of Shoken was bad for Burisma because he was under control.
Do you see how extreme this is and how deliberate it is?
This is the lowest level, most primitive and crude form of lying.
It would be like if you were talking to a friend of yours and you were saying, Somebody in Washington who is a pathological liar told me that Daniel Goldman is an embezzler.
That the way he got wealthy was by stealing people's pensions.
And that he has spent his entire life embezzling people's money.
I don't believe that.
In fact, the person who told me is a pathological liar and therefore I don't believe that it's true, but that's what this person who I believe is a liar told me, that Daniel Goldman has spent his entire life embezzling and that his wealth is due to theft of pensioners.
Imagine if then somebody heard you saying that and went onto television and said that you said, based on that conversation I just described, That Daniel Goldman is an embezzler and that his wealth is based on theft of pensioners' money.
That's the same kind of lying that this is.
It's that obvious and that primitive.
And the reason I can say with great confidence that Daniel Goldman is lying on purpose, deliberately and intentionally, is because there's simply no way to have sat through this And heard Devin Archer go out of his way multiple times to try and tell Dan Goldman in so many words, do not claim that I'm saying this.
Dan Goldman went back to try and get him to say it.
And he rejected those words.
He refused it.
And he said, again, this is the bullshit narrative that was being spun to me in Washington.
I'm not saying that.
And then Daniel Goldman went on to CNN with Jake Tapper and lied and told the public that Devin Archer said exactly what he repudiated saying multiple times.
Now, again, I'm not saying this is the Pentagon Papers or the Snowden reporting or the WikiLeaks reporting.
I'm not saying it's on that magnitude of revelation.
It's not.
But the reason we're nonetheless devoting the first segment of the show to this is because I think it's unbelievable and important to see how casually these people lie.
They are complete sociopaths.
And the fact that he went on CNN and said that to Jake Tapper, and I'm not even necessarily saying Jake Tapper should have been prepared in that moment to correct him or fact check him, because it's not necessarily the case that you're going to master every nuance of a witness's testimony before an interview.
But what I do know for sure, I feel so confident saying, is that CNN is not going to retract that claim.
They're not going to go back now and tell their viewers that Daniel Goldman lied.
They're never going to confront him about it.
They're going to invite him back onto the program.
They're never going to mention this.
Just like, to this very day, not a single news outlet, including CNN, that spent the weeks running up to the 2020 election lying and saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation in order to help Joe Biden win the election, even though they now know that's a lie, ever went back and told their audience that either.
At some point, when media outlets lie and lie and lie and lie and lie, And it's shown that they're lying, or they allow their guests to lie.
And it's shown they're lying, and they never ever correct the lies.
I know it sounds like it's some kind of a sensationalistic claim I'm trying to make, that I'm speaking in order to denounce people, and I'm speaking with kind of maximalist claims.
It's not.
It's the only rational conclusion you can reach.
Is that these news outlets lie on purpose.
They're there to lie.
They're there to validate the liberal proclivities of their viewers.
They're there to show their viewers that they're willing to lie for the Democratic Party.
That's really what this is about.
That's what the willingness to spread the CIA lie about the Russian disinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop was about.
It's a way to try and signal to your viewers that you're not a journalist, that you also regard Donald Trump as such a grave threat the way they do, that it's vital that you defend Joe Biden at all costs, even if it means lying.
It's why I always go back to that Sam Harris video.
And I really say this with earnestness that we owe Sam Harris a lot of gratitude because he set forth in the clearest and most candid way yet the real mentality governing all of these institutions which is that the evil of Donald Trump is so severe that anything and everything done to in the name of stopping him including censoring and including lying like this is justified and that is the
real core of these institutions.
And I think that every single time we have an example like this, that's that glaring, it is crucial to dissect it.
All right.
So I thought we were having a little break there, but we are not going to have a break there.
We're going to be talking to Saurabh in just a couple of minutes.
So before we talk to him about his excellent new book, I want to show you A couple of crucial issues that's happening in Ukraine and in particular as I mentioned at the top a new activist group that has been launched and is being run by Bill Kristol that is a response to the polling data that we've been showing you that a majority of Americans are now turning against the US support for the war in Ukraine.
There was an Economist article this week that described how so many Ukrainian men are now dying in this war.
Troops.
They're not really troops, they're conscripts.
They're people who have been conscripted by Zelensky to fighting this war, usually against their will now.
That so many of them are dying in the attempt, the futile attempt, to break through entrenched Russian lines.
They're having to dig up mass graves from World War II in order to make room for the corpses.
That's how many people are dying in Ukraine.
There was an estimate from the New York Times today, which they acknowledge was probably a severe underestimate, that the number of troops that have been either killed or wounded on both the Ukrainian and the Russian side exceeds $500,000 and that's likely I just want to show you this new group that is designed to pretend that they're conservatives.
They're going to target conservative voters who are watching Fox News during the GOP debate in Milwaukee next week that we will be at.
And it's being run by Bill Kristol, who doesn't really even pretend to be a conservative anymore.
Bill Kristol is a neocon who is realigned with Democratic Party for perfectly good reasons.
If I were Bill Kristol and my agenda were bloodshed and endless war, For whatever his motives are, and just involving the U.S.
in every conceivable war possible, I would also align myself with the Democratic Party.
Because as our next guest just wrote a book describing, the politics of the Republican Party is changing, but the politics of the Democratic Party is very united, very steady at this point.
It's changed a lot, but it's now very clear what it is.
Which is why the majority of the support coming for the war in Ukraine comes from the Democratic Party.
So here's the Washington Post today reporting that, quote, a conservative group launches a new campaign to push for Republican support for Ukraine.
Quote, in response to the growing fissures within the Republican Party over support for the war in Ukraine, a conservative group is launching a $2 million campaign Urging Republicans in Congress to continue backing the U.S.
ally.
Defending democracy together.
That's the name of the organization.
That's what the war in Ukraine is about.
Defending democracy together, meaning arming a government that, even before this war, has been closing oppositional TV stations and banning political parties, and now is under martial law indefinitely.
They just extended it again, Zelensky did, for another three months, canceling in all likelihood the elections that had been scheduled for the fall, the legislative elections.
So the Bill Kristol's group is called Defending Democracy Together.
What we do to defend democracy together is we send tens of billions of dollars of arms to fuel the war in Ukraine forever.
An organization led by Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who I believe works for The Bulwark, which is the Pierre Omidyar-funded website run by Bill Kristol and conservative political commentator, Bill Kristol.
They're launching, quote, Republicans for Ukraine to get congressional Republicans to commit to continuing funding aid for Ukraine ahead of what is likely to be a lengthy appropriations fight.
The organization gathered testimony from more than 50 pro-Ukraine Republican voters, which will be shared in an ad campaign that will air starting Tuesday until the end of the year.
The advertisements will appear online, on billboards and on national television, including during the first Republican presidential debate on August 23rd in Milwaukee, which Fox News will broadcast.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Longwell, who runs regular focus groups for the Republican voters, said one of the most, quote, alarming trends she has seen over the past few years is, quote, a real drop-off in support for Ukraine.
Oh, do you think?
You think while people are struggling, while their real wages are stagnant or decreasing, and their towns are overrun with fentanyl deaths, and there's addiction and despair and depression and anxiety all over the place?
And people feel crushed by the deindustrialization of the United States?
Is it really a surprise that people are starting to say, wait a minute, I thought this war was going to be pretty fast.
I thought Ukraine was winning.
How many billions of dollars are we going to keep pouring into this war?
Longwell said that while she has identified other shifts within the Republican base, including voters becoming, quote, more protectionist on trade, more populist, and less interested in the rule of law, as she describes it and defines it, she has not seen any issue change as drastically as Republican attitudes around foreign policy.
A CNN and SSRS poll released earlier this month found that although most Americans, 55%, oppose The Congressional approval of additional aid to Ukraine that split over support is largely divided along partisan lines.
Exactly.
Among GOP voters, 71% think Congress should not authorize new funding and 59% say the United States has done enough to help Ukraine.
Democrats, however, say the opposite, with 62% saying they favor additional funding and 61% saying the United States should do more.
Last week, President Biden asked Congress to approve $20.6 billion in additional funding for Ukraine as its military struggles to achieve a decisive victory in its counteroffensive against Ukraine.
So that's Bill Kristol being Bill Kristol, doing everything possible to just constantly ensure that the United States is pouring as much money as possible into war.
The question, though, we have is, who gave him that $2 million in order to do that?
Where is this money coming from?
Now, we know for sure that it's Pierre Midiar, the Russiagate fanatic, the Never Trump fanatic who was funding The Intercept from the beginning when I co-founded it while I was becoming a hardcore skeptic of Russiagate and of Never Trump ideology in general.
I was often attacking Pierre Omidyar's groups that he was funding by Bill Kristol and others on Russia while at The Intercept.
So, obviously, when I read the Washington Post and of this new group of $2 million in Bill Kristol, the first question I had is, who gave them that money?
I obviously had my suspicions.
And then we looked into it, and lo and behold, here's what we found.
This is from Open Secrets, October of 2020.
Never Trump Group is 2020's top dark money spender so far.
And it says, according to form 990 filings, showing grants distributed by other non-profits defending democracy together, that's the group, received $1.6 million from Democracy Fund Voice, a non-profit funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
It also received $75,000 from the Hopewell Fund, a non-profit with ties to the top dark money donor of the 2020 election cycle, the Liberal 1630 Fund.
Still, the vast majority of its funding comes from sources unknown to the public.
Defending Democracy Together have partnered with the Lincoln Project to turn Republican voters against Trump.
As part of their initiative, Operation Grant, the two groups are aiming to mobilize anti-Trump Republicans in swing states such as Ohio.
The Lincoln Project has spent nearly $32 million on ads to unseat Trump.
Okay, so we have here, too, from CNBC that the anti-Trump group, led by longtime GOP strategist Bill Kristol, raised and spent millions during the 2020 campaign.
This is from December of 2021, and it says, Defending Democracy Together, that's the group running these ads, is like WorkMoney, a 501c4 nonprofit that does not publicly disclose their donors.
It's 990 disclosure form shows two anonymous donors, each worth over $10 million.
One of those donations came from the 1630 Fund, a dark money fund that often backs Democratic-leaning causes.
Previous backers of the group include a foundation run by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch's son, James Murdoch, and his wife, Catherine.
The Murdoch family owns a sprawling media empire, including Fox News.
Another previous financier of the group is a foundation funded entirely by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
I can't say for certain that this new $2 million came from Pierre Omidyar, but what I can say for certain is that this group is funded by Pierre Omidyar and by groups tied to Rupert Murdoch's son.
And what they're doing is really a fraud.
They're pretending to be Republicans supporting the war in Ukraine, when in reality it's being run by Bill Kristol, who's not a Republican in any way.
He explicitly renounced his connection with the Republican Party.
But anyway, that's how the United States works.
You work hard, you give your tax money to the United States, your communities are crumbling, you often don't have health care, the infrastructure of the United States is crumbling, there's all kinds of deaths from despair, and then the multi-billionaire Pierre Omidyar gives money to Bill Kristol to try and propagandize Republican voters to sending more and more and more billions of dollars to a war that has become increasingly futile and yet increasingly horrific.
That word is grim, and there is no end in sight.
And why it is that whoever's funding Bill Kristol has such an interest in keeping the war going in Ukraine?
There's been reporting that PRMDR actually gave money to the, quote, pro-democracy groups in Ukraine that played a big role in the removal of Ukraine's democratically elected president.
You have billionaires just playing around the globe as though it's their little risk game, like little boys playing risk.
And that is so much of how our politics functions.
Our guest on the line, and we are delighted to talk to him.
We're going to just take about a 30-second break and get ready for that.
Actually, we have that ready now.
He is Saurabh Arami.
He's the founding editor of the online magazine Compact, of which I believe I still am on the board of advisors.
I certainly was when it started.
I still am, I believe.
It is a great magazine.
I'm really happy to be associated with it.
He has a new book out this week, which is really provocative.
And important, it captures the key debates of the current moment.
Its title is Tyranny Inc.
How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do About It.
He was previously an editor with the Wall Street Journal and ran the op-ed page for the New York Post.
Prior to this book, he's the author of several other books, including The New Philistines in 2016, which was a critique of identity politics and how it corrupts the arts, and then From Fire by Water in 2019, which was I read part of it.
It's a really moving spiritual memoir about his conversion to Roman Catholicism from Islam, which is the religion in which he was raised, and he's long been identified with the Republican Party and conservative politics, and yet in many ways he's become, I'd say, one of the leading voices explaining how old establishment Republican doctrine on foreign policy, on economic policy, on trade, on labor, are completely failing America's middle class and working class and the United States in general, and we are really delighted to Have him here with us tonight.
Good evening.
It's so exciting to talk to you about this book, which I blurbed and now it's out in the world and I'm really excited to talk to you about it.
Glenn, thanks for having me and for your support of Compact and sitting on our board of contributing editors.
Yeah, absolutely.
I haven't had time to write for it, which I told you was likely when I agreed to join, but it's doing really important work in kind of exploring this common ground that a lot of people who are trained to see themselves on different sides of the political fence are actually finding themselves having.
And I actually wanted to start there because Your book, I think, is the kind of critique that I would say comes from the American right that probably wasn't something that would make a lot of sense in our political discourse, even as recently as a decade ago.
So before we get into that book, can you describe to me, not necessarily with reliance on political labels like left and right, although if you want to, of course you can, what you would kind of define as your political trajectory and your ideological journey as it began and where you are now?
Yeah, so I, professionally speaking, I was part of the establishment, right?
I started my career at the uber hawkish and kind of Reaganite pro-free trade, low taxes worldview of the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
That's where I started.
What do you mean by that?
Can I just interrupt you there?
I became more populist friendly in 2016, let's say, especially by 2017.
What do you mean by that?
Can I just interrupt you there?
When you say more populist friendly, what do you mean by that?
I think I understood why a lot of working class people in this country were turning toward this unlikely figure of Donald Trump.
The deaths of despair, the hollowing out of manufacturing centers.
I think all of that I was quite sympathetic to in part because when I immigrated to this country, you know, as a teenager, I had this brief brush with what it's like not to have health insurance to be to be pretty poor.
And that's become a permanent condition for millions of working class Americans.
And so I had this sympathy there that I think, you know, hark back to my own initial kind of American experience.
And then, you know, and then I went on to the New York Post, which is more it is within the Murdoch family of publications, but it's a little bit more feisty, a little bit more populist.
And my worldview is obviously kind of maturing.
And so I kind of began to inject more and more of a kind of economically populist note in so far as was possible within those constraints of even skepticism about foreign hawkishness.
Now, obviously, is a different matter because I run my own publication with my friend Matthew Schmitz, and we're both refugees from the establishment right.
But we think that there's important things that the American right, even in its now kind of Trumpian or post-Trumpian mode, doesn't get right about the economy.
And of course, it's still wildly beholden at the establishment level to foreign policy hawks.
So I've been struggling a lot with these words, left and right, conservative and liberal, because I really believe that they are more impoverished than helpful in terms of a lot of our political debates, even though they still matter in terms of having to think about what your first principles are.
But for me, at least, I think that We don't have to go back to first principles, right?
We're not constructing a society from scratch.
We're living in a society that has a lot of realities embedded within it and we try and think about ways to improve it without necessarily dismantling the whole thing and building it up from scratch.
A lot of times the first principles I think are more academic than anything, but I've come to think, I think a lot of people have, More in terms of pro and anti-establishment, and I would describe your book as a very anti-establishment book because in it you paint what I think is a very grim picture of America in the sense that the government, power centers, establishment ideologies are failing its own citizens in very severe and fundamental ways.
Is that an accurate portrayal of how you see things?
And if so, how would you describe that failure?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think that the way I describe it is that politics, where we do, you know, political contestation, we disagree about each other using the ballot box, using protest movements, labor activism, so on and so forth, has been sidelined, in part because we've seen the rise of what I call private tyranny.
We're used to thinking of tyranny as only what the government does, and that's certainly true, and there's an honorable American tradition of being alert to state tyranny.
But there's also, we've seen, especially with cases like debanking the online censorship by big tech, And similar efforts, we've seen the rise of the possibility of private coercion, which becomes actually harder to combat in some ways because our reigning kind of establishment ideology says, no, no, no, that's a private sphere.
It's a market zone.
And therefore, you know, what's done to you under the terms of service of, you know, a tech company run by an oligarch or what's done to you by a bank when you're Worldview runs afoul of the managers of the banks worldview.
That's that's not something you can contest.
Right.
It's the market.
And you made the choice.
And you can always try to find a better better deal elsewhere.
The problem is that in realities of the free market, so-called free market, in fact, we're dealing with most industries being dominated by a few large actors.
So the idea that just supply and demand or marginal productivity, all these kind of concepts that they learn in Econ 101, don't really apply in these conditions of oligopoly of just a few large actors in most markets.
When I look back at this kind of the evolution of American conservatism, the decade in which I kind of came up political age was the 1990s, the early 1990s when I was entering my mid-20s and starting to think a lot about early 20s.
And at the time, the United States was absolutely dominated by Reaganism, by Ronald Reagan, this kind of gigantic figure.
And one of the Things that I think he succeeded in doing most, that arguably was his most consequential legacy, was finding ways to persuade Americans, including poor Americans and working-class Americans, that capitalism in its most extreme expression was not only just, but something that they should cheer for, that they should celebrate when people were extremely wealthy, even if they themselves weren't, and often were struggling to
find ways to support their family.
They were told that a rising tide lifts all boats and all of these kinds of, you know, phrases that were neatly packed.
And he was a great actor and a very good salesman.
And people trusted and liked him and believed in that.
And the era celebrated, you know, this kind of ethos of greed, as it were.
That was what Wall Street was about and Gordon Gekko and all of this.
I mean, it's very much like something I associate with.
And I'm wondering whether your attraction to conservatism in that earlier iteration was something that you still support, the idea of capitalism as it was presented under this kind of Reagan economics or whether you kind of look the idea of capitalism as it was presented under this kind of Reagan economics or whether you kind of look back and said, I no longer think that that vision is something that benefits Americans or is it just that capitalism has become corrupted and
No, I would say that I've become pretty skeptical of that worldview.
And in doing so, I actually follow deeply American traditions, including conservative traditions of the pre-Reagan era.
So if you look at the rise of market society in the United States, first of all, it's the Hamiltonian state that's doing that.
So the market system did not arise just sort of organically out of a few yeoman farmers trading.
We had a state that actively was a developmental estate doing You know, internal improvements, you know, early forms of central banking.
All of this was quite coercive.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's all bad.
There's obviously it's brought about tremendous growth and the United States grew much faster during the 19th century than it had during the colonial era.
But it also, you know, it had costs.
It certainly empowered a narrow elite, what in the 19th century they called the money power.
And it stressed out yeoman farmers and made them more and more slaves to debt.
Tremendous pressure on workers, et cetera.
So there are these American responses that are quite skeptical of capitalism.
And if you read some of the quotes, for example, of the Jacksonians, including President Jackson's own veto of the Second Bank of the United States, if you didn't know that Jackson said that, you would think it was a quote from Bernie Sanders, where he decries how the rich become richer.
The poor become poor and the politics is needed and a mass politics is needed to stop that.
And then you get the New Deal tradition in the 20th century, which was upheld not just by Democrats, but also by Republicans in this sort of older Eisenhower-Nixon tradition.
So I look back at that sort of Reagan era as, you know, it's just not reflective of the full American tradition.
It's a kind of invented, relatively recent thing.
You know, one of the realities of the 2016 campaign, of Trump's successful 2016 campaign, successful both in the sense that he vanquished the Republican establishment in the primaries and then won and defeated the Clinton machine in the general election, was people remember very well that he He ran against and denounced Bush-Cheney neocon foreign policy.
Everybody understands that.
Everybody remembers that.
Everybody knows that.
He also, though, really ran a lot against traditional economic policy of American conservatism, including doing something Republican politicians never would have done, which is saying essentially that Reaganomics no longer serves us well, even if it did previously.
And Steve Bannon's vision, and I wish I could live in the world in which it ended up finding expression, was the first thing we're going to do is get into office.
We're going to do a bipartisan deal for an infrastructure package.
We're going to renew American infrastructure.
We're going to put Americans back to work with this massive spending package.
Then we're going to raise taxes on the wealthiest.
And then we're going to take that money, and we're going to use it to build a wall.
Kind of a vision of American nationalism, of populism, and how those can be fused.
I think Jerry Kushner ended up winning that power battle, and instead Spana was out, and one of the first things President Trump did was cut corporate taxes.
Do you though think that, I mean I definitely think there's this enduring change in the Republican Party when it comes to views of the security state, of American liberty, of surveillance, of the CIA, of foreign policy as a result of Donald Trump.
Do you think there's an enduring and real change in how Republican voters think about corporatism and the oppressive role that large American corporations play in their lives, not just culturally but economically as well?
I would say that's certainly true of a growing number of the Republican base, a growing share of the Republican base, I should say.
You know, in 2016, as you said, Trump ran on defending entitlements.
I'm not going to cut your entitlements.
Free trade was a failure and even hinting at a support for some sort of public health, public option in health care.
You know, he told Senator Cruz, I'm not going to let people die on the streets.
And those working class people, many of whom were, you know, Obama voters in 2012, shifted to Trump so that he won the highest marginal share for a Republican president of union households in 2016.
As you said though, he didn't, even though he didn't really deliver much for that group of voters, in 2020 he consolidated with them and even began making inroads among working class people of color.
But I just don't, I don't see the The party apparatus being capable of delivering a working class agenda in the way that we would want it to.
And the problem is that what I worry about is, you know, working class people are smart.
If you just, if you only do culture war and everything about anti-woke, and I'm pretty anti-woke, I find a lot of it just obnoxious or downright sinister.
But if you just talk about anti-woke, anti-woke, anti-woke, and not talk about things like, you know, Corporate power and, you know, rethinking the American economy because it leaves these deaths of despair in its wake.
Eventually, working-class people are not stupid.
They're going to catch on to that, and either they'll become apathetic or some share of them will just fold back into the Democratic Party, where at least, okay, the unions get a little bit of something.
And it's really tragic, but it's a responsibility for these Republicans who claim to be populists to actually deliver concretely on the economy.
One of the moments I thought was so telling about the potential for this vision that you're laying out to find fruition was when it was late 2020.
I believe it was even after the presidential campaign, but before Trump acknowledged that he was heading out of the White House.
And there was a COVID relief package.
And Bernie Sanders decided that he was going to filibuster that COVID relief package unless direct payments were made to American citizens, not just to large businesses.
And the person who stood with him in filibustering that was Josh Hawley.
So you have this kind of very classic example of the promise of right and left populism joining together.
And then it turned out that when the bill was sent to President Trump, he vetoed it on the grounds that the payments were insufficient.
He wanted, I think, $2,000 payments directly to the American people.
Ended up getting sent back to Congress.
They did increase the number of direct payments.
And then President Trump ended up signing that legislation.
That was a model of the kind of thing I think you were hoping for in 2016 and even throughout the Trump presidency that you seem to have given up on, at least in terms of Republican Party politics.
Why isn't there more of those moments that so clearly would be politically popular, not just politically popular, but political bonanzas?
Yeah, I mean, I think one is, unfortunately, the Republican Party, like any institution, has its institutional grooves, and it cannot get out of right now that rut of, you know, these cliches about markets that just aren't real.
I mean, I think that's certainly one of it.
Lack of personnel.
So Trump wanted to staff up a Department of Labor.
He had made Definite outrage to late, you know, organized labor in this country and organized labor is not all like, you know, extreme leftist the way Republicans portray them is a lot of ordinary work working class people.
I bet that's their historic movement for securing their rights and just getting a better deal at work.
You know, unfortunately, when he came around to try to staff his department, who is there that's a Republican?
It was all a bunch of union busters.
So that's who ran his labor department.
So that's, I think that's one factor.
Which is very similar to the foreign policy apparatus, right?
That he came in with this anti-neocon agenda.
Then you have Mike Pompeo running a bunch of security institutions and Mickey Haley at the UN and John Bolton eventually worming his way into the White House.
So, of course, you're not going to have a This popular vision when all you've hired are a bunch of warmongers neocons and you find the same thing in terms of economic policy.
I didn't mean to interrupt, I just wanted to draw that parallel there because very much something similar happened.
No, that's exactly right.
And I think another factor in all this is the fact that President Biden, I have to say, has incorporated much of that critique in elements of it in his policy in a way that's very challenging, I think, for Republicans.
And again, I've been calling on Republicans to be alert to this, you know, my own side.
But, you know, he has kept up the tariffs that Trump imposed.
He's actually accelerating the decoupling from China.
He's pursuing industrial policy with the chip stacks and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Now, you might disagree with the details, and I certainly don't agree with all the details of those, but the Biden administration is doing those things.
Having defanged populism, I think, the establishment in this country in very underhanded ways by using like the Russia collusion hoax and etc.
They're clever enough to give in and recognize that the environment has changed.
And so I just think if these GOP populists don't show equal vision, they'll be left behind.
But there are, I have to say, there are green shoots.
You know, you mentioned Senator Hawley.
He's certainly one of them.
Another one is Senator Rubio.
I'm sure you disagree with him on foreign policy, but on domestic policy, he's been very good supporting unionization drives at Amazon and elsewhere.
Senator Vance has allied with Senator Liz Warren on banking executives of bringing in their power.
So, you know, I don't want to sound all grim.
There are serious and worthwhile little developments that, you know, should hearten one.
So I want to focus on the word in your book that we haven't yet talked about.
It was actually the thing that got me excited to read it the first time when I read it.
Which is tyranny.
Usually when this topic is discussed, and obviously it's a very significant frequent topic on my program and in my journalism, we're talking generally about tyranny that comes from the state, about ways in which the US security state or In the age of COVID, health policy agencies constrained the American people, ensured that their liberties are being restricted in all kinds of previously unthinkable ways.
Obviously, that was a major story in the war on terror after 9-11, exploiting fears of Al Qaeda.
Your book focuses, though, on the tyrannical components that come not from the government, but from private power, from private corporations.
Explain what that dynamic is.
Yeah, so again, you know, coercion pervades us in the marketplace and in the workplace.
So much of the book is really trying to show that to the reader, because most readers are used to thinking of state power as the only source of coercion and unjust tyranny.
But there is a great deal of tyranny in the private sector as well.
It's not this zone of freedom and spontaneity.
And so I show that in by sort of reported stories.
Typically, they're not the headline-grabbing type of story.
I thought a lot of the anecdotes in your book were among the strongest parts of your book, that this is not just like a dry academic discussion.
You talk about a lot of the ways specific Americans have been suffering, in some ways that are pretty brutal and shocking at the hands of corporate power.
Can you just tell one of those stories that you think illustrates the kind of dynamic you're describing?
Yeah, so it would be, for example, the abuse of commercial arbitration in the workplace.
It can get wonky, but I can explain it pretty quickly.
So commercial arbitration is this ancient practice where merchants of relatively equal bargaining power, that's very important, relatively equal bargaining power.
They agree and say, before we go into a deal, if any dispute arises, instead of going to a typical traditional court with all the expense and pain of litigation, we will submit it to a neutral mediator who doesn't even have to be a lawyer or a judge, and they will summarily sort of decide our dispute.
That's perfectly fine.
And in 1925, Congress passed a law called the Federal Arbitration Act to allow merchants to bind themselves in this way and then to enforce arbitral agreements in federal courts.
Perfectly fine.
But over the past two generations, since really the 1980s, mainly led by conservative Supreme Court justices, arbitration has now been expanded to the workplace, a situation which is typically there's vast difference in bargaining powers.
If you are the individual employee of, let's say, Ernst & Young, which is actually a real story, a low level accountant, And you show up to work one day and you get an email that says, going forward, if you have a dispute with us, we're going to submit it to our kind of corporate design mediation process and you can't go to court and you can't do class action.
It's not like you can say, well, no, I'd like to renegotiate that.
As again, classically liberal kind of free market theory says, you show up to work because following day you have to put food on the table again.
So that's what happened at Ernst & Young.
And so this employee who claims that he was not paid overtime that was due to him under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the federal law that guarantees you overtime, he was not paid that.
But Ernst & Young insisted on sending it to arbitration where it would have cost him $200,000.
And again, Ernst & Young didn't challenge that it would have cost this employee, Stephen Morris, $200,000.
In order to recover $2,000, right, so 1% of the cost of the actual arbitration.
But our Supreme Court, you know, again, a Trump appointee.
wrote the opinion.
Justice Neil Gorsuch said, well, he had freely contracted and so arbitration overrules all.
And so in other words, what's happening is you have a real claim and there's a law called the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is specifically designed to encourage you to band with other weak workers and bring collective action to bear.
If you're forced to go into individual arbitration, it's just too costly and irrational for you to pursue your claim.
So what that means is you're basically denied ordinary justice.
So it's a technical case, but it's the kind of first of all, an example of how the Trump administration, again, the Department of Labor was on the side of Ernst & Young under Trump.
And also how insidious it is, you know, it's not the kind of thing that you typically see, because most of us just signed the employment agreement.
Because we don't have power to really bargain in the market unless we can act collectively, which is what labor unions used to do.
But unfortunately, they're so weak now.
So I have so many questions that we could delve into.
I think this book covers so many crucial things, but I only have time for one last question.
I wanted to ask you about something that's in the news that I actually think is a really interesting topic.
I've been wanting to hear your opinion on it for a while.
I wouldn't be surprised if you've been asked about it in interviews you've done this week in connection with the launching of your book.
But there's this overnight sensation in this song that was written apparently by this person named Oliver Anthony, which I think is his stage name.
I believe his legal name is something else.
But in any event, obviously...
As always happens, liberal journalists are digging for dirt on him to try and destroy his reputation because his politics and their view is a little bit off.
But he has a song, Richmond, North of Richmond, which is sort of like a working class anthem or a kind of grievance song from the perspective of working class people in the Appalachians or in the South.
that is cultural and economic in its scope.
It's become the number one most listened to song on several charts.
It's a real hit.
It's obviously resonated in a deep way.
There's been some critiques kind of nitpicking the politics of it, including the fact that he blames at some point in one of the stanzas, you know, people who are getting welfare unjustifiably, which was the Reagan technique for keeping working class people angry at those below them as opposed to those above them. which was the Reagan technique for keeping working class people But on the whole, it's something that I think is reflective of how a lot of people think and feel.
And I'm wondering what you make of that song in connection with the politics you're talking about in your book as well as the very predictable and bitter reaction on the part of the punting class to it.
Yes, the reaction.
Yeah, so full disclosure, I'm not a country music fan, you know, but I was also struck by the people who are nitpicking, especially on the on the conventional American right.
This is what I noticed.
And I did write about it because I got angry.
You know, I don't like that line about fat people on welfare.
I think that's kind of a cliche.
And I don't think that a lot of people who are on welfare Anyway, I won't get into it.
It just sounded to me as something too on-the-nose, too much like Newt Gingrich politics.
But setting that aside, when Oliver says, I'm working, you know, and the wages are shit.
I can't remember what the exact lyric is.
That's absolutely true.
And it was very interesting to see the conventional establishment American right, namely the National Review Magazine, published this response so condescendingly saying, well, my friend, my brother in Christ, if your wages are low, we're actually in a tight labor market.
You should just move and, you know, try to find a better job.
In this case, actually, the country song is closer to our political economic reality.
Over the past two generations, real wages for the bottom half of the labor market have barely budged at all.
And a lot of the kind of conditions that he describes in the song are realities.
the counties in the United States that were most exposed to, for example, free trade by Republican and Democratic elites are the same places where you have the highest rates of fentanyl and opioid addiction.
So I think that on the whole, I'm with you, that the song expressed something very real, which is why it's resonating.
And it's just all too telling and enraging and infuriating, frankly, that the immediate response of the establishment right in this country is like, poo-poo it.
Oh, come on.
You just got to work harder.
Come on.
Just show more effort.
I mean, that's all too typical.
And I don't blame anyone for not supporting the conservative movement if that's its reaction to a song like that.
Yeah, I mean, of course, that was the resentment from the establishment, from the liberal establishment as well.
And I think, you know, people who are in the multiracial working class, not just the white working class, that might have been true 10 years ago, but the multiracial working class are starting to realize That it just, even though it's a cliche, it is nonetheless true that the power centers in the United States and the people who compose them have real contempt, a snide condescending contempt for the way they think, the way they are, what they believe, the complaints that they have.
They simply don't care.
I remember, you know, the interview that I saw in 2016 that was most illuminating for me was they interviewed a coal worker in West Virginia who had lost his job.
And he was voting for Trump and they said, you know, essentially, do you really believe Donald Trump is going to bring back the coal industry?
And he said, no, actually, I don't believe him when he says that.
But at least he's coming here and talking about it and recognizing the suffering that we have.
Whereas Hillary Clinton comes and basically says, just get over it.
You know, the coal industry has gone.
It's time to move on.
And I think not only that song, but the reaction to it so much speaks to the current moment And I want to congratulate you on your book.
I think your book actually covers a lot of these debates inside the Republican Party.
There's very little debate inside the Democratic Party.
It's very vibrant within the conservative movement.
I think your book comes out right at the perfect moment as we head into this election, where a lot of these issues are being debated and represented by different candidates.
I always find your work thought-provoking.
I found your book thought-provoking.
I hope people will read it.
It's Tyranny, Inc., and check out Combat Magazine as well, which always publishes some great stuff as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it.
I know your launch week is a very busy week, so I appreciate it.
Glenn, you're very kind.
Thank you.
All right.
Have a great week.
You too.
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