Bitcoin Expert Saifedean Ammous on Trump’s Vow to “Never Allow” Central Bank Digital Currencies—What Are the Risks? Biden’s Illegal Bombing in Yemen Escalates. The 2nd Gentleman, in Davos, Speaks on American Jews’ Hardships
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Trump Rejects CBDCs (7:24)
Interview with Saifedean Ammous (17:40)
Illegal War (42:46)
The Real Oppressed (1:07:43)
Ending (1:30:31)
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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, after Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the presidential race this week, one of the first things he did was endorse former President Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy appeared at an event with Trump in New Hampshire to announce that endorsement, and when he went on Fox News, the host Jesse Watters asked him, prior to that speech endorsing Trump, what did you discuss with the former president?
Ramaswamy said he focused entirely on policy discussions, and named two policies in particular that he urged Trump to adopt.
One was a day one pardon of Julian Assange and the other was opposition to a centralized government digital currency bank that would allow the state to control and monitor all sorts of digital dollars the way it does with other monetary transactions.
After Vivek spoke at the event and endorsed Trump, Trump appeared.
And one of the first things he said for the first time was this, quote, as your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency, casting it as a way to oppose what he called tyranny.
Given that this issue has now been elevated to a presidential vow, we thought it was important to dig into its implications and why it matters.
And to do that, we will speak with Saifuddin Ammous, who was a longtime professor of economics at the Lebanese American University and is the author of the book, The Bitcoin Standard, The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking.
We spoke with him just a few minutes ago, and I think you'll find that interview very illuminating of this issue that Trump Briefly raised, but that certainly will see some more attention as the campaign progresses, at least we hope it will.
Then, Joe Biden last week ordered that various targets in Yemen be bombed as retaliation for the attacks on various commercial ships in the Red Sea by the Houthis, the militia that runs Yemen.
The attacks by the Houthis, in turn, were motivated by their desire to punish the countries responsible for the destruction of Gaza and the death of 25,000 civilians, particularly the United States and Israel.
While the Yemeni attacks did not kill anyone, they have caused some commercial disruption.
That meant that many Americans, including many conservatives, applauded Biden's decision to bomb that country.
Now, one of the primary problems with that decision by Biden, as we documented last week, is that it was undertaken without any congressional debate, let alone any authorization.
As we illustrated, presidents, absent some emergency clearly not present here, do not have the power to start new wars without first obtaining the authorization of the American people through their elected officials and representatives in Congress.
And there are very good and important reasons for that.
Including the fact that such wars are often implemented with no clear plan, no defined mission, no metric for success, and often this leads to the kind of meandering, endless, aimless wars that the U.S.
has found itself in so many times over the past several decades.
Now, as was predictable, since that initial bombing of Yemen, the United States has bombed Yemen at least three additional times, including yesterday.
The Biden administration has still not bothered to explain its rationale or its objectives to Congress, let alone seek or obtain its approval.
When asked today about all of this, Joe Biden gave an answer that could not have more perfectly illustrated why these kinds of bombing campaigns with no public debate or authorization are so dangerous.
He said, among other things, the bombing is not yet working, but he vowed that it will continue.
There will be more bombing of Yemen.
And we will show all of this to you.
Finally, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris is Doug Emhoff.
He made an appearance yesterday at the ongoing Conference of Global Elites in Davos.
And while at Davos, he used his time to speak of the grave plight of American Jews, a group, he said, that faces extreme hardship and deprivation in the United States.
He also lamented the fact that at the time when American Jews felt most alone and unsafe and vulnerable, namely after the October 7th attack on the other side of the world in Israel, far too many Americans, he said, proved that they were no friend of the Jews, meaning that too many Americans failed to stand and support Israel in its war against Gaza and failed to support the decision of the United States government to finance Israel's war and to provide the weapons for it.
It has been genuinely fascinating to watch over the last four months as the same minority group victimhood narrative that so often provokes cynicism and scorn when invoked by other groups has now been repeatedly marshaled in favor of this one group.
We'll examine the comments of the second gentleman in Davos and what they mean.
Now, before we get to the show, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There are a lot of things that people can say about Donald Trump and his campaign, just like there were a lot of things that people could say and did say about his presidency.
But one thing that I think can't be denied is that it is always unpredictable.
You never quite know exactly what you're going to get from Donald Trump, either in terms of his ideas or how he expresses them, or the ideas and issues on which he focuses at any given moment.
Trump appeared last night at a campaign event in New Hampshire, the primary purpose of which was to unveil the new endorsement of Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race and immediately endorsed President Trump.
I don't think that came as a surprise.
I think it was pretty clear that all along Vivek was closer politically and ideologically to Trump than he was to Any other candidate, I think his rationale for running was that they, the establishment that is, are trying in a lot of different ways to remove Trump, to destroy Trump, to prevent him from running, to prevent him from becoming president, that they've been able to wound him in various ways, and that if you really want the Trump agenda implemented, this was Vivek's argument I think, ultimately
It would be better to turn to a younger, more energetic person who has not yet been wounded and harmed by all the efforts that have been launched against Donald Trump in the form of indictments and impeachments and all of those things.
Now, obviously voters did not find that persuasive.
He ended up with 7% of the vote, which for a newcomer to the political scene, The fact that he made it longer than a lot of establishment politicians and made it to Iowa, got a respectable 7% of the vote, became a known quantity.
I think a lot of Trump voters have said in polls that reflect this, that they like Vivek, but believe that Donald Trump was the person they wanted to vote for.
Once Vivek dropped out, I think it was a natural choice for him to support President Trump, given the ideas that he advocated.
But one of the things that happened was that prior to going on stage with President Trump, Vivek talked to Trump and said, look, here are some things that I would like you to include in your campaign now that I'm, in a sense, going to be a surrogate or an endorser or a supporter.
And Vivek went on Fox News when Jesse Waters asked him, what were those things you talked to him about?
And Vivek said, I didn't ask for any kind of concessions about appointments or political favors.
I really only cared about policy.
And he named two policies in particular that he urged Trump to support, to make a centerpiece of his campaign.
One was to promise, as Vivek promised, a day one pardon of Julian Assange, the person who, in my view, is the most pioneering and consequential journalist of our generation.
I talked today in an interview actually about the reasons why, namely that it was Julian who envisioned that in the digital age, one of the great vulnerabilities of centers of power was that they were going to store all their secrets on thumb drives and other sorts of means of maintaining digital one of the great vulnerabilities of centers of power was that
And that would make it much easier for whistleblowers and insiders to leak and divulge a lot of those secrets in mass.
It used to be one of the great difficulties logistically of leakers when everything was on paper happened How do you take paper out without being detected?
How do you copy it?
Daniel Ellsberg used to talk about the fact that one of the great challenges that he had when he leaked the Pentagon Papers was it was a multi-volume book of Tens of thousands of top secret documents and to get it to newspapers like the New York Times he really had to go to a pharmacy with a big gigantic bag of dimes and copy one page after the next in Xerox machines of the kind they used to have in pharmacies.
There was no way to transfer enormous amounts of data easily without being detected.
And yet when Chelsea Manning decided to leak the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, hundreds of thousands of sensitive pages, she did it in about a half an hour by downloading it to a thumb drive and then just sending it to WikiLeaks.
And WikiLeaks, Julian Assange in particular, envisioned That this is going to be the new means of journalism.
Obviously, this is the type of journalism that I was able to do that enabled us to break the story with Edward Snowden, that he was able to get a gigantic archive out of the NSA to allow us to report on all the lies and secrets of the U.S.
security state.
When I did my reporting in Brazil, that was so consequential.
Same thing.
It was a gigantic archive of information stored digitally that a source was able to give me.
And it was really Julian who first envisioned, first realized that this is the future of journalism in the digital age, especially the kind of journalism that is real journalism, journalism confronting establishment power and establishment authorities.
And one of the innovations of WikiLeaks, the defining one, was that he created a Dropbox using his knowledge as a hacker in order to enable Sources to send to WikiLeaks digital information without any fingerprints, to do so without being detected, to do so anonymously.
And since then, there has been other kinds of programs developed by people like Aaron Schwartz in conjunction with the Freedom of the Press Foundation that is called SecureDrop that is now in every American newsroom that is designed to do the same thing, to encourage sources to Give information digitally without getting caught.
They all copied Wikileaks, but that was Julian Assange's pioneering decision.
But because Assange was an actual journalist, is an actual journalist, somebody who really confronted establishment power, he's not in a green room on CNN or in a makeup room in MSNBC.
He is in prison.
And so one of the arguments of the VAC is if you really believe that the U.S.
security state is fundamentally corrupted and abusing their power, you have to protect and reward people Like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who exposed their crimes and not punished them.
So that was one of the arguments that the VEC said he implored Trump to adopt as his centerpiece of his campaign.
After Trump left office, he told Candace Owens that he came very close to pardoning Edward Snowden, not quite as close to him pardoning Julian Assange.
And our knowledge of that situation confirmed that.
And we did a video about a year ago, which you can look at if you want, about what happened there, why Trump didn't end up Pardoning either of those, but Vivek is doing his best to get Trump to make that a promise for his campaign.
But the other issue that Vivek mentioned was that he wants Trump to oppose the creation of a central bank for digital currency, which is a proposal that people inside the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve are pushing.
Here is what Trump said after he spoke to Vivek about that issue.
And tonight I'm also making another promise to protect Americans from government tyranny.
As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.
You know that?
No, it's an interesting issue to raise in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire tends to be a state that is opposed to government intrusion.
It's a state that often values privacy.
In fact, when I did the Snowden reporting, one of the very first major political figures who contacted me to express support for Edward Snowden was a former two-term Republican senator from New Hampshire named Gordon Humphrey, who wrote to me and said, Look, as long as Snowden didn't leak information to the Russians, and I believe he didn't, I consider him a hero for having brought this information to the public.
I asked whether or not I could tell Snowden that, whether or not I could publicize that, and he gave me the go-ahead.
And it didn't surprise me that that came from New Hampshire.
It has this kind of anti-government streak.
So it's an interesting issue for Trump to invoke while campaigning in New Hampshire.
And you saw the cheers there.
But I think a lot of people are probably a little bit confused about what this issue is, what is a digital a central bank for digital currency, what the implications are, why it's necessary to oppose it, who it is who's promoting it and why.
We've obviously spent a lot of time on this show reporting on things that I find very disturbing, like the increasing power to exclude people from the financial system as a result of the belief that they are dissidents or have a bad ideology.
We saw in Canada the ability of the government to freeze people's bank accounts who participated in these nonviolent protests against COVID mandates.
We spent a lot of time on this show talking about how a centralized digital economic system is putting hands into states in the West to control even more, to punish even more the prospect for dissent.
And so we decided it was an important issue.
It is an important issue.
And I'm not an expert in Central banks or digital currency.
So we decided to ask somebody to come on who is who can help explain what Trump meant here and what this debate is all about.
His name is Saifedean Ammous, who was a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University from 2009 to 2019.
He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, a Master's in Development Management from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut.
And he is also the author of the book, The Bitcoin Standard, The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, and The Fiat Standard.
We spoke to him just a few minutes before we came on the air.
I found this discussion incredibly illuminating about what this issue is, why it's important, what the implications are, and I think you will find it illuminating as well.
Professor Amos, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us tonight.
Thank you for having me, Glenn.
I'm a huge fan.
Thank you.
That's nice of you to say.
So one of the reasons we're talking about this, in fact, the principal one, is because of comments made by former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday where he said, and I think it was kind of out of the blue, at least from the perspective of a lot of people.
It's not something Trump discussed before.
Quote, tonight I am also making another promise to protect Americans from government tyranny.
As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.
And he kind of made a comment immediately after, oh, have you heard about that?
Do you know about that?
Clearly a lot of people So, before we delve into the specifics, if you could just explain the controversy around this issue.
Who is exactly proposing this central bank for digital currency and what are their arguments for why we need that?
So it's been proposed by various economists, central banks, officials, people at the World Economic Forum.
These kind of busybodies are generally marketing this as a great idea.
If you wanted to really think about what it means practically, I think the best way to put it is that it is everything that you hate about the current monetary and political system that we have, but done much more efficiently.
That's, I think, what summarizes it.
Effectively, it would allow central banks to have almost complete control of the economy.
It would allow them to censor transactions, to confiscate money much more efficiently and much more effectively than they are able to do it right now.
And it would allow them to control monetary policy and fiscal policy also with a lot more efficiency.
So if you don't like those things, you're going to love a central bank digital currencies even more.
So one of the alternatives that has excited a lot of people who are very worried about state surveillance and the ability of the government to use control over our monetary system to enforce ideological orthodoxy and the like are things like Bitcoin and blockchain and other kinds of cryptocurrency.
And for a long time the argument was that if we introduce Bitcoin, if we allowed cryptocurrencies to flourish, it would enable people to engage in financial transactions anonymously, it would make it Difficult if not impossible for the state to engage in the kind of digital surveillance that it loves to engage in and it would essentially mean that we would be free from state monitoring in the way in which we spent our money.
Is the creation of a central bank for digital currency relevant to the emergence of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
In other words, would the creation of a central bank preclude the ability of these other cryptocurrencies to emerge and flourish?
I think it's related, but I don't think it is a competitor to Bitcoin.
I think central bank digital currencies, people think of it as being something that would undermine Bitcoin, but I think it's going to be the best advertisement for Bitcoin, because the value proposition of Bitcoin is not so much that it is digital, because your government's fiat currency is currently Predominantly digital.
Only a very tiny fraction of US dollars is printed into paper money.
The vast majority exists as digital money.
So the digital part of Bitcoin is not the important part.
The important thing about Bitcoin is that it is censorship resistant.
Meaning that anybody can transact and nobody can kick you off the network.
Anyone can join the network.
And that its monetary policy is predictable, algorithmic, and it's set in stone and nobody can change it.
So Bitcoin precludes governments being able to manage monetary policy and from being able to censor transactions.
And so what central bank digital currencies do, the value prop that is being advertised by people like the Bank for International Settlement, It is precisely that it allows governments more censorship, more control and more monetary policy supervision and more fiscal policy supervision.
And that's exactly what Bitcoin can solve.
And so I really think Bitcoin is the only alternative to this, because if you don't have Bitcoin, you're going to end up at the mercy of your government.
I mean, we're already seeing this, and this is why We can we shouldn't put too much stock in Donald Trump's words, because this kind of central bank digital currency, it's not necessarily a massive transformation that's going to happen overnight.
Gradually, we're seeing how the banking system is being weaponized to crush political dissent.
And of course, monetary policy has always been highly political.
And these things are just going to continue.
And it's not easy for a president to switch these things off, even if he wanted to.
Yeah, I mean that was really the question that I had once you separated from Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies which could continue to exist and to be Developed even with this central bank of a digital currency What really would this central bank that Trump is vowing to oppose?
What really would it enable the government to do that it can't already do?
As you said, it's almost like archaic at this point to even think about the dollar as being a paper currency.
Very few people spend money through paper.
We spend it digitally with credit cards or bank transfers, everything relating to a central bank.
Seems like the government has a huge amount of power right now to monitor what it is that we're doing.
We've seen candidates like the Canadian government and others start to use exclusion from the financial system or freezing of bank accounts as punishment for political protests and activities that they disapprove of.
So what really would the creation of this central digital bank enable the government to do that it can't already do more or less now?
I think the simple answer to that is that it would take out the commercial banks from the equation and just make it far more efficient and faster for governments to exert their control.
I think the best analogy or the best closest thing that we've seen to central bank digital currencies is the Gosbank of the Soviet Union, where there was one central bank for the whole country and everybody had an account with the central bank.
And that, of course, was very conducive for a kind of the kind of economic system the Soviet Union had.
Whereas today it's a little bit more complicated because you have to call individual banks and you need to conduct this business through the commercial banks.
So I think perhaps operationally the most significant aspect of this might be that it puts commercial banks out of business.
This is one possibility because it makes their job obsolete.
You know, interesting about this surveillance argument, when back in 2013 we were able to do the reporting from Edward Snowden's archive that he furnished to us that demonstrated how widespread and pervasive, really ubiquitous state surveillance had become over the Internet.
Most people were not only shocked by it, but also disturbed by it.
There was a lot of public opinion in favor of that reporting, precisely because people understood why it's so threatening to allow the government to monitor everything we're saying, to monitor everything we're doing.
I'm not going to say it didn't have some opposition, certainly it did, especially in Washington.
But a lot of people said, yeah, I think It is very disturbing.
They could easily see why they wouldn't want the government being able to monitor the internet.
When it comes to currency, it seems like for whatever reason, people suddenly lose the understanding of why privacy and why anonymity matter.
And of course, I'm sure you've heard this many times, The argument tends to become, well look, if we allow financial transactions to be conducted anonymously, without government detection, without government monitoring, it will empower all the bad people, the people who traffic in drugs, the people who trade child pornography, the people who are laundering money, the people who are doing all sorts of illegal things, to be able to do it without detection.
And therefore we want the government being able to trace money because if they can't, it means a lot of people are going to get away with a lot of crimes and other bad things.
What is your answer to that?
I think if you really want to look at crime, you know, the big leagues of crime, they don't use things like Bitcoin.
That's not really very useful for them.
They use things like JP Morgan and HSBC.
That's where the real criminal activity goes, because these financial institutions with the current monetary system, wherein they have an enormous amount of monopoly power, because The central bank has a monopoly.
The central bank licensing of banks is a very limited process which grants them a high degree of monopoly.
And therefore and also these banks are able to effectively create money every time a bank makes a loan.
It is creating new money and bringing it into existence.
So that's ideal if you wanted to perform serious criminal activity.
You'd want to have one of these international banks that has the ability to create and destroy money across borders.
And that's what we see.
I mean these major banks have paid billions of dollars in fines and they've been implicated in all kinds of criminal activity.
So it may be the drug dealer on the street who might be using digital currencies.
But the big cartels are playing in the big leagues with the HSBC, basically, and these large banks.
And I think, ultimately, it's the same argument with freedom of speech.
Would you rather live in a society where one person gets to decide who gets to say what?
Or would you rather have the freedom of having everybody have the freedom to say what they want?
And then people have the freedom to decide what they believe.
And I, of course, believe in the second option, and I think financially it's the same thing.
I'm willing to accept the idea that unsavory types of people might be able to do transactions that I can't stop, because I know that the cost and the damage that would come from having a central authority being able to dictate who gets to do what kind of transaction Is far more damaging and far more dangerous and you know look around over the last few months I know you've been pretty outspoken about the genocide in Gaza.
I'm Palestinian myself.
I've been following this.
I know thousands of people.
I've heard about thousands of people in the U.S.
and Germany and other Israeli puppet states who have had their livelihoods destroyed because they've spoken out about this.
And I think people like you should be really concerned about this.
People like your audience as well.
I presume your audience is generally probably about one standard deviation higher in terms of intelligence, conscientiousness and ability to notice what's going on in the world.
And this is not going to be popular moving forward.
They're going to be mobilizing all kinds of censorship.
regimes.
And with the way that it's going with financial assets, you don't really own anything unless you have Bitcoin.
Everything that you have can be taken away from you pretty straightforwardly.
So right now it's with banks, but with central bank digital currencies, it'll become even easier for them to confiscate all of those things.
And even if you think you have hard assets, stocks, bonds, all those things are going to become easier and easier to confiscate.
We're already seeing precedents being set with the confiscation of the reserves of Russia and confiscation of the property of Russian individuals in the West.
And I wouldn't be surprised if this is expanded further and further to punish political dissent.
You know, I'm glad you raised that example because I do think One of the inherent recognitions that we have, maybe as American citizens or people who grew up in countries where they're inculcated with the idea that we're supposed to be a free society, is the fact that there is a cost to every freedom.
If you allow free speech, you're going to allow people to express views that might actually be harmful, that might contaminate other people in terms of their thinking, that might even lead them, induce them, encourage them to engage in violence.
If you'll force the police to get a search warrant before entering homes, it's going to make it more difficult to catch some criminals.
Some criminals will probably get away.
These are generally costs we're willing to pay for the freedom because the alternative is so much worse.
For whatever reason when it comes to currency, people can't I don't comprehend that same analysis that, oh, well, if we don't allow the government to monitor every financial transaction, bad people are going to get away with things that they shouldn't get away with.
But in terms of the political dissent issue, we have seen a huge escalation in the amount of censorship and all kinds of other forms of punishment for dissent, in particular in the war in Gaza, for support for anyone who's critical of what the Israeli government is doing.
And that has meant that a lot of people who previously for the last several years have been very concerned about the various multi-pronged efforts in the West to punish dissent.
A lot of those people who support Israel are now starting to be a little bit more open to the possibility that perhaps these are good things.
So let's just focus on that for a second.
One of the things that I have have found most alarming in terms of these developments of ways to control thought and punish dissent is the increasing power that is being consolidated to exclude people from the financial system.
PayPal now partners with the Anti-Defamation League and asks them to identify ideological extremists.
Anyone in the ADL says that's an ideological extremist can lose their account on PayPal, We've actually heard lots of reports now of people increasingly not being able to open bank accounts or stock trading accounts or brokerage accounts because of whatever people discover about their online expression.
How concerned are you about this trend where people are not just being excluded from one Well, on a personal level, I'm not very concerned.
I have Bitcoin, so that doesn't really concern me all that much.
But I think from a societal perspective, I can see where this is going.
And of course, it isn't just on the issue of Palestine, it's also on the issue of Pharmaceutical products.
If you talk bad things, if you say bad things online about certain pharmaceutical products, you also get your banking cancelled.
And I think, I mean, it's hilarious watching a lot of the many people who made their name as being freedom advocates over the last few years on the issue of health freedom turn into just your average raving lunatic.
When it comes to the issue of Palestine, but it's beyond just this hypocrisy in this one issue.
I think there's a very important lesson here, which is that you don't get to choose how these things are going to be utilized.
And so one day you might think, all right, well, this is good.
It's taking out the bad guys.
Well, one day you're going to be the bad guy.
And with the way politics are, the way the politics are becoming more and more polarized in places like the U.S.
I mean, it's becoming a regular part of the political idea that we're going to go after our political enemies.
We're seeing it right now between Democrats and Republicans.
And so you can only imagine that this is going to exacerbate.
And right now, maybe this is only being used against health freedom.
Advocates and Palestinian freedom advocates, but very soon you could see this become much more widely used against much more common ideas in American society.
Yeah, I mean, we saw it with the Canadian trucker protest, and we've even seen it with people who, not even with COVID, but were just allegedly connected to right-wing views that were deemed too dangerous to allow people to participate.
As the last question, let me ask you, one of the promises of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and blockchain and the like and I actually interviewed a left-wing advocate of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency a couple of years ago and one of the arguments he was making about why the left which generally is hostile to these kinds of non-state currencies, one of the arguments he was making about why they should be more supportive is that
It has the potential to undermine the ability of the United States to keep the dollar as the reserve currency, which is the thing that in turn allows the United States government to fund endless wars, to impose sanctions regimes on whatever governments they dislike.
And of course, at the same time, I remember, and one of the reasons why it was surprising that Trump said what he said this week, was because Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump About two years ago, within about a week or two of each other, both came out and said one of the gravest threats to national security of the United States is the possibility that the dollar could be overthrown as the reserve currency.
Is that, whether you think it's good or bad, is that a real potential if we can facilitate the spread of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency that it could actually undermine the ability of the United States to use the dollar and keep it as the reserve currency that feeds these sanctions and feeds these wars?
Well, I mean, it's not a potential in the sense that you can use it today and people do use it today.
And it's something that the U.S.
government cannot confiscate.
There is no central authority behind Bitcoin that can just confiscate your Bitcoin.
And I should be clear here that we need to make a very important distinction between Bitcoin And everything else in the digital currency cryptocurrency space because Bitcoin is the only thing that's truly decentralized and the only thing that truly doesn't have a kill switch doesn't have anybody in charge.
There's nobody for the U.S.
government to go and call and have them do things so stable coins for instance things like Tether.
Even the people who run those things, they're very open about the fact that if the US government calls them and tells them, we need you to freeze this account, they can freeze that account.
And I would argue that it's very difficult to make the case that any other digital currency other than Bitcoin Can have that property of censorship resistance.
I think when the rubber hits the road, it's not inconceivable.
In fact, I'd say it's probable that it would be possible for governments to clamp down on these other digital currencies.
Bitcoin for a variety of technical reasons, which I describe in detail in my book the Bitcoin standard.
Bitcoin is the only one that's truly decentralized and that truly can resist government censorship.
And so in that sense it already is an alternative.
People all over the world use it to escape government controls to escape hyperinflation.
And I think realistically it's Only going to become more and more of a viable option over time.
I think the important thing about it is that its economic value is essentially designed to go up over time.
And so it rewards people who use it and they benefit from it.
And that's that that's a superpower that it has compared to the US dollar which is designed to go down in value over time because that's how the US government finances itself.
It increases the supply, it devalues the holdings of everybody who holds dollars.
And so holding dollars is a losing game.
You're constantly bleeding value in order to finance the US government and its war machines and its cronies all over the world.
Whereas if you're holding Bitcoin, nobody can devalue your wealth.
So I think in the longer time horizon, you can see where these two trends will head, which is that dollar holders are going to continue to bleed wealth.
And Bitcoin holders are going to continue to accumulate and accrue wealth.
And that's, I think, going to make the Bitcoin economy a more viable alternative to the U.S.
dollar system as time goes by.
And of course, I mean, the real enemy that the U.S.
dollar has is not so much Bitcoin as it is the central bank that is using it and weaponizing it in every way.
First of all, The monetary policy that is constantly increasing the supply and therefore devaluing it and making it worth less and less over time, but also the politicization, you know, the confiscation of reserves for Afghanistan and Russia, the use as a method for sanctions.
It's forcing governments and people from all over the world to look for alternatives.
And I think Bitcoin is the only working alternative.
So I know I said last question as the preface to my prior question.
This time I really mean it and it's because you drew the distinction between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
One of the main concerns for a long time about those trying to malign Bitcoin as a viable or positive alternative was that If you don't have any government control at all, you're going to ensure this kind of unregulated market, which in turn is going to lead to fraudsters and people who run scams.
And they got the best possible gift they could have possibly be given with the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman freed.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of people who have perpetrated scams well outside of Bitcoin.
Bernie Madoff didn't use Bitcoin.
The people who brought about the 2008 financial crisis didn't use Bitcoin.
But what about the argument that If the government has no ability to see what's going on or to control it, you're going to get a lot of Sam Bankman Freeds enriching themselves fraudulently at the expense of other people.
I think the Sam Bankman Freed collapse is a case in favor of Bitcoin, because if you're a Bitcoiner, you hold your own Bitcoin keys.
None of that stuff matters to you.
All that happens is people who had their Bitcoins with Sam Bankman Freed learned that that was a very stupid thing to do, and everybody who didn't was unaffected by it.
And because there is no central bank that can print Bitcoins to bail out Sam Bankman Freed and his FTX and his clients, Everybody who was involved learned a very valuable lesson.
Now, if this was taking place in the fiat system, and it is taking place in the fiat system, it has always been taking place in the fiat system, what would have happened is that the central bank would have bailed him out.
And it would have rewarded people who put their money there, and it would have rewarded him.
So effectively, I think if you want to understand the fiat monetary system, It's what happens when the people like Sam Bankman-Fried have access to the money printer, and then they rig that system to their favor.
And that's essentially the ruling financial kleptocracy that you have today.
It's just Sam Bankman-Fried with a printer to fall back on.
Whereas in Bitcoin, these people get wiped out, and the people who trust them with their money get wiped out.
People who don't trust them with their money don't need to use them.
We can use Bitcoin independently of these exchanges.
You can send Bitcoin anywhere in the world without having to go through those exchanges.
You can't do that with the dollar.
That's the difference.
With the dollar you have to rely on the financial system.
And with the dollar the financial system has a magic printer that bails out the most corrupt people and rewards people.
For their corruption.
And in fact, if you want to understand the history of modern banking in the US, the reason banking is an oligopoly is precisely because this money print has always been used to bail out those banks.
And this has been the case since 1914, since the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
So Bitcoin doesn't have that.
Nobody can print it.
And so therefore, Instead of Sam Bankman Freed establishing a one century, two century financial dynasty that rules over everybody, he just gets wiped out after a couple of years.
And that's it.
And that's the end of the story.
So the freedom that Bitcoin allows you is, I believe, unparalleled and unmatched with what happens in the fiat system.
Fraud is going to happen everywhere, but Bitcoin allows you the freedom to opt out of it and be unaffected by it.
But you can't opt out of dollar inflation.
You can't opt out of dollar bailouts for these financial institutions.
You know, it's interesting.
A lot of people I would say most people understand that the financial system as it's constructed is deeply corrupted.
But the complexity of these alternatives I think gives a lot of space to those who wanted to keep the status quo in place to kind of scare people.
into even considering alternatives.
And I really appreciate your coming on and helping us kind of work through that complexity and understanding what these issues are.
I don't think Trump had any idea what he was saying, but I think that he was listening to people who were encouraging him in the right direction.
And I think he did a good job eliminating what that direction is.
So I really appreciate the time.
You're taking the time.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for having me, Glenn.
Yeah, good to see you.
One of the things that being an American citizen sometimes obscures is that it is extremely unusual if you're not a citizen.
If you live in most countries, for your government to just kind of casually announce that they're bombing some new other country just because they think it's worthwhile to do so.
In the United States, it's extremely common just to hear, oh, the United States is bombing some new country.
You hear all the time, oh, the United States launched a couple of missiles at targets in Syria or in Iraq, places where we still have military bases for some reason.
And it really is not an overstatement, though I know in the American context it seems like it is, to say that Joe Biden last week started a new war.
And the reason I say that is because Biden bombed 15 different targets in the country of Yemen, a country With whom the United States has not been at war.
There's no declared war in Yemen.
There's no authorization to use military force in Yemen.
It is true that from 2014 until roughly 2018 or 2019, the United States was heavily involved in helping Saudi Arabia obliterate Yemen with all kinds of bombs, created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet, if not the worst.
Millions of people in Yemen, the poorest country in that region, were on the brink of starvation.
But at least since early 2022, there has been a more or less a ceasefire agreement.
The Saudis and the Houthis have decided that they no longer want to be at war with one another.
The Houthis have more or less been left in peace.
And so whatever your view of the merits of the decision, when Joe Biden decided to order the military to start bombing targets in Yemen, that is, of course, an act of war.
It is the classic act of war.
And in every conceivable way, it means that the United States is at war with Yemen.
If you're dropping bombs on another country without the consent of the government of that country, it means you're at war with that country.
If that doesn't mean that, then nothing else does.
I guess sort of an invasion of troops into that country.
And we have a constitution that obviously anticipated the possibility of war, given that the country was founded based on a war.
And there was a scheme, a framework, provided for how wars could begin.
And the idea was supposed to be that once you start a war, you need a supreme general, a supreme commander.
And whenever wars are begun, the commander, the commander-in-chief under Article 2 of the Constitution is the president.
That's who makes decisions about the wars, about how they're fought, about troop movements, about war tactics, about war strategy.
But in order to actually start the war, there's only one branch of government that can do that, and that's Congress.
Which is why under Article 1, Congress has the sole power to declare war.
And if you read through all the Federalist Papers and everything the founder said and subsequent judicial rulings, which we walked you through last week when Biden first bombed Yemen and we raised this concern about the lack of congressional authorization.
You understand why that is not just some sort of legalistic requirement, some kind of bureaucratic process that has to be complied with.
There are actually very substantive, compelling reasons why we should not want the president to have the power to command a standing army and then just to order different countries bombed whenever he decides it's worth doing so.
Even if you understand or support or empathize with or cheer, The justness of bombing Yemen in retaliation for the Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, even if you support Biden in that decision, you still should be concerned about the fact that this was all done without congressional approval.
And we walked through all of the arguments why the main one of which, not the main one, but one of which was that typically whenever wars are started without the president, which by just the president, And there's no congressional debate, there's no report to the Congress, there's no attempt to persuade the Congress, there's no public testimony by government officials about the reason why these wars are necessary.
They end up having no clear rationale and therefore no clear purpose, no clear mission, no promise about what success means, about when we're going to stop.
It just is a war that goes on its own, that has no metric or no framework to it.
And so often that's how wars become endless wars.
And we even went through the history of how the Vietnam War started that way.
But prior to the 1964 authorization to use force in Vietnam, there were just advisors and more advisors sent and then they were involved in more and more dangerous missions and more and more were dying.
And suddenly the United States was involved in a civil war in Vietnam, even though the Congress hadn't Authorized it.
And one of the Republican members of Congress, Paul Finley, whose history we recounted, authored the War Powers Resolution in large part to avoid that from ever happening again.
And yet, really it didn't do much because presidents continue to have the unilateral power, even though it's not legal, to go and start wars when they wanted.
Do you know that the war that we fought in Libya, that President Obama fought in Libya, to remove Muammar Gaddafi was a war that not only did he start by vowing President Obama would not be a regime change war He said, specifically, this is not a regime change war.
It's a war just to protect the people of Benghazi, to provide a no-fly zone over them, to protect that population.
And then, of course, it turned into a regime change war in Libya that unleashed immense horrors and suffering, not just for the country of Libya, but for many countries around it, including Europe with the migrant crisis.
Not only did President Obama involve the country in that war with no congressional authorization, the one time Congress was asked to vote on it, or the one time Congress decided it would vote on it, was when the Republican-led House brought a bill to the floor to authorize the use of force in Libya, and the House voted no.
A majority of members of the House voted no, and Obama continued with that war anyway.
In what conceivable way is that legal?
Now, the reason presidents get away with it is because the body that's supposed to enforce its prerogatives is the Congress, and they have tools to prevent the president from pursuing wars that the Congress didn't approve, such as cutting off funding The Congress could just introduce a resolution saying there shall be no funds expended for a war in Libya or for a war in Yemen.
And then the President could not use funds for that reason.
That was what the Iran-Contra scandal was about back in the 1980s under President Reagan and Vice President Bush was the Congress had approved an amendment called the Bolan Amendment that barred the expenditure of funds for a civil war in Nicaragua.
And that was when Reagan and top Reagan officials went to Iran and sold sophisticated weapons to the Iranian government and took that cash and used it to fund the war in Nicaragua.
And that became the Iran-Contra scandal.
And it ended when Bush 41 pardoned most of his top aides and prevented anybody from accountability, including himself.
But this issue has been around for a long time that way.
And now here we have there was that first day of strikes and the warning we were concerned about that we gave was this is now going to turn into a war where this is not just a one time event where the U.S.
bombs Yemen.
We're going to keep now bombing Yemen.
And Iran is involved in Yemen.
There's a lot of regional escalation possibilities, especially with Israel and Gaza and Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon and Israel bombing Syria and the U.S.
bombing Iraq.
We're really on the brink of a regional war.
And if we're going to do that, we should at the very least have a debate in Congress about what this is going to be and what the purpose of this is.
And yet there's none of that.
Here is the New York Times.
With the headline that tells part of the story, US-led strikes leave Yemen back on the brink of war.
Yemen's Houthi militia, shaped by years of civil war, says that it welcomes a battle with the United States and that strikes will not stop its Red Sea attacks.
"For nearly a decade, Yemen has been at war, pummeled by a Saudi-led military coalition, supplied with American bombs in an effort to defeat the Houthis, a once scrappy tribal militia backed by Iran that has evolved into the de facto government in northern Yemen.
The coalition expected swift victory Instead, hundreds of thousands of people have died from fighting hunger and disease.
And since the coalition pulled back several years ago, partly because of international pressure, the Houthis have only deepened their grip on power.
Three weeks ago, the U.N.
announced a potential, quote, roadmap to peace for Yemen.
Now, Yemenis worry that instead of the war quieting down, it is entering a new, even more complicated phase.
Just as I said, the U.S.
has started its own involvement in a new war in Yemen.
The Saudi-led coalition's bombing campaign and blockade against the Houthis has already made Yemen one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Analysts and aid organizations have warned that any further escalation as a result of the recent strikes will only deepen Yemen's economic woes, increasing fuel and food prices, and worsening hunger.
The strikes on Friday in Yemen sent, quote, a very clear message that Britain and the United States would act to keep shipping lanes open, David Cameron, British Foreign Secretary, told NBC, saying they showed that, quote, if warnings aren't heeded, consequences will follow.
Isn't that the kind of thing that we're supposed to debate through our representatives in Congress?
We're issuing warnings to them.
If they don't abide by the warnings, we're going to then go to war with them?
Still, the Western attack is likely to increase anti-Americanism in Yemen and bolster the Houthis' popularity as the group capitalizes on Yemeni opposition to foreign intervention, said Ibram Jalal, a Yemeni non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.
Some American allies in the region, including Qatar and Oman, had warned the United States that bombing the Houthis could be a mistake, fearing that it would do little to deter them and would deepen regional tensions.
They have argued that focusing on reaching a ceasefire in Gaza would remove the Houthi-stated impetus for the attacks.
Now, there are arguments on both sides, I suppose you could say.
The Yemenis haven't killed anybody, but they have attacked ships, commercial ships, linked to countries they blame for the destruction of Gaza, trying to impose a price on the countries at war in Gaza.
And it has affected various prices and supply chain issues.
So there's an economic cost to what the Yemenis are doing, but they haven't killed anybody.
They haven't killed any American service members.
Two Navy SEAL soldiers died last week when they were trying to interdict a ship, a ship that they said carried Iranian weapons to Yemen.
It's ironic that the argument against the Houthis is they're terrorists because they're interfering in the free flow of commercial shipping while the U.S.
is interdicting ships like we do all the time.
Not in our waters, but in international waters that we say are bringing weapons to Iran.
Obviously the United States sends weapons all over the world.
Four days after that New York Times article, this was yesterday, U.S.
CENTCOM, this is on January 17th, tweeted the following, U.S.
And you notice they just throw that word terrorist around, that's supposed to make everyone Feel good about it.
Applaud the Biden administration.
Oh, we're attacking terrorists.
That's always good.
Again, the Houthis live in a country, Yemen, that has been devastated by Saudi, American, and British bombing.
But apparently they're the terrorists.
Whoever is the most powerful country gets to wield that term and who it applies to.
And here is CENTCOM describing the escalation of this conflict that, again, The Biden Administration has not gone to Congress in order to gain its authorization to do.
Quote, in the context of ongoing multinational efforts to protect freedom of navigation and prevent attacks on U.S.
and partner maritime traffic in the Red Sea, on January 16th at approximately 6 o'clock p.m., that's last night, U.S.
Central Command forces conducted strikes on 14 Iran-backed Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired in Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen.
These missiles on launch rails presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and U.S.
Navy ships in the region and could have been fired at any time, prompting U.S.
forces to exercise their inherent right and obligation to defend themselves.
Now, this is an argument designed to suggest the Biden administration has the ability to strike in any targets without congressional approval.
There's no emergency nature to any of this.
These strikes had been planned and threatened for weeks.
And obviously after the first strike, the Biden administration, knowing it was going to do more, could have gone to Congress as well.
Just because the U.S.
military says we're only bombing Iran-backed missile sites, these missile sites can be used to attack us, doesn't make it true.
I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but many times the U.S.
military has issued false statements about what and who they were bombing.
So many times.
In fact, one of the revelations from the so-called drone papers that we were able to publish when I was still at The Intercept was that for nine out of the ten people that Obama's drone programs killed, the US government had no idea the identity of those they were killing.
And yet, if you tracked the US drone strikes Where they didn't have any idea who they were killing, with how the media reported it based on what the Pentagon told them, you can find in AP and Reuters, the New York Times, they would say, drone strikes kill 14 Al Qaeda militants, even though no one had any idea of the identity of those being killed.
So of course CENTCOM is going to say, oh, we're only bombing scary, threatening, Iran-backed missile launchers.
That doesn't make it true.
And even if it is true, it doesn't obviate the need for congressional approval.
Quote, these strikes, along with other actions we have taken, will degrade the Houthis' capabilities to continue their reckless attacks on international and commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Quote, the actions by the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists continue to endanger international mariners and disrupt the commercial shipping lanes in the southern Red Sea and adjacent waterways, said General Michael Eric Carrilla, U.S.
CENTCOM commander.
Quote, we will continue to take action to protect the lives of innocent mariners, and we will always protect our people.
Joe Biden was asked earlier today about these bombing missions in Yemen and specifically was asked whether or not all this bombing that he's now done, there's been four separate strikes in the last week, has succeeded in degrading the Yemeni ability to attack ships in the Red Sea.
And here's what Biden said.
Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?
When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis?
No.
Are they going to continue?
Yes.
He said, when you ask me, are they working?
No, they're not working to prevent the Houthis from attacking ships.
But are they going to continue?
Yes.
Well, obviously, the question is, if they're not working, why are they going to continue?
Those would be the kind of questions that he would have to answer or who's ever making these decisions would have to answer if there was a debate in Congress, if Congress were calling these people before these committees to ask them these questions.
What is the purpose of this bombing campaign?
Is there a strategy behind it?
Given how adept and experienced these Houthi fighters are from years of bombing by Saudi Arabia with the help of the US and the British, it seems like they know pretty well how to hide their missile launchers and their other military assets.
Are we just bombing madly with no real benefit?
There are obviously costs to this bombing.
We're increasing anti-American sentiment in the region.
We're strengthening the Houthis.
These are the kinds of debates we would be having.
We would be having a clear explication of war strategy, of when this bombing campaign would be over.
But because there's no involvement on Congress, it's just something that Joe Biden is doing for reasons he's really not bothering to explain to the public, except with these propagandistic pronouncements.
Throwing the word terrorist around and Iran around.
I mean, if that's something that convinces you that the government wars are justified, 23 years after the war in Iraq and the war on terror, where all those words were constantly thrown around, terrorists and war on terror and Iran and all that, then I don't think you're thinking very skeptically about pronouncements by the government.
Now, there are members of Congress Who have been vocal in their opposition.
Here is the Democratic congressman from California, Ro Khanna, who tweeted the following about that video.
I'm glad that the president agrees with me that the strikes are not working.
Next time come to Congress instead of McGurk, meaning the White House's military advisor who told them to go bomb Yemen.
Now again, of claims by the Congress that they should be asked are not very compelling, given that there's no effort on the part of people like Ro Khanna to introduce legislation to cut off funding. given that there's no effort on the part of people So again, it's sort of like the relationship between the US and Israel, where the U.S., where Biden said at the start of the war, look, no matter what you need, we're going to give it to you because
You are an ally and we're going to give you, just tell us what you need.
We're going to give you the money you want.
We're going to give you all the weapons you need.
And then repeatedly when journalists ask, look what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is provoking indignation all over the world.
It's spilling over into the ability of the United States and our soft power.
Have you given any red lines to the Israelis at all to say, if you cross this line, we're not going to continue to give you aid?
And John Kirby and other White House spokespeople have said, no, absolutely not.
Our commitment to the Israelis to finance their war and arm their war is unconditional.
It's unlimited.
So obviously, if you say our support for you is unlimited, then why would the Israelis care about grievances that Biden expresses?
Oh, we wish you would do more of that.
We wish you'd do less than that.
Who cares?
You've already told us you're going to give us all the money and the weapons we want.
Why would we pay attention to your grievances?
And as I've said many times before, the analogy is when American leftists stand up and say, I'm going to vote for Democrats no matter what, even though I don't like Democrats, because I'm so scared by Donald Trump and the Republicans.
And then the leftists go on their little YouTube shows and whatever and they whine and complain about what Democrats are doing, but Democrats don't pay any attention to them because they've already told them in advance, you have my support unconditionally.
No matter what you do, I'm always going to vote for you.
So of course they're going to be ignored, just like the Israelis should and are ignoring the Americans because they know that they have no leverage or they won't use their leverage.
Americans have a lot of leverage with Israel.
They won't use it.
And it's similar to Congress.
Who cares if Ro Khanna goes on a bunch of Sunday shows, gets a lot of attention for himself, denouncing The bombing campaign in Yemen without congressional approval?
If he's not willing to cut funds off for that military campaign until there's congressional authorization, then all of his showboating is just that.
It's theatrical.
It makes no difference.
The Biden White House is going to ignore them because Congress is not enforcing their prerogatives.
Now, I just I know from so much experience in writing about these issues and talking about these issues and presidential power, It's kind of like, it's a little bit like a free speech debate where people, if they're happy about who is being censored, it's very hard to get them to care about censorship by saying, think of the long-term effects of the things you're endorsing.
I know you're happy in this first case, you hate this person who's censored so much, you think their views are so pernicious and dangerous that You're so happy that they're being censored that you want to applaud it.
And you're not thinking about what you're endorsing and ratifying and fortifying in the long term.
And this is very much true here.
A lot of people hate Iran.
They're angry about the Houthis.
They don't think much about, is there a strategic purpose?
They just want them bombed.
And yet there's a real reason why it's important to not allow the president to go to war without congressional approval.
We're seeing that now.
These wars escalate.
They go on forever.
They start spiraling out of control because there was never any need in the first instance to articulate what the purpose and the mission were.
And that's exactly what happens, what's happening with Biden in Yemen.
And it's amazing to me how many people who say they distrust the Biden administration, who distrust The U.S.
U.S. security state and the military industrial complex seem comfortable giving them the unilateral power to start whatever wars they want with no accountability.
As we talked about before, an important part of our show here on Rumble are the sponsors that we have.
We only take sponsors whose products we really believe in, and that's the case for The Wellness Company, which has been a sponsor of our show for quite some time now.
It's based in the rather alarming fact that if you look at pharmaceutical products in the United States, 90% of pharmaceutical products are produced outside of the United States, which means they are very vulnerable to a serious supply chain disruption.
If you have something like a war or a pandemic or a trade war where countries want to punish the United States or the supply chain gets interrupted, it can be very easy to imagine that crucial medications that you might need for yourself and your family might not be available.
And what the wellness company does is, just like people stock up on, aspirin or Tylenol or other medications they know they might want to use in the long term.
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The conference that is held every year at Davos for the world's most influential global elites in the United States and Europe and Asia and the Gulf states are taking place this week
We showed you a couple of things that have happened there over the last week at Davos, some of the important statements that have been made, some of the speeches that have been given, some of the demands that were made, including by President Zelensky, who showed up at Davos with what he called a peace plan.
That read a lot more like a list of the most humiliating terms of unconditional surrender that for some reason Zelensky thinks he's ready to impose on Russia, even though Russia is clearly winning the war and currently occupying controls 20% of his country.
One of the people who traveled to Davos to speak about the important challenges facing the world is the husband of the American Vice President Kamala Harris.
His name is Doug Emhoff.
He is the second gentleman.
We've always had first ladies and second ladies.
It's the first time in American history we have a second gentleman because we have our first female vice president and he is Doug Emhoff and he's the Husband of Kamala Harris.
He is also an extremely wealthy lawyer.
He's been a partner in a major law firm for many, many years.
He has a net worth of many millions of dollars.
He had that before he married Kamala Harris.
He became very wealthy in his first marriage.
He divorced his first wife, met Kamala, married her.
And one of the things he spoke about at the World Economic Forum in the annual meeting in Davos was the Severe plight that American Jews face, the hardships of American Jews, the obstacles that American Jews face, the emotional trauma that American Jews face, the fact that American Jews feel unsafe in their country, that they're discriminated against, that a lot of people have a lot of bigotries and animosity toward American Jews.
Basically, it's a very familiar victimhood script.
It's a victimhood script that we've heard largely from the liberal left over the past several years in defense of A whole different other set of minority groups, black people and Latinos and Muslims and LGBTs and trans people in particular, Native Americans, women.
And oftentimes people, especially in this kind of anti-woke backlash, have started to react with a little bit of, or a lot of scorn toward these ideas like, oh, these minority groups, Create a victimhood narrative for themselves where they basically say everything is unfair to them in American life, that America is against them, they face all these unfair systemic obstacles instead of focusing on the successes they've been able to achieve.
One of the main planks of Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign, like Senator Tim Scott's campaign, was that the left and liberals often use and exploit identity politics and victimhood narratives as a way of gaining power.
That's the basis of censorship to say black people are very vulnerable to racial hatred, Latinos and immigrants are vulnerable to xenophobia, trans people.
There are people who want to commit genocide against trans people, so we can't allow robust criticisms of those groups.
We can't allow speech that's critical of those groups.
We have to honor and respect and revere the victimhood narrative of these groups by keeping them safe from ideas that may be threatening to them.
This has been the whole anti-woke movement based on rejection of these victimhood narratives and yet since October 7th, There has never been as concerted an effort to marshal a victimhood narrative as there has been on behalf of American Jews.
And yet the people who usually mock this and are cynical about it, when offered by other groups, suddenly become very sympathetic to it, very respectable, very reverent of it.
The Republican Party brought Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and Penn and Princeton and Brown to Capitol Hill To talk about how unsafe they felt.
Not because they had been physically attacked or threatened with physical attack, but because of the anti-Israel protest they have to endure.
The chants, the political chants that they have to hear that make them feel upset and scared.
Although this time, instead of mocking the idea that, oh, these little snowflake students need a safe space from ideas that make them unsafe, Republicans on Capitol Hill decided to honor this and even got two university presidents fired over their refusal to protect these students from these feelings of unsafety.
And Doug Emhoff, the Vice President's wife, husband rather, went to Davos and brought this narrative with him about not just the unique, singular, intense struggles and difficulties and hardships of Jewish people in the United States, but also, according to him, the fact that far too many people fail to support American Jews in their time of need since October 7th, by which he means
That not enough Americans stood up and said, I love Israel.
I want to support and finance Israel's war.
I want to arm Israel.
I have no empathy for Palestinians or the Palestinian cause.
And he had this grievance and he used his platform at Davos in Switzerland.
Very lovely city.
Very picturesque.
In order to explain how difficult it is to be an American Jew in 2024.
Here's what the second gentleman said.
But as American Jews, I think the feeling is one of aloneness and being hated and being unmoored and all these things that we had maybe fooled ourselves into thinking that this wasn't so bad.
We're not really experiencing anti-Semitism.
It's never going to be this horrible.
It happened.
And then, as you've been saying, we kind of saw who our friends were and who our friends weren't.
And there were too many in the weren't category, some who we thought were friends.
And just shocking.
So it's that feeling of just being.
So.
Being an American Jew, apparently, is to feel alone and hated.
Even if you're a multimillionaire lawyer who is married to the ostensibly second most powerful political official on the planet, You are somebody who is just in real difficulty in the United States.
To be an American Jew is an unimaginable hardship, according to the second gentleman at Davos.
The phrase that he used about, well, we found out who our friends are, again, I mean, it seems like the only way you can demonstrate your friendship for American Jews is to stand up and support this foreign country and the war that they're engaged in.
I don't feel like it should be necessary to have to support a foreign war or to want to finance a foreign country's war to demonstrate that you're a friend of American Jews.
In fact, there are many, many Jews who are among the most vocal opponents of that war.
Obviously, the majority of Jews support Israel and support that war, but a non-trivial number do not.
In fact, right now Bernie Sanders is one of the leading voices in the Congress arguing that we should cut off funds to Israel unless they promise significant changes to their human rights conduct in Gaza.
Now, one of the things that has happened as well is that there's a lot of people, we've talked about this before, who have Branded themselves as anti-woke, as opponents of cancel culture, who suddenly since October 7th have become the leading practitioners of it.
Here's a neocon at Newsweek who has identified himself as anti-woke over the past several years, Josh Hammer, who's a fanatical supporter of Israel.
And he learned that Max Blumenthal, who is an American Jew as well, apparently someone suffering great deprivation and struggle and hardship as well, is speaking, giving a speech at the Capitol Hill Club.
And Josh Hammer went on Twitter and said, quote, Why on earth is Capitol Hill Club, the well-known GOP social spot in DC, hosting the exorable Matt Bumenthal tonight?
What happened to all that?
Talk about how important it is that we have free discourse, that we defend even the rights of people who disagree with us to be heard, not to be deplatformed.
Do you see how it all comes to a grinding halt the minute Israel is mentioned?
Over the past two or three years, Josh Hammer has heaped all kinds of praise on my work, publicly and privately.
Offering me, asking me to please come and be a writer for Newsweek, telling me how great my work is when it comes to the United States and American citizens.
And as soon as October 7th happened, and I began expressing opposition to the war in Gaza by Israel, he started retweeting all kinds of warnings, like even if you are supportive of Glenn Greenwald's work when it comes to Americans and the United States, His views on what really matters, which is his foreign country of Israel, are so bad that you should regard him as a dangerous person.
The issue of Israel is not just one of the most important issues to them, it is THE litmus test.
THE single most important issue.
That causes them to abandon every single alleged principle that they have, and they turn to cancel culture and safety narratives and victimhood group narratives.
I have no doubt they're applauding Doug Emhoff for his brave and important decision to use his public platform at Davos to bring attention to the hardship of American Jews.
Here is polling data from Pew Research in 2016 that sought to examine, based on public data, the household income of various different groups by their religion.
And it broke down how many people in each group, Hindus, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Atheists, Christians of different kinds, Jewish people, are either poor, middle class, or wealthy.
And here you can see at the screen, it's listed in order of wealth.
The number one group for income earners in the United States are Jews, people who are Jewish.
Here is the top income category, making $100,000 or more per year.
$100,000 or more per year.
44% of American Jews make that.
The second group is Hindu.
Hindus and they make only 36% make $100,000 or more.
24% of Jews in the United States make between $50,000 and $99,000 and only 16% are in that poorest group of making under $30,000.
So the fewest number of Jews are in that poverty group.
The most number of Jews are in the wealthiest group.
And there you can see the List of others, and the last group on the list is Muslims.
34% of Muslims are in the lowest-earning group, only 20% in the highest-earning group.
But if you were to listen to conventional discourse, you would hear that, oh, the people who have the greatest privilege in the United States are Muslims, and the people who face the greatest hardship are Jews.
Now obviously economic wealth and income is only one metric of a group's standing in a country, though it's a pretty significant one, especially in a capitalist society like the United States.
But you use any other metric, representation in top schools, representation in institutions of power, In Hollywood, in Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in politics, and you would find the same thing.
I think it is a very, very, very, very difficult case to make that American Jews are a singularly repressed group that faces hardship and struggles as compared to other groups in the United States.
I think American Jews are doing okay in the United States.
I think Doug Emhoff, the multimillionaire partner married to Kamala Harris, is also doing pretty well.
I think the idea that he makes any sort of, that he's somehow alone or deprived or whatever, seems like a self-victimization narrative that has no basis in reality.
Here's the rest of the list.
You see all adults there, so the medium is 35% in that poorest range and 19% for Jews.
I think actually Muslims, when I said Muslims are in last place, that was only that first part of the chart.
So they're actually more in the middle.
They're right around the medium.
I think Jehovah's Witnesses are actually the lowest, right below Baptists.
Just to correct something I said earlier, but Jews lead that list.
And we covered last week the fact that the ADL launched a campaign in conjunction with Hollywood celebrities to demand that the inability of Jews to have any influence in the entertainment industry finally come to an end.
And I think one of the important things to note here is that, I think two important things to note.
One is that people who are members of a particular group are always going to be more empathetic to grievances that come from their group than they are going to be from other groups.
So if somebody isn't black, And they hear black people saying, oh, we face all kinds of discrimination.
We face all kinds of difficulties and challenges in the United States.
Very easy to dismiss that.
You're not black.
Oh, they're just whining.
They just want special privileges.
If you hear LGBTs saying, oh, we are a victim group.
We face all kinds of harm and discrimination and unfair treatment.
Oh, they're just whining.
That's just victimhood narrative.
But if you're Jewish, and then your group starts saying, no, we are the ones that face all kinds of hatred and stigma and difficulty and hardship, then you say, oh, yeah, yes, absolutely.
That makes sense to me.
It is.
It's Jews that are the number one victim group in the United States.
It is a basic lack of empathy and inability to see the world through any perspective other than your own.
I'll just give you, and this is admittedly anecdotal, but I led the first 38 years of my life as an American Jew in the United States, and I don't think I ever experienced a single anti-Semitic incident.
I don't even mean a serious one, I mean any kind at all.
And of all the American Jews I know, and I know a lot of American Jews, my entire family are American Jews, most of my friends growing up are American Jews.
I don't think any of them that I know of has experienced a single anti-Semitic incident in the United States.
Since October 7th, the entire political class in Washington, with about six exceptions, has united in defense of Israel.
All of Washington wants to fund the Israeli war.
They're all in favor of sending not just the $4 billion every year we send to Israel, but an additional $14 billion that Biden has asked for.
You have Bill Ackman and billionaires calling for no higher blacklists for people who sign petitions critical of Israel.
Institutions of power are completely on the side of Israel and American Jews.
I don't understand what Doug Emma and people like him are talking about.
I really do not.
I would say Having grown up as a gay person in the United States in the 80s under Ronald Reagan and then into the 90s, anti-LGBT animus has been something I've seen a lot more of, I've experienced a lot more of, it had a bigger effect on my life.
It was because of a piece of legislation called the Defense of Marriage Act that I couldn't live in the United States with my husband because the government was barred from giving immigration rights.
But I don't consider the hardships and struggles that come from being a gay person to be a central factor in my life narrative.
And so for Doug Emhoff to go all the way to Davos on a private jet As somebody in a very, very lofty position of power and wealth, and bring with him that narrative, is something that really takes a lot of audacity, I think.
Especially when you're framing the obligation to show friendship to Jews as being support for a war in Gaza that has brought a kind of suffering and hell to the people of Gaza that has no comparison on this earth.
To be an American Jew and be someone very wealthy and powerful, knowing that what's taking place in Gaza, where there's no health care system, where there's no hospitals, where people's children are dying of starvation and treatable diseases and bombs, and say, I feel alone.
I feel hated.
I feel deprived.
I feel sad.
I feel traumatized.
And of course along with that is a whole litany of policies that are designed to ameliorate that suffering and that hardship like campus censorship and speech laws to protect Jewish students from trauma and sadness from having to hear ideas against Israel that they find upsetting.
It's not just a deranged, self-victimized proclamation.
It comes with it a whole series of policy demands that these victimhood narratives are typically designed to usher in.
Makes it all the more repellent.
Especially when you consider what's going on in Gaza.
Here is Sean Casey, the World Health Organization Emergency Medical Team coordinator, speaking today about what he experienced when he was in Gaza, what he saw.
SEAN CASEY: Basically, the whole hospital was filled with displaced persons, thousands of them, reportedly tens of thousands of them, living in the operating theaters, living in the corridors, living in the stairs.
In the emergency department, seeing hundreds of patients a day, mostly trauma, with only a handful, literally, five or six doctors or nurses to care for all of those people.
Patients on the floor, so many that you could barely move without stepping on somebody's hands or feet.
In Al-Athli hospital, also in the north, I saw patients who were lying on church pews, basically waiting to die, in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very little in the way of medical supplies, and only a handful of staff remaining very little in the way of medical supplies, and only a handful of staff
So that, to me, seems like hardship and deprivation of a kind that merits a panel at Davos that should bring with it a series of policy measures to ameliorate it.
Thank you.
Whatever Doug Emhoff is experiencing, that does not seem to me to rise to that level.
And every group has grievances that are valid.
Every group faces challenges.
Every human being faces challenges.
So it's not to deny that there's anti-Semitism or racism or transphobia or any of those other Kinds of difficulties, but you have to put things in perspective.
And I don't think there's ever been a place on earth or a time on earth when it's been better or safer to be an American Jew than American 2024.
And I had pro-Israel advocates on my show, including Batu Amir Saigard, that he discussed in contempt on this attempt to turn American Jews into victims, saying essentially exactly that.
But if you want to start taking seriously the claims of people like Doug Emhoff that they are unique victims, that they face this lonely and hated experience in life, where they're socially isolated and subjected to all kinds of abuse, Then I think it's very difficult to justify how it is that you can scoff at or reject similar claims from other groups when they start demanding all kinds of measures to rectify the challenges that they face.
But that is the other point is one of the ways you can tell which group wields real power is typically the most powerful are those who succeed in turning themselves into victims.
It's one of the great paradoxes of life.
The Israelis believe they're the sole victims even though they have the most powerful military on earth funding and financing their wars?
The United States, in very many ways, believes that, too.
Oh, we're so hated.
Everybody hates us for totally unjust reasons.
And the ability of American Jews, of all people, to depict themselves as unique victims confronting stigma and hardship and struggle and deprivation in the United States is something that I think is more than anything a testament to the fact that it's actually a very powerful group in the United States, not at all a victim.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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