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Nov. 21, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:46:37
Media Matters’ Deceitful Study to Silence X/Rumble. Plus: Darren Beattie on New 1/6 Tapes, Argentina’s Election, & Israel-Gaza | SYSTEM UPDATE #185

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Good evening, it's Monday, November 20th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the censorship industrial regime that has arisen and been imposed since 2016 is a multi-pronged weapon.
As we have extensively documented on this show, it relies on tactics such as vintage state censorship, A billionaire-funded and government-controlled fraudulent industry to decree what is quote disinformation and pressure campaigns on big tech to ban political ideas regarded as dangerous by the establishment.
But one of the most pernicious tactics are campaigns by groups like Media Matters and the Anti-Defamation League to pressure corporate advertisers to disassociate themselves from any sites that allow dissent to liberal orthodoxies, including sites that do nothing more than offer free speech to people who want including sites that do nothing more than offer free speech to people who
To accomplish this end, these groups implicitly threaten these corporate advertisers that if they do not immediately cease their advertising on the targeted sites, then they too will stand publicly accused of supporting bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, transphobia, or whatever other accusations these sites transphobia, or whatever other accusations these sites exploit to smear their adversaries and make them radioactive. - Yeah.
These campaigns are, for obvious reasons, quite effective.
Think about it, if the ADL threatens to accuse Apple of supporting anti-Semitism with their advertising campaigns, or if Media Matters threatens to accuse Nike of supporting white nationalism by advertising on right-wing or free-speech platforms, then those corporations, which are designed to be risk-adverse, will naturally want to avoid that controversy by simply advertising elsewhere.
Well, platforms that are attempting to defend values of free speech, such as X and Rumble, rely on advertising revenue for their survival.
And so this tactic, by design, can endanger the ability of any site to air or to platform any views or ideologies that these liberal groups deem dangerous.
That is exactly what Media Matters is now doing to both Twitter, X, and to Rumble, with great effect.
And they're using extreme and blatant and demonstrable deceit to accomplish it.
We will demonstrate, show you the deceptive studies they are now using to drive advertisers away, and recall the reasons why Media Matters, independent of all this, is one of the sleaziest, most toxic, and most destructive political groups in the United States.
Then Darren Beatty is a former speechwriter and political scientist at Duke University.
He was a speechwriter for the Trump White House.
He also, as the founder of Revolver News, has done some of the best and most important reporting, debunking many of the deceitful mainstream narratives around January 6th.
He's been on our show before, and we're always happy to have him back to discuss Any topics that are on his mind tonight, we're going to talk about the new January 6th tapes that were just released, all of them, by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
It's amazing it took this long to get them.
We'll discuss the victory in Argentina's presidential election yesterday of the right-wing libertarian Javier Millet.
The internal politics of the United States surrounding the Israel-Gaza war, Ukraine, the 2024 elections, and much more.
Our interviews with Theron are often among our most watched episodes, and for good reason.
He invariably has insights and perspectives that are original and thought-provoking, even when You don't agree with them.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Media Matters of America is a liberal activist group, group, a Democratic Party activist group that has been around for a couple of decades now.
And it has always been and continues to be one of the most repulsive, one of the most deceptive, one of the sleaziest and one of the most toxic organizations of any that exists in the United States.
And it's not surprising that they are, given the fact that they were founded By one of the sleaziest and most amoral scumbags ever to emerge from the muck of American politics, whose name is David Brock.
David Brock, as many of you probably recall, in the 1990s used to be a fanatical anti-Hillary Clinton obsessive.
He was obsessed with Hillary Clinton.
He was an operative on the right.
He spread every kind of crazy Clinton scandal.
He was really, obviously, had a strong personal obsession with Hillary Clinton.
And then as the Clinton years started to come to an end, he had a sudden change of mind.
He was just as obsessed with Hillary Clinton, except now he decided he worships Hillary Clinton.
He wanted to devote his life to Hillary Clinton.
He apologized to her.
He apologized to the public.
He had called her all sorts of names of a very personal nature, but now he decided she was one of the most honorable people ever to exist in American politics.
I don't know what happened to David Brock.
I don't know what was done to him.
But overnight he went from one of the most psychopathic Hillary haters into someone who treats Hillary Clinton like a deity.
And he founded Media Matters as a way of funneling as much money as he could.
He was a big fundraiser for the American right in the 90s and he kept his ability to raise huge amounts of money and he began fundraising huge amounts of money for the Democratic Party and Media Matters was the vessel through which he did it.
And it was basically a media pressure group to yell at and scream at any media outlets that weren't being sufficiently worshipful of Hillary Clinton.
In 2008 when she ran against President Obama in the primary and then again in 2016 when she received the Democratic Party nomination only to lose to Donald Trump, Media Matters had no purpose in the world except to attack every critic of or enemy of Hillary Clinton.
David Brock did things like spend millions of dollars of big donor money to create a bot army to attack online anybody criticizing Hillary Clinton.
He's always operated in a muck and in the shadows, but he has an ability to get big money in part because he promises them that he is not constrained by any ethical or moral lines of any kind, and he isn't.
He's really one of the sleaziest scumbags in politics, and Media Matters is his spawn.
It grew out of him.
And anything that grows out of David Brock is going to be repulsive and toxic and without any kinds of ethical constraints.
And that is what Media Matters is.
Now, over the last few years, Media Matters has somewhat morphed.
Like most of the media has done.
It used to be that the media, the corporate media, treated Media Matters like a Democratic Party or a liberal activist group.
And whenever they were cited, they were cited as that.
A liberal activist group designed to put pressure on media outlets to be more favorable to the Democratic Party.
Now though, go look at how Media Matters is cited by the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News.
No longer as a partisan group, but almost as like this neutral, Reliable group of scholars, of scholars who identify disinformation, even though they're no less Democratic Party operatives than they ever were before.
And the reason is, is because in the age of Trump, media matters, media corporations like Media Matters morphed into each other.
They all became entities that are devoted to empowering the Democratic Party in the name of stopping Trump.
And so they began treating Media Matters like this kind of neutral, scholarly organization.
So often in articles about disinformation, they will cite studies by Media Matters as though they're coming out of some honorable university.
But that's because Media Matters and the media itself have now morphed and become one.
Now, one of the things Media Matters has devoted itself to over the last several years is the same thing most of our institutions of power have devoted itself to.
It's no longer a participant in debates, in political debates like it used to be.
It is now more devoted to ending political debates, to silencing people who are critics of the Democratic Party, who are dissidents to the pieties and orthodoxies of establishment liberalism.
And one of the ways they accomplish that is that they accuse everybody who disagrees with them of being racist, bigots, white nationalists, anti-Semites, transphobes.
And what they really do is go after corporations who are advertising on any social media platforms that don't censor enough.
So when Twitter and its pre-Elon Musk state, Facebook, Google, would allow Videos or speakers that Media Matters considers out of bounds, Media Matters would accuse them often of allowing white nationalism, supporting fascism, to put pressure on those big tech companies to censor, just like the ADL does.
They basically work hand in hand, the two groups do.
Now, one of the things they've been doing over the last several months is targeting the advertisers of both Twitter under Elon Musk and also Rumble.
By accusing those advertisers, by virtue of advertising on these social media sites, of supporting bigotry, of supporting anti-semitism, of supporting racism, by virtue of the fact that they're advertising on both Twitter, X, and Rumble.
And they've been very successful in getting these corporations to cease advertising on both of those sites.
And of course, the crime on both of those sites In Rubble's case fully, and in the case of Twitter partially, they're still trying.
The crime is that they are supporting and defending the free speech rights of people to be heard.
Now, we covered on Friday night one of the things that Elon Musk did, which is as these corporate advertisers were fleeing acts in large numbers.
Regarding the fact that the Anti-Defamation League and Media Matters accused Musk of supporting and endorsing anti-Semitism, Musk, in a kind of self-protective mode, went and imposed a new censorship policy on Twitter saying that no longer could you use phrases like from the river to the sea or decolonization in connection with Israel because he said to do so is to endorse genocide and the ADL
Immediately went online, and after accusing him 24 hours earlier of being an anti-Semite, patted him on the head and said, thank you, Elon, good job.
And then he said thank you to the ADL.
So that's the kind of game they play, is they accuse people of extreme racism or bigotries or anti-Semitism, and the only way out is if you do what they want.
So in the case of Media Matters, that means if you're a corporation, the only way out is to cease advertising on the sites that allow people to dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
The problem is for Media Matters is they just got caught engaging in an obvious, huge, demonstrable fraud against both Twitter and against Rumble in studies that they published where they purported to prove that major advertisers were being associated with neo-Nazi content or anti-Semitic content or racist content.
And when Twitter discovered the fraud, Elon Musk vowed a thermonuclear lawsuit that would be filed today.
And we just, seconds before we went on air, received by email the lawsuit that apparently X has filed against Media Matters over what clearly is a fraud.
And Rumble has announced that they also intend to either file suit or to support this lawsuit because they've been victimized by the same exact fraudulent tactic.
Now, here's the Media Matters study or release that kicked off this latest round of attempting to basically drive Twitter into bankruptcy for its failure to censor more.
As Musk endorses anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content.
CEO Lindo Iaccarino previously claimed that brands, quote, are protected from the risk of being next to toxic posts.
During all of this, Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts.
Yacarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that, quote, brands are now protected from the risk of being next to potentially toxic content, but that certainly isn't the case for at least five major brands.
We, Media Matters, recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi party on X. Here they are.
And then they proceeded to take screenshots of ads by those companies next to These posts that they claim are neo-Nazi in nature.
And here you see some of them on the screen.
So here, for example, is an ad for Xfinity, which is here.
This is from the Media Matters report.
And here you see posts that they say are defending the Third Reich.
Let's do some more ignored facts about the Third Reich.
And it does defend Nazism.
Now, these tweets are seen by almost nobody.
You see they have like two retweets.
In the case of that last one, no retweets.
Here's two retweets.
Here's Apple, an ad by Apple, next to a meme, what people think is a spiritual awakening is like versus what it's actually like.
And they have a picture of the Nazis as a spiritual awakening.
It got eight retweets.
So what they're doing is they're going to these posts that nobody has seen, and they're clicking madly.
They have multiple people madly clicking until one of these ads come up to try and suggest that the normal user experience is to see Apple ads or Xfinity ads next to neo-Nazi content, when in fact it's incredibly obscure stuff that only Media Matters is seeing, to the point where they have no views.
Now here is...
A statement from Rumble and the CEO of Rumble, Chris Pawlowski, saying that they did exactly the same thing, namely in May of this year, in March of this year rather, the Media Matters site issued a similar report claiming that Netflix is putting ads on Rumble that are appearing next to pro-Holocaust or Holocaust denial videos.
So here is the Media Matters ad, the Media Matters report rather, where they say from March, ads for Netflix are appearing next to Holocaust denial videos on Rumble.
And then here's what they say, quote, Rumble is heavily populated by far-right figures, and while it claims to have, quote, strict policies against anti-Semitism, the site has not taken down numerous videos promoting Holocaust denial.
Media Matters reviewed many of these videos and found that several Holocaust denial videos featured advertisements for Netflix.
Here are some examples.
And they give an example, Holocaust holes, And another, the hoax of the 20th century talking about the Holocaust.
Now, just like as is true for those tweets that they showed.
Nobody saw these videos.
Literally nobody.
They had zero views until somehow Media Matters found them and started clicking on them until they could find Netflix ads appearing underneath them.
So here is the hoax of the 20th century and then here is the Netflix ad.
Now you can see by the number of likes this has two thumbs up.
Two!
Our videos have hundreds and then thousands immediately like most videos on Rumble do that are actually watched.
Two thumbs up.
Who knows who put those two thumbs up?
But here is the statement from Rumble today and through its CEO Chris Pavlovsky.
He says quote, X is not alone.
I can also confirm that Media Matters has purposely misrepresented Rumble.
Their dishonesty warrants an immediate investigation at the highest levels.
Hence, Speaker Johnson and Jim Jordan.
And I'll bring the receipt.
Here's my statement.
And then here's the statement from...
Chris Pavlovsky.
Quote, Media Matters is threatened by Rumble's mission to protect a free and open internet.
So the reaction is to deceive the public and scare advertisers.
For example, on March 14th, Media Matters claimed that advertisements for Netflix, which were appearing on Rumble, had been placed on videos that violated our content policies.
However, according to Google Analytics, the week before publication of that Media Matters article, there had been zero page views on that video.
Isn't that amazing?
How did Media Matters even find that?
There had been zero page views on that video.
That means that the Media Matters activist who took the screenshot was the first human being to actually view the Netflix ad on the video in question.
Their story left the false impression that it was a widespread problem.
The same is true for most of the videos cited by Media Matters, all of which were removed from Rumble as soon as we were made aware of them.
It's clear that Media Matters intends to mislead and deceive about advertisements on Rumble in order to hamper free speech and harm law-abiding employers who only want to advertise their products and services.
Media Matters doesn't do anything for free, so who is funding this outrageous targeting activity?
Who is paying them to target free speech and why are they afraid of free expression online?
Speaker Johnson and Representative Jordan, it's time for Congress to ask hard questions.
Now, as intended, Netflix left Rumble after that report because they didn't want to be accused, obviously, who would, of advertising next to bigoted content or anti-Semitic content.
It's the same reason why If you're an Israel critic, you immediately get branded an anti-Semite.
Just like liberals immediately accuse their opponents of being white nationalists, or racists, or bigots, or transphobes, or you know the panoply of insults.
Because if you get branded with those titles, with those labels, those smears, obviously you're going to have a motive to stay silent.
It's a silencing method.
Now, Here is the Google Analytics chart that Chris Pavlovsky was referring to, and here you see on March 13th, and then March 14th, that was the date of the Media Matters report.
You can see here the page views were at zero.
Nobody had seen Those videos.
Nobody had seen the Netflix ad.
Media Matters was the first human being to see them.
And then it suddenly went up once Media Matters brought light to it.
Media Matters created this problem.
It didn't exist previously.
But they were able to drive Netflix away from Rumble, which is the goal, to try and bankrupt sites that don't censor on command.
Here is from BBC, the ex-ad boycott gathers pace amid anti-Semitism storms.
So you can see how effective this tactic is.
Firms including Apple, Disney and IBM have paused advertising on X amid an anti-Semitism storm on the site.
The boycott has also been picking up steam in the wake of an investigation by a U.S.
group which flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.
Left-leaning pressure group Media Matters for America said it had identified ads brought by high-profile firms next to posts including Hitler quotes, praise of Nazis, and Holocaust denial.
A spokesman for X told the BBC that the company does not intentionally place brands, quote, next to this kind of content and the platform is dedicated to combating anti-Semitism.
Mr. Musk said on Saturday that X would file a, quote, thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters, quote, the split-second court opens on Monday.
On Thursday, IBM became the first company to pull its advertising from the site following the Media Matters investigation, saying the juxtaposition of its ads with Nazi content was, quote, completely unacceptable.
The European Commission Comcast TV network Paramount and movie studio Lionsgate have also pulled ad dollars from X. Do you see what they're able to do?
Just by hurling This accusatory invective at the sites they want to publish, punished for not censoring, advertisers run away in droves because media outlets quote and amplify and trumpet whatever Media Matters claims because they're on the same side.
That's why it's such a effective and popular tactic to use.
Now, One of the things that I think is so important to realize is that if you can drive away a platform's advertisers, then it means that those sites can't exist.
So if a site wants to be a free speech site, and it relies on advertisers to pay its bills to keep itself running, these kind of tactics, where somehow Media Matters finds a video that nobody has saw, Nobody knows who put this video up, where it came from, who the creator was.
They have no followers.
Suddenly there appears a Holocaust denial or an anti-Semitic video or a post that nobody saw until Media Matters found it.
Zero views.
And then they click enough times until they get the ad and then suddenly they release a report trying to claim that, oh, if you advertise on X, You're going to appear next to Holocaust denial sites, or if you advertise on Rumble, you will as well, in a completely manufactured and fabricated way.
I don't know who posted those videos.
It could be anybody, but I know that nobody saw them until Media Matters pretended that this was a common experience.
That's why X is suing them for creating this defamatory and false image of what the experience is like for corporate advertisers on X and it costs them tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising alone.
Here is the response of the X safety team where they say stand with X to protect free speech.
This week, Media Matters for America posted a story that completely misrepresented the real user experience on X, in another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.
Despite our clear and consistent position, X has seen a number of attacks from activist groups like Media Matters and legacy media outlets, who seek to undermine freedom of expression on our platform because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters.
These groups try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X. Here are the facts of Media Matters research.
To manipulate the public and advertisers, Media Matters created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account's timeline to misinform advertisers about their placement in their posts.
Those contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.
Once they curated their feed, they repeatedly refresh their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow.
Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user.
Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article.
For one brand showcased in the article, one of its ads ran adjacent to a post twice.
And that ad was seen in that setting by only two users, one of which was the author of the Media Matters article.
For another brand showcased in the article, two of its ads served adjacent to two posts three times, and that ad was only seen in that setting by one user, the author of the Media Matters article.
That's exactly what they did to Rumble, as well, to drive Netflix away.
They found videos nobody had watched, And they kept clicking until they got an instance of a Netflix ad next to it.
Nobody had seen that Netflix ad next to that video except the Media Matters author or whoever works for Media Matters.
And then they publish a report trying to make it appear as though Netflix is constantly advertising and supporting content of this kind.
Whereas, obviously, Rumble had no way of even knowing those videos existed or who posted them because nobody had actually seen them.
Now, one of the things that I think is worth underscoring here, and we're going to get to Darren Beatty in just a second, is that none of this should be surprising given the history of Media matters and what they are.
Here was an article in 2016 in the very protracted and confrontational primary, Democratic primary war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
And by this point, Hillary Clinton had won.
It's May of 2016.
The headline is Be Nice to Hillary Clinton Online or Risk a Confrontation with Her Super PAC.
Let's put that headline on the screen, please.
There you see it.
Be nice to Hillary Clinton online or risk a confrontation with her super PAC.
Quote, Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts.
Correct the record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic frontrunner.
In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.
Some experts on digital campaigns think the idea of launching a paid army of, quote, former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, and designers, and others to produce online counterattacks is unlikely to prove successful.
Others, however, say Clinton has little choice but to try, given the ubiquity of online assaults and the difficulty of squelching even provably untrue narratives once they have taken hold.
At the same time, however, using a super PAC to create a counterweight to movements that have sprung up organically is another reflection of the campaign's awkwardness with engaging online, DigitalPro said.
The task force designed to stop the spread of online misinformation and misogyny is the brainchild of David Brock.
A Clinton confidant who once made a career spreading such misinformation and misogynistic attacks against her and Bill Clinton.
His critics say he has kept his taste for dirty tricks when he switched sides to become one of the Clinton's most valued operatives.
That's what David Brock is.
And this is before the 2016 election when they were just learning about the ability to accuse people of spreading misinformation.
They ultimately, after the 2016 campaign, formalized it into a censorship campaign and built an industry designed to control what is called disinformation and what isn't.
But they were paying journalists and bloggers and people online as bot armies.
To harass and attack anyone criticizing Hillary Clinton.
They spent millions of dollars to do it.
A little more about Media Matters.
Here from the Daily Caller, March of 2019.
This should be totally unsurprising.
The president of Media Matters, who goes around accusing everybody of being a racist and white nationalist and anti-Semite, wrote a blog post about, quote, Japs, Jewry, and Trannies.
Quote, Media Matters President Angelo Carusan is currently leading a boycott campaign against Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an attempt to get him fired.
Carusan and Media Matters, which openly pined for the destruction of Fox News, have justified the left-wing boycott campaign by pointing to a number of statements that Carlson made on a radio shock jock show between 2006 and 2011.
But Kharusen has his own track record of inflammatory statements.
Kharusen's now defunct blog, including degrading references to Tranny's Jewry and Bangladeshi's, records maintained by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Karusan posted a lengthy diatribe in November 2005 about a Bangladeshi man who was robbed by a, quote, gang of transvestites, as he put it.
Karusan was offended that the gang was described as attractive in an article.
In another post that same month, he downplayed a male basketball player coach's alleged sexual and physical abuse of his female players, adding, lighten up, Japs, using what is considered an ethnic slur.
My colleague here on the show, Sean Masrobian, has a tweet that has gone mega viral that we often cite, where it basically says that usually woke people who go around accusing others of being racist and bigoted always get caught having these kind of histories of using racism and bigotry itself.
Because what they really are are narcissistic bullies who use any tactic to shut people up.
And 10 years ago, the way you did that is by calling people Japs and Jews and all these racist statements.
And now the way to do it is to go around calling them racist and white nationalists and the rest.
And that's why he's such a perfect president of Media Matters.
So here they really got caught fabricating a A fraudulent study.
Apparently we just got the caption of the lawsuit, so I haven't had a chance to read it, just got to us online just a few seconds before we went on air, which was a Which was a lawsuit filed by Axe against Media Matters exactly over this sort of thing.
Here you see the caption of the legal complaint.
So I'm sure we'll report on it tomorrow, but it's basically laying forth exactly what we just demonstrated that they did to Rumble as well.
That I don't want to say Media Matters is behind the videos themselves, although obviously that's possible.
But somehow they're finding videos that have zero views, clicking on it repeatedly, and then creating this obviously false conception, this perception that these advertisers are linked to these videos, even though nobody ever sees that ad connected to it, and they pretend that this is a common experience in order to degrade and demean the site and drive advertisers away.
In the case of X, these deceitful Uh, tactics resulted in the loss of many millions of dollars that X now seeks to recover from Media Matters, presumably using some of the best lawyers that exist.
It'll be a very expensive lawsuit for Media Matters to defend against if If Rumble decides to sue based on the same kind of theory, that will be even more expensive.
But you can see what Media Matter is doing.
It is not an even attack on a specific ideology.
It is an attack on free speech to try and ensure that you have two choices.
Either you obey the censorship decrees of the ADL and of media matters and the disinformation industry they created, or they will destroy your reputation in the eyes of your advertisers and drive your advertisers away by ensuring that you cannot possibly be connected to or they will destroy your reputation in the eyes of your advertisers and drive your advertisers Because if you do, then you will stand accused of the same kind of bigotry and racism.
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We've rejected ads.
Because I couldn't determine whether I felt comfortable vouching for those companies because I can't put my integrity for sale.
I can't tell you, oh, go use this company.
And then you find out that is actually no good.
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Darren Beatty is a former speech writer for the Trump White House and a political science professor at Duke University.
As the founder and a journalist at Revolver News, he has broken some of the most important stories over the last couple years, especially ones involving the deceitful narrative concerning January 6, he's been on our show to talk about a wide range of political issues.
And every time he is, it's among the most watched programs that we have, because obviously people like hearing from him.
And I understand why he always is very independent minded, has a lot of insights that most other people don't offer.
So we're always delighted to have him back on our show.
And we're happy to welcome him tonight.
Darren, good evening.
Great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk.
Great to be back here as always, Glenn.
Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's dive into this new release of January 6 tapes.
This was something that a lot of the people who were opposed to Speaker McCarthy were enraged by, the fact that he did, Kevin McCarthy, under a lot of pressure, release these tapes to Tucker Carlson, for Tucker Carlson and Fox to go through and report on, but he never made them all public.
It was one of the promises they extracted from Mike Johnson when they decided to make him speaker.
He made good on that promise very quickly, just in the last 48, 72 hours.
He released a whole bunch of new 9-11 January 6 tapes that nobody had ever seen before.
The first time the public gets to see them all.
I just want to give viewers who haven't seen it a kind of taste of just one of the videos that shows people coming into the Capitol, Not violently, not having to fight their way through, not being stopped by the police, but actually welcomed by the police and marched through the Capitol quite peacefully.
Let's take a look at this video.
So you don't really obviously hear any audio, of course, but for people listening by podcast, you have these police officers standing on the side.
You have Trump supporters who are marching into the Capitol.
They're not in any way engaging in any violence.
They're not being stopped.
In fact, the police seem to be shepherding them in, escorting them in, walking them in.
They're being very peaceful.
They're walking slowly walking.
Without having to fight anybody.
Some of them are just taking videos.
It's a very kind of tranquil scene.
So, Darren, let me ask you about this video and the new videos we've seen.
Obviously, we did learn a lot when Tucker Carlson finally got his hands on them and was able to show us these videos.
But before we get into the content of them, just talk about the process.
When the January 6th Committee existed, We saw only the tapes and excerpts that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Adam Schiff and Benny Thompson wanted us to see and they hid everything else.
What does it say that it took this long, two and a half years almost, for almost three full years to be able to have the public see all the videos, not just the videos they wanted us to see?
Well, there's been a severe reluctance on the part of the mainstream media and the regime to allow the public to see any direct footage of January 6th that could complicate or contradict the official narrative that's been shoved down our throats every day
For years now, and that narrative is that January 6 is some sort of horrific, unique event of domestic terror that exceeds even 9-11.
And I think Biden even said at one point exceeds the Civil War.
In terms of the trauma that inflicted on the country, they've invested a tremendous amount of money and resources and attention in crystallizing that narrative because it's used as a pretext to further the weaponization of the national security state against the American people.
So there's a lot riding on it.
And anything that challenges that narrative, certainly I experienced it directly because Revolver News was at the forefront of challenging various aspects of that official narrative.
And so this footage is in that vein.
I think anyone who's paid close attention to the issue already knew that The Capitol Police provoked the crowd gratuitously with flashbangs and so forth.
Anyone paying attention would have already known that the Capitol Police, in many instances, opened the doors to the crowd and so forth.
But developments such as this, where the footage becomes more widely available and at scale, like the full range of footage, is very important because it reinforces The understanding that's already been out there by some of the researchers like we've been doing, Julie Kelly and others.
And it allows the public to really understand what really happened and the public that hasn't really paid much attention to it.
And so I think it's very significant that this came out for a variety of reasons.
And my understanding is there's going to be still more footage.
So a lot of people who may not have paid attention to it, they see this video and they say, this is not what they've been telling me every day for years now.
You know, the amazing thing, too, is the role of the media.
Obviously, the media paid enormous amounts of attention to January 6.
You could argue it's one of the two or three top stories to which they paid attention for obvious reasons since it happened.
Usually when there's material that the government has relevant to a story the media is covering, one of the duties of media is to insist on transparency, to press for it, to ask for it, to complain that the government's not releasing it, and then ultimately to sue under Freedom of Information Act or other kinds of provisions that force the government to release it.
That's one of the jobs of journalists by definition.
And we were talking about this last week in the context of the shooting, the mass shooting at that Christian school by that trans woman who wrote a manifesto, killed six people, three of whom were nine-year-old students, the others were 60-year-old teachers, who left a manifesto.
Usually the media feasts on these manifestos, wants to get their hands on them so they can figure out what conservative pundits or politicians to blame for having caused The violence, the claim that they were radicalized by this person or that person.
And in this case, we haven't gotten the manifesto for seven or eight months.
The Nashville Police Department, the FBI, have had all sorts of, obviously, pretextual reasons why they can't release it, including claiming there's an ongoing investigation still to determine if there was a co-conspirator.
Everybody knows this person acted alone.
There's nothing to investigate.
They just don't want this leaking.
And then we finally got a few pages through Steven Crowder and they immediately, Big Tech did, banned it from even being discussed.
And in this case, you had almost nobody in the media doing things like retaining counsel, We retained counsel in Nashville.
By that point, there were other lawsuits already pending, and they just told us, you can repeat it, but these lawsuits are going to make their way through the courts, and now they are.
But the same thing happened here with January 6th, a much bigger story.
I don't think there were any media outlets trying to pressure the government to release the footage.
Why do you think that is?
Well, it depends what kind of pressure you mean.
I think there are a lot of people have been saying the full range of footage should be released to the public and not undergo any kind of process of mediation.
Right.
I'm sorry.
I meant like media corporations, like large media corporations, like the New York Times, NBC, CNN have not been suing, have not been demanding.
That's all I meant.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, I mean, their vested interest is basically on the narrative that they'd already been promoting.
And I suspect that they did have access to it.
And based on that access, they selectively presented the footage that best solidified their narrative.
And what's ironic about that is, for instance, there was a very carefully curated video montage or short documentary thing the New York Times did called January 6 Day of Rage.
In their full range of footage, they selected the clips that most darkly and ominously suggested a pre-planned attack on the Capitol.
And guess who appears not once, but twice in this short montage is none other than Ray Epps.
So before the New York Times was releasing, publishing fully dedicated puff pieces to Epps, they thought that his participation was so egregious that in the mountains of footage they had access to, it warranted two appearances.
For sure, and I want to ask you about Ray Apps in a second.
that this was a pre-planned event of domestic terrorism.
So there's a lot of interesting twists and turns when you look into it.
For sure.
And I want to ask you about Ray Epps in a second.
That was something I was planning on asking about.
And I want to get to that in a minute.
But before I get to that, there was violence on that day.
There were clashes between protesters and police, as we've seen in so many protests of various kinds over the last, say, couple decades in the United States.
And well before that, I mean, in the 60s, there used to be these kinds of protests all the time, where protesters and police would fight against each other.
So there was violence.
There was some clashes between protesters and police.
Some police ended up injured.
But what did these clips that we hadn't yet seen until just now, things like them entering the Capitol without any attempt to stop them.
What did they show us that that narrative that we've been fed excluded?
Well, and again, like we've already seen this type of footage, but it simply reinforces the fact that in the overwhelming majority of cases, it was people who had been let in or were, you know, went it was people who had been let in or were, you know, went in largely unopposed, who weren't destructive, did not destroy any property, did not assault any officers, and just kind of went with the flow of what must
have and just kind of went with the flow of what must have been a very surreal experience of kind of people just rolling through the And then they're out of the Capitol five minutes later, in many instances.
Then the next thing they know, they're treated like Osama bin Laden.
I mean, I think that's the story of a lot of people who just kind of got caught up in the crowd psychology.
But when if the crowd is going in, the cops aren't opposing, in many cases, they're opening the door and Fist bumping people and chatting with people and so forth.
You don't really register that you're putting yourself in a position of a future domestic terrorist.
And then you, you know, you mosey on through for five minutes, take a few pictures, text your relatives on, this is crazy, I'm in the Capitol, and then you leave.
And then next thing you know, your entire life is ruined and turned upside down.
So I think the video footage kind of reinforces that reality and helps us to understand how that could be the case.
And as for the other aspect of the footage, on the outside of the Capitol, it shows, again, these gratuitous actions of provocation from the Capitol Police, the flashbangs and things like this that really provoke the crowd.
And I think a lot of the violent behavior we saw on the part of the crowd Was actually agitated and precipitated by these actions of the Capitol Police that may or may not have been given the green light from above.
Yeah, to this day, it amazes me, you know, that of all the people charged and prosecuted in the January 6th cases, a small percentage of them were accused of using violence.
The vast majority of them, the state acknowledges, the government acknowledges, did not, in fact, use violence.
And yet we watch people convicted of nonviolent protest crimes, like the Q Shaman, for example, who went to prison for a long time.
For years, people got prison sentences of years or many months, pre-trial detention, even though they were never accused of any violence.
And it's unbelievable to me to watch left liberals cheer and applaud and support the, not just the prosecution, but the imprisonment of nonviolent protestors, political protestors, given the precedence then this would create, this has created and the sorts of things they've always said. given the precedence then this would create, this has created All right, let's talk about your friend Ray Epps.
We've talked many times about him on this show.
You've been elsewhere talking about him.
Other conservative journalists and pundits have spoken about him, raising questions.
He seems to have played a very central role in a lot of these events.
You see him on video.
As you said, the New York Times featured him twice.
thinking he was a pretty important person.
He was on tape really provoking people to storm the Capitol, to use violence, revving them up.
And yet, all these people that we just talked about went to prison, Ray Epps never did, and it raised the question of why that was.
He insisted he had never worked for the FBI, I think he now has sued a couple of people, including Tucker Carlson, who insinuated that he might have worked for the government.
He now has been charged.
He pled guilty to a misdemeanor account, one misdemeanor count.
I don't believe he got a prison term, or if he did, it was very short.
Does the fact that he's now finally been charged and pled guilty change your mind about some of the questions surrounding him?
No, not at all.
I mean, it seems like a very desperate attempt to patch things up, but it's too little too late.
You know, you can't wait over two years after when all is said and done and then slap him with a misdemeanor charge that doesn't even match, you know, the same, you know, charging of other people who've gotten misdemeanors, let alone, you know, obstruction of official proceeding let alone, you know, obstruction of official proceeding felony.
And there's so many other charges available to the Department of Justice.
They wanted to use them.
They didn't have to wait this long and they could have very easily given him much more severe charges.
And of course, they don't have to.
But the manner in which they exercise prosecutorial discretion is very telling because very early on, a guy named Michael Sherwin, who is in charge of these prosecutions, who advocated infamously a shock and awe approach to arresting as many people who advocated infamously a shock and awe approach to arresting as many people before
He, I think, reasonably stated that, look, we're going after the conspicuous cases, the cases of people like the Q shaman who were kind of publicly flouting us.
The more visible cases were the ones that they wanted to exercise their prosecutorial discretion to make an example of.
And Ray Epps was among the most visible, if not the most visible.
He was one of the first 20 people put on the FBI's most wanted list.
As I mentioned, of all the footage the New York Times could have chosen to reinforce their ominous narrative, they chose Epps.
They chose him for a reason.
He was a very public figure with a sort of A made-for-TV, made-for-virality moment saying, we need to go into the Capitol, into the Capitol.
A guy, a former Marine, in camouflage, with a Trump hat, telling the crowds to go into the Capitol, who, by the way, people forget this, he was the former head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, the most demonized and heavily prosecuted militia group associated with January 6th.
Other than arguably the Proud Boys.
So with all of this stuff on paper, he would be exactly the kind of person they'd want to make an example of.
And they had very easy indictments on him from the very beginning.
And not only did they wait over two years to do a sham misdemeanor, which they warn him about in advance, you know, in contrast to all the other people who've gotten the SWAT treatment of, you know, the guns bursting down the doors at three in the morning.
They just said, oh, by the way, Epps, we want to inform you, you're going to get a misdemeanor charge now or two years later.
And by the way, this charge, which, you know, fits into the theory of these ridiculous defamation suits that he has.
So it's all, you know, so convenient for him.
So the short answer is no, I don't think a misdemeanor charge over two years after the fact changes anything but underscores how desperate the regime is to tie up loose ends when it's too little too late.
Just to tie in quickly to something you were talking about earlier in your monologue, guess Is it Media Matters?
Ray Epps' lawyer, his representation for these defamation cases, guess who he's worked for and he works for now?
Is it Media Matters?
None other.
Well, not quite, but close.
David Brock?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the fact that now David Brock is in the orbit of Ray Epps is indirectly supporting Ray Epps' defamation suits, which at least until now are technically just against Fox News, not against Tucker or myself, although we feature... which at least until now are technically just against Fox within the defamation suit.
But yeah, it's pretty remarkable that David Brock, a lawyer that worked for David Brock, who is of the law firm Perkins Coy, which in variety This is a major law firm in Washington and elsewhere.
of the Democrats and the national security state that this should be the individual to represent Epps.
And I don't know whether Epps actually has to pay for him or whether it's pro bono or something else, but it's certainly an interesting day.
I'd be shocked if this is a major law firm in Washington and elsewhere.
They played a major role in the interaction with Russiagate and the Democrats and the security state with Democratic Party voting suits of all kinds.
It's an extremely expensive firm.
I seriously doubt Rayapps has the ability to pay for it.
The way in which Rayapps has been turned into a political cause, every single other person at 9-11, at January 6th rather, has been talked about as a Satanist.
As you said, it's like almost a member of Al Qaeda or worse.
And yet the media has defended Raab so vigorously, as have Democrats from the very beginning.
They went so out of their way to be able to charge everybody there with felonies.
We've talked about before the way they had to stretch these precedents, use this Sarbanes Act that was really designed to punish people who had done things like impede the Enron investigation by trying to turn this into some sort of interference use this Sarbanes Act that was really designed to punish people who had done things like impede the Enron investigation by trying to turn this into some sort of interference
And yet they went out of their way to make sure Raab got charged with a misdemeanor, even though his...
Involvement was so much greater as was reflected by the fact that the New York Times is featuring him as you said.
All right, let's turn to the presidential election in Argentina because there is this person, Javier Millet, who kind of out of nowhere is now the president of Argentina and he of course is being described as Argentina's Trump and kind of drives me crazy because I remember when Jair Bolsonaro kind of came out of nowhere to become Brazil's president.
The media kept calling him the Trump of the tropics.
It's the only way they can understand right-wing politics.
Everybody is a monolith.
Everyone is the same.
And Bolsonaro had so many differences with Trump, just superficial similarities, including the fact that he was in Congress for 30 years before he was elected president.
He had a lot of ideological differences with Trump.
But in the case of Javier Millet, Even has more differences with Trump in the sense that, I mean, he has those superficial similarities, like, he just got elected to Congress two years ago, he had kind of been this pundit figure, attracted a lot of attention, he's been a professor, but ideologically, you know, he comes from this, like, very hardcore libertarian tradition, like, let's eliminate all these federal agencies, let's eliminate all sorts of regulations, where, if anything, Trump kind of
Challenge Republican Party orthodoxy on economics, opposed cutting Social Security and Medicare, even talked about the possibility of increasing it, railed against corporate power a lot of times.
What do you make of Javier Mille in general in terms of like a kind of right-wing populist trend and then this idea just automatically comparing everybody on the right to Trump in order for the American media to understand these figures?
Yeah, it's interesting.
It just so happens I posted what people call an effort post on Twitter.
That is, a post that's probably longer than it should be that explores some of these questions in detail and the extent to which one can compare Millet and Trump and, you know, what all of this means in the context of populism and so forth.
In a nutshell, I would say, yes, you know, I'm not an expert in Argentine politics, but I think the comparisons to Trump amount to, okay, this is challenging.
This is an individual is challenging in some fundamental way, the entrenched established order, who also has a colorful personality.
I think those two similarities are more than superficial.
And I think those two apply to Bolsonaro, by the way, as well.
Somebody who has this kind of contemptuous opposition to the existing status quo and has a colorful personality kind of does it with a lot of panache and charisma.
I think that's true for Trump, Bolsonaro and Millet.
So go ahead.
And I haven't studied it.
I mean, I think Trump's charisma is readily apparent.
I haven't studied it enough to determine whether Malay has charisma or not, or whether he's simply eccentric.
And I couldn't say whether Bolsonaro has, he might have a certain kind of Latin strongman type charisma, but they all have personalities.
And this gets to another point that I've made in different contexts is that, If you're running against the establishment, you have to have charisma.
Or put another way, you can only get away with not having charisma if you are an establishment-aligned politician.
And this, I think, gets to some of the difficulties that Ron DeSantis faces.
But I think the combination of charisma, colorful personality, plus challenging the fundamental established order in some You know, real way, those go beyond superficial.
And I guess my position is sort of soft contrarian, in the sense that I would de-emphasize the role and importance of ideology.
And, you know, I think people have made something about, oh, he's a hardcore libertarian, and he is a committed libertarian.
And Trump was, you know, sort of Non ideological in many ways, although one of his signature accomplishments was a tax cut that may or may not be considered libertarian friendly, depending on what school interpretation of libertarianism.
But if we get caught up too much in the ideology of things, I think it loses the broader picture of sort of the Ineffable sense in or the kind of the the non ideological, just general sense of marshalling political energies against the established order and the significance of that, I think.
And so I would push back a little bit to the extent that I've seen people saying, oh, you know, we shouldn't celebrate Millais because he's a libertarian and libertarianism is now, you know, out of fashion.
And wasn't it the libertarian dogma that we were all running against 2015, 2016?
Again, maybe this is kind of cynical, but I think in an age of political stagnation, in which nothing like no political agenda is ever really implemented, the first order significance of a substantive policy position is always far less important than The signaling value of a position or the effect that a public position or a public political phenomenon has on the Overton window.
And that sounds very theoretical, but to make it more concrete, take, for example, China.
To be a China hawk in 2015 or 2016 conveyed interesting information.
It signaled, it countersignaled The Syrian war to say, we should focus on China now is important because it said, look, I'm not on board with Hillary Clinton's program of, you know, going to war in Syria.
And more generally, I'm not on board with the whole neocon establishment that's more focused on the Middle East.
That had a meaning back then that signaled a certain thing.
Whereas now in 2023, Everyone from Nikki Haley to George Soros is a China hawk.
So the signaling value of that position is very different, even though on a first order basis, the policy proposals might be the same.
And I think similarly, the libertarian stuff is, um, Back in 2015-2016, when the Trump phenomenon was emerging, to question libertarian dogma had a variety of implicit signals that were meaningful.
To question libertarian dogma meant you might be on board with immigration restrictionism, because libertarians were prominently associated with Open borders type arguments to question libertarianism meant that you might be anti censorship because a lot of the censorship was perceived to come from the big tech companies and libertarians were saying, oh, you can't do anything about it because they're private companies and so forth.
And so It could be said that from a signaling point of view, in order for Trump to break up the system, it made sense to adopt sort of a somewhat, you know, anti-libertarian approach, even though that has to be conditioned against the fact that Trump's not ideological at all.
Whereas now, you have a kind of economic populism that's emerged that's divorced from Trump, a sort of attempt at Trumpism after Trump that you see in, you know, endeavors like Compact Magazine, which does some good stuff, too.
But this effort to kind of launch an economic populist program off of the energies unleashed by Trump, but channel them more narrowly into this kind of Redistributionist economic program for ostensibly conservative ends, which has a very different kind of flavor to it.
And it results in positions like Sourabh Omari, who said, oh, we should support the unionization of Starbucks, even when these union people are the most vociferous kind of left wing freaks imaginable, but we should do it in order to own the bad corporation Starbucks.
And it turns out one of the first things the union did was go on strike because Starbucks didn't have enough gay symbols for Pride Week or something like that.
Like, that should be the... So, um... Let me interject here because, I mean, as you're talking, I mean, I do actually agree with, I think, your primary point.
I don't know if you saw there was this, uh, Video of the right-wing candidate in Canada.
What's his name?
Pierre.
His name escapes me but it went very viral among a lot of American conservatives.
I saw people going crazy for it who didn't know much about him because he was being interviewed by a kind of very standard CBC liberal journalist and he was like contemptuously eating an apple while he was responding to the questions and like yeah doing so in like a very kind of like casual way he was totally unbothered by the accusatory premises and her questions he wasn't trying to defend himself
he was just like making like very clear that he was bored by them and contemptuous of them and the fact that he was eating an apple kind of indicated this irreverence for establishment authority right like you Rule number one, never ever debate or argue with somebody eating an apple.
Exactly, you're never going to win because they look just like both wise and too tranquil.
I think a lot of it is very performative in a way that might seem superficial or even theatrical, but I absolutely agree that even Argentine political scientists and the like, disturbed by this election result, who also were saying things to the New York Times like, some people voted for him for his libertarian ideology, but not many.
What they really are, are just angry.
They hate Their power structures and whoever seems like they are angry at and hateful toward those power structures and promises to go to war against them are the people who are going to get their support.
And that's what I think Bolsonaro and Trump and all these populist figures had in common.
In fact, it's the reason, I think we talked about this before, why there really are millions of Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 and then Trump in 2016.
Something that makes no sense If you're trying to put people on an ideological, a coherent ideological spectrum, but makes all the sense in the world that people are just looking for some outsider who's railing against the powers that be that they hate, and is able to channel that hatred by promising to channel it in ways that are destructive.
And that to me seems like the critical point.
Even if you look at... Masses are not ideological at all.
And that's, I think, something that a lot of people who like to intellectualize politics, that's a reality that many of those people resist.
The masses themselves are profoundly and really incorrigibly non-ideologically.
Right.
And yes, and so I think people have missed this in a variety of contexts.
Yeah, there were like 2016 election reporters saying, you know, they would go to like union halls, they would go to like rural areas, and the people would say my two favorite candidates are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, which in 2016, again, makes no sense if you're looking at things in an intellectually ideological way or trying to put people on left-right spectrums, makes no sense if you're looking at things in an intellectually ideological way or trying to put people on left-right spectrums, but makes a lot of sense if you just understand that whoever seems like they're most outside of or antithetical or antagonistic to
Along those lines, there was some new poll out from the Harvard-Harris poll, like a pretty reputable poll, showing what a lot of the recent polling has showed.
It had Trump with a six-point national lead over Biden, 53 to 47.
Obviously, the way the electoral college system works, Trump doesn't even need to win the popular vote to win, as he proved in 2016.
So if he has anywhere near any kind of a national lead or anything like even a tie, the likelihood is very high that he's going to win.
And what you have is a presidential candidate who is currently indicted on felony charges in four separate jurisdictions, two federal, two state.
And not only has that not harmed him, it really has seemed to help him, not just among Republican Party voters, although for sure there, but also just people in general.
And this, to me, seems the biggest story is the amount of contempt and distrust That people hold our institutions of authority to the point that even if a politician is indicted, people don't care because they don't trust the process.
Do you think that is a sort of dominant political reality that is getting more pronounced?
It's certainly a reality, and the indictments do not diminish public support for Trump in many cases.
It intensifies support among pre-existing supporters, and it might curry the sympathy of some people on the fence.
I think most people who look at the situation, who are not committed to hating Trump, But at the very least it's not hurting him, right?
Forget whether it's helping.
Darren, ten years ago, if there was even a whisper that somebody might be indicted, it'd be inconceivable that they would be able to credibly seek high political office.
He's been indicted four times!
Unlike major felony charges, and whether it's helped him or not, and I agree you can have a debate about, at the very least people don't place enough credibility in these institutions to even think about having that render him off limits.
Right, that's certainly true.
There's a crisis of legitimacy, and the system that indicts him is viewed with contempt by a large swath of the population, many of whom already support Trump, and so it dramatically intensifies Support and commitment among his supporters.
And it doesn't hurt him on the other side.
And so, yeah, it's, that's how the process played out, I think.
And in a certain sense, I wonder if it would help Biden to actually pardon Trump, that would be an astute political move, but for the realities of his own base, which Could you imagine if he did that?
It is why it's just an unbelievable meltdown that would generate.
No, it would generate a meltdown, but it would drive Trump crazy because, you know, he was very reluctant to go back to Twitter because he doesn't want to be saved by somebody.
He didn't want to be saved by Elon.
He certainly doesn't want to be saved by Joe Biden.
So if I thought it through and I ultimately concluded that the base would get even angrier at him, so it wouldn't make sense.
But if they were smart, they would have at least entertained the idea because he could pardon him on the federal charges and keep the civil stuff and the state stuff.
And it's really the civil stuff that bothers him more than anything else.
And so he kind of have his cake and eat it too.
But in order for that to work, the base has to be sophisticated enough to understand that it's a good political move.
So if the base doesn't understand it's a good move, it's actually not a good move.
So it's weird, this weird sort of iterative process.
Let me ask you about the ongoing, the new war.
I want to ask you about the old war, which is Ukraine in just a second, but the new war, which is the Israeli war with Gaza and specifically President Biden's up until now adamant support for the Netanyahu government, the pledge by the Democratic Party, by the Biden White House to arm Arm and fund the Israelis for as long as they need.
They're transferring enormous amounts of weaponry to Israel.
They are rhetorically supporting Netanyahu.
I just saw today John Kirby spewing contempt at people who want to suggest that Israel is committing genocide.
He kind of paid lip service to, yes, we think a lot of people are dying in Gaza, maybe too many, but we keep asking Israel to honor their commitment to protect civilians.
We thank for doing that.
It's, you know, a pretty Steadfast amount of support especially compared to even Western European governments that have started to rhetorically back away the more deaths there are calling for ceasefires and the like expressing greater concern about civilian death and the Biden White House is doing this despite a lot of polling that shows that huge parts of their base that are crucial to their victory, especially young voters.
And I think we forget Israel, Palestine has really been off the front burner for probably since 2014.
It had a kind of appearance in 2017 when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, but then Chuck Schumer came out and a lot of Democrats came out and said they agreed with it and didn't really ever turn into a political controversy.
So Seems like it's the first time people are really seeing Israel, seeing the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and seeing the Democratic support for Israel in this very steadfast way.
Do you think that the Biden White House is standing by Israel because they think They need to for political reasons, which has always been the assumption of Democrats, that you can't alienate the Israeli-supporting voter in the United States and have a hope to win?
Or do you think it's something more deep-seated and kind of about their convictions, that these are politicians in the national security state who have supported Israel always, and they just can't conceive of anything else?
That's a great question.
I don't know if I would say convictions, because after all, we're talking about politics.
Politicians, but I might say habits instead of convictions.
For somebody as old as Biden, there's a habitual tendency to do what's sort of always been done.
And and so I think there's definitely a habitual inclination on his part to be not.
I wouldn't say pro-Israel, but certainly not as anti-Israel as a great deal of the Democrat base is demanding that he be.
There's definitely kind of an establishment element within the Democrat Party.
It's a very difficult position because it's a genuine split.
And I would think I would say it probably mostly cuts along sort of establishment baselines, not entirely, but mostly, but both sides have genuine influence to the Extent that there's really no good option for Biden.
He's really in a difficult position because no matter what he does, he's kind of screwed.
And so, you know, best for him that this isn't even an issue at all.
But obviously, he can't really control that.
So it's it's a very difficult situation.
There's nothing you can't please everyone.
In this case, both sides feel very strongly about it.
And both sides have It's an unresolved tension that's really coming to the fore, and it's not pretty.
I mean, look at the numbers for Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, particularly in Michigan.
We saw the protests at the DNC just recently.
You know, make the January 6th thing look like a walk in the park by comparison.
So there's a lot of problems there.
There's a genuine cleavage within the Democrat Party that it's hard to see how there's any pretty resolution to that.
Let me ask you about American conservatives, kind of on the other side of the fence when it comes to this issue.
You always have this kind of strain in the Republican Party on the American right that kind of looked at Israel and U.S.
support for Israel the same way they would say conservatives have looked at U.S.
support for Ukraine.
The strain of the faction within the Republican Party that opposed U.S.
support for Ukraine.
Namely, Ukraine's not the 51st American state.
We have too many problems at home.
We can't go around supporting other people's wars.
We can't fund other people's wars.
There was even kind of an added argument that was represented by people like Pat Buchanan and then by Ron Paul.
Along the lines of actually U.S.
support for Israel undermines U.S.
security because it increases anti-American sentiment in the region when we tie ourselves to the Israelis, all the hatred that would go to them, spill over on us, it puts our troops at risk, etc.
We're seeing some division, again, among the American right when it comes to Israel.
You've seen people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy has kind of flirted with some dissent or some heterodoxy when it comes to Israel.
But it seems like, to me at least, American conservatives, including the ones who didn't want the U.S.
supporting Ukraine, are overwhelmingly supportive of both Israel and U.S.
support for Israel when it comes to this conflict and Israeli wars generally.
Do you think this split That's a great question and a complicated question.
or is it just kind of that same sort of isolated strain in the American right that is expressing itself, but still the overwhelming right-wing consensus is pro-Israel?
That's a great question and a complicated question.
I think it has to be addressed on a number of levels.
In one sense, I think you see greater division within the commentariat than you've seen in a very long time.
But I think it's important not to extrapolate from the divisions within the commentariat to divisions within the broader sort of voting base of the GOP.
And so you have this really interesting kind of conversation, debate going on within the commentariat.
And you have pretty, I'd say, steadfast support for Israel amongst elected officials.
And I would say pretty steadfast support among the electorates.
So there's this weird kind of thing where there's the elected officials and the electorate on one side that you don't see such a division, but you're seeing this division emerge within the commentariat.
And I think that's, that's a very interesting development for sure.
So then let me ask you this.
I've been pretty indignant, to be honest, about a lot of people on the American right who seem to suddenly have become supportive of a lot of things they've been vocally opposed to over the past six or seven years.
Things like censorship, cancel culture.
Lots of people have lost their jobs for expressing views about the Israeli-Gaza war almost entirely in the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel side.
Even these kind of victimhood narratives that they usually scorn when it comes to every other group, being unsafe on college campus, being unsafe in the United States.
Suddenly when this narrative has emerged, well, American Jews are unsafe on college campus, unsafe in the United States, we need to protect them.
There's no mockery of that at all.
There's kind of an embrace of it.
And at first I was thinking the reason why this is happening is because a lot of people on the American right are so emotionally attached to Israel or so supportive of Israel that they kind of were just abandoning every principle they have and just like the human instinct to censor is strongest when it's the views we care about most, they were just abandoning their principle.
Over time I've come to think about this a little differently, which is that After 9-11 there was this kind of framework that became popular that this wasn't just that the United States had been attacked by this one terrorist group called Al-Qaeda that we had to go and kill or dismantle or whatever.
But that this is representative of this kind of broader civilization war between the Muslim hordes on the one hand, who were not only in their region in the Middle East attacking the United States, but also infiltrating Western Europe through immigration, and then kind of Western culture on the other.
And there was this sense that, no, we have to go to war with Islam or jihadism or Muslim extremism.
And again, because this has kind of been on the back burner for a long time now.
We haven't really had those sort of war and terror conflicts.
We got out of Afghanistan.
We're not in Iraq anymore.
We're not really drone bombing Muslim countries.
It might have seemed deceptively like that went away, but it never really did.
And I think a lot of conservatives in particular are looking at things like, say, a prohibition in France and Germany and pro-Palestinian protests
Or this relentless bombing of Gaza, and they're not really seeing it so much through the metric of, through the prism of, censorship and free speech, or even geo-strategy, but instead, they're applauding it because it seems like finally the West is putting these Muslims under control, or seeing that they're actually a threat and taking action against them.
How much of all of that do you think is at play here in terms of how the American right is looking at this conflict?
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And you know, of course, there's, you know, a great deal of, you know, what you could call hypocrisy.
But, you know, when it comes to things that people really care about, you're always going to see hypocrisy.
And it's, it's a very unusually constituted individual, for whom consistency of principle is The most sacrosanct thing.
It's, you know, just the way that people are configured as a matter of sort of political psychology, moral psychology.
It's, you know, whenever you encounter genuine commitments, you know, principles that are incidental to that are sacrificed in the hypocritical way to whatever is considered to be more important.
Um, and so we see examples of that here.
Um, I think there's also a sense that you say there's this commitment to Israel among the American population.
You know, there's a lot of reasons for that.
One reason is, you know, a lot of the evangelicals who are the base of the GOP are committed to a certain kind of dispensationalist theology in which Israel plays, um, an important kind of apocalyptic role.
So there's that.
But then there's also an element of sort of Americans in their own context have not been allowed to take their side.
So there's this kind of vicarious nationalism that expresses itself through extreme support, not just for Israel, but you know, for, you know, militarism in a variety of contexts in which it's acceptable.
Because so many of the things that might be done in the United States or things to talk about in the United States are prohibited.
And so this is sort of at least a valve through which people are allowed to express these types of-- These like tribal, tribal, like excitement.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so I think there's an element of that.
But then there's a third element.
And, you know, this, this would require, you know, an hour long conversation in its own right, if not more than that, that gets to, I think, an uncomfortable and for from Israel's point of view, maybe unfortunate reality that To some degree, it has to accept is whether Israel likes it or not.
Israel in the geopolitical context is, at least for the time being, coded as right wing.
And it was striking to me, even, you know, we were talking about Argentina.
And there was just an offhand paragraph in the New York Times write-up on Millais saying, oh, and he's, you know, interesting.
He supports, you know, countries that are also fighting socialism and Israel's among them.
And I thought it was kind of bizarre.
One of the last election rallies he had, he wrapped himself in an Israeli flag.
And was running around and I think one of the first things he plans to do when Bolsonaro won the first thing he did was got on a plane and went to Israel.
I believe that's what he has said he intends to do as well or his first state visit will be to Israel.
And look, again, this is so complicated, you know, maybe we can have a whole hour, you know, to do it in another time, because in the context of Latin American politics, you know, people have to go back to, say, the Cold War, in which sort of the Islamic world was, you know, in some kind of vague alliance with the Soviet Union, and Israel, you know, played a role on the other side.
Yeah, there's that, you know, those dynamics played out to some degree in Latin America, and the vice president elect actually has a whole lecture out about the influence of various Islamic organizations in supporting, including the PLO.
Israel in a geopolitical context is for the time being, right coded.
in Latin America.
So there are so many different strains here that, you know, for the purposes of time, I have to just simplify.
But I think it's sort of a provocative and mostly true statement that Israel in a geopolitical context is for the time being right coded.
And this in many ways signifies a failure of Zionism, of Zionism, in the sense that it wasn't too long ago when the Anti-Defamation League was run by Abe Foxman, you know, rather than John Greenblatt, who was an Obama official and highly partisan.
So on one hand, and before the kind of the Trump-Beebee duo, Um, which I think further enmeshed people's perception of Israel within the hyper polarized context of American domestic politics.
And this has happened at a global level as well, such that whether it likes it or not, it's right coded.
And when you look at on the other side, you know, there are people who could look at the situation and say, you know, I think Israel's going too far in Gaza, this or that.
But then they look and they see the aesthetics and the energies of protest against Israel, and it's extremely left-coded.
It's coded in the aesthetics and energy and expression of sort of global South left-wing political movements.
You know, it's amazing because this is, you know, one of the first times in quite some time on a major and highly consequential issue, I find myself more aligned with the left, the American left, the Western left, the Latin American left.
And I have to say, you know, I've been a longtime critic of Israel, of its treatment of the Palestinians, of U.S.
support, etc., haven't made much of a secret of that, but there are times when I look How people are protesting and the things they're saying and the form of expression it's taking, I just wanted to run in the opposite direction.
I mean, obviously I'm not going to change my views, but you're absolutely right.
I think that has, in some ways, polarized this issue in a way that might not have happened were a lot of people who are on the right, who might have otherwise been more sympathetic to this, narrative that these are interventions of a foreign country that have nothing to do with us, that we shouldn't be involved in that.
Remember all that?
That's the thing that we talked about when Trump ran.
Might have been more sympathetic to it had it not gotten expressed in this kind of right-left cultural war prism.
And the reason that's happening, at least to some extent, is because you're right.
right, the people who are pro-Palestinian are treating it and talking about it like it's any other left-wing cause.
And it seems sometimes like it's just… But it's not from a vacuum.
It's not from a vacuum.
I mean, there are deep historical currents that account for this.
Going back to, you know, going back to the Cold War, but even before that, but definitely, you know, the Cold War was a major feature Of it.
And I think, you know, when I say that Israel is right coded, I mean, this is, this is going to be a this is very difficult thing for a lot of even Jewish Zionists to accept, who, I think, still they want to recover the time that wasn't too far ago, in which support from Israel was not part of the
One, I think in part that's because Israel itself has changed.
I mean, you know, at the birth of Israel and then kind of for the next couple of decades, there was the kibbutz movement.
There was a strong Israeli left wing movement, a strong Israeli labor movement.
The Israeli left is basically gone.
You have the domination of Likud, and not just Likud, but the parties to the right of Likud, who Netanyahu is now dependent on.
And so in some way, the face of Israel has changed, too.
I think that's part of why.
They too have become coded more right-way, not just the Israeli cause.
Right.
No, I mean, that's true.
Um, but I think even that, like, yes, it's, it's kind of ironic when you read in the New York Times that Millais looks at Israel as sort of fighting socialism when so much of the founding of Israel had to do with sort of labor, you know, Zionism, and like, the, you know, the, I think, you know, Rahm Emanuel's family was involved in this a lot of you know, these socialist movement.
But again, this is socialism of a very different kind in a very different context that I'm quite convinced that the current sort of global South political protesters would not welcome the kibbutz socialists into their fold any more than they would welcome classical Marxists into their fold at this point.
It's just a different type of left.
But this gets to a final kind of point that again, I could only state and would take at least an hour to talk through.
And that's a really an important division within, you know, kind of a tension within the founding of Israel itself that is expressing itself now.
And that is, you had, you know, on one hand, there was this kind of self-conscious, effort to transcend the identity of Jews as victims.
And we're not a victimized diaspora population.
We are people now with a homeland.
We're people who are, you know, farming.
We are people who have our own military and fight and even win wars for ourselves.
And we are, you know, colonizing and purchasing land and sort of exercising a kind of religious based version of manifest destiny, going back to this, you know, remarkable narrative of thousands of years.
And so there's that element to the founding of Israel, which, again, you know, cutting some corners, you could say, is an expression of nationalism and a version of colonialism, or at least a kind of manifest destiny, at least in the literal sense of manifesting what many consider to be the sort of religious destiny of the Jewish people.
And so there's that element to it.
Yeah, as you say, it's super complex and super interesting because at the same time, while you're right, that the whole idea of proclaiming The Jews have their own nation, and that it's defined by the Jewish people, and taking land, and kind of establishing a military, all of that is very, like, assertive.
The reality was it emerged in the wake of the Holocaust, the ultimate victimhood narrative.
Exactly.
That's what I was getting.
Yeah.
That's what I was getting to.
Yeah, go ahead.
So the combination, yeah, that's what I was building toward, is it wasn't purely that, and that I think any fair analysis of how Israel actually came to be was, you know, there were all kinds of immigration restrictions on the part of, you know, the British and, you know, these sorts of things.
And really, the global public opinion, the UN and all these other organizations, is only possible to have Israel in the aftermath of World War Two.
And in the aftermath of, you know, the horrific events of World War Two.
And so, Israel from its founding was this odd amalgamation of the ultimate kind of victimhood narrative
With this narrative of being the people of manifest destiny, who are overcoming the victimhood narrative, who are militaristic people, who are no longer the victims and are sort of exercising a version of maybe even like European colonialism, plus, you know, religious destiny.
And those two principles of legitimacy have existed together for quite some time.
And now the tensions between those two seem to be coming to the fore.
And it's clear at this point that the victimhood side of things is no longer a tenable principle of justification or at the very least a resource of public support for Israel.
And in fact, Jonathan Greenblatt even acknowledged this and saying, Oh, you know, in the victimhood game, the Palestinians are the victims.
And why is it all about the victims?
Well, that's been a big part of Israel's own justification for a very long time.
So part of what I mean when I say that Israel, whether, you know, people like or not, is right wing coded is there needs to be a very deep, And very radical re-evaluation of the public principle of justification for Israel as a state that takes into reality that the victimhood component of this narrative is no longer a viable option.
Right, and I think for a lot of people that the reason sometimes the ongoing enduring victimhood narrative, which is more alive than ever when it comes to American Jews and even to Israel, rubs a lot of people the wrong way, including myself, is that you do look at Israel and you see this incredibly empowered country, very powerful militarily, very powerful economically, very powerful politically.
You look at American Jews, and it's very hard to make the case, I think, that they're some kind of uniquely oppressed minority, uniquely unsafe in the United States.
And so I think that the victim of narrative in our political culture is a very valuable currency.
So I understand why people don't want to relinquish it.
But on the other hand, as you say, it becomes a lot more untenable, the more powerful, the more entrenched, the more kind of the stronger a country and a culture becomes.
And I think you're right that that
Emphasis on the more powerful component of Israel is also part of what codes it as Right-wing and you see you know figures that never before would have it being embracing Israel like Marine Le Pen and these right-wing European parties Who are doing so I think in part because they're seeing it through this culture war lens through this broader Right left lens, and I think that's where Israel is falling for them, but I agree It's something that we could spend a lot more time on But I think we've done a pretty decent job of kind of digging into
Not just the surface, but below the surface as well.
But yeah, I'd love to have you back on and talk about it.
It's a war that's not going anywhere, at least for a while.
I think it is interesting and important to think about the kind of hold that Israel has on our politics and the way it shapes it.
Because usually it gets talked about in a very kind of shallow way with a lot of slogans and this stuff is a lot more interesting.
Darren, it's always a pleasure for that reason to have you on, talk to you.
I never know what I'm going to get, but I always know it's going to be nutritious.
So thank you so much for coming on and taking the time to talk, and we'll definitely have you back on soon.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Have a great evening.
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