Sprinting to World War? Israeli-Arab Tensions Threaten to Boil Over. Why Dem Partisans Love Nikki Haley. Ukraine Suffers Latest Blow From Russia. PLUS: Michael Tracey
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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, the war in Gaza looks highly likely to escalate and spread.
Given the multiple ways the U.S.
is, as usual, Directly involved in Israel's war, the U.S.
is paying for it, arming Israel, and has military assets deployed in the region against various countries and groups.
Any such escalation is certain to drag the U.S.
even further into this conflict.
As we covered last night, the U.S.
is actually already involved in some escalatory behavior, including engaging in many ships in the Red Sea, something Biden has been doing illegally because there's no congressional authority to use U.S.
military force in this way.
An Israeli airstrike earlier this week in Lebanon has prompted more bowels from the heavily armed group Hezbollah for retaliation and vengeance inside Israel.
The Iraqi government today is enraged over a drone attack on their territory for which they blame the U.S.
It killed people near Baghdad.
Israel has bombed targets in Syria multiple times over the last 10 weeks.
A terrorist attack this week in Iran killed over 100 people.
And while ISIS claimed responsibility, the Iranians said they have not accepted that claim.
And the Houthis in Yemen continue to attack ships in the Red Sea that they believe are connected to Israel as retaliation against the Israeli bombing in Gaza, while a group of American allies have warned The Houthis today that they will be attacked if those ship attacks continue.
Those are a lot of dangerous and inflamed hotspots.
And other than the fact that all Israeli wars are treated as American wars, why is the U.S.
willing to assume the risk of these escalations?
We'll show you the latest on what is taking place in this very volatile region.
Then, we are now in 2024, just weeks away from the Iowa caucus, and there are really no signs that Trump's polling strain is eroding.
If anything, he's gotten stronger.
And Democratic partisans in the media are, as a result, getting obviously visibly desperate Some are now coming out and urging Democratic Party voters to cross over in primaries in order to vote for Nikki Haley.
Not as some tactical maneuver because they see Haley as the weakest opponent for Joe Biden, but because, and they're saying this explicitly, they see Nikki Haley as the best person, the best candidate, the best president after Joe Biden.
We'll examine what it says about Haley and about Democrats that their most partisan media voices are now urging that she be the Republican nominee.
Finally, the intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracy joins us tonight to discuss an outright lie that was included yesterday in a new manifesto by the new hero of the pro-Israel right, the hedge fund billionaire and longtime Democratic Party donor Bill Ackman.
The falsehood that Ackman is spewing has become the core one for accusing opponents of the Israeli war of being anti-Semitic, and it is a claim that is simply false.
We'll also talk to Michael about a new victory, major victory actually, in the war in Ukraine.
Namely, Russia has just taken over another significant Ukrainian city, all at the same time that we were promised that the counter-offensive in Ukraine would finally turn this war around.
The opposite is happening.
We'll talk to him about the latest in these domestic disputes over these wars.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
System Update, starting right now.
Unparalleled, certainly, within the last several decades, if not going all the way back to World War II.
There are now multiple media outlets and human rights organizations using all sorts of independent data to demonstrate that, for example, 70% of residential buildings in Gaza have been destroyed.
Since October 7th, there is virtually a complete collapse of civilian infrastructure.
No sewage, no water, no hospital system.
There is a likelihood of mass starvation, of treatable infections starting to spread through these very closely packed populations in these tiny little sectors of Gaza that they feel is safe, even though they continue to get bombed.
It's really one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and it is getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so.
But at the same time, there is a lot of other very dangerous developments taking place in other Places in that region because of this conflict, including in the West Bank, where the Israelis, Israeli settlers and the IDF that backs the Israeli settlers have escalated their violence quite significantly.
Earlier this week, there was a bombing in Lebanon by the Israelis.
There was a drone strike in Iraq that the Iraqi government blames the United States for.
There is rising tension in the Red Sea with Yemen and the Houthis and Israel and America and several other countries on the other side.
And there's Iran as well, where there was a gigantic terrorist attack that killed over 100 people.
And the source of that terrorist attack is still unknown, though, as I said, ISIS claim responsibilities.
You're talking about a region that is always volatile in the best of times.
And now you have this extremely serious likelihood, I would call it a likelihood or a probability of some kind of serious escalation.
And the United States, beginning on October 7th, deployed major military assets to the region and is directly involved in all of these escalatory risks.
And the question, just like we were asking for so long when it came to the war in Ukraine, is why is the United States willing to incur these risks?
What is the benefit to the United States from being involved in all these Middle East conflicts?
Here is the New York Times earlier today.
Tensions escalate on the Israeli-Lebanon border as Gaza reels from deadly strikes.
The killing of a Hamas leader in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, is raising fears of wider conflagration at the country's border with Israel.
But many of the villages that dot Lebanon's south have already been emptied out.
Clashes have been intensifying between Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful militant group that dominates much of South Lebanon, since Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza.
The number of people displaced by fighting has been growing daily, according to Hassan Hamoud, who helps run crisis management in the city of Tyre, where many have fled.
Now Hamas and Hezbollah are very different in terms of their military capabilities.
Hamas has basically very primitive rockets that it launches kind of indiscriminately at Israel.
Hezbollah has tens of thousands, in fact in excess of 100,000, very precise weapons aimed directly at Tel Aviv and all sorts of other targets inside of Israel.
Now obviously the Israelis have the capability to destroy Beirut and have threatened to do so.
They've told Hezbollah, if you want us to do to Beirut, to Lebanon, what we're doing to Gaza, then go ahead and keep attacking us.
But that is a conflict for multiple reasons, including Hezbollah's much greater military force that is a very dangerous one.
As well, Iran is a backer of Hezbollah.
And so the potential for wider regional conflict is very high, very significant.
And the United States has military assets, including large ships and planes.
deployed to that region since October 7th and is there specifically to get involved if there is any sort of escalation to try and deter escalation, but if not, to get involved in the case that there is.
There's been no congressional debate about any of this, of course, no real public debate and no explanation as to why this is in U.S.
interest.
That never matters.
There was never really any explanation about why the still ongoing war in Ukraine was in America's interest to fund an arm and to keep going, nor has there been an explanation here.
Now, as I said, the Red Sea, which is an important shipping lane that connects the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and has a lot of ships going through it that are of important commercial value to the West, has been made into a combat zone because the Houthis have been attacking ships has been made into a combat zone because the Houthis have been attacking ships that appear to be linked either to the United States or to Israel, but it also involves other countries, the
And already Biden has ordered, and we covered this last night from the question of legality, attacks, fatal attacks on the Yemeni ships and have threatened to do so even more.
From yesterday, here's Politico, U.S.
and allies warn Houthis of, quote, consequences as Red Sea crisis intensifies.
The statement calls for, quote, collective action amid spate of attacks in the crucial trade route.
Quote, Houthi militias will face as yet unspecified, quote, consequences If they continue to threaten lives and disrupt trade flows in the Red Sea, the United States and a host of international allies said in a new statement Wednesday.
The joint missive, issued simultaneously by the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, note that the only country in the region Who they were able to get to join this coalition was Bahrain.
Barely a military presence at all.
The Saudis are conspicuously absent, as are the Emiratis, the Egyptians.
No one wants to fight in that region alongside the United States right now.
The statement, quote, stops short of spelling out how the allies plan to quell melting turmoil in the Red Sea region, but it warns that recent events pose a, quote, direct threat to global trade and constitute a significant international problem that demands collective action.
So there's already been the use of U.S.
military force in the Red Sea against Yemen, a country that the United States has been bombing, had been bombing, or helping Saudi Arabia to bomb from 2015, 2014, 2015.
For many years it caused a huge number of deaths and a starvation crisis in Yemen.
It's the poorest country in the region, and the United States seems on the verge of, once again, entering some sort of conflict.
We'll see how extensive it is.
With no congressional debate, no congressional approval with Yemen.
Yesterday, an Al Jazeera reporter quite aggressively, quite Diligently, I would say, pressed John Kirby, the White House National Security Spokesperson, for an explanation about how he can square the Biden White House's vows early on in this war that it would not do anything to be involved in an escalation of this conflict with its actions currently in the Red Sea.
And here's what that exchange entailed.
Yeah, Admiral, you said that the United States doesn't want a second front, and you also said that Israel has a right and responsibility to go after Hamas leadership, but isn't the United States and the President, aren't they exactly Widening and escalating this, given the fact that the U.S.
is supporting chasing Hamas leadership outside of Gaza.
I mean, the fact that it's going into Lebanon, a sovereign nation.
Again, your question is presuming an awful lot.
It's presuming that I said things I didn't say.
I'm not confirming that the Israelis took this airstrike.
I would refer you to them to speak to their military operations.
Nevertheless, I'm not confirming that they took this strike.
They have a right and a responsibility to go after Hamas leadership, and we expect that they'll do that in accordance with international law.
Nothing's changed about the fact that we don't want the conflict to widen.
I mean, heck, my opening statement was four or five pages worth of talking about all the kind of capabilities that the President is putting in the region to prevent that very outcome.
Okay, so let me follow up on that then.
Given the Red Sea patrols, We knew in advance of those being set up that the Iranian defense minister said very clearly, nobody can make a move in a region where we have predominance.
The United States knew that.
Set it up anyway.
Is that not being seen as a provocation?
If you know that Iran sees that as a provocation, you take the action anyway.
That's certainly turning things on their upside down, isn't it?
Wouldn't you consider provocation, launching ballistic missiles and drones at commercial... Wait, wait, wait!
Wouldn't that be considered provocation?
Targeting innocent merchant shipping and searching innocent merchant sailors?
That's a provocation.
What we're doing, what Prosperity Garden is all about, go on web, you can look at it, it's a defensive posture.
It's a coalition of the willing of maritime nations coming together to try to I want to just highlight that what he said there was that the collection of countries the United States was able to gather in an alliance to threaten the Houthis with military force and bombing campaigns if they don't stop these attacks, he called that the coalition of the willing.
Which was the phrase that neocons of the Bush administration used for the group of countries that included a couple of large countries like Italy and Great Britain under Tony Blair but also a bunch of tiny bribe countries, little island countries like Micronesia and the Marshall Islands that participated in the invasion of Iraq and that was called the Coalition of the Willing.
It's bizarre to hear him Resuscitating that very discredited rhetoric from 2002-2003, but the reality is that so much of what the administration and what the United States and what pro-Israel supporters in America have been doing since October 7th is very reminiscent
of the war on terror that was the very first thing we talked about the week after the october 7th attack and we could see it coming you could just see it coming a mile away that there was going to be a type of force unleashed in gaza and possibly in the region unlike anything we've seen for quite some time and
And that was what we kept trying to emphasize in that first week was remember the lesson of 9-11 when you're enraged about a terrorist attack, when you're drowning in this kind of quest and thirst for vengeance.
It can lead you to endorse all sorts of things that you end up regretting.
Either on moral grounds or if you don't care about the morality of how Palestinians are treated on strategic grounds.
Because so much of what ends up getting done when people are just consumed with that kind of red-hot desire to destroy is counterproductive or even self-destructive.
And so much of the framework since October 7th when it comes to the American debate about Israel has replicated Perfectly what the debate was in the wake of 9-11, from everyone getting accused of being pro-terrorist if they don't support everything the U.S.
and the Israeli government seek to do about Gaza and about Hamas, to being accused of being anti-Semitic, these kind of tactics that are designed to shut down debate and destroy people's reputations.
But also just constantly going back to what Hamas did, like people went back to what Al Qaeda did on September 11th to justify every single thing done in the name of these attacks.
And so it's not surprising that John Kirby is kind of digging up this coalition of the willing language to justify what the United States is doing, not just with Israel and Gaza, but in the broader region because the mentality is so similar.
And so many of the people who were the ones pushing and defending All the excesses after 9-11 and accusing everybody of being on the side of terrorists and all sorts of other names that they could dig up are often the very same people, the exact same people now demanding the United States pay for and fund and arm Israel as it does something very similar, not just in Gaza, but now it's spreading just like the war on terror went from
Afghanistan, where we were told Osama bin Laden was, to Iraq, and ultimately to at least eight Muslim-majority countries, where the United States ended up bombing.
You can see this coming.
You could see it coming the week of October 7th, and you can really see it now in retrospect.
It's a provocation?
Targeting innocent merchant shipping and innocent merchant sailors?
That's a provocation.
What we're doing, what Prosperity Garden is all about, go on web, you can look at it, it's a defensive posture.
It's a coalition of the willing of maritime nations coming together to try to protect international shipping.
Shipping that affects the global economy.
No man, no man.
There's been an escalation since the Red Sea Patrol.
I totally disagree with the premise of your question.
It wasn't the United States who decided to attack commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The Houthis did that.
And who are the Houthis backed by?
Iran.
As I've said before, Iran provided the missiles that the Houthis are using.
We are simply in a defensive posture to try to protect that commercial shipping.
And we have in the last 48 hours.
There's been an escalation.
Now Iran has launched a frigate into that.
So there has been an escalation.
Okay, again, let me stop you.
I ask you again, has the United States actions supported an escalation as a result?
No.
You said that the press, your words said.
You asked me a question, ma'am, I answered it.
No.
You said nothing the president has ordered has been designed to widen or deepen this conflict.
I say I'm not going to answer.
No.
All right.
So if that's comforting to you, I don't know what to tell you because the Biden administration has shown no real signs of putting any limits on Israel.
Even when on the one occasion that it seemed to express its objection to something that Israeli ministers said they wanted to do, namely they admitted that the real purpose of this war Or at least one of the purposes of this war is not just to destroy Hamas, but to expel Gazans and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip so that the Israelis can take it over.
And the administration said, that is not our policy.
We don't agree with that policy.
They emphasized that they're in agreement with the policy of Netanyahu and the Israeli government because they said they've been told by Netanyahu and the Israeli government that that's not the Israeli policy either.
So in the one occasion where they seem to publicly disagree with some of the more extremist Israeli ministers, they did so only by emphasizing that they were supportive of what they've been told is the Israeli policy.
But other than that, the Biden administration has shown zero signs.
of trying to place any limits or lines whatsoever on what Israel can do.
And because of how vested the United States is in this war, not just paying for it and not just providing the arms to it, but having completely isolated itself at the UN in defense of Israel, to shield Israel from any kind of public measures by the UN to stop it, This is going to be not just an American war, which is already in Gaza, but now an escalated war, a regional conflict in which the United States will be directly involved.
And I think this warrants an enormous amount of attention, and we will certainly be giving it as it unfolds.
It is election year 2024 and we anticipate for sure, we've talked about this a lot here, that this is going to be one of the most intense and unpredictable political years because we have the obviously unprecedented fact that the person leading
The nomination primary race in the polls by 40 points and who is leading in all of the key swing states, including the ones Joe Biden was declared the winner of in 2020.
Donald Trump is also a person who is currently indicted in four separate jurisdictions.
In other words, the Democratic Party is simultaneously running against Trump, most likely, and trying to put him in prison.
In four different cases.
That already is a bizarre year at the same time you have the United States government trying to define the Trump movement as an insurrectionary movement, as a criminal movement.
And this is just the start.
If Donald Trump remains politically strong, what the Democrats and the corporate media, which is their allies in the U.S.
security state, are willing to do in order to prevent Donald Trump from being re-elected president is Literally unlimited.
I don't believe they have any limits on what they're willing to do in order to prevent that from happening.
And that's going to make an extremely unpredictable year.
And as a sign of just how desperate they're getting, we now have two of, I would say, the most blindly partisan Democrats in all of media.
The MSNBC host Chris Hayes and Brian Boitler, who used to work for Pod Save America and used to be a writer at the New Republic and now has his own sub-stack.
Who are now coming out and essentially saying that we think Nikki Haley by far is the best candidate for the Republicans to nominate and therefore they're urging Democratic Party voters in crossover primaries, meaning where Democrats can vote in the Republican primary if they want and vice versa, to go vote in the Republican primary because Biden doesn't need their vote.
The Democrats didn't allow a primary, even though there are primary opponents running against Biden.
There's no debates.
The Democrats are just going to pretend that Biden is their nominee with no contest, no debate necessary.
But the Republicans Have a primary.
And so they're being told by the people most devoted to the Democratic Party and media that they should go and vote for Nikki Haley.
Here is the tweet of Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, his show All In With Chris Hayes, where he says, check out this piece by Brian Boyer that Chris Hayes cited.
So Chris Hayes on his show recommended this piece, talked about it.
Saying this is a possible strategy that liberals can use.
And here you see the article on the screen by Brian Butler that Chris Hayes recommended.
Liberals and open primary states should vote for Nikki Haley.
Yes, even after her rank-stopping, stopping civil war gaff-a-thon.
Now in 2016, there were actually some Democrats Like Jonathan Shade and I think Matt Yglesias and others who at first were saying Democrats should be happy with Trump as a nominee because he was the most moderate and then they changed and they said Trump would be the best person for Hillary to run against because he would be the weakest candidate.
And as usual they got exposed as knowing absolutely nothing about politics even though they write for about it for a living.
But that is one tactic when you try and encourage your voters to vote for the candidate that you think is the weakest.
The Democrats actually did that effectively in the 2022 midterm, where they funded Some of the candidates in the Republican primary who they thought would be the weakest general election candidates and most of the people that Democrats backed that got the nominee for the Republican nomination for the Republican Party actually ended up losing in close races.
This is not that strategy.
The Democrats here, Chris Hayes, Brian Borger, are not saying we want Democrats to go and vote for Nikki Haley because she would be the weakest candidate against Joe Biden.
They're not invoking this as a tactical argument.
They're saying, as Americans, we want the best people to be running against each other.
And while we as Democrats believe Joe Biden is the best president, we think the second best candidate, the person we think would be president, the best president after Joe Biden is Nikki Haley.
That's from the liberal democratic perspective.
So here is what Brian Butler writes, quote, She would be a terrible president who would empower even worse people, people much like Ramaswamy, in fact, to undermine the country's freedoms and punish its liberal enclaves where most people live.
In a just world, nobody who's too scared to stand up to neoconfederates would ever hold any office.
But she's a person of higher character and more ethical purpose than Donald Trump.
She's running for president because she wants a big prize, a bad reason, not because she wants to stay out of prison, a worse reason.
If she were to lose the election, she'd probably admit it, which is more than we can say about Trump, who once again insists it was stolen.
Now, when I went and noted on Twitter that this is a case where liberals were saying that they like Nikki Haley better than any other Republican presidential candidate, Brian Butler responded and said, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
He posted part of his article where he was making the case for Nikki Haley.
And it is amazing to me that if you look at what Nikki Haley actually believes, she's by far the most enthusiastic supporter of all American voters.
She has not only supported literally every American war over the past 20 or 25 years.
She's not one of those people who regrets her support for the Iraq war.
But she thinks the United States has not fought enough wars.
She wants more wars.
She's already calling for a bombing of Iran.
She wanted Netanyahu to go to town in Gaza without limits.
Obviously she's fanatically supportive of the war in Ukraine and wants the U.S.
to fund that too.
And she's a very enthusiastic and robust supporter of the U.S.
security state, of the CIA, of the FBI, of Homeland Security, of the NSA, because she's an authoritarian, as evidenced by her call to force Americans to register with their government ID if they want to participate on the Internet.
And you would think that comparing that to, say, the fact that Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war, That would give you pause about praising Nikki Haley this way.
But Democrats and liberals don't care about those issues.
They don't care about new wars.
They're happy with them.
Biden got the United States involved in two new wars in Ukraine and in Israel.
They don't care about that.
Democrats don't care about opposing the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the NSA because we've shown you polls many times showing that Democrats actually view those agencies positively and they trust them and see them as allies.
So in this preference, you can see how the Democratic Party and their media spokespeople like Chris Hayes or Brian Butler, what their priorities are and they don't care at all.
about neoconservative warmongering or support for the U.S.
security state.
In fact, that is endemic to the Democratic Party.
And in that view, they see the world completely similarly to the leading neocons, which is why neocons are now Democrats.
Here is David Frum back in late December, December 28th, saying exactly the same thing as Chris Hayes or Brian Bowler.
He wrote, quote, You dunk!
But Nikki Haley winning the Republican nomination in 2024 to present voters with a Biden-Haley choice is the pivot that pulls America off the dark timeline and onto the light one.
Biden-Haley.
That is the Way that we get America to be back on the path of light and not darkness.
So says David Frum and Chris Hayes and Brian Butler.
And that is why there is a complete union of American liberals and neoconservatives, because they see the world exactly the same way.
and you can see that in their preference scheme.
All right, we are very excited as always to welcome onto the show Michael Tracy, the very intrepid independent journalist whose work you can find at Substack We have a lot to talk to him about.
Michael, Happy New Year.
Welcome back to our show, the first 2024 appearance of yours.
Hopefully it'll be the last, but we are very excited to see you.
Glenn, it's January 4th.
I stopped accepting New Year's greetings on January 2nd.
All right, well, you're going to have to accept that one, because I've already given it to you, and you already have it.
All right, let's talk about... Sorry, I reject it.
Let's talk about a couple of the things that we're interested in hearing from you about, and I want to begin with the new hero of the pro
Israel right the new the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who has funded the Democratic Party largely with the amount enormous amounts of money that he's given over the past decade or so and yet he's now considered essentially like the savior like the George Soros of the anti-woke crowd of the pro-Israel right
because of the activism he's been engaged in in the wake of october 7th culminating in his grand success which is getting the university of pennsylvania president fired for her defense of free speech and then earlier this week claudine gay the president of harvard also fell and he took credit for that and when he did he issued not even fired though glennon I mean, this actually goes to part of how he's wielded his influence and exerted his pressure.
It wasn't so much that they were fired.
They were forced into resigning.
It's that they were coerced into resigning, which might be a technical distinction in certain circumstances, but it shows that they actually were forced into doing the bidding of Ackman and his cohort.
It's a common way when you want to fire somebody, especially in elite, you give them the opportunity to resign, but it's clear that if you don't, they're going to get fired.
I think everybody acknowledges that that was from the pressure, but I take your point.
It is more accurate to say that they were either fired or forced into resigning.
And in this long He posted this long manifesto, 4,000 words on Twitter, where he not only took a victory lap, but also explained why he did all this work to get these two presidents fired, why he wants the MIT president fired.
And along the way, he said the following.
I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th, before Israel had taken any military action in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel, quote, solely responsible for Hamas's barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be, I wondered.
Now, you pointed out today that this statement is a lie.
It's a falsehood, but also it's an important one that a lot of people have been saying.
Why is it false?
Well, this claim has been foundational to the whole mythology that's been erected about January, sorry, I was just about to confuse January 6th and October 7th, the two dates indelibly seared into our heads.
This claim from Ackman has been central, a central tenet of October 7th mythology for the past several months, which is that the anti-Semitism, the rabid, virulent anti-Semitism of all these That's just flatly, factually false.
was proven when they started launching their protests and issuing their statements denunciatory of Israel before Israel had even acted militarily in Gaza in the wake of the October 7th incursion by Hamas.
Now, that's just flatly, factually false.
And you can tell that Ackman probably has never even examined that question with any precision because he's just absorbed the folklore around the chronology of when these protests started and whether Israel had launched any action preceding the protests.
Because I actually happened to be in Europe on October 7th, so I was up and following some of the developments before most Americans would have been aware that anything had even happened.
And at approximately 3.30 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time, the IDF announced on Twitter, slash X, that they had already begun taking retaliatory action against Gaza, in Gaza, or launching retaliatory strikes against Gaza, because if you recall, the
October 7th attack by Hamas, the incursion by Hamas, started with a barrage of rockets that it launched into Israel, followed by the land and air incursion of the Hamas fighters into southern Israel.
So, by the acknowledgement of the IDF, by the acknowledgement of the Israeli military itself, Ackman is just flatly wrong.
There had already been retaliatory military action in Israel or in Gaza, probably before he had even woken up on October 7th.
And this just gets elided because it's so convenient to kind of make out the anti-Israel or pro-Palestine protesters to be this rancid group of completely manic haters that it didn't that they weren't even responding to any kind of potentially punitive military action by Israel and Gaza.
They were just celebrating the glory of Hamas because they're anti-Semitic to the core.
Michael, let me just put the graphic on the screen that you referenced so people can see just how indisputably true this timeline is that you are explaining.
So first of all, here is Bill Ackman, and we pointed this out just a second ago, but he said, I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations early on the morning of October 8th Before Israel had taken any military action in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas.
And as you say, this is the claim that pro-Israel fanatics have made over and over that these people were protesting even before Israel started bombing Gaza and therefore they weren't obviously protesting the bombing of Gaza because it hasn't even started yet.
Now even if that timeline were true, of course everybody knew what Israel was going to do because they've been doing it for years.
It's not like This conflict just began on October 7th, just like the conflict in Russia and Ukraine didn't begin on February 24th, 2022, when the Russians invaded.
There's an entire series of events that came before that that are crucial to know in order to understand the context of what happened in February 2022.
There's a long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict about Gaza and the West Bank, where the Israelis have bombed Gaza many times.
And so the idea that you are against Israel and the broader conflict is something that would make sense anyway, even if it were true that they hadn't started bombing on that morning of October 8th.
The thing is, though, it's completely false.
Here is the IDF.
It is the verified Twitter account of the IDF.
And on this date here, which is October 7th, 2023 at 3.49 a.m., they say in response to the barrages of rockets launched by Hamas they say in response to the barrages of rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza at Israel, the IDF is currently striking Hamas targets
Now, I don't know, maybe there's some issue with time zones, but clearly in what was October 7th, you had October 7th, which was the attack, and then the Israelis immediately didn't just say we are going to bomb Gaza, they began bombing Gaza. and then the Israelis immediately didn't just say we are
And so by the time people were protesting that next day, they were not only protesting the years of bombing by Israel and Gaza, but also the actual bombing that had already started taking place, that the IDF announced publicly that Bill Ackman, that This liar has been insisting did not begin while those protests were underway.
And by the way, within a matter of hours of the IDF making that announcement that they had commenced retaliatory strikes in Gaza, Netanyahu addressed the nation of Israel and the world and announced that Israel was declaring war.
Meaning Israel was mobilizing and entering into a full war posture for the first time in decades.
So that would have already been on the record before Bill Ackman probably awoke on October 7th to learn of the news of the Hamas incursion.
But you're right that even if some student group at Harvard or wherever else that these people have been so fixated on now for months,
Even if some student group hadn't been aware that Israel had launched retaliatory strikes at that juncture, yet nonetheless issued a statement or started to organize a protest critical of Israel, it wouldn't demonstrate that they were motivated by some outburst of anti-Semitic vitriol.
But it happens to be the case that the entire timeline that Ackman and his compadres have relied upon is just straightforwardly factually false and nobody really examines it with any degree of exactitude because the whole narrative is convenient to propel their crusade forward to get as many scalps as they possibly
can as they move to enforce new speech codes whereby speech critical of Israel would be more stringently punished.
So Ackman clearly has had success with this strategy so why should he care if this one little factual element might be off?
Clearly nobody in his kind of sphere of influence has taken the time to correct it or fact-check it, and he just got the cream of the crop achievement by forcing the ouster of the president of Harvard of all places.
They're not very scrupulous, but they're fact-checking.
But it doesn't matter.
And not only that, Michael, this is just such a— I don't even know if ironic it's sufficient to capture it, but you have had this sector of American conservatives, the anti-woke crowd, the people who may not even consider themselves conservatives, but who have been aligned with them and adjacent to them in this whole post-George Floyd culture but who have been aligned with them and adjacent to them in this whole post-George Floyd culture war, conflict
But you certainly had real American conservatives as well joining together to raise the banner of free speech.
One of the reasons why In part, I become somewhat aligned with them because my work has always been in defense of free speech and free speech absolutism, and I have too been opposed to and concerned about this growing pro-censorship sentiment taking place on college campuses as well as in other institutions in the United States.
And yet, The same conservatives, aside from all the cheering they've done of various censorship measures like Ron DeSantis, banning pro-Palestinian groups at the University of Florida, here seem to think that they have won some grand victory by having now had fired not one but two university presidents And obviously there was an attempt to pretend that the reason Claudine Gay got fired was because of her plagiarism, when obviously the Penn president, Liz McGill, had no plagiarism scandal.
She was fired less than a month ago.
What they had in common, just like the MIT president who Bill Ackman now wants fired, is not plagiarism, but was that appearance in Congress Where essentially they refused to vow to censor more aggressively Speech that was critical of Israel, what Elise Stefanik was trying to call pro-genocidal speech.
And they were trying to say, it depends on the context.
If somebody is writing an op-ed that's critical of Israel, and using phrases like, from the river to the sea, or free Palestine, that would be free speech.
But if you're running up to a Jewish student and screaming, from the river to the sea, or kill Jews in the face of a Jewish student, that would be conduct.
exactly the kind of distinction you would want university presidents to be drawing in defense of free speech.
And now you have these conservatives and these anti-woke people who claim to believe in free speech celebrating the firing of two American presidents when their real crime was refusing to say they would censor all Israel critics on campus by calling it genocidal speech.
Do you think that all along these people who have been marching under the free speech banner have really wanted only to shield their own views from censorship, against censorship?
And wanted to censor their adversaries?
Or do you think that October 7th was such an emotional event for them that sort of like what happened on September 11th, people started just being willing to support measures that before that event they never would have thought about supporting?
I think the vast majority of self-proclaimed free speech advocates, even free speech advocates who paint their advocacy in terms of free speech absolutism, might come
Consciously believe that they are principled proponents of that cause, but then when real world circumstances challenge their commitment to the cause, they find that other commitments that they have, such as in this case punishing who they perceive to be the woke left, who have run rampant on college campuses and have unfairly targeted conservative political speech, or ousting somebody from
This incredibly esteemed position of American political, societal, social power, the president of Harvard, who they believe had been Unjustly elevated to that position in the first place based on a racial dogma that had been cultivated at these elite institutions.
Those values come to supersede whatever pre-existing commitment they would have claimed to have had to free speech or free speech absolutism.
And this is not unique to the right.
I would say that there's a similar tendency on the left, you know, in the Early 2000s, when there was a war fever around Iraq and 9-11 and Afghanistan and George W. Bush was in power, the left held itself out as principal opponents to censorship in much the same way, but then once the dynamics shifted and people of
Their ilk tended to more control the levers of censorship power in society.
They found that they didn't hold fast to that same level of anti-censorship commitment.
So I would say upwards of, I don't know, 90-95% of people who claim to be free speech proponents Really are more just proponents of people of their political affinity controlling the levers of censorship power, more so than any opposition to censorship as such.
Well, there's always such a kind of self-delusional process that people engage in because nobody wants to admit about themselves That they are people who want to silence dissent to their views.
Nobody wants to admit that about themselves.
You need some psychological excuse, some kind of intellectual framework that permits you to separate yourself from the people who do that.
And the way that the liberal left in the United States has been justifying censorship of right-wing speech without claiming that they're censoring is by saying, no, these things we want to censor are not just political views.
These are dangerous expressions of violence.
These are calls when embedded in them for minority groups to be not just attacked, but to be murdered and killed and genocided.
You know, they accuse right-wing speech of being secretly calling for the genocide of trans students or the elimination of violence against black people or against immigrants or against Muslims.
And then they say, well, this is not political speech.
This is violent.
And it is amazing, Michael, to watch these conservatives who have been complaining about this for years now, not in an ironic way or in kind of a tit-for-tat way where they're saying, well, look, we don't really think this, but since you think this, we're going to force you, but in a genuine, earnest way to first take Israel criticism, but in a genuine, earnest way to first take Israel criticism, like Elise Stefanik did, and define it as something else, as genocide or as
And then on that basis, and of course, they're accusing everybody of being a racist who disagrees with them as well.
And on that basis, the exact same tactic of the liberal left.
Then they're saying, look, these views have to be punished and prevented because this is not speech.
This is something different.
This is violence against a minority group by people who hate the minority group, namely anti-Semites.
I just don't understand, honestly, how the human brain prevents itself from recognizing that they're embracing the very same tactics that they've long so vocally claimed to despise.
Well, not everyone has such an impeccably constituted brain as you do, Glenn.
That's true, but I mean, I don't even think you need that in order to have—that's what I'm saying.
This is like a very basic recognition of just like the smallest amount of self-awareness That should make these people be aware that they're the ones going around now calling them.
It's the American right, the pro-Israel sector of the American right going around calling everybody racist the second that they hear disagreement on Israel and demanding that these people be silenced on college campuses.
And I would just say one more thing, which is this whole excuse that, oh, well, we're just doing this because we want to make the left have to live under the regime that they've created.
It would be convincing, I guess, if it were very new that Israel critics were being censored.
In reality, Israel critics have been among the most frequent and constant targets of censorship for years on American college campuses and in the United States.
It's not some new, new invention that the American right decided to invent to force the left to live under their regime.
It's also such an impoverished ethical calculation to just say, an eye for an eye, whatever the circumstance, whatever deterioration in conditions the eye for an eye results in, we're just going to, you know, mimic the tactics of our declared enemies.
You know, I think that that basically corrodes one's moral compass if you Use that as your kind of guiding philosophy, really whatever the situation is.
But yeah, that's often how people on the right justify their support for speech suppression measures.
We should also, I think, dwell on that in invoking the word genocide and thinking that just ends all debate and also automatically justifies the repression or punishment of speech.
The right is borrowing from a tactic that's more commonly associated with the left in that you're holding up this alleged victim group against whom the utterance of words would further victimize them, meaning victims of genocide, and therefore the standards that would be in play to determine whether speech is permissible or not, all go by the wayside.
And Lelisa Stefanik, in her house hearing in December, masterfully borrowed this tactic by presenting a scenario to the college presidents that was not a scenario that had any connection to what they masterfully borrowed this tactic by presenting a scenario to the college presidents that was not a scenario that had any connection to what they would actually be dealing with
Nobody on those campuses has ever gone around chanting, we demand the genocide of the Jews.
Nobody has used that terminology.
But Elise Stefanik, in that hearing, defined certain hotly contested and debated chants and slogans, like from the river to the sea, or what have you, as unambiguous calls for genocide.
Intifada was her example too.
Intifada, yeah.
Right.
Stefanik specifically defined those slogans as unambiguous examples of calls for genocide.
And then she went on to put to those college presidents later, does calling for genocide violate the code of conduct of your respective universities?
Now, when the college presidents hesitated, because she had already defined her terms, and if they said yes, that would mean that they're endorsing a prescription of certain Debated slogans.
I mean, you can make a case that From the River to the Sea or Globalize the Infantile or Calls for Genocide.
You can make a case of the contrary.
That's supposed to be what you do in an academic setting.
Debate on the merits, the veracity of competing claims.
But what Elise Stefanik wanted these presidents to do is completely bypass that whole academic conceit and issue a decree from on high administratively that they had that the the university administrators had hereby determined that no debate was permissible any longer and that these slogans actually did constitute calls for for genocide
that's a tact that that's a tactic like end running the argumentative process that tended to be have been spearheaded most kind of flamboyantly by people on the liberal left in the past but the right masterfully borrowed that tactic and also i i think that's a good point of view of the
I almost wonder if the focus on Ackman is a bit misplaced, because we really should emphasize that the ouster of two of the three presidents that were hauled before the House for Elise Stefanik's hearing in December, they've been subjected to government coercion, government censorship.
I mean, this is a precedent-shattering example of Congress intervening and demanding the punishment of speech and then exerting pressure politically, financially and otherwise in concert with others to We covered this last night, too.
It wasn't just Congress.
It was also, for example, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who has a seat on the advisory board of the University of Pennsylvania, came out and said that he thought Liz McGill's testimony and comments in response to this question were reprehensible in the Biden White House.
Also condemned it as disgraceful.
So you could really make the case that this is one of the strongest examples yet of the government intervening in the administration of private colleges and helping to coerce and induce the firing of a college president for the crime of defending excessively broad conceptions of free speech, which makes it even more dangerous.
Now, Obviously, Stefanik actually threatened that the federal funding that these colleges and universities receive could be at jeopardy, could be in jeopardy if they don't take immediate action to remedy what she was declaring to be this unacceptable tolerance of could be in jeopardy if they don't take immediate action to remedy what Right.
So obvious if you have like any active brain cells to see how that could easily be turned around by a Democratic majority to say if you don't start expelling students.
Who use this speech that's offensive to trans students or that makes black people feel unsafe, you're going to lose your funding as well.
Now, what this has been about as well is... And one last thing, Republicans have even started to come around to the imposition of federal civil rights law to enforce The speech codes related to Israel that they're demanding.
Now, there had been previously a whole school of thought on the right that had actually gotten some more prominence recently, that the underpinnings of woke ideology actually owed to these civil rights statutes, particularly that came about in the 1960s, because it segregated student groups into racial or ethnic classes, and that there had to be a more
Direct challenge to the rightness or wrongness of those statutes themselves if you actually want to combat woke ideology.
That was the theory that had gained some prominence and all of a sudden October 7th happens and they're more than eager to wield the machinery of civil rights law to coerce college administrators into conceding to the outcomes that they want.
Yeah, and the safetyism rhetoric has been driving me insane.
You know, oh, these American Jewish students feel so unsafe because they have to see these protests and hear Palestinian chants, you know, basically saying that words are violence.
Now, the whole objective of this, and this is why I say this has been going on since a lot longer than October 7th, since October 7th, is to really make it so that people feel I'm frightened and afraid and threatened to express criticisms of Israel here in the United States.
It's an incredibly menacing thing that is trying to be done.
We're basically people who are fanatical supporters of this foreign country in the United States.
And I should point out, I don't want to overgeneralize, there are a lot of conservatives who do not support this stuff.
Either they don't support the US funding Israel's war or they don't support, even if they do, these speech restrictive measures.
In their defense, but obviously a lot do.
And there's this account that is exactly the living, breathing embodiment of what the American right has been calling cancel culture called stop anti-Semitism.
And what they've been doing is they've been finding people who post photos or slogans on their social media that are apparently over the line that they've decreed that Americans can't cross when criticizing Israel.
They put their pictures up, they tagged their employers, they demand their employers fire them, and they've actually gotten a lot of people fired, a lot of Americans fired for the crime of expressing their views on this American-funded war in Israel.
And one of their new major examples of offensive speech in the United States that they found today is this.
I don't know if you saw it, Michael.
It's incredible that this is even allowed in the United States, but hopefully it won't be for much longer.
Thanks to Can't Stop Anti-Semitism, they said, quote, Beverly Hills.
This is in Beverly Hills.
Jennifer Garner's 18-year-old daughter was spotted today.
She was spotted today.
Not Jennifer Garner, her 18-year-old daughter was spotted today donning a sweatshirt featuring a watermelon, Michael.
A fruit repurposed to represent the challenges of the Palestinian people.
The symbol erases the entire country of Israel.
And then here's the photo.
And again, I don't even know how this is allowed.
How did the police not come and descend on them immediately?
But there you see the photo.
I think that's Jennifer Garner on the right and her daughter who is masked.
I don't know.
She also appears to be immunocompromised, which makes the targeting of her even more disgraceful.
Totally.
I mean, this is a disabled person.
But here you see, she's like, she's like Tara Lorenz.
And there you see the sweatshirt with the watermelon on it, which I guess now is a hate image.
It's a hate symbol.
But, you know, yesterday the same account took this picture of this woman, this totally random woman, who was eating in a diner and her crime was she had opened her laptop and among various liberal stickers, like a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter thing or whatever, she had the Palestinian flag.
And this account is trying to make it impossible for people to go out into public and exercise the right as American citizens to express their views about this foreign country.
It's incredibly odious.
Right.
So because there's such a paucity of actual anti-Semitism for all these anti-Semitism searching activist groups and social media accounts and politicians and donors to actually identify, what they have to do is conjure up a never-ending series of anti-Semitism
anti-Semitic symbols that they claim, or of symbols that they claim are anti-Semitic, or slogans, or allusions to anti-Semitism, or anything but an actual concrete expression of anti-Semitism because it almost never exists.
Maybe very scarce, scarcely here and there.
You can find some moron saying anything in a country of 330 million.
But the anti-Semitism that they're claiming is so prevalent and so dangerous and that needs to be so urgently combated, it really does not exist in significant number.
So they have to settle for A cartoon icon of a watermelon, or remember when it was an octopus plush doll, or when it's chanting various slogans, or it's just being a little rude when you're protesting, or not being sufficiently and vocally mindful of the fearful state of pro-Israel students when the protests are underway.
Like, it's all these extremely tangential Supposed instances of anti-semitism that they're forced to Settle for because they really can't come up with anything else.
I actually I do think it's also worth noting just for the sake of fairness That when an Ackman for example says that there were people who started protesting Israel instantly on October 7th because they had some sort of pro-hammas viewpoint I don't think that should be denied that that viewpoint exists entirely.
I actually was in, like I mentioned before, in Europe or in England on October 7th, and I actually went to some protests in Birmingham, which has a heavily Muslim population, pro-Palestine protests, and without, you know,
Distorting the sample size that I was using or really having any agenda other than to glean what people actually thought about the conflict, I did get certain sentiments expressed to me that you could reasonably construe as anti-Semitic in a way in that, you know, people were asking me if I was partially a Jew.
And there are people who do politically support Hamas because they believe that even the violent resistance of Hamas is legitimate.
They believe that Even Israelis who live on a kibbutz in southern Israel, they are settlers, colonial settlers, and therefore legitimate targets of the resistance.
That sentiment does exist.
For sure.
But to conflate it all with anti-Semitism as though it's just this, again, random outburst of Jew hatred that has no connection to an ongoing military conflict in the Middle East Yeah, of course anti-Semitism exists.
You can find it.
You can find racism.
You can find people who want to murder trans people.
Those people actually exist also.
There are some people who really are opposed to immigration because they're white nationalists.
You can find those people as well.
But it doesn't mean that those... And there are some people who support Hamas and support what Hamas did.
Of course, and if you go to any pro-Israel protest, you will also hear people saying, I think all Arabs should be killed.
I think Gaza should be turned into a parking lot.
I think Gaza should be flattened.
I think the whole thing should be destroyed.
It should be taken off the map.
You've heard Israeli officials saying that.
There are extremist views in every faction.
There's no denying that.
But for one thing, those views, even when they find their more repellent expression, are still protected speech, certainly in the United States, but also It's not any kind of crisis.
You know, every time people want to censor speech, they always have to declare some sort of crisis before they do.
That becomes the tactic.
That's how 9-11 was used.
That's how January 6th has been used.
It's how the war in Ukraine has been used.
It was how COVID was used.
Now it's how October 7th is being used as well.
Even if like 20 percent of Americans aged 18 to 25 do actually support Hamas, meaning that they're not just accused wrongfully of supporting Hamas, but they've actually expressed outwardly support for Hamas or they support what Hamas did on October 7th as legitimate but they've actually expressed outwardly support for Hamas or they support what Hamas did Even if that is the case, I mean, I'm just stipulating it.
It doesn't therefore automatically mean that all the Jews of Philadelphia or Cambridge, Massachusetts are in mortal danger.
I mean, that that logical leap just has no basis whatsoever.
And yet it's just assumed by Ackman and his fellow travelers.
Exactly.
Just like the fact that a lot of people want to go and bomb Gaza doesn't mean that every Arab or Palestinian in the United States is endangered.
If people say, I want to go bomb Iran or invade Iran, it doesn't mean that every Persian in the United States is endangered.
These are debates that people have all the time and have to be allowed to have, even if it makes certain people Uncomfortable.
All right, I want to switch focus a little bit to this other war that the United States is funding that pretty much everyone has forgotten about even exists, but it's actually still going on.
It's the war in Ukraine.
And before I show you what has happened within the last 24 hours, I want to remind people at home Of what we were told was going to happen in the next or the last six months in Ukraine.
So going back to June, there was an article in the Washington Post.
This is when public opinion started eroding in supporting the ongoing U.S.
funding campaign in Ukraine.
We were told, oh, don't worry, things are going poorly, but this amazing counter offensive is coming.
It's going to completely transform the war.
Max Boot, the fanatical neocon warmonger who loves to cheer war but never actually fight in any of them, had an article Where he said, quote, the Ukrainian offensive is beginning.
David Petraeus is optimistic.
These are the same people who were promising the Iraq War was going to turn around.
It's a whole article about how David Petraeus just got back from Kiev.
He had interviewed a bunch of Ukrainian officials, and he's here to say that they have a great plan for the counteroffensive.
The counteroffensive is going to work.
The month before that, Ann Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in a cover story was heralding the counteroffensive.
It was called the counteroffensive.
It was a June cover story in the Atlantic devoted only to that.
And if you see the art there, it's a picture of President Zelensky, kind of like that heroic thing that was done for President Obama, Che Guevara.
And it has this art that says the choice is between freedom and fear, a report from the front by Ann Applebaum.
It's like he's an edgy countercultural graffiti symbol.
Yeah, it was illustrated by Bono, actually.
So it's not exactly difficult to see the countercultural ethos they were trying to invoke there.
When you look at that, you should hear, like, guitar solos in the background.
Completely, with Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg sitting Indian-style on the floor.
Alright, so... Yeah, I could hardly imagine a better time than rocking out with Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Bono.
Right, as they're talking about the coming glorious victory of the Ukrainians.
At the Hudson Institute or something.
Right.
Now, here in the New York Times today is a somewhat different story that is being told.
Obviously, the counteroffensive was a gigantic failure.
Enormous numbers of Ukrainians were sent to the front lines and mowed down one after the next.
As a result, they're having an extremely difficult time of finding new conscripts.
They actually recently expanded the range of people who are now eligible for the draft in Ukraine to include a whole bunch of diseases and disabilities that usually people are automatically exempt from fighting in wars since they actually can't.
They're not healthy enough to, but the Ukrainians are so desperate for bodies to go to the front line.
That's one of the reasons they are losing because a lot of the people in the West did not answer Zelensky's call when he said, look, if you support Ukraine, get off social media, stop putting our flag in your bio, come to Ukraine and help us fight.
We need you here fighting, not cheering on social media.
Most people stayed on social media.
And those who actually did follow the call early on in the war, Glenn, because I met some because I happened to be in...
In the border area of Poland and Ukraine, when those, you know, heroic Americans were flowing in to answer Zelensky's call, they really didn't have all that much to do.
I mean, it was really more of a PR statement on Zelensky's part.
Yes, there did come to be a reasonably professionalized International Legion unit, but for the average, like, Reddit user who thought that they had this, you know, Civilizational obligation to head to Eastern Europe to fight against the Russian hordes.
A lot of them just kind of wandered around and made up stories for how valorous they were and then left.
Right.
We actually have some documents we're going to be reporting very shortly on this show about someone who did go there and pretended that he was fighting and what the Ukrainians actually thought of this person.
But here's the New York Times today.
As we know, the front line really hasn't moved for months, really throughout most of 2023 in Ukraine.
But today, there wasn't a breakthrough in the counteroffensive.
There was another breakthrough by the Russian army, taking more of Ukraine.
It already occupies about 20 percent.
Here in the New York Times, a trophy in ruins, evidence grows that Russia controls Marenka.
"Ukraine said it was defending territory behind the Eastern frontline town.
Its capture would be Russia's most significant territorial advance in Ukraine in more than six months." "Although Marenka is in ruins, it stands as Russia's most significant advance since the fall of Bakhmut in May.
While its control is unlikely to turn the tide of the war, the loss of the town would be further evidence that Moscow has firmly seized the initiative on the battlefield after Ukraine's summer counteroffensive fell short of most of its goals." I would say so.
That's quite an understatement that the counteroffensive fell short of most of its goals.
And Moscow's success in Marinka would be one more blow to the morale of the Ukrainian army, which is now on the defensive and struggling with manpower and ammunition shortages amid concerns about a potential shortfall in Western military assistance.
Michael?
So many people tried saying for so long that this was a losing battle, that all that was going to happen was that we were not going to save Ukraine and Ukrainians, we were going to destroy Ukraine, spending huge amounts of money.
Many, many Ukrainian young men in Ukraine dying against their will, being sent to the front to fight a war that Ukraine cannot win.
Everyone who said that was called a Putin apologist, a Kremlin agent.
It's all turned out to be true.
The same people who are always put forward as the foreign policy experts, David Petraeus and Max Boot and Jeffrey Goldberg and Ann Applebaum, yet again prove to be complete liars and propagandists, always promising things that never happen to keep their wars going.
Is this at all going to produce any kind of self-reflection on the part of anybody about how we just again got into a war that ends up being a complete failure?
Well, I think it's worth recalling what was said about Bakhmut, which was referenced in the report you just read as sort of an analogy to this latest Russian advance, or it was the most recent instance in which Russia made any kind of significant territorial gains in the war.
And the Battle of Bakhmut was raging, which was basically the low point or one of the low points for the war in just terms of this grinding attritional warfare where it was very crudely reminiscent of World War I.
And the Voktor group got very involved, just kind of throwing lots of convicts that had recruited from Russian prisons into the battlefield.
What was said over and over again by American pundits, by the military industrial pundits who invariably always land on supporting U.S.
foreign policy prerogatives, was that even if Russia does end up taking Bakhmut, which they acknowledged was likely from about December of 2022 to May of 2023, they would say that it would not be a strategic victory for Russia.
Meaning it would just be this marginal tactical gain, and it might even be a strategic loss for Russia, because they would have lost so much manpower and resources in attempting to seize this relatively insignificant town.
If you then fast forward a couple months, and after even the most ardently pro-Ukraine analysts had to admit that the so-called counter-offensive, quote, failed to achieve its goals, There's been a bit of a retrospective analysis done of the significance of Bakhmut, and it turns out it probably wasn't so much of a so-called strategic, you know, it may actually well have been a strategic victory for Russia or a strategic defeat for Ukraine, contrary to what we were universally told.
And I'll just give you an example of this.
Three of the most sought after, highly regarded Ukraine war analysts who strive to at least appear to be nonpartisan, although they don't make any bones about supporting Ukraine, are Michael Kaufman and Dara Massacott are Michael Kaufman and Dara Massacott and then Rob Lee.
They're in the think tank world in D.C. and sometimes they can have some decent insight and information just because they have basically devoted their lives to studying intricately every little aspect of this war and the nature of the Ukrainian war effort versus the Russian war effort.
And, you know, they were among the chorus of people who were downplaying the significance of Russia seizing Bakhmut in the spring of 2000.
And in November of 2023, so about a month or two ago, maybe two months ago, a month and a half ago, they got together and they did like a retrospective on maybe what they might have gotten wrong or misjudged about
The Ukraine War in 2023, and they basically came to a consensus that Bakhmut was a giant catastrophe for Ukraine because Ukraine funneled a huge amount of its most seasoned soldiers, of its most accomplished fighters, into this sink pit of warfare in Bakhmut, and that was justified at the time because
The idea was that Ukraine needed to delay.
It needed to buy some time so it could be armed with U.S.
and Western weapons and tanks, and it needed to have all the weapons furnishments that had been promised arrived in time for the counteroffensive.
Well, the counteroffensive turned out to be also a logistical and strategic and tactical disaster, so all the sacrifices that They were saying were justifiable that they had made in Bakhmut were a waste.
And now if you read the reports on this latest city that's been seized, Malenka I think is the name.
I might be mispronouncing that.
You see the same sorts of people quoted.
Like, the New York Times quoted somebody from this military industrial think tank in the UK, RUSI, R-U-S-I is the acronym, saying, oh, look, no problem.
This is not a major strategic win for Russia because, you know, the place has basically been destroyed.
And they always have a rationale for why it's nothing like a strategic victory for Russia.
But then if you recall, they were in – they were ecstatic.
They were in a state of almost orgasmic joy in September and October and November of 2022 when Ukraine did have some success in retaking areas around Kharkiv and Kherson and so forth.
So nothing was ever a strategic win for Russia, but even the most slight strategic advance for Ukraine was cause for this kind of euphoric celebration.
I think we're going to see that dynamic pretty much continue even though the state of the war is very dire at the moment because the U.S.
is rearming.
I mean, I just looked up the most recent reports that the U.S.
is starting the first quarter of 2024.
It's getting to the point of having almost tripled The amount of artillery munitions that it produces, and also Europe is also ramping up its artillery and other weapons production, and also Russia itself is basically converting into a full-blown war economy.
The projection is that in 2024, about 30 percent of Russian government spending will be for military or war related purposes, which is an enormous amount.
So whatever the rut that Ukraine appears to be in at the moment, I think people should be aware that lots of countries around the world are rapidly accelerating their rearmament in a way that strikes me as ominously reminiscent of the pre-World War I and World I think people should be aware that lots of countries around the world are rapidly accelerating
I'm not saying that there's going to be a world war, but when you have countries that are pouring so much of their national resources and GDP into the military sector, that creates an opportunity or creates the possibility that there's like a momentum toward war as the ultimate culmination of that.
Just a few weeks ago or less, there was another incident where a Russian missile purportedly entered into Polish airspace, didn't crash.
But who knows, I mean, as long, the longer this goes on, the more that there's just a roll of the dice every single day that some incident is not going to spiral into a wider war.
And to tie it back to Israel for a second, the Biden administration's position on Ukraine was that also that it opposed a wider war for a long time, meaning it didn't want to see the warfare expand beyond the boundaries of Ukraine.
And sure enough, the war has expanded beyond the boundaries of Ukraine.
It's not maybe covered that much, But Belgorod, the Russian city in the border region with Ukraine, was just subjected to a massive missile attack late last month.
And there's been a significant amount of shelling in the Russian border areas.
And the U.S.
basically gives this its tacit support.
Drone strikes in Moscow, etc.
And you even have a potentially – and there's always like a drone that lands in Romania or something, and everybody has to hold their breath before it's made known whether that's going to prompt some wider escalation.
And the same line has been taken with the Israel war in Gaza.
The Biden administration doesn't want a new front with Hezbollah.
It doesn't want an expansion of the war to include like direct combat with Iran or the Houthis in Yemen.
And yet we have almost daily attacks on U.S. – either assets or troops by what they call Iranian proxy forces to the point where the Biden administration just issued like an almost what seemed like an ultimatum.
Yeah, we covered that.
We covered that earlier.
We covered that earlier on the show that there's a lot of prospect for escalation.
The point being, if you pour resources into a war effort for such a protracted period of time, And even if you claim that you want to limit the contours of the war itself, just the pouring in of the resources almost makes inevitable that the war is going to expand.
Exactly.
And that's always been the danger here is this kind of unintentional escalation.
You know, so far, the $60 billion that the Biden administration requested for Ukraine has still not passed the Congress.
And we are now into 2024.
But there's likely to be, I think, a deal where the Biden administration gives the Republicans enough on what they call border security in exchange.
Mike Johnson will bring that bill to the floor.
And I think that that $60 billion will end up being approved because once the United States gets into these wars, Even though there's a lot of talk now about pressuring Ukraine to try and resolve this diplomatically, the reality is that the Russians are definitely not going to give up the land that they have won, and they seem to be looking to gain more.
They just gain more.
And it's hard to see any kind of diplomatic settlement given the maximalist promises that the West made about, we're only going to accept a complete expulsion of Russian soldiers from every part of Ukraine, including Crimea, which is never possible.
That is further away than ever.
So we'll see where this goes.
But it's absolutely the case that just like the war in Israel, there's always the danger of unintentional escalation the longer it goes on.
All right, Michael, we have to go.
Michael, we have to go.
He actually said that Mike Johnson personally assured him that the Ukrainian aid would pass Congress.
And that would be the largest aid package.
And I hate even saying aid because I always want to use scare quotes because it's like almost makes you think of a first aid kit or something.
Zelensky said that Speaker Johnson, whom Zelensky met with when he came to D.C.
last month, personally assured him that the legislation would pass eventually, I think in January.
And bear in mind, this would be the largest package yet of the whole war.
Exactly.
Of the $60 billion, the largest expenditure yet.
All right.
Thank you so much, Michael, for joining us.
We have an after show that we have to get to.
I want you to check your clothing to make sure that there's no watermelons, nor are there any octopus on any of your clothing so that you don't get dragged in as a new hate crime perpetrator by that account.
I want to make sure you're thorough about that.
And thank you so much for coming on.
We will see you shortly.
I have a suspicious banana.
I don't know if that counts.
I'm sure it will soon.
All right, Michael.
Have a good evening.
That concludes our show for this evening.
This is Thursday night, so now that we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our live after show where we take your comments and respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions with our live interactive after show that we do for subscribers to our Locals community.
