Bernie Denounces Cornel for Spoiling Biden's Chances—Completing Transformation Into Establishment Hack, w/ Sabby. Plus: Overcoming Destructive Ideological Stereotypes | SYSTEM UPDATE #140
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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.
The Republican presidential debate held last week in Milwaukee revealed some very sharp and serious divisions within that party.
Ideological conflicts, not about ancillary issues, but about fundamental ones.
We devoted several shows over the last week to examining those very vibrant and often bitter disputes taking place within the GOP and the American right generally.
Splits that have been long brewing, but that exploded into plain sight with the inability of the Republican establishment to stop Donald Trump in 2016, despite using every weapon that establishments have.
And that had become even more visible now with the failure of the Republican establishment, the seeming failure though increasingly desperate attempts to wrestle that control back from Trump and restore traditional Republican establishment orthodoxies.
Now, simultaneous with the emergence of these sharp differences within the Republican Party, the Democratic Party has become almost the exact opposite.
That party has virtually no internal differences of any meaningful kind.
Other than perhaps the post-911 Republican Party from maybe 2002 to 2004, I really don't think I've ever seen in my lifetime one of the two political parties more bereft of internal debates, factional conflicts, or ideological disputes than the Democratic Party of 2023.
The Democrats march in the lockstep, all of them, and it is virtually inconceivable to imagine putting party leaders on a debate stage and watch them do anything other than express, at best, the most piecemeal and trivial disagreements.
While Republican and conservative voters openly despise many of their party's establishment leaders, Democrats from the AOC and Bernie left to whatever is on the right, Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, have basically united all of their factions, including the ones who as recently as a couple of years ago were parstering as party opponents.
They have them completely in line, under control, and in captivity.
In 2016, the nominally independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont led what he called a political revolution.
One, he said, not solely at establishment Republicans, but equally at the Democratic Party as well.
Now, Bernie and his followers depicted themselves back then as some sort of threats to Democratic Party establishment dogma and to the center of party power itself.
And they paraded around as radicals, as revolutionaries, waging war on the Democratic Party.
Now, one can spend an infinite amount of time debating whether there was anything genuine about that moment or whether it was just a marketing pose, but ultimately it doesn't really matter because they no longer pretend.
Even that pretense is gone.
One of the very first members of Congress to endorse Joe Biden in the 2024 election was Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 primary victory over establishment Democratic Congressman Joe Crawley was celebrated as some sort of intimidating and radical blow against Democratic Party establishment orthodoxy.
AOC endorsed Biden already, even though he has two primary challengers within the party, RFK Jr.
and Marianne Williamson, the latter clearly running to Biden's left, as well as an independent candidate with the Green Party, clearly running as the anti-establishment politician AOC pretended to be, Cornel West.
But any doubts about the utter fraud that is the supposedly left-wing oppositional faction within the Democratic Party was completely erased last week when Bernie Sanders, the revolutionary leader from 2016 and 2020, not only endorsed Joe Biden, also becoming one of the earliest members of Congress to do so, but was sent out to attack Cornel West, his longtime friend and one of his most vocal supporters,
After a new poll showed that West running as an independent would draw many votes away from Joe Biden, the worst crime there is.
Bernie, as he always does these days, eagerly obeyed his order and fulfilled his role as party enforcer, as unity enforcer, with gusto and glee.
Using his old persona as an establishment critic to attack Cornel West for the crime of challenging Joe Biden and the DNC establishment.
Now, after spending the last several shows examining the internal debates within the Republican Party, tonight we're going to examine the utter lack of them inside the Democratic Party.
And to help us do that, we are going to be joined by one of our favorite left-wing critics of the Democratic Party, Salvina Salvati of the Revolutionary Blackout Network.
That is a program who hosts we've had on our show many times before.
I believe this is Sabi's first appearance on our network.
But we will talk to her about the fact that there is essentially now full unity, the entire network of power centers, not only within the Democratic Party, but those that support the party, the corporate media, big tech, Wall Street, and especially the liberal left.
Then, last year, while at Substack, I wrote about the very improbable but very profound friendship that formed between my late husband, David Miranda, who was one of Brazil's most prominent gay politicians, and Cabo Daciola, arguably one of Brazil's most well-known evangelical politicians, who was known for his steadfast opposition to legal recognition of LGBT relationships.
And in that article, I described how Daciola, who started on the left about a decade ago when he became an overnight star, when he led a very charismatic fight as the leader of a strike by the firefighters for better living wages, is now widely depicted by the Brazilian left as a hateful bigot, particularly against is now widely depicted by the Brazilian left as a hateful bigot,
And yet, beyond developing a deep and meaningful friendship with David, Cabo was one of the people who dedicated the most attention and support when David was hospitalized for nine months in the ICU last year and then afterward when David died in May of this year.
Support that he gave not only to David by visiting him in the hospital and praying over him and with him but also to me and our family with constant phone calls to me asking how David was doing, how I was doing, how our kids were doing.
And I wrote the article to illustrate a lot of lessons about common humanity and ideological demonization and what really matters and what doesn't matter About how we judge people's character and their values.
Last night, in the middle of the night, Daciola's beloved wife Christiana passed away after a years long and deeply painful battle with leukemia.
She was 52 years old, and she left behind not only her husband, but also their three children, all of whom are in their teens.
His tragic loss, that I learned about only this morning, caused me to reflect again on the lessons derived from our interactions with him over the last year.
But it also led me to want to share a very formative story that shaped a lot of my perspectives about what does and does not matter when judging the real values and characters of other people that I experienced in my early 20s when in law school in New York, and I will share that story with you at the end of the show as a way of, I think, giving insight into the politics of our show and what we're trying to accomplish.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So although I want to begin this first segment talking about American politics, I want to do so by quickly talking about British politics.
Because something happened in the United Kingdom that I think often doesn't get enough attention.
It's not the vote to leave the EU called Brexit that happened in 2016, a vote that we discussed last night that I believe was the event combined with Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton months later.
That led Western power centers to conclude that the internet and Western populations could no longer be trusted to be free.
But what happened in the UK is very similar to what happened in the Republican Party in 2016.
In 2016, Donald Trump overtly ran against the Republican establishment, whose orthodoxies on foreign policy and on immigration and economic policy he vehemently and unflinchingly denounced.
And yet he won anyway.
And something very similar was being attempted in the Democratic Party when Bernie Sanders lodged a campaign that nobody took seriously in the beginning because nobody believed the Clinton machine could be defeated.
And yet he came very close to beating Hillary Clinton.
The DNC, in the words of Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile and others, had to cheat in order to prevent him from winning, but ultimately He didn't win.
The establishment in the Democratic Party won and then they fortified their stranglehold in 2020 when they got rid of Bernie very easily and ultimately crowned and anointed Joe Biden.
So you have two very different stories.
The complete failure of anti-establishment or whatever you want to call them, left-wing critics of the Democratic Party to take over their party.
They completely failed to do so and rather than Demanding things from the party or threatening to leave the party.
They just became more subservient than ever.
They followed their leader Bernie Sanders and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez into more subservience to the Democratic establishment than ever.
Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, the exact opposite happened.
Donald Trump vanquished the Republican establishment, even though they did everything in their power to destroy him.
And they are now, as a result, trying desperately to take the party back.
And yet it seems like any candidate who espouses establishment pieties from the pre-Trump Republican Party has very little chance to win.
In the United Kingdom in 2015 and 2016, something very similar happened, which is the Labour Party, the longtime center-left party in the UK, that has typically been controlled by centrists and people now called Blairites.
After the three-term Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who modeled himself very similarly to Bill Clinton, who turned the Labour Party away from Labour and the working class into the party of the professional managerial class and corporations, ends
Lost control of their party because Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour Party leader, even though Jeremy Corbyn had spent his entire life as a backbencher in the Labour Party and was somebody who essentially had views that were very anathema to the vast majority of the establishment, more moderate Labour officials.
Now, what always happens in Democratic Party politics or in Republican Party politics is that whenever the party nominates someone disliked by the vast majority of voters, whether it be Mitt Romney or John McCain in the Republican Party or Joe Biden in the Democratic Party, the dissidents, the people on the left, are told it doesn't matter that you are dissatisfied with the leader.
Your responsibility is to vote for the party anyway.
Even if we cheated to make your candidate lose, because the only thing that matters is that our party wins and stays in power.
So even though you, people on the right, You're with your anti-establishment and populist America First ideology.
When you have to vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain or George Bush and Dick Cheney, you swallow it and you do it because that's what good party followers do.
And that's what Democrats are told now, not only by the party establishment, by the people they thought were challenging that establishment, like Bernie Sanders and AOC.
They're told it doesn't matter how much we cheated right in your face, how much hatred we spew at you, your obligation is to support the party no matter what.
Now, I know probably a lot of you have a view of Jerry Corbin that is extremely negative because the propaganda campaign that was launched to destroy his character was virtually unlike anything I've ever seen.
And I'm not going to ask those of you who believe that propaganda campaign or that demonization campaign to change your minds about it simply because I request it.
If I do that, it'll be because I devote a show to dissecting that propaganda and showing it to you and trying to persuade you of it.
But I'm going to ask you instead just to leave it aside for the moment.
Because it's not really relevant to the point.
What happened when Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour leader in 2015 and then led the party through the general election of 2017 and then into 2019 was that it turned out that the people who ran the Labour Party were actively conspiring not against Corbyn but against the Labour Party itself because they preferred to lose the election if Jeremy Corbyn was the leader
And preferred that the Tories under Theresa May win in part because they were closer ideologically to Theresa May than they were to Jeremy Corbyn and also in part, and I think this is the much bigger part and the more relevant part to understand American politics, what matters to the leaders of a party in a two-party system where the two parties are very close ideologically.
is not so much which party wins or loses the election.
In general, they would rather win the election than lose it because they get more benefits that way, they get more power, they get more access to all sorts of privileges.
But what really matters to them far more than whether they win or lose the election is that they maintain control of the party.
They would rather their party lose under the control of somebody else then have their party win because what matters to them is that they are always in control of the party.
That's the source of their power, and that's what matters most to them above all else.
And so all of those people in the Labor Party, the centrists, the establishment figures, the Blairites, got caught actively working to sabotage the Labor Party and wanted it to lose in 2017 to the Tory Theresa May.
Here is the Independent, which is a self-centrist establishment newspaper in the United Kingdom.
In April of 2020, you see the headline, Anti-Corbyn Labor Officials Worked to Lose the General Election in Order to Oust the Leader.
A leaked dossier finds, quote, calls for investigations into possible misuse of funds by senior officials on the party's right wing.
Labor Party officials opposed to Jeremy Corbyn worked to lose the 2017 election, the general election, in the hope that a bad result would trigger a leadership contest to oust him.
A dossier drawn out by the party suggests, a huge cache of leaked WhatsApp messages and emails show senior officials from the party's right wing, who worked at its headquarters, became despondent as Labor climbed in the polls during the election campaign, despite their efforts.
Yes.
The unreleased report, which The Independent has seen in full, was drawn up by the last days of Mr. Corbyn's leadership and concerns the conduct of certain officials, including some who were investigating cases of anti-Semitism in the party.
That was the primary attack line used to destroy Jeremy Corbyn from within his own party.
Labor has confirmed the document is a genuine draft, though it is not clear who it was commissioned by or written by.
The 860-page document claims that, quote, an abnormal intensity of factional opposition to the party leader had, quote, inhibited the proper functioning of the Labor Party bureaucracy and contributed to, quote, a litany of mistakes in dealing with anti-Semitism, which it admits was a serious problem in the party.
Tactics by anti-Corbyn staff evidenced in the report include channeling resources to candidates associated with the right wing of the party, refusing to share information with the leader's office, and quote, coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months during the election campaign.
The report says hostile staff created a chat so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other, with one participant stating that tap, tap, tapping away will make us look very busy.
An election night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labor had overturned the conservative majority, meaning they thought their party won, one senior official said the result was, quote, the opposite to what I had been working toward for the last couple of years.
Describing themselves and their allies as, quote, silent and gray-faced and in the need of counseling.
Another said, quote, we have to be upbeat and not show it.
While a third told the group that, quote, everyone needs to smile, describing the result as awful.
Another very senior party official said it was going to be a long night.
All of that because the party was winning under Jeremy Corbyn.
So all of these people, these establishment people who constantly were telling the British left, we know that you don't like the party leader.
We know you think he's too neoliberal, he's too establishment, he's too dedicated to globalist institutions.
And I just want to remind you that Jeremy Corbyn Was somebody who clearly supported Brexit, even though he was required to pretend he didn't when running for Prime Minister as the Labour Party campaign.
He opposed things like vaccine mandates and threats of firing health care officials and other people for not getting the vaccine or vaccine passports.
He has a lot of views for those of you who have believed this demonization campaign that one day I'm gonna present to you to let you see the real Jeremy Corbyn.
But as I said, for this moment, it doesn't really matter.
What this shows is that the party leaders in the establishment who demand your loyalty and your subservience to the party, even when the party gives you a candidate that you hate, whose ideology is anathema to your views, will never turn around and give you that same loyalty When you finally do get your candidate, they will work to destroy the party and have it lose because they would rather lose the election than lose control of the party.
And what amazes me is that even with that known in British politics, there are so many people on the British left Who read that same report, obviously, that I just showed you, who understand that their own party purposely lost the election to Jeremy Corbyn, who now that there is the establishment and the Labour Party has wrestled control back from that party.
They have Sir Keir Starmer, who reminds me a lot of a kind of Obama-Clinton figure, though infinitely less charismatic, with infinitely less substance.
Just the ultimate vessel for a serving establishment agenda.
The British left is being told that their duty is to support the party, even though the party didn't even pretend to hide their contempt for the left-wing populist or anti-establishment figures who supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Now, I tell you that story because it is very illustrative of what is taking place in the Democratic Party, which, as I said, is what I want to illustrate.
It is not me who is saying that when Bernie Sanders ran in 2016 and presented an extremely formidable challenge to the Hillary Clinton machine, the establishment candidate, that the Democratic Party began to cheat to ensure that they won, right in the faces of their left flank.
The people who are now being told their duty is to march behind Joe Biden, and you are doing it!
Remember that Donna Brazile, who was the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, does not get any more establishment than she.
She ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000, his presidential campaign.
She wrote a book.
And as Vanity Fair reminded us in November of 2017, in that book she said she has, quote, proof that the Clintons rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders.
The former interim DNC chairwoman details how the Clinton campaign took control of the party's finances during the 2016 election in her new book.
No, Bernie Sanders responded in an April 16 interview when asked by NBC's Chuck Todd whether he thought the Democratic Party had been fair to him in his primary challenge against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive presidential nominee, quote, look, we're taking on the establishment.
That's pretty clear.
They're taking on the establishment.
That's what Bernie Sanders said.
Days earlier on the eve of the Democratic primary in New York, the Vermont senator had accused the Clinton campaign of improperly subsidizing the former Secretary of State's presidential bid through the Hillary Victory Fund.
The joint vehicle her campaign set up with the DNC and 32 state party committees.
The Clinton camp forcefully dismissed Sanders' accusations and argued that his attacks had, quote, gotten out of hand.
Quote, as Senator Sanders faces nearly insurmountable odds, he is resorting to baseless accusations of illegal actions and poisoning the well for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket.
Robbie Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, said, although he eventually campaigned for Clinton after she clinched the nomination, Sanders spent the next several months claiming the primary system was, quote, rigged against him, only to be roundly dismissed by party leadership.
But according to Donna Brazile, who served as the interim DNC chairwoman after Debbie Wasserman Schultz's ouster, You may recall that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign as the DNC chair because WikiLeaks published the proof that the DNC was cheating in favor of Hillary.
In case you're wondering why Julian Assange is imprisoned by the Biden administration, that's why.
Sanders' accusations were hardly baseless, according to her book.
In her new book, entitled Hacks, an excerpt of which was published Thursday by Politico, Brazil said she found concrete proof that the Clinton campaign stacked the deck.
An August 2015 document outlining the, quote, joint fundraising agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America that effectively allowed Clinton to control the DNC's purse strings.
With the DNC millions of dollars in debt after Barack Obama's 2012 re-election bid, the organization was in desperate need of cash, leaving the party with little choice but to rely on Clinton's donors to recapitalize.
But much of the money was ultimately routed back to Clinton, Brazil writes, describing a conversation with Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary's campaign.
As she learned, the Hillary Victory Fund was little more than a fundraising clearinghouse for the Clinton campaign.
She then went on to explain how that proved that the party was corruptly cheating on behalf of Hillary Clinton to ensure that Bernie Sanders couldn't win.
They cheated right in the face of Bernie Sanders supporters.
It wasn't only Donna Brazile who said that.
It was also Another party stalwart, Elizabeth Warren, who really was no fan of Bernie.
She ran in 2020.
She dropped out of the race as the only candidate left standing after Biden and Bernie were the two left and refused to endorse Sanders, even though supposedly she was also running as part of that left-wing flank.
And here's what she told PBS NewsHour in November of 2017 about the DNC's cheating.
We're learning today that a new book that is coming out by Donna Brazile, the former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, that the campaign of Secretary Hillary Clinton was far more influential at the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, than we previously knew.
Do you think, though, that what we're learning from Donna Brazile's book suggests that the campaign, that what the Democratic National Committee did, meant this election was rigged?
Yeah, I think it was.
It's a pretty powerful charge.
What we have to focus on now as Democrats is we recognize the process was rigged and now it is up to Democrats to build a new process, a process that really works.
Okay, so imagine how little dignity and self-worth you have to have to have seen all of this happen.
integrity of the system, that Democrats, as they run a primary, are going to let the people speak and that we're going to have a candidate who's the candidate chosen by the people.
That's our job.
Okay, so imagine how little dignity and self-worth you have to have to have seen all of this happen, that the party to which you belong, that constantly tells you you have to vote for them to save democracy, rigged that constantly tells you you have to vote for them to save democracy, rigged the system and cheated to make sure that their preferred candidate
These are the same people who now insist that any suggestion That they would ever rig the general election or that they did so is an obscene conspiracy theory that undermines faith in the democratic process even though Democrats Have claimed that every national election loss they've had since 2000, which means 2000, 2004, and 2016, was the byproduct of cheating.
But more so, we know from the most stalwart Democrats that the Democratic Party cheated to ensure that Bernie Sanders could not win that primary, even if the most Democrats voted for him.
And instead of saying, I am not going to associate myself with that party, because there's no possibility of working within it to win, Because when we almost won, they just cheated to make sure we lost.
Most of the Bernie AOC left submitted to the party and said, Bernie and AOC tell us that our job is to devote ourselves to the Democratic Party and even though they cheated, and we know they will cheat to ensure we never take power, We're going to just do what Liz Warren said and try and inside this incredibly corrupt party run by people who are willing to break every rule to maintain power, somehow create a fair system within that party.
These people have no dignity.
To watch party establishment leaders do that right in front of their face, express that kind of contempt for them, and return to them loyalty, submission, subservience, and a vow to support them no matter what.
Now, let's just remind ourselves, in light of what Bernie Sanders is now doing, in light of what AOC is doing, in light of the entire unified Democratic Party, and how they all march in lockstep behind Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment, What this Bernie Sanders movement was supposed to be in 2016, the way in which he described it.
Here is a video from the 2016 debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
And just listen to a little bit of what Bernie said about the kind of movement that he was leading and what its objectives were.
I'll let you answer that question.
I am very glad, Anderson, that Secretary Clinton has discovered religion on this issue.
But it's a little bit too late.
Secretary Clinton supported virtually every one of these disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.
I voted to save the auto industry.
He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.
I gotta just watch that again because Remember, Hillary Clinton was one of the most unpopular political figures in decades.
And if you want to remember why, let's just listen to that again.
I voted to save the auto industry.
He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.
I mean, who wouldn't want to hear that for four years straight?
How is it possible that she lost, not just the general election, but also Donald Trump?
But also, this presidential primary that she only ended up being the winner of because the DNC cheated.
That is a pretty big difference.
Well, if you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed this economy, excuse me, I'm talking.
If you're going to talk, tell the whole story, Senator Sanders.
Let me tell my story, you tell yours.
I will.
Your story is for voting for every disastrous trade agreement and voting for corporate America.
Did I vote against the Wall Street bailout when billionaires on Wall Street destroyed this economy?
They went to Congress and they said, oh please, we'll be good boys.
Bail us out.
You know what I said?
I said let the billionaires themselves bail out Wall Street.
Shouldn't be the middle class of this country.
Wait a minute.
Can I finish?
You'll have your turn.
Why should the people of Flint believe that you aren't just using this crisis to score political points?
I worked throughout my time as a young lawyer, as a person, an activist, certainly in Arkansas, then in the White House to try to fix problems wherever I saw them.
And this problem is one that is particularly outrageous and painful at the same time.
So when I heard about it, I immediately sent people here to find out what was going on.
It was almost unbelievable.
We have this problem in other places, but we don't say that it was actually caused by decisions made by public officials in positions of authority as this one was.
What is absolutely incredible to me is that water rates have soared in Flint. - Good.
You are paying three times more for poison water than I'm paying in Burlington, Vermont, for clean water.
First thing you do is you say people are not paying a water bill for poison water.
I mean, that was the campaign.
The campaign was, we don't have minor policy difference of the Democratic Party.
What we have is a Democratic Party establishment that is fundamentally and radically corrupted, that cheats, that subverts a fair vote, that serves their large donor class, the same donor class that funds the Republican Party.
And that is willing to destroy the middle class and vacuum it out in order to keep doing trade deals that de-industrialize the United States and which destroy the middle class.
That was Bernie Sanders critique.
The entire campaign, the whole point was to dismantle the democratic establishment because it was rotted in its core.
I want to bring Savion in just a second to talk about But the point about foreign policy is not just to know that you can overthrow a terrible dictator.
Before we do, let's just look at one other video clip just to remind ourselves of what these Democrats just a few years ago were pretending they were, what they pretended to believe.
But the point about foreign policy is not just to know that you can overthrow a terrible dictator.
It's to understand what happens the day after.
And in Libya, for example, the United States, Secretary Clinton, as Secretary of State, working with some other countries, did get rid of a terrible dictator named Gaddafi.
But what happened is a political vacuum developed.
ISIS came in and now occupies significant territory in Libya.
And is now prepared, unless we stop them, to have a terrorist foothold.
But this is nothing new.
This has gone on 50 or 60 years.
Where the United States has been involved in overthrowing governments.
Mossadegh, back in 1953.
Nobody knows who Mossadegh was.
Democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran.
He was overthrown by British and American interest.
Alright, so the Democratic Party is a party of corporatism.
It is corrupt at its core.
that the Shah of Iran came in, terrible dictator.
As a result of that, you had the Iranian revolution coming in, and that's where we are today.
Unintended consequences.
All right.
So the Democratic Party is a party of corporatism.
It has corrupted its core.
It goes around the world supporting wars and the overthrowing of governments that unleashes huge amounts of anti-American sentiment.
That was the critique of Bernie Sanders.
One, aimed straight at the heart of the Democratic Party establishment.
Now, just this week, Bernie Sanders presented himself as the chief unity enforcer of the Democratic Party, degrading himself to such an extent that, as you see here in Politico, he attacked His longtime friend and vocal supporter in 2016 and 2020, Cornel West, who's running as a Green Party candidate.
We had him on our show.
We intend to do so again.
You heard from him directly because Cornel West's crime is doing what Bernie Sanders claimed he wanted to do.
Which was to radically subvert the power of the Democratic Party establishment.
And yet, instead of joining that cause, Bernie is now the chief defender of the Democratic Party, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In many ways, they have become the most valuable instruments of the Democratic Party establishment.
They once pretended to dedicate themselves to subverting and undermining because they lend what is left of their credibility as party dissidents, to persuade others who follow them that somehow the way they can continue to serve what they perceive as this radical anti-establishment agenda is by remaining in servitude until the end of time to that very same Democratic to persuade others who follow them that somehow the way they can continue to serve what they
So to talk about what this all means, and there's several other interesting components to this that I want to cover, we are delighted to have on our show.
We've been trying to get her on our show for some time.
She's a very busy woman and it's difficult to do so.
We're thrilled we're We were able to make it work.
She's Sabrina Salvati, who's the host of the Savvy Savv podcast.
She's also the co-host of the Revolutionary Blackout Network, which is familiar to our audience.
We've had other hosts, including Nick Cruz, on our show many times.
I believe Savvy was on our show in kind of the prelude rehearsal version of our show, but never actually on the show itself.
So Savvy, we're so excited that we were able to make this work.
Good evening to you, and thanks so much for joining us.
Hi Glenn, thanks so much for having me on.
Absolutely, so I am very excited to talk to you about...
This new role that Bernie Sanders has, or you know what, maybe it's not a new role.
I don't actually think it's a new role.
I just think it's a clearer role, which is as the attack dog for the very Democratic Party establishment that he long claimed to be devoted to subverting and undermining.
And the way in which he did that this week was by being the leader of the attack, the increasingly ugly, ugly attacks on what?
Was alleged to be his longtime friend, somebody who vocally supported him, who he's now turning around in the media and attacking.
That's Cornel West.
What do you make of all that?
I think that what Bernie Sanders is doing to Cornel West is absolutely pathetic.
I want people to understand what this is really about.
Bernie Sanders is a tool of the Democratic Party.
What they have done is they have taken someone who appeared to be outside the duopoly because he's a registered independent.
And they have used Bernie Sanders to basically usher people into the Democratic Party, pretending to be an outsider, to pretending to be anti-establishment, and riling up a base of young people and working class people, and getting those people energized about a political revolution that Bernie Sanders knew was never going to happen through the Democratic Party.
I want to be very clear about that.
And then in turn, what Bernie Sanders is to do when they do not allow him to win, and they won't allow him to win even in the future, is to take those supporters, that base, and to tell them to vote for the corporate establishment that he told them to fight back against.
Now you see Bernie Sanders attacking Cornel West.
Cornel West has the guts to do what Bernie Sanders did not have the guts to do.
Bernie Sanders says that this is to protect democracy.
But Bernie Sanders knows, even when it comes to his own presidential campaigns, there really wasn't a real democracy, at least when we not look through the Democratic Party, because of the superdelegates.
Bernie Sanders, till this day, doesn't really mention the DNC fraud lawsuit.
He doesn't talk about the fact that DNC attorney Bruce Spiva argued that the DNC is a corporation.
The judge ruled in that case that the DNC can select a candidate and does not owe you a fair election.
But Bernie Sanders doesn't mention this.
Bernie Sanders is doing a press tour telling everybody how we have to protect democracy so you should not support Cornel West and you should support Joe Biden.
Once again, he's telling you to support the corporate candidates that he told you to push back against and to fight against.
So what people have to understand is that Bernie Sanders is a tool of the Democratic Party to make you think that you are going to get progress, but to water it down And to prevent you from having any strong outside grassroots movement that is going to change the system.
So let's remind ourselves that Bernie Sanders technically is not even a member of the Democratic Party.
He is somebody who has long praised the third-party candidates who challenge the two-party system, saying that the two-party system is radically corrupted, the Democrats and the Republican establishments have far more in common than they do differences, that alternatives are crucial.
And here you now have not just anybody as an independent candidate, but someone who's supposed to be his friend, someone who supported his campaign vocally in the last two presidential elections.
So even if Bernie Sanders at the end of the day Wants to end up supporting Joe Biden the way he did in 2016 and 2020.
What does it say to you about Bernie Sanders' character that he's willing to take the lead?
I don't think anyone other than AOC, who we'll get to in a minute, has directly criticized or attacked Cornel West until Bernie Sanders did it.
A year and a half out before there's a single primary vote cast, what does it say to you about his character that he's doing this with such gusto?
It tells you that Bernie Sanders is just as corrupt as the corporate Democrats that he tells you to fight back against.
He's really no different.
I think that Bernie Sanders got marching orders from the DNC leadership.
He follows DNC leadership, even though he's supposed to be an independent.
And I'm pretty sure they told Bernie Sanders, get out there and get what's left of your base and get those people energized to come in and support Joe Biden so that we don't lose to Donald Trump.
This is really how this works.
When Democrat leadership tells them to do something, they do it.
This is why the squad members don't really push back or fight back the way that they're supposed to.
All of these people are destined or really want to keep their seats.
That's more important to them.
That's become more important to them.
Book deals are more important to them.
These speaking fees are more important to them than actually fighting for the people, which is what they ran on.
I think that Bernie Sanders seriously owes working class people a public apology for taking their last $5, for taking their last $10.
I watched people travel for hours to come to see Bernie Sanders speak here in Boston because they believed that he was going to fight for Medicare for all for them.
And the way that he has treated these people, you don't even see Bernie Sanders on left independent media anymore, Glenn.
He's doing a press tour.
He won't go on to TYT.
He's definitely not going to come on to my show.
He would never come on my show.
He would never come on my show.
Somebody who had supported me during the Snowden reporting, who supported me when Brazil tried to prosecute me, whose campaign I don't explicitly support in 2016, but very obviously supported over Hillary Clinton.
He would never come on this show or any other show that is in any way separated from the Democratic Party establishment, because as you said, Bernie Sanders is not separated from the Democratic Party establishment.
And let me ask you something about the attacks in particular.
I don't know how many people remember this because it happened a little bit quickly.
And also people who are younger tend not to remember things from even before five years ago.
But in 2007, the Clinton primary war against the Obama campaign was one of the ugliest things in politics I've ever seen.
And as you probably recall, Barack Obama had acknowledged, I think much to his credit, that he had to use drugs in college.
Like a majority of Americans did.
George Bush also had admitted that when running in 2000, that he had experimented with cocaine, that he was an alcoholic.
There was no indication Barack Obama had any problems with drugs.
He experimented with them, as most people did, as I did in college, as almost everybody I know did.
And in the Clinton campaign, you surrogate in the most despicable way possible, claiming it would be Republicans who were going to do this.
They said, the problem now is Republicans are going to start saying, well, where did you get these drugs from?
And how much did you have?
And did you ever sell them?
And then black leaders said, look, You can have this primary war, but you're not going to take the first viable Democratic Party nominee, I guess they didn't consider Jesse Jackson to be that, and turn him into a drug dealer.
And that's the only reason that kind of went to an end is black leaders in the party drew a line.
I'm sure you've seen the attacks on Cornel West.
For as long as I've been around, Cornel West has been talked about in reverent terms, even within the Democratic Party, despite his being a critic of it, as one of the leading black scholars and leading intellectuals in the United States, which he absolutely is, just objectively if you look at the history of his books and scholarship and the influence it has had, and now Savvy.
Overnight they are trying to turn him into a deadbeat dad.
They have this scumbag who himself doesn't really matter except that he's clearly a paid influencer.
This 20 year old kid, Harry Sisson, who went on Twitter and said Cornel West, the Green Party candidate, Owes close to $500,000 in unpaid taxes and child support.
This is the guy that people on the far left are saying should take votes away from Biden?
Seriously?
Don't be fooled.
He's not a serious candidate.
Biden 2024.
Later on, I believe he deleted the tweet.
He was talking to some other paid influencer and he was saying, let's remind everybody at every opportunity that Cornel West went around impregnating multiple women and abandoned his children, which is a total complete lie, but it plays into the worst tropes That the Democratic Party feels free to use.
Honestly, it infuriates and disgusts me.
What's your reaction to the way they're attacking Cornel West?
Well, we knew smears were going to come because he's running third party, but also even if he ran in the Democratic Party, they would smear him too because they already selected Joe Biden.
That's how it works for the Democratic Party, but it just goes to show you that the Democratic Party, that liberals can also use racist tropes against people.
Wait, so I think we're breaking some news here.
What you're saying is that liberals, people who are adherents of the Democratic Party, 100% Glenn.
Some of the same people who have, especially I see it here like in places like Massachusetts, right?
So some of the same people who have a Black Lives Matter sign in their window don't want you living next door to them.
They don't want me living next door to them.
Some of the same people who say that they support that LGBTQ people should have their rights don't want it in their backyard.
So there's a lot of this that happens and I think that... Or look at with immigration.
For years we heard that anybody who wanted to close the border, anybody who was complaining about the number of immigrants in their community automatically was racist and white nationalist and now there are a lot of immigrants who are being sent to or settling in blue cities in New York and Washington and the leaders of those cities are demanding that the federal government stop that flow.
They're very good about Cheering for immigration when it's other communities that have to integrate them, and the minute it's their communities that need to, suddenly they're demanding that the wall be built.
That's right.
When migrants were sent to Martha's Vineyard here in Massachusetts, all of a sudden all the liberals who said, you know, immigrants' lives matter, you're welcome here, said you can't stay here.
Get them out.
We don't have space for you.
We don't have space for you.
But this is the reality, Glenn, and then this goes back to the class issue.
And a lot of this, there's intersection here, but a lot of this goes back to the class issue, whereas you will find that some of the wealthy, more elite liberals, they will talk a good game, but when it comes to action, they will say some of these same talking points that they blame the Republicans for saying.
So what is it really about?
And that's what I think we have to ask when we look at What's happening with Cornel West?
What's happening with Bernie Sanders?
What's happening with what's left of the progressive base?
I think at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, a lot of these people that were part of the Bernie movement, were they really, you know, amped up for radical change and some type of revolution and changing the system?
Or were they mainly liberals, upper class liberals, that just wanted health care?
Right, or who really enjoyed the media branding that made a lot of them very wealthy of pretending that they were some sort of space that a lot of white progressives, wanting to be edgy, wanting to feel like they didn't have the same politics as their mom, who loved Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, got to go and feel radical even at the end of the day.
Those people who were getting rich off this edgy branding were telling them to go and vote for Gavin Newsom or going and telling them to go for Joe Biden because they wanted to make sure that they maintained their access to those establishment circles.
That is correct.
It's all about protecting the status quo.
And that includes Bernie Sanders, too.
He's still going to protect the status quo.
So what Bernie Sanders actually did is he actually took his movement and now he's moving it further to the right.
Whereas it was supposed to be the left, he's moving it further to the right just to get along with the status quo, with the Democratic Party, because they're afraid that you'll get someone like Donald Trump again.
If you look at what's happening with the economy, Would that be so bad for a lot of people?
The economy is a mess.
So to sit there and to watch Bernie Sanders tell these deliberate lies about Joe Biden's economy, you know exactly what the game is.
You know exactly what he's doing.
Bernie Sanders probably has been the best political con artist of my generation.
He scammed a lot of people, and he owes a lot of people their money back.
People who gave them the last bit that they had because they believed in him.
Now, you don't do that and walk away from that.
Unless you're just corrupt as the others that you told people to fight against.
Yeah, and we should remember as well that during the campaign, Donald Trump was associating himself with Bernie Sanders on a lot of issues affecting the working class and the middle class, including opposing more of these trade deals that we just, I don't know if you were on, but we showed Bernie Sanders in the debate attacking Hillary Clinton for signing and wiping out and de-industrializing the working class and the middle of the country, not caring at all about the working class, bailing out Wall Street with billions of dollars to save their big donors.
There's a lot of stuff that Donald Trump was saying, and at the end of the day, whatever else you want to say about Donald Trump, and we all have our critiques of him, the fact of the matter is he is the first president, American president, in decades, not to involve the United States in a new war.
That is a historical fact that cannot be denied.
Now, Sabi, let me ask you, obviously what's going on here is there was this poll, I'm sure you saw it.
Where it was an Emerson polling poll that polled how people would vote in the national election in 2024 if it were Trump versus Biden, and Trump has a two-point lead in that scenario, 46 to 44%.
Let's put this on the screen if we can.
But then when you add Cornel West into the equation, which presumably is what will happen when voters go to the voting booth in 2024, they will see not two names, but multiple names, including Cornel West.
Trump's lead increases to five points.
Trump 44, so he took away two points from Trump.
Biden 39, so he took away five points from Biden.
Cornel West 4%.
That is part of what has frightened them.
So the argument coming from A lot of these progressives, a lot of the Democratic Party, you know what the argument is, obviously.
It's the one they used against Ralph Nader, the one they used against Jill Stein, is that every vote for Cornel West is a vote being stolen from the rightful owner of those votes, Joe Biden.
And so the only possible outcome of a Cornel West candidacy would be to help the Republicans and Donald Trump.
What's your response to that argument?
Number one, you have to earn votes.
You don't just get them.
This election is not owed to Joe Biden, especially when he hasn't done things for the working class people and prices have continued to increase.
So we don't owe him our vote.
That's that's the first problem.
The second problem is when we look at these polls, we have to remember these are people that typically have landlines, correct?
So like I'm never polled.
I've never been included in any of these political polls.
I would argue that 4% for Cornel West is probably higher than 4%.
So that's something we've got to think about.
These are the people that will vote because regardless of party, they feel like it's still their due diligence to do so.
It's their duty to vote.
But they're not polling people like me.
They're not polling millennials.
They're not polling like Gen Z or even Gen X. We're left out of those polls.
So I question, and that's why I say I think that 4% for Cornel West is actually higher than what it says right now.
And that's considering if it got to the point where Cornel West got that 15% and he's on the debate stage, oh well then it goes up even more.
And I think the Democratic Party is going to try to prevent that.
But I feel like the way the Democratic establishment is attacking Cornel West It's very extreme because I don't see the Republican Party attacking libertarian candidates this way.
So it's really interesting.
I think they realize that Cornel West is a threat to them, that he could garner some of the black vote.
I just saw a recent poll also that 20 percent of African-Americans are supporting Donald Trump this time around.
So it's not just Cornel West.
There are obviously factors a part of Biden's presidency that have not helped the lives of working class people in this country, and that includes black people as well.
And people are showing that with these polls.
I mean, it just couldn't be clearer.
Now, I mean, the entitlement syndrome, no matter how many times Jill Stein voters or Ralph Nader voters say, If they weren't running, we would not have voted for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton.
They just don't believe it.
They believe they own these votes.
They believe they own black votes.
They believe they own LGBT votes.
They don't believe they... I mean, Joe Biden said on The Breakfast Club in 2020, if you aren't clear and determined to support me, you ain't black.
And that is absolutely their attitude, as you know as well as anybody.
Nathan Robinson, who is one of those people who kind of branded himself as a Bernie Sanders supporter, though I will not in any way suggest that he did that cynically.
I think that's genuinely his view.
He's like a good Democrat, but one that like believes that within this party that cheated right in their face are somehow gonna reform them or whatever.
But I think it's more naivete than cynicism in his case, but it doesn't really much matter to the point, which was he saw that poll and he said the following.
If I were Joe Biden, I would be inviting Cornel West to the White House and asking him to submit the list of policies he would take in exchange for dropping out.
Now, I want to just leave aside the hilarity of believing that Cornel West is so gullible, such a dupe, as if he's Bernie or AOC, that he thinks that if Joe Biden invited him to the White House and made a bunch of empty, unenforceable promises that you could depend on those and then suddenly drop out.
But I was also kind of wondering, let's play this kind of out, this thought experiment, I was thinking about Cornel West on my show and the critiques he was making about the Democratic Party.
What would Joe Biden say to him?
I'm going to fire Victoria Nuland and the neocons who are dominating the foreign policy of my administration.
We're going to stop fueling the war in Ukraine.
We're going to stop militarily encircling China and pursuing a Cold War.
We are going to try and get Medicare for All instead of promising to veto it.
I will now work to do everything possible to provide it.
I'm going to pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
We're going to provide transparency to the war machine in order to stop it.
All the things that Cornel West is running on, what possibly could the Democratic Party or Joe Biden credibly offer to Cornel West given his critique of this duopoly in a way that would cause him to even think about dropping out of the race the way Nathan Robinson is fantasizing that he might?
There's nothing he would agree with in reference to what Cornel West is running on.
That includes Medicare for All, too, by the way.
Yeah, I said that.
Yeah, a big one for, like, Bernie Sanders, who's really big on Medicare for All, but apparently not so much if he tells you to vote for Joe Biden and he knows Joe Biden isn't going to pass it, and Joe Biden has already said so.
I think these particular characters, the Nathan Robinson, right, the Tom Hartmans, the Jacobin crowd, the DSA crowd, I think that it is time that what is left of the progressive movement to move away from these people.
They are going to hold us back.
They will continue to tell the same message years from now when we have gotten nowhere.
When it comes to policy on the national level, none of these progressive policies have passed.
They passed in the local areas.
They passed in states.
But that has been done by grass movements with the people on the ground.
That's how we were able to pass some of those progressive policies in states like Massachusetts, California, even Nebraska passed $15 minimum wage.
So it's not just a blue state issue.
But when it comes to any type of progressive movement on the ground and push for policy, we are never going to get there if we continue to listen to the people that watered down that message and continue to hold us back.
Occupy Wall Street was a good idea.
The problem is that movement was then funneled into a Bernie Sanders campaign.
And we saw what happened.
It was watered down compared to the message that the people had out on the street.
So my message to people is, if you're going to have these movements, you have to have the movements on the outside.
You cannot let these movements go through the Democratic Party or any political Two-party system party, and you have to mobilize the people.
You cannot just leave the people abandoned because you lost your campaign, so now there's no more movement.
Glenn, you know we had the numbers to really make some type of a difference in this country.
Hundreds of thousands of people showed up for Bernie Sanders.
Imagine what we could have done with those numbers, but when the leader walks away from the movement after the campaign dies, that was the end of the movement.
Yeah, I mean, it was very similar to what happened with Barack Obama.
He really assembled millions of young people who genuinely believed in what he said he intended to do, which was go to Washington and radically change the way it works and for whom it works.
And then when he got there, he ignored that army behind him, served the D.C.
establishment, centers of power in the most reliable and loyal way possible.
He extended the war on terror he vowed to dismantle.
And all of those people obviously got extremely disillusioned, and there are millions of people who don't even bother to vote because they've seen this play out over and over.
And the idea that the Democratic Party, dependent since the Clinton administration on funding from the military-industrial complex and from large corporate donors, the same people funding the establishment wing of the Republican Party, can possibly be reformed is a delusion and a lie that they're telling themselves because they don't have the courage to actually do what their alleged beliefs Would lead them to do.
Now, let me ask you, I want to get to AOC, the other extremely radical revolutionary leader that we're lucky enough to have in the United States and what she's doing as well.
But before I do, I just, I want to just go back to this because maybe you've already answered it and I'm asking you to repeat yourself.
And if I am, just tell me that.
But the thing that amazes me is it isn't just that There's an independent Green Party candidate who is extremely well-known, extremely likable, someone I think could easily excite young voters in a way that Joe Biden doesn't have the slightest chance of doing, which is Cornel West.
But if you're looking at it from Bernie Sanders' perspective, even if you want to remain enslaved to the Democratic Party, even though you spent your life claiming that you're not a part of it and getting people to support you on that basis, Biden does actually have Primary challengers, RFK Jr., who I think is extremely problematic for lots of reasons that we don't need to get into, but then there's Marianne Williamson, who's sort of like a kind of modeling herself after Bernie, sort of running to the polite left of the Democratic Party.
So even if you're AOC and Bernie Sanders and are saying, I think we need to stay within the Democratic Party, why not just Pretend at least, like, as a gesture, a crumb to throw, to say, well, we're going to support Marianne Williamson for now, just to show that we're still devoted.
Like, they've given up on the pretense even.
The same reason why they didn't endorse Nina Turner, because Democrat leadership told them, don't you do it.
Don't you endorse Nina Turner.
We're already going with Chantel Brown.
Same reason why I think AOC was the only one that did, and she did it at the last minute the night before she got the pass or the approval, so to speak.
So one of them could be the one.
But that's why.
Democrat leadership has already spoken to people like Bernie Sanders and squad members like AOC.
Don't you even dare think about doing it, or you will not keep your seat.
This is why people who were vocal during that point in time when they were in office, like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, this is why they're not there.
Because they pushed back against Democrat leadership, and Democrat leadership made it so that Dennis Kucinich no longer even had a district.
They redrew his district so he didn't have one, and that's how they got him out of office.
Because yes, he used to attack the Democratic Party from the populist left, from the working class, class-based politics, that they hate more than anything.
And I think you're exactly right.
The official position of the Democratic Party, as announced by Simone Sanders on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough is where they go to announce their official proclamations, is there is no primary debate within the Democratic Party.
We're not going to ask Joe Biden to take A few days away from his napping to debate Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr.
We're not going to put him up.
We don't recognize the debate.
Joe Biden is our nominee.
They're proclaiming that before there's a single vote cast.
And it doesn't seem to bother Bernie Sanders in the slightest, even though that's what they did to him.
Nor does it seem to bother the other person that we were presented with as proof that the Democratic Party has all this vibrant debate going on within it.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who was actually, I think, the first member of Congress To announce her support for Joe Biden, and she did it so notably on one of the most popular podcasts for hardcore loyalists of the Democratic Party establishment, which is that pod save thing that is hosted by a bunch of Obama boys.
So we have the video, right, of AOC announcing her endorsement of Joe Biden on the pod.
I'm sure you've heard this before, Savvy, but I want to work you up a little bit, even if you have, but I also want to make sure that our audience who hasn't seen it sees it.
This is AOC in July saying, no, she's not interested in Marianne Williamson.
She's not interested in Cornel West.
She's not interested in anybody other than Joe Biden.
She didn't extract a single concession.
She didn't apparently ask for anything in return.
She just became right out of the gate as early as possible on this program.
None of my program or yours or anybody else's who she turned to for support when she needed it back in 2018.
This is where she goes and this is what she said.
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.
Savvy, just so you make sure you heard that, she thinks he's done quite well, given the limitations.
Let's listen to the rest.
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 Could have gone better.
We have major structural 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.
And the United States Senate will be what holds back this country from an enormous amount of progress.
So is that because I understand what she's saying.
Joe Biden, who spent his life building the prison state and the drug war in the United States, who supported various aspects of Jim Crow, who was probably the most important Democratic senator, even more important than Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, in getting half of the Democratic Senate caucus and a big part of the Democratic Party to support the invasion of Iraq by supporting it when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who has devoted his entire life
To serving the corporations in Delaware to make it more difficult for consumers in debt to get out of their debt through bankruptcy, remain in servitude to credit card companies.
Suddenly has had a gigantic ideological transformation at the remarkable age of 76.
He got to that Oval Office and he suddenly became basically a carbon copy of AOC and Bernie Sanders.
So there's no reason to have to challenge anything Joe Biden is doing except that we have to eliminate the constraints that are preventing Joe Biden from doing what he really wants to do, which is a complete reversal of everything he's spent his whole life doing to be able to finally serve the working class.
Do you find that to be a credible way of understanding politics in Washington?
Not at all.
I think AOC is—she's acting, right?
So this is what she was told to say.
I don't even think she wrote those points down herself.
She was already told by Democrat leadership, you better go out there and cheer on Joe Biden, even when he's done something bad.
You better go out there and talk him up.
We need for you to do that, or we'll try to find someone to primary against you and get you out of here, right?
And then it's embarrassing for her to be this so-called progressive who got in, and then you're basically pushed out, so to speak.
I honestly do feel like AOC knew exactly what she was doing when she went on to that podcast.
That podcast in particular, by the way, heavily smeared Bernie Sanders' campaign, which AOC technically was a part of at least the second time around and endorsed him instead of Joe Biden.
So for her, she'll go on to pod Save America because she knows she's not going to get pushback.
She's not going to be criticized.
None of these people, where are they when it comes to left independent media, the same left media that promoted their campaigns, that talked them up, that told people to canvas for them and donate to them.
You don't see them come onto these left platforms because they know they've been such a disappointment to what's left of the progressive community.
And they don't want to take any type of criticism from the people who actually did help them get elected and get into office.
She knows Joe Biden hasn't done a good job.
She knows people Part of her district is in the Bronx.
She knows people are struggling still financially, are struggling to pay for groceries that continue to increase every week.
AOC knows this, but AOC is there to play her part to make young people believe that you can have a chance just like me and you just got to keep supporting the Democrats and we are making gains.
But that's not what's happening, but she's acting at this point.
Let me ask you this just to kind of wrap up our interview.
I could talk to you all night, and I'm going to keep harassing you to come back on the show.
But just in consideration of your time, I'm going to try and wrap it up.
And I'm going to do a two-part question.
So feel free to kind of pick the parts you want.
But first of all, I was in Milwaukee last week for the Republican presidential debate.
I would love to attend a Democratic primary presidential debate.
Unfortunately, there won't be one.
But one of the things that was so notable was that there was this incredibly rabid Dispute about crucial issues.
So, you know, you had candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy saying, I don't want another cent going to the war in Ukraine.
And a lot of people cheered and a lot of people booed.
And then you had Nikki Haley and Mike Pence.
saying, no, we need to continue to spend all of our money and fuel this war forever, the goal of which is not to help Ukraine win, but to keep it going forever, to enrich the arms industry, to destroy Russia.
So you've had these really rapid disputes.
And when you turn on Fox News, you can see one host who supports the war in Ukraine, another who opposes it, some who believe in traditional Republican economics in the Reagan era, others who support a more working-class-oriented politics.
They have these real vibrant debates, genuinely, on the American right within the Republican Party.
If you turn on the Democratic Party news outlets, CNN, the New York Times op-ed page, the Washington Post, MSNBC, Pod Save America, you don't hear a single peep of debate.
Every single Democrat in the Congress, squad members like Ilhan Omar, who know better, every last one of them voted for that $40 billion authorization for the war in Ukraine and will call you a Russian agent if you dare to question what they're doing, what was done to Bernie Sanders previously.
There's just no debate.
Everything is in lockstep.
And just as one example, I just wanted to share this with you because it really, I don't know if you saw AOC's interview with the New York Times today.
You know, there's been those political articles like praising AOC, like, welcome, you're now part of the inside.
You're an insider, congratulations.
And that was the kind of ethos of the New York Times article today.
And the reporter, though, pressed her and said, under Donald Trump, you made this extremely flamboyant and theatrical visit to the Border.
She dressed up in white.
She posed for those very distraught and anguished shots.
Nothing at the border has changed, except that in some ways it's gotten worse.
And they said to her, it's been two and a half years since Joe Biden was inaugurated.
Why have you not gone to the border?
Like, where did your interest in the border go that was so expressive and so emotive?
And she first tried to say, I'm tending to the problems in our backyard.
We have a lot of migrants in New York.
I'm tending to them.
And they said, I know, but you said that the abuses at the border, which haven't stopped, were Nazi-like.
Where did your interest go in them?
So it's kind of a two-part question.
Do you look at the American right and see this kind of debate, this war that they're waging against the establishment, for better or for worse?
And then secondly, the fact that AOC It's so flagrant in the insincerity of her beliefs and yet people, there's still a lot of people who still believe in her.
What do you make of that whole mess?
I think it's easy to appear to be left when the president in the White House at the time is a Republican, right?
So we did see a lot more gusto from people like AOC and the squad when Trump was in office.
But the moment that Joe Biden won, that changed.
To your point about the border, that did change.
She hasn't been back down there.
Kids are still in cages, and I don't see her crying now, the fake tears that she even had during that time in those pictures.
So I think that's the difference.
They have the approval and the okay when Trump's in office because the goal was to get Donald Trump out.
But the moment that that position is replaced by someone who's a member of their own party, now they have to toe the Democrat line.
They can't push back in that way or they'll be removed from their seats.
Now, in reference to the Republican Party, it does seem like to me that there are more people, more so those that are part of the Freedom Caucus, that are willing to push back On establishment voices in the Republican Party, they'll push back on like a Kevin McCarthy.
We saw that whole ordeal that happened with the speakership.
That's what the squad was supposed to do.
So I think it comes down to it seems like to me the politicians that are in the Democratic Party in D.C.
are not listening to their constituents.
And they're not listening to their constituents because they know that their constituents will continue to support them regardless because they're not likely to be challenged.
AOC doesn't have a challenger.
Ilhan Omar, these people don't have primary challengers.
That could change, right?
Whereas with the Republican Party, it seems like to me the pushback that came from people like a Lauren Boebert or a Matt Gaetz and a Marjorie Taylor Greene before she changed her mind, it seemed like to me they are doing what their constituents want them to do.
So I think this goes back to the point of political parties.
When I think back to the founding fathers, one of the things that the founding fathers did not want for this country was political parties.
And this is the reason why.
Because people would look beyond policy in some circumstances.
It's a great point.
side with the party that they're a part of because it's their party.
So I hear people bring this up a lot of times about what the founding fathers want for this country, but they don't bring up that point that they didn't want political parties in this country.
And sometimes I wonder what would it be like if we did not have political parties?
It's a great point.
They were very worried about how factions, how human beings break up into factions and how they give up on common values.
And so often it just is true that people in the working class in the United States who are successfully split and divided and taught to hate each other have so much more in common in terms of their common enemies and their common interests.
And yet they remain split.
And political parties, these two in particular, are a crucial way that's done.
Just by the way, the political article from April heralding AOC was entitled, From Agitator to Insider, The Evolution of AOC.
And it was all about how she's now learned to become a cooperative member of the Democratic Party, which I think is absolutely true.
Savvy, let people know, please, where they can find your genuinely outstanding work.
I watch you all the time.
I watch your network all the time.
So please let people know how they can find your work.
Sure thing.
You can find me on YouTube.
My channel is Sabby Sabs.
You can also find me on the Revolutionary Blackout Network.
We're also on YouTube and we're also on Rumble.
So, yeah, exactly.
You guys are on Rumble.
I was super excited when you joined.
And if you Want somebody whose views you may not always agree with, although sometimes, or often, you probably will, I think, but someone who is, well, you just saw her, so you don't need me to explain to you.
They're just very, not only honest and beholden to nobody, but it's also commentary based in a lot of work, a lot of information and knowledge.
I think that's the thing I appreciate most about it.
It's never polemical or just ranting.
It's a very well-formed and well-developed argument, and that's what I appreciate most.
Thrilled to have you on the show.
We've been trying for a long time, as you know.
Let's not make it another seven months until the next appearance.
I hope to have you back soon.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Have a great night.
So as I indicated at the start of the show, there was an article that I wrote when I was still at Substack, and it was in October of 2022.
So it was roughly four months or so after my husband, the Congressman David Aranda, Was hospitalized with a very severe intestinal infection that turned into sepsis and kept him in the hospital in the ICU unit for nine months until he died in May of this year.
And the reason I wrote the article was because prior to being hospitalized, David had left his party that he had been in for a long time because he didn't want to support the current president, Lula da Silva, in the first round of voting.
He wanted to support a different candidate instead.
He also had joined that party because it had always been an oppositional party to Lula's party and it was quickly becoming subservient to the Democratic establishment.
Very similar to the conversation that I just had with Savvy about what happened to the Democratic party.
And so David left and he joined this political party and it was a party much less imprisoned by dogma.
That was a major reason David left it and one of the people who ended up being in that party was Cabo Daciola, who became this very famous and popular politician in 2010, I believe, when he led a firefighter strike.
He was a firefighter.
He's an evangelical.
The Brazilian firefighters had pay that was barely at a subsistence level.
They were risking their lives to rescue people in fires and yet could barely afford food.
Their pay was shockingly low.
He led a strike.
He became a very popular figure.
He often used the gospel as a way of arguing for better treatment of the working class and for workers in Brazil.
And the left was so thrilled to have him because he was an actual member of the working class, which the left all throughout the democratic world has great difficulty in attracting.
They love academics who talk about the working class as this kind of species that they don't know much about, but they study and care about.
But they have a lot of difficulty getting actual members of the working class.
So they finally got Cabo Daciola, a firefighter, an evangelical, who talks openly about Christ and Christianity and the role it plays in his life.
But even though he continued to support those economic causes and he got elected to Congress as a member of the same left-wing party to which my husband belonged, the fact that he opposed Same-sex marriage on religious grounds, the fact that he refused to endorse it morally based on his same religious values, the fact that he thought that political rights were derived from God and not from the government made him anathema to that party.
He left, they expelled him, so they lost one of their only actual members of the working class.
He ended up going to this same party and ended up kind of in a fluke in the same party as David and they instantly formed this very close friendship.
They just, in part because they kind of came from the same humble origins.
David grew up in a favela.
Cabo grew up quite poor.
And so here you had David Miranda, one of the most visible LGBT members of Congress, one of the very few gay politicians in Brazilian politics in its history, openly celebrating his friendship with Cabo D'Aceola, this evangelical leader who has not changed his position on same-sex this evangelical leader who has not changed his position on same-sex marriage or LGBT rights at
And I'll never forget the first day that David or Cabo, one of them, published their photo, they met at the airport, they talked for so long they both missed their flight, and they posted pictures of themselves, a selfie they took, and David got viciously attacked by the left, saying, how is it possible that you can even speak with somebody Let alone express positive thoughts about someone who hates you, who hates gay people.
If you go on the internet and look for Cabo D'Aziol, where I mentioned him, the Brazilian left will tell you that he is a hateful person.
When David was hospitalized, there was no shortage of politicians wanting to associate themselves with David for about a week.
A lot of them wanted to call, visit David, have the media attention that came from the sympathy that's generated when somebody becomes sick.
Cabo didn't disappear after the first or second week.
He called me every week wanting to know how David was, wanting to know how I was doing, wanting to bring his wife and kids to be with my kids.
He went to the hospital and prayed over David when David wasn't conscious, prayed with David when David was.
Friendship that they formed was extremely meaningful, as was the role that he played in trying to provide my family and me with a lot of comfort.
Not just trying, but actually doing it.
And then when David died, he kind of even increased his efforts even more.
He's become a friend of our family.
We're launching an institute in David's name next month, and he's playing a crucial role in it.
And so I wrote this article.
Here you see the title, Values and Character versus Political Identity, Some Personal Reflections.
And I talked about that friendship and what it taught me.
And I won't go into all of it.
If you want and you're interested and you haven't read it, you can find it on Substack through this title.
So the reason I'm talking about this is over the Last night, Cabo's wife, I think they've been married for 30 years or something, they have three children they're raising together, passed away from leukemia.
And he talked to me a lot about his wife's struggles with her illness, talked about how she lived a lot longer than her doctors said she would.
How that strengthened his belief in God and attributed to his faith.
And I think obviously in part it was due to his human decency but in part because he empathized with our situation is one of the reasons that he wanted to give so much support.
And I think he thought his wife was getting better and she took a massive downturn over the last several weeks and ended up hospitalized and passed away and left him as a single father raising three kids.
So I was thinking a lot as that entered the news and when I learned about it early this morning about this relationship.
I've reached out to him, of course, and so I revisited that article that I wrote.
I posted a condolences on my Twitter page and Instagram.
We don't have them here, but there were some pictures that I posted of David and Cabo together commemorating his wife and just sharing some thoughts about What I felt about what just happened.
In any event, what that really led me to do is it reminded me of a story that was really, this is not the first time I understood that a person's worth and their value and their character is not determined by the political party to which they belong or the ideology they claim to believe in or the hashtags they post on Twitter.
I've been around way too long to believe that someone's character and value and worth as a human being is determined by left or right or what political causes they support.
I just seen, I mean, as you just heard Savvy saying, you have all kinds of progressives who love to flamboyantly express values that their personal actions simply don't align with.
And that's true, I think, in every political faction.
So I wanted to kind of share the first time I learned about that because I think it's such an important lesson.
It's absolutely, I think, a central perspective that shapes the show we do here, shapes my approach to politics and to people in general.
I was in law school, my first year in law school at NYU.
I was 24, 23.
I had lived the last four years in Washington, D.C., where I went to college and took a year off and traveled around Europe and then went to live in New York.
And I was in my first year of law school and had a roommate.
And she started dating this guy and it got serious enough and he asked her to go visit his parents' house in Massachusetts.
And she went, she spent the weekend at his house where his parents lived, and she came back and she told me, with this kind of mischievous excitement, that her boyfriend's mother is a huge conservative.
This is in the early 1990s, just coming out of the Reagan era.
George H.W.
Bush was president.
And Rush Limbaugh was a very popular political commentator, very influential.
And she told me her mother is a huge Rush Limbaugh fan.
And this was right when the internet was just starting to emerge, kind of in the early to mid-1990s.
And at the time, the internet was really just this series of segregated sites on AOL, CompuServe.
There was one other, I forget the name, that was sort of the three biggest sites.
So it was not really an internet that was connected.
It was kind of siloed off.
And within CompuServe, there was this right-wing political forum designed to allow conservatives to congregate with one another, to meet, to chat, to debate, to discuss.
And my roommate told me that his mother was part of this site.
It was run, I believe, by National Review and the Heritage Foundation.
It was called Town Hall.
Rush Limbaugh used to promote it all the time.
She came back very mischievously, and she said, you need to go in there and troll people and provoke them.
And at the time, my view of religious conservatives, especially, but conservatives in general, but religious conservatives as well, because I grew up in a working class neighborhood, but in South Florida, where there weren't a lot of religious conservatives, South Florida, for those of you who know, it is more like Southern New York.
But more so my adult years, my early adult years, formed living in Washington DC and then New York City.
I very much was part of this left liberal cultural milieu and I looked at social conservatives in particular, religious conservatives in particular, as people full of hate and Basically, people who are kind of primitive and a sort of superiority complex that enabled me or caused me to look down at people like that, which is very much something that I picked up from the cultural milieu in which I was existing in these East Coast colleges and in these cities.
And I did go into this forum with the intention purely to provoke people to say I'm gay, I'm a gay lawyer in New York, to go in and argue with them about LGBT issues and about abortion and about cultural issues and Reagan and Bush.
And I went in there with the worst intentions, just to cause problems and to upset people.
And what I found was over the course of the few weeks that I was doing that, I started noticing that these kinds of attempts to provoke and upset people slowly started to morph into kind of earnest debates with people who I was finding to my great shock weren't really actually stupid and primitive, but were actually very smart and informed.
I started Feeling like some of these debates were actually worth having, that they were challenging, that they were intellectually challenging for me and difficult for me, and that I was talking to a lot of people who, to my shock, were not at all the caricatures that I had been trained to think of them being.
And then over the course of a few more months, I found that not only was that happening more commonly, but I was actually now engaging in kind of interpersonal interaction.
There were direct messages where people could direct message you if you were online, and you ended up talking to them privately, and that began to happen as well.
And this was at the time when the internet was completely anonymous.
People used screen names almost nobody used.
their real names.
So the second month that I was in there, when I was still kind of in the provocative mood, they had what was their annual get-together, where they would physically gather in one place so that they could deal with each other as human beings and not just screen names.
Obviously, I didn't even think about going.
I was still there just to provoke them, thinking they were going to hate me, wanted to kill me.
And so the next year, I was now there for a full year, obviously getting to know these people personally, We were on almost every day.
The annual meeting was being held in Indiana in a Hilton or a Holiday Inn in a suburb of Indianapolis.
And some of them began saying, oh, you should come.
And I remember telling my friends, you know what, I'm considering going to this right wing, this meeting of these right wing people who I'd gone in to provoke and kind of have gotten to know.
And I remember people saying, are you crazy?
You can't go to Indiana and meet a bunch of religious conservatives.
They're going to kill you.
I remember thinking, I probably thought that a year earlier, but I actually don't think that anymore.
And I decided to go and I went.
And it was just one of the best weekends I had ever had.
They were incredibly warm and welcoming.
It was this experience that was still very new where you met people and got to know people on the internet.
Which was still a very unusual and novel experience.
And then you got to like actually attach a human being to those people, to those people, those screen names with whom you had been arguing and fighting.
And I could not have been more warmly received.
Everybody was incredibly friendly to me.
I'm talking here about social conservatives, religious conservatives in the early 1990s.
Who encountered me because I purposely went in to provoke them, to provoke their hatred and their anger and their rage.
I didn't go in there with good intentions at all.
And they didn't change their views about LGBT issues or any of the political issues they were arguing about and believed in, just like Cabo Dacio didn't change his political views when he formed this friendship with David and then With so much generosity and spiritual support, provided so much support for our family during our most difficult time, they just saw me as a human being and I saw them as human beings.
And ideology and political party just didn't play a role in it.
Once you get to know a human being, you search for the things in which you have in common with them.
And it just taught me a huge lesson about stereotypes and caricatures of people that media encourages us to adopt about one another.
And it's something that has stayed with me forever.
It's something I think that I've tried to adhere to as much as possible.
The Young Turks, which is this, for those of you who don't know what that is, be very thankful, but they have this segment where they send people, it's a left-wing YouTube show, a Democratic Party YouTube show, kind of the Bernie AOC crowd that we were just talking about.
They send people to Trump rallies, and they stick cameras and microphones in front of Trump voters, Trump supporters, and the whole point is just to mock them.
Most of the time, they're not saying anything embarrassing, but because they look a certain way, because they express themselves a certain way, because they have a MAGA hat, You're obviously, if you're a liberal, trained to look down on those people like I did in my early 20s before I had these personal experiences that dispelled these stereotypes.
And one of the things they've been doing is when they've been going to these rallies, there are people, they ask them, where do you get your news from?
Where do you get your source of information from?
And a lot of them will say Matt Taibbi.
A lot of them will say independent media.
And a lot of them will name me.
And there was this one video that they were passing around that they thought was going to be incriminating for me because it showed that at least part of my audience are adherents to Donald Trump and to the MAGA movement.
And this is one of the women who they interviewed.
And I think they they I don't think I know that they clearly thought that this made me look bad because they were constantly throwing it around the Internet and putting it into forums where I'm criticized and even putting it into my Twitter mentions as some sort of proof that I have become corrupted.
And here's what This person said, this is from the Young Turks in August of this year where they went to a Trump rally.
Research.
Do it yourself.
You know, you can go on the internet and find, you know, non-partial people like Glenn Greenwald, things like that.
So Glenn's a non-partisan?
Oh yeah, I would say he's non-partisan.
Non-partisan leaning towards being a liberal.
Okay, honestly, I love that woman.
I don't know who she is.
I don't know anything else about her, but I could just tell what her spirit is by having watched her say that.
I couldn't be more thrilled that I'm able to reach people of a wide, diverse range of views.
I know there's a lot of leftists in my audience, a lot of people who are independents, a lot of people who are Trump supporters, a lot of people who are libertarians.
That has always been true of my audience.
It's more true now.
It's something I celebrate and I think is one of the most important parts of our show.
That we are not siloed into ideological camps, that we can have dialogue with people.
The reality is, in my early 20s, before that experience happened, I probably would have looked at this woman, made judgments about how she looked, about her simplicity.
She doesn't look like she came out of a CNN green room, or out of a faculty lounge at an Ivy League school, and I probably would have made judgments about her, that this video and videos like it are intended to foster among people who are liberals to think about Trump supporters as barely human.
That experience with Cabo, the fact that I obviously kind of reconnected to those sentiments as a result of the passing away of his wife overnight, for which I obviously have a lot of empathy, I thought was a good opportunity just to kind of Explain how I think we try and understand people, how our politics are shaped.
I think Savvy actually talked about it extremely well when talking about how a lot of black voters are now abandoning the Democratic Party, are actually starting to vote for Trump, realizing that their interests are not being served, that the working class has a lot of interest in common.
And have the same kind of enemies, but they're purposely kept separated.
And the ability to overcome those differences, not to judge people based on ideology, to judge them based on their character and their values as reflected, not by hashtags and political slogans, but by their actions and their lives.
I think it's one of the most crucial things we do.
And I think it's the thing that, if anything, is probably the centerpiece of how we try and do our show here.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, we are also available, System Update is, in podcast form.
You can listen to each episode 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you follow us there and rate and review the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
where you have been climbing the podcast charge gradually.
But inexorably, I think we are in the top 20 now on Spotify and hearing that on Apple.
And it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
As another reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have our live after show right after this show on our Locals platform, which is the place where we have our subscribers who help support the independent journalism that we do here.
If you want to become a member of that community, which gives you access to that after show that's interactive in nature, that also allows you access to the transcripts we produce and to a lot of the independent journalism.
Including a lot of written journalism I'm hoping to do more of in the near future the way I did on Substack.
You can join our community and support the work we're doing here as well.
For those of you who have been watching, we are very appreciative.
The audience size is growing as well, and we're very grateful for those of you who are making that happen.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
