Zelensky Begs DC for Money—While Torturing US Journalist, Gonzalo Lira. Bill Ackman’s Long-Time Censorship Crusade Gets Results. Google Loses Massive Anti-Trust Suit, w/ Matt Stoller
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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, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky goes to Washington today, again, with his hand held out for more American money, again.
The Biden administration, after first blocking any possibility of a diplomatic resolution at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war almost two years ago, Has now spent more than $110 billion in American resources to fuel this war, accomplishing little other than guaranteeing the destruction of Ukraine, sending hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men to their deaths, and all but ensuring that Russia will end up controlling roughly one-fifth, at least, of what had been Ukrainian territory.
Over the last month, President Zelensky's closest allies in Kiev have run to the Western press to turn on both Zelensky and the war, accusing the Ukrainian leader of everything from having become an authoritarian to becoming, quote, delusional about his obviously baseless belief that Ukraine still has some chance to expel all Russian troops from Ukrainian soil.
But none of that stopped Zelensky from going to the White House today and doing what he does best, demanding more American money.
And he made the rounds with the American media and also met with members of Congress to plead, demand, and insist that still more American money be transferred to keep fueling this increasingly futile but as destructive as ever war.
Most revealingly, Zelensky even met with the CEOs of most of the true beneficiaries of this war, the only beneficiaries of this war, the arms dealers in Washington.
We'll tell you the key events that are transpiring on his trip.
Then few people outside the world of high finance and academia knew the name Bill Ackman on October 7th when Hamas attacked Israel.
Yet almost immediately, almost overnight, this multi-billionaire hedge fund manager and fanatical supporter of Israel went on a rampage against anyone and anything inside the United States insufficiently supportive of Israel.
At first, in a very public way, helping compile blacklists of American college students who committed the crime of placing blame on Israel for the long-standing conflict with the Palestinians, insisting that they not be hired by other CEOs.
And then he used his vast wealth to coerce Harvard and other institutions in order to intensify their censorship attacks aimed at Israel critics.
It has been bizarre watching so many Israel supporters and assorted Republicans and even conservatives march behind Bill Ackman and celebrate him as a hero and to watch him celebrate himself as one.
He really did recently praise his own courage because what could possibly be scarier than being an American billionaire supporting Israel and the United States?
One can barely fathom the courage that must require.
Bill Ackman is what every conservative and even many liberals claim usually to despise.
A billionaire who weaponizes his wealth to cancel and destroy the careers of those who disagree with him, and who tries to dictate to major American universities which political views they may and may not permit to be expressed.
And he's hardly alone.
When it comes to pro-Israel billionaires in the United States.
But the last few months have taken people like Bill Ackman out of the shadows and thrust them into the very public spotlight.
And it's vital to realize that his cause, while masquerading as some sort of noble fight against university wokeness, is really nothing other than an attempt to force universities to prohibit and punish criticism of this foreign country for which he harbors so much affection.
Finally, as the Justice Department prepares to go to trial against Google in one of the most significant antitrust suits brought by the U.S.
government, one that was commenced incidentally by the Trump administration, Google just suffered a major defeat in a courtroom in San Francisco against a private corporation.
A company named Epic Games, which is the creator of Fortnite, won a jury verdict that Google's use of its Google Stores on Android phones violates America's antitrust laws.
They sued on 11 counts and the jury quickly, after just three hours of deliberation, ruled against Google on all 11 counts.
We'll speak with one of the nation's premier antitrust and Google experts, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, to tell us what all of this means and doesn't seem to bode very well for Google and many of its upcoming fights with various private and public entities that are claiming it is a illegal monopoly.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting now.
Everybody except for three human beings seems to recognize that the war in Ukraine is over, that Ukraine and NATO and the United States have largely failed at its stated that Ukraine and NATO and the United States have largely failed at its stated objectives, and that the only way to meaningfully end this war is by going to the
That Russia will agree to keep only the 18% or so of Ukrainian territory it now occupies, given the demonstrated impossibility of expelling Russian troops from Ukrainian soil.
There's only three people left who seem to continue to want to pour billions and billions and billions of dollars to keep that pointless and futile and failed war flowing, and that is Joe Biden, Zelensky, and Nikki Haley.
Those are the three who seem genuinely most excited about this war and continuing to transfer American funds to this war.
Now, President Zelensky just attended the inauguration of the newly elected leader of Argentina, President Mele.
He tried to meet with Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who has repeatedly refused to arm Ukraine as part of this war, like many countries in this world have, arguing Lula did that.
His priority is not Ukraine's war, but the welfare of his own people, and he's not going to send Brazilian resources to fuel the war in Ukraine, something that Joe Biden has refused to say.
In fact, he's been opening his coffers in Treasury to President Zelensky.
And President Zelensky is now in Washington after attending the inauguration of the new Argentine president, in part to speak with Republicans who have now impeded
The bill that would send billions more to Ukraine, for now at least, the position of the House Republicans, and we'll see how steadfastly they hold this, is that they refuse to send any more money to Ukraine until at least an equal amount is spent on the security of the United States' own border.
And that they'll, even if they authorize the $60 billion President Biden seeks in addition to $14 billion for Israel, and they continue to question how Republicans can keep pretending that they are so aghast at the national debt when they continue to want the war in Israel funded, want the war in Ukraine funded, want foreign countries to receive all of the American resources for their wars.
want to cut corporate taxes and then wonder why there's a national debt.
But in any event, that is the establishment wing of the Republican Party.
But in this case, at least, they're saying they will not send another $60 million to Ukraine until they get border security.
And that's basically because the base of the Republican Party, American conservative voters, in the name of America first, has turned against this war.
And they can't fund it, at least not without getting something very significant that they can show their voters in return.
Here for the New York Times today, Republicans sidelined Zelensky with border demands and barreling aid package.
The Ukrainian president delivered an urgent plea for more help for his country in its fight against Russia, only to be told by Republicans that his challenges were not their focus.
And you can see the New York Times tutting these Republicans for saying that, hey, we were elected by the American people.
We're members of Congress of the United States.
Our focus is now going to be on the welfare of the American people and addressing the massive problems faced by the United States, not fueling this war on the other side of the world that has no relationship whatsoever, no effect on The welfare of the lives of the American people.
Quote, as President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stood at a lectern in the Capitol on Tuesday, pleading with senators to quickly approve more aid for his country's war against Russian invaders, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, delivered a blunt message.
Quote, here's the problem, Mr. Graham, a defense hawk who has been a champion of aiding Kiev, recalled saying to Mr. Zelensky, quote, it's got nothing to do with you.
If Lindsey Graham is even acknowledging that there's now a problem in fueling a war...
You know something's gone very wrong.
Quote, but it was a problem for Mr. Zelensky, whose visit to Capitol Hill and the White House failed to snap a Republican filibuster of $110.5 billion emergency spending that includes $50 billion more in security aid for Ukraine.
Zelensky made the case that supporting Kiev would protect the West by preventing President Vladimir Putin of Russia from seizing more of Europe.
Only to be told by Republicans that that was besides the point.
Now, this fear-mongering that Putin is going to march into Poland and all these other NATO countries, this is the same war-mongering rhetoric we always, always get.
We have to stop Assad or Gaddafi or he's going to start expanding.
We have to stop Saddam Hussein or he'll march through the Middle East.
We have to fight them over there so we don't fight them over here.
If we don't go to war in Vietnam that will be a domino and the rest of the dominoes will fall.
It's always the same claim.
It virtually never comes to pass and yet it convinces enough people to fuel wars.
Vladimir Putin knows what it means to attack a NATO country.
He's never done it in the history of his more than 20 year rule as President of Russia.
Why would anyone think that he's now suddenly going to turn around and invite World War III, force the United States and Western Europe to go to war with Russia?
His problem has always been Ukraine, and specifically the United States' design to expand NATO into Ukraine, the success the United States had in imposing a coup on Ukraine and changing their government in 2014.
We all heard Victoria Nuland participating in those change of plans by choosing The leader of Ukraine, one that they knew would be more pro-Western and pro-US, even though the elected president, who they helped topple, had a constitutional term for another year.
All of this tumult that the United States caused on the other side of the Russian border, these threats to put Ukraine into NATO, that's what has sparked this conflict.
Not some sudden maniacal desire on the part of Putin after 20 plus years of power to start marching through Western Europe like some sort of Hitler figure.
And yet we're incapable as a country, incapable of having a foreign policy debate, a debate about war, a debate about conflict, without immediately putting it into the prism of World War II.
Everybody is Hitler.
Everybody is Churchill.
Everybody's Chamberlain.
Everybody's the new Hitler.
This is the only way that Washington discourse can proceed.
It's so condescending and simple-minded.
Quote, Zelensky's visit on Tuesday to Capitol Hill was a vivid departure from Mr. Zelensky's previous trips.
A year ago, he was largely hailed by lawmakers as a hero.
They invited him to address a joint meeting of Congress and capped off his trip by overwhelmingly approving nearly $50 billion to arm and aid his nation.
Don't forget that.
Don't treat these Republicans in Washington like some sort of heroes because after two years of cheerleading this war by joining hands with Biden and the Democrats, they're now forced by their voters to put a halt to it.
The only no votes did come from the Republican Party.
There were about six or seven dozen anti-establishment populists in the Republican Party who voted no on this from the beginning.
Most of the Republican establishment joined with all of the Democratic Party in fueling this war, even though it was so predictable and predictive that it was going to end this way.
This time, however, with American support for sending aid to Ukraine deteriorating, particularly among Republican members of Congress, the reception was markedly frostier.
Some Republican senators made a point of doing a media tour preemptively criticizing Mr. Zelensky's visit and complained that he was coming at all.
Now, this idea that we were fighting to protect Ukrainian democracy and fighting to save Ukrainians was always such blatant propaganda.
We said from the start, others said from the start, that the opposite goal was really driving the United States policy.
It wasn't to protect Ukraine, it was to sacrifice Ukraine, to destroy Ukraine.
In pursuit of the real US goal, which was to weaken Russia.
And Ukraine is destroyed.
Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men have lost their lives.
The United States is now going to pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine while JPMorgan and BlackRock profit.
And the only people who benefited from this war, which again was so predictable, but if you stood up and said this until about a month ago, You are branded a Kremlin propagandist.
The only people who in the United States benefited from this war, aside from the CIA, with all their augmented authorities and budget, were the people that President Zelensky met with today, namely the CEOs of U.S. defense contractors, Boeing and Raytheon and all of those that run namely the CEOs of U.S. defense contractors, Boeing and Raytheon and Here, from the site Ukraine Forum, you see a picture here, and this was actually posted by President Zelensky to his Telegram account.
This is Zelensky meeting with the CEOs of various defense contractors, the people who have received the billions of dollars to send weapons to Ukraine.
Quote, "As part of his working visit to the United States, President of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with executives of U.S. defense companies.
Quote, "I had an important and fruitful meeting with leaders of U.S. defense companies.
I am grateful to all workers, engineers, all those who work in American defense companies and partners who produce weapons that help safeguard Ukrainians and help our army defend the country.
These are the people who have done a lot for Ukraine, Zelensky said in a post on Telegram.
Now the reason he's meeting openly with these defense contractors is because the lie, the propaganda of this war has switched.
Bill Kristol's group started running ads aimed at Republican voters trying to convince them That this war in Ukraine was helping them because it was benefiting American companies.
Nikki Haley has been doing the same thing.
That has become the Biden White House message as well.
Now, obviously, when you go and meet with Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics, it's a huge risk because usually they like to stay hidden because it's so obvious that all of these expenditures are done for their benefit.
It's a transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer continuously to these massive corporations.
that control Washington in so many ways.
The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, came right from the board of Raytheon before joining the administration.
Nikki Haley got self-enriched in part by serving on the board of Boeing.
There's this revolving door that if they serve these companies, these companies then reward them.
And these companies place their board members and their executives inside the Pentagon.
And it's basically just a lateral part of the U.S.
government.
But in order to promote this idea that somehow this war is helping the United States and not Ukraine, Zelensky had to meet with them.
Here we see Zelensky's Telegram post.
Quote, we held an important and fruitful meeting with the heads of U.S.
defense companies.
I am grateful to all the workers.
Now, I don't know if we have the photo of this meeting, but we can try and get it up.
But he posted several photos of him standing there with a bunch of CEOs of various defense firms like Raytheon and Boeing.
We'll show you that in a second if we can get that up.
Now, One of the things that makes this so infuriating and appalling that Zelensky is in Washington trying to get billions more of your money for this war that has proven so disastrous is that there's an American citizen named Gonzalo Lira who has a YouTube show and he has been a vocal critic of Zelensky and the war in Ukraine from the start.
He was arrested and released at the start of the war.
He continued to speak out against Zelensky.
And then he was detained several months ago and he's been disappeared, held in a Ukrainian dungeon somewhere, not tried with any crimes other than criticizing President Zelensky.
So think about this.
You have Zelensky in Washington claiming that we need more billions of dollars from Americans because They're fighting for democracy.
They've turned Ukraine into a complete autocracy.
Zelensky canceled elections.
They've closed oppositional media outlets.
They've shut down oppositional parties.
They've arrested critics.
And they're holding an American citizen, whose only crime is criticizing Zelensky while telling us they need more of our money, to fight for democracy.
Here was Gonzalo Lira in his own words on his Twitter account in July of 2023, shortly before being arrested.
Quote, right now I'm about to try to get out of Ukraine and seek political asylum in Hungary.
Either I'll cross the border and make it to safety or I'll be disappeared by the Kiev regime.
This is what's happened to me over the past three months.
And he went on to tell the story of how he's been repeatedly threatened by Ukrainian security services for his criticism of The Zelensky government.
And then of course you have these bots and these Ukrainian partisans who added this community note onto his tweet.
That actually revealed more than they intended to.
They wrote, quote, Lyra is actually a YouTuber.
He has violated Article 436-2 of Ukraine's criminal code.
He denied the Buka massacre and other Russian attacks against civilians, exposed the location of Western journalists and Ukrainian soldiers, including their faces, among other crimes.
In other words, he's in prison because he expressed his dissent about this war.
That's what he's accused of doing.
And they had that freakish extremist...
American citizen who became the spokesperson, the Western spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Forces.
We're going to show you this person in a second.
We've reported on her before.
She got fired for some extremely deranged views that she got caught on video when she didn't know she was speaking to two Russian comedians, pranksters she thought she was talking to a top Ukrainian official, and she admitted all kinds of horrible things.
She played a major role in Gonzalo Lear's arrest.
Here, by the way, is The photo of President Zelensky meeting with the CEOs of Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman and you can see they're all smiling as they should be.
They've all been wildly enriched at your expense, at the expense of the American taxpayer.
I'd be smiling too.
Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson actually did a show on Gonzalo Lira and he wrote, quote, Gonzalo Lira is an American citizen who's been tortured in Ukrainian prison since July for the crime of criticizing Zelensky.
Biden officials approve of this because they'd like to apply the same standard here.
The media agree.
And then he's talked to Gonzalo Lira's father about the impossibility of getting any help from The Biden administration and getting him released.
I believe we have the video of a journalist from Grayzone who went today to the State Department and asked Matthew Miller, the spokesman for the State Department, about what is being done to secure the release of this American citizen from the dungeons of Ukraine.
And listen to this exchange.
Clear in the past that he'd be willing to engage with them on such matters.
Yeah.
So back in May I asked you about Gonzalo Lira.
He was the US citizen arrested in Ukraine for posting dissident content online and you told me the State Department was aware of his arrest in May and we learned last night through a series of tweets by him that he had been tortured in the Ukrainian prison and he was now on a motorcycle with a broken rib trying to flee to the Hungarian border and so I'm wondering you know if this is true Given the State Department knew of his arrest and his detention, how has this been allowed to occur?
We have a U.S.
citizen... This is back in August, by the way.
So this has been an issue for months.
And here's what the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said.
He could not have cared less.
...being detained and perhaps tortured in the prison of one of our strongest allies.
Well, you lost me with the perhaps and the if this is true.
I think I'd want to verify those reports before I commented on them.
Alex, go ahead.
I just want to verify anything before I comment.
Go ahead, Alex.
Now, obviously, this was a public matter.
The State Department didn't know because it didn't care.
And now you have Zelensky in Washington with the encouragement of Joe Biden demanding billions and billions of dollars more and there's no pressure to release this American citizen whose only crime is criticizing President Zelensky.
Here is an article in the Daily Beast which is a repellent tabloid that is very close to the U.S.
security state.
They were a big pusher of Russiagate.
And they tried to malign Gonzalo Lira's reputation because he's committed the crime of criticizing President Zelensky and the war in Ukraine, but in doing so made clear that he actually has been arrested.
The Daily Beast, May 5th, Red Pill dating coach Gonzalo Lira, accused of shilling for Putin, is arrested in Ukraine.
Gonzalo Lira, a prolific online personality who became an outspoken supporter of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, had his home in Kharkiv raided by the security services.
Ukraine's security service, SBU, has arrested Gonzalo Lira, a dual citizen of the United States and Chile, on charges of producing pro-Russian propaganda.
So that is what Ukraine calls any critic of it, a pro-Russian propagandist.
They've issued several official blacklists of American journalists and politicians who they've deemed pro-Russian propagandists.
I've been on several of them.
So is Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul and Tulsa Gabbard.
I've never said a positive word about Russia in my life.
But because I opposed U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine and questioned and challenged and dissented from the narrative about the Ukraine war, I got called a pro-Russian propagandist.
The only reason I'm not in the Ukrainian dungeon is because I don't live in Ukraine.
If I lived in Ukraine, Gonzalo Lira's destination would be mine.
That's what they mean by pro-Russian propaganda.
That you're a critic of Zelensky.
So you have a country imprisoning an American citizen for expressing his free speech rights against this war.
While the leader of that country is in Washington demanding billions more from the United States with the support of the Biden White House that doesn't seem to care by all appearances at all, at all, about the imprisonment of this American dissident.
Now here is the spokesperson who I mentioned earlier, Sarah Ashton Cirilla.
We've Reported on her several times.
She's now fired because she made statements even to derange for the Ukrainians.
But here was just to get a little taste of her.
She's central to this Gonzalo Lira prosecution.
She testified against him.
She was agitating for his arrest on Twitter.
She's a maniac.
She's a fanatic.
She went to Ukraine.
She volunteered to serve with the Ukraine Defense Forces, because she's a trans woman, they thought she'd be a perfect spokesperson to the West for the Ukrainian cause.
Oh look, we have trans people too.
And here's just part of how she speaks and reasons.
Russia hates the truth that their obsessive focus on a Ukrainian volunteer is simply allowing the light of the Ukrainian nation's honesty to shine brightly.
Next week, the teeth of the Russian devils will gnash ever harder and their rabid mouths will foam an uncontrollable frenzy as the world will see a favorite Kremlin propagandist pay for their crimes.
Now this is demented.
This is the stuff of nightmares.
You need to go to therapy if you watch too much of this.
And this person here was talking about Gonzalo Lear basically predicting his conviction for the crime of criticizing the Ukrainian government when she's talking about the gnashing of the teeth of Russian devil.
She's talking about this American citizen And this puppet of Putin is only the first.
Russia's war criminal propagandists will all be hunted down and justice will be served as we in Ukraine are led on this mission by faith in God, liberty, and complete liberation.
All right, so if you find that inspiring, if you think that's a person who's fighting for democracy and Western liberalism, I don't know what to say, but This entire scam has finally collapsed.
Not just in the United States, but in the West.
People are done transferring their funds to this war that has gone in every way other than they were promised.
And President Zelensky doesn't care because as long as the war goes on, he doesn't have to face another election.
There's billions of dollars of unaccounted for money flying around Ukraine, flying around Kiev.
This was a country that was already the most corrupt in Europe before this war started.
Every attempt to try and impose some measure of safeguards on where this money was going, introduced by Rand Paul and by others, was defeated.
So it wasn't just that the establishment wings of both parties have been sending billions of dollars of your money to fund a war to Ukraine, but have been opposing any attempts to even trace where the money is going.
When they finally allowed the Inspector General To trace where the money in Afghanistan was going, they found that billions of it was disappearing, was unaccounted for.
And they just wanted the same office, many members of Congress did, to trace where this money in Ukraine is going.
And yet, oddly, the people of the U.S.
Congress who wanted this money to go to Zelensky were opposed, even to that basic degree of accountability.
So it's no wonder Zelensky wants to travel the world, urging that this war continue.
This has nothing to do with democracy.
These are demented maniacs who are in support of this war, like this person I just showed you, who for two years was the Western spokesperson for this cause until they just went way over the line, even as far as the sign has been set when it comes to how we talk about Russia and the United States.
This is a gigantic scam, a huge transfer of wealth, and the people who have been the recipients just want more and more and more, and they will suck at this tro until the money dries up.
We'll see if the money dries up.
The position of the Republican leadership at the moment is not, we're never going to give another dime to Ukraine.
It's that we will send the $60 million to Ukraine if we get some sort of concession from the Biden administration when it comes to the American border.
Why does security at the American border depend upon sending $60 billion to Ukraine?
I don't know.
But that is the position of many House Republicans, including the Speaker, Mike Johnson, who has at many points been a supporter of the war in Ukraine, who has said it is urgent that we and the United States and NATO win and that Russia lose.
But at least for now, he's saying no more money for Ukraine until we get what we want on the border.
And we'll see whether or not that actually happens.
But if there's another $60 billion, or another $100 billion, or another $20 billion sent to Ukraine, it won't change the military situation.
We showed you many times that the front line of this war has not moved in almost a year, except a matter of a few meters each direction.
Russia is far more likely to seize more territory than Ukraine is likely to seize any of it back.
It's just a money pit.
And that's not the bug of the war.
That's actually its feature.
Every now and then you get a glimpse of the people who actually exercise real power in They're not the Lindsey Graham's of the world, or the Mark Rubio's of the world, or the Chuck Schumer's of the world.
The people who are elected to high political office and cast their little votes on all the bills that come up.
Far more often than not, agreeing with one another, the two parties are, because the most consequential policies are actually a matter of bipartisan consensus, because the establishment wings of both parties are funded by the same oligarchs.
The real power lies with the oligarchs, the people with all the wealth.
And many of them, not all, but many, like to avoid the spotlight, where they exercise power in the dark.
And one of the people who had been doing that is named Bill Ackman.
And yet he decided that the attack on October 7th in this other country, didn't even happen in the United States, wasn't an attack on our country.
It was an attack on a foreign country, but it was a foreign country that he loves deeply and cares intensely about.
And he decided it was worth becoming as public as possible in order to essentially do two things.
One, Destroy the lives and reputation and career prospects of anybody who criticized Israel too harshly.
And number two, ensure that our major universities Could no longer allow harsh criticisms of Israel or defenses of the Palestinian cause, that greater speech controls were needed, greater censorship was needed.
And because these universities rely on people like Bill Ackman, who donate hundreds of millions of dollars, so their name goes on buildings at Harvard and Penn, they have a lot of power over what these institutions of higher learning can and can't do and can and can't say.
And it's not often they use their power in public.
They do it in private.
They pick up the phone, they call the university president, they say, I hear there's a class where this professor expressed this view that seems very offensive.
Are you going to look into this?
Or, I heard there was an event that is going to have some speakers whose views I find offensive.
Are you sure you want to have that event?
Because if you do, I would probably seriously reconsider my commitments to continue to donate to your school.
A lot of conservatives, a lot of people on the right, a lot of pro-Israel supporters recently celebrated when the president of Penn was fired, Liz McGill.
And the reason that was given was that she had gone before Congress and was questioned In a very manipulative way about whether the policy of Penn is violated when a student advocates genocide of Jews.
And the reason I say it was a manipulative way is because the part of the video that viralized had no context to it.
The context, both at that hearing and more broadly, is an attempt by the Bill Ackmans of the world, by the people who wield the greatest power of our discourse, to start redefining criticism of Israel As genocide advocacy.
And it's not unlike what left liberal advocates of censorship do.
They take right-wing speech on race, policing, affirmative action, immigration, trans issues, and they redefine it.
They say, what people on the right really mean when they oppose affirmative action, immigration, and police reform, and the right of trans kids to seek medical care and transition, What they really mean is kill all black people, kill all immigrants, kill all trans people.
So when we center them, we're not centering political speech, we're centering incitement to murder against vulnerable minority groups.
And the American right has been horrified by this attempt.
This is censorship.
They're smearing our reputation by calling us racists and saying our speech is inciting violence.
And yet, since October 7th, Any criticism of Israel, any attempt to oppose the Israeli war in Gaza, any attempts to call for a ceasefire, any attempts to criticize Israel for the broader conflict because of their occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza gets redefined as advocacy for genocide, calling for the murder of all Jews.
So when people like Elise Stefanik, the Republican Congresswoman from New York, who conducted this questioning of the University of Presidents, and then multi-billionaires like Bill Ackman, this hedge fund manager, want to censor Israel criticism, they don't say, oh, we're here to censor Israel criticisms.
They use the left-wing, left-liberal tactic first.
They say, this isn't Israel criticisms.
This is advocacy of genocide.
And when you point out, well actually, there aren't people on college campuses going around chanting, gas the Jews or kill all Jews as is claimed.
They'll say, oh no, they don't say that, but that's what they secretly mean when they're criticizing Israel, when they're calling for a ceasefire, when they're defending Palestinian rights.
What they secretly mean is genocide against Jews.
So we're not censoring, we're just punishing genocide advocacy.
That's the game that Bill Ackman has been playing.
He's a censorship proponent leading a pro-censorship campaign at American universities.
Many of them have been doing this since before October 7th.
Have been opposed to the administrations of these universities before October 7th due to their refusal to censor Israel critics with enough vigor as robustly as these billionaires want.
And then they exploited October 7th and the emotions around it to gather people up and say, look what these universities are permitting this free speech, which we're going to call genocide advocacy.
And then a lot of people on the right, not all but a lot, said, look, I'm a free speech absolutist.
I believe in free speech, but this is too far for me.
This should not be allowed, these ideas.
Now one of the first things Bill Ackman did before he went on the censorship crusade at American universities was he helped call for the names of students who signed a statement condemning Israel after the Hamas attack for saying the conflict is the fault of Israel.
He demanded that their names, all of their names, be publicized.
And they didn't actually get the names of the students who agreed with this statement.
They got the names of the students who are members of the group, the groups that signed the statement.
So some of them didn't even agree with the statement.
Some of them hadn't even been members of these groups, but they circulated a list of students.
And Bill Ackman led the way in saying, let's circulate this list, and I pledge as a CEO I will never hire these people, and I hope my fellow CEOs of hedge funds and banks will also pledge never to hire them.
That is pure cancel culture, at least as the right has been calling it, and many on the right stood up and turned him into a folk hero.
Here's CNN October 11th.
Harvard student groups issued an anti-Israel statement.
CEOs want them blacklisted.
Quote, billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman and several other business leaders are demanding Harvard University release the name of students whose organization signed on to a letter blaming Israel for the deadly attacks by Hamas, blaming solely Israel.
Quote, one should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements of supporting the actions of terrorists, Ackman said on a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
If the members support the letter, the names of the signatories, quote, should be made public.
So their views are publicly known, Ackman said.
Those views were publicly known.
Those names were publicly disclosed.
We interviewed two of the students at Harvard, whose names were put on a blacklist.
Pro-Israel groups then paid for trucks to ride through the campus with their names and faces on it, calling them anti-Semitic.
They bought websites With the names of these students in the URL, so if Tom Smith signed one of those letters, it would be TomSmith.com, and you go to TomSmith.com, there's a gigantic photo of Tom Smith with the name Anti-Semite, the label Anti-Semite on his forehead.
Turned out 1920, 21-year-old kids who signed a letter critical of Israel, blaming Israel for the conflict, and that's the Hamas attack.
And there was an attempt to say, in the United States, these people shouldn't be hired.
Using billionaire wealth to do it.
Now, since then, Bill Ackman has also tried to apply similar pressure to Harvard that one of his fellow billionaire hedge funds successfully applied at Penn, causing the firing of the Penn president.
Now, as we showed you last night, this attempt to silence and punish Israel critics on college campus using core censorship techniques is not some new tactic That Israel supporters suddenly started using as a way of showing the American left what censorship is like, to try and do this tit-for-tat censorship.
This kind of censorship of Israel critics, getting professors fired and student groups banned, has been going on for many years on American college campuses.
In fact, it's one of the most common forms of censorship that I've been reporting on for many years, as have many other people.
And the attempt to have billionaires demand the firing of the Penn president began prior to October 7th, because there was a literary festival of Palestinian authors that was going to take place on the Penn campus.
And because some of these billionaires who donated a ton of money to Penn don't like some of the people who are participating in this event, claiming they were anti-Semitic, they demanded the Penn president cancel the event.
And she said, I'm not going to cancel this event.
We have free speech here at Penn.
If you want to challenge the things that they're saying, go to the event and question them or challenge them or hold a separate event with critics of theirs.
But I'm not going to cancel an event because billionaire donors to our school dislike the views of some of the speakers because they're too critical of Israel.
That was the real reason they wanted her head on a pike.
It was a censorship campaign.
And that's what Bill Ackman has been doing at Harvard.
Now, the New York Times today has a profile of Bill Ackman and his long campaign against Harvard, a lot of which is based in petty resentments that they don't immediately jump and obey whatever he tells them to do about what kind of classes they can have, what kinds of teachers they're permitted to empower and hire, what kinds of views they permit.
Here's this billionaire folk hero.
Quote, the billionaire investor has mounted a high-profile battle against Harvard President Claudine Gay over anti-Semitism and threats to Jewish students on campus, but long-held personal grudges may play a part too.
Mr. Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents that officials at his alma mater, Harvard, to which he's donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics.
Imagine being a billionaire.
You have several billion dollars.
This is the kind of wealth that is inconceivable to have.
Not only can you buy multiple enormous sprawling mansions and fly around the world in a private jet, the level of your personal consumption is just inconceivable.
But you can make and break anything you want.
You have enormous power and so you're constantly surrounded by people who are telling you how great you are.
I've worked with billionaires before.
I've seen how they're treated.
They have a coterie of people around them constantly yessing them to death and telling them how wonderful they are.
They're never used to hearing no.
And so Bill Ackman calls Harvard, which has an endowment of, I think it's $100 billion at this point.
It's basically just a financial institution with decorations as classrooms.
It's a gigantic holder of real estate and it's a vastly wealthy institution.
And even Bill Ackman's hundreds of millions of dollars often can't get him his way at Harvard.
And so he's been furious.
And he's been on this crusade against Harvard because of it.
Quote, Most recently, this includes how to respond to complaints of anti-Semitism and the specter of violence against supporters of Israel on campus.
On Tuesday, Harvard's board announced that Dr. Gay, its first black president, would stay in her post despite calls for her removal.
Though Mr. Ackman's campaign, which has included the accusation that she was hired in part because of race and gender, failed to unseat her, he succeeded in shaping the debate about anti-Semitism at universities and showcasing questions about the power of major donors to dictate the direction of elite institutions.
I mean, whatever your view on the Israel-Gaza war, whatever your views are on Israel, no matter how much you love this foreign country, we should all be able to agree that we do not want the boundaries of free speech and the content of classrooms at our major universities being dictated by the wealthiest donors to those schools.
So that anyone who donates a few hundred million dollars to Harvard or Penn or Yale or Princeton or Brown can pick up the phone and say, this class needs to be canceled or else I'm going to cut my donations off to your school.
That's blatantly unhealthy.
And you cannot pretend to want free speech, especially to thrive at an academic institution if there's one place we need in society that's supposed to be permissive of questioning of all pieties, of all orthodoxies.
It's academic institutions, college campuses.
That's why we have academic freedom and tenure for professors so they are shielded from being fired for things they say.
But what could be a greater threat than having these massive donors, these mega donors, be able to dictate to Are universities what the range of views is they're permitted to air and the ones they have to punish and suppress?
That's what these billionaires are trying to do and they're exploiting the emotions around October 7th to succeed.
Quote, Mr. Ackman has privately steamed at Harvard over at least the past three years.
Several people have discussed the subject with him, say, in part after the university administration brushed him off and his suggestions for how to set up a testing lab to get students and staff back to campus during the pandemic.
Two years ago, in an incident not previously reported, Mr. Ackman told members of Harvard's fundraising team he might not give another dime because they hadn't heeded his advice.
During the COVID pandemic, Bill Ackman was a virulent defender of shutting all of society down in the name of COVID.
After all, Bill Ackman is shielded from the effects of doing that.
He doesn't care.
to harvard administrators questioning their financial acumen during the coveted pandemic bill ackman was a virulent defender of shutting all of society down in the name of covet after all bill ackman is shielded from the effects of doing that he doesn't care shut the economy down he won't suffer he'll be fine he Here from CNN, March 26, 2020, the beginning of the pandemic.
Bill Ackman, shut down the economy for a month.
Quote, the economy will recover quickly if we can shut down the virus, and the way to shut down the virus is the ultimate in social distancing, i.e.
a total country shutdown.
What I'm proposing is a 30-day lock-in to the entire country, a coordinated 50-state lockdown.
This is the new right-wing hero.
It allows companies to plan for the future as they don't need to fire employees, particularly with the government backstop.
I call it the rip the bandaid off strategy, Ackman said.
He's spoken with CEOs of large banks, asset managers, and food businesses, and they are unanimous in the support for his plan.
He's constantly talking about how everybody agrees with Bill Ackman.
Here is a Remarkable tweet that he posted just this last week, just to give you a sense for how this person thinks.
How messianic he is, how monomaniacal he is.
This is what ends up happening to billionaires.
Bill Ackman, for the last two months, has been expressing support for Israel in the United States, the most pro-Israel country on the planet.
When pro-Israel votes come up in Congress, they pass by something like 422 to 6.
Supporting Israel in the United States is the most conventional view you can possibly have.
And that's what Bill Ackman's doing.
And he went to Twitter to say this about himself.
Here's Bill Ackman talking about Bill Ackman on December 7th.
Quote, I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks.
I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks.
The same could be said for those who called out Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare.
He's comparing himself to the people who challenged Joseph McCarthy, even though he's doing what McCarthy did, trying to root out from colleges people who have an ideology and a viewpoint Bill Ackman thinks is dangerous, just like Joseph McCarthy did.
But imagine how often you must have people around you telling you how great you are to go to Twitter and say, I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks.
Who is calling Bill Ackman brave?
For being a billionaire hedge fund manager in the United States who speaks out in support of Israel.
As though there's a long history of Israel supporters in the United States being thrown into gulags and dungeons.
Such bravery is required to do what Bill Ackman is doing.
He's just like the dissidents who were blacklisted and imprisoned during the McCarthy era.
He's the one doing the blacklist.
He's the one collecting the blacklist and calling for the blacklist.
Like Joseph McCarthy did.
He's not the one opposing McCarthyism.
He's the one imposing it.
Then he adds, I don't think it will be long before we look back on the last few years of free speech suppression and the repeated career-ending accusations of racists for those who question the DEI movement.
He is not A free speech proponent.
He is a censorship proponent.
He's using this language of the anti-woke movement of the American right to try and lure people into supporting him because he's an Israel supporter.
His cause is not free speech.
His cause is censorship.
He wants to ensure that American college campuses don't allow critics of Israel to be heard.
He wants them punished and blacklisted.
upon threat of losing his many hundreds of millions of dollars.
Here is Jamil Jaffer who is with the Columbia University's Knight Center of First Amendment speech.
And he was a longtime lawyer with the ACLU, one of the best lawyers of the ACLU, Jamil was, always defending free speech rights regardless of everybody.
And this is what he said today, quote, Ackman and others who demanded Liz McGill's resignation at Penn are trying to rebrand themselves as champions of free speech.
But from the beginning, what they've been advocating is censorship.
The only thing I can think of worse than a broad scale censorship movement on American college campuses is one that is led by billionaires like Bill Ackman using their wealth in order to accomplish it.
Now just to give you a sense for the power trip that he's on, here is what Bill Ackman tweeted earlier this week.
To the MIT Governing Board, let's make a deal.
If you promptly terminate President Kornbluth, I promise I won't write you a letter.
He thinks he's like a mafioso now.
Like, oh, you don't want a letter from Bill Ackman?
Bill Ackman is gonna... He got the president of Penn fired.
He put students on a blacklist.
He bullied Harvard with his donations.
And he's telling them, look, MIT, you don't want a letter from me.
I wield a lot of power right now.
And so what I suggest is that you fire this university president who was at the hearing, the MIT one, along with the Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania one.
That's our little deal that we'll make.
I'll leave you alone if you agree to fire that president for not vowing to censor Israel critics.
This is The kind of thing that was even a bridge too far for the Wall Street Journal, despite being a fanatically pro-Israel newspaper.
They published this article earlier this week, Bill Ackman's Ruthless Quest to Oust College Presidents.
Former shareholder activist takes to open letters, tweets, and campaign against heads of Harvard, Penn, and MIT.
What Bill Ackman is angry about with these university presidents is not what a lot of you are angry about.
That they've been censoring for many years.
Bill Ackman is a large donor to the Democratic Party.
He was a absolutist on COVID shutdowns.
What Bill Ackman wants is more censorship at college campuses.
He hasn't been angry at college campuses for censoring right-wing speech.
He's been angry at universities for not censoring Israel critics.
And I had thought there was starting to be a consensus in the United States that free speech is something that needs to be restored.
That we want to restore free speech at American college campuses, stop firing professors for the political views they express, stop punishing students and closing student groups.
For the political activism to which they commit themselves that campuses of all places should be a hotbed of dissent and debate and free thought and free inquiry and free expression.
But what I think we should be able to agree on even more easily is that if we are going to have a censorship framework at American universities, as we have now, The last thing we want are billionaires being able to seize control, to commandeer control of the outer limits of free expression by using their hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to universities and their endowments to dictate What should and should not be permitted.
And right now there are a lot of billionaires trying to pressure these universities to punish and outlaw and prohibit and censor critics of Israel.
This foreign country to which many of them harbor, for which many of them harbor a great deal of love and affection.
We should not allow anyone as Americans to erode our free speech rights for any reason, let alone in defense of some foreign country.
That is what this billionaire campaign is about at Harvard, Penn, MIT, and beyond.
And even if you dislike these college administrators because they've been censoring too much, don't be lured in by people who hate them for very different reasons because they're not censoring enough, who don't want to dismantle the censorship system but want to expand it to include the groups and the causes that they most love.
In a courtroom in San Francisco this week, Google suffered what might be one of its worst defeats ever, if not its worst defeat ever, when it lost a major antitrust case brought by the creator of Fortnite that claimed that its Google Stores, as used on Android phones, was a violation of antitrust laws.
The jury took three hours, four hours at most of deliberation to find In favor of the plaintiff against Google on all 11 counts of antitrust violations.
This comes as the Justice Department is headed toward trial or verdict with Google over the much bigger case about whether Google's search engine and the way it uses this against competitors is a violation of antitrust law.
There's all sorts of other procedures and court processes and government and regulatory agencies looking into Google on antitrust grounds.
And it could very well be that this is a serious threat to Google to talk about this case and its implications.
We have called our good friend of the show, and I think one of the leading experts on antitrust in Google, Matt Stoller, back to the show to help us understand all of this.
Matt, good evening.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Always good to see you.
Not always, sometimes good to see you.
Tonight's good to see one of those.
So let me ask you just about this case.
First of all, go ahead and tell us what it is that we should know about this case where Google just lost in front of a jury on 11 counts of antitrust violations.
Yeah, I mean, this is a huge deal, right?
This is a multi-trillion dollar corporation, almost like a private government, private, almost kind of central.
You mean Google?
Oregon for Google.
Yeah, sorry.
And global.
Which multi-trillion dollar big tech corporation are we talking about, right?
It, like, controls what, whenever we have a question, like, Google controls the answers that we get.
You can call it a global sensor or whatever.
It's very, very powerful.
It's also one of several really powerful big tech firms.
None of them have ever lost a major antitrust case.
And now, for the first time, a jury in San Francisco, the heart of big tech countries, said Google has violated the law.
They are a lawbreaker.
They are a monopolist.
That is a huge deal.
And as you mentioned, there's like a number of other cases that are saying Google's too powerful in these different ways.
There's also cases against Amazon.
There's some against Facebook.
There will probably be some against Apple and maybe Microsoft.
And so this is, I think, hopefully the beginning of a wave of Yeah, absolutely.
of allegations that these companies have been violating the law and then kind of a restructuring of these companies so that we could actually have some control over our society again.
Does that make sense? - Yeah, absolutely.
So let's talk about this case though, just to understand specifically what was alleged here and what the jury found.
The case that the Justice Department has brought against Google that is now into this trial stage that you and I have talked about before on this show is one that really goes to the heart of Google's business to its search engines, the way it disadvantages its competitors, what's its search engine dominance.
This case wasn't about its search engines, but instead was about the dominance Google exercises through its Google Play Store on Android phones and its ability to charge fees and to use its ad business in conjunction with this Play Store.
What specifically was the kind of antitrust violation the jury found Google to have engaged in? - Yeah, so like we either have in our phones an Apple phone or an Android Google phone, right?
And these are supercomputers that are in all of our pockets, and they are basically digital leashes that track us.
And we do a lot of commerce through them.
And Google and Apple not only surveil us, they also like, you know, they take a VIG, they take a piece of every time we transact and buy an app.
Right.
So this claim was from Epic Games.
They make video games.
They make a number of software that goes into other video games.
And they said, you know what?
We are tired of having to go through the Google Play Store to get an app.
app onto an Android phone.
Because what Google does is they say, look, if you want to get an app onto an Android phone, you have to sell it through our app store.
There's no technical reason for this.
They just like you have to sell through our app store and you have to use our payment system, basically their credit card processor.
But unlike a normal payment credit card processor, which charges like 2% or 1% or 3%, Google charges 30%.
And so they're like, you have to go through the Google Play store.
So that's the only store for apps and we're going to charge 30%.
And Epic, a number of other companies sued, but Epic, you know, the CEO was really mad and he said, I'm not going to settle.
And it went to a jury and the jury said, yup.
Google is monopolizing.
They are forcing companies to use their, it's called a tying claim, but they are forcing companies that want to sell through their app store to use their payment system.
And they're taking that 30%.
And now it's going to go to a remedy phase where a judge is going to say, all right, you break the law.
you have to either maybe allow other companies to have app stores on the Android phone, or you can't force companies to use your payment system, or you have to spin off Android, whatever it is.
The judge could actually break them up if he wanted.
It'll also likely be appealed, but it's a huge deal.
Like, there's appeals, there's the question of the remedy.
But nonetheless, I think, you know, for Google to be in a courtroom and to actually go take an antitrust lawsuit to its conclusion and to lose in front of a jury I would think has to be pretty rattling to them.
On the other hand, there's this kind of cynicism that, you know, this handful of companies, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are so gigantic.
They're wealthier than a lot of countries.
They're more powerful than a lot of countries.
I think there's a lot of skepticism, almost inherent, that at the end of the day, they're just not going to be held accountable in a meaningful way just because they have too much power to allow that to happen.
Do you see this as a real sign that Google is in trouble with all of these other cases that are now pending?
Oh, yeah, they're done.
I mean, you know, it'll take a few it'll take five years.
But look, there's there's four other major antitrust cases and that involve other parts of their business.
There's likely going to be more than that.
There are also significant cases about privacy violations, various ways that Google's been allegedly deceiving users.
And the thing is, is that in each of these cases, it's going to be like a litigator, usually up in front of a judge who decides like, what was cool about this one is jury.
But now, like, you know, as well as I do, the judges are cowards, and they never like to like break precedent, especially with against against a large company like Google.
Well, now a jury's already done it.
And in every case, the lawyers are going to be like, well, we know that Google's a lawbreaker already because that's what they were found, you know, that they broke the law in this other case.
So let's talk about their lawbreaking in this instance.
And now all of a sudden the precedent is such that like these cowardly judges are going to have to find a reason to rule for Google instead of before when they had to find a reason to rule against Google.
And I think it's going to like, Flip all of these cases to be much harder for Google to win them.
And I think ultimately, like over the next five years, you know, they're going to be appeals and stuff like that.
But like over the next five years or so, I suspect that Google's just going to start settling.
They're going to start agreeing to split off pieces because it's like it's they know they're going to lose.
It's not worth it.
There's lots of legal uncertainty.
And like, I know there's a lot of cynicism, but this is actually how we restructure these these companies.
And it's actually sort of astonishing that it's working.
Yeah, you know, we talked about before this kind of...
I had Senator Mike Lee on my show last night.
We were talking about the attempt by the Biden White House, working with members of both parties, to not only extend, but to expand the power of the FBI and the NSA to spy on Americans en masse without warrants.
And we were discussing the fact that people hear that, they kind of know it's a bad thing, but it's a difficult task to get them to understand viscerally why it really matters to them, like why it really affects their lives in a negative way.
And I think that's the same as antitrust issues and we've talked about before the reason why people should care and I told you this story that was really when I started working with Rumble.
That I saw Google's ability to use its search engine dominance to just bury anybody they want that's a competitor to their other businesses like YouTube.
It's impossible and people in the audience should try and go do it.
Think of a show that you remember we did and try and go to Google and find it by entering the title or the general topic with my name in Rumble and see if you can find this video.
I have a hard time finding my own videos if I don't know the exact name as they appear on Rumble.
And even then, the search engine will usually point me to the clip of it we post on YouTube, even though the viewership is like 120th of what it gets on Rumble.
And you can really see how Google, with this dominance that it has in the search engine, can just bury other companies, especially ones that compete with them in other areas.
And so it makes this idea of competition a joke because of just how monopolistic they are.
Is this a sign that these other companies that have also been labeled monopolies by the relevant committee of the U.S.
Congress, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, also are in trouble in similar ways to the way Google is in your view?
Yes, absolutely.
And one of the reasons is because this was not a government suit.
One of the key distinctions between the way that the U.S.
works and the way Europe works is in Europe they have these big government agencies that do stuff for the public, whereas in the U.S.
we have, you bring cases yourself, right?
Like Rumble's bringing a case.
Or class action lawyers can do it, right?
You don't have to rely on the government or bureaucrats or politicians.
You can bring a case yourself.
And that's what's so exciting about this is Epic Games brought the case.
These are very hard to win or traditionally very hard to win.
And they won.
And now what I'm seeing is all of these fancy law firms are actually who always defended these big companies.
They're starting to realize, oh, wait a second.
Maybe we can build a bigness going after these companies.
And you're starting to see.
You just saw today a private company filed a suit against Amazon for targeting them in their retail store.
And so, like, I think you're going to see a ton of you're going to see a ton of companies starting to file suits against big tech.
And I mean, you know how, like, you know, you talk a lot a lot about like Bill Ackman and like one of the things that's going on with in these is that like rich, powerful dudes, like they like to fight over annoying things in universities.
Because it like gives them a thrill.
And it's like here you have the guy behind Epic is a guy named Tim Sweeney.
And like what he did is the right thing that you should do if you're an angry billionaire that wants some sort of justice as he took on Google.
Right.
And that's the kind of thing that you hopefully will see.
We'll see like people who really you know who have some power in our society are actually going to start targeting the real oppressors that we're facing, which are like these big tech firms and other dominant firms, not just big tech, but across the economy.
I don't think he should be that dismissive of what Bill Ackman is doing because I don't know if you know this, I don't know if you heard this part, but he said last week, quote, I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks.
The same could be said for those who called out Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare.
So apparently there are a lot of people in Bill Ackman's immediate vicinity who are telling him, Bill, You're an American billionaire, and you're defending Israel.
Do you know how risky and dangerous that is?
There's this long line of people who are billionaires who have supported Israel, who have been put into gulags or even killed, and yet you're going forth and doing it anyway, just like the people who stood up to Joseph McCarthy, even though Bill Ackman is the one maintaining the blacklist and trying to weed out dissidents from universities.
But anyway, I digress, because I just wanted to put in a word of defense for Bill Ackman, since you were so harsh about him.
It's my fault.
Can I, can I say something about the FBI?
Because I think this is something that's like pretty interesting.
One of the things about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI that was good is that they actually did some stuff on antitrust.
People don't know this because it's not like written about, but the, but the FBI was originally one of the, one of their charges and they used to investigate antitrust.
Since they turned to counterterrorism in 2005 or so, they've stopped doing any, basically any work on antitrust.
So one of the things that might be kind of interesting to ask, and they don't want to, to kind of ask and note is that, you know, the FBI really has like white collar crime.
One of the things that's actually bad about the FBI doing all sorts of this stupid stuff is that they're not actually going after white collar crime, collusion, raising your prices on food or medicine or controlling speech or all these things that raising your prices on food or medicine or controlling speech or all these We have this huge policing agency that's supposed to look at this stuff but isn't.
And I think that'd be kind of like an interesting thing to start sort of prodding people is like, why isn't the FBI doing useful things like actually looking into corporate collusion?
They used to do that.
And instead, they're doing like this kind of weird and annoying stuff that, you know, I think we can all agree is at the very best, the kindest way to put it is that it's useless.
I knew only Matt Stoller could find the good in J. Edgar Hoover based on antitrust activities.
But actually, Well, let me follow up on that a little bit, because... That was probably the wrong way to say it.
Yeah, the weird segue, especially when talking to me.
Hey, let me tell you one of the good things about J. Edgar Hoover.
The thing is, though, Matt...
I'm not exactly known as a fan of the Biden administration, but I do think one of the things he did that deserved a lot of praise, that I praised him for, is appointing to the, as chair of the FTC, Lena Khan, who has a long history of doing something that a lot of people on the American right said they wanted done, which is confrontations with Big Tech over its sprawling massive power.
And I think there was at first, and we've talked about this before, some skepticism about a Democrat standing up to Big Tech because there was an assumption that when Democrats stand up to Big Tech, it's because they demand more censorship power, which is more censorship.
Well, we demand you Facebook and Google censor more hate speech, but that's not what Lena Kahn has been doing.
She's been attempting to say these companies are way too powerful to be consistent with a healthy democracy.
She's been confronting them in a lot of ways.
She continued this suit against Google or supported this suit against Google that was started by the Trump administration.
This is the thing that the Trump administration talked a lot about, confronting big tech in a way that Lena Khan is doing.
And yet you've had these incessant attacks on her.
Here you have just today a new article from New York Magazine which is a liberal magazine and yet here's the headline.
Lena Kahn's rough year when a liberal star took over the FTC she was expected to break up big business.
Instead critics say she's broken the agency.
Is this just The kind of influence that these big tech companies who hate her have and it's manifesting in these kinds of articles or is there something more substantive going on and why she's being so publicly vilified?
No, I mean, it's ridiculous.
Like the guy who wrote that article used to work at Paul Weiss, which is a major big law firm and, you know, that represents, I don't know, Amazon and Facebook and so on and so forth.
And the way he wrote that article, and this is consistent, like this isn't a one-off.
It happens – there's lots and lots of articles on how terrible Lena Kahn is and her counterpart at the antitrust division, Jonathan Cantor.
You can go on to CNBC.
You can see just anywhere where big money is talking.
They just despise these people.
What this guy did is he talked to all of the – he's like, "I did interviews with a bunch of people who have left the agency and they don't like her." It's like, "Well, of course they don't like her." Like she changed things so that the agency would take on big tech and take on, you know, big pharma and various companies like that.
And they're mad because like I said, they left and now they work for big tech and big pharma and so on and so forth.
And what's crazy about this situation is like the author of that article said, look, Lena Kahn, because, you know, some people don't like her, might jeopardize the ability to revolutionize antitrust.
And that article came out.
Literally 5 a.m.
the day after Google lost its first antitrust case.
And that's what New York Magazine actually thought was interesting and what they thought that people should know about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
In addition to that, and this is something people didn't notice because the Google case overshadowed it, but the FTC Yesterday, like the day before this case came out, sued a pharmaceutical company that charges for a rare disease called Pompe disease.
They charge $750,000 a year for treatment.
And they were trying to buy what was a potential rival.
And Lenacon's FTC blocked that, said you can't do that.
And then they walked away from the deal.
So we'll probably bring competition and reduce the price eventually.
And she's very successful.
I mean, nobody thinks that these companies should be able to charge $750,000 a year for these kinds of treatments.
And every biotech venture capitalist and biotech person on Wall Street was just fuming at the mouth.
Like, how dare someone come in and say, you can't Block.
No one should be able to block us from financing companies who are going to charge $750,000 a year or a million dollars a year for a treatment for a rare disease.
How dare someone do that?
And that's like happening across a lot of different industries.
These egregious, cheating and corrupt practices happening in corporate America.
Finally, a few people in certain factions of the Biden administration are doing something about it.
And there's some holdover from the Trump administration.
It's not a partisan thing.
And the fury from The big law people.
Oh, the guy, by the way, who wrote this is a Democrat.
So just like it's an intro party dispute.
And you see similar fury on the Republican side with Republicans who want to do something about concentrated power.
And then, you know, Republican big law people who are, you know, angry about it.
Like a couple of months ago, George P. Bush had an article in The Wall Street Journal being like, I'm really mad at like If you're going to take on big business and big tech and corporate America and stand up for the consumer, which are the people who pay the prices for these unscrupulous practices, you're going to end up as the subject of hit pieces in the kinds of
Well, Matt, I honestly can't think of anything that would cause more ecstasy and glee in your life than a jury trial against Google on antitrust grounds.
I'm picturing days of, like, party binging going on at your home, so I'm very appreciative of your willingness to take a few minutes away from all that celebration to talk to us about its implications and its significance.
I know you're so happy and that happiness shown through in this interview, but you managed to nonetheless remain focused.
So I really appreciate that.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Always good to see you.
Bye.
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