Congress Again Renews FBI’s Warrantless Spying Power Over Americans. Vivek’s Revealing Clash w/ CNN on 1/6. Natasha Bertrand’s CIA Servitude. Dems Pretend to Chide Israel
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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, in Washington, the U.S.
security state pretty much always gets its way.
This, yet again, is exactly what happened over the last 24 hours as first United States Senate And then the House voted on a bipartisan basis to renew and extend the FBI's power to spy on the communications of American citizens without warrants of any kind.
Despite mountains of evidence that the FBI has been abusing that power, and despite endless complaints and attacks on the FBI by congressional Republicans, many of whom voted to extend this power.
Over the past two weeks, we had two lawmakers on our show, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky, both of whom held out real hope that this time Congress would do its duty and at least impose limits, safeguards, and reforms on the FBI as a way of addressing all of the times they got caught abusing these and reforms on the FBI as a way of addressing all And I told each of them that while I wanted to believe them, I was highly skeptical given how many times I've seen exactly this happen over the years,
namely that it seemed like there was an effort to try and limit the spying powers of the U.S. government and yet always at the end they get enough votes to prevent any namely that it seemed like there was an effort to try Now, unfortunately, my skepticism was validated.
We'll show you what happened, how the FBI yet again won, the right to hold on to this truly dangerous and authoritarian power, and most of all, who in Washington is responsible for this travesty.
Then, it is hardly a secret that the primary ideology of the corporate media is blind loyalty to the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the agencies composing what Dwight Eisenhower, on his way out the door, called the military-industrial complex.
Still, in a sewer of corporate media employees who perform this function, none is as corrupt about it, as mindlessly subservient to the CIA's talking points and agenda, as Natasha Bertrand of CNN, who proved her usefulness in this function by becoming the queen of the most deranged components of Russiagate.
No CIA conspiracy theory was beneath her dignity to spread.
And then she became the first person in media to spread the CIA lie before the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop was, quote, Russian disinformation.
Bertrand has a new article on the Biden administration's alleged view of the war in Israel, and it is really worth looking at just to see the kinds of rotted journalistic tactics that seem so normal because of how pervasive they are, yet they're tactics that are not just acceptable in corporate media, but propel these people who use them to ascend the corporate media ladder faster than anyone.
After that, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on a CNN town hall last night with one of the network's personalities, Abby Phillips, who went to CNN from being classified as a reporter with the Washington Post.
Phillips asked Vivek about his statement that January 6th was, quote, an inside job, something he first said on the show when I was interviewing him, and then something he repeated at the last Republican presidential debate.
CNN's Abby Phillips sought to prove that this was a false conspiracy, but rather than letting Vivek answer her questions, she used the tactic that has become the most common among incompetent TV interviews.
Anytime you see someone being heralded as a great interviewer on cable, it's almost always because they do this.
She just simply refused to let him speak, constantly interrupting him, every third word, talking over him.
In large part because she just had no idea what she was talking about, and in part because much of what Vivek was saying was demonstrably true.
But she really believed it was false because CNN never allows its host to tell its audience about it, and so she's never heard it before.
There's really a lot of illustrative meaning from this quite contentious exchange between Vivek and the CNN person, so we want to break it down for you and show you the meaning we think can be extracted.
And then finally, Democrats are playing a deeply cynical, I would say even jaded game, when it comes to the posture of the Biden White House toward Israel's war in Gaza.
From the start of the war, Joe Biden did what he has done his entire political career.
He pledged complete, unlimited, and unconditional financial and military support for Israel.
He even flew to Israel to stand by the side of Benjamin Netanyahu as he promised that.
And he continued to do that, to provide Israel with all the money and all the weapons they asked for, even as the world began turning against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and it required the U.S.
to isolate itself in order to continue to support Israel.
He kept doing that as well.
What changed, however, was that polls are now showing increasingly that the Democratic Party base is abandoning Biden.
They're willing to not vote for him over his support for Israel's war.
And ever since, Democrats have been making these theatrical gestures in public to pretend that they are chiding Israel and feigning concern about how they need to observe limits that they're not actually observing.
And yet, in reality, They're telling the Israelis the opposite.
The things they're making repeatedly clear in public as well that the U.S.
financing and arming of Israel's war is not conditioned on any behavioral changes, but instead is unconditional and eternal.
No matter your views on the war itself, this sort of deceitful game playing should repulse you.
On one of the most serious matters, this war in Gaza, the Biden administration is telling the Israelis one thing, doing that same thing, and yet trying to pretend in public that they're against the very actions that they continue to take simply to deceive their voters into believing that they have now seen the light of day.
And we're gonna break that down and show you the evidence that demonstrates that they are in fact doing this.
A few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Our big story for tonight, the one that we think deserves the most attention, is the votes in the House and the Senate over the last 24 hours actually that ended up extending and renewing One of the most dangerous and authoritarian powers that the FBI has, that the U.S.
security state has, the ability to spy on American citizens without the warrants required by law.
And although there was supposedly a lot of momentum this time towards stopping its renewal and imposing reforms and limits on what the FBI can do, Congress instead, as they always do, found a bipartisan coalition To enable its renewal.
A lot of members of the House who are further to the right are blaming House Speaker Mike Johnson for enabling this to happen.
And it's a criticism that we think has a lot of validity.
Before I delve into that, I just want to share with you an observation, which I continue to find amazing.
I was just thinking about this right before we went on the show and about a different matter, which is that it is really amazing.
There's this bizarre aspect to American political life, to being an American journalist, which is that You are free to criticize your own government, the American government, and its wars, as continuously and harshly as you want, without provoking a lot of rage.
And of course, we do that on our show all the time.
We've built a large audience by harshly criticizing Biden's war effort in Ukraine.
We've been very critical of other foreign policy aspects in terms of interfering in other countries and regime change operations in Libya and Syria, the war on terror.
And you build up an audience and they say, oh, we think you're doing such a great job.
The one thing that you cannot do as an American journalist without provoking intense and constant rage is criticize a foreign country and its war, one foreign country in particular, Israel.
It is really amazing how many people will applaud and cheer as you condemn your own government and harshly criticize American war.
wars as American journalists and other Americans will applaud you.
But then the minute you criticize a foreign government, one in particular, Israel, you're free to criticize Ukraine or NATO or any other foreign government pretty much, but there's one foreign government.
The minute you criticize that foreign government and that foreign government's wars, the spigot of rage and indignation is more intense than almost anything else you can do.
I think it's a very strange dynamic.
I don't think there's another country in the world, at least not that I know of and I've worked and done journalism in a lot of countries, where you're more free to criticize your own government and its wars than you are to criticize the government on the other side of the world.
Israel occupies such a central and sacrosanct place in the hearts and minds of so many American citizens for so many different reasons.
That I've had trouble, I think, articulating this dynamic before, and I realized today how strange it is.
That is not the normal state of affairs.
We tend to be nationalistic and tribalistic, more loyal to our own government and country than some foreign country on the other side of the world.
Yet when it comes to many sectors on the American ideological spectrum, everything is twisted and reversed, where you're free to criticize the United States government, call it tyrannical, call it corrupt.
call its wars deceitful and designed to help elites but one thing you cannot do that will really provoke people's irrevocable and intense rage is criticize israel and it's worse it's really quite a bizarre dynamic all right
let's go back to the top story which we want to cover in part because immediate doesn't really cover this story because it requires the use of technical terms like section 702 and fisa that i know kind of by design make people sort of turn away you know It seems very technocratic.
It seems very distant.
It seems very technical, the kinds of issues that you're discussing.
But also, corporate media in general will not cover issues unless the two parties are at each other's throats over them.
When the two parties join and unite, as they have here and as they do on so many issues like it, corporate media just thinks it's not worth covering it.
In part because the model of corporate media is to polarize along party lines.
So you have media outlets that are more Republican and media outlets that are more Democrat, and that's how the audience wants to understand the world.
And if you can't feed them a narrative That valorizes one party and villainizes the other, as can't be done on this issue and so many others because the parties are joined at the hip and have the same view.
This is not a value or worth.
They assume their audience will turn away.
But also this requires pointing out the abuses of the U.S.
security state, and that is one thing the corporate media won't do.
So this is not a technical issue.
This is about your core fundamental rights of privacy.
The question of whether the U.S.
government will be able to spy, not on other countries and foreign populations, but on our own citizens without the warrants that are so foundational to the entire American founding.
One of the main reasons The colonists and the founders of the United States rebelled against the British King was because of this unlimited spying.
They would just send the King's police and guards into people's homes at will, no warrants, no demonstration of guilt, look through their papers, look through their private affairs, and the Fourth Amendment was crucially designed to prevent it.
And we now have somehow a spying apparatus on the part of the very agencies that have proven over and over that they will abuse their power for political ends beginning with the FBI that have somehow been given the power primarily after 9/11 in the name of fear of terrorism that allows them to spy on the phone calls and email communications and other digital conversations of American citizens without first going to a court and obtaining warrants.
And the risk of abuse is not theoretical.
Every four years there's an Inspector General's report that documents the extensive abuse on the part of the FBI.
And we showed you, when we interviewed Senator Lee, the exchange that he had with the FBI Director Christopher Wray over exactly this issue.
Every time the FBI goes to Congress and says, we're all going to die unless you keep giving us this power, members of Congress say, but what about all the times you've abused it?
The FBI always says, oh, don't worry.
We've reformed ourselves.
We've implemented new rules that will never happen again.
I've been hearing the same thing since the very beginning of the war on terror when these programs were first installed.
And in 2005 when they were first exposed.
And it's just, it's the same exact Groundhog Day over and over and over.
And that's why when Senator Lee and Congressman Massey, who deserve a lot of credit, they took the lead in trying to stop this, were telling me that they were optimistic about the prospect for finally stopping this because there was bipartisan movement to impose reforms.
I wanted to believe them.
But as I said to you and to them, I just I was so skeptical.
And now here we have many media outlets, let's just pick The Hill today.
Congress approves short-term extension of warrantless surveillance powers.
Quote, included in the defense policy bill headed to the president's desk after approval by the House on Thursday is a measure that extends section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, until mid-April.
Several conservative lawmakers voiced frustration over its inclusion in a must-pass bill,
Quote, the fact of the matter is what's being stated is it is impossible to oppose the National Defense Authorization Act because we put a pay raise in it or because we put something in there that is seemingly so important that we have to ignore the critical destruction of our civil liberties by adding FISA extension right on top of it without doing the form necessary to protect the American people, said Congressman Chip Roy, a Republican of Texas, who has argued a FISA reauthorization should be a standalone bill.
Now let me just explain the procedure because sometimes congressional procedure can be complicated but it's important to understand so that when we look at the roll call votes you can see who in Congress is responsible and some of the names might surprise you.
What happened was there's a National Defense Authorization Act that gets passed every year.
It's basically the military budget for the next year and you have to pass it otherwise the military won't be funded.
And so a lot of members of Congress try to jam as many controversial things in there that they can, so that it doesn't get a standalone vote.
It just becomes part of this military budget that everybody has to vote for, no matter what's in it.
And what they tried to do, and succeeded in doing, was taking this extension of the FBI's warrantless eavesdropping powers, knowing it was controversial, and they just jammed it into This overall defense budget, they knew people were going to have to vote for.
And in the Senate, there was an effort by Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, the Republican senator from Kentucky, to remove this provision.
And the new speaker, Mike Johnson, had promised there'd be a standalone vote, that it wouldn't just be thrown into some overall legislation.
And what happened was, in the Senate, the motion by Rand Paul to remove it Failed by a vote of 65 against, 35 in favor.
Rand Paul only needed 41 votes to remove the warrantless eavesdropping renewal, and it failed by six votes.
He had a bipartisan coalition with him voting to remove it, but the majority of the Senate, the majority of Democrats, the majority of Republicans in the Senate voted to keep it in.
And then Mike Johnson, for whatever reason, didn't make good on his promise to remove it and have a standalone vote.
He kept it in the overall budget.
And then a lot of people, as Chip Roy was just complaining, felt they had to vote for it even though it had this unconstitutional provision that is extremely dangerous.
There were some people who voted no anyway on the overall budget.
I'm not sure if Chip Roy was one of them.
We'll show you the roll call vote.
But that's the way that it happened.
They didn't really have a vote on the renewal itself, except in the Senate, and we do have that roll call vote, which we're gonna show you, of who is responsible for keeping it in the overall budget.
Now, to understand why this is so dangerous...
We explained it and went through the history of it with the show that we did with Senator Lee, the other show we did with Congressman Massey.
So if you want to really hear the detailed explanation of how this came to be, how it is that the FBI has the power to spy on American citizens without warrants, please go watch those segments, which we took out from the overall show and published as standalone segments.
But here's Jamil Jaffer, who for many years was with the ACLU.
He was one of my favorite ACLU lawyers.
He had nothing to do with the ACLU's partisanship or focus on left liberal cultural issues.
He didn't work on trans issues.
He wasn't there to turn the ACLU into an arm of the Democratic Party.
He was a civil libertarian.
He is a civil libertarian.
And he probably knows more about the history of warrantless eavesdropping and FISA than almost anyone in the country.
He now works at the Knight Center at Columbia for the First Amendment.
He's also a major free speech advocate.
And he had this thread on Twitter explaining why this is so dangerous to you, to all Americans.
And Edward Snowden recommended it.
And I just want to share the first several tweets, even though it was a pretty long thread, just to give you a sense.
Jamil is a very rhetorically constrained person.
He doesn't use melodramatic language.
He doesn't use hyperbole in any way.
He's a very careful lawyer.
And I found it just so notable that he felt compelled to explain how dangerous this bill is, how dangerous these powers are.
Here's what he wrote, quote, I don't think Americans understand the extent to which the, quote, foreign intelligence exception has hollowed out the Fourth Amendment.
Now, what he means by that is that under the Fourth Amendment, as part of a criminal investigation, if the government wants to spy on your communications, it has to go get a warrant first.
And what they say is, oh, but when we're not doing a criminal investigation, when we're just gathering foreign intelligence, Our powers increase.
That's what 9-11 ushered in.
All the fears of 9-11 gave the government greater powers.
The Patriot Act and things like that.
So that when they're claiming that they're not conducting a law enforcement investigation, but a intelligence gathering operation, they have greater powers to censor.
And they used to call that the intelligence exception to the warrant requirement.
Oh, just in the cases where we're collecting foreign intelligence, that's the exception to the Fourth Amendment.
And here he's now explaining why this exception has turned into the rule and completely destroyed the Fourth Amendment.
He goes on, quote, most reporting about the current legislative debate is technical and incremental and misses the forest for the trees.
Here's what's crucial.
What was once an extremely narrow exception to ordinary constitutional principles has become, over time, a justification for warrantless surveillance on a staggering scale, not just of foreigners' communications, but of Americans' communications too.
With respect to Americans' international communications, the Fourth Amendment has become essentially a dead letter.
Intelligence officials have obscured this quite intentionally over the course of multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican.
But since the Snowden disclosures, the line has been that Americans don't need to worry about this surveillance because the NSA activities are targeted at foreigners abroad, and any collection of Americans' communication is incidental or inadvertent.
But every part of this sentence is misleading because Intel officials have accorded unusual definitions to all of the important words in it.
In other words, what they're doing is they're saying that, oh, don't worry, when we are spying without warrants, we're only targeting foreign nationals.
Now, we will read your emails and listen to your phone calls without warrants, but only if you happen to be talking to the foreign targets that we're spying on.
And then we just incidentally or accidentally end up spying on your conversations too with no warrants.
But as Jamil is explaining, they played with this, these words so much that they can easily spy on your conversations if they want by targeting not foreign nationals but you.
And that's why it's not rare that they do it.
It's very common.
It's by the tens of thousands that they're reading emails and listening to Americans' conversations without the warrants required by law.
And their abuses of it for totally improper ends, for political ends, is extremely well documented.
And that's what makes it so dangerous.
Now, here is the House vote, as I explained.
This is the actual vote on whether to, on the National Defense Authorization Act itself, and on a motion to agree to the conference report.
And the breakdown there is, as you can see, It's very bipartisan.
You have 147 Republicans voting to pass it and 163 Democrats.
So the overwhelming majority of both parties voted yes.
You had 310 yes votes.
You had 73 Republicans voting no.
45 Democrats voting no.
And so you had 118 voted no.
And so it passed by this gigantic Majority.
Now, as I said, and as Chip Roy was quoted as saying, some of these people who voted yes were complaining that they would have voted no on extending the warrantless eavesdropping powers, but Mike Johnson allowed it to be put into the overall defense budget that they were forced to vote yes on, even though he promised he wouldn't.
He would have a standalone vote.
And even with that, you have 118 people Who were still willing to vote no on the Defense Authorization Act because of how much they objected to these warrantless eavesdropping.
But the real action was in the Senate.
Because as I said, it was in the overall defense budget, this bill to extend and renew the FBI's warrantless eavesdropping powers.
And so Rand Paul presented a motion that would have, in effect, stripped out the warrantless eavesdropping extension of the FBI from the National Defense Authorization Act and required a standalone vote on it.
So that nobody could hide and say, oh, I wasn't voting for warrantless eavesdropping.
I was just voting for the national defense budget.
Because even though it had some bad things, it has a lot of really great things like raises and salaries for soldiers and service members.
That's what they do.
They're cowards.
They don't want to vote on the thing they actually want passed.
Rand Paul said, "Let's have a vote just on this." And the people who voted yes were the people who were essentially voting to keep the warrantless eavesdropping bill in the overall defense budget and not have a standalone vote.
The people who voted no were voting with Rand Paul to strip it out.
And all he needed was 40 votes, or 41 votes, because that would have been a filibuster.
But instead, the only no votes he got was 35, so he fell five short.
of what he needed to strip it out, and therefore it stayed into the overall defense budget and went to the House where they then voted on it.
So, here's the roll call vote on that, and I just want to show you a few interesting votes.
So, by and large, the right-wing populists, the people who have been warning that the U.S.
security state, the deep state is out of control, largely voted with Rand Paul to try and strip it out of the budget so it didn't get renewed.
So you have people like Josh Hawley who voted no.
And remember, the no vote is something that's positive, something that you want people doing.
You had some people in the Democratic Party, more on the left wing, such as Such as Cory Booker voting with Rand Paul and Sherrod Brown voting with Rand Paul.
You even had Bernie Sanders doing the right thing for once and voting with Rand Paul, so did Elizabeth Warren.
But the reason it passed is because the Establishment Democrats and the Establishment Republicans joined together and made sure that Rand Paul's motion failed and that this got extended.
So you have people like You have Chuck Schumer who voted against Rand Paul's amendment.
You had Tim Scott doing the same thing.
These yes votes are people who are voting for the FBI.
You have Mitt Romney voting for the extension of it.
And then you have just the standard people who typically defend the U.S.
security state.
Amy Klobuchar, same thing.
She voted to extend it.
Mark Kelly of Arizona, Tim Kaine of Virginia, all these sort of standard issue Republicans, and then if you go down to this list where you have some more people, you have, again, the right-wing populists who pretty much stay true to their word to try and strip the FBI of their powers, like J.D.
Vance, who voted no, and he was joined by, for example, Elizabeth Warren, who also voted no.
So you see here's Rand Paul, of course he was the one leading the way and he voted no.
But then you have the, again, the Democrats who are establishment Democrats with the establishment Republicans.
So you have people like Ted Cruz who loves to talk a big game about the deep state and yet here he is as usual defending them.
You have people like Tom Cotton.
Voting in favor of the FBI.
John Fetterman, who has recently become an unironic hero of the pro-Israel sectors of the American right because what a fanatical Israel supporter he's become.
Here he is voting for the FBI.
Lindsey Graham, of course.
So you see this bipartisan coalition that always emerges where the establishment wings of both parties join hands and then you have the anti-establishment Members of Congress, and I don't want to call people like Elizabeth Warren anti-establishment, but at least in this instance she was willing to defend privacy, along with the kind of populists in the Republican Party, but they're not enough.
The US security state always gets its way.
And here you see the breakdown, and as a result this bill ended up passing.
As I said, there were members of the House Right Wing who felt very betrayed by what the new House Speaker Mike Johnson did here.
Here you see the Axios article where the headline is, the House Freedom Caucus compares Mike Johnson to John Boehner.
And for those of you who don't remember, John Boehner was the villain and supreme enemy, like Paul Ryan became, to people like the House Freedom Caucus and members of the anti-establishment right.
So to compare him to John Boehner already is a real declaration of war against Speaker Johnson.
Here's what the article reported: "House Freedom Caucus members are slamming Speaker Mike Johnson's handling of the National Defense Authorization Act, likening him to former Speaker John Boehner in a list of internal talking points obtained by Axios.
The memo calls this year's NDAA, which is the defense budget, "an utter disaster for House Republicans and a massive unforced error from leadership.
Arguing it was a deal struck behind closed doors that side skirts regular order and takes aim at the bill's extension of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has sparked a strong divide within the conference.
So you can kind of see who's to blame here.
And this is why I was so skeptical of the optimism that a lot of well-intentioned people had.
Because I've seen this so many times.
The U.S.
security state is incredibly sprawling.
The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, they have enormous amounts of power and money in Washington.
Elected officials come and go.
Presidents come and go.
Those people continue to run Washington.
And they have all kinds of ways to grease people's wheels, to give them benefits, to threaten to punish them, to withhold contracts that might benefit their district or their state, or to give a contract that can benefit someone's re-election campaign, as long as they deliver the votes on the things most important to the U.S.
security state.
And they always end up with whatever sufficient majority they need.
I told you the story before that in the wake of the Snowden reporting, In 2013, there was so much anger over NSA spying that a true bipartisan coalition very organically began to form to try and take away powers from the NSA, spying powers from the NSA.
It would have been the first time since 9-11 that powers were taken away from the NSA instead of new powers given to them.
And at first, no one took this bill seriously.
It was co-sponsored by Justin Amash, who was a Tea Party Republican, a junior member of the delegation.
And he joined with John Conyers, the decades-long liberal congressman who was often kind of on the fringes as well.
So they both didn't have a lot of sway.
No one took seriously the idea that they could put together a coalition to reform the NSA.
And yet the anger over the Snowden reporting, and we kept reporting and reporting, and that anger kept increasing.
Was fueling what looked to be like a bipartisan majority.
I really believed that that bill was going to pass.
The Conyers-Amash bill that would have stripped the NSA of a lot of its powers in the wake of the reporting we did showing all these abuses.
And when the Obama administration and the national security apparatus inside the White House began believing that too, that out of nowhere this majority was forming in Congress that was bipartisan, They called Nancy Pelosi, and they made her all kinds of promises, and she whipped the Democrats to vote no, and she got just enough votes to sink this bill by something like eight votes.
It was some very close vote.
They got just enough votes.
No one knew what the result was going to be up until the last minute.
And then Foreign Policy Magazine, the most mainstream foreign policy journal in the United States, ran a big article with the headline, How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA.
Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA and these abusive powers that they had.
And that wasn't the last time I had my hopes up about reform.
I thought in 2018 there was no way Democrats could possibly give the FBI unlimited spying powers because at the time people like Pelosi and Adam Schiff were accusing Trump of being a dictator, of being a Nazi, of being a white nationalist authoritarian.
I didn't think they could possibly stand up and at the same time give that same administration The power to spy on Americans without warrants, and yet the Democrats did.
Republicans overwhelmingly favored that renewal, and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and that minority crew of Democrats say that I've got just enough votes to give the Republicans the majority they needed to get that bill passed.
So, I've been through this cycle many times.
And like I said, the U.S.
security state always wins in Washington.
And it just did again.
And the victim, as usual, is you.
You have lost your privacy rights yet again.
The opportunity to provide you some safeguards limit has been destroyed and dashed.
And you can look at the roll call vote.
You can look at how it happened.
And you see exactly in Congress who is responsible for this travesty.
One of the themes of my journalism, almost for 20 years now since I began writing about politics and doing journalism, has been that the American corporate media is far too subservient and deferential to the U.S.
security state.
One of the main reasons I started writing about politics in 2005 was because I had watched the media, not just the Fox News conservative media, but the supposedly liberal media, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, All unite behind the Bush administration in selling the Iraq War to the American people.
And then I also watched them justify every erosion of civil liberty that was offered in the name of fighting terrorism.
And so by the time I was writing about politics, it was mostly out of indignation and frustration about how mindless was the American corporate media in serving the often fake and false talking points of the U.S.
security state.
That was a major reason why I wanted to start writing.
Was because I felt like there was all this dissent that was true that the American corporate media would not give platform to.
And so I've seen many journalists, up close and personal, whose mission in life is to do nothing but repeat what the FBI and the CIA tells them to.
And I've seen those people be the ones to thrive in corporate media.
I've talked about that many times.
The more you lie for the U.S.
security state, the more your career in corporate media will thrive.
Nonetheless, There is no journalist, journalist I mean, a corporate media employee with the HR title journalist, who is willing to serve the security state and mindlessly spread their lies quite like Natasha Bertrand, the CNN intelligence correspondent.
Only five years ago or six years ago, Natasha Bertrand was at some obscure site called Business Insider.
And in 2016, she began becoming the queen of Russian insanity.
She would print every insane story that was fed to her by the low levels of the CIA and the FBI about Trump and the Alpha Bank, the Steele dossier.
I mean, she was on board with all of it.
And as a result, she got rewarded.
She was hired.
She moved up that ladder very quickly.
She first got hired away from Business Insider by MSNBC.
Then she was hired by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.
Then she went to Politico.
And then finally she landed at CNN, which is where she belongs.
You see just her going up this ladder the more she lies.
And her specialty is, she's just open for business.
She tells Langley and the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters at the FBI, just, I'm here, just tell me what to say.
And then she writes it down.
And I'm not exaggerating.
That is what her entire existence is for.
Not only was she ground zero for all the Russiagate, the worst and most obviously deranged expressions of Russiagate that she got from the FBI and the CIA and proved her loyalty to them, she was the person who did this.
She was the first one while at Politico to publish the extremely damaging lie And I say it was extremely damaging because the entire purpose of this was to manipulate the American electorate to vote against Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
The New York Post had been reporting incriminating stories from an obviously authentic laptop that came from the president's son.
That detailed all these ways that Joe Biden was helping Hunter and was working with Hunter in Ukraine and China to trade on Joe Biden's influence and name to generate profit for his son and for his family.
And they were desperate to stop it.
They were petrified this was going to help Donald Trump win because it made Joe Biden look like what he is, which is a lifelong sleazy politician who is incredibly corrupt.
And one of the vulnerabilities he had was that Hunter Biden was being paid by a Ukrainian energy company while Joe Biden, his father as vice president, was running it.
And that was what a lot of these stories were showing, the details of the sleaze.
And so the CIA decided to invent an absolute lie that this laptop was not authentic.
Instead, it was Russian disinformation.
And they got together and they signed a letter saying this and their first question was, who should we dump this on?
Who's stupid enough to put their name on this and just go out there without asking any questions and just mindlessly repeat it?
And the answer was obvious, Natasha Bertrand.
That's what she's for.
She exists to do that.
She just lays there and they give her, they pour these scripts on her and she picks them up and she reads them and calls it a day.
So here from Politico, that was the very first story.
Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinformation.
Dozens of former intel officials say, quote, more than former 50 intelligence officials signed a letter casting doubt on the provenance of a New York Post story on the former vice president's son.
Now, in the most minimally healthy media culture, that would have ended her career.
Twitter and Facebook suppress the story based on this lie.
The media reported it over and over in the run up to the 2020 election.
And then once Biden was safely elected, every media outlet started admitting that the laptop was actually authentic, including Politico.
They have a young reporter, Ben Shreckenberger, who was on our show.
He wrote a book called The Bidens, and he did all this shoe-leather reporting that proved that the laptop was not Russian disinformation, as Politico, through Natasha Bertrand and the CIA claimed, but was in fact fully authentic.
And then the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and CBS News and all of them then did the same.
She's responsible for a gigantic, massive fraud to say nothing of Russiagate.
Now she has a story out today that ties to another segment we're going to do on the games the Biden administration is playing where they're pretending to try and convince their voters angry at them for supporting Israel that they're actually opposed.
So they keep leaking these stories that oh, they told the Israelis enough is enough.
You need to be more careful.
Stop killing so many innocent people.
But it's all a ruse because Biden is a lifelong fanatical Israel supporter and still is and has told the Israelis and the public that he will finance their war with no conditions.
So the Israelis know it's all show.
They're just doing this because they Need to assuage their voters?
Oh, look, we don't want to look like we're standing always next to Israel, that every time you see a video of a dead baby in Gaza, don't blame us.
We're actually pressuring the Israelis, even though they're giving the Israelis the bombs and the money that the Israelis used to do that.
It's a sick game the Biden administration is playing and Democrats are playing.
And Biden had the CIA or the Biden White House wanted to have the CIA leak.
In a way that makes it look like the United States government is now turning against Israel, even though they're really not.
So who do they go to?
Obviously, you go to Natasha Bertrand.
She writes down whatever you tell her to write down.
I just want to show you how she described her story so you see the tactics she uses, the techniques she uses.
And again, this is what most of them use in corporate media.
It's one of the reasons why corporate media is so corrupted, but she does it in such a brazen and unmitigated and unmasked way that on some level she's like a museum exhibit.
For understanding why the media is so rotted and specifically how they do it.
So here she is on X promoting her own news story.
Exclusive!
She always gets exclusives because they know that if they give her this first, she'll just say anything.
This is what she wrote, quote, nearly half of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used in Gaza since October 7th have been unguided, otherwise known as dumb bombs.
Now, do I believe that that's true?
It very well may be.
The level of destruction in Gaza is anything but careful and targeted.
The problem is that This is all that her reporting ever exists of, according to a new U.S.
Intel assessment.
So do you see how her reporting works?
And I put reporting in quotes.
She makes a statement that sounds factual.
She's saying nearly half of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions Israel is using Gaza have been unguided.
And then there's a comma.
And then always this phrase, according to a new U.S.
intel assessment.
She's like a seventh grader summarizing a book report by having read the CliffsNotes, only she summarizes CIA claims.
Everything is, that she ever opens her mouth and says and gets put on CNN to say, is always this formulation.
According to U.S.
intel sources.
According to sources in the intelligence community.
Here is the next paragraph.
The U.S.
assessment described to CNN by three sources who have seen it says that about 40 to 45% of the air-to-ground munitions Israel has used have been unguided.
Quote, it's a massive civilian harm problem, said Brian Kastner.
But, again, here you see the same formulation.
The U.S.
assessment described to CNN by three sources who have seen it.
So, she didn't even see this report.
CIA analysts or operatives or whomever in the Pentagon called up Natasha Bertrand, they have her on speed dial, I promise, and they said, hey Natasha, you want an exclusive?
We have a report and we're going to tell you what it says." And she's like, yeah, yeah.
And she sticks her tongue out, she wags it, she pants.
She writes down what they tell her to say and it becomes CNN's story.
There's no other work that goes into it.
There's no questioning of this.
There's no critical scrutiny applied to it.
There's no investigation to determine if it's true.
Now again, leave aside the substance here.
This is the Biden administration trying to convince people, oh look, we're turning against the war, that's why we're leaking this about the Israelis.
It's a ruse.
But for the moment, I just want to show you how everything that she does is nothing other than acting as a spokesperson for the CIA.
When you stop and think about, someone can do that and call themselves a journalist for a major media corporation.
And believe me, every time I criticize her, there's people in the media who come and say, leave Natasha alone.
She's a hard-working journalist.
They don't see a problem with this because this is what they do.
They are spokespeople for the U.S.
government and specifically for the intelligence community and the military-industrial complex.
Here, she is in a separate tweet.
She begins her tweet.
Officials say, So everything that follows is what she's been told to say.
Officials say the U.S.
already expects allies to use U.S.
provided equipment in accordance with international law, but the U.S.
does not independently assess each Israeli strike the U.S.
deems concerning or disproportionate.
The U.S.
leans on Israel to justify strikes after the fact.
So all that was was what officials say.
I have to say, even though I've been pointing this out for 18 years now, that this is what the media does, this one individual is so tawdry about it.
She's so flagrant about it.
She doesn't do anything else ever.
She is the all but official spokesperson of the CIA and she has laundered lie after lie after lie and got promoted up the media ladder as she does it.
It's just, she's not alone.
I think maybe the only person who competes with her in terms of doing this so loyally is Jennifer Griffin at Fox who Tends not to repeat so much the CIA or the FBI, but the Pentagon.
When Jennifer Griffin's mouth is moving, it means the Pentagon is speaking.
I've watched Jennifer Griffin hold in her hand Pentagon talking points that were given to her and read that into the camera as if it's news.
There's not a brain cell that's working in her head other than the ones necessary to be able to read what the Pentagon has told her to say.
But in terms of damage done, And in terms of lies disseminated, there's just nobody that competes with Natasha Bertrand.
And yet she is paid by CNN.
A lot of money was paid by The Atlantic before that, and Politico before that, and the MSNBC before that.
So you see how pervasive this tactic and coveted this tactic is in media outlets.
She's paid by them to do exactly that.
This is not a flaw.
This is what she is paid to do because this is the real function of our largest media outlets.
Speaking of corrupted media outlets, Vivek Ramaswamy went on CNN last night where he had a town hall that was hosted by one of the new CNN personalities, Abby Phillips, who came to CNN from the Washington Post.
And one of the things that she asked him about was Vivek's claim that, as I said, he made for the first time on my show.
He came on very shortly after the All the video footage of January 6th was released, not just the parts that Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff selected for us to see, but all of it.
And you saw things like the police leading a lot of the protesters into the Capitol, not violently, but peacefully.
And Vivek saw that, and he did a lot of research into the fact that there were FBI informants on the ground at the Capitol.
The FBI was getting real-time information on January 6th from its informants, who were part of the insurrectionists, but they also had infiltrated every one of the three groups that ended up being accused of having organized this so-called insurrection.
The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers.
The FBI had its pentacles in every single one of these groups.
So when Vivek is saying it's an inside job, what he means is the FBI was all around it and all over it.
He doesn't mean they planned it or coordinated it.
But he also talks about the fact that that Michigan case of where they arrested a bunch of people on the right, right-wing anti-government activists, and claimed they wanted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer right before the election.
was filled with FBI informants as well.
And as a result, several of those people ended up being acquitted because they were directed and lured by the FBI's informants who were being controlled by the FBI.
This is what the FBI has been doing for decades.
But if you say this, because the corporate media is so loyal to and subservient to and defensive of the U.S.
security state and the FBI, they act like you're crazy, like the FBI doesn't create crimes.
I spent years as part of the War on Terror reporting on cases where the FBI didn't have enough terrorism cases in the United States to justify all the money it was spending and all the powers it said it needed, including eavesdropping, without warrants.
So they would have these scummy informants who they caught in other crimes like embezzlement or common financial fraud.
Pretend to be a new attendee of a mosque somewhere and they would target these young Muslims, often ones with severe financial problems or emotional difficulties.
And the FBI informant would get plots that came from the FBI.
Hey, let's go blow up this bridge.
And if they said no, they'd come back the next day and say, hey, I have this money.
I have this plan.
Look, here's the blueprint of the bridge.
And they kept luring them and coercing them and pressuring them.
So many of the domestic terrorism cases that the FBI claimed it disrupted and patted itself on the back for having done so actually were devised by the FBI, directed by the FBI.
Through their use of informants, they've infiltrated political groups in the United States for decades to do this.
And yet, these idiots in the corporate media who think it's unpatriotic to criticize the FBI, who used to say, oh, you can't speak ill of Robert Mueller or question Robert Mueller.
He led the FBI to do so as to impugn the good men and women keeping our country safe.
They don't know this history.
They're empty-headed.
When Vivek was at this town hall and Abby Phillips wanted to ask him about this theory, I think that's totally fine.
She should have asked him.
I asked him about it as well.
But as you're going to see, she was so agitated, so uncomfortable, had no clue what to do.
She just wouldn't let him speak.
She just kept talking over him.
and calling him a liar and insisting that he had no evidence and he just let's watch this we're going to play it in just a second There we go.
Let me ask you about something that you said at the debate last week.
You used the phrase inside job to describe what happened on January 6th.
The next day, Capitol rioter Alan Hostler highlighted your comments at his sentencing.
He is going to prison for 11 years.
So first of all, this question is so stupid.
It's so stupid.
Think about this question.
So there's this bad guy.
spray, sun batons, tactical gear to the US Capitol.
Are you concerned that a convicted felon like that is now promoting your comments in court?
So first of all, this question is so stupid.
It's so stupid.
Think about this question.
So there's this bad guy.
He's in a criminal trial, she's saying.
And he used Vivek's comments about January 6 in an effort to defend himself.
And then she's like, aren't you concerned about that?
Why would you be concerned about that?
Who cares?
That has nothing to do with anything.
The only thing that matters is, is what Vivek is saying truthful?
Does it have evidentiary support?
If it's truthful, And a January 6th defendant then cites it.
That's how the justice system is supposed to work.
Look at this primitive, moronic, low-grade tactic she's using.
Oh, this bad person over here cited what you said.
Doesn't that prove that what you're doing is terrible?
It's such a lowbrow, unjournalistic way of thinking.
The only thing that matters is, is that comment true or not?
But she's trying, of course, to speak to a liberal audience and say, you know those January 6th interactionists, those are bad people.
They're using what he's saying.
In their attempt to reduce their massive sentences, their prison sentences, then somehow that means the statement is obviously bad or false.
It's such an intellectually dishonest tactic, but she just can't formulate a question.
CNN can't formulate a question based on the merits.
They have no idea what he's talking about.
They don't understand the arguments he's making.
Because the world of CNN is so closed, That it's not like they know this evidence and are pretending it's not there.
They really don't know it.
People like this don't hear it.
The only people they speak to are other liberals or other liberal journalists who are just as empty-headed, who are just as trite and read from the same script.
It is a closed information system.
Watch how this proceeds.
Here's my concern, Abby.
And I want to tell you guys where I'm at.
If you had told me, it's close to three years ago, that January 6, 2021 happened.
If you had told me three years ago, back when I was a biotech CEO, not steeped in this world, I was just consuming passive media, but was focused on my world of developing medicines.
If you had told me that January 6 was in any way an inside job, the subject of government entrapment, I would have told you that was crazy talk.
Fringe conspiracy theory nonsense.
I can tell you now, having gone somewhat deep in this, it's not.
I mean, the reality is this.
We do have a government, first of all, we have to acknowledge that has lied to us systematically over the last several years about the origin of COVID-19.
About the Hunter Biden laptop that we were told was false by 51 CIA experts and otherwise before we now know that it was true.
You could go straight down the list.
The Trump-Russia disinformation collusion hoax.
All of it.
Now we come to January 6th.
The reality is we know that there were federal law enforcement agents in that field.
We don't know how many.
I think it's a shame, if I may finish just to answer your question.
I'm going to go ahead and interrupt you here because you're saying that there were federal agents in the crowd on January 6th.
So why before Congress, when pressed on what the number was, they didn't say there were none, they just couldn't say how many there were.
So you're saying that there's no, that you have not seen any evidence that there were, and so you assume that there were.
So we've seen multiple informants suggesting that there were.
We know people were, we know people were FBI informants who were asked to... Is there any evidence...
finish this and you can come back and question me.
Well, let me clarify.
I know this is very uncomfortable for you.
I'm going to clarify my question because you...
I'm going to clarify my question because I want to make sure that you understand what I'm asking.
I understand this deeply.
I told you, I was working three years ago.
I'm not there now.
Where is the evidence?
Yes.
Where is the evidence that the government had a plot, an inside job, inspired to foment violence on January 6th?
So first of all, she completely distorted what he said so that she can have like her big moment.
Like, I stand up to politicians and I don't let them get away with false statements.
I correct it.
I fact check them.
And so she took what he said, which is that there were FBI informants on the ground.
There were FBI informants in this group that the FBI has used and trapped in the past.
And she made it into a caricature.
Where's the evidence that it was the FBI that did this plot, that it was an inside job, that they were the ones who did it?
And that's not what he said.
And she's interrupting him every four words.
I was counting as I was watching that.
He couldn't get more than four words out.
He was trying to answer her question.
She didn't want an answer.
She wanted it to be her moment where people said, oh, well, Abby Phillips is a tough interviewer.
But she wasn't doing anything that is difficult or that is tough or journalistically impressive.
She just wouldn't shut up and listen to his answer.
Do you know how easy it is to have a guest on the show and I ask them a question and then I wait about two seconds and then I interrupt and start talking over them and then I make a point and they go to speak again and then I interrupt them six seconds later and start yelling at them and telling them they have no evidence.
This is not difficult.
This is the easiest thing in the world to do.
When you look at who these journalists think are such great interviewers, like Mehdi Hassan, half the time what they're really doing, or more than half the time, is they're just filibustering.
They're yelling at people.
They're speaking over them.
They're letting them speak for seven seconds and distorting what they're saying.
These are not smart tactics.
These are not difficult tactics.
They're not impressive tactics.
If I have someone on my show, I'm going to ask them the hardest question I can think of.
I'm going to insist the answer, but I'm also going to let them give their answer.
I'm going to listen to it, and then I'm going to dissect it.
I'm going to point out where it's wrong.
I'm going to point to evidence, but I'm always going to let them speak because that's the coward's way out.
So, she took what he said, turned it into a joke, and then tried to claim that there was no evidence for it.
He's too smart to allow that to happen, so let's listen to how this unfolds.
I'm not going to let you put words in my mouth.
I'm going to put my words in my mouth.
And I'm going to tell you what I mean by that.
Where is the evidence that the government was involved in planning or executing January 6th?
I'm going to give you hard facts.
And if I may, Abby, I know this is going to be a little uncomfortable, but we're going to go through this and you can push back on it after that.
And you can push back on that.
And let's do this fairly.
Why did they suppress footage of now what's been released?
200 hours of footage of shooting rubber bullets into that crowd.
Shooting tear gas into that crowd.
You didn't see that before.
You saw what the response was to that.
Now you see footage coming out of actually rolling out the red carpet for Capitol Police allowing people in.
So he said, look, just let me answer.
Let me explain.
You keep asking for the evidence.
You keep saying there's no evidence.
I'm going to tell you what the evidence is.
And then when I'm done, you can push back all you want.
She can't, she can't, she can't hear it.
She won't allow these facts to go over the CNN airways.
Do you see how even, she just interrupted him again.
It was maybe like 20 seconds of speaking, but she tried interrupting him after about 10 seconds.
And he just kind of pushed her away and talked over her.
This is pathetic.
Let's listen.
We've been listening to this now for 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
questions.
I don't think there has been one time other than when he first started trying to explain himself when he was maybe able to talk for 20 seconds that she has let him speak without talking over him.
It just gives you a headache.
It's totally worthless.
But it also shows what they're scared of.
We're going to show you in just a second what Vivek is referring to.
That I guarantee you Abby Phillips has no knowledge of, even though it's from the New York Times, because it just doesn't comport with her worldview or her narrative.
But she's just chattering the whole time, just talking over him.
She keeps saying she wants to hear the evidence, but when he tries to give it to her, she won't let him.
When there was 200 hours of...
Terry Ficking was the government, not me.
Release the whole thing.
And let me just finish one thing, too, because this is super important as a topic.
I think this is a civil libertarian issue of our time.
Gretchen Whitmer's kidnapping.
I want to be really clear on this, because it's the same issue in the same FBI, same even part of the FBI.
Three people who are in an alleged plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
We're acquitted at the end of trial because it was entrapment.
That is, government agents put them up to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done.
They gave them credit cards with spending limits of up to $5,000, encouraged them to buy munitions, planned something they weren't otherwise willing to plan.
So much so, and I want people at home to know this, especially CNN viewers to know this, is that one of the jurors went to those defendants and apologized afterwards, gave him a hug.
Apologize.
Seeing what the government had put a poor guy up to who had to go to some Mexican restaurant across the street to get hot water.
These people were exploited with credit cards up to $5,000.
FBI agents putting them up to a kidnapping plot that we were told was true but was entrapment.
Same thing with the Capitol Police.
People letting them in freely.
Many of those people then being charged.
Look, the government cannot put you up to do something and then charge you for it.
That's wrong.
I don't want to have to interrupt you.
I really don't.
But I don't want you to mislead the audience here or at home.
I think they've been misled by mainstream media.
I mean, the amazing thing about that is he referenced multiple lies that the FBI told that the Russians had blackmail control over Donald Trump, that the Trump campaign criminally conspired with the Russians to pack that the Trump campaign criminally conspired with the Russians to pack into the DNC, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian And every one of those lies came from CNN as well as other media outlets.
And then she has the audacity to say, look, the reason I'm interrupting you is because I cannot allow disinformation to go over the CNN airways.
Now, I don't know how many people are watching this show, but I know That CNN has a very tiny audience.
But so the idea that the CNN airwaves are sacrosanct doesn't really matter that much.
But do you see the level of delusion these people have that they can with a straight face say, we don't allow disinformation here when so many of the main stories that have come from CNN over the last seven or eight years have been utter lies to say nothing of COVID and all the disinformation and deceit that came from there or the war in Ukraine over and over and over.
Now here's one of many articles that I'd be willing to bet a lot of money Abby Phillips is unaware of it.
Not just Abby Phillips but also CNN's audience because they don't ever tell them this.
Here from the New York Times.
This isn't a Darren Beatty article at Revolver News.
This isn't something that Jim Jordan issued as a memo from the Judiciary Committee.
This is the New York Times.
As liberal and pro-FBI as it gets, as anti-January 6th as it gets, look at the headline on the screen.
Among those who marched into the Capitol on January 6th was an FBI informant.
A member of the far-right Proud Boys texted his FBI handler during the assault, but maintained the group had no plan in advance to enter the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.
The FBI was talking to the Proud Boys, the people who ended up being convicted of sedition for organizing this plot.
They had a handler.
One of the Proud Boys out January 6th had an FBI handler who was directing him and telling him what to say.
That's in the New York Times.
So when Abby Phillips says, this isn't true, there were no FBI agents at the January 6th, the FBI had nothing to do with it.
You just look at, this is the one article of so many.
That somehow emerged, even though the investigation was controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Adam Schiff.
They sought to suppress all this as much as possible.
Here from the New York Times, as well, in March of this year, in Proud Boys, January 6th, a sedition trial, FBI informants abound.
Abound.
That means they're everywhere.
The most recent informant to emerge from the trial is a Texas-based activist who became uncommonly close to some of the defendants, their lawyers, and relatives.
Quote, even before the trial began, defense lawyers had suggested that the bureau, the FBI, had as many as eight informants in the far-right organization in the months surrounding January 6th.
At least one of them, from the group's chapter in Kansas City, was in the throng of Proud Boys that marched on the Capitol that day.
On Wednesday, new court papers revealed that there was yet another informant in the Proud Boys' orbit, one who became uncommonly close to people involved in the sedition trial.
And then about the Michigan case from The Guardian, March of 2022.
Michigan governor kidnap case, hardened terrorists or FBI dupes?
Quote, when they were arrested, the case seemed to slam dunk, but as more evidence had unfolded and the trial has begun, a different narrative has emerged.
Far from being a dedicated bunch of coup plotters, their attorneys argue, the Wolverine Watchmen are hapless victims of FBI entrapment who had been induced by paid informants to commit crimes that would not otherwise have considered.
The FBI, according to defense filings, deployed at least 12 informants.
As well as several undercover agents, quote, there was no plan, there was no agreement and no kidnapping.
Defense Attorney Joshua Blanchard said last week.
And there was an investigation in BuzzFeed by two journalists who did a great job in investigating this Gretchen Whitmer case that proved that the FBI was infiltrating and running this Gretchen Whitmer plot.
This is what the FBI has been doing forever.
And yet I remember when the first time anyone started asking questions about what role the FBI played in the FBI in the January 6th plot, people like Darren Batey and then Tucker Carlson had Darren Batey on his show.
I wrote about it.
Everyone in the liberal media was scoffing at it, like, oh, you're drowning in these insane conspiracy theories.
These people have no idea what the FBI's history is.
They have no idea what these facts are.
Because in the liberal world, the January 6th insurrection was one of the worst events ever.
It was done by right-wing fanatics.
And the FBI was the victim.
The U.S.
government was the victim.
The idea that the U.S.
security state had infiltrated and had a hand in every one of these groups, even though it's true, to them is a fact that they don't recognize.
And I just thought that way that she was like nervously chattering the whole time he was trying to speak, not letting him speak.
It is a pet peeve of mine that this has become some sort of like venerated way.
Liberals are really dumb.
Do you know that the number one book on the New York Times bestseller list is Liz Cheney's book, Oath and Honor, is what she called it?
I mean, if you produce some anti-Trump anything, Liberals will make you very rich buying it.
And that includes the ones in the media.
Liz Cheney lost her race by 36 points and yet she's all over the media being treated like some wise statesman with her finger on the pulse of the American populace.
Because she hates Trump, that's all that's required.
These are people who are really not smart.
I know it's rude to say that about people.
I know it's impolite to speculate on their intellect, but intellect really does matter.
It is an influence on people's behavior.
And if you go work in these corporate media outlets and you are forced to say these lies over and over, and you really don't process that the one spreading the disinformation is you, even though all the evidence is right in front of you, it's because your brain is just shut off.
Now maybe part of that is just the incentives of being on TV and getting a lot of money from these corporations so you're willing to say whatever you have to say.
But the fact that she couldn't engage what he was saying, she was afraid to let him speak, so she had to talk over him the whole time, I think shows how frightened they are whenever any sort of alternative view or dissent pierces their world.
That's why they demand censorship of the Internet.
They don't want anything that challenges their worldview ever being heard.
And I don't blame them.
If I were them, I wouldn't either, because they have no capacity to argue their case The only way they can succeed is by ensuring that nobody ever contradicts what they say.
For our last segment, there is no question that the Biden White House, and I know a lot of conservatives don't believe this or don't want to hear this.
Thank you.
But it's absolutely true.
The Biden White House has been steadfastly supporting Israel from the very start of this war.
Joe Biden flew to Israel.
He said to Benjamin Netanyahu, whatever you need, however much money you need, however many weapons you need, you have it from us.
And the first thing he did when he got back to Washington is he asked Congress for another $14 billion to send to Israel on top of the $4 billion that the U.S.
sends to Israel every year as part of a deal That Joe Biden and Barack Obama negotiated with Netanyahu is one of the very last acts they did in 2016 on their way out the door.
Biden has been a pro-Israel warrior his whole career.
There's video that we've showed you of him before saying Israel is the greatest investment we have.
I'm sick of people who feel like they have to apologize for supporting Israel.
There's no apology necessary.
He was a true believer.
The problem is that they're looking at these polls.
There's another poll out today showing that Joe Biden is behind in every swing state, seven of them, all seven of which he won in 2020 against Trump.
He's behind Trump in all of them by some insignificant margins.
And this is already true before this war started in Israel.
But one major reason is that young people and Muslims who are critical in several of these swing states, But also just liberals and leftists are sickened to watch Biden support what they regard as a horrific war in Gaza.
And a lot of them are saying they won't vote for Biden because of it.
Their perception of Biden has significantly declined.
And this is new.
Usually, the United States is an overwhelmingly pro-Israel country.
There's never any harm to siding with Israel in the past.
That's why both parties do it so completely.
That's why Israel has gotten more aid than any other country by far from the United States.
The pro-Israel lobby is very powerful, and the United States is a very pro-Israel country.
That is changing, especially in the Democratic Party, and Biden is scared.
White House Biden's advisors are scared that their appearance of being so steadfastly pro-Israel, which is what they are, can endanger his election.
They won't change the pro-Israel policy because Biden believes in it so much, but what they want to do is pretend with leaks and statements that are completely meaningless that they're somehow pressuring Israel behind the scenes to slow down or use less force or be more careful with civilians, even though Biden has repeatedly said we will never condition Israeli aid on anything.
So the Israelis know But they can ignore what the United States says or pretends to want because the money in the arms will come anyway.
It's like leftists who say, I'm going to vote Democrat no matter what in every election because Republicans are always worse.
Obviously, if you're a Democratic politician, you're going to ignore any leftist who pledges their unconditional loyalty to you, who says, I'm always going to vote for Democrats, even if I'm angry at them.
Because it's my duty to make sure Republicans don't win.
So of course, if you're a Democrat and someone pledges their loyalty to you, you're never going to listen to their complaints.
You're going to listen to the complaints of somebody who might not vote for you.
That's just basic leverage.
So if Israel knows, as they do, that the United States, under Biden, will never, ever cut off aid, no matter how much they defy what the United States wants, of course Israel will ignore what the United States wants.
And they should.
I would too, if I were Israel.
Because Biden has said, we're going to give you all the money and the weapons you need, no matter what.
So they're playing this game, the Democrats are, where they keep kind of trying to pretend to Democratic voters that they're limiting what Israel can do, even as they're the ones primarily enabling it.
So here's the New York Times today.
Based on Democratic Party leaks, the U.S.
wants Israel to use elite forces to rescue hostages and kill Hamas leaders.
President Biden's National Security Advisor advised Israel on Thursday to end its large-scale ground campaign in the Gaza Strip and transition to a more targeted phase in its war against Hamas, American officials said.
That's the kind of Natasha Bertrand reporting that usually see the kind of formulation she used.
But of course, the New York Times uses it too.
And that is what happens.
Biden officials went to the New York Times, they wanted this article that made it seem like they're limiting what Israel can do in Gaza, even though they're not trying at all.
And they they they can't even if they wanted to, but they don't.
Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor did not specify a timetable during his meetings with top Israeli officials on Thursday, but four American officials Four American officials said, so you see here this is what these officials in the Biden White House want the public to hear, that Mr. Biden wants Israel to switch to more precise tactics within three weeks or soon thereafter.
Even that's so meaningless.
Hey Israel, like maybe three weeks from now or sometime thereafter, We'd like you to be a little bit less indiscriminate in the way you're killing civilians.
Try and be a little bit more precise, starting like three weeks from now or sometime thereafter.
The official has asked for anonymity to discuss the president's thinking.
That is such a farce, too.
They try and make it seem like these officials are needing anonymity because they're disclosing something about the president's thinking that they're not supposed to disclose.
They're there as part of a White House propaganda plan to plant in the New York Times a story that makes it seem like the Biden White House is putting on its own Israel, even though they're not.
These anonymous leakers aren't telling the New York Times something that we're not authorized to tell the president.
They're telling the New York Times what the Biden White House wants their voters to hear.
They're just serving as propagandists for the Biden White House, the way Natasha Bertrand does for the CNN and the way for the CIA, the way Jennifer Griffin does for the Pentagon.
Quote, the new phase that the Americans envision would involve smaller groups of elite forces that would move in and out of population centers in Gaza, carry out more precise missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, the officials said.
The call for a change in tactic comes as differences between the United States and Israel have widened as the conditions in Gaza turn catastrophic.
Now, if you believe that there are serious differences between the United States and Israel, that they're widening because the Biden White House is so worried about conditions in Gaza, I want to say with all due respect that you're very gullible.
Whatever you want to say about Netanyahu and the Israelis, they did not hide what they intended to do in Gaza.
They said from day one, we are going to extract a price that is unlike anything we've ever done before.
The amount of destruction we're going to bring to Gaza is going to be way beyond anything the world has seen.
And Biden heard that and he went there and said, you have our full, unconditional, unlimited support.
Joe Biden has never cared about what the Israelis do to Palestinians.
What he cares about is creating a perception among Democratic voters that he does care.
And he's using these kinds of leaks to create that impression.
Mr. Biden said this week that Israel was beginning to lose international support because of, quote, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, a much harsher assessment than his earlier public statements urging greater care to protect civilians.
Mr. Sullivan, who was in Israel on Thursday, spoke about a possible transition, quote, in the near future, but I don't want to put a timestamp on it.
Said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman.
So Jake Sullivan went to Israel and said, yeah, I think at some point there should be a transition to a different kind of war, maybe a more careful war.
I don't want to put a timetable on it.
I don't want to rush you.
Take your time.
I know there's a lot more to destroy there, a lot more people to kill.
But maybe in the future, Can we maybe think about the possibility of doing like a little bit more of a precise war?
These are the major differences in the New York Times and the Biden White House wants Democratic voters to think exist between Israel and the Democratic Party even as the Biden White House gives Israel all the bombs they're using to doing this thing that supposedly Biden is uncomfortable with.
This is the game that is being played, and it has been played from the beginning.
Here's NBC News.
This was from November 2nd, so just a few weeks after this war started.
Biden officials voiced new concerns and warnings over Israel's war with Hamas.
Administration officials are worried that the president's quick support for Israel after Hamas attack could backfire, meaning politically backfire.
They weren't regretting That they told the Israelis, we're going to support you in every way.
They weren't reconsidering that policy.
What they're worried about is the perception that if things go really bad, meaning like the Israelis end up killing like, I don't know, 5% of the Palestinian population in Gaza, or maybe 10%, a couple hundred thousand people, maybe like 100,000 people.
They don't want it on their legacy that they cheered that without limit.
So they wanted to start creating a media strategy, said NBC, To make it seem like they had concerns on their mind.
And they admitted that, quote, if this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements, a senior U.S.
official said.
The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.
provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children.
They're worried about that perception, but that's the absolute truth.
The Defense Department has said that the U.S.
is not putting any limits or restrictions on the weapons it's providing Israel.
So do you see what they're doing?
On the one hand, they're saying, we are providing all the weapons being used to kill civilians and children.
We just want to be able to pretend That if some enormous amount of civilians, even more than has already been killed, end up dead in Gaza, we have a record to pretend that we were like, oh, we're kind of concerned.
We'd like you to kill a few less people.
I mean, it's just a political scam that the Democrats are running.
Now, the cost to the United States from this support has been immense.
The State Department has repeatedly issued global warnings, warning Americans they face a heightened risk of violent anti-American attack wherever they go in the world.
The United States just isolated itself from the rest of the world by being the only country to veto a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire.
There you see that from AP.
And then, in the General Assembly, The United States was one of only 10 countries, along with Israel, voting no on a ceasefire.
Hundreds of countries, 150 something countries voted yes.
The United States and Israel joined with countries like the Marshall Islands and Palu, those tiny little islands that they made support the war in Iraq so they could say how big of a coalition of the willing was.
And there were a couple other more serious countries like Austria, but mostly the entire world was opposed or in favor of a ceasefire.
Biden has isolated the United States, further driving countries into the arms of China.
To say nothing of the massive amount of weaponry and money that we're giving to Israel in a way that's making it harder to fund the war in Ukraine that for two years we heard was of a great, great importance to American security.
And what the Biden White House is doing is instead of Acknowledging this policy, they're trying to pretend that that's not their policy in a way that is deeply cynical.
So maybe you're in favor of the Biden administration policy of funding and arming Israel without limits, maybe you're against it, but whatever else is true we should want the government to be at least basically honest about their war policy and to be on guard against these kinds of deceitful manipulations of public opinion where they pretend that they have a policy that they in fact do not have.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a few reminders, because this week is our one-year anniversary of the debut and launch of System Update.
It debuted on December 12, 2022.
Tomorrow night is our 200th show.
We're going to commemorate that one-year anniversary and the 200th show by having on the former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, who just launched a new media outlet.
We have a very wide-ranging amount of views that we're going to discuss with him, from the war in Israel to the censorship calls that some of the American rights support to the fundamental pathologies of the American media, the purpose of his new media, and a lot more.
We taped this interview yesterday.
We're going to have the whole show be about this interview tomorrow.
We really think you're going to like the conversation.
I really found the conversation engaging.
Obviously I talked to Tucker a lot over the years on his show, outside of the show, and so it was very comfortable having a kind of conversation with him.
We were able to delve deeply into a lot of topics that we think you will find very interesting.
So look for that tomorrow.
That will start at 7 p.m. Eastern.
As a couple of other reminders, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can listen to every episode 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, and this being Thursday night, we're about to go do this now, we move to Locals after we're done with our show here, which is part of the Rumble platform where we have our live interactive after show where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and your critiques and hear your suggestions for future shows.
Those after shows are available only for supporters or members or subscribers of our Locals Community.
And if you want to become a subscriber to the Locals Community, which gives you access to those twice a week shows, as well as to the daily transcripts we prepare for each show here so you can read them, I think so.
