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.
Whenever the establishment wings of both political parties in Washington announce they are in full agreement on some major legislative package or war funding, it's basically inevitable that bad things, usually very bad things, are about to happen.
That is most definitely the case with what Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have proudly unveiled.
While we're being told that the two parties can never agree on anything, they just showed us something they are calling a bipartisan bill, even though very few Republicans seem to support it.
And it's something they're also calling a border security bill, even though only a small percentage of the $120 billion it would spend would stay at home in the United States, with the vast majority instead Going to finance the wars of foreign countries, including $60 billion more for Ukraine and $17 billion more for Israel.
Just that alone is $77 billion out of the $120 billion.
Almost immediately upon this being unveiled, the populist wing of the Republican Party vehemently denounced it, both on the ground that the border security provisions are woefully inadequate, if not making the border crisis worse, and because such a massive amount of that allocated billions would be spent on foreign countries and not, as usual, spent to improve the lives of the American citizens who they ostensibly represent.
For that reason, The fate of the bill is very much in doubt, especially since many Democrats also oppose the bill on the grounds that the immigration restrictions are too severe and they don't want to send more money to Israel, especially without conditions.
Meanwhile, one of the primary champions of the bill, Mitch McConnell, is now admitting that it basically has no chance to pass and it's dead on arrival.
But the bill itself, as well as the fallout from it, shines a very vivid light on the real priorities of bipartisan Washington.
And are thus very worth examining to understand what happened here.
Then on last night's show, we reported on the genuinely unhinged, borderline pathological response by many in corporate media and the political class to Tucker Carlson getting caught visiting the country of Russia.
Russia.
Earlier today, Carlson, in a video explaining his decision, confirmed that he is indeed in Russia and is going to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To say that the response to that has become vastly more deranged is to severely understate the case.
But it actually says a lot about America's corporate media that they don't think it's deeply immoral to interview a foreign leader who is an adversary of the United States.
Something American journalists have long been celebrated for doing.
But there are deeper reasons why so many people in the U.S.
media are deeply fearful at the prospect of Americans getting to hear directly from Vladimir Putin.
It's not because, as they're claiming now, that they dislike how Carlson plans to conduct a fawning interview.
For one thing, they don't mind fawning interviews at all.
How many of those have we been subjected to over the last two years with their favorite foreign leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine?
A large number of American journalists got to interview Zelensky.
Can you think of a single time when any of those interviews were out of stereo, contained even a minimally difficult question?
And then aside from the obvious dishonesty and condemning an interview they have not seen, their desire for Putin never to be heard from, or only to be heard from if some American journalist is banging his fist on the table and repeating all the propagandistic talking points about how Putin is the greatest evil, It all says a great deal about what their true function of the corporate media is.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The two political parties in Washington, we are constantly told, can absolutely just not agree on anything.
thing.
They have such wildly different views of the world.
They're always at each other's throats.
Bipartisanship is just impossible any longer.
It used to be that the two parties would get together, journalists love to talk about how Ronald Reagan, the Republican president, would have drinks with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, and they would kind of reach an agreement, shake hands as patriots, and it just doesn't happen anymore, we're told.
That is one of the most deceitful narratives possible.
The reality is that although the parties sometimes disagree on culture war issues in particular, and occasionally on other issues of economic policy, the vast majority of American policy is done through bipartisan consensus.
Through the leaders of both political parties getting together.
They are funded by the same corporate and special interests.
Both all the corporations that fund the Democrats fund the Republicans, all the banks that fund the Republicans fund the Democrats.
They're serving the same donor class.
And as a result, they constantly agree on most things.
It's just the media rarely covers when there's agreement.
They only cover when they're bickering, creating the illusion that they're constantly fighting with each other.
And for the last several months, the top priority in Washington, and I mean the top priority, has been to get another $60 billion to keep the war in Ukraine funded.
Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have basically said, we're willing to do anything to make this happen.
And originally the position of the Republicans was, we're not going to give any more money to Ukraine because we have a giant hole in our own border.
We have no border security ourselves here at home.
Even Democratic mayors and Democratic governors are saying that there's a crisis on the American border.
I saw a clip where Al Sharpton the other day was saying that we now have a migrant invasion.
Al Sharpton, who has spent his entire life condemning the police and running against the Democratic Party from the left, is now suddenly sounding like Ted Cruz when it comes to immigration, saying we're under attack and under invasion, and talked about how upset it was when he saw that illegal immigrants in New York Assaulted police officer Al Sharpton.
That's how extreme that this has gotten.
And so the Democrats sat down and said, we want to negotiate a border deal with you in order to get what we really want, which is a new $60 billion for Ukraine.
And then once October 7th happened, the priority of both parties became, and we want billions more for Israel on top of the $4 billion a year that we already sent to Israel.
And the byproduct was unveiled this week.
Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer had a press conference where they both heap praise on this bill that they're calling the bipartisan border security bill.
Even though most Republicans are now making clear that they will never vote for this bill, and there's plenty of Democrats who refuse to vote for it either, there's no chance that it can pass.
This is what they unveiled.
Now, as a result, funding for Ukraine and funding for Israel Is very much in doubt as a result of the chaos that has been generated by this quote-unquote bipartisan border security bill that is much more about financing foreign wars than it is about making life better for Americans in the United States.
Here's Reuters on February 4th summarizing the bill.
You see the headline, U.S.
Senate unveils a $118 billion bill on border security, aid for Ukraine and Israel.
Now that headline makes it seem like this $118 billion more or less goes equally to these causes when in reality $77 billion of this $120 billion is solely to pay for Ukraine and Israel's wars.
There's a bunch of money in there for the new war in Yemen.
We're also going to devote $10 million to giving humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
So we're paying Israel to destroy Gaza, and then we're paying for the humanitarian aid that they now need to not starve to death or die of mass treatable infections.
So we're, I wouldn't say financing both sides of the war because we give way more to Israel than to the Palestinians, but We're paying for Israel to destroy Gaza and then paying to try and assuage your own conscience about the kind of human suffering that's there.
So you have $10 billion going to Gaza.
That's now $87 billion of the $120 billion.
You have another $5 billion for more aggression in the area around China.
You have several billion more for the new campaign that we're bombing in Yemen.
And so by the time you actually look at it, a very small percentage of this actually goes to American citizens that has any effect on their life.
Yet, as a result, what really happened as soon as this bill got unveiled...
The populists in the Republican Party do something liberals in the Democratic Party never do.
They revolted against their leadership.
And they said there is no way that you can support this bill.
Donald Trump came out and said this bill should be immediately rejected.
And as a result, according to Reuters, quote, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson declared the bill, quote, dead on arrival if it even reaches his chamber.
How long are we going to have to, by the way, qualify every time we say X by reminding people that that's actually Twitter?
It's so annoying to have to say.
He said in a statement on X, formerly called Twitter.
How long are we going to have to, by the way, qualify every time we say X by reminding people that that's actually Twitter?
It's so annoying to have to say.
It's been months since it's been renamed.
Anyway, the article goes on, quote, the Democratic and Republican Senate backers of the wide-ranging border security and foreign military aid bill, pledged to push ahead despite opposition by Donald Trump as well.
In addition to $20 billion for border security, the bill included $60 billion to support Ukraine in its war with Russia.
$14 billion in security assistance for Israel, and that number is really closer to $17 billion.
$2.4 billion to the U.S.
Central Command in the conflict in the Red Sea.
And $4.83 billion to support U.S.
partners in the Indo-Pacific facing aggression from China, according to figures from Senator Patty Murray, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Now what they really mean You see how everything's always phrased to push the foreign policy position of the United States?
That $5 billion for the seas near China are not to protect American allies under attack, it's to deploy more and more military in the immediate vicinity of China.
Basically keep them militarily encircled in a way that obviously the United States would never tolerate China doing to the United States.
Here's a chart just to give you a visual idea of how little of this money actually goes to the United States and to the lives of American citizens.
So here is the... I'm just going to grab my little pen that I love to use.
Here is U.S.
border security.
I'm going to try and get these pens up here if we can do that.
Is that possible?
There, we had to erase that.
Here is for U.S.
border security.
I'm making a mess of these pens, but here U.S.
border security is $20 billion.
That's the only thing that is even arguably going toward the United States.
And a lot of that $20 billion is not really to border security.
It's to fund NGOs that represent asylum seekers.
It's to help sanctuary cities with more financing, blue state mayors and blue state governors that are defending it, that are demanding it.
But let's just even be generous and let's say that all $20 billion is going to fortify the border of the United States.
Members of both political parties are saying in polls they regard this immigration problem as a major priority.
And here you have, you can just see graphically, $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, $10 billion for Gaza, $5 billion for the Indo-Pacific, and $2.4 billion for, quote, Red Sea conflicts.
Red Sea conflicts.
That we are now fighting by virtue of our support for Israel.
The Houthi began attacking American ships because they argued the United States was the country financing the war in Israel, or the war in Gaza, helping Israel destroy Gaza.
So this is just another cost of our tying ourselves to the hips with Israel and financing its wars.
So you just see graphically.
What the priorities are of bipartisan Washington has nothing to do with the lives of the American people.
Now, here from Bloomberg is a little bit of analysis about who really is benefiting most from this bill.
And I know it'll shock you to find out that it's the U.S.
defense industry that is going to profit enormously from this bill.
Surprise!
U.S.
defendant industry would get $35 billion boon in the Senate-Ukraine border deal.
"Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics are among those boosted by spending on artillery, air defense, and submarines." Quote, "Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Goodman, and Hill, formerly known as Huntington Eagles.
Oh, it's HII, I believe.
Yeah, Huntington Eagles Industry, are among the companies likely to gain the most business from the overall package.
The deal will help the U.S.
invest in its own defense industrial base and support American jobs producing weapons and equipment the U.S.
can send to Ukraine, a senior administration official said.
Do you see what they do?
Someone from the Biden White House came and delivered propaganda to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg wrote the first two paragraphs of their article based on White House propaganda and added a senior administration official said so they gave him anonymity.
Why?
He wasn't spilling any secrets in an unauthorized way.
He was giving Bloomberg its propagandistic framework for how to understand us.
In other words, they're trying to say, yeah, I know it seems like we're sending all these billions of dollars to other countries, but don't worry, it's going to go into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, which in turn will help you.
It's all about helping you.
That's the reason why they're fueling these wars in other countries, senior administration officials said.
Quote, Israel would receive $10.6 billion in its fight against Hamas, including $4 billion for its Iron Dome and David Sling defensive systems, both made by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and the U.S.-based RTX.
It would also receive $1.2 billion from the laser-based Iron Beam air defense system made by Rafael, an Israeli company.
The Senate bill includes $2.4 billion to support U.S.
operations in the Middle East and to cover combat expenditures for weapons to counter Iranian-backed groups who have attacked Red Sea shipping and American troops and allies stationed in Iraq and Syria.
Isn't it remarkable that if you look at every poll going back a decade now, Americans overwhelmingly say they want these endless wars in the Middle East to stop?
And as a result, you have politicians constantly promising when they run for office They're going to put an end to endless war in the Middle East, and yet over and over and over and over again, bipartisan Washington concocts reasons to ensure that we are constantly in endless war in the Middle East.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last decade when the United States was not bombing Iraq.
Now, you can debate the motives, but the reality is that the priorities of Washington clearly is to ensure that endless war remains endless.
And while they can't hide any longer who the real beneficiaries are, the arms industry that funds both parties' campaigns, now they're pretending that, oh, don't worry, when they get rich, you do well also.
You should cheer for higher profits for the military-industrial complex because the benefits will trickle down to you.
Hear from Responsible Statecraft on February 2nd, earlier this week.
Congress is poised to cede more foreign weapons oversight.
Why?
The new bill would speed up the delivery of deadly arms while scaling back the ability of elected representatives to monitor the implications.
At a time of record U.S.
weapons sales and many wars, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has decided that Congress should provide less, rather than more, oversight of the booming business.
Current law requires the executive branch to notify Congress of a proposed weapons deal over a certain dollar threshold.
Congress then has 15 or 30 days, depending on whether the country is a treaty ally or not, to review the transaction before the administration can proceed.
But if Congress is not even notified about a sale the administration is planning, there's absolutely no chance it can block the transfer.
This arms industry-backed deal... This arms industry-backed bill the House is marking up raises the dollar threshold for notice to Congress substantially by 66%.
And would dramatically reduce the number of potential sales Congress is told about each year, in addition to exempting more sales from its own oversight.
With this bill, Congress would require the Secretary of State to take weapons from U.S.
government stocks for delivery to foreign forces in cases where the production and delivery of the weapons is taking more than three years.
It would achieve this through the use of quote, drawdown authority, an emergency mechanism used at very large scale to move weapons from U.S.
stockpiles to Ukraine over the past two years.
In sum, if Congress were to pass this bill, it would have less knowledge of which weapons are being transferred to which countries and less ability to ensure that transfers are consistent with U.S.
law, policy, and interests.
Do you see how everything they think about doing is benefiting the corporate donors in the arms industry that finances both of the parties' campaigns?
So that you can vote for Republicans, you can vote for Democrats, and this industry will be served.
Now here's the thing I find unbelievable about an admission that Mitch McConnell made during the process of negotiating this bill.
Here from the New York Times on January 25th, about two weeks ago, less than two weeks ago, The argument was that all of this is from Trump.
Trump strengthens his grip on Capitol Hill as he presses the nomination of the president's former opposition.
The former president's opposition to this bill has all but killed the prospects for a bipartisan border deal, reflecting how his influence in Congress has grown as he gains ground in the Republican primary.
Republicans are quote, in a quandary.
Mr. McConnell said in a closed door meeting on Wednesday, according to lawmakers who attended, what was supposed to be the sweetener for conservatives, opposed to sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, had become just as politically treacherous terrain as the foreign aid itself, he acknowledged.
In other words, what the Biden administration was saying was, look, we want, as our priority, to send $60 billion to Ukraine.
Why is that the administration's priority heading into an election here?
To send $60 billion to keep the war going in Ukraine.
Think about that.
Why is that their priority when it's not Ukrainians who will vote for them but Americans?
Because what determines elections is who finances campaigns.
And the administration said, we know we told our voters when we got elected that we're going to end all of Trump's immoral and repressive restrictions on immigration.
We are so desperate, though, to fund this war in Ukraine, to send another $60 billion to Ukraine, that we, the Biden White House and the Democratic Party, are willing to screw over our own supporters and abandon the promises we made to them by embracing at least some of the immigration restrictions that we were denouncing as immoral and even Nazi-like when Donald Trump was advocating them.
Now the reality is this is not, if you're looking for border security, this bill does not give you that.
It allocates more money to border security, so people like the Border Patrol are happy with it because it gives them a lot more funding.
But in terms of actually trying to reduce the number of people illegally entering the country, if that's a priority of yours, this bill would not go very far at all in doing that.
And the reason is because the person who negotiated the bill on behalf of the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell, has acknowledged that he doesn't care about border security either, at least nowhere near as much as he cares about sending this money to Ukraine.
In other words, Mitch McConnell has the same priority as Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer.
So when he was negotiating, he was on the same side as them.
And he was just there to pretend that Republican Party voters had a representative in this process, and yet here's what the New York Times said.
This is an amazing admission.
Mitch McConnell himself regards the border deal as less important than sending military aid to Ukraine.
It's less important, the border deal.
What is more important to him?
Sending military aid to Ukraine.
So Mitch McConnell is the head of a party that has said forever that border security is its top priority and that increasingly is opposed to sending more money to the war in Ukraine.
And yet Mitch McConnell admits that his priority has nothing to do with the voters he supposedly represents.
Now think about it this way as well.
Mitch McConnell represents a state, Kentucky, that is one of the poorest states in the country.
They have extremely low literacy rates as compared to other states, a low life expectancy, very poor access to education, higher education, and health care.
You would think, right, that the person elected to the Senate to represent the people of Kentucky would prioritize bills that benefit the lives of the American people in general and the people of Kentucky.
That's the concept of how the system is supposed to work.
And yet, Mitch McConnell's top priority, according to him, something he's willing to sacrifice everything for, including the top priority of the Republican Party, which is border security, is something that has nothing to do with the lives of people of Kentucky, or benefiting the lives of American citizens, to send $60 billion over to Kiev, with no accountability, in order to keep that war going.
Next week I'm going to be traveling, so we're getting some shows and interviews ready while I'm traveling.
And earlier today we conducted an interview with Rand Paul, the Republican Senator from Kentucky, the other one, that I'm very excited to show you about.
And one of the things as I was preparing for this interview that I remember is that when Democrats were joining with Republicans to send billions and billions and billions more to the war in Ukraine, Rand Paul stood up and said, look, I'm against this, but I know it's going to pass.
So all I want to do is assign an inspector general to monitor where this money is going when we send it to Ukraine, whether or not it's reaching its intended destination, whether or not it's being used for the purposes that we tell the American people we're sending this money for.
And the Senate on a bipartisan basis overwhelmingly rejected Senator Paul's attempt to impose oversight scrutiny on the use of this money, this disbursement of money to Ukraine.
Why?
Why would they do that?
And of course, now we're getting all kinds of reports that people close to Zelensky and people in Ukraine have been embezzling tens of millions of dollars.
The most predictable thing in the world.
Why would Mitch McConnell, beyond wanting to send $60 billion to Ukraine when he represents the Republican Party in the state of Kentucky, also block efforts by his fellow senator from Kentucky just to put some oversight on that money?
As soon as that inspector general began monitoring the flow of money to Afghanistan, he began discovering enormous amounts of abuse and embezzlement and theft and disappearing money.
That was why Mitch McConnell didn't want it.
He doesn't want his precious war to be questioned or reflected poorly on by showing evidence of where that money is actually going.
There are a lot of people profiting from this war.
A lot of people in Kiev and Washington.
The people who are not profiting are the American people who are being saddled with debt.
When we finance Ukraine's war, we're borrowing that money from China and saddling Americans with debt to fuel this war.
And if you think Mitch McConnell and the establishment leadership of the Republican Party have anything in their mind having anything remotely to do with the welfare of the American people, I think you need to look again.
The evidence is so clear right before you that it has nothing to do with it.
Now, here is Mitch McConnell's ally and partner, and I would say ideological fellow traveler, Chuck Schumer.
It says it all that the two senators who lead the two opposition parties in Washington are in full agreement.
They're in full alignment on most everything in terms of the priorities of Washington.
He went on MSNBC and warned of how scary it will be if we can't keep that war in Ukraine going.
Here's what he told Mika Brzezinski, whose dad was the National Security Advisor for the Carter administration.
We're at a turning point in America.
This bill is crucial, and history will look back on it and say, did America fail itself?
Why is it crucial?
Well, if we don't aid Ukraine, Putin will walk all over Ukraine, we will lose the war, and we could be fighting in Eastern Europe in a NATO ally in a few years.
Americans won't like that.
If we don't help Israel defend itself against Hamas, that perpetual war will go on and on and on.
If we don't help humanitarian aid to the starving Palestinians in Gaza, hundreds of thousands could starve.
And the border, everyone has said it's chaos.
A speaker, you just saw Speaker Johnson, he said it's chaos, we have to do something legislative a few months ago.
But what has happened, in answer to your question, so this is crucial for America, it's a turning point.
History is going to look over our shoulders and say, did we rise to the occasion?
To his credit, Mitch McConnell did.
Mitch McConnell rose to the occasion to his credit, Chuck Schumer says, because they are behind this bill.
And they both think exactly the same thing.
We need to send billions more to Israel to finance its war.
We need to spend billions more on Ukraine to finance that war.
And then we have to throw a small amount into America's own border to cast the illusion that they kind of also care about the United States.
And it's a bill that people on the right who have prioritized stopping illegal immigration took one look at and laughed in their face as they read the bill and what it permits.
But look at how these two parties, the leadership of them, do you see how they have the same exact views on the most fundamental questions?
And here's Chuck Schumer trying to tell you that the reason we have to finance the war in Ukraine is because if we don't, then Putin is going to attack Poland and then on to Germany and then on to France and suddenly we're going to be involved in a new war.
Do any of you believe that?
Do any of you believe that Putin Has broad ambitions to go to war by invading NATO countries and forcing the United States?
Do you think that's what Putin wants?
Do you think that's a reasonable or likely fear-mongering scenario as to why you have to stop Russia and Ukraine?
Beyond the fact that there's no hope for that war, the Ukrainians just don't have any people to fight it any longer, no matter how much we give them in money.
We can't provide the artillery they need and they don't have the citizens to fight in this war.
Increasingly Ukrainian men are saying no and are doing everything possible to evade the draft because they know they're being sent as cannon fodder to the front lines for a war that is completely futile, that is enriching Western elites and Ukrainian elites and has very little to do with the security of their country.
Let's listen to the rest.
Yeah.
...including Speaker Johnson are just scared to death of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has said he wants chaos.
Donald Trump has said, "Well, wait till I become president.
That'll take at least a year.
Ukraine could be gone.
The border will get much worse.
War in the Middle East will get worse, maybe bringing us into it." He's doing it all for political reasons.
And let me just say, will Senators, the crucial question, the $64,000 question, the majority of Republican Senators know this bill is the right thing to do.
It's a compromise.
I don't like everything in it.
Neither does McConnell.
But it's a compromise.
That's the only way you get things important done in the Senate.
We proved that two years ago in our bipartisan legislation.
And will the Senators drown out the political noise from Trump and his minions and do the right thing for America?
It's a crucial question.
First of all, as we're about to hear, when we get to the segment about the media reaction to Tucker Carlson confirming the interview with Vladimir Putin, they're all pretending today that they hate interviews that don't have an adversarial pushback to them.
That everybody in powerful positions needs to be challenged?
Chuck Schumer is reading talking points from his prepared paper that his staff prepared.
You can see him doing it right here.
Watch as he looks down.
There you go.
He's reading talking points.
And will the senators drown out the polls?
He's reading talking points.
That's why he has his glasses on.
I use glasses to read.
I would never go on TV in front of a camera and use my glasses because I'm not reading anything that's in front of me.
I don't have notes here.
I don't have a script prepared.
But he does.
So that's why he's like speaking like this.
His glasses are on his nose.
And he's allowed to speak for two minutes, completely uninterrupted.
And obviously there's not a single adversarial question asked here.
That's how Democratic Party officials are usually treated on these corporate networks.
It's how Vladimir Zelensky has been treated in every interview he's done by Western journalists.
So the idea that these people are indignant if an interview is an adversarial, as everybody knows, is a joke.
Here is Mitch McConnell.
And I guess the other thing I want to say about Chuck Schumer is this idea that The Republican Party officials are petrified of Donald Trump, that they're doing everything that Donald Trump believes should be done.
Do you know why that's happening?
Because the people who compose the Republican Party, Republican Party voters, are making very clear that they overwhelmingly prefer Donald Trump to the people in Washington.
That's why Trump has dispatched One candidate after the next, including the ones that the establishment is supporting up to and including now Nikki Haley.
So they make it seem sinister that people in office are listening to the views of their own voters.
That's actually what they should be doing.
And that's why it's so nauseating that Mitch McConnell doesn't care in the slightest about the views of the party that he claims to represent, let alone the people of Kentucky.
Here is McConnell speaking yesterday, actually today, in the Senate chamber about this bill.
We're obviously taking a look at the product that Senator Lankford negotiated with the Democratic President and the Democratic Senate, which has been endorsed.
By the border council, an important union down by the border that supported President Trump in 2020.
So that's the policy part of it.
I think Senator Lankford has done a remarkable job.
However, we had a very robust discussion about whether or not this product could ever become law.
And it's been made pretty clear to us by the speaker that it So he's admitting defeat less than 24 hours after this bill was unveiled.
I want to congratulate Senator Langford on a remarkable job of negotiating with the other side, getting the support of the Border Council.
But it looks to me and to most of our members as if we have no real chance here to make a law.
So he's admitting defeat less than 24 hours after this bill was unveiled.
That's how misaligned it was with the views of the American people, who not only rebelled not from the right, but also from the left.
This is not a bill that people support and they cannot get it done.
Now the problem that they have is that a majority of members of Congress want to send $17 billion to Israel and a majority of members of Congress in both parties want to send $60 billion to Ukraine.
The problem is, is that how can they justify sending $17 billion to Israel or $60 billion to Ukraine when they can't look their voters in the eye and say that we're spending any money on the United States?
That was the whole point of this bipartisan bill, was to trick Americans into acquiescing to the fact that we're going to send $80, $90 billion to foreign countries to finance their wars while telling them, well, we're also spending a little bit on our own country.
But without that, if you just strip that away, which has to be done because there's no way that bill can pass and it's no longer the thing that can justify sending $60 billion to Ukraine or $17 billion to Israel, how can the Congress possibly send all that money to those other countries when people believe very strongly that we have a serious crisis at the American border that is now affecting not just border towns but every major city in the country?
Here is Axios on this problem.
Mike Johnson faces internal Republican dissent on the Israel bill.
He wants to bring a four vote on a bill that would have no purpose other than to send $17 billion to Israel.
So it strips out the $60 billion to Ukraine and the border security bill that they just negotiated.
And you would think that would be easy to get done, but the politics have changed so much on sending billions of dollars to other countries that even Israel Is a hard call to get through the House.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, is facing criticisms from both the right flank of his party and Ukraine hawks for the standalone Israel aid package the House plans to vote on this week.
The right-wing House Freedom Caucus released a statement on Sunday saying it is, quote, extremely disappointing.
It is extremely disappointing that the Speaker is now surrendering to perceived pressure to move an even larger, but now unpaid for, Israel Aid Package.
The $17.6 billion that the Israel Aid Bill Johnson rolled out on Saturday excludes cuts to the IRS that he tucked into an Israel Aid Bill last fall in an attempt to offset the spending and placate conservatives.
So let me just explain that because it's so important.
When Mike Johnson came into the Speakership, He made a promise.
He said, whatever new spending we do has to be offset by other spending cuts so that we're not increasing the debt and increasing the deficit.
The problem is that in order to send $17 billion to Israel, there are going to be a lot of Republicans opposed to it because no longer are they now saying they're going to cut the IRS budget to compensate.
And the House Freedom Caucus is saying we cannot, as conservatives, increase the national debt, especially to borrow money from China in order to finance Israel's war.
When Israeli citizens, millions of them, have a better standard of living than Millions of Americans do?
How can you justify that?
The problem for Mike Johnson is that because there are so many Ukraine hawks in his party that are furious that he's not bringing a 4 vote for $60 billion to Ukraine, he needs a lot of... and then you have these people on the right saying, I'm not sending money to Israel if we don't have offsetting cuts.
He needs Democratic votes to get this approved, the $17 billion to Israel.
The problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who won't send money to Israel because they're becoming very concerned by or opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza.
They won't send money there without conditions.
And then a lot of Democrats won't vote for any bill that cuts that IRS budget increase that they worked so hard to get.
So it's very difficult for him to figure out how he can get these votes necessary to send $70 million to Israel.
Quote, in jettisoning the IRS piece, Johnson is attempting to deal a blow to Senate negotiators on a comprehensive national security package that would also include funding for Ukraine, Palestinian civilians, the Indo-Pacific, and border security.
It used to be the case that if you brought a bill to the floor to send money to Israel, People didn't even care what amount it was.
No one was going to vote no on an aid package to Israel.
On top of the problem now in getting these votes for that, Axios is reporting, and it's true, that Biden is saying he will veto an Israel-only spending bill because he's so adamant, remember, their top priority is not getting money to Israel, but getting money to Ukraine.
House Republicans slammed Biden as, quote, anti-Israel following a veto threat.
Quote, Republican lawmakers are criticizing President Biden for issuing a veto threat against a clean Israel funding bill, saying it is, quote, grossly irresponsible.
While most Republican members support the clean Israel bill, members of the House Freedom Caucus came out against it for the lack of offsetting cuts.
It's really interesting what this chaos has engendered.
It's showing what these people's priorities are when you strip away the rhetoric and you watch what they're desperate to get passed.
Mike Johnson is so desperate to get money to Israel that he's willing to abandon the central pledge of his speakership, which is not to increase the national debt of the United States.
And to ensure that, only spending bills get approved if there's offsetting cuts for a net zero.
But when it comes to Israel, Mike Johnson is willing to waive his own rules.
Remember, Mike Johnson, in that first address he gave as a new Speaker, said the first thing we're going to do, now that I'm Speaker, is not spend money on the fentanyl crisis, or the border crisis, For anything else to help American citizens, he said the very first thing we're going to do is pass a bill to help our good friend Israel.
And you have other members of Congress whose top priority is getting money to Ukraine.
And then a few whose top priority is actually securing the border, only the measures they want can't get passed.
The Democrats, and now Joe Biden, is issuing this veto threat over an Israel-only bill, and now they're in chaos.
But most of the energy in the Congress and in Washington is geared toward not how we can secure our own border, not how we can improve the lives of American citizens, but instead, how can we get $60 billion to Ukraine and $17 billion to Israel?
And if you like those priorities, by all means, keep supporting the people who are in power because they will continue having that as their priorities.
But if you think the priority of the American government should be improving the lives of the American people and improving the country called the United States.
That's the reason why there's so much anti-establishment sentiment.
All right, last night we devoted a segment to examining all the people who are in consensus that Tucker Carlson is a traitor to the United States.
And they mean that literally.
And the only thing that they had saw last night, as of last night's show, that they had confirmed for sure, was that Tucker Carlson was physically present in Russia, meaning he had visited Russia, and he attended the Bolshoi Ballet.
And because of that, there were people, and I don't mean obscure people, I mean prominent neocons and liberals, calling him a traitor, calling for his re-entry into the country to be denied, calling for the FBI to investigate him.
And of course there was speculation that he might interview Vladimir Putin, something that American journalists have been doing for decades and being celebrated for.
Interviewing these people that the United States government constantly tells us to view as our enemy but never actually getting to hear from them.
CNN and ABC and the New York Times have interviewed Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and Yasser Arafat.
And Muammar Gaddafi, and Iranian officials, so that Americans can hear directly for themselves what the leaders of those countries are saying.
So we're not only hearing about them, but also from them.
It's a crucial function of journalism, not just to reinforce the propaganda of the United States government, but also to present views and information that might contradict it.
Otherwise, you should just go work for the U.S.
government.
Go be a State Department spokesperson or CIA spokesperson.
If all you want to do is promote U.S.
propaganda and U.S.
foreign policy narratives, there are jobs for that.
That's not supposed to be what journalism does, but with corporate journalism, that's what it's become.
And we're going to show you Tucker's video that he released today in which he explains, I don't really even think he should have to, why he decided to interview Putin.
It's about four minutes long, but I really think it's worth hearing.
Tonight we're here to interview the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
We'll be doing that soon.
There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously.
So we've thought about it carefully over many months.
Here's why we're doing it.
First, because it's our job.
We're in journalism.
Our duty is to inform people.
Two years into a war that's reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed.
They have no real idea what's happening in this region, here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine.
But they should know.
They're paying for much of it, in ways they might not fully yet perceive.
The war in Ukraine is a human disaster.
It's left hundreds of thousands of people dead, an entire generation of young Ukrainians.
And it's depopulated the largest country in Europe.
But the long-term effects are even more profound.
This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances.
So, whether you agree with the U.S.
that followed have as well.
And in total, they have upended the world economy.
The post-World War II economic order, a system that guaranteed prosperity in the West for more than 80 years, is coming apart very fast and along with it, the dominance of the U.S. dollar.
These are not small changes.
They are history-altering developments.
So whether you agree with the U.S. financing of the Ukraine war or not, There is no denying that this is an incredibly significant war.
We've constantly reported on the cost to the United States and loss of influence around the world.
China was able to march into the Middle East and negotiate a peace deal between the Saudis and the Iranians while the United States was obsessed with Ukraine and who's going to govern particular provinces in eastern Ukraine.
The countries of the world have aligned behind China, have joined the BRICS alliance, because China has effectively been able to convince the world, oh look, the United States is doing what they always do, which is throw their military weight around.
We've gone into massive debt, we've risked escalation with Russia, and it has really undermined the strength of the American dollar.
Everything that Tucker just said is undeniably true in terms of the consequences, even if you support it.
We have heard from President Zelensky endlessly.
He's been put on every news show.
He appeared at American award events.
All kinds of celebrities went to visit him and chat with him and promote it.
He was the global celebrity that everybody wanted to talk to.
We've heard from him constantly.
Never challenged, basically.
Certainly not by American journalists.
But heralded and venerated in the most Vividly propagandistically imaginable.
So when you have a pile of Zelensky hagiography and a pile of Zelensky interviews that are really just talking point opportunities to venerate Zelensky, isn't it obvious that hearing one time directly from Putin instead of constantly hearing about him is something that would benefit our discourse?
Even if we decide that everything we hear from Putin we hate, Given what is being asked of us as American citizens to fund that war in Ukraine, and everything we've been told about Russia for the last seven years, that it's the grave existential threat to our democracy, that it's interfering in our politics, that we have to censor the internet to prevent its disinformation, don't you want to hear what Russia has to say about that?
Instead of only hearing what Ukraine has to say about that and the State Department and the CIA?
Isn't that a pretty obviously important function of American journalism?
They will define the lives of our grandchildren.
Most of the world understands this perfectly well.
They can see it.
Ask anyone in Asia or the Middle East what the future looks like.
And yet the populations of the English-speaking countries seem mostly unaware.
They think that as nothing has really changed.
And they think that because no one has told them the truth.
Their media outlets are corrupt.
They lie to their readers and viewers.
And they do that mostly by omission.
For example, since the day the war in Ukraine began, American media outlets have spoken to scores of people from Ukraine and they've done scores of interviews with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
We ourselves have put in a request for an interview with Zelensky and we hope he accepts.
But the interviews he's already done in the United States are not traditional interviews.
They are fawning pep sessions specifically designed to amplify Zelensky's demand that the U.S.
enter more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it.
That is not journalism.
It is government propaganda.
Propaganda of the ugliest kind.
The kind that kills people.
At the same time our politicians and media outlets have been doing this, promoting a foreign leader like he's a new consumer brand, not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.
Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine, or what his goals are now.
They've never heard his voice.
That's wrong.
Americans have a right to know all they can about a war they're implicated in.
And we have the right to tell them about it because we are Americans too.
Alright, so that's pretty much to the point.
Pretty clear explanation.
Now again, I don't even think it should have been necessary for him to have to explain himself and justify why he's going to interview a foreign leader.
Every journalist who calls themselves that should want to do that.
We've asked for an interview with President Putin before.
We were pursuing an interview with the Foreign Minister of Russia as well.
I mean, of course I would have done those interviews.
Every journalist should want to.
Some of the most important interviews I've done has been with foreign leaders, including foreign leaders who are not aligned with the United States.
That's part of your job.
At least it always was thought of that way.
But now we have an entire new crop of corporate journalists, And American journalism has always been aligned primarily with the US security state.
I got involved in journalism in 2005 because the New York Times and CNN were so devoted to the Bush-Cheney-Neocon framework of the war on terror were so uber-jingoistic after 9-11 that nobody was really dissenting or questioning or challenging government propaganda.
So they've always been aligned with the U.S.
security state.
The New York Times and The Atlantic and The New Yorker helped sell the war in Iraq, along with Fox News.
But what really has happened is that for most of these journalists, these corporate journalists, all they care about is one thing and one thing only.
They only have one cause.
And that cause is defeating Donald Trump in 2016, defeating him through 2020, sabotaging his presidency, and now in 2024, ensuring he doesn't return to power.
And their allies in that cause have become the CIA and the FBI, who in 2020 and 2016 interfered in our politics with Russiagate and the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to try and defeat Donald Trump.
And so a lot of American liberals whose perspective is monomaniacally focused on Trump, who only have learned about politics since 2016, really do see the U.S.
security state as their primary allies, and they are more loyal to them than ever before.
And they really do believe that it's immoral to deviate from what the U.S.
security state, the military-industrial complex thinks and wants Americans to believe.
They see their job as bolstering that.
As being state media.
As being government propagandists.
Here is CNN's Aaron Burnett.
Very typical of corporate media who went on her show last night and seized with rage at the mere possibility that Tucker Carlson would interview Vladimir Putin.
And I think what she said is so revealing.
Let's listen to it.
A massive shakeup in Kiev coming as Putin is trying to court the MAGA GOP in the United States.
In fact, one of the leaders of the MAGA GOP is in Moscow tonight.
It's the man you see here with the MAGA leader Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson.
Possibly there in Moscow to interview Putin.
Definitely there as a Putin-supporting celebrity.
Just listen to how Russian state media is breathlessly celebrating his visit.
Independent journalist Tucker Carlson has flown to Russia from the U.S.
via Turkey to Vnukovo Airport.
He saw Spartacus Ballet at the Bolshoi Theater, had lunch in a nice restaurant, went for a ride around town, rode the subway.
He charged his smartphone via USB port and connected to a fast and free Wi-Fi Internet.
Now, I don't know about you, I didn't hear any venerating or celebrating, they were just factually reporting what Tucker Carlson, who is well known in Russia and globally, what he was doing in Moscow.
And here's what Aaron Burnett, seething with all sorts of emotions, including jealousy, over the fact that she's never broken a story of any kind.
She's never done a notable interview.
She's imprisoned at CNN as a newsreader reading from a teleprompter within the very rich lines of what she is and is not allowed to say, sounding like every other CNN host with no ratings and no impact.
A complete failure.
From a journalistic perspective.
And here's what she has to say.
He charged his phone.
Although they're knowing the details about the fact that it was during USB port may give him reason to think twice about all of this.
But look at them talking about him like a celebrity.
Everything he does on camera, breathlessly repeated.
No, it is unclear if an interview between Putin and Carlson will take place.
But if it does, it gives Putin a chance to sit down with a big supporter.
It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about?
Why do I hate Putin so much?
Has Putin ever called me a racist?
Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?
Does he eat dogs?
These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no.
Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that.
I'll actually always remember watching that clip.
I was standing in Ukraine 48 hours before the war began there.
Do you hear that?
She's so proud of herself that she was in Ukraine around the start of the war.
She's actually talking as though this war means something to her personally.
Why is it okay for Erin Burnett A fanatical supporter of the U.S.
support for the war in Ukraine.
Why is it permissible for her to go to Ukraine, in fact be so proud of it and boast of it and talk as though she's like a victim of the war?
This means so much to her personally.
She was in Ukraine when Russia attacked.
Why is that okay for her to go to Ukraine but Tucker Carlson can't go to Ukraine?
Russia, why is it that CNN can interview Zelensky as they've done many times before, but Tucker Carlson can't interview Vladimir Putin?
The difference is that Ukraine is supported by the U.S.
security state and Russia is demonized by them.
And so in her mind, the only thing a moral journalist does is align themselves with the U.S.
security state's policy.
You go to Ukraine, you prop up Zelensky.
You glorify Ukraine because that's what your government told you to do.
That's what your government wants you to do.
And every journalist is duty bound to go and promote the narrative of the U.S.
government.
Whereas what Tucker Carlson is doing is adversarial to the U.S.
government.
He's questioning the narrative of the U.S.
security state.
He's argued against it.
And he's giving voice to somebody who wants to challenge it, who disagrees with it.
And in her mind, being adversarial to the government is immoral.
It merits scorn and outrage.
Do you hear what she's saying?
She was like, I was in Ukraine, and so this means extra to me.
She thinks you can go in to countries only that are allied with the United States.
She thinks that you could only interview leaders that the U.S.
security state approves of and interview them in a way that allows them to be heard and glorified by the American people.
But the one thing a journalist does not do is act adversarial to the United States government.
This is the mindset, the rotted mindset, of most of the people in the corporate media.
That is really how they think.
I'm not making that up.
I'm not describing anything that's not there.
I'm just summarizing what she's saying and how she thinks.
I gotta hear that again.
And the answer to all of them is no.
Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that.
I'll actually always remember watching that clip.
I was standing in Ukraine 48 hours before the war began there.
Oh, so she was really personally offended to hear Tucker Carlson questioning why we should support the war in Ukraine and consider Vladimir Putin an enemy.
That was something that struck deep to her core because she was in Ukraine.
And so I guess because she was in Ukraine, it means that no journalist is supposed to question The rather consequential decision of the U.S.
government to involve itself and the American Treasury in that war in this way?
Well, Carlson then stood by Putin consistently all the way through.
And that is why he can go to Moscow now without any fear of being summarily imprisoned.
He's a hero.
This was Putin's mouthpiece in the United States.
Somebody who had turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Putin because they were happening far away.
Once vibrant towns turned to ruins, mass graves with dozens of bodies in the Kiev suburbs, a theater full of innocent women and children sheltering.
Zelensky's government is in turmoil.
world's children written on the roof.
More than 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed or injured.
And tonight, Putin is trying to seize on the fact that Zelensky's military appears to be in turmoil, capitalizing on a moment of intense American political dissonance.
Zelensky's government is in turmoil.
And a big reason why is because Ukraine is starting to turn against Zelensky because they know that he has lied to them and misled them into a conflict that has been devastating to Ukraine.
And the fact that Vladimir Putin says it doesn't mean it's untrue.
you But this clip shows you so much how these people think.
The irony of all of this as well is that CNN has done exactly the same thing and celebrated itself many times.
In fact, has gone far beyond what Tucker Carlson is doing because let us remember that the United States is not actually at war with Russia.
They're not considered constitutionally or legally to be an enemy country.
We're not at war with Russia.
There's no authorization to use military force against Russia.
There's no declaration of war against Russia.
So even if we were at war with Russia, Of course you would still want to hear from government leaders and have them questioned.
And the proof of that is what CNN itself used to do.
Here, for example, in 1997, CNN, through its reporter Peter Arnett, went to interview Osama Bin Laden right after he had declared a jihad against the United States.
Here you see the CNN logo in the corner of that screen, and there's CNN's Peter Arnett Who is sitting down for an interview with Osama Bin Laden.
I want to play you a clip of this because, remember, this was before 2001, before the September 11th attack, but it was during a time after which the United States had already designated Al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization, had blamed Al-Qaeda for attacking and killing Americans.
He was a declared enemy of the United States, and yet CNN went proudly and interviewed him anyway.
Which again is what journalists are supposed to do.
You should want to hear from Osama Bin Laden, even if you hate him, even if you disagree with him.
You should want to hear what he's saying about why he has declared al-Qaeda and a jihad against the United States and that's exactly what CNN asked him and here was his answer.
You have declared a jihad against the United States.
Can you tell us why?
The U.S.
government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal through its support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
And we believe the U.S.
is directly responsible for those killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance of the United States regime has reached the point that they occupied Arabia, the holiest place of the Muslims, who are more than a billion people in the world today.
For this, and other acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared jihad against the U.S.
Is the jihad directed against the U.S.
government?
Or United States troops in Arabia?
What about U.S.
civilians in Arabia or the people of the United States?
We have focused our declaration of Jihad on striking at the U.S.
soldiers inside Arabia, the country of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina.
In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in Arabia.
Therefore, even though American civilians are not targeted in our plan, they must leave.
We do not guarantee their safety.
So if Erin Burnett had been around CNN at the time, presumably she would have gone on TV and said how disgusting and despicable it was that CNN He aired an interview with Osama bin Laden and Peter Arnett wasn't saying you're a disgusting terrorist and calling him names.
He was asking him, why do you feel the United States has done things that justify your pledge to attack them?
And he was able to explain his rationale.
Obviously, a lot of Americans heard that and said Osama bin Laden is a despicable human being.
But they were better off for hearing it, for understanding what the grievances were.
CNN also interviewed Saddam Hussein.
And they've done some multiple times.
Here is CNN 1991, right at the time of the Persian Gulf War when the United States was going to war with Saddam Hussein after he had invaded Kuwait.
And CNN went and interviewed Saddam Hussein.
There you see the CNN reporter with Saddam Hussein and the CNN logo at the bottom of the screen.
Because this is what journalists always did and always believed was their duty and function.
And now today's crop of journalists are so subservient to the U.S.
security state, they view themselves as activists on behalf of the CIA and the FBI and the State Department, and propagandists and aligned with the agencies that want to stop Donald Trump, that they don't even pretend any longer to be journalistic in their function.
Which is why she can speak so, with such pride, about the fact that she stepped foot in Ukraine, which the government told her to do and wants her to do, whereas Tucker Carlson is doing something the government doesn't want.
Imagine calling yourself a journalist and thinking that a journalist acts unethically or immorally or unpatriotically because they do something that's adversarial to the government, the very core of what journalism is supposed to be about.
Again, if you want to go and serve as a propagandist for the U.S.
State Department, go work for them and stop pretending to be a journalist.
He's speaking of propagandists who call themselves journalists now or who get paid to do something resembling it.
Here is Jen Psaki who until about a year ago was actually working for the US government.
She was a spokesperson for Joe Biden and now she has a show on a supposed news outlet called MSNBC where she continues to do exactly what Aaron Burnett does and most of them do which is defend The Biden White House and their foreign policy.
And here's what she had to say about Tucker's trip to Russia.
It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about?
Why do I hate Putin so much?
Has Putin ever called me a racist?
Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?
So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?
If you've been watching the news, you know that Putin is having a border dispute with a nation called Ukraine.
Border dispute is certainly one way to characterize a major military invasion.
Of course, Carlson is now just another far-right conspiracy peddler with a show on the internet.
He's no longer on Fox, as we all know.
And he's apparently been spending the last few days in Moscow for some reason.
Who knows?
We don't know why.
He has to stay relevant somehow, so I guess we'll learn in the coming days.
Maybe.
And there you see the graphic, the GOP from Russia hawks to Putin apologists.
First of all, most of the Republican Party from the beginning has favored the U.S.
financing of the war in Ukraine.
As we said, the most vocal and steadfast supporter of the Biden administration's policy is the senior Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
But the idea that you have to support U.S.
foreign policy and never question the government in order to be a patriotic American is the hallmark of authoritarianism or neoconservatism.
And that's why you hear David Frum sounding like every liberal and Democrat on TV, the former Bush-Cheney speechwriter, who on February 6th said this, quote, what evidence do you have of something sinister in Trump-Russia other than Trump ordering his party to lose a word of Putin while an intimate Trump TV ally is in Moscow talking with Putin?
What this is really redolent of We've reviewed this history before is that the United States government tries to propagandize our citizenry by ensuring that they never actually hear from anyone that the United States wants to go to war with so that the only thing Americans ever hear about our enemies is what the US government wants them to hear.
After 9-11, A lot of media outlets were trying to interview Osama bin Laden because, again, that's what journalists would do.
The United States government had blamed Osama bin Laden for the 9-11 attack.
So they wanted to go and interview Osama bin Laden and say, did you do 9-11?
If so, why?
What was your motive?
Why would you kill large numbers of American citizens?
And the U.S.
government issued orders, and we've gone over this before, you can find this in mainstream press reports as we've shown you before.
The Bush administration told the TV networks, we don't want you airing any interviews with Osama Bin Laden, neither old ones nor new ones.
And their reason was that they thought he might use some kind of a hand signal or some hidden phrase that would be code to activate sleeper cells in the United States to tell them secretly to go launch terrorist attacks.
Like he would pull on his ear like Carol Burnett or like wiggle his nose like Bewitched.
and activate the sleeper cells in the United States using these interviews.
And the American media said, "Okay, we will obey you and we won't show any interviews of Osama bin Laden." And that's why Osama bin Laden wrote what became his notorious letter to America in 2002, where he wrote a letter to the American people explaining why Al Qaeda has so many grievances against the United States.
And it was not like we were being told because he hates us for our freedom.
It was, he said basically what he said in that interview that CNN aired.
That their three primary motives for hating the United States was number one, that the United States finances Israel's attacks on Palestinians.
Number two, that the United States had imposed a suffocating sanction regime on Iraq that killed 500,000 Iraqi children.
And then when Madeleine Albright was asked about whether it was worth it, knowing that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of the sanctions, she said, yeah, it was worth it.
And then the main reason for Bin Laden, Was he was Saudi and Saudi Arabia is sacred in the Muslim religion and the idea that there would be American troops deployed in Saudi Arabia where we prop up a dictator and impose it on them is something that was so deeply heretical and offensive to Osama Bin Laden.
So what he was saying in this letter to the United States was the reason we attacked you is because we're enraged at your policies, namely your interference in our region.
And the reason we believe that you, American civilians, are fair targets is because you're the ones who elect the government that then comes and bombs our children.
Basically the same rationale that people use now for why it's okay to kill Gazans, because they were the ones who elected Hamas and therefore are responsible now.
The United States goes and elects a new government every two years or every four years.
Hamas, the people of Gaza haven't voted since 2006.
But that is Osama Bin Laden's rationale, that as long as civilians vote for the government, they have responsibility for the government's actions, including this bombing of the Middle East that American civilians sanctioned through their votes, and that was why he said it was justified to attack the United States.
Now, again, you don't have to accept that.
You don't have to like it.
It's better that we hear directly from the people doing violence to the United States and the people we're told to hate and are our enemies, rather than only hearing our government's description of them or claims about them and never hearing from them.
That was why a couple of months ago, back in November, for the first time, a lot of younger Americans who did not know about al-Qaeda's claims about why they hate Americans, and did not know about this letter, found this letter that Osama bin Laden had written to the United found this letter that Osama bin Laden had written to the United States in 2002, and they began reading it and talking about it and saying, oh my God, I never knew this history before because it's been kept
And the response of the U.S.
government and the U.S.
corporate media, when people began talking about this bin Laden letter, which was published on the Guardian's website, because it's obviously a historical document, an important journalistic document, the response was to demand that TikTok ban anyone from talking about that letter.
And that's exactly what TikTok proceeded to do.
The U.S.
government said, we don't want Americans reading this letter.
We don't want them hearing from Osama bin Laden.
And there you see the NBC News headline, TikTok removes hashtag for Osama Bin Laden's quote letter to America after viral videos circulate.
The Guardian also pulled the text of the Al Qaeda's founder letter from its website after people cited it on TikTok and X.
That's the posture of the US government.
They do not want Americans hearing from enemies of the United States.
They do not want people hearing anything that undermines the narrative that the American government is feeding to its citizenry.
That, I suppose, is normal.
That's what governments always want, to control the population by controlling what they can and can't hear.
That's what censorship is for.
But when you consider yourself a journalist, You're supposed to work against that propaganda, not work to maintain it.
And back then in November, so many American journalists, corporate journalists, cheered and celebrated when TikTok censored this letter and the Guardian removed it from their website.
It's the same impulse that says that Tucker Carlson should not allow Vladimir Putin to be able to Express himself and let Americans hear what he has to say.
It's the same mindset as telling American media companies never to interview Osama bin Laden, to censor the bin Laden letter, to censor what Vladimir Putin wants to say about what his real goals in this war are, about the real reasons that he entered it.
You don't have to believe Vladimir Putin, but you're so much better off, you're more fully informed if you hear from him.
Right now all we've heard from is Zelensky in a series of highly propagandistic interviews where he was never challenged on anything.
Now here is, just to give you a kind of sense again of what these people in corporate media are like, they deserve all the contempt and hatred they that are falling on their head.
The failure of their media outlets, the mass layoffs, it's all well deserved and well earned.
Here is Andrew Desidero, some just random reporter from POC or one of those media outlets.
He was so bothered, so upset that Tucker Carlson is going to interview Vladimir Putin.
And here's what he said.
I hope Tucker Carlson will press Vladimir Putin to release American journalist Evan Gershovich from prison.
That's the Wall Street Journal reporter that the Russians are imprisoning on charges of espionage that seemed to me to be baseless.
But there's a trial that is taking place in Russia.
What a maddening irony, he said, it is for Tucker Carlson to be interviewing Putin based on a false pretense about the Ukraine war while Putin is jailing an American journalist whose truthful and brave reporting was exposing Putin.
Now, I checked to see if in the entire history of work of this American journalist, he ever once Based on this deep, passionate belief he has in press freedoms, ever denounced his own government for keeping Julian Assange in a dungeon for the last decade and trying to put him into prison for life.
And I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out that he has never mentioned the name Julian Assange or WikiLeaks except during Russiagate in order to accuse him of being a Russian agent.
Think about what that says about someone, about a journalist.
They're so brave in condemning foreign governments thousands and thousands of miles away that they have no control over and no influence over.
But when their own government does the same thing, namely imprison journalists for the crime of exposing their government's crime, they don't even raise a peep about them.
What kind of journalist are you?
What kind of person are you if you only are willing to criticize America's enemies but not your own government for persecuting fellow journalists?
Journalists who, like Julian Assange, have broken more stories than him and all of his friends combined.
Or what about The fact that Ukraine just basically murdered an American critic of Zelensky, who was begging his government to save him after he was put in prison by the Ukrainians twice for criticizing Zelensky.
That's Gonzalo Lira here from Newsweek, who is Gonzalo Lira, pro-Putin American expat, dies in Ukrainian jail.
Quote, speaking about Lera's arrest, the Ukrainian government's Center for Strategic Communication Information Security said the YouTube poster had been charged with, quote, justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine in violation of Article 463.2 of the country's criminal code.
In other words, he was criticizing the Ukrainian posture, the Zelensky's policy.
He's an American citizen reporting on the war from Ukraine on YouTube.
He was put into a prison and murdered.
Do you think Andrew DiZidero and his friends Who again never breaks stories.
They just repeat government propaganda.
They run around Capitol Hill asking congressmen to say things that they then write down in defense of the Democratic Party.
Do you think he ever once stood in defense of Gonzalo Lira and criticized the Biden administration for failing to stand in defense of this American citizen?
Of course not, because Ukraine, he won't criticize, because he, like Ukraine, is aligned with the US government.
Do you see what these people are?
They're complete state media propaganda.
So as far as I'm concerned, what they're going to want is for Tucker Carlson to go to do this interview and basically just repeat what you hear every day.
Mr. Putin, you're a murderer.
Mr. Putin, you've imprisoned journalists.
Mr. Putin, you're destroying and killing Ukrainians.
And if he doesn't do that, which presumably he won't because he's not there to reinforce American propaganda, he's there to allow Americans to hear the other side.
They're going to claim they're so enraged as journalists because they so deeply offended both by governments that imprison journalists and by journalists who fail to do adversarial interviews, even though none of them has ever conducted an adversarial interview of Vladimir Zelensky.
Or of any Democratic Party leaders, and none of them will stand in defense of press freedom when it's the U.S.
government, the Biden administration, attacking American journalists and dissidents like Gonzalo Guerra and Julian Assange.
They're just little messengers of the State Department masquerading as journalists.
And they look at someone like Julian Assange.
Who I would argue is the most consequential journalist of our generation, has broken more major stories again than all of their little journalistic colleagues combined.
And they seize with jealousy to the point they want him in prison because they think exposing the secrets and the crimes of the US security state is itself a crime.
They think doing journalism Actual journalism, not being a propagandist for the US government, is actually a crime that should put you in prison.
And they're also consumed with major jealousy over journalists who break important stories, who have a large following, who have a large impact, whereas nobody cares about or pays attention to anything they say, which is why their entire industry is failing.
Because they all sound alike.
They all repeat the same banal conventional wisdom.
They all serve the same masters.
And people know that these are propagandists and deceitful liars, just herd animals performing a function completely different than the one that they claim.
And so they see Tucker Carlson with millions and millions of people interested in what he's saying and trusting his reporting.
And they look at Julian Assange, he's broken.
Historic stories, a historic figure.
And they compare them to themselves.
Completely little inconsequential specks of dust who have no accomplishments, no major stories, and never will because they're not there to do that.
That's not their function.
Their function is to serve centers of power.
And this is where the rage over Tucker Carlson's interview of Vladimir Putin, that they haven't even seen by the way, is coming from.
They are petrified that he will allow Americans to hear information that contradicts what the government is telling them and what they've been telling them for two years.
In other words, they're angry that he's there to do journalism.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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