With War in Gaza, the Core War on Terror Mindset Returns. Authoritarian Nikki Haley Demands Ban on Online Anonymity. New Poll on Israel-Gaza Shows Breach With DC Elites | SYSTEM UPDATE #182
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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.
Ten days after the 9-11 attack, George W. Bush stood before joint sessions of Congress and, in a speech authored by Supreme Neocon David Frum, who at the time was Bush's White House speechwriter, uttered this now-notorious line, which came to define the political climate in the United States for the next several years, quote, Or you are with the terrorists.
That binary framework, by design, suppressed debate and dissent for years to come in the United States.
It meant that anyone questioning what the United States government wanted, any war it proposed, any power it seized, any decree it issued, rendered one standing accused publicly of being pro-terrorist, of supporting Al Qaeda, of being on the other side.
That's what that meant.
Either you are with us, the U.S.
government, or you're with the terrorists.
That was the climate that produced quick and overwhelming enactment of the Patriot Act, mass warrantless domestic NSA spying, the invasion and destruction of Iraq that among other things gave rise to ISIS, torture chambers and CIA black sites, and multiple wars around the world that impoverished and immiserated American citizens, while enriching the military-industrial complex and the arms industry.
Every protest and every march against Bush-Cheney's neocon policies in late 2001, 2002, and through 2003 were instantly branded as pro-terrorist.
Go watch any random Fox News show from 2002 or 2003 to see how that worked.
Any Americans who didn't go along had their reputations ruined and were frequently fired.
Does that sound familiar?
It should, since that's what's been happening over the last five weeks in this country.
As much as any civil liberties erosion, or unjust and unwise war itself, it was that climate of oppression, of equating all dissent with being pro-terrorist, that caused me to start writing about politics and enter journalism in 2005.
And ever since, many Americans, including many in the elite political, media, and punditry class, have insisted That they regret those excesses of 9-11, that they now see how easily they were put into a state of fear that caused them to cheer counterproductive wars and to acquiesce to the erosion of their own rights at home.
But after the last five weeks, I'm really left wondering, what do they regret exactly?
It's hard to see anything given that the exact same template has once again emerged.
Indeed, the Israeli Defense Forces has been consciously copying David Frum's defining phrase that came out of George W. Bush's mouth.
As they post all over their social media accounts, quote, either you stand with Israel or you stand with the terrorists.
And now we are right back into the dissent-destroying culture of 2002, only this time it's being done not in response to an attack on our own country, the United States, but to an attack all the way on the other side of the world, on a foreign country.
That is, in turn, a response to a decades-long complex conflict over land and statehood that should not be America's war, let alone render people in the United States subject to censorship and reputational destruction for questioning the U.S.
role in that war on or whose side the United States should be.
Then Nikki Haley is easily one of the most warmongering and authoritarian candidates to run for high office in years.
We have been repeatedly covering some of her more unhinged statements, her cheerleading for every war, her self-serving and self-enrichment by serving Boeing and Neocon war groups in DC, but yesterday she really unveiled the depth of how entrenched her authoritarian instinct is.
By calling for a law that the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled is a direct violation of the First Amendment's core guarantee of free speech.
Namely, Nikki Haley vowed that as one of her first acts in office, along with compelling big tech companies to reveal their algorithms and what they support and what they don't, she said she would ban American citizens from expressing themselves on the internet anonymously or using a pseudonym.
Both long-standing and iconic American traditions, and instead required them to register their names and verify their identity as a condition, a legal condition, to speaking out on social media.
We'll examine just how extremist and repressive this proposal is and what it actually says about Nikki Haley.
Finally, just as we asked repeatedly at the start of the war in Ukraine, we have been asking since the start of this new war, the one involving Israel, how is it in the interest of American citizens, remember them, American citizens, to fund this new war, to make this new war an American war, to invest American resources in fueling a foreign country's military needs whose citizens, in many cases, enjoy a higher standard of living than many Americans?
Polling is starting to show that American citizens are reaching the same conclusion, asking the same questions.
And that yet again, there is a massive breach between the views of the American citizenry and what they want, and the overwhelming bipartisan consensus in Washington.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I've talked before about how the motivating event in my life that led me to stop practicing law and to decide to seek out a public venue, a public platform to talk about politics, to enter journalism, was not any one specific policy exactly, but more so the repressive climate that emerged in the wake of the 9-11 attack.
I lived in...
I worked in New York.
I was in New York on 9-11.
I remember how horrific it was.
3,000 of our fellow citizens died.
People jumped out of tall buildings in a desperate attempt to flee a fire that was consuming them, jumping to their deaths.
People died in absolutely horrifying ways.
And a lot of people in the United States craved vengeance.
Wanted to exact vengeance for that attack.
Wanted to kill the people who did it.
Bomb a lot of countries.
90% of Americans united behind George Bush, united behind that idea.
I was one of them.
I wasn't really paying attention to politics, but I was part of, obviously, the citizenry and the culture.
And after a very short time, I started realizing that that culture was being exploited.
Those fears and the anger of decent people were being exploited to usher in authoritarian policies that I never thought I would see in the United States.
Such as the power of the president to arrest American citizens on US soil and put them into cages with no charges of any kind.
Or the institution of due process free zones around the world where the government had the ability and the right to imprison people with no charges for as long as they wanted.
But it was really more this general notion that if you exercise your right as an American citizen, To criticize the U.S.
government, you were accused of being unpatriotic, of being on the other side, of being a pro-terrorist, subversive, of being pro-Al Qaeda.
It was a binary framework that was imposed, and it was led by George W. Bush's speech ten days after the 9-11 attack, when everybody was on his side for the most part.
When the country united behind him, even though eight months earlier, half the country thought he had stolen the election, that he was an idiot.
He was an extremely divisive and polarizing president until 9-11.
And everybody united behind him and they proceeded to exploit that unity and that sense of patriotism and that anger and fear by ushering in a huge series of authoritarian measures, the Patriot Act NSA spying, and then a bunch of wars that they wanted way before 9-11, like the invasion of Iraq, but also a big plan to regime change in Syria and Libya.
And Iran.
And what bothered me more than, again, any specific policy was the fact that you're not supposed to be called a terrorist lover or unpatriotic in the United States if you question your government and its wars.
That is a foundational right of being an American.
What made Woodrow Wilson such an evil and pernicious president was that he enacted a law in 1917 called the Espionage Act that was designed to criminalize dissent.
Opponents to his policy of entering World War I and involving the United States in that war.
Now, maybe you thought that was a good policy.
That's fine.
A lot of people do.
But people who didn't got imprisoned.
As spies.
And that law, the Espionage Act of 1917, haunts us to today.
It's the law that is used to try and imprison Edward Snowden.
It's the law that is being used to try and extradite the imprisoned Julian Assange.
It's the law that's being used to try and prosecute President Trump.
It's the law that has been used against many whistleblowers and sources under the Obama administration.
That's what happens when you allow a binary framework to be introduced where you're told that you cannot dissent, question your government.
Oppose its wars without being a terrorist lover when a binary framework is imposed.
We are right back to that.
Right back to it.
Over the last five weeks, scores of Americans have been fired from their jobs.
Journalists and people who work in the corporate world, in academia.
Nobody has been fired.
Not one person.
For expressing support for the Biden administration's involvement in this war on the side of Israel.
Nobody has been fired for being too extreme or excessive or violent in their expression of support for Israel, even though we have people running around saying, erase Gaza from the map, eradicate Gaza, flatten it.
Those are genocidal statements.
Not one person has lost their job for that.
Every single person who has lost their job over the last five weeks, For expressing their views on this war, every single one of them has been either critical of Israel, pro-Palestinian, or critical of the U.S.
government's decision to involve itself in this war on the side of Israel.
That is the binary framework that I'm talking about.
We have people who are being censored, including by acts of the state, banning pro-Palestinian groups on campus, exactly the climate that emerged after 9-11.
Here is a tweet that went quite viral by a suddenly popular fanatic little supporter of Israel named Dr. Eli David.
And there's a lot of politicians that we've covered expressing this view.
I just think this is so incredibly vivid about the mindset that has prevailed.
There you see he has the world divided into two.
That's a dichotomy, a binary framework.
And he wrote, The world is now fully divided into good and evil.
On which side are you?
And on the side of good, the side of moral good, this of course is a very similar framework for what George Bush said in that quote.
You have, of course, Israel at the top.
Israel is the pinnacle of good, the representation of good.
You have to pick your side, and there's no way to be a good person.
There's no way to be on the side of good without fully supporting this foreign country called Israel.
That's at the top, right there, the peak.
And then you have the United States here, the UK here, Germany here.
You have a couple of the world's most savage and brutal dictators in the Gulf States.
Because they're on the side of the United States, so somehow, I think it's like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
They're on the side of good, too, so if you want to be a good person, be on the side of good.
These are all the people you need to support.
And then you have evil.
Your only other choice.
The only other choice for supporting all these countries is this.
You're on the side of evil.
And there, of course, at the top, you have Israel's enemies.
You have Palestine.
You have Iran.
You have this dragon, which I think is supposed to be a representation of the Chinese.
You have Putin.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I mention that on the side of good, very, very important, you also have Ukraine.
There you see the blue and yellow flag.
So Ukraine is also on the side of the good.
And then on the side of the evil, you have Putin.
You have the United Nations.
You have all these vaguely looking Muslim people, probably Iran.
You have Hamas.
You have the BBC.
And then you have Harvard.
There's that Harvard shirt.
So that's it.
That's your choice.
Pick.
As an American citizen, sorry to tell you, but if you don't want to be evil, you need to support Israel.
Isn't that an incredibly convenient dynamic and framework?
For Israel's most fanatical supporters, we spent a segment on our show asking why so many Americans obviously view this foreign country with so much intense affinity.
It's not just American Jews.
There are evangelicals and national security hawks and people who see the world now as a war of civilizations.
This is very much the framework after 9-11.
Amazingly, Saudi Arabia, I think, is on the side of good, even though if any government was tied to the attack on 9-11, it was them.
And again, this isn't just one tweet.
We've covered pretty much more than any other topic on our show since October 7th.
The fact that US politicians, media figures, politicians in both political parties that are completely yet again on a war in lockstep like they were with the war in Ukraine, but even more so this time, have all been saying that if you don't support Israel, if you don't want to send your money to Israel, if you don't want to involve your country in Israel's war, You're a terrorist lover.
You love Hamas.
Now, after the Hamas attacks, the attack on October 7th, that came onto my show three or four consecutive nights, starting my show by explaining, not just saying, but explaining in detail why I thought it was important to regard Hamas's attack on Israel as morally unjustifiable, no matter what your view of the broader conflict is.
And yet I also believe that Israel's military response has been morally unjustifiable and the United States should not be providing Israel with the bombs to drop on Gaza, in part because it's an immoral war to kill in excess of 10,000 people.
You can think about it so many different ways.
5,000 children killed.
5,000 children in Gaza killed in the last month, five weeks.
That is more than the number of American troops killed for the entire war in Iraq.
One out of every 200 people in Gaza has lost their life in the last five weeks through Israeli bombing, through Israeli ground evasion.
One out of every 200.
Or through disease and other health issues that have come from blockading a country, not letting in water and food and medication and fuel, except in the tiniest percentages necessary for survival.
One out of every 200 people in Gaza has lost their life in the last Five weeks.
Now, I refuse to be told that if I don't support my government's use of my resources to fuel that war, while Israeli officials are saying things like we want ethnic cleansing in Gaza, We believe Gaza is ours.
We believe the West Bank is ours.
It's not just about killing or destroying Hamas.
It's about taking that land that doesn't belong to them and annexing it and making it part of greater Israel, which is what the explicit position of not just the Netanyahu government, but Netanyahu himself is.
I refuse to be told that my refusal to support that vision means that I am a supporter of a terrorist group or a group of people in Gaza that I explicitly condemned.
This binary is bullshit.
It's exploitative, it's manipulative, and it's dishonest.
It was exactly what we all lived through 20 years ago, for those of you who remember.
And it's also ushering in all sorts of authoritarian measures that should not be in the United States, even if there were an attack on the United States, as there was in 9-11, let alone on a foreign country on the other side of the world.
This is the thing I think I can't believe more than anything.
Maybe I was naive.
But when I heard all these people saying, you know what, I really regret so much of what we did after 9-11 when I was going on Fox News and hearing from all these hosts, you know what, you were right all along.
We regret what we did.
I thought they were genuine when I was watching polling data from Americans showing that they had turned against all these policies they were induced to support after 9-11.
I didn't think we were going to live through another 9-11 moment in the United States.
Either you stand with us or you stand with the terrorists.
Because I actually thought people had learned their lesson.
We have not.
We're right back to this.
As a reminder, here's the exact quote that I'm talking about.
This is George W. Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
And that prompted a standing ovation and sustained applause in the United States Congress.
And now here the Israeli Defense Forces on their Instagram account.
There you see it.
Either You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.
Here, it's the official IDF account copying David Frum's words that came out of George Bush's mouth.
Hashtag stand with Israel.
Do you think that's the only two choices?
Now, I think it's worth noting
Really worth noting, this is one of the things I find so baffling about how American conservatives, not all of them by any means, in fact, one of the most influential conservatives in the United States, Candace Owens of the Daily Wire, has been a dissenter on this war from the start, even though she works at a media outlet founded by one of the world's most fanatical Israel supporters, Ben Shapiro.
And just a few minutes ago, Candace Owens had an interview that she gave published with one of the other most influential conservatives in the world, Tucker Carlson.
Those two got together.
And Tucker Carlson, from the beginning of this conflict, has been saying, he had me on his show as well to say it, trying to tell conservatives, this is not your war.
Remember all the stuff about America First and non-intervention and how we have to take care of our problems at home?
Remember all the stuff you said about believing in free speech?
And now you're all insisting that pro-Palestinian protesters, dissenters of Joe Biden's policy, be censored?
And he had on Candace Owens, even though five or 10 minutes earlier, maybe an hour earlier, Ben Shapiro went on Twitter and told Candace Owens to quit.
After she cited a biblical verse about how money can't be more important than morals and he said, if you don't like taking money from us, you're free to quit or you should quit.
Because we're back to a conservative movement that for all of its claims of how much they love debate, at least some of them don't actually want to tolerate debate, especially when it comes to this foreign country to which they have the greatest affinity.
So there are a lot of people rejecting this mindset, but there's a huge number of people who are accepting it.
Now, one of the interesting things about American conservatism is that it is obsessed with China.
China, in the eyes of most conservatives, and by the way, the Biden administration, there's another place they agree, China is the real enemy of the United States, the primary competitor, the primary adversary, the true threat.
A lot of people are willing to go to war if China invades Taiwan, wants the United States to go to a hot war with the second most powerful military on earth, a nuclear on power.
And yet, one of the things that has strengthened China more than anything is the resentment that they are able to exploit that so much of the world has about the fact that they perceive that the United States is the country that has gone around Fueling wars, unjust wars, all over the world.
And they were able to use our support and fueling of the war in Ukraine to do that also.
What do you think the world sees, the world as a whole sees, when they watched a Trapped, stateless, civilian population of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, being obliterated and bombed daily by one of the world's most powerful militaries that is backed and funded and armed by the world's most powerful.
Most of the world doesn't have this kind of obsession that a lot of Americans have about Muslims or an attachment to Israel.
Now you can say I don't care what the rest of the world thinks but that's an odd thing to say if you're simultaneously saying the most important thing for the United States to do is to undermine China and its power because this perception that the United States is this bully in the world that uses its military unjustly is China's biggest asset.
And if the United States really wants to tell huge numbers of countries all over the world that you're pro Hamas, you're pro terrorists because they don't want to see Gazans And babies being blown to bits every single day, day after day, by the thousands.
That seems like a poor strategy to me.
Here is the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva.
Brazil is the third largest democracy on the planet, or the fourth largest democracy on the planet.
It's the sixth most populous country in the world, the second largest in the hemisphere, in our hemisphere.
Here's Lula today, November 13th.
Rather, yesterday.
There were, I'm sorry, that was on Monday.
There was a little mini-drama where there were about 8 or 10 Brazilians trapped in Gaza, and the Brazilian government was trying and trying and trying to get them out.
And they kept being promised, oh, we're going to let them out tomorrow, and it didn't happen.
And there was a suspicion in Brazil that that was because Lula had called what the Israelis were doing in Gaza genocidal.
And so we kind of pulled back his rhetoric for a while.
These Gazans got out.
These Brazilian Gazans got out through the crossing in Egypt.
They came home.
Lula met with them.
Listen to what he said about this war.
In my 78 years, I have seen a lot of brutality and violence and a lot of irrationality.
But I've never seen such a brutal and inhumane violence against innocent people.
Yes, Hamas committed an act of terrorism and did what it did.
But the state of Israel is also committing acts of terrorism.
They're failing to acknowledge that children are not at war, women are not at war, and they're not killing soldiers, they're killing children.
More than 5,000 children have already been killed.
More than 1,500 are missing, certainly buried in the rubble.
And they're destroying everything that took people decades to build, a house, a street, a building, a school, a hospital, just one bomb detonates it all.
Nobody is taking responsibility, so who is going to rebuild all that?
Now, you can say whatever you want about Lula, he's a leftist, he's a communist, whatever.
He's not a communist, but you can say that if you want.
But the point is that this is a view that is shared by most of the world.
Just like the unjustness of the U.S.
role in Ukraine and the fact that the United States provoked that war wasn't shared in the United States or in the U.S.
media or in the Western media or Western Europe, but was throughout the world, this is a view overwhelmingly shared by the world.
And if you want to claim that you want the United States to confront China and to exert influence, you have to care about U.S.
standing in the world.
One of the biggest prices the U.S.
paid as a result of its war on terror response was that its standing in the world was destroyed as a moral actor.
Here today is a meeting that President Biden had with the President of Indonesia.
I believe that's the fourth largest country in the world by population.
The second largest democracy after India, Joko Widodo.
And this is in the White House.
Biden was there to talk about some climate.
agreement they were negotiating and out of the blue the Indian the Indonesian president brought up his disgust for the United States support for the war in Israel here's what he said and then you can listen to Joe Biden I guess you can call it a response he spoke words after the Indonesian president spoke even though they weren't at all responsive to anything he said yield the floor to my friend
Indonesia appealed to the U.S. to do more to stop the atrocities in Gaza.
This fire is a must for the sake of humanity.
Once again, thank you for your invitation, President Biden.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And as we met outside, as you get out of your automobile, we had a very important discussion on climate.
Do you see that?
That is embarrassing.
A country like Indonesia does not confront the President of the United States in public that way unless they're really serious and passionate about what they want to say.
And in front of the media, he said, we urge the United States government to do more to restrain Israel and its attacks on civilians.
And Biden said, you know, remember when we got out of your car and we had that nice talk about the climate?
This is a person, Joe Biden, that is not functional.
But this is a serious cost for the United States.
And if you think it's worth it to sacrifice our national interest again for the State of Israel, then just be aware of the costs we're paying.
Here at the UN, In late October, so this was more than two weeks ago, and there's been a lot of building anger and horror at what's going on in Gaza since then.
There was a resolution at the General Assembly, and they adopted the resolution, quote, for the protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations on the ongoing Gaza crisis.
120 countries voted for it.
14 voted no.
45 abstained.
I don't think we have the full vote total here.
Maybe we can get it.
There we have it.
So, in addition to the United States who voted no, you have Tonga, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, Nauru, these are the countries, these tiny little islands, the United States always bribes to vote with it.
This was part of the Coalition of the Willing.
Let me read that again.
In addition to the United States, you have 14 countries voting no.
In addition to the United States, they include Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Israel of course, Hungary, Guatemala, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Fiji, and Austria.
Not even Germany, which has sacrificed all of its dignity to support Israel and everything that it does, not even Germany voted no.
They abstained.
45 countries abstained, that included most of Europe.
So I know in the United States, it seems like everyone's on Israel's side, just like it seemed like everyone was on Ukraine's side, because the vote totals in Congress are so overwhelming.
Because if you watch Fox or CNN, you get a drumbeat, an endless drumbeat of people telling you that that's the right view.
The establishment wings of both parties are united, but in the world itself, that is not the majority view.
That is a small minority view.
And it's costing the United States a lot.
Again, Fiona Hill is a popular foreign policy advisor and expert in Washington.
She's known as being very hawkish on both China and Russia.
She served in the Trump administration in the Trump White House where she was a vehement advocate of arming Ukraine of doing more to confront Russia.
She was a partner and ally of John Bolton.
She's actually a hawk.
But she gave this speech that we covered at the time that we want to remind you of in May of 2023, to European policy elites.
And she was basically trying to get them to say, look, I don't think this.
Me, Fiona Hill, does not believe this, but the rest of the world is starting to turn against the United States.
And the reason they're turning against the United States is because they see the US as a bully.
As a country that just goes around starting wars everywhere for the last 25 years.
And they see the war in Ukraine through that lens, even though Americans were told it was so obvious we were there benevolently to protect democracy, to fight against aggression.
People in the world don't believe that.
And China is being very wise and very successful in building a confederation of countries So I want to show you just a small clip of what Fiona Hill said to these European foreign policy officials.
And as you listen to it, just think about how everything is going to be worse to a thousand times exponentially.
At least in the war in Ukraine, both sides have an army.
Russia has a formidable army.
The Ukrainians have a formidable army now that NATO has paid for it.
The United States has paid for it.
Palestinians have no army.
They have a few rockets.
They're just a trapped population.
They can't leave Gaza.
They haven't been able to leave Gaza in years.
And the world's most powerful planes are dropping the most powerful bombs on top of their heads on their hospitals.
And their schools, and their ambulances, and their streets, and their buildings, and their houses.
And yes, every time there's a claim that Hamas is there, you know that's not true.
It's true sometimes.
There are a huge number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed in the last five weeks.
An enormous number.
An intolerable number.
And not just killed, but, I mean, on some level you can make the case that the ones who have been killed Have the better fate.
There was a UN doctor saying if I had to choose between going to hell and being in a hospital in northern Gaza, I would choose hell immediately without a second thought.
Here's Fiona Hill.
Listen to what she's trying to tell people about the world.
Now, since 1991, the United States has seemingly stood alone as the global superpower, but I would argue that today, after a fraught two-decade period, shaped by American-led military interventions and direct engagement in regional wars, the Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself.
Now, this decline is relative, of course, economically and militarily, but it is very serious in terms of U.S.
moral authority.
And again, we've heard quite a lot about that as well.
Unfortunately, just as Osama bin Laden intended, the U.S.' 's own reactions and actions have eroded its position since the devastating terrorist attacks of 9-11.
America fatigue, and we actually heard about that last night on the panel, as you might recall.
I'd already had that in my notes, and then we heard one of our panellists actually say it.
America fatigue and disillusionment with its role as the global hegemon is widespread.
And this, I would argue, also includes in the United States itself, the fact that we frequently see on display in Congress, news outlets, and in think tank debates.
For some, the US is a flawed international actor with its own domestic problems it should be attending to.
And for others, the US is still a new form of imperial state that ignores the concerns of others and throws its military weight around.
Well, why am I saying all this?
Because in the near term, this is particularly detrimental for Ukraine.
And I think we've heard a lot about that over the last year.
Because globally, the war in Ukraine is viewed as one in a long series of dramatic events since 2001, driven by the United States.
America's heavy-handed conduct of the war on terror alienated the vast swathe of the Muslim world.
The U.S.
invasion of Iraq in 2003, hot on the heels of Afghanistan, revived the horrors of U.S.
Cold War interventions in Korea and Vietnam.
U.S.
inaction in conflicts like Yemen and selective interventions in Libya and Syria underscored U.S.
foreign policy inconsistency.
I'm relating to you all the things that I've been hearing myself over this last year from all kinds of interlocutors.
Those are not things she believes.
She made that clear.
She supports the U.S.
war in Ukraine.
I guarantee you, although I don't know, I guess I'm guessing, I'm confidently guessing that she supports U.S.
support for Israel as well.
But what she's saying is that the entire rest of the world, what we've always called the rest of the world, which now is actually a lot more powerful than that dismissive term implies, is disgusted with the U.S.
It's frustrated with the U.S.
It resents the U.S.
It doesn't regard it as a moral hegemon.
And in the past, in the 90s, in the 2000s, no one had any alternative.
The U.S.
was the sole superpower.
That's not the case anymore.
China is a viable alternative, and a lot of countries are turning to it.
And when they do, they make China stronger and the United States weaker.
And these constant obsessive foreign wars that the United States constantly finds in fuels, one after the next, killing people all over the world on every continent, is creating the perception, both in the United States, but especially in the rest of the world, That the United States is a bully.
That it is a harmful presence in the world.
This is coming from Fiona Hill, one of the most entrenched DC insiders in the foreign policy community.
Now, I understand, I remember all the videos that came out of October 7th.
I have so many people in my life who have been traumatized by those.
I empathize with that.
I understand it.
The original death toll that we got from Israel from October 7th, which lasted for many weeks, was 1,400 people.
Just recently, they quietly and with no explanation downgraded it to 1,200.
We don't really know how many of those were military and police versus civilian.
And we also know for sure, because of the testimony of the survivors in many of the places where Hamas was, that a lot of the civilians were killed by the Israeli military, not by Hamas.
But there's no doubt that hundreds of civilians were killed, often in brutal ways, by Hamas.
They targeted people who were civilians.
They knew they were civilians.
They killed them anyway.
I understand that people We're enraged by that, we're horrified by that on a humanitarian level, through empathy, because they identified as Jews with those victims.
I understand all of that.
I think all of that's valid.
I shared that reaction.
But I also remember on 9-11 feeling the same way.
When 3,000 people had two buildings collapse on top of them.
You're talking about young parents and young people working Who were civilians and were innocent, who were trying to earn a living.
People on airplanes lost their lives.
And so much of the anger and the rage that we felt was misdirected.
It led us to support things that we regretted because it was unbelievably counterproductive to say nothing of morally disgraceful.
Don't let your reaction to October 7th lead you to places that are dark and disgraceful that you'll come to regret.
And do not let the re-emergence of that childish and yet deeply insidious framework that either you stand with Israel and the United States and everything it wants and its savagely despotic allies or you stand with the terrorists.
Don't let that framework be imposed on you because it is so deeply deceptive.
And if we saw that propaganda screen record the first time, I'd have sympathy, I'd have empathy for the people who fall for it.
We just went through that 20 years ago with 9-11.
we have an obligation to learn from that history and not to let it happen again.
Nikki Haley is somebody that we've been increasingly focused on, on this program.
She, of course, is the former Republican governor, two-term governor of South Carolina, also the former U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, currently seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
And the reason we've been focusing on her is several fold.
One is she has reasonable polling numbers.
At least to the extent that anybody can set to have reasonable polling numbers in a presidential race where one candidate has had a 40 to 45 point national lead for almost a year now.
She's also becoming the obvious establishment candidate, the one they intend to pour enormous amounts of money into propping up.
That's part of why we're focused on her, but also because she is monstrous.
She is a dangerous, fanatical human being.
And I know this can seem less important than other things she said.
It's not though, because this came from a place of instinct.
I don't think this is a very well thought through policy.
I think she went online, or she went on Fox.
She kind of let her real self kind of fly.
And listen to what she said.
And obviously, by the way, the context of this, just like the show we did yesterday, remember, we talked about the launching by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the Democrat from New York, of a new online social media surveillance campaign justified in the name of this narrative that anti-Semitism is so dangerous.
I had people right before I went on my show on Twitter telling me that American Jews can't even leave their house.
That's how endangered they are in the United States.
In the name of that narrative, she was saying, Governor Hochul, that we need to monitor social media more.
We need to aggressively seek out people who are posting hateful thoughts and counteract them, reach out to them to correct that behavior, she said.
That was the context for Nikki Haley's interview on Fox.
There you see the on-screen cry on Ambassador Nikki Haley on the explosion of anti-Semitism.
And here's what she said.
When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms.
Let us see why they're pushing what they're pushing.
The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name.
First of all, it's a national security threat.
When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say.
And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots.
And then you're going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say.
Accountability.
And they know their pastor and their family members are going to see it.
It's going to help our kids and it's going to help our country.
First of all, I can't tell you how many times Nikki Haley speaks and in the middle of her sentence she just throws in this phrase, it's national security.
That is already an authoritarian way of thinking about the world.
Everything's about security, nothing about rights.
Always on the far end of pretending that she's devoted to security, always on the opposite end of where individual rights reside.
That's just an authoritarian instinct that she has.
But to say that nobody should be able to be on social media, unless they're first registered and verified with their identity and have to post under their legal name, I don't think I've ever heard anybody advocate that before.
I mean, a lot of people have said, who are online, oh, people who are anonymous abuse their anonymity.
For sure, that's true.
I can't tell you how many repulsive things have been said to me because people hide behind anonymity.
There are anonymous websites about me that contain fabrications and forgeries and slander and lies that they're able to do because of anonymity.
I understand the cost of anonymity.
But anonymous free speech is crucial.
The ability to speak under an pseudonym or under anonymity, especially in a climate like we have where people get fired routinely for expressing their views or worse, is crucial and the irony is of it is that what shaped our Constitution were the Federalist Papers.
Those were the arguments that were advanced by people like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to argue in favor of the US Constitution and the enactment of the American Republic and they used Pseudonym, Publius, for doing so.
They didn't want their real names attached to it for a variety of reasons, including they didn't want the distraction on the personality.
Mark Twain wrote under pen names.
People have used pseudonyms and anonymity forever.
It's a critical part of political speech.
And yet, it wasn't actually the first time Nikki Haley has said this.
So, while a lot of people, including myself, Well, rant and rave against cowardly idiots who exploit anonymity for nefarious ends.
I would never dream of wanting a law to prohibit it.
Because the benefits of speaking, of allowing people to speak anonymously, to empower people, to enable them who might be endangered in some way in other countries, in our country, if they speak out, is so much greater the benefits are than the cost.
But she said it before.
Here she is on the Ruthless podcast saying it again.
Listen to what she said here.
They need to verify every single person on their outlet.
And I want it by name.
What about Smug?
Does he qualify?
I've provided them with my government.
If Smug is on your driver's license, then look, you can put Smug in parentheses, but I want everybody's name.
I want it by name.
I want those names attached to people speaking by social media.
This created a huge backlash over the last day or so.
She was attacked by Ron DeSantis in his campaign.
She was attacked by Vivek Ramaswamy in his campaign.
She was attacked by most conservatives to their credit, along with everybody I saw on the liberal left react.
I mean, she unified people in disgust and horror.
Here she is trying to walk this back.
She went on to CNBC earlier today and tried to pretend that she was only talking about foreigners, even though it makes no sense.
But even in this interview, she kind of repeated the same thing in the attempt to walk it back.
Listen to what she said.
We need our social media companies to verify everybody so that we can get all of those.
So you're not really saying that people can't tweet anonymously?
But that's bad enough because you see what it's doing to our kids and bullying and everything else.
Do I think life would be more civil if we were able to do that?
Yes, it's the same reason why I think doxing, like you know, you should stand by what you say.
But no, like if you can have anonymous, I don't mind anonymous American people having free speech.
What I don't like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.
No, obviously that's not what she said, that's not what she meant.
How would you only be able to force Russian and Chinese and Iranian people to use their names?
How would you know they're Iranian, Russian and Chinese unless you knew everybody's identity?
She just, she felt like she had to step back from the controversy, but she still wants that policy.
Now, this is not the first time this issue has been raised.
There are a lot of states in the United States over the years that have tried to get people to or require people to present their name, to use their name in connection with any political speech.
There's all kinds of Supreme Court cases.
Adjudicating the constitutionality of state or local law that has said, which Nikki Haley said, which is if you want to be heard, if you want to circulate pamphlets, if you want to circulate political speech, you have to put your name on it.
And people wanted to circulate pamphlets with controversial views.
They didn't want their name on it.
They put a group name on it.
They were punished.
They were arrested.
They were prosecuted.
They were fined.
And it went to the Supreme Court.
And in every case, Usually, unanimously, the Supreme Court said, you can't force people to attach their names in the United States to their speech.
Of course, speaking anonymously is a core First Amendment right.
Here, back in 1960, 63 years ago, the U.S.
Supreme Court, unanimously, in Talley v. California, Said the following, quote, the question presented here is whether the provisions of a Los Angeles City ordinance restricting the distribution of handbills, quote, abridge the freedom of speech and of the press secured against state invasion by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
The provision, the city ordinance stated, quote, no person shall distribute any handbill in any place under any circumstance which does not have printed on the cover or the face thereof the name and address of the following.
A, the person who printed, wrote, compiled, or manufactured the same, and then it had a whole long list, but the essence of what it had to have, it was illegal.
To distribute any handbill, in any place, under any circumstance, unless it has, on the face of it, the name and address of the following person, of the following, the person who printed wrote.
So that was the ordinance, very similar to what Nikki Haley wanted.
Here's what the court said, unanimously.
Quote, anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures, and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind.
Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all.
The obnoxious press licensing law of England, which was also enforced on the colonies, was due in part to the knowledge that exposure of the names of printers, writers, and distributors would lessen the circulation of literature critical of the government.
Think about this.
One of the key abuses of the British Crown that gave rise to the American Revolution was a law that the Supreme Court in 1960 called obnoxious that did what Nikki Haley wants to do, which was require the name of anybody who wants to criticize the government or speak and be heard in public.
The court went on and said, The old seditious libel cases in England show the lengths to which government had to go to find out who was responsible for books that were obnoxious to the rulers.
We have recently had occasion to hold in two cases that there are times and circumstances when states may not compel members of groups engaged in the dissemination of ideas to be publicly identified.
And it cites Bates v. Little Rock and the NAACP v. Alabama.
And those cases are really interesting because There were groups, the NAACP and others, that were very controversial at the time.
And governments wanted to get the list of the names of the people in those groups.
And the Supreme Court said no.
That would violate freedom of association.
People have a right to associate without having their names dragged out into public.
Because if they can't associate and join groups secretly, Then the ability to join controversial groups that are critical of the government, that are critical of majoritarian sentiment, will be compromised.
It's a long line of cases going back decades.
And then here's what the court said on this case.
Quote, the reason for those holdings was that identification and fear of reprisal might deter perfectly peaceful discussion of public matters of importance.
This broad Los Angeles ordinance is subject to the same infirmity.
We hold that it, like the Griffin Georgia ordinance, is void on its face.
Not even a close call.
The court had discussed and contempt on First Amendment grounds for Nikki Haley's mindset 43 years before she decided to advocate something that has long been deemed radically unconstitutional.
Here's a 1995 Supreme Court case from McIntyre versus Ohio elections where the court said the following, quote, the question presented is whether an Ohio statute that prohibits the distribution of anonymous campaign literature is a, quote, law abridging the freedom of speech within the meaning of the First Amendment, quote, anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures, and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind, citing that Talley case.
Great works of literature have frequently been produced by authors writing under assumed names.
Despite readers' curiosity and the public's interest in identifying the creator of a work of art, an author generally is free to decide whether or not to disclose his or her true identity.
The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official re-American names such as Mark Twain, Samuel A. Corn Clemens, and O. Henry William Sidney Porter come readily to mind.
Benjamin Franklin employed numerous different pseudonyms.
Whatever the motivation may be, at least in the field of literary endeavor, the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest, unquestionably, and requiring disclosure as a condition of entry.
Accordingly, an author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The fact that Nikki Haley didn't know That the Federalist Papers were written anonymously?
Documents and tracts and pamphlets as central to the founding of the country she wants to lead as any is... I don't know what to say about that.
I remember in law school reading the Federalist Papers over and over and over and over.
I'm being so enamored of them.
And if you go and read the earliest writings that I published when I first started writing about politics and the war on terror and the erosion of civil liberties, I constantly cited those because they were foundational to my worldview.
They still are.
And they were written anonymously under a pseudonym to conceal the identity of those authoring it.
I mean, this is so basic.
And this is what I mean.
It's one thing if she had sat down and formed this Very conscious decision to advocate an unconstitutional policy because she thought there'd be political advantage to it.
That's not what happened here.
She was just kind of speaking off the cuff, angrily.
She probably got accused or attacked on social media by anonymous people, and she's like, ban them!
Ban that!
Don't allow that!
That is an authoritarian instinct.
That is a despot's mindset.
And that's what Nikki Haley is, and it's a big reason why the Republican establishment is so eager on ensuring she's the nominee.
As our last segment, one of the themes of this show is that we have a broken political system in large part because there is a gigantic breach between the views of the American public on the one hand and what D.C.
elites enact as policy on the other.
The American citizens have turned against the war in Ukraine.
While that has caused some Republicans in Congress to become less supportive and less willing to authorize it, the Biden administration is pressing ahead demanding it.
And we see that in so many different areas.
That is definitely been the case and when it comes to the war with Israel and Gaza, that there is a big breach between Americans views on the one hand, And the overwhelming majority of views of American political elites and both parties and media elites as well.
Here from Reuters, November 15th.
U.S.
public support for Israel drops.
Majority backs a ceasefire.
Reuters Ipsos shows quote 7 set 32% of respondents in the two-day opinion poll which closed on Tuesday said quote the US should support Israel when asked what role the United States should take in the fighting that was down from 41% who said the US should back Israel in a Reuters poll conducted on October 12th and 13th.
The drop in US support seen in the new poll among both Democrats and Republicans, and especially among older respondents, follows weeks of heavy Israeli bombardment and ground combat against Hamas in Gaza in retaliation for an October 7th rampage.
About 1,200 people were killed and around 240 taken hostage.
Since then, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Around 40% of them children in Israel's assault, according to counts by health officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
By the way, that formulation is so wrong.
The Economist did an investigation of these numbers, and even though they're incredibly pro-Israel, they concluded they were accurate.
The U.S.
intelligence community has said that those numbers, if anything, are low because of the amount of people who are counted who are buried in the rubble still.
Quote, some 68% of respondents in the Reuters poll said they agreed with the statement that Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate.
68% of Americans say that.
In a potentially worrisome sign for Israel, just 31% of poll respondents said they supported sending Israel weapons.
31% want to send Israel weapons, something the Biden administration is doing in huge amounts, while 43% oppose the idea.
The rest said they were unsure.
Support for sending Israel weapons was strongest among Republicans, while roughly half of Democrats were opposed.
By comparison, 41% of people answering the poll said they backed sending weapons to Ukraine in its fight against a nearly 21-month Russian invasion, compared to 32% who were opposed and the rest unsure.
When it came to Ukraine, support for sending weapons was stronger among Democrats.
Here from And by the way, this has been true from the start of the war.
At the very beginning of the war, there were maybe two or three members of Congress who said, we're in favor of a ceasefire.
And when reporters asked the Biden White House about that call for a ceasefire, the Obama White House, sorry, the Biden White House, even though they were talking about Democrats in Congress who had called for that, said that it was reprehensible, despicable.
It's a call for a ceasefire even though a large majority of Americans favor that policy.
A ceasefire in Washington is practically taboo to call for it.
That is the split between the American citizenry and DC elites that we see over and over and over and over.
There have obviously been All sorts of polls showing that Biden's in big trouble because of his support for this war among younger voters, among Muslim voters whose votes they need to win in Michigan.
And I'm not saying that an elected official is supposed to just immediately abandon a policy the minute the citizen returns against it, but the fact that you have a policy which is a ceasefire, calling for a ceasefire, The Biden administration has expressed contempt for, even though the vast majority of American citizens favor that, shows how little public opinion matters, especially when the two parties join hands, as they have over this foreign country in this foreign war, as they did over the war in Ukraine as well.
And they simply don't care about public opinion.
And now we're back to Being involved in yet another war where we promised to give Israel everything it needs and wants with no limits until the end of time.
Even though they already get billions of dollars every year in foreign aid.
At the same time we're still involved in that war against Russia, the largest nuclear power on earth.
At the same time that a lot of conservatives seem to want war with Iran.
And at the same time, people continue to insist that the real enemy is China.
And that maybe we should have a war with them too.
What happened to all that anti-interventionist sentiment that we thought was growing?
How many wars do people want to fight?
Have the United States fight or fund or fuel at once?
We actually did a video a few months ago asking that question.
Because I know a lot of conservatives, especially ones who support President Trump, like his anti-interventionist sentiment.
And yet I was already noticing that when it comes to Israel, there's a militaristic view among a lot of conservatives.
Let's support Israel.
Let's fund Israel.
Let's support their wars.
There's an attempt to seek out confrontation with Iran, which is a very serious country, three times the size of Iraq, much more militarily sophisticated.
A lot of Republicans want to continue the war in Ukraine, although most Trump supporters don't.
And then you have China over there, that most people will say on both parties is the real enemy.
How is the United States supposed to fight all these wars?
And what happened to this idea that unless countries attack us, we shouldn't be involving ourselves in wars.
It just disappears the minute a new war starts.
That's the thing that amazes me.
How potent fear mongering is, how potent propaganda is.
People always say in general, I don't want more wars.
I want to stay out of wars.
We get involved in too many wars.
And yet the minute it comes to a new war, a new specific war, it's incredibly easy for the media to induce people to say, let's go fight that war.
Fortunately, polling is showing a lot more resistance than you will find anywhere in Washington or anywhere in the corporate media.
And that, I think, is very encouraging.
But what I don't think is encouraging Is how many people who spent the last six years claiming to believe in free speech who now support censorship?
How many people have been fired in the United States for expressing dissent?
And how we seemingly have returned to this 22-year-old framework that I thought we rejected.
That we're all stuck in this binary framework where either you applaud everything the United States and the Israeli government do or you stand accused of being pro-terrorist.
It's idiotic, it's moronic, but it's very potent.
but it should be scorned as should anybody promoting it.
So that concludes our show for this evening as As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast version.
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