Speaker Johnson & Biden Open War on Ukraine/Border Fight. Corrupt Congress Outperforms S&P 500. Gaza Destroyed & LGBT Issues. Hunter Biden Laptop Confirmed (Again). UK Censorship
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Biden White House for months now has been desperately seeking to wrangle another $60 billion out of the U.S.
Congress to send to their friends and allies in Ukraine.
But for the first time since his branch of that war began two years ago, large sectors of the American public, along with many European nations, have decisively turned against further funding of this bloody yet futile war.
House Republicans, led by their new speaker, Mike Johnson, have been adamant that no new funding for Ukraine will be authorized, let alone another $60 billion, which would be the largest authorization yet, without several conditions being met.
Chief among them, real steps to first secure the American border before the Ukrainian border is secured, including measures that the Democratic Party have long claimed were fascist and white nationalists when Trump was advocating them.
As well as meaningful oversight measures to monitor and control how those billions of American dollars that are sent to Kiev are being used and by whom.
At least thus far, it seems like Speaker Johnson is being very firm in holding tight to those demands.
Just a short time ago, a couple hours ago, he went to the White House with other top House Republicans to meet with President Biden.
By all accounts, including the account provided by the Speaker immediately after he left the Oval Office, the two sides remain far apart, evidently unable to reach an agreement that would keep the war in Ukraine funded.
We'll report on the latest and show you the speaker's comments as Biden's rush to keep this war funded with American resources is, at least for the moment, still being stymied.
The U.S.
security state and the military-industrial complex almost never lose in Washington.
The war in Ukraine has been their top priority for two years, and competing with Israel, it still is.
We'll see if they actually lose this time.
Then, the Israeli destruction of Gaza continues unabated, though there is no problem there when it comes to the flow of U.S.
dollars to Tel Aviv, largely because President Biden has been very willing to resort to clearly illegal means to keep sending American weapons without any congressional approval, knowing that both parties overwhelmingly support his doing so.
We will show you the latest independent data including videos that demonstrate the unparalleled nature at least for modern warfare in the last say six decades of the destruction of civilian life in Gaza including the very real risk one now might say the probability that tens of thousands of Gazans will imminently die
Not from bombs alone, though those two, but due to the full-scale Israeli ongoing Israeli blockade and as a result from a combination of hunger and various treatable infections for which no antibiotics are available in Gaza.
Now our view since the start of the war has been the same.
It has not changed regardless of your views on its wisdom or desirability.
The fact that the U.S.
government is financing and arming Israel at great cost to both the country and its citizens requires that everyone at least know what is actually being done there.
We will show you what's taking place, and you can make up your own mind about whether you're comfortable financing it and supporting it.
And then we'll also examine one of the most common and most cynical rhetorical tactics that I hear almost every day for justifying this Israeli war in the eyes of Westerners, namely arguing that because Hamas is vehemently anti-LGBT, people in the West, especially gay people, should consider namely arguing that because Hamas is vehemently anti-LGBT, people in the West, especially gay people, should
In other words, if you're a gay person, you should so hate Hamas because they're anti-LGBT, that you should be cheering on the Israeli destruction of Gaza, and if you're not, there might be something wrong with you.
Now, this is an argument that is as corrosive as it is disingenuous, and given how commonly wielded it now is, not just for this war in Israel, but for all Western conflicts, we'll briefly examine the problems with it.
After that, we will take a look at a new report that documents the amazing luck that members of Congress have had in trading stocks, constantly trading at profits that significantly exceed the market, and how that amazing luck and skill has continued throughout 2023.
Produced by an anonymous but highly reliable independent data journalist who really got his start on Twitter where he saw this work was not being done and then began doing it in a way that has a great deal of impact and we'll show you a little bit about that person.
The report details how many members of Congress are now following in the footsteps of Nancy Pelosi and exhibiting remarkable skill and luck with buying and selling at exactly the right time to maximize their profits.
And then as well, we will look at new proof, this time provided from the US government itself, that the Hunter Biden laptop was, I know this is going to shock you, authentic all along.
I continue to regard this as one of the worst media scandals in recent times, that most of the corporate media spread, repeatedly spread, a CIA lie, right before the 2020 election.
That reporting on materials from the Hunter Biden laptop did not warrant confidence because the documents were not real, but rather were Russian disinformation.
And every time there's new proof that the laptop and the documents on it were in fact real and genuine and authentic, and every time the media refuses to retract their false story, like now, it's still more proof of why contempt for the corporate media is not only justified and well-earned, but actually vital.
And then finally, this was a story we were going to report on a Monday and ran out of time.
The Metropolitan Police of London issued a chilling statement, one that I would submit could be found by definition only in an authoritarian country, in which it vowed that it was going to criminally investigate its speaker at an anti-war protest held last Saturday in London, even though the anti-war protest itself was entirely peaceful.
The speech that was given there was one that enraged a lot of people.
It was interpreted, I think, falsely as calling for more massacres of the kind that took place on October 7th.
But even if that were the speaker's intent, and he vehemently denied that it were, Calling for violence against foreign countries, against Iran, or against Yemen, or against Iraq, or against Russia, or against Hezbollah, or against Israel, is clearly protected speech.
This is another example of the way in which our core free speech protections are being eroded in the West in the name of shielding this foreign country from criticism.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the most unyielding truths about Washington that I have observed over and over in the almost 20 years that I've been writing about politics and doing journalism full-time since basically 2005 is that it is extremely rare, extremely rare, for the military-industrial complex or the endless war machine or the U.S.
security state to suffer any real losses in Washington.
It almost never happens.
When the U.S.
security state wants something, when the military-industrial complex wants something and really wants it, it's almost, it's not just a rarity, it almost never happens that in some way or other they don't prevail.
And yet over the past three months, the top priority of the war making machine in Washington, along with the war in Israel, continues to be the war in Ukraine, which has enriched arms dealers in the West and all kinds of allies of Kiev and Zelensky in unimaginable ways.
They're obviously eager to keep that war going.
And as a result, President Biden, even before the outbreak of the war in Gaza on October 7th, asked for another $60 billion.
Which would be the largest authorization to date.
The U.S.
has spent over $100 billion.
The first authorization back in 2022, in May of 2022, was for $40 billion.
That was actually the second authorization.
The first was an immediate authorization of something like $14 billion.
The billions of dollars just have been flying around.
And every time anyone asked for another dollar or another billion dollars or another $10 billion for Ukraine, the Congress has just been blindly giving it.
And obviously what has changed, aside from the fact that none of the promises that have been made about the war in Ukraine has come true...
It is obviously a futile effort.
The Ukrainians are even running out of not just artillery, but people to fight those wars.
They're pulling 50-year-old disabled people off buses to send to the front line and threatening people with decades imprisonment if they try and flee the country or bribe officials to get out.
It's been happening more and more as people understand that they will be used as cannon fodder to have their lives end for a war that there's no chance of winning.
There is now real opposition in many Western countries, including in the United States, to continuing to just pour money down this bottomless pit in Ukraine.
And as a result, House Republicans, who from the start have been the only people willing to stand up and oppose this war in any meaningful way, there's been about 10 senators that have as well, all from the Republican Party.
have really grown in number.
And the position of the Republican Party right now is not, we will never give you another dime for Ukraine no matter what.
That is the position of many House members.
But the official position of the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is, look, we will consider bringing a bill to the floor for another $60 billion in Ukraine if and only if you, the Biden administration, agree to a wide range of very harsh measures that will close off the border,
Make it much easier to arrest and detain people who try and enter based on asylum claims, and deport people out of the country.
And thus far they are insisting, not on symbolic measures, but on very concrete ones, on very authentic ones, that they can go to their voters and say, look, the only reason we agreed to spend $60 million on the Ukrainian border is because we got the kinds of things we've been telling you for years now we will get for the American border.
Whatever else you want to say about Mike Johnson and I have criticisms of him in lots of ways including the fact that he stood up in his first speech and said the very first thing we're going to do is not anything for you Americans but instead for what he called our good friend Israel and the first bill that he wanted to get to the floor was a bill to send more money to Israel.
I've had other criticisms of his as well, of him as well.
The one thing I will say for him is that I think he has the potential to be a very effective political operative in Washington, a very effective House Speaker.
He's very smart.
By happenstance, I had him on my show two or three months before he was elected House Speaker at a time nobody thought he would.
To talk to him about a hearing at which he harshly interrogated FBI Director Christopher Wray about the systemic censorship efforts in which the Biden administration was engaged with respect to big tech.
I said at the time I came away very impressed with his intellect, with his depth of knowledge, with the seriousness with which he talked about issues and the integrity that I felt like he had, the kind of core integrity.
I walked away with a positive impression for sure of then Congressman Johnson.
And three months later or less, he was elevated to the House speakership, something that happened more or less almost by luck when nobody else was able to get enough votes.
And they kind of finally settled on someone inoffensive.
And at least thus far, he is sticking to this pledge, even though he has already angered a lot of House Republicans by making deals with the Democrats that they perceive as being too compromising or too soft.
to on spending and debt and all sorts of other things, at least when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
Thus far, he has made good on his pledge that he will not allow a vote on more money to Ukraine unless there are extremely harsh and very tangible measures to close the border.
Now, the problem for President Biden is that he has a lot of parts of his constituency who have truly been convinced that these kind of border security measures are an expression of American fascism, even neo-Nazism and certainly white supremacy.
Because that's what they were told year after year after year after year ever since Trump descended down the elevator and made border security and a wall a central plank in his campaign.
So Biden cannot let this war in Ukraine go unfunded because his credibility was staked on the war in Ukraine, on ensuring that the Russians would be expelled from every inch of Ukrainian territory or the war would never end.
The United States repeatedly promised to stick with Ukraine until that happens.
So we cannot afford to be seen as abandoning Ukraine, especially while the Russians haven't been expelled from an inch of Ukrainian territory.
In fact, they've been recently expanding The amount of land they control.
But at the same time, if he is to give in on these border security measures and announce all sorts of very harsh clampdowns and crackdowns on people trying to come into the country, people who have recently entered the country, that the Republicans at least as of now seem to be genuinely demanding and being willing to hold up Ukraine aid unless they get it.
It is a serious political dilemma for President Biden.
Here is what Speaker Johnson said after leaving the White House today and basically announcing that there is no deal and he can't foresee a deal in the short-term future that would satisfy Republican demands that would allow the war in Ukraine to be funded.
Thank you all for being here.
We had a productive meeting, I think, House and Senate leaders.
The President was very forthright.
I told the President what I have been saying for many months, and that is that we must have change at the border.
Substantive policy change.
We documented 64 instances where the President took executive action or his agencies took action to create the current catastrophe that we have at the border.
It is a national security and a humanitarian catastrophe.
And I articulated that to the President in the meeting now.
We understand that there's concern about the safety, security, sovereignty of Ukraine, but the American people have those same concerns about our own domestic sovereignty and our safety and our security.
We have talked about the necessary elements to solve this problem.
We passed our bill and it has critical elements.
It's a restoration of the Remain in Mexico policy.
It is the end of catch and release.
It is reform to the broken asylum and parole systems.
We're not insistent upon a particular name of a piece of legislation, but we are insistent that the elements have to be meaningful.
The House is ready to act, but the legislation has to solve the problem and that Now, let me just stop there and say the following, which is, and I know maybe you've heard me say this before, but I really think it bears emphasis.
The way in which he's framing this argument is important.
He's framing it basically from an America First perspective, though he's not using that term.
He's saying, look, why should we continue to spend tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars to secure Ukraine and its border against Russia, while we refuse to secure our own border?
How does that make any sense?
Maybe we should consider paying for the security of other countries only once our country is secure.
But until that time happens, he's arguing, we shouldn't be funding the security issues and needs of other countries because our own country and our own citizens are being deprived.
And that makes intuitive sense, I think, to most Americans.
Why is it that we would fund other countries when those countries have things that we don't have?
And he's saying, once our border is secured, then maybe it makes sense to say, well, now what do we have to give to Ukraine to secure its border?
The question I have, of course, that I've actually been asking for a long time of conservative politicians, is why does that rationale apply to Ukraine but not apply to Israel?
Why doesn't this same argument, that I know many people find very convincing, That we should not be paying for the security of other countries until we can secure our own.
Why does that apply to Ukraine so persuasively but not apply to Israel?
Why should we be paying for Israeli wars and Israeli security and ultimately this is an issue of Israeli border security.
Remember that part of this part of the war this expression of the decades-long war between the Palestinians and the Israelis began with a breach of the border when Hamas militants flew in hang gliders over the Israeli fence that separates Israel from Gaza when they crashed through the electronic gate.
And the Israelis have spent a lot of money fortifying that border and now they're saying our border cannot be secured until we go and kill Hamas.
And the United States is paying for that.
The United States is paying for all of it on top of the billions of dollars we already spent to Israel.
And I want anyone to try and get a coherent answer from somebody like Mike Johnson and Mark When I had him on my show, when I had Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz or any other member of Congress, the only one willing to give a consistent answer was Thomas Massie, who said, I agree with you.
I think it applies exactly the same way.
Ironically, I had RFK Jr.
on my show, and he was on saying all of these things about Ukraine.
And when I said to him, well, why doesn't that apply to Israel?
He's a vehement supporter of Israel.
At the time, he said, you know what?
Now that you asked me that, in that way, Maybe you're right.
Maybe it is time that we stop funding Israel for the same reason that we shouldn't be funding Ukraine, all the reasons that I've said.
We're too in debt already.
We don't have anything at home.
Funding these endless wars only make the problem worse.
All the arguments that he said he's been making for Ukraine and when I asked, it doesn't apply to Israel, he kind of said, you know what, now that I stop and think about it, maybe you're right.
I'm going to go and reconsider that.
And then shortly thereafter, he was accused by the Democratic Party of anti-Semitism.
They got that tape where it seemed like he was saying that Jews and Chinese had special genetic immunity for certain viruses that were being created.
And ever since, he's gone to the far, far end of the pro-Israel spectrum with people like Rabbi Shmuley, who even in the Israeli context is a complete extremist and kind of seeking protection from him.
But anyway, back then, he was open to that argument.
And sometimes when I've asked that argument and insisted on an answer from people, even random people who I speak to, they will say, the reason is, is because Israel is our ally and Ukraine isn't.
I don't know how you define ally, but the reality is, is that so many times we've told Israel, you need to stop doing X, Y, and Z because what you're doing is harming our national security.
And the Israelis said, we're not going to stop.
I've showed you that so many times.
Going back to the 1980s, In the early 1990s, when the position of the U.S.
government was settlement expansions are directly harming U.S.
security.
We need you to stop.
And if you don't stop, we're going to withhold loan guarantees.
And the Israelis said, we're not going to stop.
We're going to do whatever we want.
You're going to continue to fund us.
And we have.
Whereas Ukrainians know they're in a subservient position.
They know that we're giving them all the money they use for their war.
And so they do what they're told.
They never defy U.S.
orders.
That seems like a real ally.
From an American perspective, I think you can make a much stronger case that Ukraine is an American ally more than Israel, but even if you want to say they're both allies, how is it that it makes sense to object to the funding of Ukraine's military needs and its security needs without first securing the U.S.
border while demanding that all that money that Israel wants go to Israel without first securing the U.S.
border?
I think it's just political hypocrisy and the reality of who wields political power in Washington, but this principle that's being invoked here would be a lot more persuasive if it were applied consistently.
Alright, let's listen to the rest.
That's the critical point.
We understand the necessity about Ukraine funding and we want to say that the status quo is unacceptable.
We need the Commander-in-Chief of this country, the President of the United States, to show strength on the world stage, and not weakness.
We cannot continue with the current status quo.
We understand the importance of what's been needed, but when I met with President Zelensky just last month, right before Christmas, he said that the necessary ingredient is the proper weapons systems that they need.
There are certain things that are needed to ensure that they can prevail.
We need the questions answered about the strategy, about the endgame, and about the accountability for the precious treasure of the American people.
We understand that all these things are important, but we must insist, we must insist that the border be the top priority.
I think we have some consensus around that table, everyone understands the urgency of that, and we're going to continue to press forward.
Now, that was a second argument, a separate argument, which was beyond the argument that we need to secure our own border before we secure the Ukrainian border.
A secondary argument was, even when it comes to the question of funding Ukraine, and he was kind of saying, "We realize it's important," but he was saying, "We're not going to just keep pouring money into Ukraine until we have clarity about what this mission is.
What is the objective here?
How do we know when we've succeeded?
When is it time to come home?
When is it time to end the war?
Is it really never going to end until you expel every Russian troop from all of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?
Because if so, it's never going to end.
The Russians will never permit that.
They will do anything to stop that.
And I mean anything, because they perceive that genuinely as an existential threat to Moscow.
And so they want to know from Biden, what is this war?
What is the mission?
What is it?
What are the criteria to know how it's progressing and succeeding or if it isn't and when to stop?
But also we want real oversight measures on where the money is going.
Senator Rand Paul and others have been trying to attach this to spending bills from the start.
And yet Mitch McConnell would immediately call Rand Paul a Russian agent for wanting to attach Oversight bills of the kind that when it was done in Afghanistan discovered billions and billions of dollars of fraud.
There have already been indicia of this aid disappearing into Ukrainian bank accounts.
There have been top-level defense officials in Kiev who have been denounced and investigated and fired for kickback schemes and bribes.
You can only imagine if you're gonna pour over a hundred billion dollars from all these NATO countries into what has been the most corrupt country in Europe.
With leaders like Zelensky who have already been reported to have offshore bank accounts or connected to so-called Ukrainian oligarchs, where that money is going, how little oversight there is.
And at least for now, Johnson is saying that even if we get security at the U.S.
border, before we find Ukraine, we want these measures.
Here's a New York Times report that kind of gives the details, most of which I was just saying, and there you see the headline that suggests they, at least now, are serious.
Quote, Johnson digs in against border deal to unlock Ukraine aid, defying Biden.
Hours before a meeting at, I love that framing, defying Biden, as though the House Speaker works for Joe Biden and takes orders from Joe Biden.
That's his job.
To quote-unquote defy Joe Biden, especially when it comes to defending the majority view of the American public, which is we don't want more funding for the war in Ukraine.
Quote, hours before a meeting at the White House about how to break the stalemate in Congress over aid to Ukraine, the Republican speaker signaled a compromise was not possible.
And this is the issue, which is that you don't even have to believe in the integrity or steadfast nature of Mike Johnson.
He has a House Caucus that has made very clear many of those members are not going to fund the war in Ukraine under any circumstances, even if the border is secured.
But a lot of them are apparently going along with the idea that unless we get real border security that we can go to our voters and
Present as authentic, not just symbolic, not just empty gestures, but harsh border security measures of the kind that Joe Biden will have a great deal of difficulty selling to his base, which the Republicans know they seem, at least as of the moment, committed to the idea that no matter how much is said about the necessity of defeating Russia, about the way we're leaving Ukraine in the lurch, they seem willing to take that attack
Because they feel like they're posturing in defense of the American people.
And right now the American people view their own interest as superior to the interest of the Ukrainians.
So I do think Joe Biden is in a very difficult position here.
And I think the war in Ukraine is also in a difficult position.
But like I said, in 20 years of covering all this very intensively, it is extremely rare that I have seen the U.S.
security state lose.
And if they don't get their funding and get it quickly, that will be a serious defeat for the U.S.
security state.
I will believe that when I see it.
All right, so we have obviously been reporting on the Israeli war in Gaza from the very beginning, including the October 7th Hamas attack that we spent the first week primarily focused on and arguing the reasons why you can't morally justify that attack.
But for people who are now saying things like, well, it doesn't matter what the Israelis do either, that everything is game and fair and war.
I always wonder what foundation they had for even condemning the Hamas attack at all.
I mean, if everything is fair game and war, and that's your belief, on what basis can you condemn Hamas for killing civilians?
Israel has killed 30 or 40 or 50 times the number of Palestinian civilians as the several hundred that were killed on October 7th by Hamas.
And they've killed a multitude of that, not just after October 7th, but also before.
And the argument is always, when it comes to Western wars, and this is a Western war given that the United States is paying for it and arming it, is that the deaths of civilians is secondary, it's unintentional, it's tragic collateral damage, it's not what's intended.
All you have to do is look with your own eyes at the kind of destruction that is now visibly apparent in many of the most densely populated parts of Gaza.
And if this wasn't carpet bombing, if this wasn't an indiscriminate use of attack by air and by shelling, without the slightest regard for the destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian life, I want to see an example of what you think is that if this is not.
Here is a photojournalist who just surveyed a part of Gaza.
And look at this and you tell me whether you think this is remotely directed at Hamas or targeted at military targets or quote unquote terrorist targets or if it's just indiscriminate destruction of the civilian life and civilian infrastructure and God with the intent of rendering it uninhabitable as many Israeli officials have said explicitly is the real goal of this war.
The war is not a war.
There is a war.
The war is a huge war.
The war is a huge war.
Very few buildings standing, even fewer buildings standing that are irreparably damaged that will not be torn down and reconstructed.
There's no sewage, there's no healthcare system, there's no water.
It's uninhabitable.
Most of Gaza, the densely populated parts of Gaza.
And it's come from months now of just massive bombing.
2,000 pound bombs of the kinds that the United States stopped using in any areas where there's civilian concentration because the death toll is just too high for civilians to justify morally.
And you look at video after video and that's what Gaza looks like.
And one of the many things that has made the violence in Gaza unparalleled in terms of recent warfare is the number of journalists who have been killed.
Western journalists are not allowed to stay in Gaza.
The only ones who have gotten in were ones that went in embedded under the arms and protection of the IDF.
And subject to its censors.
That's what CNN has said its reporting is.
It's subject to Israeli censors, even the reporting they do from Israel.
And then you have propagandists like Douglas Murray have gone and embedded for a day or two with the IDF and then come back.
And of course, they were chosen for that because they were already so pro-Israel.
Most of what we know in Gaza comes from two different sources.
Number one, independent aid organizations, very brave people with organizations like Doctors Without Borders.
And UN humanitarian groups, UN hunger groups, independent groups that are involved in many wars, but every one of those groups is automatically accused of anti-Semitism in order to demean and malign any information that comes from them.
And then you have journalists based in Gaza who also are accused of being Hamas propagandists and who have been killed in record number.
There are more journalists that have been killed in Gaza since the start of this conflict just three months ago than were killed in all of the Iraq war.
In fact, all the war of terror in just three months.
And a lot of these journalists have been killed not while working but at home with their families.
Entire families wiped out.
Clearly journalists have been targeted because Israel does not want the world seeing the reality of what it's doing.
As the phrase goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Pictures like that are what Israel doesn't want the world to be seeing, which is why so many of the journalists providing those pictures are now no longer living.
The Economist is a very difficult magazine to dismiss when it comes to Israel because they are and always have been vehemently pro-Israel, like most of the UK is.
In fact, the official editorial position of The Economist since October 7th happened is and continues to be that the Israeli war in Gaza is justifiable, that they have every right to go in and quote-unquote destroy Hamas.
They have been defending Israel since the start of the war.
So don't come and say The Economist is an anti-Israel or a pro-Hamas outlet unless you think that any magazine that prints anything that's incriminating of Israel automatically and inherently is anti-Semitic and biased.
Only people who say positive things about Israel are to be trusted.
That is a very poor way of picking and choosing which media outlets to believe.
And ultimately, you shouldn't even believe in media outlets or disbelieve in media outlets As a general proposition, you should assess what they're saying and the evidence that they're providing for it and see whether or not what they're claiming is substantiated.
In other words, you read everything with a skeptical eye.
But for those of you who do first say, okay, which magazine is this before I should even consider it?
The Economist, this is objectively true, editorially supports the war in Gaza by Israel.
Here is the Economist from January 10th, just last week.
The headline was, just how bad is it in Gaza?
As Israel is accused of genocide, we look at the humanitarian crisis.
Here's what, and this is not an opinion piece, this is a news article.
Based not on Hamas or Hamas agencies, certainly not exclusively, but all kinds of those other independent aid organizations that are risking their lives to be in Gaza.
There were Norwegian medical teams that just entered Gaza trying to operate on children and brought medical supplies with them.
There have been international nurses and healthcare workers who have been in Gaza and testified to what they saw there.
Based on an amalgamation of these sources, here's what The Economist is reporting.
Quote, In Gaza, infrastructure has collapsed.
Almost two-thirds of Gaza's hospitals are closed.
The 13 still working are overflowing, with patients being treated on blood-slicked floors.
They do not have enough supplies or staff.
Desalination plants that once supplied clean water have shut down for lack of fuel and spare parts.
Displaced children have access to just two liters of water a day.
The UN uses the five-step integrated food security phase classification, the IPC scale, to measure hunger.
At phase one, people are fine.
At phase five, they are starving to death, regularly skipping meals and often going 24 hours without food.
Arif Hussein, the chief economist at the World Food Program, says that there are 706,000 people around the world at that worst level, that's level 5, actual ongoing starvation.
Four out of the five people on Earth who are in that level 5 starvation category, 577,000 are in Gaza.
577,000 are in Gaza.
577,000 Gazans are in level five of starvation.
That is a quarter of the Gazan population.
Not people who are on the brink of starvation, who are in the process of starving to death.
Quote, the scale, severity, and speed make this crisis unprecedented, he said.
And we have shown you so many reports from all over the world saying that you have to go back to World War II to find a conflict, a level of civilian destruction this severe.
The amount of bombs that have been dropped in a tiny little area in such a short period of time, the level of civilian destruction, 70 to 80% of civilian residential buildings are either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.
It is inconceivable how this population will survive even if they physically survive whenever this war ends.
Not just in terms of the trauma, imagine children having to live through this.
But the ability to have a sustainable place to live, what percentage of the Gazan population will be dead at the end of this war?
And if you're somebody who supports this, what percentage is acceptable to you?
That is the question that I was asking of every Israel supporting guest we have on the show from the beginning of the conflict.
What percentage of the Gazan population are you willing to have die for you to say that this war is justifiable?
Right now, 1% at least.
Of the Gazan population, by all accounts, have been killed by Israeli bombs.
One percent.
So, one percent of the people who were alive on October 7th are now dead.
In just three months.
And, by all accounts, this war is ongoing, and we're going to see over the next two months, three months, people dying in mass numbers of starvation, but also treatable diseases like infections because there's no antibiotics allowed in Gaza.
Remember, Gaza is under an Israeli blockade.
The Israeli Defense Minister announced at the beginning of this war that they will not allow food, water, fuel, or electricity into Gaza, and the reason, he said, was because they're quote, human animals and need to be treated as such.
They have now allowed a tiny amount of aid to enter a couple of different places.
But nowhere near enough to even keep that population alive.
And we're not talking here about whether the Israelis should be the ones providing this aid.
No one is even saying that.
What we're saying is the Israelis should allow international organizations in to safely distribute this aid so you don't have huge numbers of civilians, including children, dying in large numbers because of starvation and treatable disease.
This is basic war legality and war morality.
And if you don't believe in it, Then don't object and call people terrorists when they wage war in a way that you want to somehow find morally reprehensible because you're already saying you don't believe in this concept when it comes to war.
And then there's a separate question of why the United States should be paying for this.
Now, one of the arguments that I hear over and over, and in part because I'm a critic of Israel and the Israeli war, who's also a gay man, but it's a very common argument generally now in the West, not just to justify the war in Israel, but to justify anything the U.S.
security state does, is to invoke the culture war in general, and in particular LGBT issues.
So it's a common argument to say that because Hamas is hostile and has a lot of antagonism toward LGBT, they kill gay people sometimes, they don't tolerate homosexuality, people who tried to be openly gay in Gaza would be killed by Hamas.
Therefore goes this argument.
Gay people in the West or people who care about LGBT issues somehow have some kind of like a moral obligation to identify themselves solely by their sexual orientation, decide that they're going to view the world through the issue of LGBT issues, even including geopolitical conflicts.
That somehow if you're a gay person, you have to elevate the importance of LGBT issues, not just in terms of your personal political priorities, but the prism through which you understand wars.
And you just kind of simplistically and reductively look at which side is better for LGBTs, and oh, that's the side I'm on.
And if the United States or the West proposes to go to a war with a country that's bad for LGBTs, like Russia, where we heard the same thing, oh, Russia's bad for LGBTs.
They don't like gay men.
Putin has introduced a bunch of oppressive measures against LGBTs and trans people.
He doesn't like gender ideology.
He's not in favor of gay marriage.
Somehow that's supposed to mean that as a gay man, you're supposed to stand up and say, oh, now I support a war against Russia.
Here is a TikTok video by a gay man named Daniel Ryan Spaulding.
In October of 2023, this went mega viral.
And here's what he argued.
I think it's a little ironic that the people who seem to be defending Hamas online are also the ones they'd be most likely to kill.
Oh no no, I'm sure the Islamic terrorists would love you, queer intellectual feminist.
We're freedom fighters!
They're fighting for their land and I'm fighting for my right to purple hair!
What the fuck?
It's like a girl in a really toxic relationship.
I know you don't like him because he kidnaps and murders people, but trust me, when I'm alone with him, he is such a sweetheart.
I'm sorry, if your reaction to people being slaughtered, beheaded, raped, and burned alive isn't complete and utter disgust and horror, if your reaction is, yeah, but I mean, why?
See it from their perspective.
You need to get your fucking head checked, okay?
I'm sure Jeffrey Dahmer had a rough childhood.
That doesn't mean I empathize with him.
If you want to free Palestine, free Palestine from... Alright, so, a lot of conservatives love this little finger-clicking, neck-snapping, sassy video in defense of Israel.
Let me just show you one part that I find very remarkable.
Here, as I said, this went mega-viral.
Just this one part here.
Listen to this.
Such as sweethearts, I'm sorry if your reaction to people being slaughtered, beheaded, raped and burned alive isn't complete and utter disgust and horror.
If your reaction is, yeah, but I mean, why see it from their perspective?
You need to get your fucking head checked, OK?
So what has been the reaction to three and a half months of people being burned alive and bombed to death and children having their limbs torn apart?
And watching people get their arms and legs amputated with no anesthesia and watching 25,000 innocent people die, half of whom were women and children.
Is it horror and disgust and all the other adjectives that he so sassily invoked?
Or has it been, oh, we need to look at it from the Israeli perspective?
As a member of the United States, as a member of the West, as somebody who is on the side of the people who are waging more wars than any other country in the world, constantly finding ways to justify slaughter on a mass scale is something that the United States and the West do with extreme regularity.
And then when we do it, our argument is always the one that's being condemned there, which is Oh well, you have to look at it in the broader context.
You can't just look at what the Israelis are doing over the last three months.
You have to look at what happened on October 7th.
You have to see it in the context so that you see it from the Israeli side.
That's always the way wars are justified.
But this broader point that because Hamas Is antagonistic to or violent toward LGBT somehow that compels gay men in particular to be on the side of Israel is one that I hear all the time.
In fact, they have propaganda tours where they invite gay office holders and gay journalists from the West to go to Israel.
It's a gay specific tour of Tel Aviv.
And people go there and they get shown the gay bars of Tel Aviv and the sex shops in Tel Aviv and get introduced to a lot of gay men in Tel Aviv, gay Israeli men.
And they're told, look at how much gay life thrives in Israel, but in Hamas and Gaza, they kill you if you're gay.
And a lot of gay politicians come back obsessed with supporting Israel and cheering Israel.
That's what happened to Richie Torres.
The Democratic Congressman who got elected to represent the poorest district in the United States, the poorest district from the Bronx.
And for whatever reason, known only to him and his team of what I hope are his team of psychologists, only he knows why he decided, representing the poorest people in the United States, to prioritize the issue of Israel as one of his main, if not his main, focal points of advocacy while in Congress.
And he's a gay man and went on one of those gay trips.
Now, one of the reasons why I find this argument so obnoxious, and here today I see it all the time, here's just someone who identifies as an America First advocate, I get these all the time too, they say America First but then they yell at me if I say we shouldn't finance Israel which is a foreign country.
He said, quote, go over there wearing a pride flag and I'm sure you'll run into thousands of enlightened, totally innocent Palestinians.
Book your trip.
Because I was saying that a lot of people see this destruction of Gaza and the civilian death that has ensued and they don't pretend to object to it.
They say, I'm happy about that.
I support that because I don't think there's anything such a thing as innocent Palestinians.
I was actually saying I prefer that candor to the people who deny the truth of what's going on in Gaza.
I prefer the people who say yes, massive numbers of civilians are being killed and I support that and I'm happy about it because I don't regard Palestinian life as being valid and he decided to say go to Gaza and see how gay people are treated.
Now, one of the reasons why I find it so obnoxious is because I thought we were all supposed to be against this idea of identity politics.
That you don't see yourself first as a human being.
Now you're supposed to see yourself first as a gay man.
And if you're a gay man, or a lesbian, or someone who identifies as LGBT, you're required to look at wars, not the way other people look at wars, through the geopolitics, or the strategy of wars, or whether they're morally justified with the laws.
No, you have to prioritize gay issues somehow.
You have to introduce LGBT issues as your prism for deciding whether or not you think a war is just.
It's a complete non sequitur.
Beyond that, there's this neocon tactic that is at the center of war propaganda in the United States and you easily see it when you're opposed to a war and you find it outrageous and unjust.
It's an attempt to say, and neocons are experts in this propaganda tactic, Now when it comes to our wars, the wars that we want you to fund, like the war in Israel, the war in Ukraine, before that the war in Syria, the war in Libya, the war in Iraq, the war in Vietnam, every one of the wars that we want you to fight and pay for and die in, there are only two choices.
Either you support the war we want, you cheer for the war that we tell you we're going to want, that we want to do, and we want to launch.
Or you'll be accused of supporting the other side.
It's a binary choice, like George Bush said when David Frum wrote his speech.
Either you're on the side of the United States or you're on the side of terrorists.
So, when it came time for the war in Iraq, people who stood up and objected to the war in Iraq, said we don't have any business invading Iraq and changing its government.
They were accused of being pro-Saddam Hussein, of loving Saddam Hussein, of overlooking the crimes of Saddam Hussein.
Now, millions of people didn't care at all for Saddam Hussein, didn't like Saddam Hussein, didn't love Saddam Hussein, recognized his repression and tyranny, but nonetheless argued that it was not in the American interest to go and invade Iraq, nor was it legally or morally justified to do so.
It's such a deceitful argument to say if you're opposed to a war, it means you love the other side.
People who oppose the regime change war in Libya, oh, you must love Gaddafi.
You're pro-Qaddafi.
You're an apologist for Qaddafi.
People who oppose the CIA war in Syria, oh, you're pro-Assad.
People who oppose funding the war in Ukraine obviously get told, oh, you must love Vladimir Putin, you love the Kremlin, you're a supporter of Russia.
And a lot of conservatives who oppose all those wars have no trouble understanding why that's incredibly deceitful and intellectually dishonest and manipulative because there's more than just two choices.
You can recognize that a foreign entity is repressive or tyrannical or even evil and at the same time be opposed to having the United States go in and bomb that country or change its government or pay for that to be done.
And yet suddenly we get to the war in Israel And the same people who have no trouble seeing how corrupt, intellectually corrupted, that framework is, that binary framework that neocons use, suddenly start using it themselves.
Oh, either you support what Israel is doing, and you want to finance the Israeli war in Gaza, or you love Hamas.
The only two choices.
And if you're a gay man, how can you love Hamas?
Because, after all, Hamas is so Repressive toward and even violent toward LGBTs.
If you're a gay man, you have to be required to hate Hamas and therefore also to want to pay for Israel as it bombs Gaza.
Do you see how that makes no sense whatsoever?
How it's so reductive.
It's forcing people who are in certain groups to adopt a particular view the way liberals do.
They say if you're black, you must support affirmative action.
And if you don't, there's something wrong with you.
If you're an immigrant, you must support Open borders, or not cracking down on the border, and if you don't, you're self-hating.
If you're a member of this group, you must support this.
If you're a member of this group, you must support that.
This reductive attempt to reduce everybody to their identity and then impose on them by virtue of their identity a set of beliefs they're somehow required to adopt.
So if you're a gay man, you're required to support the war in Ukraine because Russia is anti-LGBT.
If you're a gay man, you're required to support Israel and its war in Gaza, even though it's destroying huge numbers of innocent lives in ways that are, I think, clearly criminal under the laws of war because Hamas is anti-LGBT.
It is such an imbecilic and deceitful and propagandistic argument.
Beyond all that, it's so incredibly disingenuous.
So many of the people who wield this are not in favor of LGBT rights.
But, more to the point, there are a lot of countries in the world, not just Gaza, Where being LGBT is a very dangerous thing to be.
And so if someone is serious and saying the reason we should support Israel and its destruction of Gaza is because Hamas is anti-LGBT, why aren't people also calling for the United States to go and bomb Egypt and change the government of Egypt?
Because after all, as you see in this Deutsch World Report from March of 2023, There's constantly crackdowns by the Egyptian government of LGBT rights in Egypt.
Let's put that on the screen, please.
There you see the headline.
LGBT rights in Egypt.
Queer community battles crackdown.
Do you think if you go around in most places in Egypt wearing a pride shirt or holding hands with someone of the same sex, you say, is your marital partner that you'll be treated well?
How about in Saudi Arabia here from France 24 in April 2023 quote, we have no place LGBTQ Saudis forced into exile.
Am I also as a gay man duty bound to support A war against Saudi Arabia?
A war to change the government of Egypt?
Should I have to also advocate an invasion of Uganda that recently introduced the death penalty for homosexuality?
Should I have to support a war in the United Arab Emirates to change its government because of how repressive they are to gay men?
How about a war in Qatar too?
war in Qatar too or a war in Jordan or Bahrain there's an endless number of countries antagonistic to LGBTs and the idea that just because they're anti-LGBT or even violent toward LGBTs you're somehow duty bound to support a war that's designed to destroy its population and change its government is completely imbecilic
and anybody would have no problem understanding that the minute you remove the argument and the manipulative attempt from the context of Israel, but for some reason The minute you put it into the context of Israel, people are so emotionally attached to that topic, to that foreign country, that their brains stop working.
Nobody supports a war in Israel, a war by Israel, in Gaza, because Hamas is anti-LGBT.
That is not the reason.
And opposing an Israeli war in Gaza does not mean you support Hamas.
Just like opposing the U.S.
involvement in the war in Ukraine does not make you pro-Putin.
Just like opposing the U.S.
war in Libya does not mean you are pro-Qaddafi.
And on and on and on and on.
It is probably the argument that at this point is the most common one to make against Gay people in the West who oppose Israel and the war in Israel?
Oh, but you're a gay man.
You should care only about LGBT issues.
And because Hamas is not as good for LGBTs as Israel, you should support the Israeli destruction of Gazan civilian life.
You should be cheering as 25,000 people and counting die in Gaza because Hamas doesn't treat its LGBTs well.
It's such a manipulative non-sequitur.
It's the sort of thing that define who neocons are, where they try and make everything binary.
David Frum was going all throughout 2003 saying anyone who didn't support the war in Ukraine, including conservatives, was on the other side.
They were unpatriotic.
They were pro-Saddam.
And if you can understand why that argument is so corrupted when neocons make it, you shouldn't be making it yourself.
There's so many aspects to it that are incredibly deceitful, but if you're going to insist on making it, at least be consistent about it.
At least then insist as well that we should be bombing Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Uganda and the United Arab Emirates because those governments are at least as hostile to LGBTs as Hamas is.
And apparently the reason we have a trillion dollar a year Pentagon and a hundred billion dollar a year intelligence system is so that we can go around the world bombing countries and removing governments and regimes that are insufficiently supportive of LGBTs.
I never realized how deeply concerned so many conservatives in the United States were for LGBT issues.
It's moving, it's so touching, inspiring.
But I don't find it convincing as a reason to support the war in Israel any more than I found it convincing as a reason to support all those other wars that I've opposed as well.
One of the topics that has been hidden and really escaping critical scrutiny until the last couple of years has been the fact that many members of Congress, including the richest and most powerful ones, simultaneously have access to all sorts of non-public information by virtue of their role in Congress and the power that they exert over all sorts of industries, including lawmaking and regulatory oversight.
And while they're getting all this non-public information and interacting with these industries and even controlling them and influencing them in all sorts of ways, unbelievably by a stroke of luck, they're buying and selling stocks in these industries and doing so as if they're Warren Buffett on methamphetamines.
They have a skill to maximize profit in a way that even the most well-compensated hedge fund managers are incapable of achieving.
And one of the very few reasons we know about this is because a person who's anonymous on Twitter has done a remarkably diligent job of just using public data that had been long ignored and connecting dots in order to constantly and tirelessly document How greatly members of Congress are outperforming the market at the same time that they are influencing these industries and having access to information that the public generally doesn't have.
To the point that it has now become a very real issue as a result of that person's work.
Here from Yahoo Finance, January 3rd of this year, members of Congress outperformed the S&P 500, sometimes by huge amounts.
Congratulations to them.
Quote, Congress only managed to pass 27 bills in 2023, but many of its members had a much more productive year in the stock market, according to a new report that highlights their trading performance, which was helped by the fact that those in Congress are exempt from certain insider trading rules.
Some of those members saw the value of their portfolio grow by well over 50 percent.
Thanks in part to some well-timed, maybe even suspiciously well-timed trades, a third of the 100 members of Congress who reported financial transactions this year beat the S&P 500, which was up 24% in 2023, according to Unusual Wales, a stock and options according to Unusual Wales, a stock and options news service.
When broken out by party, Republicans earned an average of 18% returns on their trades, while Democrats earn 23% according to the report.
The report says the difference is explained by Republicans having large parts of their portfolio in financials, oil, and commodities, all of which had rough years.
By adding the maximum disclosed amounts, unusual wells concluded that trading members of Congress could have made up to $1 billion in stock and options trades in 2023, hundreds of millions of dollars more than in 2022.
Now, the amazing thing about this is that Unusual Wales is an anonymous Twitter account that simply by virtue of extremely hard shoe leather reporting, gathering public data, financial records, and then connecting dots and constantly documenting it in a reliable and very and then connecting dots and constantly documenting it in a reliable and very straightforward and unbiased manner has brought almost single-handedly a huge amount of public attention to an issue that goes to the heart of integrity in our
And yet had been almost entirely ignored for so many years as people like Nancy Pelosi exploited this access to her great enrichment.
Here is Unusual Wales on January 2nd announcing the following quote, I have just released the full report on politicians trading in 2023.
Like every year since 2020, U.S.
politicians beat the market, and many in Congress made unusually timed trades resulting in huge gains.
Here are the top performers of 2023.
And then you go to this chart here.
Now, this right here is the SPY, which is the standard and poor year to date.
So this is basically, if you just invested your stock, In what's called the market, if you just invested your stock in the overall market, you could have expected a gain of 24.8%.
That would have been just the random average market profit.
And you see here a few politicians who actually did worse than the market, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Mitch McConnell, and Tommy Tuberville, and Ro Khanna, and Michael McCall.
I mean, don't cry for them.
They're not in the poorhouse.
Anyone who's investing in the stock market already has assets that most Americans don't have, and they had a healthy profit between 10% and 18%.
There's just nothing suspicious about it because it's reasonable by market standards.
What is notable is how many people are way above the market who are in Congress.
Here you see at the top, the Democratic Congressman Brian Higgins, who had a return of 238%.
238 percent.
He more than doubled in one year the amount of money he was investing.
The Republican Mark Green, 122 percent.
And then here you could just go down the list, you see the red lines are Republicans, the blue lines are Democrats, so it's incredibly bipartisan.
You have Senator Ron Wyden and Seth Moulton.
Here's Nancy Pelosi, the queen of stock trading.
She only, only made a profit of 66.5% on her trades this year, which was triple the market, but it still was only good for ninth place.
Very shameful in the scheme of her career of stock picking, which has been incredibly fortuitous.
Congratulations to Nancy Pelosi.
Really, I mean, like the Warren Buffett of her generation.
And then you see here, Senator Susan Collins, the Levi Strauss heir to the billionaire fortune, Dan Goldman, he increased his wealth by 52%.
And when you're a billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, the representative of Manhattan, that's a lot of wealth that you've increased.
And it is amazing that this one Twitter account, anonymous Twitter account, has done such a remarkable job of doing independent journalism, real independent journalism.
Here's what they added, quote, many members in Congress made huge gains in their portfolios after a market record year for SSPY.
Sadly, many members had more trades than legislative votes this year.
Here are some of the highest realized gains this year.
Now, we actually asked This person, we said, look, we want to highlight the work that you're doing.
Can you tell us about, you know, essentially, what can you tell us about yourself?
Why are you doing this work?
And here's what they told me before the show.
Quote, the reason I do it and have for years is because I think that the data around finance and politicians is often obscured.
And it is worth examining why they hold their positions, for the same reason why it is important to understand why companies lobby to Congress and individuals directly.
I'm a small voice in this, but want to put data in a transparent and understandable way.
I believe the data also helps elucidate regarding whether or not members of Congress should be able to trade on companies they legislate over.
Nancy Pelosi's history of her NVDA trade is an example of this, which is found in the report.
Ultimately, before 2019, no one was doing this work, so I was glad to help where I could.
As for the independent angle, I just like combing through data.
Did you know that lobbying in 2022 broke records despite a downturn in the markets?
So, this is why independent media is so important, because this person was just motivated to actually do the job of a journalist.
Imagine the massive amount of resources that the large media corporations have, and the things they wasted on.
Doxing individual internet users for the crime of making fun of politicians, turning it on the American public, having 10,000 opinion writers who just over every day find new ways to say that Trump is a fascist and a threat to democracy and Adolf Hitler.
And yet it took this anonymous person just doing their civic duty in a very bipartisan way on Twitter to start using this financial data to examine and divulge how corrupt these members of Congress are, how they're enriching themselves and devoting often more time and energy to it than legislating for the American people.
And obviously, Unless you really believe that they're just all like lottery winners.
I mean, do you know how rich a hedge fund manager would be if they were able to get anything like a 200% return on the money that was invested with them?
You have billionaire hedge fund managers and people worth $500 million who are happy to get just a little bit above market.
I mean, 30 and 40% would be extraordinary.
And you have 200, 180% Nancy Pelosi having a reasonably bad year for her at 66%.
I mean, any of these people, if they could replicate that, if they could give up their access to non-public information and their ability to influence these industries and could maintain that stock record, would get even unimaginably richer than they already are.
But doing that when you're not in Congress is a lot harder, which is one of the reasons why this is an issue that merits so much attention.
Here's Nancy Pelosi when she was finally asked in December 2021 about calls from other members of Congress to start banning members of Congress from stock trading or at least banning them and restricting them or taking away their insider trading exemption.
Here's what she said.
Insider just completed a five month investigation finding that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers have violated the stock act, the insider trading law.
I'm wondering if you have any reaction to that.
And secondly, should members of Congress and their houses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving the Congress?
No, I don't.
No.
Nancy Pelosi is not the fastest or most agile person at this point.
She's obviously very old.
You can see her there.
She's barely mobile.
She's frozen under layers of not just makeup but plastic surgery and just all the kinds of things that they put into making rich older men and women presentable in this way.
And yet he asked her about this report showing immense profiteering in a way that seems to violate the law and whether or not members of Congress and their spouses should be prohibited and banned from trading stock while in office.
And there is barely a second that elapsed between the end of that question and her very emphatic answer.
She was very locked in to this topic, one that she cares about deeply.
And she's far from the most articulate person, but she had a very emphatic answer ready to come out of her mouth.
Here's what she said.
No, I don't know to the second one.
We have a responsibility to report on the stock, but I'm not familiar with that five-month review.
But if people aren't reporting, they should be.
Because this is a free market and people So funny.
I mean, she's really, she came from the American left.
She represents the city of San Francisco.
She was supposed to represent left-wing politics.
That was when she was elected to Congress, before she became part of House leadership.
That was, she was like the AOC of her time.
If you ask Nancy Pelosi, anything that impinges upon her massive personal wealth, and she will sound like Ayn Rand.
Or Alan Greenspan.
I think we showed you the clip once before where this young student, motivated by the Bernie movement in this very earnest way from 2016, asked her in a town hall, look, there's a big movement behind Bernie.
A lot of us young people just want some more socialism.
We don't mean communism.
We just mean a little bit more social net protections, less military spending, more social spending.
And she popped out of that seat she was in.
And she said, look, we are capitalists, not socialists.
That's the first thing, OK?
I mean, she was extremely aggressive in that answer.
And that's because this is the thing that actually affects her the most, is her personal wealth.
And so she gets asked, like, shouldn't we limit the way in which people who, like you, who have access to this non-public information and can affect these industries, can simultaneously enrich yourself?
And she's like, no!
The free market!
That's what prevails!
That's the highest value!
The free market!
She's ready to speak at the Koch Brothers Institute on Libertarianism!
The first second it's a question of her personal wealth.
Here is a clip from 60 Minutes back in 2012 where this issue made one of its first public appearances.
I wanted to ask you why you and your husband back in March of 2008 accepted and participated in a very large IPO deal from Visa at a time there was major legislation affecting the credit card companies making its way through the house.
Did you consider that to be a conflict of interest?
I don't know what your point is of your question.
Is there some point that you want to make with that?
Well, I guess what I'm asking is, I mean, could it have been clearer?
He said to her, you and your husband participated in an IPO, an initial public offering, involving Visa at the same time that you were involved with them legislatively.
Isn't that a conflict of interest?
And she's like, huh?
Huh?
What are you asking?
I don't understand any of these terms.
I just saw a congresswoman from San Francisco.
I don't know about these weird finance terms you're using.
Can you explain what you mean?
I don't know.
I don't even understand.
And so, he tried to clarify.
Well, I guess what I'm asking is, do you think it's alright for a speaker to accept a very preferential and favorable stock deal?
Well, we didn't.
And if you participated in the IPO, and at the time you were Speaker of the House, you don't think it was a conflict of interest, or had the appearance of a conflict of interest?
No, it only has appearance if you decide that you're going to elaborate on a false premise.
But it's not true, and that's that.
I don't understand what part's not true.
Yes, that I would act upon an investment.
Yes.
I mean, this is like the kind of arrogance that it's hard.
I don't think I think, again, all of us are influenced by a certain degree of romanticized propaganda about our own country that we want to believe.
And we're all trained to believe that members of Congress are accountable to their constituents and they face the voters every two years.
And this is true only in the most meaningless and technical sense.
There's so much money flooded into the congressional process that the members of Congress have a higher re-election rate than members of the Russian legislative branch did under Leonid Brezhnev.
Their re-election is practically guaranteed as long as they don't step out of line because of the financial incentives that flow to them and the way they stay in power.
There's no accountability to the voters or the constituency they represent.
And that's why she could be that arrogant.
This is 2011.
And this is Steve Kroff from 60 Minutes.
Considered, at least, to be one of the trustworthy news outlets.
60 Minutes, they ask hard questions of everybody in power.
And he kind of did.
And she just said, it's not true.
I didn't do anything next.
And she went on to then become House Speaker, despite how he, in front of everybody, detailed this remarkable financial investment that she had in these transactions as a member of Congress that enriched her and her husband to a great extent.
She not only didn't she feel responsible to explain herself or justify it, she didn't even acknowledge it at all.
She didn't even pretend to give a coherent answer.
Here from CBS was the report back in 2011, just to give you a sense for how long this has been going on.
New details on Visa's attempt to influence Pelosi.
Quote, as CBS reported, current insider trading laws do not apply to non-public information about current or upcoming congressional activity.
In other words, lawmakers can go into confidential meetings with corporate leaders, understand new legislation is going to come out next week, and are free to trade on that information.
As Steve Kroft reported on 60 Minutes, Pelosi is one of many lawmakers whose stock market trades could have been seen as a conflict of interest.
The former Speaker and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs, one of which was from Visa in 2008.
Just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt the credit card companies began making their way through the House, the Pelosi's purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44.
Two days later, it was trading at $64.
Now Newsweek and the Daily Beast report that this stock purchase was made as Visa was engaged in a full-court press to lobby Pelosi to stop legislation to curb credit card swipe fees to vendors.
In 2007, Visa used an army of lobbyists to try to influence Pelosi, including one of her former advisors, Dean Aguilin, Newsweek reports.
Aguilin left Pelosi's office to work for the lobbying firm Ogilvy.
By law, he could not lobby Pelosi's office directly, but he did lobby Congress on the credit card issue and offered advice to other lobbyists on that particular mission.
In addition to exploiting the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms, Visa's Political Action Committee made a $1,000 donation to Pelosi's re-election campaign.
Newsweek reports, Visa's headquarters is in Pelosi's home district.
Two days after that donation was made, Pelosi met with Visa executives in her office.
Agulin also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the campaign arm of the House Democratic Caucus in the first half of 2008.
The former Speaker maintained she wasn't influenced by Visa's lobbying efforts or her husband's stock purchases.
Quote, I will hold my record in terms of fighting the credit card companies as a Speaker of the House or as a member of Congress up against anyone, she told 60 Minutes.
The slight fee legislation opposed by credit card companies eventually passed.
So in the meantime, she profited off the rise in that stock price.
That's how long things like this have been going on.
Now, again, this issue has been brought more and more to the fore, I would say largely, overwhelmingly as a result of the singular efforts of that independent journalist whose work we highlighted.
And so a lot more attention now is being devoted to members of Congress who simultaneously use their power in Congress to affect industries while they profiteer off their trading and enrich themselves in the process.
Here from the Washington Free Beacon in May of 2023, the House Democrat who ran as quote an anti-corruption crusader makes a perfectly timed stock trade.
And it's talking there about Dan Goldman, who ran against a bunch of experienced politicians but got the Democratic nominee in Manhattan because he was on the Mueller team, he had made a bunch of MSNBC appearances, and most importantly of all because His family, his extremely rich family, were friends with the Salzburger family.
And despite how immensely wealthy he is from unearned wealth, he got into Congress and began making extremely well-timed stock trades as soon as he got into Congress that started doubling and tripling his wealth.
Here's what the Free Beacon reported.
Quote, Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss-Gene fortune, on April 10th purchased upwards of $65,000 in shares of two companies, Navida and Bill Holdings, according to the latest financial disclosures.
The timing could not have been better, as Navida and Bill Holdings increased 41% and 32%, respectively, since the Democrat purchased them.
For comparison, the S&P 500 index has increased just 2%.
Since April 10th.
So he did 15 times better than the market.
The market had a 2% increase and Dan Goldman with his perfectly timed stock trades had an increase of 41 and 32%.
It's the latest all-time trade for Goldman, who during his congressional campaign touted himself as an anti-corruption crusader.
Goldman, whose district encompasses Wall Street, sold upwards of $15,000 worth of shares in the PacWest bank corp on March 6, just two days before its share price plummeted amid concerns about a bank run, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Goldman has made more than 700 trades of shares worth up to $30 million since taking office in January.
That is a remarkable record, and so congratulations to him as well.
Now, we showed you what the person from unusual whales has had to say about the reason he did it.
A person from unusual whales has had to say about the reason he did it, and this is why we spend so much time not just on the need for independent journalism, but also a free press and free speech, because this is the sort of reporting that could easily be prohibited if more and more controls because this is the sort of reporting that could easily be prohibited if more and Thankfully, we have this reporting.
It has brought a lot of light to this bipartisan corruption, and it really shows you the value of independent journalism, but also just how deeply and systemically corrupt these people in Congress really are.
Speaking of systemic corruption, the corporate media, as you all know, spent the weeks leading up to the 2020 election doing everything possible to discredit and even get banned from the Internet, reporting by the New York Post about spent the weeks leading on the internet, reporting by the New York Post about the Biden family's profiteering ventures in Ukraine and China
by announcing, citing the CIA and 51 intelligence officials, former intelligence officials, that you shouldn't believe any of the New York Post's reporting because it was based on a laptop that they purported to have come from Hunter Biden but was in fact Russian disinformation.
We all know now that that was a complete and total lie concocted by the intelligence community that the corporate media ratified because they were petrified with what that reporting might mean for the 2020 election and Joe Biden's chances to defeat Donald Trump.
And even as these media outlets have gradually admitted that that laptop was actually fully authentic, None, not one, has retracted those lies they spread leading up to the election.
Because they don't care about lies.
Because lies are actually what they're there to do.
Now, just as a reminder, here was Joe Biden being asked in October 2020 about this entire story, and here's how he used those lies from the CIA.
What about the Americans who really today only want me to ask you about Hunter Biden's laptop?
How are you going to get them to see that you are fighting for them when they're so dead set against you?
By the way, there's nothing to any of that.
Nothing to any of that.
It's all a smear.
Every major outfit, every serious investigator has pointed out.
That this is a smear.
This is classic Trump.
We have four days left, and all of a sudden, there's a laptop.
And you may recall, there's also talk about four months before, there was a similar thing that somebody had, allegedly.
There's overwhelming evidence that, from the intelligence community, that the Russians are engaged.
I mean, look, this is, my son's an honorable man.
I mean, that's that.
Do you see how the system works?
The CIA that's banned from domestic politics, according to Joe Biden, said this was Russian disinformation.
Then the media goes and repeats it.
Then when Biden's asked about it, he says every credible media outlet has said that this is fake.
This is a smear tactic.
This is Russian disinformation.
If anyone cared at all about disinformation or integrity in our reporting and our elections, Every person associated with spreading that lie would have been fired.
Everyone.
But not one person has.
Because people want disinformation in these institutions who claim that they oppose it.
We've had media outlets confirm the authenticity, and here, as one of the best reporters on this story, Miranda Devine, who actually works at the New York Post, Noted yesterday.
In new court filing today, the DOJ confirms Hunter Biden's laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents match what they obtained from a search warrant on his iCloud.
Don't hold your breath for a retraction from Joe Biden, who said, quote, it's a Russian plant.
The Dirty 51, meaning the 51 intelligence agents who signed onto a letter endorsing that lie, were myriad dishonest media operatives.
They blamed Russia when the Bidens knew it was Hunter and so did the FBI.
And here's what the DOJ filing said.
This is a DOJ filing, an affidavit in the case of Hunter Biden's criminal investigation for a bunch of charges related to tax evasion and fraud and obtaining a gun license.
They filed a document in court saying the following, quote, while investigating the defendants for tax violations, investigators obtained evidence showing his prior gun purchase was illegal because he was addicted to controlled substances.
Quote, in August 2019, IRS and FBI investigators obtained a search warrant for tax violations for the defendants Apple iCloud account.
In response to that warrant, in September 2019, Apple produced backups of data from various of the defendant's electronic devices that he had backed up to his iCloud account.
Investigators also came into possession of the defendant's Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store.
A search warrant was also obtained for his laptop, and the results of the search were largely duplicative of information investigators had already obtained from Apple.
So not only did the FBI know that the laptop was authentic at a time when the CIA and former agents and the media and Twitter and Facebook were all saying it was Russian disinformation then banning it on that basis, but the story of how that laptop
Came into the possession first of that laptop owner and then ultimately to Rudy Giuliani was exactly what the New York Post said that it was, which was that Hunter Biden had left it at a laptop store in Rhode Island, in Delaware rather, to be repaired and never went and picked it up.
Every part of that New York Post story was true.
And yet almost every media outlet, including the one to which I belonged at the time, The Intercept, ratified the CALI that this laptop was Russian disinformation.
And to this very day, not a single one of them, even now that the Biden Justice Department is admitting that that whole thing was a lie, has retracted their story or confronted what they did.
I know I've talked about this before.
I'm going to talk about this again.
It is such irrefutable proof.
That these media outlets don't get stories wrong.
They lie on purpose.
They lie on purpose.
And they work in conjunction with the U.S.
security state to do so with the specific intent of manipulating the outcome of our elections.
If you don't think that's coming over the next nine months or ten months, I don't know what to tell you.
We're going to have a lot of these kinds of manipulations and deceit, especially if Donald Trump ends up as the nominee.
All right, one last story we've been meaning to report on since the beginning of this week and we didn't have time but we want to take the time tonight to do it because we have been very concerned about the ongoing attack of free speech in the West.
We're always concerned about that.
That's always one of the topics that we cover the most.
One of the differences with this show and others is that we don't have an Israel exception for our reporting or our views on the importance of free speech and the perniciousness of censorship.
We don't start supporting censorship when it comes to people who criticize Israel or who are opponents of Israel.
We even apply free speech even when it comes to criticizing this foreign government.
In London on Saturday, as has happened many times in London since the start of the war in Gaza, there was a gigantic political protest where people peacefully marched through the streets of London in defense of the rights of the Palestinians to live and have self-determination and criticizing the war in Israel, which the UK government is supporting.
And at one of these protests, a speaker stood up He was a critic of Israel and a supporter of the Palestinians.
He had a written speech written out, and one of the things it said was, we must not normalize massacres of the kind that is happening in Israel.
Meaning, what Israel is doing to Gaza.
We must not normalize massacres of that kind.
And when he got to that line in his speech, speaking in front of tens of thousands of people, not a professional speaker, The way it came out was we must normalize massacres.
He left out the not.
He didn't say we must not normalize massacres.
He said we must normalize massacres.
And it immediately went viral.
People said, oh, look, that's a person who's not only cheering what happened on October 7th in Israel, but saying we need more of those.
We need to normalize massacres.
It was so obviously not what he was saying.
I'm familiar with the work of this person.
He condemned October 7th.
He's not a supporter of violence against civilians.
You could just tell as soon as you read it, his brain had kind of a lock.
Like, wait, I know that didn't come out right.
And he just abruptly ended his speech.
He said, thank you, and he left the stage.
And then he showed the written speech.
I'm like, why would he get up and say this?
Why would he get up and purposely say we need more attacks of the kind that happened on October 7th of the next day, deny that he said that?
That would make no sense.
But so often, as happens, social media clips viralize, people don't look at the context, it's the same thing that happened in those congressional hearings with the university presidents.
And a misleading perception gets created.
Now, even if he had said, I think we need to normalize attacks of the kind that happened on October 7th, there's no question that is political free speech.
You cannot criminalize somebody saying, I think we should bomb Iran off the map, like Lindsey Graham said in the last month.
You cannot criminalize somebody saying, I think we should bomb Yemen and kill all the Houthis.
You cannot criminalize somebody saying, I support the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
I think Gaza should be flattened and turned into a parking lot, as I've heard so many people saying so many times in support of Israel.
None of that can be criminalized.
And you cannot criminalize people saying, I think the Palestinians have the right to attack Israel.
As a form of resistance against occupation and blockade.
You're allowed to advocate all of that about what free speech means.
You can't go and participate in a massacre, but you can stand up in a speech and say that you think it's justified.
And yet, in the UK, a supposedly Western country that believes in free speech, we're constantly hearing from members of the British Right that they hate censorship.
They're against cancel culture and attempts to constrain political speech.
A Tory member of Parliament took this video clip that was posted by an Israeli supporter, Emily Schrader, and you see her there.
She said, quote, we must normalize massacres as a status quo.
And she made it seem like he was calling for more massacres of the kind that happened on October 7th.
And this Tory MP, Robert Jenrick, said, we must normalize arresting and deporting people like this.
Now, first of all, this Member of Parliament had no idea whether the Speaker was a citizen or a subject of the British Crown.
He just assumed he was a foreigner.
Secondly, he said, we should normalize arresting people like this.
Arresting people?
He's holding a microphone at a peaceful political protest expressing his views on a war that the UK government is heavily involved in.
You think people like that should be arrested?
People who give political speeches because they are seen to have endorsed violence against Israel?
Should it be legal to endorse violence against Iran or Yemen or Gaza?
Should that be illegal as well?
Is any Defensive violence illegal or just defensive violence against just one foreign country that's supposed to be sacred and elevated and exempt and treated differently from all the other countries in the world to the point that you can actually be arrested for justifying or defending the opposite side of Israel in a war.
You should be arrested is what this MP said.
And he had a lot of support.
A lot of Western conservatives cheered that.
Who pretend to believe in free speech until it comes to Israel.
And it wasn't just this conservative calling for his arrest and then deportation.
Here is the UK Metro Police, the official police department of the City of London.
The next day, posting the following quote, a video of remarks made by one of the speakers at yesterday's protest in central London has been shared extensively online.
Officers are aware of the remarks, the commentary surrounding them and the subsequent statements issued by the speaker.
They are assessing the matter and as part of that assessment will be speaking to the speaker, will be seeking to speak to the individual concerned.
We will provide a further update in due course.
Do you want the police responding to controversial political speeches online and then going in criminally investigating them?
They've been doing that in the UK with things like anti-trans speech.
If you say you don't think there are multiple genders, you think there are only two people who've gotten knocks on their door from the police saying I'm here to investigate your social media postings.
That's tyrannical, right?
You're opposed to that?
How can anyone possibly suddenly decide that that's a good thing just because this foreign country got criticized?
Or because violence against it was justified?
It's constant that we hear violence against foreign countries justified by people who defend and support wars.
Including people justifying the violence used by Israel and Gaza.
That's not criminal.
I think it's wrong.
I think it's immoral.
I don't think it's criminal.
I don't think people standing up and defending the Israeli assault on Gaza, the killing of civilians, should be arrested, or criminally investigated, or forced to respond to a police interrogation.
And if you're someone who supports that, please, please, please just don't come and pretend that you support free speech.
Just please don't pretend that.
Here's the video of the speaker.
His name is Mohammed Al-Qurd.
He writes for The Nation and other Western media outlets, and you can judge for yourself the context of his speech.
But whatever else is true, again, standing up and holding a microphone in front of signs protesting a war is a non-violent political act that in a free country you are allowed to do without being menaced and threatened by political officials and the police with the rest for what you say.
Hello everyone.
It's an honor to see all of you.
It's an honor to be here.
The atrocities that the Israeli regime is committing in Gaza are some of the most horrific, brutal tragedies of all of our lifetimes.
But this genocide is not without a culprit.
Okay, so it's a three-minute speech.
I'm just going to show you the end.
I mean, most of the speech is devoted to criticizing Israel.
If you really want to see the whole thing, I'm not trying to keep it from you.
You can easily find it online.
But here's the last 30 seconds or 40 seconds or so where he made these remarks.
And you can see here he's reading the speech from a transcript on his phone.
There's nothing more within your capability to do.
Look intently into the eyes of the children of Gaza and convey this message to them.
I dare you to look into the eyes of a Gazan child and tell him that you tried your best Our day will come, but we must not be complacent.
Our day will come, but we must normalize massacres as the status quo.
Thank you.
I mean, the whole thing is so obvious what he was saying.
He said, our day will come, but we must not allow this to continue.
Our day will come.
And then he meant to say, but we must not normalize massacres as the status quo.
It doesn't make sense to say, our day will come, but we must normalize massacres as a status quo.
Even though that's what he said.
Because he obviously omitted the word not.
It's so, any honest person looking at that, hearing it, following the sentence structure, understood that that's what he meant.
The minute I saw that, I understood that he omitted the word not.
But even if he intended to say what he actually said, we must normalize massacres, and he was calling for more violence by Palestinians against the state of Israel, you are allowed to do that.
You're allowed to advocate the justness of wars against a foreign country.
It's done all the time without people being arrested.
And you're even allowed to do it if it's the country of Israel that is the target of your speech.
There's no Israel exception to free speech doctrine.
Here is what he said online.
He posted the full text of his speech and he said, my full remarks from today's 500,000 person march in London, quote, we must not normalize massacres as the status quo.
And if you read the speech again in the context, you listen to the whole thing.
It's incredibly clear that that is what he was saying, but I don't want to spend a lot of time in that point because it doesn't make the slightest bit of a difference.
Go ahead and assume that what he meant was what he said.
October 7th was good.
It was justified.
We need more of those.
Feel free to think that's morally reprehensible.
You have every right to think that, just like people think it's morally reprehensible to defend the Israeli war in Gaza.
To cheer, though, while politicians call for him to be arrested and deported, to cheer when you read a statement from the Metropolitan Police saying we are criminally investigating this person and he will be required to come and be interrogated by us about the things that he said, That should send chills down your spine.
And if you're somebody whose views happen to align with the establishment when it comes to Israel, and you decide that you're willing to cheer all this because you're happy with how the establishment is using its power in this one case, just remember that two months ago you were their target and two months from now you will be again.
And if you're sitting online cheering, The abuse of police power to punish and arrest people for giving political speeches that are non-violent in nature, even if they advocate violence.
Please don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously when two months from now it's you and your like-minded allies who have the police knocking at your door because of a social media post you made or a speech you delivered in which you said something that they decided to interpret as violent and rhetoric, which happens all the time.
And I know some people say, look, I'm not supporting this, but I'm only supporting it because it's about time the left have to live under the same standards they created for everybody else.
This kind of censorship aimed at Israel critics, as we've demonstrated many times, did not just start in the last several months.
It has been going on for years and years.
And the reason for that is that censorship is a tool of the powerful.
You can always know who has power by who gets to censor.
You can always know which views are marginalized by the views that are silenced.
Censorship is a tool of the powerful used against dissidents and against the oppressed.
That is the nature of that weapon.
And that is the reason why Right-wing dissident speech, which is considered threatening and menacing by the United States government, by the U.S.
security state, is often the target of censorship.
And it's also the reason why Israel critics and defenders of the Palestinian cause also in the United States are frequently and long have been the target of censorship efforts, because the neoliberal order is on the side of Israel.
So people who are on the American right who generally consider themselves anti-establishment, don't delude yourself into believing that somehow you've finally got seized and commandeered the levers of censorship power and now finally get to use it against the left.
You're not the one using it.
The ones using it are the neoliberal establishment, the people who always use it.
It just so happens that the American right, by and large, not entirely, but by and large, is aligned with the neoliberal establishment on the question of Israel.
But they're the ones still exercising this regime, this weapon, this framework of censorship.
And some people are just happy because in this case, it's finally being exercised to advance their views of Israel or their views of this war rather than to silence their views.
But any moment that you spend sharing this framework is a moment that you're spending fortifying it, going into the future.
And anyone who believes in free speech or just basic civil liberties by definition should be horrified seeing members of a parliament and especially the police issuing these kind of threats against somebody whose only crime was giving a nonviolent political speech because their opinions provoke the anger and rage of those who wield a lot of power.
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 us in every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you follow, rate, and review the show, it'll really help spread the visibility of the program.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow, which is designed to take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques, and hear your suggestions for future shows and for guests.
And that after show is available exclusively for members of our Locals community.
If you want to become a member, which gives you access not only to those twice a week after shows, but also to the daily transcripts of every show that we broadcast here.
We produce written transcripts on that Locals platform.
It also gives you access to the interactive features that we have where people post a week-long thread of comments and critiques.
And I try and spend as much time as I can engaging with it and responding to it.
It's the place where we publish our original journalism.
