Elon Meets Netanyahu in Israel—Why? Vivek Ramaswamy on Free Speech Debates, Ukraine, & More. Plus: CNN & Senate Dems Demand More Censorship Over Israel | SYSTEM UPDATE #187
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, every crisis in the West over the last six years has been instantly exploited to demand and then to implement More and more controls on online political speech.
The Russiagate fraud, the 2020 election, the COVID pandemic, the January 6th riot, the war in Ukraine, each of them ushered in new and escalated forms of online censorship on the grounds that each presented dangers too grave to continue to permit speech to be unfettered.
Exactly the same has been true for this new war between Israel and Gaza, which like the war in Ukraine, Joe Biden is funding and arming with American resources while the EU stands by and cheers.
From the very start of this war, this new war, the same officials and establishment figures in the West who have imposed this years-long censorship regime began doing so again, but this time on the ground that there was too much dangerous speech critical of Israel.
That what needed to be silenced and suppressed was not conservative speech this time, but criticisms of the Israelis or support for the Palestinians.
Censorship measures which many on the right, not all, but many, this time endorsed because the views to be silenced, criticisms of Israel deemed excessive, are views they disliked and were happy to see suppressed.
Yesterday, CNN's anchor, Dana Bosch, who has been outspoken in her support for Israel and her determination to combat what she insists is a crisis of rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses, spoke to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and they both joined together to demand more controls of online speech in the name of this new war, in the name of protecting Israel from what they say are hatred and inaccurate information aimed at that country.
This is the same unit of corporate and political power that has imposed this elaborate and increasingly repressive censorship regime since 2016, though this time the reaction to these censorship demands seems quite different.
Then, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he did so based on the vow repeatedly stated to adhere to what he called free speech absolutism, which he defined as, quote, allowing all speech that is legal He has mostly followed through on that pledge, not entirely though.
He personally banned both Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, even though what they said, while definitely offensive to most people, was not even arguably illegal.
But he has followed through in large and important ways, certainly more so than the prior Twitter regime did.
But Musk has spent the last two weeks embroiled in a major and costly scandal that has reportedly cost X in advertising losses up to $75 million.
That's because Musk has spent two weeks being widely accused By the media, by liberal activist groups like Media Matters, by all sorts of people of being anti-Semitic, or at least having endorsed an anti-Semitic tweet which drove these corporate advertisers away.
Now, as we reported last week, Musk immediately responded to the scandal by announcing a ban on X of certain phrases that Israel's most fervent supporters hate most, including using the term decolonization End quote.
From the river to the sea toward Israel on the ground that those phrases are genocidal.
While this new Israel-protecting censorship policy did provoke a head pat and an attaboy from the ADL, the same group that just 24 hours earlier was calling him anti-Semitic, it wasn't enough to bring back major advertisers who fled.
So today, Must travel to Israel to meet with its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where Must publicly affirm the validity of every one of Israel's core arguments justifying its ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
And then he held a one-on-one conversation with Netanyahu on X where he sounded like Israel's most devoted supporter.
We'll examine this remarkable trip by bus to Israel and what really happened here.
And then finally, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has surpassed the expectations of most longtime political watchers with the support he's been able to build inside the GOP with his very outsider presidential campaign.
We'll speak with him tonight about all sorts of issues involving free speech and censorship, one of the flagship issues of his campaign and his public persona even before the campaign began.
We'll talk about the war in Israel and Gaza and specifically Biden's new request to send another $14 billion to Israel.
We'll discuss newly released videos about the January 6th riot that the public hadn't seen up until this point because Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff sought to conceal it.
We'll talk with him about corruption scandals involving Nikki Haley, the way the establishment has united against her, and much more.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We've extensively covered, of course, the online censorship regime that has emerged in the wake of the 2016 enactment by British voters of Brexit, followed by the truly traumatic event for neoliberal the online censorship regime that has emerged in which was the election of Donald Trump as American president over Hillary Clinton, and the conclusion that institutions of power reached that they can no longer afford free speech on the internet because doing so allows people to form their own views and to remain out of control from what neoliberal elites want them to do, and the conclusion that institutions of power reached that they can no longer afford free speech on
Neoliberal elites want them to do, especially how they want them to vote.
And we've repeatedly identified the primary actors who participate in the construction and the implementation of this censorship regime.
And among them are neoliberal billionaires in the US security state, Western intelligence agencies, this new fraudulent disinformation industry.
But also, most importantly, led by the largest media corporations in the United States, who include people who have the job title journalists.
These are the leading censorship advocates.
As well as members of the Democratic Party who have explicitly been demanding from Big Tech that they censor more in alignment with their agendas at the point that a federal court ruled the Obama administration's or rather the Biden administration's practice of doing this is so extreme that it's a grave violation of the First Amendment.
Over the last seven weeks, or almost eight weeks now, since the October 7th massacre in Israel by Hamas, we have heard all kinds of new censorship calls for more controls for online speech.
And they come from the very same people who have been constructing that censorship regime and controlling it for the last seven years.
Only this time Their targets aren't conservative speech, because so many conservatives are aligned with the pro-Israel perspective of most neoliberal institutions of power, including the US government, most European governments, and the corporate media.
This time, their target are People who are critical of Israel, who express support for Palestinians.
These kinds of people, people who are critical of Israel, who support Palestinians, have lost their jobs in large numbers here in the United States in politics and media.
Student groups have been banned for expressing too much support for Palestinians, including by Governor Ron DeSantis and the University of Florida.
There have been all sorts of efforts to try and constrain online political speech, and so it's not a surprise, at least it shouldn't be, that CNN, through its online anchor Dana Bash, who has been very explicit in her support for Israel, and particularly her concern for what she says is a online anti-Semitism crisis on American campuses, hosted the Democratic Senator from Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
These people have been calling for censorship in the name of the war in Ukraine.
In the name of January 6, in the name of Russiagate, in the name of the 2020 election, in the name of January 6, and now they're doing it again, only this time they're doing it in order to protect This foreign country, Israel, which people like Chris Murphy and Dana Bash both support, and not just support, but want the U.S.
government to fund and arm.
And Joe Biden, of course, just asked for another $14 billion in American money on top of the billions the U.S.
gives to Israel every year to pay for and fund its war.
So here was this discussion that both of them had about the need to do more censorship online, for big tech platforms to censor more.
Given what they regard as excessive criticism of Israel and what they claim is rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses.
Senator, we have seen an alarming spike in anti-Semitism, hate against Jews, across the United States, but particularly on college campuses.
You also sit on the Senate committee that deals with education.
What's gone so wrong on America's college campuses that you have students openly applauding the terrorist killings of What is the favorite phrase of every censor in every culture and in every time period?
Listen, I'm all for free speech on our campuses, but I've been very disappointed. - What is the favorite phrase of every censor, in every culture, and in every time period?
I'm all for free speech, but when you hear that, go running because an authoritarian has arrived.
An authoritarian censor has arrived, and that of course is the first phrase that Chris Murphy uses to introduce his calls for censorship.
I'm all for free speech, but...
campuses, but I've been very, listen, I'm all for free speech on our campuses, but I've been very disappointed at the response of many of our university officials.
There's a direct line between some of the most vicious anti-Semitism speech happening on our campus and threats of violence to synagogues and to Jewish communities.
I ultimately, you know, think we need to.
Now, let me just point out something here.
In the last seven weeks, a six-year-old Muslim boy was murdered when an American broke into their house, screamed anti-Muslim slogans, and stabbed him to death multiple times and killed him. and stabbed him to death multiple times and killed him.
There have been Palestinians targeted for all sorts of abuse.
There have been Jews who have felt unsaved validly as well.
But the idea that there's only one faction that has extremists in it or people who engage in threats and violence is always wrong.
Always.
There are bad people in every political faction and every political cause.
Just two days ago in Burlington, Vermont, three 20-year-old Palestinian students who are in the United States illegally to attend colleges like Brown were all shot.
Two of whom are wearing the traditional Palestinian scarf that identifies them as Arab or Palestinians.
And they don't know the motive yet, but a lot of media outlets and groups and law enforcement agencies have strongly suggested that they need to investigate the possibility of a hate crime against American Palestinians or Palestinians legally here in the United States.
So to try and pretend this is all one-sided, when For all the talk about the anti-Semitism threats on campus, there haven't been any murders of American Jews on campus of this kind, or serious assaults that put people in hospitals.
This is a crisis that is being exploited to justify censorship, just like every other crisis since 2016, all the ones I just went through.
Not denying that there's not a outpouring of a lot more intense criticism of Israel and even hatred toward Israel and in some cases hatred for Jews as a result.
of watching 50 straight days of a bombing of Gaza that is of historic proportions, or at least unlike anything we've seen in the last century, in terms of number of civilians killed in such a short time, in terms of infrastructure destroyed, civilian infrastructure, making northern Gaza almost entirely unlivable.
So the issue is not that there's no censorship in terms of what we're seeing in the United States.
The issue is there's a lot of anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab hatred, as there always is when there's an outbreak of wars like this, and censorship is not needed.
It is not a necessary solution, and yet they're exploiting this crisis and the fears that people have expressed, college students feeling unsafe, in order to demand it.
Listen to what they say.
Communities.
I ultimately think we need to think really hard about the way in which our young people are receiving information about this conflict.
We need to hold accountable the social media sites, in particular TikTok, which is just full of virulent pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic material.
The college campuses need to have a better means of accountability for this kind of hate speech.
But we also have to recognize that these young people are getting their information from somewhere, often from a Chinese controlled social media platform that has in its interest trying to turn America against each other.
And one of the means, I know that a lot of you think a lot of conservatives have been trained to believe that the Democratic Party is this bastion of left-wing radicalism.
And that it's not just on cultural issues where there's a real difference between the Democratic Party and American conservatives, although there is on issues like abortion and gun control and trans issues.
If you think those are central to American political life and the distribution of power, then for sure there's big differences.
But if you don't think that, on the policies that determine the distribution of wealth and power, the parties almost entirely agree.
They were in full agreement.
On Joe Biden's fueling of the war in Ukraine, there were about six dozen Republican members of Congress who voted no and have expressed opposition.
But the entire Republican and Democratic establishments joined together.
Obviously, they're completely joined when it comes to Israel.
No dissent, almost, with the exception of maybe eight or nine members of Congress, one of whom has already been censored.
The sole member of Congress of Palestinian descent, not for corrupt acts, but for her speech.
And they also agree on China.
The Republican Party, the American right, is not more antagonistic toward China than Joe Biden is.
Joe Biden has militarily encircled China with bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, all through the South China Sea.
American planes are buzzing the Chinese planes.
And here you see a Democratic senator saying, which is We've covered this before and I'm going to do a whole show on it, but TikTok is governed by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, to manipulate and propagandize American students, when in reality TikTok is a capitalist company.
They're desperate to remain in the United States.
The FBI and CIA have been threatening to ban them and have instead extracted a promise for them to turn over Censorship decisions, content moderation decisions to the U.S.
security state, which is why TikTok banned the Bin Laden letter.
Why, if this is all about Chinese propaganda and turning Americans against their own country and in favor of the Chinese, why would TikTok ban the Bin Laden letter, which sets aside multiple grievances against the United States?
TikTok has banned multiple segments we've done on the war in Ukraine where we criticize the United States and NATO narrative.
Why would they do that?
But in any event, leave that aside.
The Democratic Party agrees with you on this.
They want to ban TikTok too.
They've been demagoguing on this for a long time.
And here they are saying that social media sites need to be better, more accountable, and control better the flow of information about this war, TikTok in particular, but not only.
And administrations on college campuses need to hold people more accountable for their speech.
These are classic calls for censorship, but of course a lot of people on the right, not all but a lot, even though they don't want to admit it, are in full support of CNN and the Democratic Party's censorship calls in this case because they're aligned with them on the issue of Israel.
You can be aligned with CNN and the Democratic Party on the issue of Israel if you want.
Cheer Joe Biden for wanting to give $14 billion more to Israel if you want.
It doesn't mean you have to support the same censorship regime that you've been screaming bloody murder about since 2016 because usually it's directed at you.
Let's listen to the rest.
The platform that has in its interest trying to turn America against each other.
And one of the means they may be doing that is trying to promote a lot of pretty hateful and divisive material about the conflict in Gaza.
Every single time there's a significant part of the public that doesn't agree with them when they're voting for Donald Trump.
When they don't believe Russiagate, when they poll show Donald Trump leading again, their view always is.
The reason for this is because social media allows too much free speech and too much disinformation.
And we have to control it to prevent people from holding views we disagree with.
That is their solution to everything.
Now, it's not just Chris Murphy.
Here is Adam Schiff, one of the biggest bugaboos of the American right.
Elon Musk has been amplifying anti-semitic content, profiting from misinformation, and allowing pro-Hamas propaganda to spread on X. This needs to stop.
I've joined Congressman Dan Goldman and Congressman Jamie Raskin, both Democrats, in demanding accountability from X. You see they're taking This pro-Israel sentiment, and using it, exploiting it, to demand more censorship to protect Israel from criticism.
Or to prevent people from expressing support for the Palestinian cause.
Even if you support Adam Schiff's pro-Israel views, you should not want him with this power to control online speech, just because in this one case, he's using it against your enemy, because very shortly he's going to be back to using it against you.
At the very beginning of the war, three days before the bodies were even identified and cleared from Israel, the top EU official in charge of their censorship regime, this French official Thierry Breton,
Decided to use the Gaza war, the war in Gaza, to say this proves yet again that the EU needs to censor Twitter because Elon Musk is allowing too much anti-Israel or pro-Hamas content to circulate online.
Here from the Guardian October 10th, just three days after the Hamas attack, the EU warns Elon Musk over quote disinformation on X about the Hamas attack.
Quote, failing to moderate content such as fake news could incur a fine of six percent of X revenues or a EU blackout under new laws.
We covered in full the letter that this EU censorship official sent to Elon Musk.
Tariq Brenton, the commissioner responsible for the act, wrote to Musk to urge him to ensure quote a prompt accurate and complete response To the request to contact Europol, the EU police enforcement agency, and quote relevant law enforcement agencies within the next 24 hours.
There are concerns in Brussels that Twitter is not responding within 24 hours to complaints about disinformation or other illegal content such as hate speech within the required time.
Now here's part of the letter that this EU official, and if you support free speech at all, you should despise this Terry Brentom.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter and said the bird will be free, Thierry Breton put a quote over him saying the bird may be free in other places but in the EU it's subject to our censorship laws.
Threatening him that you're not going to bring free speech here to Europe.
And he has been leading the way to demand and impose more censorship of political content from big tech.
And here's the letter on October 10th, not even three days after the Hamas attack.
It was October 8th when we really, October 8th when we really had a clear image.
And two days later, he was exploiting this new war to try and demand more censorship from Elon Musk.
There you see the letter, the European Commission chair, Thierry Breton, member of the commission, Brussels, October 10th, 2023.
Dear Mr. Musk, Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU.
Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation.
Given the urgency, I also expect you to be in contact with the relevant law enforcement authorities in Europol and ensure that you respond promptly to their requests.
Moreover, on a number of issues of the Digital Service Act combines, that's the new EU law that allows them to censor the internet and punish social media companies for not censoring.
That deserve immediate attention.
My team will follow up shortly with a specific request.
I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate, and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours.
We will include your answer in our assessment file on your compliance with the law.
I remind you that following the opening of a potential investigation and a finding of noncompliance, penalties can be imposed.
Yours sincerely, Terry Brenton.
Do you see what's happening here?
Do you?
They know that the American right and conservatives have been opposed to their censorship regime, so they're now trying to get them on their side by saying, look, in this case, we're on your side.
We love Israel.
We support Israel.
We don't want there to be online content stimulating criticisms of Israel or support for the Palestinians.
And we're going to use this word to demand that Elon Musk impose further constraints that we're going to threaten him with all kinds of punishments.
If he fails to comply with our censorship orders, not this time about COVID or Ukraine or the 2020 election or some other election in Europe, but this time to protect Israel from quote excessive criticisms or hate speech or disinformation.
If you're going to cheer or acquiesce to censorship calls, because in one particular case, Your political opponents this time are the target.
You are going to lose forever any moral credibility, any credibility, to pretend that you object in the future, except on grounds of self-interest.
You have no claim to believe in free speech if this is the sort of thing, if you're ready to get in bed with CNN and Chris Murphy and Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman to censor the internet, this time in order to support Israel and protect it from criticisms. this time in order to support Israel and protect it
So in a related story, Elon Musk today went to Israel.
He visited Prime Minister Netanyahu.
They had what looked like and sounded like a very, very agreeable talk.
He flew to Israel.
He met with Israeli officials, including the Israeli president, the prime minister.
And then he hosted a hour-long, one-on-one conversation between himself and Prime Minister Netanyahu on X, on spaces.
In which Elon Musk affirmed essentially every single last claim of Netanyahu, a person despised by much of the Israeli public.
And the key context, the critical context for this is that Elon Musk has spent the last two weeks being widely vilified as an anti-Semite.
And losing advertisers over those allegations.
And one of the things he tried to do to stem the flood and loss of those advertisers was introduce a new corporate policy, which we covered last week.
A new censorship policy saying that you are no longer allowed to use the words decolonization or from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free when talking about Israel on the grounds that it's genocidal.
Those phrases, those political phrases that Israel hates are banned.
And the ADL Publicly said, good job, Elon.
Good boy.
And he said, thank you.
Thank you so much, Jonathan Greenblatt, for that praise.
But that didn't stop the flow of corporate advertisers out of action.
So today he escalated his efforts and he went to Israel.
Hear from the Guardian.
Elon Musk to meet Israeli President amid accusations, anti-Semitism accusations on X. Quote, Isaac Herzog's office, that's the president of Israel, says the president will emphasize the quote, need to act against rising anti-Jewish hate during the tech billionaire's visit.
Obviously the only reason, way that Elon Musk can act.
against what they classify as anti-Israel hate or anti-Jewish hatred is through his power of censorship on Twitter.
Quote, "Netanyahu met Musk in California on September 18th and urged him to strike a balance between protecting free expression and fighting hate speech after weeks of controversy over anti-Semitic content on X." Do you see what Netanyahu's saying?
He's saying, Mr. Musk, I want you to constrain the free speech rights of people in the United States and the West in order to protect us, the Israelis.
On November 15th, Mr. Musk agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the quote, Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory was speaking the actual truth.
Now, the reason they don't actually show the quote Of Elon Musk, what he agreed with is because the Guardian is lying here.
What the viewer said was that a lot of Jewish organizations like the ADL have funded what the American Right regards as anti-white programs, like woke programs that teach anti-white content, or open borders, and Elon Musk was agreeing with that.
That was his statement.
Now, you can still call that anti-Semitic if you want, but that's not really what the Guardian described it as.
Quote, the White House condemned what it called, quote, an abhorrent promotion of anti-Semitic and racist hate that, quote, runs against our core values as Americans, referring to Mr. Musk's statement.
Major U.S.
companies, including Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, and NBCUniversal parent company Comcast paused their advertisements on his social media site.
And they haven't come back.
Here from the New York Times, November 25th, X may lose up to $75 million in revenue as more advertisers pull out.
Quote, internal documents show companies like Airbnb, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft have halted ads or may do so after Elon Musk's endorsement of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The organizations that have paused their ads on X range from political campaigns to fast food chains to tech giants.
Airbnb, for example, halted more than $1 million of advertising while Uber cut back on ads worth more than $800,000, halting campaigns in U.S.
and international markets.
On the NBC program Meet the Press last Sunday, the Republican candidate Chris Christie called Mr. Musk's comment part of a, quote, recent outpouring of an outrageous type of hate.
Whether it's Elon Musk, whether it's professors on our college campuses or students that they are misleading, or whether it's individuals who are speaking out in an anti-Semitic way on the streets of our cities, he said, CNN, through its activist Oliver Darcy, its censorship advocate Oliver Darcy, tried to drive other corporate advertisers away, the ones who hadn't left yet, by publishing this article on CNN on November 22nd.
The NFL, Washington Post, and Walmart, here are the major companies still advertising on X despite Elon Musk's anti-Semitic endorsement.
That is how media outlets are the leading activists for the erosion of free speech.
They oftentimes publish articles saying look at this filthy content that Facebook or Google or Twitter are allowing and they try and shame them and pressure them into censoring.
But oftentimes it's by trying to drive their way their corporate advertisers in the event they don't censor enough.
By saying, look, these are the companies still willing to pay for anti-Jewish hatred on X, obviously trying to shame them and drive them away, which of course is classic activism.
You expect Media Matters to do that.
That's an activist group.
It has nothing to do with journalism.
But that is the warped and surreal reality that you have to recognize as the leading advocates of censorship and Internet censorship.
are the largest media corporations in the United States.
Quote, Some of the world's most recognizable brands have opted to continue their advertising partnership with X despite the surge in hate speech on the platform.
And owner Elon Musk continue peddling of misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories, including an endorsement last week of an anti-Semitic post.
Since Musk's takeover, the platform has reinstated accounts previously banned for harassment and abuse, eliminated verification of authentic information sources, and instituted a paid blue checkmark system that has boosted the visibility of racist accounts.
Musk has also embraced and fanned the flames of dangerous conspiracy theories suited to an organization exposing the rise of hate speech on the platform.
Attacked George Soros, a frequent source of anti-Semitic abuse.
No criticizing George Soros, the person who spends more of his fortune to influence American politics and is the largest single donor of the Democratic Party.
He's off limits.
No criticizing him.
and threaten the American Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group.
While Musk maintains that he is not anti-Semitic, industry experts have said that continuing a relationship with X is unwise and could cause brand damage.
Musk last week ignited fierce backlash when he backed an anti-Semitic post that accused Jewish people of "hatred against white people." His endorsement of the post came as the progressive watchdog Media Matters issued a report that indicated that advertisements for major brands appeared next to neo-Nazi hate speech on X.
And we, of course, documented last week why that was a fraudulent study.
They issued the same study that's fraudulent about Rumble.
Do you see what they're trying to do?
They're trying to prevent any platform that allows for free speech or doesn't censor enough to have any association with corporate advertisers.
Quote, the one-two punch led to an advertiser exodus Friday that has bled into this week.
And of course, CNN is trying to fuel that.
So if you're Elon Musk, And you're being widely accused of anti-Semitism, the single worst accusation you can face in the United States, by far, in terms of career damage and reputational detriment at elite levels.
What would you do to stop that?
You would fly to Israel and meet with Benjamin Netanyahu and promise to do anything he wants and agree with everything he says, and that's exactly what Elon Musk did today.
Here is part of The conversation that they had, the one-on-one conversation they had on X about the Israel-Gaza war.
How are they being trained to have these, to believe that murdering and having joy at the death of civilians is a good thing, and to stop that training?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.
We have first a mission to destroy Hamas.
Nothing's going to stop that, because if you want peace, destroy Hamas.
If you want security, destroy Hamas.
If you want a better life for the Palestinians in Gaza who've been hijacked by Hamas, destroy Hamas.
Now, let me just interrupt there and say that for a long time, the biggest supporter of Hamas was Benjamin Netanyahu.
And that is not a conspiracy theory.
That's something the Israeli press has documented.
Netanyahu allies admit this.
Netanyahu wanted to prop up Hamas because they knew that if there were a more moderate face for Palestinians, it would put pressure on the Israelis more so than they have.
To reach a peace deal with the Palestinians and give them a Palestinian state, whereas they knew if they had Hamas in charge of Gaza, they could use Hamas to demonize the Palestinians and turn public sentiment against a two-state solution.
And that's what they did masterfully.
They propped up Hamas.
They worked in tandem.
Netanyahu on one side, Hamas on the other.
So when he says, oh, the key to everything is destroying Hamas, remember that the reason Hamas is so strong is because Benjamin Netanyahu cynically All of that is a precursor to the question that you asked.
Palestinian people, even though there hadn't been an election in the last 17 years?
All of that is a precursor to the question that you asked.
You first have to get rid of the poisonous regime, as you did in Germany, as you did in Japan, Yeah in World War two these were two there's no choice.
There's no choice So there's Elon Musk saying you're right.
There's no choice.
There knows choice this idea.
He the reason many many at Yahoo is Trying to claim that Israel faces the same sort of threat that the world faced with Nazi Germany in Japan is because what did the world do?
in the face of the threat to Nazi Germany in Japan and It decimated entire cities and purposely killed and burned to death huge numbers of innocent civilians, including in Dresden, but many other places.
And then the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to end the war.
So once you can set up the framework, and of course, what the world did after World War II is it looked at all these atrocities that were committed in World War II, these targeting of civilians by the Nazis, but also by others, and created a system of rules, fortified the rules of law to say, we don't want this to be done anymore.
There are now laws against this.
It's a war crime to collectively punish or to recklessly kill civilians.
But Benjamin Netanyahu wants That to be the framework.
Everyone's always fighting Nazis because once you're fighting the Nazis, anything and everything is justified.
And here's the on-messing.
Oh, you're absolutely, that's absolutely right.
You gotta, you gotta do everything.
Everything.
Can't care about civilian deaths.
Just flatten it if you need to.
Just get rid of them all.
But then look at what happened.
I mean, what you had in Germany was denazification.
And what you had in Japan under Douglas MacArthur was a cultural reformation.
And Japan that you visit today is so different from Japan of the 1930s.
Germany that you visit today is so different from Germany of the 1930s.
Well, is that possible in the Arab world?
And I categorically say, of course it is, because we've seen it already.
So their model is the Gulf States.
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan.
These are the most repressive, savage, tyrannies on the planet.
These are regimes that the United States funds and props up.
To prevent the population from ever speaking their mind, it keeps them under a thumb to ensure there's no sense of democratic expression.
Because if you have an election in the Arab world like you did in Egypt, they're going to elect the wrong person from the perspective of the United States.
The Egyptians, the first time they got to vote in decades, after living under the thumb of the vicious dictator Hosni Mubarak, who the United States propped up for decades, finally got to have an election.
Remember when they all marched in Tahrir Square and we all cheered and we loved them for doing this, even though the dictator they were rebelling against was one that the United States kept in power?
And then as soon as they had an election, they voted for somebody, put into office Mohammed Morsi with the Muslim Brotherhood, who was a critic of the United States and Israel.
And we couldn't tolerate democracy in the Arab world.
So we had to overthrow him and impose a military hunter led by General Sisi, who is at least as brutal and savage as Mubarak was before him.
And then Mubarak does what he's told by the United States because he gets billions of dollars every year by the United States like the Israelis do.
He keeps the border with Gaza closed.
And he doesn't allow the Egyptian people to have any democratic expression.
That is Netanyahu's model for what he wants to do in Gaza, at best.
I think the Israeli intent is to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza so the Israelis can take it.
There have been military documents saying that.
That's the official position of many Israeli officials.
But even the state of goal of what Netanyahu wants, the model of what he wants to impose on the Palestinians, is pure dictatorship.
Just the dictatorship that does the bidding of Israel and the United States.
When you visit Abu Dhabi, or when you visit Bahrain, you see something entirely different.
Sure.
There was, in fact, a cultural change there.
And let me say that that same thing is, in my opinion, happening to a considerable extent in Saudi Arabia.
The de-radicalization of...
of these Muslim countries, these Arab countries, some of it already took place, some of it is taking place.
But there's another country with a substantial Arab minority where that is already taking place, and that's called Israel.
20% of our citizens are Arabs, most of them Muslim.
They serve in high places in the academy, in the Supreme Court, in the Knesset, and so on.
And I'm not saying that there isn't some radicalism there, but mostly there isn't.
In fact, they're integrated into the society.
So we have to do the same thing.
We have to demilitarize Gaza after the destruction of Hamas.
I mean, I'm worried about Elon Musk that he might have strained his neck, given all the nodding he was doing when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke.
know imbibe their values yeah and then we have to also rebuild Gaza and I hope to have our Arab friends helped in that context yeah I mean I'm worried about Elon Musk that he might have strained his neck given all the nodding he was doing when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke and let me just remind you again that what Benjamin Netanyahu is saying though
oftentimes you're not allowed to question or criticize it in the West is vehemently criticized in Israel by people who hate Netanyahu bill.
There are protests, before this war happened there were, Israel was on the verge of a civil war over Netanyahu.
And even now there are people who want him gone.
Poll shows 60% of Israelis want that government gone.
But if you're Elon Musk and you need to prove you're not an anti-Semite, you go to Israel and you nod your head when Netanyahu speaks.
Including when you're told that your power needs to be used to help us, Israel, stop there to be such a flow of free speech against us.
As he told them in September, you need a balance in the West between free speech on the one hand and stopping hate speech on the other.
Hate speech for Israel.
Here is another part of this, what do you want to call it, lecture, set of instructions, conversation, if you want to be super neutral about it.
We'll take a listen.
Well, the one thing you cannot do is give immunity.
To the terrorists, because they're hiding among civilians.
Because if you give them immunity, everybody says they shouldn't be doing this.
But effectively, nobody's willing to take the action to make sure that this is not an effective tactic.
Because if it is, it'll repeat itself again and again and again.
By the way, Hamas says, we're going to do it again and again.
But it's not only against Israel that they'll do it.
This will spread very quickly throughout the Middle East and peril the entire region.
From there, they'll go to Europe, and from there, they'll also go elsewhere to America, whom they call the Great Satan.
We're just a little.
America's the Great Satan.
America's the Great Satan.
And this is an Iranian axis.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas.
It's all part of that same axis that goes against Israel, the United States, free civilization, and the moderate Arab states.
We're all on one side.
This is classic neoconservatism that we've been fed for 30 years.
If we don't pay for the wars that Israel has with its neighbors to let them destroy their neighbors, they're going to come to the United States.
All of Israel's enemies are American enemies and the West enemies.
Coincidentally, it's great for Israel.
Just so happens that all the Israeli enemies, if you don't pay for Israel to kill them all and cheer, they're going to come to the United States and get you.
Hamas is going to come to the United States and get you.
That's what we heard in Iraq and in every other war, we have to fight them over here so they don't, we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them over here.
Let's do the rest of this while Elon says yes, yes, totally, totally, laughs at his jokes.
So we just heard that part.
We have first a mission to destroy Hamas.
Nothing's going to stop that, because if you want peace, destroy Hamas.
If you want security, destroy Hamas.
If you want a better life for the Palestinians in Gaza who've been hijacked by Hamas, destroy Hamas.
All of that is a precursor to the question that you asked.
So we just heard that part.
So he also, Netanyahu was saying that we face an axis of evil, which was David Frum's phrase at the beginning of the War on Terror that came out of George W. Bush's mouth that caused so much destruction. - Okay.
Which is that we're facing an axis of evil composed of all of Israel's enemies.
Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraq, Iran, Iranian militias in Yemen.
And so we have to do everything possible to ensure that the public understands that their duty is to support Israel, including shielding them from disinformation or hate speech that might impel them to question that.
And Elon Musk already took some steps toward that with his new censorship policy banning certain phrases.
Here is the president of Israel, the office of the president of Israel.
That announced this, quote, in a meeting President Isaac Herzog held with Elon Musk and families of hostages, Rachel showed Elon a video of her son, Hirsch, badly injured, being abducted by Hamas.
Malky, father of another hostage, Omer, presented Elon with a dog tag inscribed, quote, our hearts are hostage in Gaza.
Now note that Elon Musk didn't go to the West Bank and meet with Palestinians who have been killed in record number.
This year and since October 7th by maniacal psychotic settlers who don't belong there backed up by the IDF.
They just killed three Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank for the crime of celebrating the release of those prisoners.
The Israeli government told them you're banned from expressing joy at the release of these prisoners.
And the ones who celebrated were murdered by Israel in the West Bank.
Elon Musk didn't go there.
He didn't talk to those families.
Obviously he didn't meet with Gazans.
And hear about the 14,000 people and counting who have had their lives extinguished, including more children or the same number of children now in the last seven weeks and were killed during the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Or more children in Gaza that have been killed in two years of Russian fighting in Ukraine.
He didn't go meet with any of those.
He met only with Israelis, which is fine to do and I think he should do.
But how do you get a complete picture if you're meeting with one side of a war?
Here is Elon Musk getting this video presentation from Israelis about what happened on October 7th.
That's the Israeli president standing over Elon Musk proudly with his hands clasped while he watches intently what he's being shown.
I see him, I see him!
Your heart is with our hostages in Gaza.
No, no, no.
The heart is with our hostages in Gaza.
Sure.
So if you put it, it will be here.
Thank you very much.
And then in response to this dog tag, Elon Musk out on Twitter.
I will wear it every day until your loved ones are released.
I mean, honestly, this is sad to watch.
This is sad to watch.
And I think one of the important things that I think sometimes people don't stop and think about, Elon Musk is the world's richest man.
On paper, he's worth $250 billion, a quarter of a trillion dollars.
He controls Massively influential and powerful companies.
Not just Axe, but SpaceX, which has more satellites in space than any, I think, than all governments combined.
He has Starlink that can either provide or deny internet connection.
He has Tesla, a pioneer in electric cars.
He's in control of all these companies.
So you might think he has FU money.
Where he's not subject to the influences and shame, where he can be forced to do things like this, these kind of penance rituals, because he got called an anti-Semite, you'd be very, very wrong for two reasons.
One is, it is a really strong human instinct not to suffer societal stigmatization and expulsion and scorn, where it's in our DNA.
A couple thousand years ago, if the tribe expelled us, it meant that we would Wall into a corner and die, wither away.
We couldn't protect ourselves from the elements, or feed ourselves, or protect ourselves without our tribe by loan.
And so the people who evolved were people who had a natural instinct to avoid that kind of social exclusion.
So when you have every major newspaper in the West and major, major influential people accusing Elon Musk of the worst thing you can stand accused of in elite culture in the West, which is anti-Semitism, of course you're going to do everything possible to get out of that.
And to prove that you're not that, including running to Israel, and in the most sycophantic way I've ever seen, meeting with these very controversial figures, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli officials, and fully endorsing what most of the world has completely turned against.
That's why Mark Zuckerberg, when the New York Times would run stories saying Facebook is allowing this material and Mark Zuckerberg has blood on his hands, Facebook would turn around and censor it on command.
You would think, Mark Zuckerberg's so rich, why would he care about being accused of having blood on his hands by the New York Times?
It's because they do care.
They want to be integrated into society.
They like going to fundraisers.
They like appearing at the White House.
They like being embraced by society.
And if you create a framework Where you can make the public turn against them, they will desperately avoid that.
That's what you saw today with Elon Musk.
Desperation to avoid that.
But there's also a big financial price to pay.
Twitter is a financially strapped company.
It is not thriving economically.
He paid $44 billion for it.
It's not even worth half that according to every estimate.
It was barely Sustaining itself with the cash flow it had, and now the combination of media matters and these anti-Semitism accusations drove away up to 75 million dollars and counting in corporate advertisers.
You have CNN out there trying to drive the rest away.
And so here you have Elon Musk doing everything he can, announcing new censorship policies to protect Israel, running to Egypt, running to Israel, but not the West Bank or Gaza, or meeting with Palestinians and hearing about the immense suffering there.
Just to give you a sense of what that suffering is, here's the New York Times, which I know a lot of people have been trained to think about as being left and liberal.
Very steadfastly pro-Israel paper.
I know a lot of people don't believe that, because people hyper monitor every word in every article.
And people on the left think the New York Times is viciously anti-Palestinian.
People on the right think it's viciously anti-Israel.
People always think the media is biased against them.
Always.
No one ever thinks the media is biased in favor of them.
Ever.
Liberals think the media is too pro-Trump or at least insufficiently anti-Trump.
Every single person believes the media is biased against whatever view they hold.
You never hear anyone saying the media is biased in favor of my view.
To the point where even liberals believe that the media is insufficiently anti-Trump when they're obsessed with anti-Trump agiprop.
But the family that owns the New York Times is the Sulzberger family.
They have always editorialized heavily in favor of Israel.
At the start of the war, after October 7th, the editorial position of the New York Times was, Israel is absolutely right to start bombing Gaza and to do what it's doing.
And yet here's the New York Times with this report.
You see this?
Just look at this headline.
Because we keep hearing how what's happening in Israel is just standard warfare.
In fact, the IDF is the most moral force on the world that goes to lengths to avoid killing civilians that no other military does.
Only an anti-Semite could possibly criticize this.
And here you see on the screen, Gaza civilians under Israeli barrage are being killed at a historic pace.
Let me just emphasize this.
Gaza civilians under the Israeli barrage are being killed at a historic pace, meaning this is not like every other war fought.
This is much more savage and much more brutal and indiscriminate.
And it makes sense if you're going to drop gigantic bombs, 500 pound bombs that the U.S. wouldn't even drop on Iraqi cities because they were too big.
And you're going to drop that on a densely packed, trapped civilian population in the Gaza Strip, half of whose population they are children, of course you're going to kill thousands of civilians every day that, every week that goes by.
It stands to reason.
And then the Times says this, even a conservative estimate of the reported Gaza casualty figures Shows that the rate of death during Israel's assault has few precedence in this century, experts say.
Not Hamas says, experts in the West say.
Few precedence in this century when it comes to the rate of death of Israel's assault.
Every bomb that Israel drops comes from the United States directly or is paid for by the United States.
And everybody in the region knows that.
That's why the State Department has repeatedly issued travel advisory warnings that says your security has not been increased since the start of this US-supported war.
It has been jeopardized.
You face a heightened risk of anti-American buy-on attack wherever you go in the world because of the anger this is generating.
Here's what the New York Times reports.
First of all, here is the graph.
Just that orange is women and children.
So in this very short time, From when we had, on October 20th, regular reporting on women and children began.
We already had 10,000 women and children killed in Gaza.
By conservative estimates, 14,000 people in total.
Now, if you want to believe that every adult male is a Hamas militant, which is absurd, it still means that they've killed 10,000 Innocent civilians and 4,000 Hamas militants.
The reality is even the Israeli say or the Israeli press say that 2,000 Hamas militants have been killed since the start of the war and that Hamas has 40,000 total soldiers or militants.
That means that Israel would have to do 20 times the bombing campaign that it's already done to kill every Hamas militant at this rate.
And that would mean that You have 200,000 civilian deaths at minimum.
If you continue the rate where you killed every Hamas militant, you got rid of Hamas, as Israel says is their goal.
How are you going to get rid of Hamas?
You have people in the West Bank who never did before now waving the Hamas flag.
Because both sides are so polarized in nationalism.
They're right next to each other.
They're on top of each other fighting for the same land.
But you can support Israel and still find this repellent, especially in the context of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for the last 60 years.
They don't have a state.
The people in the West Bank live under a brutal occupation that is violent and humiliating.
What would it be like if you lived under an occupation of a foreign military that hated you and that routinely shot you and the people you live with?
And even though the Israelis disengaged or withdrew from Gaza, their troops and the settlements in Gaza, in 2005, they never disengaged from Gaza.
They continued to control the airspace, the borders, along with Egypt, and the sea lanes of Gaza.
Gaza City had an airport, and Israel bombed it.
Which prevents anyone in Gaza from leaving Gaza.
People in Gaza can't get out of that tiny little strip because Israel bombed their airport and doesn't let them cross the border.
They shoot people who approach the border.
And then the U.S.
ensures that its U.S.-supported dictator in Egypt keeps that border closed as well and nobody can escape by sea or they'll be killed.
So you have people who are 18 and 20 and 22 years old.
Millions or hundreds of thousands.
Who only know other Gazans.
They've never met anyone outside Gaza.
They can't leave Gaza.
They're trapped there.
And then they have this unprecedented bombardment since at least World War II in terms of the number of civilian deaths.
Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict.
Pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.
But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel's assault is different.
Israel's assault is different, even worse than those U.S.
civilian killing wars.
While extreme wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel's campaign has few precedents this century.
People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of the U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.
Now, let's just be clear about the separation of issues here.
On the one hand, you have whether you support the Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza.
And I've heard so many people saying, look, sorry, war is hell.
There are no limits in war.
Civilians die in war, but if you're somebody who believes, oh well war is hell, there are no limits, whatever people do to win a war is justified or at least not legally or morally debatable or questionable, then what is your moral basis for condemning the Hamas attack on October 7th against Israeli civilians?
I was able to condemn that because I actually believe there are moral precepts and legal precepts Governing how people can use violence that even when they have a just cause, they still can't target civilians or kill civilians recklessly.
They can't engage in collective punishment.
That's how I had a basis to condemn the Hamas attack on October 7th, unambiguously and easily.
The parts of it that killed civilians, not the parts of it that targeted civilians.
IDF soldiers, something like of the 1,200 person death count, at least 350 were active IDF soldiers in Israel.
So the civilian death count is around 850 or 900.
And if you're somebody who says, ah, where's hell?
No limits, no moral limits.
How do you condemn Hamas for what they did on October 7th?
But even if you want to justify what Israel is doing, there's still this separate question of whether the U.S.
should be paying for their war.
Whether the U.S.
should be giving Israel $4 billion every year, and then giving it another $14 billion, as President Biden has requested from Congress, and the bipartisan Congress is almost certain to give them that, so that the world knows this is actually an American war?
And whether that's good or bad for American national security, does that matter?
U.S.
foreign policy, whether it helps or undermines the security of American citizens?
And then there's of course the broader question of whether we should suffer an erosion of rights in the West, in the United States especially, in the name of shielding Israel from criticism or having information circulating that might cause people to criticize Israel or be opposed to Israel.
Do you think we should lose our free speech rights in the name of a foreign country on the other side of the world just because a lot of Americans seem to have a strong emotional attachment to it?
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that makes sense.
So the pressures on Americans is so great that even Elon Musk has to go pay homage in the most degrading way possible.
And the more degrading it was, the better, because it shows if they can do that to Elon Musk, what are they going to do to you?
It'd be easy.
People have had their careers destroyed, of course, including huge numbers of people over the last seven weeks in the United States who have been fired, put on no-hire lists.
Not for calling for the death of Jews, but for calling for a ceasefire, for criticizing Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.
We are losing our rights with every crisis, including this one.
And the question is, how much are you willing to sacrifice and give up or endorse in the name of this foreign country?
Vivek Ramaswamy is a Republican presidential candidate who has surprised a lot of poll and pundit watchers by being much higher in the polls than anyone believed at the start he would be, given his propensity for attracting media attention, for his very heterodox views, for the fact that he's running an outsider campaign, the only one in the debate stage willing to criticize not just the Democrats but the Republican Party.
I certainly don't always agree with Vivek, but I've interviewed him several times and I find him a very interesting figure on the political scene.
I think he is somebody willing to speak his mind without giving a lot of thought to the political consequences of it, which I think is very refreshing.
He's obviously coming to this campaign as an outsider and sees it that way.
Mitt Romney recently said he would vote for any Republican candidate on the debate stage, except obviously Trump and Vivek.
The Republican establishment hates him.
Nikki Haley called him scum.
Ronald McDaniel said he'll never get assent from the Republican Party.
And I personally think that's the kind of anti-establishment candidate we need more of.
So Vivek Ramaswamy joins us tonight.
We taped this interview right before our show began, just minutes before.
And we asked him about the censorship issues surrounding Israel, but also free speech in general, the Israel-Gaza war, the $14 billion request from Biden to pay for the Israeli war.
But then we also talked a lot about the release of the January 6 videos and what he thinks about January 6 and the abuse of power by the FBI.
and what curves the FBI needs.
We talked a lot about the Nikki Haley campaign and the way in which big money donors are lining up behind her.
So I always find my interviews with Vivek interesting, and this one is no exception.
I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
Vivek, it's great to see you again.
Welcome back to System Update.
I'm glad to talk to you again.
Good to see you, Glenn.
The thing I knew about you before you even ran for president was first you had written a Wall Street Journal article, co-authored an op-ed, arguing that this censorship regime where the government pressures big tech to control online speech is unconstitutional.
I think it proved very prescient given the court rulings we've had saying that.
You then wrote a book, Woke Inc., where you advanced even further, more passionately, this defense of free speech, both online in terms of our political culture.
And then you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal at the start of the Hamas-Israel war, saying we're not going to defeat Hamas through cancel culture.
Since October 7th, we've had this kind of spate of censorship.
State censorship in the West, and then kind of informal cancel culture.
Lots of people have been fired, some for excessively supporting Israel, but mostly for people who have criticized Israel excessively.
What is your view of free speech issues like this in terms of the role that it'll play in the Republican primary?
Look, the role it'll play in the Republican primary, I mean, that's for political analysts, Glenn, but my job in this is, I'm a candidate, I'm gonna share my convictions, and I think I'm the only candidate in this field that is a true free speech advocate to the core.
I object to governmental backdoor intrusions into free speech, and most of this was coming from the left.
At the time that I wrote Woke Inc.
and that first op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that you referenced, it came at some great personal sacrifice.
After that very first piece I wrote, Glenn, Two advisors to my company, and I was still a CEO of a biotech company at this time, two prominent advisors to my company resigned for making this argument defending free speech in the aftermath of January 6, 2021.
And so I have been a crusader against left-wing cancel culture and remain so today.
But I apply that principle 360 degrees.
I don't care if you agree with me or not, you have the right to say it.
And I believe much of our Republican primary voter base cares about that deeply, but it's gonna take somebody who's willing to explain that to them, which I think the other candidates are not.
And I am, because, you know what?
If the government can decide what speech can and cannot be expressed, there's no point in going through the rest of the motions.
We're done as a country.
The United States of America might be a mass of land, but the identity of the nation is gone.
if the government or the party in power can use force directly or indirectly to silence its political opponents.
And I also worry, Glenn, that that's also the path that leads us, dare I say it, to violence actually.
I mean, if you tell people they can't speak, that's when they scream.
If you tell people they can't scream, that's when they tear things down.
And so history teaches us this is not a road we want to go down.
People will ask now, in the wake of a lot of the anti-Semitism, which I think is wrong in the United States, and I've condemned it, what do you do then?
And how do you draw the line between free speech and this kind of speech that borders on inciting violence?
Here's the answer.
If you are expressing an opinion, no matter how heinous that opinion, it's protected.
So telling somebody, hey, go down the street and stab that individual, that's not protected speech.
That's directly inciting violence in a clear and present sense of that word.
That's not the expression of an opinion.
If I sell you, I don't know, a bottle of water, but it contains poison inside of it, but I say, hey, it's just a bottle of water, that's not protected speech.
That's commercial speech.
It's not expressing an opinion.
But if you're expressing a true opinion, no matter how heinous that opinion, that is free to go in the United States of America.
That's what the First Amendment protects.
And that's what I'm going to protect.
I mean, give me liberty or give me death, I mean that literally.
I will protect this one to the very end.
And I could lose some election, I don't care.
I will stand for our right to express our opinions.
My sense is that could be a winning political strategy, Glenn, but that's not what's guiding me to say it.
Absolutely, and when I asked you what role will it play in the primary, I didn't really mean to imply that this was an opportunistic strategy because I know it's not for you since you've been saying it for a lot longer before you were in President's Candidate.
What I meant was, one of the things that distinguishes your campaign is that you spend most of your time talking to voters, including going to a lot of places most Republican politicians don't, as opposed to in back rooms raising money from GOP big donors.
In the process of doing that, have you heard from voters, from people, that this is a concern of theirs?
That they seem to be losing their core liberty because of this censorship regime imposed on the internet?
Well, I'll tell you a mix, actually.
So there's a selection bias, certainly, of people who come to my events, which include a lot of free speech advocates, many of whom have not been traditional Republican partisans, by the way, or people who have voted in the Iowa caucus.
We're bringing in new people, which, as a side note, Glenn, if we get them actually to come on January 15th, I think we're going to shatter the expectations in the polls, because these people aren't polled.
But put that to one side.
I'll be honest with you, what I see with the traditional Republican base right now is they're looking for leadership on this issue.
Many of them do see pro-Hamas college students or people marching on the bridge of Manhattan Bridge or Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
And wondering, hey, what the heck is going on?
This is wrong.
And many of them, when Ron DeSantis says he wants to disband Students for Justice in Palestine on campuses, or Nikki Haley saying similar things, kind of come around to being like, okay, well, yeah, we need to go after these bad guys.
And I think it's going to take a leader to be able to say, hey, what they're saying is heinous.
I will call that out.
It's offensive.
It offends the conscience in many cases.
But it's an opinion.
And if you say that now, that you want the government being able to silence them, let me explain to you what that means.
If you question a vaccine, that means you're going to be a bioterrorist.
If you label a student who tweets supporting terrorism, which is effectively what DeSantis is doing, Then that means that if you're tweeting questioning the efficacy of a vaccine, they're going to label you a bioterrorist.
Or if you question what's being taught in the school, you're going to be called a domestic terrorist.
That's happening in school parents who attend school board meetings already.
Or if you say that someone who protested at the Capitol peacefully on January 6th, and you say they shouldn't be locked up, maybe you're an insurrectionist.
Then it really lands, I think, with the voter base and says, OK, no, no, no, I don't want that.
Actually, I know that you told me that that speech was bad, but now that you explained it to me, I get that it's bad, but it shouldn't be censored.
We do live in a moment, Glenn, where people need to be led.
And I think part of what goes on in partisan politics today is you have a lot of poll testing going on.
People test something in the polls.
If it's going to go well, they're just going to spout that back out to the people.
There's an old Thomas Sowell expression, which goes, if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.
If you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
I think you have a lot of politicians now doing the polling on this in the Republican primary and giving them what they want to hear.
In my candidacy, one of the things that you've seen is at the time that I adopted many of my positions, they weren't necessarily popular at that time.
Some of them have come around to becoming the mainstream Republican political view.
And so my hope is this defensive free speech that I'm offering in this primary will age well, but it's not necessarily where many traditional GOP primary voters are right now.
Once I explain it to them, they are, but that requires me reaching a lot of people to do it.
That's the honest answer.
So, several other times that we've spoken, we've talked about both the Ukraine and U.S.
policy toward Israel, so I don't want to spend a lot of time on that.
I only want to ask one question about that because I have several other things I want to ask you about.
But I do want to ask you this because you have made some of the most pro-Israel statements in terms of Israel's right to react to the October 7th massacre in the ways that it decides it wants to do.
But there's a separate question of whether the US should be financing Israel's wars, should be transferring billions of dollars in money.
Joe Biden just asked for another $14 billion to give to Israel.
When we talked about Ukraine in the past, you said, look, we have too many problems at home.
We can't afford to be financing a bunch of wars, including foreign nations wars.
Does that rationale apply to Biden's request for $14 billion?
And it'll be a lot more when all is said and done to Israel Or is there something different about Israel that makes that rationale inapplicable?
I'm against that funding request.
And I have been clear about this.
The $61 billion to Ukraine, the $14 billion to $16 billion, depending on the spending request for this specific war in Israel.
I've made the case, actually, Glenn, that I don't think that's in the U.S.
interest, and I don't think it's in Israel's interest.
But either way, my rule of thumb across the board is any new elective foreign aid, we shouldn't be giving it as a country to anybody whose national debt per capita per person is less than the United States.
Now, I also go further and say that this is also consistent with Israel's own founding vision.
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, famously said effectively in his own way, "We don't want to depend on the fleeting sympathies of America or the UN or the West or anybody else.
Israel has an absolute right to its own national self-defense.
And I stand by that.
But I stand by that by saying that we're best off, and I believe Israel's best off, when we're not intervening, when we're not armchair quarterbacking what they do.
We muddy the waters with U.S.
involvement in this specific war.
So that's where I land on that, is I think it's better for the U.S.
and better for Israel.
And I should say there are a lot of very vehement pro-Israel supporters in the United States, including several who have been on our show, who have called for an end to USAID to Israel precisely because they believe it hamstrings Israel, it places limits on what they can do.
All right, let's move to something else, which is the newly elected Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, made good on one of his promises that he made when elected, which was to release all videos of the January 6th riot that happened at the Capitol in 2021.
It is shocking, I think, that it took two years for the public to see all videos as opposed to the videos handpicked for us by Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney.
But now we finally have them.
There have been a lot of videos that we've covered on our show that I think are very illuminating.
What do you make of these new videos and what is your view now on January 6th Looking Back?
Look, it shocks the conscience, the fact that you have police escorting people in.
That's a form of entrapment, I would say.
Somebody escorting you in as though they're actually rolling out the red carpet for you.
Some of those videos.
And then some of those same people have been prosecuted as domestic terrorists, effectively, in the treatment the court system has given them.
That's wrong.
That's not the United States of America.
And Glenn, for me, this is a part of a continuing and deeply concerning pattern, frankly, over the last 20 years of the national security establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, in many cases Republicans more than Democrats, exploiting those laws to completely disrespect the constitutional rights of individuals.
I mean, the same government, and this is, you know, long past, but the same government that we know lied to us in the aftermath of even something terrible that happened to this country.
Horrific.
In the wake of 9-11, they said that, oh, Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with it.
And then now we know that Omar al-Bayoumi, the 42-year-old graduate student who welcomed people in LAX airport, absolutely was a Saudi intelligence operative.
Our own government declassified that 20 years later.
So it's this bad habit where they use the act to effectuate an agenda that otherwise should shock the constitutional conscience.
But then when the fervor has died down, quietly release what the actual facts are to say that they were transparent.
The people deserve the truth, the whole truth, not just when it's easy, but when it's hard.
And the fact that this took two years to come out, I think explains a lot of why they suppressed this video footage.
There's stuff in there that I'm sure the government did not want us to see when the Biden administration led a post 9-11 like Patriot Act like scourge of Americans across this country, concerned Americans, that's wrong.
The wave of domestic terrorism calling white nationalism the greatest threat that we face in the United States and then really I would say offending the Constitution at various steps of the way to go after people who have not been granted their constitutional rights to due process and many of those prosecutions or those plea deals that have been extracted.
That's wrong.
So one of the things I've said is, a president rarely gets an opportunity to go back and change the past.
You can only change the future.
But one way a president can do it is through the pardon power.
And so I have a list of day one pardons I'm committed to, Glenn.
Anybody who was a peaceful protester on January 6th, day one pardon.
Anybody who had their due process rights were denied, including Brady rule violations or otherwise, day one pardon.
I put others on this list too.
I mean, put Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, not quite a pardon, but a form of clemency.
I would say the same because he wasn't prosecuted, but the same idea to Russ Albrecht to be able to go to Donald Trump, even somebody who was, I believe, now the victim of politically motivated persecutions through prosecution.
It's interesting that I am the only Republican candidate in this field that's actually been able to say these things, certainly on that debate stage.
And the question again that that begs is, why, Glenn?
And it's because the puppet masters in the Republican Party establishment do not approve of this message.
Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman, failed chairwoman, I should say, of the RNC for her failed track record over the last five years, after that last debate, that third debate, which I don't know if you saw that or not, but that was somebody who said, I would not get another cent of funding from the RNC, almost proving my point about I would not get another cent of funding from the RNC, almost The thing, and it's sad, the sad reality is, the only reason I'm able to do this is because I can self-finance this campaign with 150,000-some-odd small-dollar donors that are lifting this up.
But it takes a guy who has lived the American dream, achieved financial success at pretty much the highest level, to be able to declare independence from that establishment.
That's not how the system is supposed to work, but it's the reality of the system as it exists today.
And so, yeah, a lot of what I'm saying, I'm the only candidate saying it because the Republican establishment doesn't approve of it.
But that gives me a special sense of purpose to double down and keep doing it.
So you alluded earlier to the false sense that came after 9-11 that led to the Iraq war.
And, of course, one of the things that we found out or that we knew at the time even was that a lot of the advocates of invading Iraq had wanted to invade Iraq long before 9-11 and use 9-11 as the pretext to do something that had long been on their agenda.
What I think a lot of people have forgotten is that well before January 6, when President Biden was elected, November, December of 2020, early into January of 2021, before January 6 happened, they were making it clear, the Democrats were, the Biden people were, that one of their priorities was pending legislation from Adam Schiff that, that one of their priorities was pending legislation from Adam That would allow them to use all the same powers they had used against foreign terrorist organizations as part of the War on Terror, but now against domestic terrorist organizations.
And obviously what was the biggest gift to them in that cause was January 6th.
Now with all this evidence out, are you concerned or do you think we need to think more about whether the FBI had more knowledge We've already seen examples of this.
You don't have to stretch very far.
I mean, look at the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case.
The acquittals that came out of that trial, otherwise putting people in prison, found that why it was entrapment.
They were effectively FBI goading them to do things they otherwise wouldn't have done.
I think it is shocking, Glenn, that we still have no clear answers from the government on how many federal agents were in the field that day on January 6th.
We deserve the plain answer to that question.
And the longer they wait and the more they demur, and the more evidence that comes out, you hear from the Capitol, former, at least Capitol Hill, police chief and others who have made some concerning observations about the security failures that day.
We deserve those answers.
And there's little doubt that the FBI, dating back to J. Edgar Hoover, and by the way, it's still the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI, they celebrate his legacy.
It's shameful.
That's calling the shots.
And so I believe we deserve transparency.
We deserve answers.
I don't want to sit in a situation where, post 9-11, we had to wait 20 years to say that Omar al-Bayoumi was actually not a graduate student who happened to receive the terrorists, but was a Saudi intelligence operative.
Don't wait 20 years.
To tell us that this was somehow a government created or government goaded incident.
Tell us the truth, whatever it is.
Tell us the truth now.
I'm not somebody who is a conspiracy theorist.
I'm a realist.
But I want to see the facts bare.
And what I do know is the government is clearly hiding.
They've been asked many times, have not given a clear answer.
We know the answer is it wasn't zero.
How many federal agents were in the field?
And it's a shame that I'm the only Republican that has the guts to actually press this issue.
This is an untouchable issue.
The Republican Party establishment does not want us talking about it.
This is the danger, actually.
Because back then, in the post-9-11 era, Glenn, it's even worse now in one respect.
In the post-911 era, it was actually the Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party, the Karl Rove, George W. Bush Republican Party, neocon establishment, that at least was met with resistance from liberals who I disagree with on a lot of things, but at least the civil libertarians showed up in the Democratic Party.
Now what you have is the neocons have really taken hold of both major political parties.
You got the, you know, Dick Cheney 2.0s crawling over all over that debate stage that I'm on every month.
Conversely, the Democratic Party has really just become a new instrument for that very neocon establishment.
And so the Joe Bidens of the world who might have, although he actually favored the Iraq War, but the very people who would have been Democrats at least opposed to the Iraq War and opposed to these lies and calling for government transparency back then, are now doing the bidding of the Dick Cheney 2.0.
Under the guise of having two parties who might disagree on transgender issues, that's fine.
But when it comes to these core issues relating to constitutional protections, these core issues relating to also our foreign policy, which is broken for some of the same reasons that our constitutional protections are vulnerable, Both parties are actually more similar than not, and I think that's deeply concerning.
It should be deeply concerning to every Republican that I'm the only one on that debate stage that's able to say these things.
Largely because the only reason why is if I wasn't able to sell finance, I wouldn't be able to say them either.
That's what's more concerning now than at least back then it was red versus blue.
You had at least one party, say what you will, standing up against or at least initially standing up against the Iraq War or the intrusions on civil liberties after 9-11.
Now it's more or less unchecked when you have the equivalence of the Liz Cheney, the next generation of Dick Cheney, and the Lindsey Grahams and the Nikki Haley's and the, you know, really on a given day a Ron DeSantis or Chris Christie or anybody else in the Republican Party representing effectively that totalitarian worldview.
With the time we have left, I do want to ask you about Nikki Haley because clearly one of the most fascinating parts of this Republican primary is that you have two people, yourself and she, who are nominally in the same party and yet in so many ways you couldn't be more polar opposites.
Obviously you have some agreements on social issues and the like, like you just mentioned, but on these kind of core issues of war and civil liberties and core constitutional freedoms, in many ways you couldn't be more antithetical.
One of the things that distinguishes your campaign is that it's an outsider campaign being threatened by the Republican Party establishment with no funding, whereas Nikki Haley's core base is the corporate media that hates you, but even more so the huge dollar donors that have long propped up Jeb Bush and the Bush family and Dick Cheney and all these neocons.
What have you learned about this kind of insider outsider dirty game that drives presidential races in particular?
And what does it say about the Republican Party that they are so eager to prop up Nikki Haley with money?
It's disgusting, is what it says about the Republican Party.
And let's just go into the depth of this.
There's one part of this where they'll use certain puppets and prop them up.
This is almost a symbiotic relationship where this individual is also making money off that entire process, right?
You have somebody who claims to be an accountant, never obtained a CPA, but anyway is in debt, drowning in debt at the time she leaves the UN.
And then in a few short years, becomes a military contractor, whose business address is her home address, which is, you know, interesting.
He has yet undisclosed.
Gives secretive speeches, including to foreign actors and domestic actors alike.
Joins the board of Boeing, a company for whom she has done special favors her entire career as governor of South Carolina.
And what do you know, in a few things later, she's collecting corporate stock options during this presidential campaign.
As far as I know, unprecedented for somebody who's running for U.S.
president literally while on the campaign.
Now emerges a multimillionaire.
That's corrupt.
There's no other word for it, Glenn.
I think it is the state of American politics is now you have a class of politicians who make money off the very policies they pursue.
And I say this as somebody who I think has been the only person in the Republican Party with the stones to say this about Joe Biden.
I think part of the reason we're sending $200 billion to Ukraine, no doubt about it, is that, in my mind at least, there's a $5 million bribe that that same country paid to Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and if reports are to be believed, actually even have a tape, and using that as leverage for the payback of that bribe.
But I can't call that out in the Biden crime family, if you have a Haley corruption family.
And I could care less to swap out a Republican version of the Democratic corruption that we have, selling off our foreign policy to make their family rich.
It's disgusting.
And that's one step worse than the ordinary version of dirty politics that I've already learned.
Which is that every politician dances to the tune of their biggest donor.
I mean, that's just, that's like a law of nature.
As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, every politician dances to the tune of their biggest donor.
In my case, that biggest donor is me.
And other people look at who their biggest donors are.
Sometimes you'll never even know, because it's done through dark money and shadowed context.
But the worst part about this is this takes that to the next level.
This is also somebody who is personally profiting from the very foreign policy pro-war agenda that she's advancing.
The bloodthirst isn't even an organic bloodthirst.
It's a thirst for personal power and money.
And it's disgusting.
Whether it's, you know, Dick Cheney in heels or Dick Cheney 1.0, I don't care.
It was bad with Dick Cheney 1.0, and it's that bad with Dick Cheney 2.0.
And I do think that You know, this two-party system, if this is really the deeper divide that matters, it's not the red versus blue distinction that matters.
It matters whether or not you believe it's the job of the U.S.
President and the sole moral obligation of the U.S.
President to the U.S.
citizens, or whether you're allowed to have other objectives and other allegiances to your own pocketbook as well.
That's what I think is on the table, and I think that people are going to see through it.
The challenging and interesting part about this is how much the mainstream corporate media has decided they're going to protect this puppet of theirs.
Why?
Because she can be controlled.
I mean, I don't believe she actually has convictions, which actually makes you a convenient vessel.
If your only conviction is your own pocketbook, that makes you pretty easy to capture.
That's the sad state of affairs.
It exists in the Democratic Party, but I can't call it out there or in the mainstream media if I'm not calling it out in our own party as well.
And you know what, I think that the nation is going to be far worse off if Nikki Haley comes ever anywhere within spitting distance of the White House, not just in the presidency, but in any role touching or shaping our foreign policy.
And if I have anything to do with it, that's not going to happen.
Well, in fact, according to polls, lots of Republicans plan on voting for you.
But I think even for the ones who don't, they should be appreciative of your candidacy.
If it weren't for your candidacy, there'd be nobody on that debate stage making that critique of the rot within the Republican establishment every bit as much as in the Democratic establishment.
It's always interesting to talk to you.
So I'm super appreciative that you came on our show tonight.
Have a good night.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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