As Migrants Surge Into Blue Cities, Dems Suddenly Embrace a Border Wall. PLUS: Matt Stoller on Gaetz’s Revolt, the Google Trial, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #156
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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, Joe Biden and his Department of Homeland Security are building a wall on the border, the very same border wall that they and their media allies spent all of the Trump years denouncing as a tribute to white supremacy and redolent of what both the Nazis and the Stalinists built.
When it comes to the question of undocumented migrants, everything changed for American liberals as soon as those immigrants stopped being an abstraction that Democrats could coddle and hug like a plastic toy or a distant mascot and instead began arriving in large numbers or sometimes even in just small numbers.
In the communities, cities, and states that Democrats govern and where liberals reside.
Indeed, several of the most prominent Democratic governors and mayors this year went from maligning everyone who favored border restrictions as an evil white nationalist who hates brown people.
That was when lowly border communities in Texas and Arizona were the ones receiving most of the immigrants and bearing the burden of integrating them.
They did a 180, and now they're shrilly complaining about the surge of immigrants and demanding that Biden do more to stop those immigrants as soon as they began arriving in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and those states and cities became responsible for housing and taking care of those immigrants.
It really is that craven and disgusting, the way they just switched from hugging immigrants from a distance to demanding they be stopped as soon as they became their neighbors.
Our budgets are being strained by these immigrants, they shouted.
We have no room for these people.
Keep them away from us.
Biden heard all of those pleas and listened this time because it's now Democrats and the Democratic Party base being affected by immigration.
Affluent residents of cities and suburbs in the north rather than just the deplorables in the red states.
And so Biden's homeland security last night announced the following in an official decree in the Federal Register.
Quote, the United States Border Patrol's Border Patrol in Rio Grande Valley sector is an area of quote high illegal entry remember this is biden's homeland security saying this as of early august 2023 border patrol had encountered over 245 000 such entrants attempting to enter the united states between ports of entry in the rio grande valley sector in fiscal year 2023
therefore i the homeland security secretary must use my authority under section 102 to install additional physical barriers and roads in the rio grande valley Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads.
Barriers, of course, are the wall.
Now with the 2024 election approaching, Democrats need to assuage concerns over immigration, especially now that it's affecting their own voters or the voters they want to attract.
At the same time, they can't afford to alienate immigration groups and other liberal activists by admitting what they're doing, namely building the wall that American liberals spent years denouncing as a Nazi landmark.
So the White House is simultaneously announcing the building of Trump's racist wall, While insisting that they're not really doing it, and demanding that the media defend them.
Well, look at this duplicity, both in order to bring clarity about what is really going on, but also to demonstrate the defining hallmark of American liberals.
They love righteously condemning other people and demanding that other people, the lesser people, make sacrifice and endure burdens, but then scream bloody murder the minute they are the ones who are affected.
Then, one of the nation's leading experts on big tech and antitrust law is friend of the show, Matt Stoller, who, among other things, is a fellow with the American Economic Liberties Project.
He's the author of a highly popular substack called Big About Monopoly, Abuses, and Big Tech, and he wrote one of the best books of the 21st century on antitrust law and big tech.
That's entitled Goliath, The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
We'll talk to Stoller tonight about a variety of very very newsworthy topics not getting enough attention, including the ongoing lawsuit in a federal court right now between the Department of Justice against Google, claiming that Google is violating antitrust laws, as well as a recent lawsuit that is quite sweeping in its scope filed by the Justice Department against Amazon, claiming as well as a recent lawsuit that is quite sweeping in its scope filed by the Justice Monopoly laws.
And since Stolar worked for Congress for several years inside Congress, we'll hear his analysis about the recent success of Congressman Matt Gaetz in making Kevin McCarthy the first ever Speaker of the House to be removed from that position by a vote of the Congress.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Unless you were hatched out of some kind of a shell within the last 72 hours or last week, you are well aware that American liberals, meaning leaders of the Democratic Party and their media allies, meaning leaders of the Democratic Party and their media allies, spent a lot of the Trump years, most of the Trump years, in fact, claiming that Donald Trump was a fascist and a white nationalist and essentially a Hitler kind of figure, an unprecedented threat to all things decent, so much an unprecedented
That liberals, who used to say that about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney not all that long ago, began insisting that actually Bush and Cheney were patriots, they were noble and kind people, even if they had some policies that liberals disagree with, in order to isolate Trump as this unique pathogen, this singular threat to all things decent in American democracy.
And whenever I would press liberals to explain what is it that Trump did that makes him a singular evil, Considering, for example, the fact that Trump was the first American president in decades.
Not to involve the United States in a new war.
He doesn't have any Iraq war invasions based on false pretences on his record.
No torture regimes or rendition or due process denials in Guantanamo.
He didn't change the regimes of Syria and Libya and leave those countries as complete bloodbaths and wrecks the way President Obama did.
What is it that Trump did that makes him such a single evil?
Almost always liberals will say That what distinguished Trump from every other American leader that made him a Hitler figure was his immigration policy, specifically his desire to build a wall and to prevent immigrants from entering the United States illegally in such large numbers.
That is almost always what they will point to.
And the fact that Trump's wall, the wall that he wanted to build to keep illegal immigrants out, was a racist wall, a tribute to white supremacy, was something that was stated over and over and over.
Not by random liberals, but by the leaders of the Democratic Party, by governors and mayors and leading media allies of the Democratic Party.
This was gospel.
It was canon.
That Trump's wall was driven by nothing except racism and white nationalism and even Nazism.
But now, lo and behold, it turns out that Joe Biden and his administration are building that wall.
They're extending that wall.
They're expanding that wall, the very same wall that Trump wanted to build, that Trump built some of.
And that liberals and Democrats spent years insisting was a monument to Nazism.
And the reason they're building that wall is because now illegal immigrants, people who are undocumented, are arriving no longer only in border towns and red states like Texas and Arizona and then seeping their way into parts of the American South or into Oklahoma.
Or even into California, but they're arriving in the cities, the most important cities to liberals, the cities where they inhabit and reside, where liberal elites Live their lives.
And now that it's affecting American liberals instead of their enemies, their political enemies, liberals have suddenly gone from, we love immigrants, anybody who wants to limit the amount of immigration to the United States is a racist and a fascist, to Biden, we demand that you do more to keep these people away from us.
We don't have any space for them.
We can't afford to take care of these people.
Here from CNN this morning, you see the headline on the screen, which is right now the headline reads the following.
Biden says that border walls don't work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas.
That's the headline.
Biden says border walls don't work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas.
So you see the propaganda already at work.
They're building a wall, but CNN has to insert in there that Biden says the wall's not working and they changed the word from walls to what they're building, from walls to barriers.
But clearly what they're doing is they're building a wall.
Now, CNN's headline radically changed from What it is now, this weird Orwellian formulation, Biden says border walls don't work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas.
It's almost saying, let's put that headline on the screen please, the CNN headline.
It's almost saying Biden says, I hate border walls, at the exact same time that his administration announces they're going to build more border walls.
This is CNN trying to defend the administration, but Kind of giving up the effort, really.
It's not a very good effort because the only thing they can really do to help Biden here is to not use the word walls, but to use the word barriers, even though obviously they're building in a wall.
Now, when this headline was first put up this morning, I don't know if we can put me in the tweet on the screen at the same time.
But the headline was much different.
The headline in CNN.
I wrote the headline because there's a change to Twitter to X where no longer the headline appears on the screen when you put in the link.
It only shows you the feature photo that the article uses.
And you have to click on that in order to go to that site.
So it's a change to how X formats its tweets.
But here I wrote the headline as it appeared this morning before they changed it to help Joe Biden.
And there you see it on the screen.
CNN, Biden administration bypasses 26 federal laws to build an additional border wall in South Texas.
Do you see what propagandist R-CNN is?
They tried to change it to comport with the Biden administration's denials that what they were doing is actually what they're doing.
But this morning, before the Biden administration realized what a crisis this was going to create, what a reaction this would cause, before they denied building a wall, even though they last night said they were building a wall, CNN didn't know what else to do.
And so they told the truth.
Biden administration bypasses 26 federal laws to build additional border wall in South Texas.
That's exactly what they're doing.
They're building a border wall, the same border wall that Trump tried to build.
Now, if you look at the article, and again, this article has been rewritten since this morning as well to comport with the Biden administration's very irrational and lame attempt to try and deny that they're building a wall, it says the following, quote, the Biden administration will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley.
You see how they won't use the word wall, even though they did in this morning's headline?
Now they're saying border barriers, which I think is a wall, right?
A barrier on the border that's called a wall.
According to a notice posted to the Federal Register Wednesday, citing quote, high illegal entry.
In order to justify the building of this wall, the Biden administration had to declare a high flow of people who are entering the country illegally, so they had to admit that to justify this expenditure under the law, and they did.
CNN goes on, quote, construction of the wall, the what?
The wall will be paid for using already appropriated funds earmarked specifically for physical border barriers and the administration was under a deadline to use them.
But the move comes at a time when a new surge of migrants is straining federal and local resources, placing heavy political pressure on the Biden administration to address a sprawling crisis.
Do you see how now the media is willing to admit there's a crisis at the border now that Not just red state governors and mayors and low-life deplorables are complaining, but also the elevated nobles in Chicago and New York and Washington.
Border Patrol reported nearly 300,000 encounters in the Rio Grande Valley sector between last October and August, according to the federal data.
Last month, Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the highest total this year.
President Joe Biden, who as a candidate, vowed that there will, quote, not be another foot of border wall constructed on his watch.
And we're gonna show you that video.
He really told the New York Times that.
He said, there will not be another foot of this racist wall when I'm president.
But now, the Biden administration, quote, has been plagued by issues on the border since the first months in office, when the U.S.
faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flat-footed.
Now that was the other part of the claim when I would ask liberals, why do you feel justified calling Trump a Nazi?
How is he a singular evil?
They would say the border wall, but then they would also say, oh, they're kids in cages.
Remember that phrase?
It was just kind of like a cliche, that slogan, kids in cages, kids in cages.
I mean, my favorite moment of the Trump years was when Obama's star speechwriter, John Farrow, who now is the host of Pod Save America, the popular liberal podcast, saw a photo of kids in cages and he went on to Twitter and in classic liberal righteousness language said, this disgusts me to see these kids in cages.
This is not who we are.
And he posted that photo from AP.
Only for it to turn out That that photo was taken not in 2019 or 2018 under Donald Trump, but in 2014 and 2015 under President Obama.
He was saying, what kind of monster could possibly allow a policy like this that puts kids in cages reacting to that photo?
And the photo was from the Obama years.
Because of course the Obama administration detained people trying to enter the country and put, when they were children, put them in detention facilities, just like the Trump administration did and just like the Biden administration is doing now.
You notice, though, you never hear anymore about kids in cages, even though kids are still in cages, because they were props, they were toys for liberals to exploit.
They don't care about kids in cages at all, at all.
That's why there's no melodramatic border visits anymore, no talk of kids in cages.
Now the Biden administration has spent all day denying this report and I'm going to show you what the Biden administration itself last night did and what they said So you can just make up your own mind about whether or not the Biden administration is telling the truth that they now deny they're building the wall.
Here is from the US Federal Register, which is where official agency pronouncements go.
These are the decrees that the executive branch agencies have to issue under the law in order to do the things they want to do.
So for example, under the law, it'll say, Homeland Security is permitted to build border barriers as long as it first decrees in the Federal Register that there's a crisis at the border of justifying the construction of walls.
So they are required to issue these notices and to opt, not required, to opt to use the authorities given them under the law, in this case to build a wall, Trump's wall, at the border.
And this is what they said to justify it.
Quote, the Secretary of Homeland Security has determined pursuant to law, that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Star County, Texas.
So this is what they want to do.
They are issuing this statement because they need to waive certain laws, regulations, regulations, and other legal requirements, so that they can ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads at the land border in Star County, Texas.
Does this seem to you like they are saying there's an emergency and we need to expeditiously build a border wall Because that's what it seems to me like they're saying because that, in fact, is what they're saying.
The DHS statement goes on, quote, important missions of the Department of Homeland Security include border security.
Congress has provided to the Secretary of Homeland Security a number of authorities necessary to carry out DHS's border security mission.
One of those authorities is section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996.
In Section 102A of that law, Congress provided that the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take all actions as may be necessary to install additional physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the United States border to deter illegal crossings in areas of, quote, high illegal entry into the United States.
In Section 102B, Congress called on the Secretary to construct reinforced fencing on the southwest border And provide for the installation of additional fencing, barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors on the southwest border.
Finally, in Section 102C, Congress granted the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive all legal requirements.
Therefore, I must use my authority under Section 1 of 2 to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley sector.
Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads.
Construction will be funded by a fiscal year 2019 appropriation through which Congress appropriated funds for the construction border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley and DHS is required to use these funds for their appropriated purposes.
So, there is a law that allows, permits, Homeland Security to build Trump's wall in the event that they opt to declare an emergency at the border, which is exactly what they did.
No one forced them to, no one required them to.
They did it because the Governor and Mayor of New York and the Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago and the Mayor of Washington, D.C., all of whom, every last one of them, Spent the Trump years citing the Statue of Liberty and all kinds of, paid all kinds of homage to the beauty of diversity and immigration before those immigrants started arriving in their cities and states in large numbers.
Now that they are, they sound like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio and they're saying keep these immigrants out of our communities, keep them out of our country.
In 2020, Joe Biden, when he was campaigning for president, was asked by the New York Times about his views of the border and from his basement.
You can see it there on the screen.
He didn't go anywhere at the time.
That was during COVID.
This is what he told the New York Times about his immigration plans.
President Obama was known as the deporter-in-chief, removing more than 3 million people during the Biden-Obama administration.
Trump campaigned on Build That Wall.
You made me president, thank you.
I did, no, the Obama-Biden administration.
Trump campaigned on Build That Wall.
Are you willing to tear that wall down?
No, there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.
Number one.
Number two.
I mean that's it.
There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.
And now yesterday they issued an order saying we're going to build more wall and the reason is obvious.
They didn't care when it was their political enemies, whose communities had to integrate these immigrants, whose budgets had to accommodate their needs, and now that they're arriving in northern cities, suddenly it's an emergency.
Because liberals are excellent experts, the world's greatest experts, at gushing so righteously and nobly about all these elevated concepts of how good they are.
When it doesn't affect them or their communities at all, when it's other people who pay the price, and the minute these things start to enter liberal communities, they do a complete 180 and start demanding exactly the policies that, before it hurt affecting them, they denounced as Nazism and white supremacy.
Let's listen to the rest of Biden.
What I'm going to focus on and the fact is that somebody in this group written a lot about the border.
I'm going to make sure that we have border protection, but it's going to be based on making sure that we use high tech capacity to deal with it.
And at the ports of entry, that's where all the bad stuff is at.
What about the land confiscations?
What about the land confiscations?
End.
End.
Stop.
Done.
Over.
Not going to do it.
Withdraw the lawsuits.
We're out.
We're not going to confiscate the land.
So, that was all before and everything is different now.
Now, as I'm certain you know, a certain congresswoman named Alexander Ocasio-Cortez went to the border, or at least she went to a parking lot at the border, and she stood outside of a fence And took a series of photographs showing various degrees of anguish and upset.
And a lot of you probably don't know this, but in the gallery world, in the world of art galleries, this is referred to as AOC, a vision in light.
These are very coveted photographs because they show so much passion for people, so much empathy and concern.
So this is in 2019 when she went down there.
It might have been 2018, but Trump was president, of course, and she put on this whole theatrical demonstration.
And she hasn't been down there since, since Trump was president.
She no longer cares at all about what's happening at the border.
In 2019, AOC tweeted the following, of course Trump was president, quote, the entire premise of a wall is not based in fact, it's based in a racist and non-evidence based trope that immigrants are dangerous.
So she'd go on to say some Democrats are willing to quote compromise and spend billions on a trope.
Because we've accepted some kind of racism as real politic in America, but now that Biden is building the wall, the wall that is based not in fact or evidence, but racism and non-evidence based tropes about immigrants being dangerous.
I guess we'll see whether or not AOC will condemn Joe Biden for being a white supremacist now that he's building a racist wall.
I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
I think that'd be quite dangerous for your health.
She'll probably express some kind of Disturbance just because even for AOC this is too much not to, but she most definitely won't accuse Joe Biden of being a racist or a white supremacist for building a racist and a white supremacist wall.
In August, just a couple months ago, the New York Times interviewed her.
There you see the Title, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and how she's changed.
So many articles on how she's growing up, our little AOC growing up into a Washington insider.
She promised to disrupt the Democratic Party, but now she's a team player.
She practically boasts about it every day.
Just today, She proudly remembered that when she got to Congress after winning in 2018 and it was time to vote for the House Speaker, when it got to her, she said Republicans looked at her and when she voted for Pelosi for House Speaker, they were disappointed, she claims.
And so I posted the segment of the interview I conducted with her in 2018 when she was running for Congress against Joe Crowley.
Almost nobody was paying attention to her.
I interviewed her and I specifically asked her, if you win, And at the time, no one expected she would.
I said, if you win, do you plan to go to Washington and vote for Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to continue in their leadership positions?
And she told me, no.
She said, no, I don't think it makes any sense for them to continue.
They've been there too long.
It's time for new people.
And then she gets there, and the first thing she got to talk about months later, after promising small donors and voters she would vote against Pelosi, she got there and did exactly the opposite.
Now she's boasting of it on the grounds of what a great team player she is.
But the New York Times noticed the fact that she'd made this very melodramatic trip to the border and yet hasn't been under Joe Biden.
They asked her, why haven't you been at the border?
Why you went to the border?
You said the border was the site of Nazi atrocities.
Nothing's really changed under Biden.
So why aren't you going back and getting in your white costume and Taking some more pictures.
And this is what she responded, quote, I mean, it doesn't start at our border.
And I know that this has been a right-wing talking point, but I do want you to understand your thinking here.
Oh, I'm sorry.
This is the New York Times asking the question.
They said, quote, I mean, let's go back to that.
This is the New York Times asking AOC, I mean it doesn't start at our border and I know that this has been a right-wing talking point, but I do want to understand your thinking here.
Why haven't you used your considerable clout as a Latina leader to visit the border and highlight the ongoing issues there now like you did during the Trump administration?
And this is AOC's answer.
Well, this is something that we're actively planning on.
What I have done is tours of our New York area facilities.
Right now this crisis is in our backyard and we have toured the Roosevelt Hotel.
She toured the Roosevelt Hotel in New York.
I think it's been very important for us to, especially to my constituents who are demanding accountability on this, to look at that front line that is right here in New York City.
What front line is in New York City exactly?
Unless you're saying the front line is the difficulty of absorbing immigrants into the city in large numbers, which is what Eric Adams is saying, which is what Governor Kathy Hochul of New York is saying.
Is AOC now saying that immigrants are a danger, immigrants are a burden, which in the Trump years she called a racist trope?
So anyway, if you're wondering why AOC hasn't gone to the border, it's because she's too busy on the front lines at the Roodeveld Hotel in New York.
Now, as a reminder of the sort of thing that was being said about Trump's wall, Here is one of the most popular liberal op-ed columnists for the New York Times, Jamal Bowie, in 2019.
The title of his op-ed was Trump's Wall of Shame.
It would stand as a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history.
So he said the wall was a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility surging This moment.
I wonder if we're going to get a Jamal Bowie op-ed this week saying that Joe Biden is a white supremacist and building a white supremacy, a monument to white supremacy.
Here from Bloomberg, the headline on that op-ed, this isn't a border wall.
What is it then if it's not a border wall that Trump wants to build?
What is it then?
It's a monument to white supremacy.
Just like confederate monuments, President Trump's vision of a massive wall along the Mexican border is about propaganda and racial oppression, not national security.
That's the same wall that Joe Biden is now building.
Now, There's a whole other side of this issue, which we want to show you, which is the fact that all kinds of leading Democrats, Democratic governors, Democratic mayors also spent the Trump years, it wasn't just AOC and media figures, denouncing this wall as white supremacy, as racism, as grounded in the worst of America, and our hatred of brown people, and our fears of having new people come into the country who don't look like us.
And now that New York and Illinois and Washington D.C.
are required to use their budgets to integrate immigrants into their communities in large numbers, immigrants who aren't documented, who are there illegally, who don't have identification, who don't have money, who don't have homes.
They're required to house them and take care of them in large numbers.
Suddenly, they all start sounding like immigration hawks.
The exact same people.
Who went from singing the praises of immigrants and calling people who are concerned about it racist, to demanding that immigrants be kept out of their state and cities now that it's affecting them and their constituents.
This is really what liberals are.
So we're going to show you these examples, but before we do that, we're going to get to Matt Stoller, who I believe is on the phone.
Is that on the line, actually?
Is that correct?
He is on the line, so we've introduced Matt many times.
It actually starts to annoy me the more I have to sing his praises.
Basically, he's an antitrust expert.
He's been around in almost every job in Washington.
He wrote a great book on big tech and antitrust law.
He follows these issues, I think, as closely.
And as with such with an expert eye as anybody.
And so we wanted to bring him on to talk about several very important developments over the last several weeks, but also a couple issues involving Congress.
Matt, good evening.
Welcome back to the show.
It's always great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Always glad to have you.
So you were on our show, I don't know what it was, maybe six weeks ago or so, right at the start of the trial that the Justice Department had initiated against Google, accusing Google of a wide range of illegalities, of abuses of the antitrust law.
The trial was about to begin.
We kind of talked about what the trial alleged, why it had gotten to the trial stage, which a lot of these cases don't.
And now we're kind of in the middle of this trial and I want to talk about some of the things that have happened in the trial.
But before we get to that, remind everybody kind of what's at stake in this trial.
What are the core allegations against Google that the Justice Department is pursuing?
Yeah, so the core question is, should Google control the Internet?
Google has 90% market share of the search engine market.
Everybody uses Google to find stuff.
And that confers massive amounts of power and money on Google, largely through advertising.
And the claim by the government is that Google has this this power, not because it's the best search engine, but because it pays distributors like Apple, you know, or Mozilla or any browser, when you go onto the browser and you just search for something, Google is just the service that pops up.
The reason Google is what's called the default is because they pay billions of dollars to these companies to be the default, something like 15, $20 billion a year, something like that to Apple.
And that is what's called monopoly maintenance, right?
What Google is trying to do is to prevent anyone else from coming into their market.
And so over the last six weeks, that's been the basic push and pull.
Are these agreements that Google has signed with all of these distributors an illegal way to maintain a monopoly?
Or is Google just so awesome that all of these companies want Google and Google is paying them because it's a nice company that likes to be kind to Apple?
Yeah, clearly this is, you know, Google, Amazon, which we're going to talk about in a second, but also Apple, Facebook.
These are companies that are bigger and more powerful and wealthier and more influential than almost any company in American history, in the history of corporations, if not in the history of humanity.
And the idea that so much power and wealth is concentrated in a handful of companies is kind of shocking.
The allegations are very strong.
The question now is, can the government prove them?
And I've been hearing some talk from other experts about some of the evidence that has emerged, including Google emails between executives talking about market share, some issues involving Apple.
I know a lot of this has been conducted, this trial has, behind a wall of unusual secrecy, which I want to get to in a second, but in terms of what we have been able to learn about the evidence and whether the government is proving some of the claims you just referenced, what have we seen in terms of evidence that emerged at this trial?
Yeah, so what we've seen is, you know, essentially like, There's a lot of evidence that Google pays distributors not to accept rivals.
So they pay Apple a lot of money.
And Apple has negotiated with rivals like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft to potentially have an Apple-branded search engine.
And then at the last minute, Even though they're getting offered more money by Microsoft, they go with Google.
And, you know, Apple likes this situation because, you know, it is a comfortable, you know, they, I think, know that if at the end of the day, if there were competition in search, the margins for everyone would shrink.
But It is pretty clear that they are choosing to not get into certs themselves and not take partnerships from other companies, and instead going with Google, which cuts against their own sort of arguments about privacy, because they are getting paid a lot of money to do it.
And Google, you know, the argument that Google is making Is that, you know, the argument that Apple is making is Google is just the best product and we choose the best product.
But that doesn't really explain why Google is paying them so much money.
And that fundamentally, that's essentially what the government put forward.
It's what we knew at the beginning of the trial.
It's what sort of the witnesses are coming out and saying.
There is a lot of other evidence like Google has, you know, this government has essentially proved that Google has the ability to manipulate the price of advertising and controlling prices is really one of the indicia of monopoly power.
On the other side, Google has shown that their search engine generally is better quality than the other search engines.
And the government's contention is that that is because having more data search engine, which is basically true.
But it is also the case that Google search engine is better.
So the funny thing that Google proved is that the number one search term on Bing is actually Google.
So people want to get to Google.
So it's kind of like this open question of, I guess the last thing to say is Apple had a Maps program.
There's Apple Maps and there's Google Maps.
And Apple put Apple Maps as the default on the iPhone.
And people didn't like it because Google Maps was better because Google Maps had a lot more data.
But ultimately Apple Maps stayed on as the default and now a lot of people use Apple Maps and it's just as good if not better than Google Maps which shows that really what's happening here is the defaults drive the quality of the product.
So the ultimate question I think for this judge is Do you just allow Google to monopolize and prevent rivals from getting into the market and just say, OK, well, Google's product is better because it's you know, there are it is the only search engine that people use.
Or are you going to say you have to let rivals into the market because otherwise you're allowing this company to win unfairly?
Maybe it'll still win if it doesn't have these agreements.
But right now it's winning unfairly.
And I think that's just a question that the judge has to make a decision about what the law means, and then that's gonna get appealed.
I think the important thing when it comes to antitrust is talking about why people should care.
Like, what is the impact on the ordinary person?
Otherwise, it just seems like a kind of fight over market share and profits to a bunch of big companies that doesn't really affect people's lives.
The last time you were on, we talked before about the Rumble lawsuit against Google, which has advanced to the discovery stage, meaning the court has refused to dismiss it.
And the essential argument is that because Google owns YouTube, they purposely suppress the videos of any non-YouTube platforms.
I know from experience, if I try and find my videos on Rumble, unless I know the exact title and even then, I'll at best find the clips we put up of the show on YouTube.
That comes up way before, even though the views are maybe 1.6, 1.7.
Sometimes I can't even find my Rumble videos in Google search.
I don't know if you saw this, but I want to ask you about this.
The Intercept reported it, where Rumble had signed the exclusive rights to broadcast the Republican presidential debate.
They had the exclusive rights broadcasted online.
Fox obviously had the exclusive broadcast rights for television.
And what Google normally does when there's a presidential debate is if somebody enters Republican presidential debate, they put the link and they kind of promote heavily where you can go find the presidential debate because the idea is that Google wants Americans to go watch presidential debates.
They contacted the RNC, Google did, and they said, hey, we want to know where it's going to be online because we want to promote it.
And when the RNC said, Oh, actually, it's Rumble that has the exclusive rights.
Suddenly, Google said, oh, actually, we don't have the capability to promote this, even though they were the ones who asked.
They've done it many times before.
And that night, if you tried to find the RNC presidential debate online, you basically couldn't find it in Google because they just ignored or suppressed So, in terms of these allegations against Google that you're talking about, if I'm just an ordinary person, if I use the internet for my own purposes, I don't really care if Google or Microsoft or Apple get a bigger share of the market.
I think they're all kind of big, rich, influential companies.
I don't really care.
Why should I care about this Google lawsuit?
How does it affect my own use of the internet or my exposure to information?
Yeah, I mean, the problem is, you know, this Google is the government of the internet, right?
I mean, that that that's the fundamentally what you just described is Google controls the web.
And actually, the CEO of Microsoft said it, it has moved from an open web to the Google web, right?
So we're living in Google's world.
I mean, I was doing like the nerdy antitrust analyst thing, monopoly maintenance, and all that annoying stuff that you have to like talk about when like you're dealing with lawyers.
But the truth is, You know, Google controls what we see, it controls what we find, and it controls, you know, in many ways, like our neighborhoods, right?
What you're looking for, you know, the restaurants you can find, or the, you know, if you're a locksmith, whether you can, you know, have a livelihood, right?
Google can just be like, nah, I think you're a scam, and you You can no longer get customers, and that happens to people.
I mean, this is such a powerful institution, not to mention all the politics, you know, where Google controls huge aspects of speech.
Like, this is one of the most powerful institutions ever in human history.
And it's powerful globally, too.
So this is like crazy important.
And when you have multiple rivals in a market, you have an Apple or you have a Microsoft, you have a Google, or you have new smaller entrants, right?
It fundamentally and depending on how you can structure the market, it could be a situation where you could have lots of search engines.
All of a sudden, the power of one entity to say, I am going to this is what the web looks like.
It radically reduced.
It's not just like, if you have one player in there, they have a lot of power.
And if you have two, It has a little bit less power.
It's like you have a lot less power if there's one alternative in the market.
And if there are two alternatives, wow, so much less power.
So right now, Google is like an authoritarian dictator of the internet.
And they kind of share power with Facebook, they share power with Amazon and Apple.
And it's like, if you break that and you just force them even to compete with each other, then what you've done is dramatically increased the amount of liberty we have to find things online, to find each other, to communicate with each other, to sell things to each other, to exchange ideas, to sell books, all of these things that make a society.
Right now, we have these Very, very small set of intermediaries of which Google is a key one.
You break that and you restore some, you restore a democracy on it.
So just one last question on this, Matt.
You know, I think the biggest antitrust lawsuit up until now involving internet was the DOJ's lawsuit against Microsoft in the 90s.
Right.
That got a ton of attention.
I mean, I remember waking up every day and reading about that trial.
It was very melodramatic.
There's almost no attention being paid to the Google trial.
I think there's a lot of different reasons for that.
I mean, there's obviously some within your creepy little world of antitrust freaks, but I'm saying, like, generally in the media, broadly, there's not a lot of attention.
One of the reasons, I guess, and like I said, I think there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that the trial is being conducted behind a quite unusual wall of secrecy.
Usually trials are open in the United States.
The idea is we're supposed to see how courts work.
We're supposed to have open access to our courts.
You do have journalists going, but there's not a lot of transparency about the trial itself.
There's an unusual amount of secrecy.
What do you make of that?
Yeah, it's really amazing.
So we set up a site called Big Tech on Trial and I hired someone to go to the courtroom every day.
But, you know, a number of antitrust trials like when Microsoft tried to buy Activision or American Airlines and JetBlue were We're litigated against by the DOJ.
They had an audio feed that went online, so you could call in and you could listen if you wanted, because trials are supposed to be open to the public.
And this judge, Judge Amit Mehta, he decided at the beginning of the trial, I don't know, I don't think anyone's really interested.
And also, I'm not a business person.
I don't want to hurt Google.
So we're not going to have an audio feed.
And that was a really big deal because, you know, all sorts of people all over the world who would normally be listening to this trial or could listen to this trial no longer can.
You have to be in D.C.
and you have to be able to go to that courtroom and take notes.
And there are no electronics allowed in the courtroom.
So it's not like you can tweet from the trial.
It's really limited in what you can do.
And the other thing, and I think this magnifies the problem, is that The judge is highly deferential to Google in terms of what should what the evidence that can be made.
So there's like a lot of times when you go to the courtroom, you know, you'll you'll go there and they'll start asking this, you know, with Apple witness or something about, you know, an Apple executives on the stand.
And then, you know, 10 minutes in the judge, the judge will be like, okay, we're going to do the rest in a closed session.
Please leave.
And then for like, An unknown amount of time.
Sometimes the whole day, there's no, it's all in closed session.
And all of the financial information is redacted, which is crazy, right?
I mean, there's no, this is not harmful, like to put this stuff out there.
Everyone knows Google's paying these companies a lot of money, whether it's $12 billion or $17 billion is of public interest.
It will not harm Google.
These are supposed to be public.
There's supposed to be a public record.
And the judge has been extremely cautious and really leaned against what I would argue is his constitutional duty to have a public trial and allowed Google to kind of keep a lot of secrecy here.
And so much so that actually the journalists started getting angry and started to like write about it.
The New York Times, I mean, I was saying this is how to hide a $2 trillion trial.
New York Times wrote about the Wall Street Journal, it's become a regular thing, this trial Guardian, like all of the outlets that you love.
They, they've actually been angry about how secretive it is.
And I think that this, it's a good thing that they're angry.
But then you have the other dynamic here, which is that a lot of the you would expect trade publications that cover advertising to be obsessed with this trial, because this is all about advertising.
And it's about the biggest company in advertising, like hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising money.
And you haven't heard anything.
And that is, I think, because there's just a lot of fear of Google.
Google is incredibly dominant in the media.
And everyone is either taking money, paying Google money, or getting money from Google, or both.
They're highly dependent on Google.
And I think there's just huge, huge amounts of fear.
So that's another aspect here.
But it's like a mix of sort of weird secrecy, Absolutely.
That's why we wanted to have you on.
So let me ask you about another lawsuit that, when I read, it seemed almost as sweeping as the allegations against Google, if not in a way more so, which is a lawsuit that was just brought.
And I guess we should point out, by the way, for people who don't know, that the lawsuit that has led to this trial against Google was actually one initiated by the Trump administration and then continued by the Biden administration.
This new lawsuit against Amazon is one that is newly brought by the Biden administration, by the Federal Trade Commission, as well as by 17 state attorneys general.
And it alleges against Amazon sweeping violations of antitrust law, claims that it's engaged in monopolistic abuses.
A lot of these companies, certainly Amazon, got way more powerful during the pandemic as small businesses went bankrupt, a lot of power got consolidated in these huge giants, especially ones that dominate the internet.
What is this lawsuit against Amazon about and what do you make of it?
Yeah, so this lawsuit alleges that Amazon has been systematically inflating prices across the economy and hiding it through a really clever scheme.
So just to start with a very basic thing, there are 170 million Amazon Prime customers in the United States, and you get free shipping if you're an Amazon Prime customer.
But of course, There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Like, someone is paying for this very expensive logistic network of free shipping.
And who is paying for that?
Well, obviously, it's the consumers.
It's the people that are buying things from Amazon.
They just hide it.
And so that's the essence of the suit.
And how they hide it is a little bit complicated, but it's interesting.
So Amazon is about 60% of the items that are sold on Amazon are sold not by Amazon directly, but third-party merchants on Amazon.
So think of Amazon as kind of like a shopping mall, and they charge rent to individual stores, and about 60% of them are not Amazon, or they're independent stores, or they're Best Buy, they're smaller merchants.
And then 40% is Amazon itself, they're selling stuff.
Well, what the allegation here is that that 60 percent, those third party sellers are they are actually told that that they they're saying, OK, you have to pay Amazon huge fees.
You have to pay for every dollar you get in from a customer.
You have to pay 50 percent of that to Amazon, which means they have to raise their price pretty dramatically or else they can't make any money.
But the thing is, is that you would expect, well, I'm selling widgets for $10 on Amazon and giving $5 of it to Amazon.
Well, I can just go and sell it at another online seller.
I can sell it directly for, you know, $6, right?
Because I'm giving $5 of it to Amazon.
Why don't I do that?
Like, why don't you see lots of sellers doing that?
And the reason is because Amazon Tells all of its third party sellers, if you go off of Amazon and you sell anything less outside of Amazon than on Amazon, we are going to hide you from customers.
Right?
So that's an it's called an anti discounting provision.
And so to a consumer, you're like, oh, this costs $10 and I get free shipping and it's on Amazon and it's the lowest price anywhere.
And that looks really good.
But what you don't see is that that item should cost $6 elsewhere.
And it isn't because of the power that Amazon wields over those third party sellers, because Amazon has so much of the market.
And this is where the monopolization thing comes in.
They have so much of the market that if you're a third party seller, you can't afford to not be on Amazon.
It just means you go out of business because you can't get customers because that's where the customers are.
So the lawsuit alleges, there are other things in the lawsuit that are really interesting that allege, you know, various forms of price inflation.
But the lawsuit essentially alleges that Amazon is inflating prices on Amazon itself and then also outside of Amazon and causing this kind of like huge increase in costs that consumers are paying, even though they're not seeing those costs.
And they're doing it by preventing any of their third party sellers from leaving, which has, and the last thing I'll say, has two effects.
One, it means that those third party sellers can't sell stuff for cheaper.
But two, it prevents anybody from competing with Amazon because you go to Amazon because it has a broad and rich selection of stuff.
Well, if you try to replicate that and try to pull some of those third-party sellers over, you're not going to be able to because those third-party sellers are going to be like, no, I'm not going to sell outside of Amazon because then Amazon will punish me.
And so that's essentially the monopolization claim.
Yeah, I think it's a lot easier to understand in this case why it has this deleterious effect on consumers and ordinary people than even in the Google case.
All right, let me ask you just before I let you go, About the situation with Matt Gaetz.
I personally don't really care about whether Kevin McCarthy or Jim Jordan or some other standard issue Republican is the Speaker of the House.
It kind of amazed me exactly for that reason that so many people seem so upset that Matt Gaetz was successful in fostering the removal of Kevin McCarthy from that Speakership.
I don't just mean Republicans who supported Kevin McCarthy because they give them, he gives them a lot of power, but I mean like journalists who ordinarily would hate Kevin McCarthy.
You seem so upset by any kind of instability or deviation from norms.
I never realized until this week that Kevin McCarthy was such an extraordinary linchpin of American security and prosperity, but apparently he is given how upset people are by his removal, who ordinarily would be saying only bad things about Kevin McCarthy.
You worked in Congress in a bunch of different capacities.
You talked a little bit about what your views were on all of this.
What are your views about what happened this week with Matt Gaetz and McCarthy?
Well, I mean, I call it the norm fairy.
Like, people get very upset when you cross the norm fairy.
Like, there's all these norms that stuff just isn't done, right?
I when I look at at Congress, you know, it's one of the most loathed institutions in American politics.
And there's they're not governing.
And I mean, people want Congress to do things that make better.
And Congress isn't doing that.
And they're really mad about it.
And to me, that's the giant scandal.
All this process stuff, which is essentially like.
Arguments about like seating charts and like who gets different parking spaces like That stuff shouldn't matter when you have an institution that has been at 10% approval for decades.
They were so upset that after this happened, some of these Republicans expelled some of the Democrats from the big, nice offices.
The journalists were incredibly upset by that.
That, I don't know, some random Democrat doesn't get one of the nice views any longer of the mall.
Right, right.
It's like, yeah, that was Steny Hoyer.
And then they now call it a speaker emeritus, Nancy Pelosi.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Where did that come from?
How did she get?
What is that?
Like, so once you're a speaker, you're like an emeritus, like a professor who is always a professor until they die, even if they're not teaching classes any longer.
She's just like the speaker emeritus, like hovering over the Capitol with their spirit until she takes the path of Dianne Feinstein.
Where does this all come from?
It's like noble gentry or like lifelong titles.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's just like this weird clinging on to all of these kind of myths that our institutions work and are worth preserving in sort of their existing form, and really a fear of what might come next.
And I think one of the interesting things about Matt Gaetz And I don't agree with him on a lot of different policies, but he's actually like saying, he cares about different policy objectives.
And that's what, I mean, from what I could see, and I've watched him and he is just like, he does not care.
He's just like, this is what I think, and I'm going to pursue this policy.
You know, he's just like, Congress needs to govern.
I don't we don't agree with how Matt Gaetz would use Congress to govern, but that's his main problem.
And so I think that when he got, you know, engineered this this ouster of Kevin McCarthy and doesn't care about the norm theory or process, I think he reflects more what most people think.
Then all of this other norm nonsense where they're like, oh my gosh, everything is working so well.
It's like, no, it's not.
And then, you know, like Ro Khanna comes out and says, hey, how about a deal where we can like restore the rules in a more stable way, but then we get rid of like the ability of members of Congress to engage in stock trading or take PAC money.
And Matt Gaetz comes out and says, I would do that deal.
And so it's like, This is actually the interesting conversation going on and all the norm stuff, all the civility stuff, like that stuff is kind of important in a system that's functional and legitimate and that people like generally trust.
But that's not the situation that we're in right now.
So that it's like a fascinating like it's a fascinating dynamic to watch.
Exactly.
That's why I really that's why I really do say I mean, this is what my reaction was to this.
And of course, a major theme of the show.
That obviously, like left versus right, conservative versus liberal, still matter in a lot of debates.
But I think the much more relevant metric in our politics these days is whether you regard these institutions as fundamentally and inherently legitimate and worthy of preservation, or whether you like when they're subverted and disrupted because they deserve to be.
And what is so interesting, Matt, is that a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals who supported the Bernie Sanders campaign, who were excited about AOC's election, had visions in their head that the left was going to do exactly this to the Democratic Party, that they were going to come in and start pressure Nancy Pelosi to cave into their priorities, threaten to remove that they were going to come in and start pressure Nancy Pelosi to cave And they've done none of that.
They've become this lockstep party.
And a lot of the reforms that Max Gates got the first time around when he wouldn't vote for Kevin McCarthy until the 15th ballot were reforms that a lot of people have been saying The ability of House members to demand specific issue votes so you don't just vote yes or no on the entire government with the threat of a shutdown.
A lot of these are very real reforms that he definitely thinks a lot about and cares a lot about.
It's just amazing to watch these people, I think this is what it is in Washington, acting to protect these institutions that in reality everybody hates except for them.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's like a general, you know, you can, I used to be really interested in the procedural stuff.
And I would, I would sort of be like, you should go at Democrat, I'm a Democrat, you go at democratic leadership and use leverage to like, you know, and what has been interesting in antitrust is to actually like try to persuade with ideas.
And to see, you know, in a lot of areas in the Biden administration, and they're not doing a particularly good job, but in antitrust, they really are.
And it's because the people who are You know, who are doing it and they have support and opposition in both parties actually are interested in governing and are interested in wielding power on behalf of the public interest.
And I think what you see in both parties is they're just not thinking about the world that way.
They're not thinking, how do I use my position of authority to govern to make things better for people.
Instead, there's a kind of like, they kind of lose their focus.
And they, you know, I think there are well meaning people on both sides just think that they're losing, there isn't a particularly strong focus on like, the ultimate legitimacy and governing output of the institutions that they're in.
And it's been this way for decades.
And so, you know, it's, it's hard, it's hard to do anything but laugh at this, at the sort of silliness.
And I agree.
I think that there is something very annoying about the faux radicalism.
It's my side.
They're my people.
But there is something really frustrating about it.
I think it's opposed.
I'm fine with working within the Democratic Party.
That's what I do now.
to achieve policy objectives, and you can do that.
But I just feel like you need to actually do it.
That's really where we need to go.
And I think you see the same poser type of stuff on the right as well.
So I think that we do have a problem, like a systemic problem.
And it is nice when you have these moments where you can sort of explore that.
And I think that this is one of those moments where you can say, hey, maybe we really should reset the institution.
Yeah.
Well, it does seem like these institutional resets do generally come these days more from the right.
I know you don't want to say that because you do work in the Democratic Party or maybe you don't agree with that.
We'll have you back on another time so that I can explain to you why you're wrong.
For now, I know you have to go.
I really appreciate your taking the time to come on.
It was super informative about issues that I really do think are being incredibly ignored given how consequential they are.
So I appreciate your enlightening us about all of those.
I hope you have a great evening.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Bye, Matt.
So we're going to get back to the segment that we interrupted in order to go talk to Matt.
We kind of interrupted ourselves at a natural breaking point.
We were talking about the fact that throughout the Trump years, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, a lot of the leading Media representatives of the Democratic Party had a consensus that Donald Trump's attempt to build a border wall to keep out immigrants from entering illegally was racist and Nazi-like, a monument to white supremacy.
And now Joe Biden today, through his Homeland Security Department last night, has announced that they are going to build that very same wall, expand it, Put it in new places because lately Democratic Party-held politicians have gone from singing praise of the Statute of Liberty and calling people white supremacists for being concerned about immigration to demanding that the Biden administration do more to keep out more immigrants because now it's coming
Their communities and their towns and their cities and their states and now they suddenly care about the impact of immigration whereas before they didn't when they were just kind of mascots that they could exploit the way liberals love to do when it was just the deplorables having to integrate.
Now I think the history of how Democrats have talked about the wall and immigration is so interesting because for a long time not even that long ago in fact when I started writing about politics
Immigration was, immigration meaning more immigration, opening the borders, was a view that was advocated more by the Republican Party than by the Democratic Party and the reason for that was because the Republican Party was controlled by the kind of corporatist interests that have now gone to the Democratic Party.
That was, George Bush was a huge proponent of immigration reform because they wanted more immigrants coming into the country because that would lower wages for the American worker.
It would create a huge supply of workers that corporations love because then they have a competition among workers and can pay lower wages.
And for exactly that reason, for a long time, for decades, opposing open borders and immigration reform was a left-wing position on the grounds that when we have huge numbers of immigrants into this country, it's the American worker who suffers.
There was an article by Jamelle Bowie, who I mentioned earlier, who wrote about how Donald Trump's wall is a reminder of racial strife and white supremacy.
But in 2013, when he was writing for the liberal outlet The American Prospect, he warned the Democratic Party, don't go too far with being pro-immigrant because African Americans don't like Policies that increase the amount of immigrants because they're usually the ones who pay first.
They're the ones who lose their jobs or whose wages get depressed.
And they know that.
They know that they're the ones who most compete, he said, not me, he said, with immigrants.
And in 2016, when Bernie Sanders was running for president in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton, he was interviewed by Ezra Klein at Vox.
Ezra was at Vox at the time.
And Ezra was trying to make the case to Bernie Sanders That if you're on the left, you have to want as many immigrants pouring into the country as possible because to be on the left means that you care so much for the poor.
And it doesn't matter if they're poor Guatemalans, or poor Vietnamese, or poor Cubans, or poor Venezuelans, or poor people in Idaho or Alabama.
We care about them all equally.
We don't distinguish on the left.
We want them all to come so we can embrace them and lift them up.
Now obviously, they weren't coming to Ezra Klein's community back then.
That's why he could say that.
And I just want you to watch what Bernie Sanders said.
This is just seven years ago, eight years ago in 2016, when Ezra Klein asked him about immigration.
Open borders?
and what you said about being a democratic socialist is a more international view.
But I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds.
Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders, about sharply increasing the amount of foreign aid.
Open borders?
That's a Kochbunders proposal.
Of course.
I mean, that's a right-wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States.
Isn't that amazing?
Excuse me.
Isn't that amazing?
Just seven years ago, the avatar of the American left, Bernie Sanders, said open borders is a right-wing policy.
It's a policy of the Koch brothers to drive down the wages for the American workers.
Anyone on the left would never be in favor of open borders, he said.
Because to bring in a ton of immigrants means to depress wages for the American worker.
Let's listen to the rest of this.
this is essentially the original United States but anybody it would make a lot of global poor richer wouldn't it and it'd make everybody in America poor then you're doing away with with the concept of a nation-state and I don't think there's any country on the world which believes in that I mean that's nationalism as a client was saying we should want everybody to come in who's poor from all over the world because then we're helping poor people We'll make poor people richer.
And Bernie said, yeah, but you make the American working class poorer.
And he said, you're not really a nation unless you protect your borders.
That was Bernie Sanders' view.
And he said, it's a right-wing idea to want huge numbers of people pouring across the borders.
That's what the Koch brothers want.
And that was true.
When I started writing about politics in 2005, It was the Republican Party, John McCain and George Bush, serving their big corporate donors by advocating open borders, or a huge amount more of immigrants coming in.
And Bernie Sanders is saying what he just said in that interview.
Now, he got immediately attacked by Hillary Clinton.
He was, of course, they implied he was a racist.
There you see from 2016, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders spar over immigration issues.
And she pandered to the base of the Democratic Party, especially to Latino voters, and said, you're racist, you want to keep out immigrants.
Because immigration stopped being a working class issue for the Democratic Party and started to become an identity politics issue for the Democratic Party.
Where now you couldn't advocate for what Bernie Sanders on the left in the United States has long advocated, labor union.
Cesar Chavez was against a lot of immigration.
Because it went from being, like the Democratic Party itself, a working class issue to an identity politics issue, and the only issue in an identity politics framework is who you get to pin the label racist on, or white supremacist on, and that's what Hillary Clinton was in the mode of, and that's what she did to Bernie Sanders, which is why Bernie Sanders almost won that election.
And would have had the Democratic Party not cheated, because he was appealing to ordinary people, because he was talking about the class issues that affect them.
Now, what really started to change...
Was in the middle of last year when Governor DeSantis decided that he was going to fly a few dozen migrants, people who had entered the country through Texas illegally, he flew them to Massachusetts and specifically to Martha's Vineyard.
And what happened was when those people got to Martha's Vineyard, which of course is a bastion of American liberalism, He sent them there in September when the rich vacationers weren't there.
It was after Labor Day.
That's not when they're in Martha's Vineyard, but it was basically these liberals who lived there all year round.
And those liberals started saying, we can't have immigrants in Martha's Vineyard.
We're not.
We can't take care of these people.
We have no space for them.
They need to get out of here.
Here's the Washington Post.
The headline, DeSantis moved to fly migrants to Massachusetts, stokes confusion and outrage from critics.
Quote, the flights marked the latest effort by politically ambitious Republican governors to send migrants to Democrat-led cities, which critics see as a cynical ploy.
Can we put the article up on the screen?
Quote, putting them on that island might have suited DeSantis' political efforts to try to get the spotlight, said Representative William R. Keating, a Democrat who represents Martha's Vineyard and other parts of southeastern Massachusetts.
Quote, but it was one of the worst places to do that.
Many of the 48 migrants said they do not know what will happen next or how long they will stay here.
As in Washington, officials in other urban areas where migrants have been dropped have complained.
That they lack resources to house them.
And that's what happened that first day they got to Martha's Vineyard.
A bunch of liberals were telling the media, we can't, we don't have space for these people.
They need to get out of here.
We're not a border state.
We're not the kind of people who have immigrants in our community.
And then it was pointed out, oh look, these are the same liberals who constantly accuse anybody who wants a wall or who wants their limits on immigration of being a white supremacist.
And then they started saying, no, we love our immigrants.
And they put on a big show.
They had like a fair.
They gave out cupcakes.
But then they made sure that the very next day, within 24 hours, the Massachusetts Reserves was sending military buses to remove them from Martha's Vineyard and taking them to a military base.
And all the nice liberals who love immigrants so much were waving goodbye to them as they got out of their communities.
And this is what liberals are in the United States.
This is what sickens me about them more than anything else.
Everything is theatrical.
Everything is performative.
Everything is LARPing.
They love to denounce other people for refusing to bear sacrifices and burdens that they themselves refuse to get anywhere near.
They live behind walls and gated communities.
Where there's barely any racial integration, and where there are no illegal immigrants, I can assure you.
And they love to look down their noses at the people down there, at the communities who have far fewer resources, who are complaining about the inability to integrate migrants, and they call them racists, and deplorables, and white supremacists, and Nazis.
And then the minute immigrants get anywhere near their communities, they start screaming bloody murder.
And that repeats itself on every issue over and over and over again.
They love to call people racist when they have no black people, no Latino people in their lives except for the people who work for them.
Everything is performative.
It's all about proving how righteous you are without ever actually having to reflect any of those values in your life.
And the minute they start being affected, everything changes.
Here is the billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois.
Governor Pritzker, who liberals absolutely adore, just like they adore the billionaire Levi Strauss heir Dan Goldman, the newly elected congressman from the Mueller team who represents Manhattan.
Governor Pritzker is another billionaire, like Dianne Feinstein, close to being a billionaire who they also worshipped.
And here he is in 2019, during the Trump years, of course, singing the praises of immigrants.
And talking about how good people, good liberals, meaning liberals, good people, welcome immigrants and don't complain about them.
Illinois' governor signs a series of bills aimed at protecting immigrant families in the state.
Eyewitness News is keeping you connected to the Capitol.
The new bills address everything from MAP grants for undocumented students to banning detention centers.
Governor JB Pritzker believes the move is necessary to create a firewall against what he calls attacks on immigrants by the Trump administration.
Local law enforcement agencies will also no longer be allowed to coordinate with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
We want law enforcement to act properly in the state of Illinois and properly now means you're not coordinating with ICE agents to take our people away.
These are our... You're not coordinating with ICE agents.
These are our people.
We don't want you taking them away.
Look at all the people behind him clapping righteously.
...residents in the state of Illinois.
All three bills go into effect immediately.
Those bill signings come as it's revealed ICE is expected to raid communities in 10 major U.S.
cities Sunday, including Chicago.
These aren't expected to be random raids.
In February, ICE sent out about 2,000 letters to families who had court-ordered removals.
Those are the people immigration officers are going after.
The move comes after President Trump announced on Twitter ICE was preparing to deport millions of undocumented immigrants next week.
All right, so now fast forward to 2023.
Joe Biden is the president.
There are a ton of immigrants going to Chicago that they didn't plan for, they didn't budget for.
Here's NBC News, October 2nd, Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker, the same Illinois governor that you just watched, calls on Biden to step up action on the migrant crisis.
In a letter Monday, Pritzker knocked the White House for a, quote, lack of intervention and coordination at the border.
What happened to the governor who in 2019 was saying, these are our people, we love them so much, we're going to protect them.
Now he's saying to Biden, keep them out of this country, keep them out of our communities.
We can't afford them.
We can't pay for them.
We can't care for them.
We have enough of our own problems.
Here's the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, incredibly Inspiring video, where she said the following, quote, as you know the Statute of Liberty is inscribed, it says, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
And that statement encapsulates our values.
We want people to come here, despite where they came from or despite the circumstances that drove them to this country, into this state.
What we see, say, you are welcome here.
You're welcome with open arms and we'll work to keep you safe.
What a nice person she is, Governor Hoko.
She's incredibly empathetic and warm.
She loves people who are different than she is.
She wants to Anyway, 2023, Governor Hochul went on Face the Nation, as enormous amounts of people who enter the country illegally pour into New York City and New York State, and she sang a much different tune.
It can be done.
This can be done in a bipartisan way, comprehensive immigration form.
What specifically do you want?
Well, we want them to have a limit on who can come across the border.
It is too open right now.
People coming from all over the world are finding their way through simply saying they need asylum and the majority of them seem to be ending up in the streets of New York and that is a real problem for New York City.
Oh, that's a real problem for New York City?
It wasn't a real problem for her before when they were ending up in Texas and Arizona and she was citing from the Statute of Liberty To distinguish herself from the dirty, filthy, evil, white nationalists and racists in the South who were saying, look, immigration is a problem for our communities because we can't integrate them all and can't afford them.
It creates chaos.
And now she sounds like Trump.
She sounds exactly like Trump in 2016 when he came down that elevator, 2015.
She's saying, we can't, there's just too many of them.
They're just coming in, and they're ending up on the streets of New York.
That's the problem.
Who cares when they were in those places where those other gross racists were?
And I was like, the Statue of Liberty is weeping.
These are our values.
We hug them.
We welcome them.
We say, come on in more.
But the minute they actually get there, she goes on TV and she starts sounding like every single Republican from Texas or Arizona.
125,000 newly arrived individuals and we are being taxed.
Now, we are always so proud of the fact that New York has the Statue of Liberty in our harbor.
We are one of the most diverse places on earth because of our welcoming nature and it's in our DNA to welcome immigrants, but there has to be some limit.
There has to be some limits.
She remembered what she was saying.
She's like, yes, I still love the Statue of Liberty.
We love immigrants so incredibly much.
We get so excited when we see different people.
We're such good people.
We care so much about immigrants.
Not this many, though.
This is way too much.
Keep these people out of my state.
Welcome immigrants, but there has to be some limits in place, and Congress has to put more controls at the border, and not in this budget threat, shutdown threat.
Talk about eliminating positions for border patrol when we actually need to double or quadruple those numbers.
So get back to work and do your jobs. - She is infuriated about immigrants coming to New York.
She is enraged.
Get you back to your job, quadruple the border agents.
Keep these people out of my state.
If she were a Republican and said that in 2019, there would be hundreds of articles in liberal digital outlets about how she sounds like Joseph Goebbels.
And I just showed you all those articles.
Eric Adams, The mayor of New York City who is warning that immigrants are a plague.
He's a Democratic mayor.
He was nominated in a primary by Democratic Party voters in New York City against a whole bunch of other left-wing candidates.
He won.
That's why he's mayor.
Because Democrats in New York City voted for him.
He was doing the same thing.
There you see from the Daily Mail, New York City Mayor Eric Adams welcomed migrants to the Big Apple and was, quote, proud to be a shelter state as they arrived on buses in 2022 before begging Biden for aid and saying the crisis will destroy the city.
Speaking to reporters at the time, the mayor said, quote, as the mayor of New York, I have to provide services, families that are here, and that's what we're going to do.
Our responsibility as a city, and I'm proud that this is a right to shelter state, And we're going to continue to do that.
But then a lot more immigrants started arriving, and the extremely loving and kind and empathetic Democratic mayor also started saying much different things about immigration.
Here he is on CBS New York, the local CBS affiliate, on September 7th.
New at 11 now, Mayor Adams more passionate than we've seen about the asylum seeker crisis.
As more buses arrived at Port Authority today, the mayor says the city is severely impacted by the influx of migrants.
Speaking at a town hall meeting tonight on the Upper West Side, the mayor said that he doesn't see an end to this problem as the city is not getting enough support from the federal government.
This issue will destroy New York City.
Destroy New York City.
We're getting 10,000 migrants a month.
Now we're getting people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they're going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City.
The mayor says the city currently supporting 110,000 asylum seekers that have arrived in the five boroughs since April of 2022.
I mean, can you believe this?
It's like the worst caricature of American liberals.
You couldn't make this up if your intent were to mock them.
If I were to write a satire of American liberals, and I were to propose a bunch of fictional characters who were governors and mayors, who during a Republican administration, when there weren't a lot of migrants, illegal migrants entering their city, but they were entering red states, I would have them cite from the Statute of Liberty.
And say this is who we are, not those Nazis on the border complaining, and then had a bunch of immigration waves into their city only to have them turn around and start demanding that the government keep these people out, calling them a plague and a crisis, saying they're going to destroy our city.
I don't think I'd get a publisher to publish that satire because it would be too obvious, too extreme, too glaring.
They would say, this is lacking in any nuance.
That's how extreme they are in just completely abandoning all of those righteous lectures, those sanctimonious accusations and denunciations of people concerned about immigration.
And as I said, this is what liberals are.
It repeats itself over and over in every single other issue, including racism, Every accusation they have, the minute things affect them, they completely change.
Here is the White House Press Secretary today.
I have to say the White House Press Corps, which ordinarily is unbelievably compliant when it comes to the Biden White House, even they looked at that video of Joe Biden saying, not another inch of the border wall on my watch.
And compared it to the announcement by Homeland Security that they were building more border walls because there was, in their words, an emergency at the border.
Even from the media, the White House Press Corps, that contradiction was too much.
And they actually asked Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, about it.
And here's what she said.
This is a law that we are complying with.
We have asked Congress multiple times to re-appropriate this.
This is not the way that we believe is going to be effective here.
We believe in modernizing the system, not actually building a wall.
The President said himself he does not think this is effective, and so we're complying by law.
And we believe that in the rule of law here, and we're moving forward in getting that, in following the law.
There will not be another wall constructed in my administration.
How can you say that he's not breaking that promise?
Well, what I can say is that there's a law that the DHS is complying with.
We believe in the rule of law, and that's what we're moving forward with.
What else are they going to say, I guess?
Now, I guess what they're trying to suggest is that they didn't really make a decision, they were forced into doing this, but that is an absolute lie.
Which is why I showed you the original Homeland Security decree published in the Federal Register because it makes very clear it's discretionary.
In other words, they have to declare there's an emergency at the border in order to spend that money on more wall.
If they just didn't declare that, they wouldn't have spent the money.
But the reason they're doing it, it's amazing this kind of corner they painted themselves into.
They have to Throw a bone to these Democratic mayors and governors who we just showed you spent years saying only racists care about immigration and now suddenly are saying keep these people out of our states and out of our cities.
They have to give them something because they are being overwhelmed.
They don't have any place to put these immigrants.
There's a huge homeless problem in democratic cities.
Never mind finding space to accommodate tens of thousands of people who have entered the country illegally or on asylum requests.
So they have to show they're doing something to address that problem.
But at the same time, they have to pretend they're not really building Trump's wall because they spent so many years claiming only Nazis do it.
And Biden vowed during the campaign, as explicitly as you can be, As explicitly as that brain of his will permit him to articulate anything, that he would not build a single molecule of a new wall.
And now they're doing it.
Here is the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
Who issued a little video that also denied that Homeland Security is doing exactly what they're doing, which is building the wall.
And he said, quote, I want to address today's reporting relating to a border wall and be absolutely clear, there is no new administration policy with respect to border walls.
My full statement and then he essentially said the language in the Federal Register notice is being taken out of context and it does not signify any change in policy whatsoever.
What they're trying to say is there was a law in place already and it's true there was but the law said if Homeland Security declares an emergency at the border then and only then can they appropriate this money, use this money that's already been appropriated to build more wall.
They went and on their own declared an emergency at the border.
Which is why they're now spending this money, but when they saw how angry people are at the hypocrisy and the sanctimony and the violation of the promise, I mean, they're building a wall that everybody said was a Nazi and white supremacist wall.
AOC said it was a wall based not in evidence, but white nationalism.
And how do you justify that?
So they're saying on the one hand, we're building the wall and on the other, they're insisting their media come to their defense and say they're not really building a wall.
And at least for now, it's a bridge too far, even for the media.
But to me, what it shows is just the absolute rotted nature of American liberals, of the Democratic Party.
their virtuousness ends right where their own interests begin.
Just one final issue I wanted to bring to your attention We've been reporting on the war on rumble that has been underway for a long time.
For reasons that are obvious, which is Rumble is a platform that refuses to censor.
Voices that most other platforms censor.
They refuse to be bullied or coerced by big media corporations.
Big media corporations all the time run articles saying Rumble is a vector of disinformation and hate speech.
They have these people and these people and these people.
And Rumble refuses to censor.
But this war has escalated severely ever since Russell Brand, one of the people on this platform who's among the most popular, Was accused by anonymous women through the media of having committed various forms of sexual assault from 2005 to 2013.
