Carlson-Shapiro Rift on Israel Exposes the Right’s Long-Standing Israel Divisions. Kafkaesque New Social Media Bans. PLUS: Matt Stoller on Boeing’s Safety Fiasco & Corporate Greed
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Welcome to a new and what we think will be an exciting 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, One of the most significant rifts in conservative politics has been emerging over the last three months, ever since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the Biden administration's immediate request for another $14 billion for having to have the United States finance Israel's new war in Gaza.
But that riff turned into a major explosion last week when one of the most influential figures in conservative media, Tucker Carlson, launched some extremely vitriolic critiques against Ben Shapiro and, more broadly, the pro-American sector of the American right.
Carlson had previously expressed the substance of his critiques over the last several months, including in an interview on this program in December.
His two principal points have been, number one, it is a direct and glaring violation of so-called America First ideology, America First ideology, to demand that American taxpayers fund the Israeli military and fund Israeli wars, especially considering that millions of Israelis have higher standards of living than millions of American citizens do.
And number two, much of the American right, ever since October 7th, has completely abandoned its claimed belief in free speech in order not just to defend, but to demand a wide array of attacks on the free speech rights of Americans who are critical of Israel.
In other words, demanding the erosion of the rights of American citizens in order to shield this foreign country from critique.
Other influential right-wing figures beyond Carlson have recently voiced similar critiques about the Biden administration's unflinching support for Israel, including some who did so on our program.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, for example, explained how he is now the target of a very aggressive effort by AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee, to recruit and fund a primary challenger against him to punish him for opposing Biden's $14 billion request for Israel.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who also told us he opposes that request, as well as recent conservative efforts to silence and demand the firing of various Israel critics, and The Daily Wire host Candace Owens, who exchanged incredibly vitriolic insults with her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro over the latter's fanatical support for Israel.
And there have been many other examples as well.
But what rendered Carlson's most recent comment, speaking to Breaking Point's host Sagar Anjeti, a new frontier in this rift is that Carlson waded directly into a claim that, despite being clearly true for many Israel supporters, is also one of the most rigidly enforced taboos in American discourse.
The former Fox host strongly implied, if not outright stated, that what motivates Shapiro's obsessive fixation on Israel and his relentless demands that the United States, American citizens, fund and support that country is not his view that such policies are best for the United States, but rather his view that such policies are best for Israel, the country to which, according to Carlson, Shapiro maintains his highest allegiance.
Now for these comments, Carlson, needless to say, was instantly condemned as being a bigot and a racist.
Not this time by Media Matters or Brooklyn-based digital media outlets, but by some of the Republican Party's staunchest supporters of Israel.
This event did receive some attention, but not nearly as much as it deserved, given the multi-pronged significance for this long overdue debate on U.S.
policy toward Israel within right-link politics, especially given the new political orthodoxies of the Trump-era conservative movement.
Over the weekend, I published a rather lengthy article on our Locals platform regarding the implication of these disputes that have been surfaced within conservative politics as a result of Carlson's accusations against Shapiro and his most fanatical pro-Israel allies.
These issues have, of course, been a major topic of our reporting and commentary on this program since October 7th.
But the ability to gather it all together in one place, take a few steps back and reflect on it, and then express it in written journalism was both cathartic and, I hope for my readers, illuminating.
As I've been saying for some time, I've been really wanting to return to more regular written journalism, which has always been the anchor of the work I do.
The idea when coming here was to do this show nightly on the Rumble platform and then publish our written journalism on the Locals platform.
But doing that has been difficult for me over the last year, both because of the time constraints of producing this nightly show at a quality level we feel comfortable with presenting.
It takes a lot of preparation to do the right way, as well as the personal struggles our family has faced over the last 18 months.
So I resolved that in 2024 I would finally start writing more.
And perhaps the excitement of rediscovering that passion for my writing, as well as my very passionate views about this topic, caused an outpouring of a lot of energy.
In fact, the primary challenge over the last week in working on this article was how to reduce it to a manageable length.
With the help of our great editorial team here, I was able to do that, and I really hope that those of you who haven't read it yet will.
But I nevertheless wanted to take a few minutes tonight to highlight some of what I regard as the most important and overlooked aspects of how we arrived at where we are, where the United States, virtually alone in the world, Has no space to criticize Israel.
How no issue unites the establishment wings of both parties in Washington more than mindless and unlimited support for this foreign government.
Even when, as now, it requires the United States to incur very substantial costs.
Costs that we incur both as a nation and as a citizenry.
And most of all, I want to continue to do what I can to encourage some sort of reckoning With the principles of conservative politics that most of its leaders and adherents profess, And the necessary abandonment of those principles in order to justify everything that is happening in the United States when it comes to the topic of Israel and its war in Gaza.
Right before this show began, just minutes before, there was breaking news about an announcement by Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis that perfectly illustrates and relates to the point we wanted to cover on tonight's show, where DeSantis announced how, in his own words, he is implementing a program that makes it easier specifically For Jewish students in the United States to transfer to Florida State schools and to receive a variety of benefits as a result of that transfer.
Not the first time that Governor DeSantis has advocated group-based rights of the kind that he typically says he opposes when it comes to other groups.
So we're going to cover that just breaking story as well.
Then, over the last 24 hours, almost a dozen journalists, pundits, and commentators were banned from Twitter from X. With no explanation of any kind, their accounts just simply disappeared.
The only thing they had in common?
They had been outspoken critics of the Israeli war in Gaza and scathing critics of the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.
Now today, after a lot of uproar about this, Elon Musk, to his credit, responded to critics of these bannings, including myself, with a vow to investigate what happened.
And then all of those accounts were quickly reinstated.
But this episode, along with our experience, recent experience at TikTok that we told you about, where our show's account was banned without warning or explanation in December, only then to be quietly reinstated after public protests after several weeks, illustrates how Kafkaesque big tech decision making over our discourse has become.
The issue is not merely the repressive nature of having the boundaries of our political debates severely limited by often unseen corporate executives or automated systems.
That's obviously a concern of ours, one we've covered a lot, but it's also the complete lack of due process and appeal available for those whose ability to participate in public discourse is zapped out of existence overnight, often in the most arbitrary ways.
We'll examine these events today at X and the one at TikTok, as well as the ongoing banning on TikTok of the popular YouTube commentator Jimmy Dore, also without explanation, to illustrate this highly consequential problem with big tech censorship on our political speech.
And then finally, a really harrowing and almost fatal episode involving a Boeing 737 at Alaska Airlines has shined considerable light on this corporate giant, on whose board, let us remember, Nikki Haley so lucratively sat after leaving the Trump administration.
Many of Boeing's troubles are the byproduct of the standard and most definitely bipartisan revolving door politics of the DC swamp.
Industry executives are appointed to the government positions overseeing that industry, get very permissive, and then leave government and are highly rewarded when they return for services rendered.
But much of it is the byproduct of the kind of mega mergers that have increasingly destroyed competition for the American consumer, most often appearing within big tech, but also in other industries as well.
We will speak to one of the country's most informed and interesting antitrust analysts, the friend of the show, Matt Stoller, who has written a book on this, who works for a leading think tank about all of these events, as well as some of the latest antitrust proceedings that may finally pose serious dangers To both Google and Microsoft in order to understand these sometimes obscure yet highly impactful proceedings.
Before we get to the show, a few programming notes.
First of all, we were involved in a debate.
I don't know why I'm using the royal we.
I was involved in a debate on January 6th, which was Saturday night, that I originally had planned to attend in person in Austin, Texas, and for logistical reasons at the last second was unable to, so I participated remotely by video, and on the side of the debate, which was about January 6th, Was my, along with myself, Alex Jones and the former Trump speechwriter and Duke University professor of political science, Darren Beatty.
And on the other side was the YouTuber Destiny, as well as the two Krasenstein twins.
And I have to say, I didn't know what to expect from them, the two Krasenstein twins, but they actually performed at a higher level of substance than I had anticipated.
I thought actually they did the best job on their side of the debate, but the debate got quite, The viewership for this debate was extremely high.
points, but it was a very long three-hour debate.
And so we prepared the highlights of the debate, the things that we thought were, say, the 20 or 25 most important minutes of the exchanges we thought were most illuminating that we published as a separate video on our own platform, which we hope you will take a look at.
The viewership for this debate was extremely high.
On our platform alone, it was watched by close to 600,000 people.
Destiny had another 600,000 just on his platform.
Zero Hedge, which organized the debate, had several hundred thousand people there.
It was streamed on X. So it was definitely well in excess of a million people that watch live.
And I think these kinds of debates are things that, especially when done in a way that I think is more focused, I think a one-on-one debate or a two-on-two debate, is actually generally more illuminating are the kinds of things that we really believe, especially when they are involving people who genuinely disagree on key issues can be not just entertaining, but I think very nutritious.
The ability or the obligation to confront the strongest arguments against your position to allow the audience to hear that.
When it brings together audiences that are usually siloed, people end up hearing arguments and views presented in a way that they're not often accustomed to hearing it, I think it can change minds.
So we definitely intend to do a lot more of those.
I'm hoping Rumble will start to help organize and sponsor them.
They've indicated some interest in doing that, but in any event, I enjoyed doing the debate.
I hadn't done one of these in quite a while.
So check out the excerpts that we selected.
It was really about not only January 6th, but whether that can be considered an insurrection or a coup, something of course that I think is radically and wildly overstated, though done so for very specific reasons.
The question of whether Trump can be accused of having engaged in or incited that insurrection, a crime with which he has never been charged, though that's serving as the basis for the attempt to remove him from ballots.
The role of the FBI in the proceedings on January 6th, and the role of the FBI generally in our public life, and a lot of related issues that I really think are worthy of a lot more attention than usually afforded them by the corporate media, so you can find that on our Rumble page.
As another reminder, we are encouraging our viewers to the show to download the Rumble app, which works both on your smart TV and your phone.
Doing so enables you to follow the programs that you most love to watch on Rumble.
Obviously, that begins with System Update, but there are a lot of other programs worthy of your time and attention.
And if you follow those programs and activate notifications, which we hope you will, it means the minute that we begin broadcasting live or any of those shows do, you'll be notified.
So you can just click on the link.
You don't have to remember when shows begin at one time.
And we're trying to build Rumble as not just the audience that watches the videos, but the live audience as well.
It really helps fortify Rumble and its free speech effort with advertisers and the like.
So we hope that you will consider doing that.
As another programming note, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can listen to each episode 12 hours after their first 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.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform.
That's where we publish that new article.
And every Tuesday and Thursday night, we have a live interactive after show where we take your comments and questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions for future shows and guesses.
It's really a way to maintain a dialogue, not just a monologue, between myself and the audience, which I think is a crucial form of journalistic accountability.
If you want to become a member of the Locals community, which gives you access not only to those After Shows, but also the daily transcripts of every program that we produce here on Rumble in written form, As well as the original journalism, like the article that I just wrote.
We have several more coming down the pike that we will publish on that platform as well.
And in general, it's just the thing that really helps support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
It's critical to our show.
Just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the values but also one of the perils of doing a live nightly show about the news is that you can't always control what happens in the world that can affect your preparation.
You can spend the day preparing a show and then sometimes hours or even moments before you're about to go live on air, something happens that you just absolutely have to talk about.
It just throws the entire plan for your show kind of off track and you have to try and accommodate it at the last minute.
And then sometimes, like I said, it can be a real value because as happened today, we have been planning on speaking about a particular issue, the topic of that article I had mentioned.
And lo and behold, something happened, I mean, just moments ago, not even an hour ago, that so perfectly illustrates the perspective that I wanted to share with you that it was almost like it was custom made.
Like, I couldn't have thought of a better example to bolster and vividly illustrate the point that I wanted to make.
So, as I indicated, the article that we wrote was triggered by the surprisingly vitriolic comments, criticisms that Tucker Carlson voiced about Ben Shapiro, and in particular, Ben Shapiro's very intense, long-standing, and obviously
uh really entrenched love for and devotion to the foreign country of Israel and it affects his advocacy about what the United States should do and it affects his advocacy about free speech and a whole variety of other issues and it's not just Ben Shapiro he's probably the most prominent representative in the media of this view but it's been a very long-standing
plank of American political life that Israel is the foreign country that by far the United States is willing to sacrifice the most for.
Gets more foreign aid over decades than any other country by far.
And our article was designed to explore these rifts in conservative politics that were illustrated by this attack on Ben Shapiro by Tucker Carlson that he made while on breaking points.
And as I said, the two primary arguments were the foreign policy issue that an American conservative movement that has redefined itself since Trump as being about an America first foreign policy is insistent that American taxpayers pay for the wars and the military unassisted Of Israel and not just pay for their wars, but incur all kinds of other costs in order to do so.
Diplomatic costs, harms to our physical security, harms to our standing in the world.
Very difficult policy to reconcile with the America First ideology has been enunciated by the Trump movement and by right-wing politics in general.
That's a tension that we have explored many times before.
And then I think the other issue, which is even more disturbing, is the fact that the American right has, to its credit, become the most robust and vocal defender of free speech in the United States over the last decade, the most vehement opponents of both state and corporate censorship, the ability to constrict our political discourse in the name of avoiding people being offended or having them feel unsafe because of dissent that they have to hear.
And yet, for years now in the United States, But especially since October 7th, there has been a very concerted effort, led by many of the same people on the American right, who have created an image, a very lucrative media brand, based around their defense of free speech, that when it comes to Israel, they completely abandon, and instead start deciding that actually censorship is not only justifiable, but crucial.
And I want to show you the two clips from the interview that Tucker Carlson gave to Sagar and Jetty because it really outlines this.
But before I get there, I just want to show you what Ron DeSantis announced.
Now, Governor DeSantis was a figure that was of importance in the article that we wrote because even before October 7th, Ron DeSantis made a decision, clearly, that he intended to try and attract the hardest core neocons and Israel supporters who are still in the Republican Party.
Most neocons, the leading neocons, have left the Republican Party for the Democratic Party precisely because of these tensions that have emerged in Trump-era politics, but there are still a lot of neocons and a lot of Very devoted Israel supporters left in Republican politics and DeSantis made a decision early on whether through conviction or through political calculation and strategy or some combination thereof to become the most pro-Israel president running in the race.
And one of the things that he did again before October 7th back in 2019 or 2020 Was that he decided he was going to sign into law a new hate crime bill that increased penalties for so-called hate crimes.
Now, hate crimes in general have always been very controversial in Republican politics.
Most Republicans, most conservatives have long argued, and it's a view that most free speech advocates, including myself, agree with, that we don't need hate crimes.
Because violence is already a crime.
If you go and kill somebody, if you go and assault somebody, if you target somebody with violent acts, you will go to prison regardless of whether you're doing it because you hate the person, because you want vengeance against them.
Because you dislike who they are for personal reasons or because of the group to which they belong.
And the concern with hate crimes enhancements of punishment and penalties is that it requires the state to try and ascertain what's going on in the mind of a person when they commit a crime.
And somehow it becomes a worse crime if you're, say, killing somebody because they're black or because they're gay or because they're trans or because they're Muslim.
Or because they're Jewish than if you kill them for some reason of personal animus.
And it basically is a thought crime.
It's something that becomes a different kind of crime because of what's going on in your head.
So conservatives have long opposed this just on principle.
And yet Governor DeSantis decided that he favored a bill to increase penalties for hate crimes.
And when he did it, he specifically said he was doing it in order to target anti-Semites, to increase the punishment against people who commit crimes aimed at Jewish people because they're Jewish.
He didn't talk about the other groups.
He talked about specifically doing this in order to protect American Jews.
And what made it so extra bizarre Is that he did not sign this bill that governs the rights of American citizens, that imposes punishment on American citizens, that affects American citizens, specifically citizens of Florida.
He didn't sign the bill in the United States.
He didn't sign the bill in Florida.
He flew to Israel.
And after meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he had a ceremony, a bill signing ceremony, to sign a bill governing American citizens' rights in a foreign country, in Israel.
And that obviously raised a lot of eyebrows.
It's a very strange thing to do for someone who claims to be an American nationalist, is to go around the world signing bills in foreign countries while the officials of that foreign country look on and applaud.
The ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, generally a liberal organization, came out and applauded Governor DeSantis, not only for signing the bill, but doing so in Israel.
And then after October 7th, one of the very first things that Governor DeSantis did was he issued an executive order banning from the University of Florida educational system from all campuses, we're not talking here about children or high school students, we're talking about adults in college, a pro-Palestinian group called Students for the Justice of Palestine.
And the argument that he made to justify why he could ban a student group Who's principal purpose is to defend the rights of Palestinians.
Obviously something that is within the free speech rights of Americans was because he claimed that these groups, this group, by advocating in defense of Palestinians and criticizing Israel, was lending material support to Hamas, a terrorist organization, in a way that was criminal.
And the free speech organization FIRE.org, which built up a lot of credibility over the last decade with conservatives because they were one of the few groups willing to defend right-wing speech and right-wing students on American college campuses targeted with censorship.
came out and said that not only do they oppose Governor DeSantis' order banning this pro-Palestinian group, but they considered it to be such a grave and flagrant violation of the First Amendment that they urged school administrators to ignore the order on the grounds that it's unlawful.
Because it is true that it's a crime to lend material support to terrorists.
Or terrorist groups.
Usually the way that crimes work, as we had discussed in the case of banning President Trump from the ballot on the grounds that he engaged in insurrection, is you have to be charged with a crime and then brought into court and convicted of it.
These student groups were never charged with that.
And Governor DeSantis didn't even claim they had done anything other than express their political views.
And as FIRE said, you cannot have material support for terrorists.
Composed of nothing more than the expression of political speech, but it was an example of a Republican politician claiming to hate censorship, claiming to vehemently favor free speech.
Who came out and banned a student group because of the views that they were expressing to the point that a free speech organization popular among American conservatives not only denounced it but said it was a grave violation of the First Amendment so much so that administrators should ignore the order.
We covered that extensively at the time.
This is showing you this kind of progression of Governor DeSantis and this part of American political, the American conservative faction, abandoning their professed principles in the name of shielding this foreign country from critique.
Now, one of the most egregious and amazing examples that I talked about in the article is that about three weeks ago, the American corporation Palantir, which was funded by Peter Thiel and has a very close working relationship with the The U.S.
security state actually had a personal interaction with them once because back in 2015-2016 they were hired by the Bank of America, Palantir was, because the Bank of America had expected there to be a major leak about the Bank of America from WikiLeaks and Palantir planned how to try and destroy the reputations of what they called WikiLeaks' primary Advocates.
And I was one of the people, one of the two or three people that the plan talked about and how they could destroy my reputation as a way of making it impossible for me to defend WikiLeaks.
Palantir ended up apologizing publicly.
When this document came to light, the CEO called me and apologized.
But that is Palantir.
They have a very close working relationship with the U.S.
security state.
And about three weeks ago, the CEO of Palantir and Palantir as a company announced That they were going to create 180 jobs, new jobs, for people to be able to go and work for that corporation, and they were reserving these jobs exclusively for Jewish students.
If you're not Jewish, if you're Christian, if you're Muslim, if you're anything else, Black or Latino or anything else, you are barred from these jobs.
Only American Jews can apply for and be hired for these jobs.
Just a classic group-based set-aside that every American conservative I know, almost by definition, vehemently opposes.
And yet when Palantir announced that they were creating 180 jobs solely for American Jews, Ben Shapiro went onto Twitter and oozed with praise.
He said, love this.
That was it.
Love this.
And that tweet was up for seven hours while all of his conservative followers, or many of them, said, what do you mean?
How can you possibly praise a job set-aside program based solely on group membership?
Isn't this the thing that you've been claiming for years you detest?
Affirmative action and judging people not by their individuality, but by the membership, the group membership to which they belong.
And so seven hours later, he very begrudgingly backtracked and said, yeah, I guess maybe these jobs should be open to everybody.
Barry Weiss is another person who went onto Twitter and saw that there were 180 new jobs being created, not for some minority group that she's not part of, but a minority group that she is part of.
And she, too, said, wow, and obvious approval.
So that was a really mass dropping moment, I think, in terms of whether a lot of these conservative thought leaders and pundits who have been, again, getting very wealthy, Off of branding themselves as defenders of free speech and opponents of group-based set-asides, make complete exceptions for Israel.
My article called it an Israel exception to American conservative political views.
Now, just right before we went on to the show, Governor DeSantis on Twitter posted this tweet that announced the following, quote, Today I am directing Florida's colleges and universities to make it easier for Jewish students to transfer to a Florida higher Today I am directing Florida's colleges and universities to make it easier While leaders of, quote, elite universities enable anti-Semitism, we will protect Jewish students and welcome them to Florida.
And there are provisions in this law that essentially say that people who opt into this program will have out-of-state tuition reduced to make it more like in-state tuition.
Here is the group StopAntiSemitism.com, which has basically become the cancel culture entity of the American right, the pro-Israel sector of the American right.
They've been every day posting pictures of obscure American citizens for the crime of things like having a Palestinian flag on their laptop in a cafe or holding a sign that's pro-Palestinian.
They've gotten people fired for things like this.
They're dragging them into the public.
All the things the American right has spent years saying they're opposed to.
And they went onto Twitter today very excited about this new program.
Quote, Florida, as a result of the skyrocketing cases of anti-Semitism students across the U.S.
are facing, Governor DeSantis is directing the state university system and the Florida college system to waive credit hour requirements and application date windows to make it easier for Jewish students facing anti-Semitism on their campuses to transfer in a Florida-based college university.
in-state tuition may be granted on a case-by-case basis.
So there's a financial benefit to this as well, as well as a special privilege available, according to the DeSantis, if you're Jewish.
Now, if you read the text of the law, it's obviously written by lawyers who are trying very hard to make this discriminatory and illegal privilege, group-based privilege, less illegal by essentially depicting it as a program available for anyone fleeing religious persecution.
But Governor DeSantis, in describing the purpose of it, said, specifically, just like he did with his hate speech law, that it's designed to benefit American Jews.
Now, the American right has been hearing grievances from all sorts of minority groups and mocking them and heaping scorn on them, saying, look, stop complaining.
These are excuses you're making.
Toughen up.
Life is about hearing things you dislike.
Mocking black student groups and Asian student groups and LGBT student groups and Muslim student groups.
Saying, oh, you poor little babies need a safe space for hearing views that you dislike.
And apparently a lot of people on the American right, like Governor DeSantis and Ben Shapiro and Barry Weiss, have decided that they finally found a minority group that is the truly persecuted group in the United States, American Jews.
Now I think if you look at the reality of life in the United States, it's extremely difficult, to put that mildly, to make the case that American Jews are singularly and uniquely persecuted.
Every metric would negate that claim.
Which isn't to say that there's not anti-Semitism.
There's also anti-black racism, and anti-Latino racism, and anti-LGBT animus, and anti-Muslim animus.
Those things all exist too.
But the argument has been that you cannot provide benefits to people based on their demographic characteristics until October 7th, when all of that changed.
Now, here is the interview that Tucker Carlson gave.
He gave it in, I'm going to show you two segments.
The first one was his attack on Ben Shapiro and his allies for seemingly wanting to prioritize the needs of Israel over the needs of the United States.
And here's what he told Sankaran Jetty.
This was on December 29th.
for years.
I've watched it with Ukraine and I watch it now with Israel.
I watched in particular, there was a lot of consternation around some comments you made, I think by Ben Shapiro and other, where you were like, "Well, I've never seen this level of care about Americans who are dying of fentanyl," which I think is a traditional nationalist message.
And yet I've watched the entire kind of right-wing ecosystem get embroiled in fundamentally what is a third world conflict.
Now, Now we can say support, you know, not support.
We can have criticisms, etc.
of that.
But what explains this like literal allegiance to a narrative on Ukraine, on Israel?
Why is it that so many of these people don't seem to have the same level of care for actual American citizens?
You know, I find it really distressing.
And in both of those conflicts, I approached it with a clean conscience because I just don't have strong feelings one way or the other.
And I'm not hostile.
I've never hated Ukraine.
I don't have any feelings about Ukraine.
And Russia, same thing.
I've never been to either place, and I'm not invested emotionally.
So I could just look at it from an American perspective.
In the case of Israel and the Arab world, I've spent a fair amount of time in both, and I like both.
And I felt terrible for the people who were killed on October 7th.
I still do.
So I didn't, I had no weird motive.
I was just like thinking about it from an American perspective.
Is this good for us or is it not?
And I was just amazed by the intolerance and the willingness to immediately go to invective and character assassination.
And it's like, I said, you know, first of all, If the people who live in Gaza who are being moved out are so evil and dangerous that they can't live in the region, why would you want them to move into my country?
I mean, what are you saying?
They can't live there because it's too scary to live next to them, but they can live next to me?
So at that point, I felt very hostile about that because it showed such contempt for me and my family and my neighbors and my country.
It is my country.
That's how I feel about it anyway.
It's all of our country.
And so I was like disgusted by that and I said so and I don't know why that's weird.
Why wouldn't I be offended by that?
And then it was immediately, you know, I'm a hater or a bigot or something like that.
None of that registered with me because You know, first of all, I've been attacked for so long, but attacks that aren't true... You know, if somebody said, you know, wow, you've gained some weight this summer, I'd be like, ugh, it would hurt my feelings, because it's true!
But if someone's like, oh, you're a hater, you hate, you know, that's not true.
So I don't really care.
But I did think it showed, like, the level of not just corruption, which I knew, but of, like, emotional instability and craziness.
I mean, there are people, and I stopped reading any of it, but there are people on the right Who have spent the last two months, every single day, focused on a conflict in a foreign country, as our own country becomes dangerously unstable on the brink of financial collapse, with tens of millions of people who shouldn't be here in the country, we don't know their identities or the purpose of their being here.
Like, stuff that could destroy the country for real and make it impossible for my kids to live here.
They've said nothing about that, and they're focused with laser intensity on foreign conflicts, and I'm like, At some point, I've got four kids.
If I'm so caught up in the problems of my neighbor's children and completely ignoring my own children as they get addicted to drugs and kill themselves, You know, I'm not against helping my neighbor's kids, but clearly I don't love my kids.
I mean, that's, that's, you know, that's the only logical conclusion.
And they don't care about the country at all.
And that's, you know, that's kind of their prerogative.
But I do.
Because I have no choice.
Because I'm from here, my family's been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here.
Like, I'm shocked by how little they care about the country.
And including the person you mentioned.
And I can't imagine how someone like that could get an audience.
people who claim to care about America because he doesn't, obviously.
Right?
Right.
Well, I mean, Tucker, we've seen it too on free speech.
I mean, people who build become multimillionaires.
All right.
So let me just stop at that for a second, because one of the reasons I hope you read this article that I wrote, if you haven't yet, is because I spend a good amount of time documenting the very ample costs and damage that the United States endures that we incur in order to tie ourselves at the hip to is because I spend a good amount of time documenting the There is no country on the planet who has been as steadfastly devoted to the Israeli war as the United States.
A lot of countries in the first week with the emotion of October 7 stood up and said, oh, we support Israel.
And as I've seen what has unfolded in Gaza, the complete destruction of civilian life, they have often rapidly retreated.
But the Biden administration is steadfast.
And They defend everything Israel does and has made very clear that there's nothing that can get Joe Biden to reconsider paying for Israel's war, shielding it diplomatically in the world, and essentially justifying everything that they're doing.
And I go through all those costs, which I really hope you'll read, and decide, are those costs worth it?
Why are we willing to incur such a mammoth cost if you don't care about the moral component of the war?
From just a pragmatic perspective, we interviewed Professor Muir Shimer last week, and he went through a lot of that as well.
But the amazing thing about it is the abandonment of conservative principles, including the fact that, as Tucker just alluded, and this is something else I document in the article, the minute that you raise any of these issues, the minute you start questioning the Israeli government or you start questioning the American support for it, you will not just be disagreed with. the minute you start questioning the Israeli government or you You will have your character smeared.
You will be called racist and bigoted.
And told that you are driven by a hatred for Jews and the irony of that is that the primary grievance of the American right when it comes to left liberal tactics is that a lot of people on the left, a lot of American liberals are incapable of engaging in debate any longer without immediately accusing everybody who disagrees with them of being racist and bigots.
And to listen to the American right complain about that all these years And then watch them become the leaders and the most aggressive and casual purveyors of that topic.
Everyone in American life knows that if you criticize Israel, or if you question American support for Israel, you will be accused of anti-Semitism.
To the point that just like racism and all the other accusations whose meaning has been diluted because of its overuse and cynical exploitation, that accusation has lost its sting, which is very dangerous because there is anti-Semitism in the United States.
But that phrase is increasingly losing its sting because of how cheapened it has been, principally from the pro-Israel right that tosses that word around automatically for whoever questions that foreign country, which is the right of every American citizen to do.
And that's exactly what happened to Tucker.
A lot of conservatives who have been holding their tongue, as he's been criticizing Israel for the last three months, heard this interview and decided this was a bridge too far.
Now, the other point that he made, and this is one that he's made with me twice, I did his show early on in the conflict, I think late October, and then he came on my show last month, and this is one of the things we focused on, was
The extraordinary way in which the American right has aggressively embraced, not all the American right, this sector of the American right has aggressively embraced the exact tactics of censorship, cancellation, all the things they pretended to oppose and loathe when done to them in order to silence and punish and destroy their reputations and even get fired a lot of Israel critics.
And the excuse that I always hear from those who are doing that is, oh no, we're just doing this because we want to make the left finally have to live under the regime of censorship they created.
And the reason that's so false is because this did not just start happening in October 7th.
For as much as right-wing speech has been the target of censorship in college campuses and more broadly in our political culture, especially since the Trump presidency, Israel critics, critics of the Israeli government, have been the most frequent and the most aggressive targets of censorship in academia and in media.
More people have lost their jobs for expressing criticism of Israel in academia, in media, in our corporate world, on this topic more than any other.
It is not new.
It is the opposite of new.
I have interviewed, on this show, many people who have lost their jobs for expressing criticism of Israel.
That has been a major source of censorship in the United States for many years and it doesn't come from the American left.
Now, here is what Tucker has said about that in his interview with Njeti.
Well, I mean, Tucker, we've seen it too on free speech.
I mean, people who've built, become multi-millionaires, who've, you know, made entire careers, who've, you know, literally became famous, you know, on this very reason.
I know you've spoken about this previously, but it's very important to our audience as well, is that, you know, standing up for free speech rights of people you do disagree with is just, is probably the most important.
Yes.
And we've seen some of that come for American citizens on Palestine.
How do you work through this, too, when we're both under such immense pressure, even social pressure, of like, how could you support this?
You know, take maybe the context of the university presidents.
We've got billionaires like Bill Ackman.
I'm curious what you make of this.
My assessment is they're upset that they're not included as marginalized within the DEI regime.
They claim to be against the DEI regime.
But will you really keep going to make sure that, you know, all this racial hatred and all this other has been enshrined in elite institutions will be, you know, once you get a win, are you really going to keep going past that?
What's your assessment of this general moment on Palestinian, you know, free speech, hypocrisy and more?
Well, we have free speech in this country, and it applies to people we disagree with, by definition.
Period.
I mean, it's the first right guaranteed that, of course, it precedes government.
It's given to us by God, as the document says.
But it's the first right enumerated in our founding documents.
So it's the foundation of the country.
And so you can't give any ground on that.
Like, none.
And anyone who would give ground on that, and I would include the governor of Florida, who I think is a good governor and I like him personally, but signing a censorship bill is completely unacceptable.
And I don't care what your motives are.
I mean, this spring there was some black nationalist group that was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for its views on Russia.
And my first thought was, you know, that's not acceptable.
Now, how much do I have in common with the black nationalist group that I guess probably hates people who look like me?
Actually, probably 100% chance I'd like him if I had dinner with him.
To be honest, I'm sure they're really good guys.
I mean, I just sort of feel that.
But whatever.
It was irrelevant to me.
You can't do that.
You can't try to put people in prison for expressing opinions the government doesn't like or the ruling class doesn't like or any opinion.
Any opinion.
Any opinion must be protected, or no opinions are protected.
So anybody who seeks to limit my ability to say what I think, believe what I want, is treating me as a slave.
As a slave.
I mean, not as a human being, and certainly not as a citizen.
That's just really clear, and I don't know why people don't grasp this.
But, you know, one sort of parenthetical ironic note, to see people who spent a career mocking, you know, the sensitive liberals on campus who want safe spaces, and they're, you know, feeling in danger because opinions are violence, say that exact same thing.
People feel unsafe.
What?
You know, no!
No!
You know, words are not violence.
You have to tolerate them in a free society, or it's not a free society.
All right, so that was, you can understand, I think, what became such a provocative critique of the American right and the reason it fostered so much debate and also led to my article.
Now, as I said, I think I was so happy to finally be writing again after many, many months that the article ended up basically being four articles in one and we had to spend a lot of time trying to reduce it to a manageable and it's still a somewhat long article, but certainly within reason.
But there were a couple of standalone articles that we're going to publish, one of which was on Bill Ackman, who has become for a lot of pro-Israel conservatives, this kind of heroic messiah figure, because people have come to believe that he's really interested in dismantling because people have come to believe that he's really interested in dismantling the diversity, equity, inclusion programs at American academia, when in reality, that is not That is the pretense under which he's marching.
His real goal is to purge academia of Israel criticism and knows that in order to get the support of the American right that he needs, he needs to package it in this other package.
The other aspect of the entire A controversy that rarely gets attention because it's taboo is something I also wrote about and then took out, but I'm going to publish it shortly, about how taboos function in American discourse.
The reality is, and I just wish people would be a lot more honest about this, is that there are millions of Americans, not just American Jews, but evangelical conservatives and others who are taught from birth or from childhood, they're indoctrinated with the belief That Israel is not just another foreign country.
That Israel is a special country.
It has a particular importance, sometimes divinely ordained or culturally critical.
And that has come to shape into adulthood a lot of people's views about what American policy should be geostrategically.
And that plays a vital role in why people like Ben Shapiro look at a set-aside program for Jews Jobs only for American Jews, a contradiction of everything he claims to believe in, and his first reaction, instinctively, is to say, love this.
I think that needs to be aired a lot more.
But one of the things I did include in the article that people who have read it have reacted most positively to, that I want to go over in just a minute, but I want to get to Matt Stoller first because he's on the line, but we're going to return to this, is the history of U.S.
policy toward Israel because it hasn't always been the case that it has been taboo to question U.S.
support for Israel.
In fact, including, maybe even especially, in Republican and conservative politics because the last two presidents who did so most meaningfully were Ronald Reagan and George Bush 41.
And I just want to show you a little bit about that because it's a really unknown history but I think it sheds very vital light on the nature of our debates now and they have a lot of food for thought about where we've gotten and how.
So, like I said, before we do that, just to respect the time of Matt Soler, which is very, very precious.
I don't want to keep him on the line any longer, even though he's going to hang up and listen to the show.
He's a huge fan of the show, rarely misses an episode.
But Matt is with the American Economics Liberties Project, where he specializes in antitrust, he wrote.
One of the best books on the modern debates over antitrust, which was Goliath, that focused on the big tech battles in antitrust and the way in which it harms the American consumer, this kind of monopolistic abuse of big tech giants.
He also is the author of a newsletter called Big that has become very popular.
It's a free newsletter on Substack.
He's also a friend of the show, and we are always happy to have him on.
Matt, good evening.
It is great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Hey, thanks.
And I put on a jacket for you.
You're looking very sharp.
Yeah, the control room was telling me that.
I was like, I don't believe it.
It's Matt Stoller.
And yet, here you are.
And they were right.
You look very good.
So congratulations on that.
All right, let me ask you, there was this harrowing footage, like everybody's worst nightmare who flies of this gigantic hole in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 from Alaska Airlines, and it turns out there has been a lot of warnings, a lot of warning signs with this particular plane that for whatever reason didn't get a lot of attention, and I think
A lot of the attention, journalistically, got devoted, and understandably so, to the standing revolving door aspect of how the industry of which Boeing is a part, they had Nikki Haley on the board, they have a lot of friendly regulators inside the government who worked in this industry, go to the government, come back, that famous revolving door.
But there's also A significant antitrust component to how Boeing has consolidated power and the ways in which that has resulted in some of these problems.
Talk about what those antitrust issues are within this industry.
Yeah, so I wrote this up in 2019 when the problems with the 737 MAX first became really obvious with multiple plane crashes.
So Boeing was, for most of the 20th century, an engineering marvel.
I mean, it was a place run by engineers.
They designed the B-52 in a weekend.
They bet the company on the 707.
I mean, it really One of these sort of institutional jewels of America and the world.
And in the 1990s, this changed, right?
How did we get from this incredible company to a company that can't do anything?
Or, you know, they screw up a lot.
I mean, they built the lunar module.
They're amazing, or they were amazing.
Well, what happened is in the 1990s, the Clinton administration said, hey, we have too many defense contractors.
The Cold War is over.
And we're going to cut spending, but we don't want your profits to go down.
So why don't you guys all merge with one another?
And the Pentagon actually paid the merger costs and also ripped up a bunch of procurement rules.
And one of the mergers that took place was Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas.
And McDonnell Douglas was a kind of a disaster as an aerospace company.
There have been a series of aerospace mergers throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and this was the final one.
This was the only two remaining civilian aircraft manufacturers of a certain size getting together, and so Boeing would now be the monopolist over, the only producer in America, aside, and globally there was also Airbus.
But that's the whole U.S.
aerospace industry.
And then Because it had no competition, at least domestically, the only thing that the management was focused on was squeezing more revenue from tax concessions, from offshoring, from laying people off, and then from squeezing costs out of the manufacturing process.
Instead of trying to innovate, instead of Having the engineers design cool things, the Jack Welch MBAs got put in charge.
And that, you know, you fast forward 10, 15, 20 years, and you get disasters like the Dreamliner, the 77 Dreamliner, and then the 737 MAX.
And the 737 MAX happened in 2019.
We've known about this catastrophe.
The CEO had to resign.
And yet, they didn't really change the culture.
They put another Jack Welch private equity guy named David Calhoun in charge.
And so you fast forward to today and, you know, you've got an emergency exit door that they didn't screw the bolts on because they're using some dumbass supplier spirit aerospace systems and they're not investing in good workers or in good production processes.
It's basically they're just tossing the institution on the trash heap, as often happens when you monopolize an industry because there's no one else to go to.
So one of the topics you just touched on is one I'm really interested in.
Just by coincidence, when I was doing a bunch of research on Bill Ackman over the past several weeks, just because this person kind of materialized out of nowhere.
I mean, he's obviously been very influential in the finance world.
That's how he got to be a billionaire.
But he's now obviously whetting his appetite for using his vast wealth for political power.
So I think it's kind of important to know, hey, who exactly is this person?
And where did his wealth come from?
And one of the things that he specializes in is buying companies, stripping them of all its value, and then driving up the stock price, and then selling them and leaving these companies in rooms, you know, like hauling out American industry and American companies.
And this has been, you know, like look at, if you look at Boeing, you know, it is, leaving aside like the relationship to the military industrial complex, it is the kind of thing that, to the extent you can find good things about American capitalism, It did kind of illustrate this idea that you have engineers who invent things, you have a labor force that builds things.
These factories were based in the United States creating a lot of jobs.
You had labor unions who were fighting for good paying wages for American workers and it was this kind of innovative industry.
And there have been advances in commercial aviation.
I think I saw this amazing statistic that there hasn't been a fatal crash of an American civilian jet in, I think, 18 years now, which is obviously, you know, very impressive.
And yet, at the same time, you have this other part of the economy that no longer focuses on building It's just kind of like finance, like just wealth being created digitally and on paper from these financiers and vulture capitalists that, rather than contributing anything or building anything, really are about destroying things.
Talk a little bit about that distinction, both in terms of how it's played out at Boeing, but then more broadly in the American economy.
Right.
No, that's exactly, that's exactly right.
And what happens, there's a sort of an extractive part of our economy.
And that's what finance really is.
Finance is effectively, it's a middleman type of job.
You're supposed to connect the savings of a nation to the investment.
You're supposed to run the payment system.
And historically, about two cents of every dollar in the economy has gone to finance, bankers.
Um, and and other people in that industry.
Today, it's about 9%, right, which is a hugely inflated amount.
And what has happened is that instead of, you know, we used America used to have kind of our institutions run by engineering types, and and we prioritized making things, whether that's good or bad.
I mean, you make you make like, there's there's definitely America did a lot of bad things.
But like, you know, we had a certain economic order.
If you wanted to get rich, you got rich by building a steel plant and running it and selling a lot of steel.
And what has happened, and this is a transformation that really started in the 70s but picked up steam over time, is that we started to move to what's called an asset light model of production.
Not really production, where we just sort of move stuff offshore and you would have a financial overlord class.
People like Bill Acton, there are many others, a bureaucratic class are part of it too.
And they kind of have this tacit deal with like the Chinese Communist Party and other recipients of offshoring who want to build things for their own strategic reasons.
And they would kind of like finance that class and we will offshore things.
And so our working class increasingly has less and less power.
We increasingly make less and less and more is made abroad.
But the deal is the US controls the dollar.
And we kind of have this financial parasitic class on top that runs things, makes geopolitical choices, fights over kind of monopoly rents.
Like that's one way to see the fight over Harvard that Bill Ackman is engaged in or a lot of these speech fights.
It's just a fight among like bureaucrats and billionaires over like over extra rents.
But that's essentially like the you know, you see a kind of like populist resurgence.
You see a resurgence of unions.
You see a militant workers who are angry about this.
You see like a lot of the Trump phenomenon was a reaction against this.
You see like a lot of the things that we do on antitrust are a reaction against this kind of high finance model of production.
But that's really like that's I think kind of the core conflict in America right now.
And the cultural stuff is is really important.
It's a really important part of it because it's a way of disguising what's really going on where we which is about prioritizing you know the the Fights among this kind of weird intra like intra elite fights among this weird finance class versus normal people who actually make things and sell things and grow things and do things for a living.
Yeah, you know, what's so interesting about that, Matt, is I feel like in a lot of ways the 2008 financial crisis, like pretty much everything that happened prior to the emergence of Donald Trump, has been completely buried.
But in so many ways, I think that was one of the lessons, right, was that you had all these people Manipulating these incredibly complex financial instruments that were created over the last, say, 10 to 20 years.
Things that Warren Buffett famously said were so complex that no one understood them.
They were weapons of mass destruction aimed at the American economy.
All these derivatives and mortgage-backed securities.
And yet all these people Profiting enormously, getting extremely rich, without actually creating anything, without contributing anything, again, actually deconstructing it.
And there were political ramifications.
You had the Occupy Wall Street movement.
You had what had originally was the Tea Party that came out of this kind of libertarian economics that before got co-opted by the Republican Party, but then definitely played a major role in the populist economic populism of Donald Trump in 2016, as conceived of by Steve Bannon.
But have there been any Real reforms or positive changes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis or has this obsession with like creating wealth seemingly just on paper without making anything gotten worse in the United States?
Well that's a big question.
I would say yes there have been reforms but yes things have gotten worse.
And and and also I think that that in one major way things have gotten better.
And that is in 2008 we were all under the impression at least I was that we lived in a kind of a market system and Corporations and banks were kind of neutral technocratic institutions.
And then after the financial crisis, you think a lot of people realize I did that that corporations and banks are political institutions and markets are politically structured.
And we have to drop a lot of the illusions that we were living under.
And that's what the bailouts were.
And I talked to people on the right.
I talked to people on the left.
I think we all understand like the bailouts were kind of like giving the game away.
And what a lot of people expected was that the bailouts would indicate, all right, there's time for like, it's time to have a sort of a new arrangement, like, all right, the free market stuff, that's kind of a fraud.
You guys all wanted your bailouts.
Now we're going to like cut a deal and figure out how to make things work again.
That isn't what happened.
What happened is this kind of like weird parasitic overclass realized, oh, we actually just can control politics.
And that's what they started to do.
And so, you know, the billion, someone who was worth a couple billion dollars back then, they're now worth $30,000.
In terms of what good reforms there have been, I think what you do see is that a lot of people learned from the financial crisis and there's a kind of delayed policy reaction to the financial crisis.
That's good.
In terms of what good reforms there have been, I think what you do see is that a lot of people learned from the financial crisis.
And there's a kind of delayed policy reaction to the financial crisis.
So a lot of the antitrust suits that you see against big tech are coming from people who learned about political economy during and after the financial crisis and have said, no, we want to do things differently.
Now, most of the people who are still in charge of our governing institutions are are not, you know, are they learned before the 2008?
They're still kind of like diehard neoliberal types of the Larry Summers or whatever, but like the newer generations and not not like young people anymore, people who are 40 and under.
are like, no, we have to do things differently.
And they're not in control of things, but they're starting to gain control of institutions here or there.
And that I think will and is making a significant difference.
But so far, things are still getting worse because the kind of new thinking doesn't have enough power.
And the different populist movements are kind of too disorganized and too like fighting with each other and haven't really decided that they want to do politics.
But I think we're getting closer.
So speaking of some good news, the last time you were on my show, I think like in late November, we talked about a couple of developments in the antitrust and litigation world that seemed pretty threatening to Google.
Google, you have this ongoing trial with the Justice Department that was initiated by the Trump Justice Department, continued by the Obama administration, the Biden administration, rather.
You had this jury verdict in favor of a company that was suing because of abusive practices with the Apple store that I'm sorry, with the Google Play store that the jury verdict was in favor of the company suing Google.
And now you have this potential, I think it's $1.6 billion jury verdict that is being sought as a result of a trial relating to a patent dispute concerning artificial intelligence.
Where is Google in terms of all of these different processes?
Are we really seeing this kind of tide finally turning?
this like damn breaking, whatever metaphor you want in terms of Google.
I know the last time you said you think, yes, Google is really reaching the point where it's just no longer going to be sustainable as this giant.
What have the last couple of months brought on that front?
Yeah.
I mean, another thing that happened is Google had a case against the incognito mode on Chrome and they had to settle that and We don't know what the details are yet, but that'll come out.
They lost an important legal motion, and presumably the settlement is unfavorable to Google, but, you know, we don't know.
And there's a trial date for a state lawsuit on advertising technology set for 2025.
There's a trial later this year on ad tech.
I mean, Google is going to have, it has so many problems, legal problems, and that's just, I'm just talking about the U.S.
stuff, there's a lot of problems it has worldwide, that I think they're gonna start talking about restructuring the company, spinning divisions off, I don't know if it'll be this year.
I think it'll be towards the end of this year, but it could be next year.
I think we are hitting a tipping point.
It hasn't quite reached the stage of obviousness.
People at the company are probably still trying to deny that this is a Really, this is kind of the end of the road for how they run their business, and they're going to have to find new models.
But yeah, there are too many problems that they are encountering.
Everywhere they step, they create new legal problems.
And when a judge or when a jury rules against you, which is what happened, it kind of says to judges around the country and other juries, hey, this is a law-breaking company you should maybe be more skeptical to.
Last question, this whole drama that happened at OpenAI where the board was in revolt and tried to fire Sam Altman and then had to bring him back and you have this kind of, you know, very opaque role that Microsoft is playing with this massive investment that it now has in OpenAI.
Somehow it started, Elon Musk has been complaining about this, as a nonprofit to which I think he donated.
And then along the way, it became this massive private for-profit company that Microsoft has a gigantic stake in.
And now there is a EU investigation underway to determine whether or not Microsoft's role in open AI may violate certain EU regulations.
Obviously, this is part of this broader explosion of artificial intelligence and all of the products that are coming with absolutely no regulatory framework at all.
Maybe that's for the best, maybe not.
I don't really know.
But what is the challenge or the challenges that Microsoft faces with regard to this multi-multibillion-dollar investment that it now has in open AI?
I mean, OpenAI is basically a subsidiary of Microsoft.
And what Microsoft has been trying to do with all of these, like, silly, oh, it's a nonprofit, oh, we just have a stake, but then not something not on the board or whatever, is to try to pretend that they don't own OpenAI so they can avoid antitrust scrutiny over whether they're allowed to own OpenAI.
And when Sam Altman was fired, Microsoft made it really clear to the board, hey, You guys, you might think you run this place, but in fact, we provide the money and the computing power.
So you have to do what we say.
And then Sam Altman got hired back.
There were other things going on there, too.
But Microsoft is now saying, OK, we want some board control.
And effectively, they're giving the game up.
They're saying, "No, OpenAI is really kind of like, we have significant amounts of control over that company." And when that happens, then what that could do is it could trigger an investigation of like, as if it's a merger, right?
And then you'd have to say, "Oh, well, is this merger reducing competition in some way?
Or are there potentially other problems with it?" I think that's what the EU is looking at.
I don't know if domestically we'd be, if in the US that's happening.
The FTC is pretty aggressive about these things, so I suspect that the EU is looking at it.
The FTC could be looking at it too.
But, but broadly, like, what you're going to start seeing, I think, with AI, and you are seeing already, is that the existing rules against things like fraud, or, or, or deception, or anti competitive behavior, They're going to be applied, and they are being applied to firms that use AI.
And they're going to be applied to Microsoft.
They're going to be applied to OpenAI.
I know OpenAI is actually being investigated by the FTC.
So that's the way that I think about it right now.
People like to talk about AI as if it's a new regulatory framework.
And in one sense, it probably does.
There's new technology here.
But in another sense, what we really just need is like the rule of law needs to apply to the powerful.
Because fraud is fraud, and if you're using AI to do fraud, it's just fraud.
You don't need special rules for that.
But if you never convict anyone who's powerful for fraud, or if you never really are able to bring these companies, these dominant companies, to heal, then it doesn't really matter what kind of laws you have.
You don't need new laws, you just need the rule of law.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I think it actually goes to, I think, what is always the challenge when we try and cover these antitrust issues and these issues of corporate malfeasance is that we talk a lot about how to make people understand that these are not just abstract legal battles, that they have very real effects on the average person. what is always the challenge when we try and cover Understand that these are not just abstract legal battles that they have very real effects on the average person.
I think there's nothing like a gigantic hole in the fuselage of a commercial jet to bring to very vivid and visceral light the reason why these issues matter so much.
It's the reason why we like to cover them and do so principally by talking to you.
So we are super appreciative always of your taking the time Matt and we will continue to cover this and harass you to come on our show and help us figure this all out.
Thanks so much.
Alright, thanks for having me.
Alright, have a good evening, Matt.
So right as I was talking about right before we took that break to talk to Matt about these issues that, you know, are somewhat difficult sometimes to express the importance of, but like I said, sometimes you do see the visceral evidence.
It's this fascinating history, and it's the only other part of my article that I want to kind of highlight because I do think that sometimes these historical frameworks are very difficult to kind of navigate through.
It takes a lot of time to do it.
It takes a lot of recall, and with everything going on in the world, most people don't have the time to do it.
It's easy to forget.
Most of us didn't live through the history in the 1970s, and even the 1980s and 1990s.
It's very distant now.
But I do want to show you a couple of snippets about how, in particular, Republican politics treated the issue of the United States and Israel.
For a long time in the 50s and 60s, after Israel's founding, President Truman really didn't care much about Israel.
There was the Suez Canal conflict and the United States began caring more.
But it was a very much arm's length relationship.
Israel really was like any other foreign country.
And it was really only as time went by and Israel began occupying a much greater Place in the imagination of the Jewish diaspora and American Jews in particular did politically this issue start to assert itself probably under the Kennedy administration and then into the early 1970s and then definitely by the 80s and 90s it was as important and had as center stage priority as it does now.
But I want to show you before I get into the whole issue of Reagan and Bush 41 and their attempts to denounce and threaten and place limits on Israel that would be completely unthinkable in our modern political climate in ways that I think will shock you if you haven't been familiarized it with before.
I just want to show you an interview that Richard Nixon gave after his presidency.
Richard Nixon, whatever else you think about him, was always a very wily and shrewd political figure.
He understood the political landscape very well.
He worked himself up as someone who didn't have a lot of charisma from a kind of obscure member of Congress from California, kind of latched himself onto the McCarthy controversy until it became too extreme and disassociated himself from it in just enough time to save his reputation, kind of latched himself onto the McCarthy controversy until it became too extreme and disassociated himself from it in just enough time to save his reputation, became the vice president to President Eisenhower for two terms, suffered a very close defeat to President Kennedy in 1960 suffered a very close defeat to President Kennedy in 1960 that a lot
He then ran for governor in 1962 and lost, and that was when he said you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any longer.
It seemed like his career was over.
He lost a gubernatorial race by a significant margin after being almost the American president and yet made an amazing comeback in 1968 and then won a landslide victory in 1972.
Obviously, the Watergate scandal took him down, but he really understood how to navigate state political currents in the United States.
And here he is talking about the issue of Israel and the political pressures brought to bear on an American president by the Israel lobby in the United States.
I found these comments very interesting.
Listen to what he said.
It isn't a question whether I felt it.
The fact is that American Jews support Israel.
And I understood that.
And the fact is that every Jewish prime minister that I have known has enlisted American Jews to bring as much pressure as possible in the political process on American presidents.
That's understandable.
I don't object to it.
Now just that comment alone is interesting because we hear so much about The dangers of foreign influence in our political life.
And yet what he was saying there was that Israeli politicians are very adept at marshalling the support of American Jews.
And these days, a lot of the support for Israel, if not more so, comes from American evangelicals in this kind of bizarre twist of fate that has been very beneficial to Israel from an American perspective.
And there was a video of Prime Minister Netanyahu when he didn't realize he was being videotaped or it wasn't for public consumption in 2001 sitting with some people in his apartment talking about the use of military force and whether it would be too aggressive and whether the world will turn against it and the American political system would as well.
And he said, I don't care about American political leaders.
I'm not afraid of them.
I was never afraid of Bill Clinton.
Every time he tried to tell me anything, I ignored him because we have and can get the American people to stand up in support of us against their own government.
And he was mocking the idea that American political leaders could ever impose limits on Israel because of the ease with which Netanyahu said Israel could induce public opinion to go on the side of Israel, and that's what President Nixon was describing there.
The President must not go along with it on occasion.
Let me explain something about what is called the Jewish lobby in this country.
In the first place, Jews, understandably, in the United States, Because of what happened in World War II, because of the Holocaust, are going to put first priority on the survival of Israel.
Now, as good Americans as they are, they believe that America's survival and security ...is directly related to Israel's.
In other words, their belief is that being for Israel first means that that does not mean you're putting America second, because they think it goes together.
An American president, however, has to approach it in a different way, in my opinion.
He's got always to think first of what is best for America, and that's true whether it has to do with the Israelis, or whether it has to do with the Irish, or the Germans, or what have you, or the Poles, etc.
Usually what is best for America is also best for Israel and vice versa.
But on occasions, for example, an American president must make a decision that does not in effect give the Israelis a blank check.
And one example of that is a decision that I made.
I decided early on in our administration that we were going to seek good relations with Egypt And others of Israel's neighbors.
Many of my Israeli friends didn't like that because they wanted a special relationship with Israel and Israel only.
But I have always said that Israel's interests are better served to have the United States a friend of Israel's neighbors and potential enemies than to leave a vacuum which the Soviet Union would fill.
I still believe that and I think that should be American policy today.
Now, obviously, like anyone who says anything like that, President Nixon was accused of anti-Semitism, and there were a lot of tapes where he spoke disparagingly of the influence of Jews that emerged, even though many of his closest advisors and supporters, like Henry Kissinger, were Jews themselves.
But just like Tucker Carlson immediately got accused of anti-Semitism, so too was President Nixon, even though those comments were very mild, but it showed the ease with which people could talk about that reality, that American Jews have a very close Emotional connection that has been inculcated in them since childhood to revere Israel and to consider its priorities first.
And it doesn't mean they're unpatriotic or subversive.
They have this framework that says that American and Israeli interests never diverge.
And President Exum was saying, of course, that's not true.
There are times when it does diverge.
And the role of the American president is not to put Israeli interests first, but American interests first.
And sometimes that means alienating Israel and its American supporters.
Now, in the 1980s, when President Reagan, in his first term, was faced with some complicated conflicts in the Middle East, including the fact that the Israelis were at war and had very hostile relations with Syria and Lebanon and were often bombing them, the Americans had a military base in Lebanon of Marines, and in 1982, a suicide bomber attacked those military bases and killed 241 American soldiers. 241.
American soldiers in Lebanon.
And there was a great deal of pressure on President Reagan to take military action against the countries that Israel insisted was behind that attack.
Namely Iran.
The Israelis have been wanting the United States to fight Iran for many decades and tried to use this event to pressure Reagan to attack Iran.
And not only did Reagan refuse to attack Iran, he ended up withdrawing American bases from Lebanon on the grounds that it was not in our interests Namely America's interest to be there but instead it was in Israel's interest but not in the American interest.
Imagine what would happen now if the United States were attacked in the Middle East and the response was not to bomb everybody we could find but instead simply to
Pick up and leave on the grounds that we have no interest there as proven by the fact that our troops had just been attacked in large part because the perception that we were too tied at the hip to Israel and that the people who were Israel's enemies made the United States its enemies as a result of that very very unblinking support.
Here's an article from Responsible statescraft by Lawrence Korb, a long-time Middle East analyst.
And the headline was, Ronald Reagan wasn't afraid to use leverage to hold Israel to task.
In fact, Republican presidents were much tougher on Tel Aviv in the wake of its aggression against neighbors, settlements, and civilian attacks.
This is somebody who actually worked for President Reagan in his administration, Lawrence Korb.
And I go into this in my article, but I just want to explain one aspect of what happened here, which was, because it's so interesting, which was that the Israelis were bombing Lebanon and Syria.
And President Reagan was becoming increasingly angry about it because the bombing was so severe, it was killing a huge number of civilians in the region.
And the perception of President Reagan was that those attacks on Israel's neighbors was harming American national security.
And so at the time, the Americans were giving a lot of aid to Israel.
And Reagan understood The bizarre paradox that the United States was giving aid to Israel and at the same time Israel was doing things that Reagan believed directly harmed American national security is evidenced by things like the attack on the military base that killed 241 Marines.
And so Reagan picked up the phone and he called the then Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.
And Menachem Begin is a very interesting figure.
Prior to Israel's formation, there were terrorist groups that was composed of Zionist Jews who viewed the British as illegitimate occupiers of what they regarded as their territory, and they would do terrorist attacks against the British to drive them out.
They regarded the British as unjust occupiers and the terrorist group the Argonne was often was led by Menachem Begin.
And one of the things that they did was that they bombed the King David Hotel, which is where the British They had as one of their administrative bases, that's where their officials who were administrating the Palestinian territories were often based from.
They would govern there.
They had offices there.
And the air going under Menachem Begin set off a bomb in the King David Hotel that killed, I believe, a total of 91 people, mostly British, some Jews, some Arabs.
And the position of the Ergun was that they had given a notice of 15 minutes to evacuate the building, but it was not nearly enough time for them to actually get out.
Huge numbers of people remained.
The bomb went off.
It killed a lot of people.
And if you go and listen to BBC, tapes at the time, they talk about this Jewish terrorist It was just pure terrorism.
The British viewed this as terrorism.
Even though the British were there, administrating land that wasn't theirs, the Israelis saw the British as unjust occupiers and the Israelis used violence against the British to drive them out.
So that should sound very familiar to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And nobody had any trouble at the time calling those groups Jewish terrorist groups.
And Menachem Begin was the leader of that and became the Prime Minister of Israel.
And Reagan called him and said, I believe what you're doing with this bombing campaign is so excessive and so indifferent to the value of civilian life of Arabs that it's actually a holocaust.
And Menachem Begin said, "With respect, I don't think you should be lecturing me on what a Holocaust is.
I lived through it.
My family lived through it." And Reagan then backed down and he said, "I demand that you immediately cease this bombing campaign or you're going to lose American aid." And within an hour, Begin announced the cessation of this bombing campaign.
Again, something that would be utterly inconceivable for an American politician today to do.
Imagine if a Democratic president did that, what pro-Israel conservatives would be saying about him.
Or even a Republican president did, and yet that was Ronald Reagan, who did not go on a bombing campaign to avenge the attack on the military base, but instead withdrew troops from Lebanon on the grounds that we had no national security interest in being in that region.
And then demanded, with the threat of a cessation of aid, That the Israelis ceased that bombing campaign that the Americans perceived to be against our interests.
It's an incredible story.
I go into the article with obviously a lot of documentation.
Just going to tell the story for the purposes of here in order to focus on what happened in the next administration, which was the Bush 41 administration.
So when the first president, Bush, was inaugurated as president, He had a lot of foreign policy experience.
He had run the CIA and he had been Ronald Reagan's vice president for eight years.
He was there for all those events that I just described.
Ronald Reagan relied a lot on George Bush as vice president, the first George Bush, because he had so much foreign policy experience, including being the director of the CIA.
And President Bush's administration was composed largely of realists of the type that Professor Mearsheimer derives from.
His Secretary of State was James Baker.
Baker had been one of Reagan's most trusted aides.
He was his Secretary of Treasury and the Chief of Staff at the Reagan White House.
And then George Bush, who knew James Baker going back many years because they were both in Texas, made Jim Baker his Secretary of State.
And Bush 41's National Security Advisor was Brent Scowcroft, who also came from a realist foreign policy tradition, similar to the kind that Henry Kissinger was, but a little bit different.
And their view of the world was that the role of the United States government was to adopt policies in Americans' interests, period.
Not to adopt policies that would help other countries or serve their interests, but to help advance American interest.
And one of the policies that the Bush administration, the Bush 41 administration inherited was a massive annual aid package to Israel where the United States transferred billions of dollars every year to Israel.
And then on top of that, provided billions of dollars of loan guarantees that enabled the Israelis to do things like rebuild things that had been bombed, but also to fortify their military.
And at the time, the position of the United States government with respect to Israel was the same as it is now and has been for the last four decades, which is that what is in America's interest is a two state solution where the Palestinians obtain their own state side by side with the Israeli state.
Because the failure to have a two-state solution creates a perception in the region that the Palestinians are being abused and that the United States is responsible for it.
It creates a lot of problems for the United States in the Middle East.
James Baker was an oil guy who was from Texas, so was obviously the Bush family.
And they regarded the oil industry as very important to the United States and the ability to have positive relations with the Arab world in that region was of high priority to them from an American perspective.
And it was being undermined and damaged by our support for Israel at the same time that Israel was making a two-state solution increasingly unlikely, even impossible, as a result of allowing Israeli settlers to expand in the West Bank, which was always supposed to be part of the Palestinian state when there would which was always supposed to be part of the Palestinian state when there And they were expanding so much that they were taking up all the land that was supposed to form a Palestinian state.
The Bush administration, the Bush 41 administration, got to the point where they said, these settlement expansions are directly harmful to our interests.
We are giving you many billions of dollars a year.
And in return, you are pursuing a policy that you know we oppose and believe directly damages our interests.
And therefore, And here's the Washington Post article from February of 1992, the last year of the Bush 41 administration they were preparing to run for re-election against the Democratic nominee who is Bill Clinton.
There you see from the Washington Post, Jim Baker bars Israeli loan aid unless settlements are halted.
And here's what the Washington Post reported.
I just want you to think about the impossibility of something like this in our current political environment.
As you look at Joe Biden, Absolutely prohibiting the use of any American leverage to tell the Israelis you cannot cross this line or you will risk American aid being lost.
Quote, Secretary of State James A. Baker III gave Israel a blunt public warning yesterday that unless it stops building Jewish settlements in occupied territories, it will not get $10 billion in U.S.
loan guarantees to help resettle hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Quote, the choice is Israel's, Baker said, appearing before Congress as Middle East peace talks resumed here and delivering what amounted to a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government.
Six weeks later, after Jim Baker did that, here was the headline in the Washington Post.
Charge of anti-Semitism is abhorrent, Baker says.
So obviously what happened was Jim Baker told the Israelis you need to stop expanding settlements in the West Bank or we're going to cut off aid because it's not in our interest for you to do that.
And within six weeks Jim Baker was widely vilified as an anti-Semite.
And the leader of the smear campaign to accuse Jim Baker of being an anti-Semite for being insufficiently supportive of Israel was the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton.
It was Bill Clinton who was trying to make it taboo in the United States to criticize or place any limits on Israel because he was such an opportunist that he understood that the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States was so great that, as President Nixon said, they tolerated no separation of any kind between the two countries.
Here's the Washington Post.
Quote, at a White House news conference, Baker was asked to respond to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's charges in New York Thursday that the Bush administration's browbeating of Israel has made, quote, overt anti-Semitism more acceptable.
The anti-Semitism charges are a byproduct of the strained relations that have developed between the Bush administration and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Clinton, speaking to a Jewish audience in New York, referred to complaints Bush has made about the power of pro-Israeli lobbyists and to the controversy about Baker.
Charging the administration with, quote, strident rhetoric, public and private, against Israel, against the Jewish community, Clinton said that, quote, this administration has broken down the taboo against overt anti-Semitism.
Do you understand what happened there?
It was Republican presidents, to some extent Nixon, much more so Reagan, and then Bush 41, That we're recognizing that the pressure campaign from America's Israel supporters to force the United States basically into captivity to whatever Israel wanted, even at the expense of our own country, was so damaging.
And they thought it was their obligation as American leaders, not Israeli leaders, but American leaders, to put some stop to that.
And then Bill Clinton came along and created an environment in which the Democratic Party's official view was that anyone who attempts to do that will be smeared as an anti-Semite.
Bill Clinton said our obligation as a country is to do everything that the Israelis request and demand.
And whoever doesn't is an anti-Semite.
Here, just to give you a sense for the climate that got created by that, Was a congressional hearing where Secretary of State Baker went and appeared before Congress to talk about his policy of telling the Israelis they risk American financial support if they continue to pursue a policy that the Americans regarded as damaging to Israeli security.
And in this clip, which was reported on by McLaughlin Group, which was a news program at the time, the Member of Congress who is grilling Secretary of State Baker in a very hostile way was a congressman named Larry Smith.
He was a Democrat from South Florida representing Hollywood.
That's the area where I grew up in South Florida.
It's an overwhelmingly Jewish city and he was one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress, Congressman Smith was, and just watch this exchange about Israel and U.S.
support for it, and where the Democratic and Republican parties respectively were, and how inconceivable a scene like this would be now.
Baker the Bold.
Secretary of State James Baker drew a line in the sand with Israel this week.
Stop building settlements in the occupied territories, or lose $10 billion in loan guarantees.
That ultimatum produced a sharp exchange between Mr. Baker and one of Congress's strongest pro-Israel supporters, namely Larry Smith.
When you in fact are not putting any conditions on anyone else on the Arab side at all.
Nobody else is asking us for ten billion dollars in additional assistance over and above the three to four billion dollars that we give every year Do you hear that?
- They're not asking for time.
- So what I, so, well, let me just, you want me to answer your question?
- Yes sir, but I would like, you know, they're not asking for. - Do you hear that?
It's nothing's changed in 30 years.
Congressman Mr. saying, why are you making all these demands on Israel but not on Arabs in the region?
And Jim Baker said, there is nobody else demanding of us billions of dollars every year in unconditional aid on top of $10 billion in loan guarantees.
That's why.
Because with that support comes the American right to place limits on what the Israelis can do, particularly when we perceive that it harms our national security.
And that extremely reasonable position is what caused all of this political acrimony and accusations of anti-Semitism.
Watch the rest of this.
So, well let me just, you want me to answer your question?
Yes sir, but I would like, you know they're not asking for any assistance.
Very shortly, Mr. Secretary, because I want to make sure that every member of the committee gets a chance to question and some others are coming.
Well, I think I probably finished the answer anyway.
You know, you've done that before, Mr. Secretary, and I find it extremely offensive.
And for you not to finish the answer is another attempt to try to reject any kind of significant intrusion.
No, Larry, I think I finished the answer.
Well, sir, you did not finish the answer, and it's basically the same way you want to deal with this subject.
I finished it as far as I was concerned, and I will determine when I finish my answers, not you.
I hope someday the American public is going to determine whether you finished the answers or not.
Israel says it will not budge.
The West Bank settlements will go forward.
So I don't know if you heard, but he said in his breath, disgraceful.
You see the importance of Israel to that congressman.
And he was far from alone.
And then at the end, you heard the news reporter, John McLaughlin, say Israel basically stuck its middle finger up the United States and said, we're not going to listen to you.
Yeah, you're giving us billions of dollars a year, but we don't care.
And that continues to be the Israeli view.
And anyone who questions that, to this very day, gets accused of being an anti-Semite, just like Jim Baker was, just like Richard Nixon was, just like Tucker Carlson just got being accused of, just like I've been spending the last three months being accused of, and much longer.
It's not just any of us, it's everybody.
It's an automatic tactic to hurl racism and bigotry accusations against anyone questioning Israel.
That's just the nature of American political discourse.
Now, speaking of people who are accused of being anti-Semites, here is a video clip of both Pappy Cannon and Ron Paul, and I went over this with, I believe with Professor Mearsheimer, where both Pappy Cannon He was a top Reagan official.
He was the communications director first for President Nixon, and then he served many key functions in the Reagan White House.
And then he challenged Bush 41 in a primary challenge in 1992 where Bush ultimately lost to Bill Clinton and received a lot of support based on his anti-establishment populist And then Ron Paul in 2008-2012 followed suit.
There were some differences, but a very similar ideological connection where he got a lot of support based on anti-intervention and America First ideology as well.
And both of them understood that there was no way to profess support for an America First ideology or an anti-interventionist foreign policy.
Where we say we're not going to pay for other countries' wars, we're only going to pay for wars that directly threaten American national security.
There was no way to create an Israel exception for that ideology, as has been done now by many, many American conservatives, as Tucker Carlson said.
Just listen to some of the things that Pat Buchanan, one of the leading Republicans of the 1970s and 80s, and then Ron Paul, both precursors of Donald Trump, had to say about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul recently called the onslaught in Gaza an atrocious massacre.
It's our money and our weapons.
But I think we encouraged it.
Certainly the president has said nothing to diminish it.
As a matter of fact, he justifies it on moral grounds.
They have a right to this without ever mentioning the tragedy of Gaza.
You know, the real problems are there.
To me, I look at it like a concentration camp and people are making homemade bombs and like they're the aggressors.
That was Ron Paul in 2009, so the president at the time was Barack Obama.
Ron Paul was criticizing Obama for being too scared of Israel, too reflexively supportive as they were bombing Gaza at that time.
You can almost randomly pick any year over the last 30 and find Israeli bombing of Gaza and every time American political leaders in both parties reflexively support what the Israelis are doing because they saw what was done to Jim Baker back in 1991.
And that was pretty much the last time any administration has been willing to stand up to Israel anyway.
Here's Warren Papi Cannon on this.
The Israelis have been hit with for six months with these little rockets, which didn't kill anybody.
It was outrageous, cruel, and stupid.
And they triggered a blitzkrieg against the Palestinians in Gaza, which in my judgment is an Israeli concentration camp, where a million and a half people are locked up, cannot come out or go in.
They've been controlling food, electricity, fuel, and the innocent people.
in gaza are the one suburb.
A concentration camp, Pat, doesn't that diminish the significance of the real concentration camp?
I'm not talking about a death camp.
I'm talking about what the British had in concentration camps in South Africa and what the Spanish had in Cuba and what others have had where they bring all these people, lock them in there, and treat them with great cruelty and a humanitarian disaster, despite what Zippy Livni said.
Now, those are right-wing politicians.
saying that sort of thing.
As recently as 2009, Here today was Ron Paul.
Congressman Paul was, of course, on my show, I think, two weeks ago.
I think that was actually where I talked to him about this tradition.
And this is what he said, quote, Secretary of State, this is Ron Paul today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Israel trying to convince Tel Aviv to slow down on killing civilians, stop flattening infrastructure, and to not ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
Israel's response thus far has been a hard no.
Has Washington ever been so impotent?
Also today, thousands of amputee children in Gaza continue to suffer as U.S.
provided bombs destroy their lives.
The idea that somehow this is a left-right issue, that only leftists question US support for Israel, is the kind of thing, like so many other things, that people believe only if they begin paying attention to politics within the last seven seconds.
You could actually make a stronger case that over the last 30 years, it has been American conservatives far more willing to stand up in defense of American national interests and question and even denounce the actions of the Israeli government, particularly when it comes to violence against their neighbors from President Bush and President Reagan and Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and on and on, Jim Baker.
And somehow it has become completely taboo to question this any longer.
And that is why I think what Tucker Carlson has been doing, what Candace Owen has been doing, what Thomas Massey has been doing, what Vivek Ramaswamy has been doing is so significant.
Because the reality is, and I really encourage you to read the article I wrote, where I laid out as best as I can, that the stated core values of the American conservative movement about foreign policy and America first and especially free speech are that the stated core values of the American conservative movement about foreign policy and America first and especially free speech are woefully and irreconcilably in conflict with what the dominant wing of not just the Republican Party, but the
Illustrated perfectly by what Ron DeSantis announced just minutes before we went on the air of this set-aside program that he said was designed to enable American Jews to get special advantages within the Florida state school system.
It is well past time that there's some effort to either jettison these views that American conservatives say define their movement or to stop maintaining an Israel exception for them.
So early this morning a lot of people woke up to the news that a lot of Twitter accounts, close to a dozen, and I don't just mean random Twitter accounts or troll Twitter accounts, I mean prominent Twitter accounts, people who have hundreds of thousands of followers, people who are established journalists, We're all, without any notice, without any explanation, just banned, had their accounts closed.
And if you went to their pages, it would say, this account is suspended.
I talked to several of them.
Each one of them said they had gotten no notice, no explanation about what the nature of this ban was.
And there were really two things that they all had in common.
It included people like the journalist Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept.
And then just Alan McLeod, who's a journalist with Mint Press and several other large accounts.
And one of the things that they have in common is they've been very critical of the Israeli war in Gaza and US support for it.
The other thing they have in common is they've been viciously critical of Bill Ackman and his attempt to use his personal wealth to cleanse American academia of the ability to criticize Israel.
Now, A lot of people raised their voice in objection, and I was one of them.
And in response to me and to others, Elon Musk, to his credit, said, I don't know about this.
I'm going to investigate it.
I'm going to find out.
What happened here is one of his tweets where he said, I will investigate this.
Within an hour or two, the accounts, every one of them had been reinstated.
Again, without explanation, they were just back online.
And one of the things Musk said was, quote, we do sweeps for spam, scam accounts, and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them.
So it all seems a little bit odd that an algorithmic error would end up banning multiple accounts that were critical of Israel.
Remember the context here.
The pro-Israel sector of American politics started attacking Elon Musk, accusing him of being anti-Semitic.
And days after that, he flew to Israel.
We covered it extensively at the time.
He had a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.
He kind of went on this tour to show his support for Israel.
He mouthed all the pro-Israel bromides that people are required to recite.
The ADL congratulated him, patted him on the head.
He then announced a new Twitter policy that any phrases that are deemed to be pro-genocide or inciting of violence will be banned and specifically named things like intifada, which is nothing more than the Arab word for resistance or uprising, as well as from the river to the sea.
It seemed to be a new Twitter censorship policy designed to ban some of the most common and popular pro-Palestinian phrases when people pressed and said, well, what about genocidal speech in favor of Israel?
Things like flatten Gaza, kill all Arabs.
He then said, well, yeah, of course it'll apply to that as well.
But the other thing that's going on here is that the EU, Has enacted a new, one of the most repressive online censorship laws called the Digital Services Act that allows them to impose very serious fines on social media companies if in the judgment of the EU they permit too much disinformation or hate speech to circulate.
And the very first formal investigation launched under this new law was announced by the chief EU censor, a French official, and it was aimed at Elon Musk and X, and the specific allegation And there you see the New York Times report on this, illicit content on Elon Musk, axe draws EU investigation.
The allegation was that Twitter is allowing too much anti-Israel or pro-Hamas content.
So the EU is trying to force Twitter to censor more in accordance with the EU policy, which is to support Israel.
Now, what's really going on is the EU, of course, has been censoring in a way that is more aligned with the liberal left.
They've been censoring On COVID, to prevent anybody from questioning the efficacy of the vaccine, or the importance of masks, or trying to ban discussion of the origin of COVID.
They've been censoring on Ukraine, including by making it illegal for social media platforms to host Russian state media.
That's why Rumble is not available in France because Rumble refused to remove RT and Sputnik on the orders of the French government saying we're not going to allow foreign governments to dictate to us who we can host.
But very cleverly, the EU decided we need some right wing support for our censorship regime.
So they decided to frame this investigation of acts as an allegation that Twitter and Facebook and Elon Musk are allowing too much pro-Israel or sorry, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas content.
In other words, they're not censoring Israel critics enough.
So whether this was some kind of an attempt to assuage the EU investigation Whether it was a deliberate attempt to target people criticizing Bill Ackman in Israel, whether it was just some kind of innocent error that seems very directed, I don't know.
I'm glad that Elon Musk was responsive to the complaints of those of us who objected and that those accounts got reinstated.
But I think it illustrates an important point, which is that one of the big dangers of how big tech controls our political debates is that there's just a complete absence of accountability.
These accounts just get zapped out of existence.
A lot of times people spend years building up a business and followers and they're just immediately banished from online.
Elon Musk deserves credit because one of the major reasons he bought Twitter was because he wanted to roll back a lot of the censorship excesses that had existed in the pre-Musk era and I think he's done that.
Not always perfectly, we've criticized Instances where he banned people that were inconsistent with Twitter's stated policy including Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and others, but in general he definitely has made strides in restoring free speech even though it has cost him a lot in terms of advertiser excess, exodus and other things.
This was very inconsistent with what he had promised, which is why I so vocally objected, but it got fixed in a short period of time.
But you may remember as well, we had reported a month or so ago on how the TikTok account for this program, it wasn't in my name, it was in System Update.
We posted clips of our program there.
Obviously, we're trying to reach as much of an audience as we can.
There's a ton of people, for better or for worse, on TikTok.
And it was a way to reach that audience and some of our Videos went very viral on TikTok and out of nowhere, one time we got a warning about a video that we had published that was critical of the Ukrainian government.
It got taken down and banned and we got a warning.
We appealed it and they said they were wrong.
They reinstated the video.
They withdrew the warning.
The only other strike we ever got was I did a report on CIA interference in the Brazilian election.
It went mega viral because we had put Portuguese subtitles on it and Brazilians were consuming it and spreading it around in large numbers and that did get taken down and we were told it was disinformation even though it was based on very public media reports and a lot of original reporting that we did.
But back in, I think, November or December, out of the blue, we got word that TikTok had just banned our account.
Did not provide any explanation at all.
Our social media manager tried to get an answer.
What did we do?
What video was it?
Nothing.
They just wouldn't provide an answer.
And they even said this ban is permanent and there's no appeal.
Now, we raised a big stink about it.
We reported it on our show.
It was covered by media outlets.
And simply by luck, somebody who is a fan of the show, who has followed my journalism for a long time, heard about the band, knew somebody at TikTok, asked them to investigate why this had happened.
And we were told that the reason it happened was because there was some quote, overzealous moderator who disliked our show.
And had marked every one of our videos as disinformation and in violation of TikTok's policy.
And that's what caused our account to be permanently banned.
Just some malicious moderator who decided they didn't want our show on TikTok.
Now, had we not had the platform that we had, had we not had somebody in our audience who knew someone at TikTok, we would still be banned.
We don't care about TikTok very much.
We don't rely on it.
So it's not a big deal.
But for a lot of people, it's a huge deal.
It's the way that they get heard.
Now, my friend and the popular YouTube and rumble commentator, Jimmy Dore, his account got banned at exactly the same time as ours did.
There you see his report from December 14th.
TikTok bans Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore.
He's showing their inability to log into their TikTok account.
Jimmy's account still is banned, he never got an explanation about why, and he filed an appeal that has never been answered.
It is really unbelievable the extent to which online censorship has become normalized.
This is really quite new.
The first real test case was only 2018.
That was when the big tech companies got together and banned Alex Jones.
And then shortly after, banned Mylianopoulos.
And only one of the very few people objecting at the time was the then member of the board of directors of Facebook, Peter Thiel, one of the earliest investors who said, this is going to get out of control very quickly.
And he was right.
But so many people decided that they hated Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos enough that they weren't willing to object, not realizing the framework they were implementing.
And now we live in a world in which political censorship online, the primary means that we use to communicate and spread news and organize, is more censored and controlled than ever.
And the other aspect of it is, it's just all done in an unseen way.
There are no restrictions of any kind, no guidelines, no opportunity to contest it.
It's just a very Kafkaesque world.
And I think one of the things to remember is that the people who really Began becoming the leading agitators for the censorship regime under which we all now live.
So ironically are the people employed by the nation's largest media corporations who call themselves journalists.
They became the leading agitators for censorship even though the role of journalists for decades in American life was to advocate for the most robust free speech and free press interpretations possible.
There was a segment on CNN today that I happened to see that just illustrated the point so well.
There was a controversy because the former NFL punter Pat McAfee has his own show on ESPN.
They hired him because he had his own independent show online that was attracting a big audience.
And he puts the Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers on the show.
And Aaron Rodgers made a joke about Jimmy Kimmel being on the Epstein client list.
He was obviously joking, but it turned into a big controversy.
Aaron Rodgers is hated because he questioned a lot of the COVID Orthodoxies.
He refused to get vaccinated.
He's a big, strapping, healthy quarterback.
He made the correct assessment that he was not in danger, didn't need the vaccine.
So the liberal establishment hates Aaron Rodgers because of the views he expressed.
And here was Oliver Dorsey going on to CNN and using CNN.
And this is what they all do.
They Live to pressure social media companies and media corporations to narrow the range of acceptable ideas and to punish and silence and fire people who deviate from liberal orthodoxy.
It's as I've said before, it's watching journalists be the leading agitators for censorship.
It's like watching a cardiologist be the leading proponent of increasing cigarette smoking.
So here's just some of what No one can tolerate Oliver Darcy for very long.
No one watches CNN, but let's just watch a little bit of this because it really illustrates what their function has become.
Teener media reporter Oliver Darcy.
Oliver Kimmel says that he would accept an apology from Rodgers.
He just spoke the quarterback on ESPN.
No apology?
What did he say?
No apology, Boris.
No surprise there either.
Kimmel said he wasn't anticipating one.
Look, Roger said that he understood why Kimmel would be mad if he made the accusation, but insisted he did not make this accusation.
He certainly did signal or suggest that Kimmel might be involved in the Epstein documents that were released over the last several days.
He was not.
What Rogers did do is he used his time to go on this anti-vaccine rant assailing Jimmy Kimmel for apparently standing with the medical community and the likes of Dr. Fauci during the pandemic.
Why don't we take a look at that?
He gave a platform to one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation during the COVID times, Dr. Fauci.
So in my opinion, you know, he ripped me about the Vax and that turns out to be an L on many occasions because the Vax was not safe and effective like we were told that it was in the beginning.
There are a lot of injuries now that we've seen related to the vaccine.
So in my opinion, you went after me.
That's fine.
You're a comedian.
Go for it.
Not offended.
But that was an L.
Of course, what Rogers is saying there is just not true.
The medical community would of course say that the vaccine was both safe and effective.
And at some point you have to wonder when ESPN and its parent company, Disney, when they step in here, you know, Disney is at this point one of the only major media companies outside maybe Fox News that would allow this sort of dangerous anti-vaccine medical misinformation to be aired unchecked on their air.
And this isn't the first time Rogers has done this.
You know, he goes on these extended rants during his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, which is aired on ESPN.
But for now, ESPN and Disney, they're staying silent and not commenting.
This is exactly how journalists have become the leading advocates.
Do you see what he did there?
The whole point of this segment was to say, we're going to shame Disney for allowing free speech, for allowing Aaron Rodgers to question the wisdom of Dr. Fauci.
It is such a disgrace as someone who entered journalism, in part because I was supportive of the core defining values of what journalism is, exposing the secrets of the powerful, holding them accountable, but also defending the values of free press and free speech.
And these people who work for corporate media are one of the major reasons why so much of The internet is now controlled through a censorship regime because little weasels like this, who are like hall monitors, like how can Disney allow this person to say something wrong, have been using their platform.
The New York Times does this.
They have an entire tech team that does it.
NBC News has that little disinformation unit.
Their only purpose is to repeatedly pressure and demand major corporations To fire people who express dissent from liberal pieties, to silence them, to de-platform them upon threat of having these media outlets accuse those corporations of allowing the spread of disinformation.
This is the game that has been being played for seven or eight years and it is what has led to more and more censorship in the United States and the fault lies With these corporate journalists.
Now, obviously they're doing the bidding of the U.S.
security state and the U.S.
government.
That's what they exist to do.
It's not like they invented this, but they were the foot soldiers who carried out this mission that could not be more contrary to the journalistic model.
And so we have this reality where the Internet began as this unprecedented zone of freedom and anonymity and liberation has become the greatest tool of coercion and information control.
That is the war that is being waged.
It's one of the reasons why I think Support for Rumble is so critical and one of the reasons why I was glad to see Elon respond to these concerns and reinstate those accounts, but it shouldn't have to rely upon the ability to reach the owner of a social media platform.
It should be the norm, but it's become the exception because of extremely toxic people like Oliver Darcy and CNN to say nothing of the irony that these people who spread more disinformation than anybody else are complaining about this information to the point where they think they can censor the internet in its name.
There really has been nothing more tyrannical, more eroding of our core liberties than this very successful campaign to turn big tech platforms into a very tightly controlled weapon of information control.
And it's only getting worse and worse.
And the alternative, they're never going to change, is to just continue to fortify the alternatives, the places that allow this kind of dissent.
And that is something that you can do is continue to support those platforms that do that.
Rumble is under attack.
Elon Musk has suffered a lot of attacks for his vow to resist this sort of thing.
And the way in which you can...
Fight that is by supporting the platforms that are genuinely committed to airing independent media, to protecting the right of independent media to express dissenting views, because that is the only way to combat all of this.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first 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.
Usually Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done here, we go to our live after show on Locals.
Because the show went a little long, because I really hope that you'll spend some time reading the article that we published on Locals.
The article is free, it's not behind a paywall, you can read it there.
We're not gonna have our after show tonight, We'll be back on Tuesday night but usually Tuesday and Thursday night we have our live after show.
We take your questions, respond to your feedback.
That after show is available exclusively for subscribers to our Locals community and if you want to become a member of that community it gives you access not only to those
After shows but also to we every day we publish written transcripts of every show that we Broadcast live here on rumble and very professionalized ways if you prefer to read that content or keep it you have access to those transcripts there's also a weekly thread that people Can put questions in and comments in that I do my best to respond to as many of those as I can and since we're not having a local show tonight.
I'll be sure to Spend some time tomorrow responding to them.
So if you had questions for me for the after show that you can't ask because we're not doing it, put them in that weekly thread on the Locals platform and I will be sure to spend some time responding to those tomorrow.
But if you want to join the Locals community, which gives you access to all of that, but especially helps the independent journalism that we're doing, just click the join button right below the video player on the Rome page.
It will take you directly to that community.
For those who have been watching Thanks for watching our show.
We are, as always, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
