Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the U.S.
Supreme Court heard arguments this afternoon as part of an appeal Regarding whether Donald Trump can be legally banned from the ballot by various states based on their assessment that he engaged in an insurrection.
The case in the Supreme Court arises from the divided ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court in December in which four Democrat-appointed judges ruled that Trump must be banned from the ballot on the ground that he engaged in an insurrection, a crime for which he has never been charged, let alone convicted.
Well, three Democratic judges dissented on the ground that he cannot be banned on the 14th Amendment insurrection ban since he has never been convicted of that crime.
Now, since then, two highly partisan secretaries of state in two blue states, California and Rhode Island, rejected Colorado's reasoning and ruled that Trump cannot be banned from the ballot.
But in the Supreme Court today, the case for banning Trump was met with extreme skepticism, even hostility.
And not just from the six supposedly conservative judges, but from at least two, if not all three of the liberal judges as well.
In particular, the justices seemed downright scornful that Colorado state officials have the right to decide for the entire country whether a presidential candidate should be permitted on the ballot or not.
They were equally scornful of the notion that this can happen automatically without any judicial trial or criminal conviction that finds someone guilty of the crime of insurrection.
Predictably, a lot of liberals, including even on CNN, are already accusing the Supreme Court of being partisan, or even funnier, intimidated by Trump.
But as other CNN pundits even admitted, and imagine how bad it has to be for them to do so, there is clearly a possibility, if not a likelihood, that the court ruling against Colorado and in favor of Trump will be an overwhelming majority of the court, if not unanimous.
What will liberals say then if it's an 8-1 or 9-0 ruling in favor of Trump?
We'll show you some of the key exchanges from the court as well as some of the analysis about it.
Then, ever since Elon Musk purchased Twitter and began battling to restore free speech, claims have proliferated that the platform, now known as X, has uniquely fostered and permitted both hate speech and disinformation.
Usually, the objective of this claim is to try and pressure and coerce Musk to censor more.
In fact, in the EU, the argument that he needs to censor more is now being made as part of a formal criminal investigation into X and Musk that holds that Musk has the legal duty under EU law to stop both hate speech and disinformation.
But this week, the multi-billionaire Mark Cuban, the longtime owner of the Dallas Mavericks, among other things, bitterly complained in an interview that X was awash with hate speech, unique when compared to other social media platforms or even the pre-Maz Twitter.
In other words, trying to blame everything on Elon Musk's free speech policy for why hate speech is suddenly at a record high on X, according to him.
Now, all of this followed widespread criticism on X of Cuban after he used the platform to defend highly controversial programs of diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, It seems obvious to me that the real reason Cuban was whining about his supposed explosion of hate speech on Musk-era Twitter was because he was very upset about having received so much public pushback for his defense of DEI.
Billionaires, like him, are very accustomed to being revered by sycophants with whom they surround themselves and are not accustomed to being the target of vicious critiques from the peasants.
After I pointed that out, Cuban responded to me in a long pose, justifying his views on social media, and X in particular.
And in that response, one absolutely finds what elites have most hated about social media and the internet, more generally, since its emergence.
Namely that it levels the playing field by forcing the richest and most influential actors in society, who can usually insulate themselves from public critique, or at least could before the internet, now to have to hear from the people whom they affect with their behavior and who do not always have praise and adoration to heap upon them.
Cuban's response illustrates the key reason why so many financial and political elites like him are so eager to control and even censor social media.
The internet, when left free, is an incomparable tool to empower ordinary people, exactly that which institutions of power and the guardians who run them always hate most.
Finally, this week on Several Days, we covered the genuinely insane reaction.
To news that Tucker Carlson had traveled to Moscow, first to attend the Bolshoi of LA, and then do what journalists have done for decades, interview a foreign leader, in this case, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
That insanity absolutely escalated today as the world awaited the release of Carlson's interview with Putin, with the EU going so far to suggest that any social media platform such as X that allows the interview to air may be acting criminally in violation of newly enacted EU law, which we've covered many times, that bans the spread of disinformation.
EU officials have previously threatened to impose sanctions and a travel ban on Tucker Carlson.
From entering their countries, and now that the interview is finally out, it is a truly fascinating interview.
I think there's a lot of parts that surprise a lot of people, and we will show you and analyze some of the key excerpts.
It was just released about 90 minutes ago, and we've had an opportunity to read through the transcript and see a lot of the video, and we will share that with you.
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week.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the most underappreciated dynamics of American political life is that the people who incessantly claim that they are here to save democracy, that they're the only political faction that cares about democracy, that needs to protect democratic values from the fascist and dictatorial onslaught of Donald Trump and his movement,
Are people who spend most of their time either getting their adversaries and critics censored from the internet or banned from the internet, trying to remove their political opponents from the ballot so that nobody can vote for them, and in the case of Donald Trump, trying to imprison their primary political rival.
It's bizarre that the people who are doing those things, those classically authoritarian moves, are people who simultaneously believe and insist that they are the only guardians of democracy.
One of the most remarkable events occurred last December, and we covered this at length when it happened, when the Colorado Supreme Court, by a vote of 4-3, decided that Donald Trump ought to be banned from the Colorado ballot, both for the primary and then for the general election, on the grounds that he committed a crime that he's never been charged with, let alone convicted of, which was insurrection.
That ruling went to the Supreme Court.
Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on it.
We listened to it.
And by all accounts, not just mine, including liberal outlets, the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly hostile, scornful toward the argument that Colorado has the right to ban Trump or that any other state does on this ground.
Hear from CNN.
Today, Supreme Court hears historic case on removing Trump from the ballot.
The justices' questions suggested they may support putting Trump back on the ballot as they expect skepticism of Colorado's arguments.
Chief Justice Don Roberts, a key vote to watch, said the arguments are, quote, at war with the thrust of the 14th Amendment.
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan questioned the implications of a single state banning a candidate in a presidential election.
Now this is the remarkable part of the ruling, is that two of the liberal judges, Justice Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, were, I would say, at least as hostile to Colorado's arguments as the conservative justices were, although they were quite hostile as well.
Maybe Maybe Justice Brown will be willing to rule in favor of Colorado, but I seriously doubt it.
But it seems likely that Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor will join the six other justices, who are generally referred to as being conservative, to deliver at least eight votes, and then maybe nine unanimously, against the Colorado ruling, which would be quite a momentous against the Colorado ruling, which would be quite a momentous event for the Supreme Court with that kind of a voice to say that the Democratic Party and the liberal effort,
Even though it was brought in the name of several Republican individual voters, it was spearheaded and organized by CRU, which is a liberal activist group that claims to act in the name of ethics in government, even though they are obviously a Democratic Party activist group.
It would be extraordinary if they get slapped out, not by six justices of the Supreme Court, but by eight or even nine.
Here's an example of Justice Kagan questioning Jason Murray, who is the attorney for these Republican voters that they got to become the plaintiffs in the case.
And you'll listen to just how clear her view was.
Most boldly, I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.
In other words, you know, this question of whether a former president is disqualified for insurrection Uh, to be president again is, you know, just say it, it sounds awfully national to me.
Um, so whatever means there are to enforce it would suggest that they have to be federal national means.
Why does, uh, you know, if you weren't from Colorado and you were from Wisconsin or you were from Michigan and it really, you know, what the Michigan Secretary of State did is going to make the difference between You know, whether Candidate A is elected or Candidate B is elected, I mean, that seems quite extraordinary, doesn't it?
No, Your Honor, because ultimately it's this Court that's going to decide that question of federal constitutional eligibility and settle the issue for the nation.
And certainly it's not unusual that questions of national importance come up.
Well, I suppose this Court would be saying something along the lines of that a state has the power to do it.
But I guess I was asking you to go a little bit further in saying why should that be the right rule?
Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination, not only for their own citizens, but for the rest of the nation?
Because Article 2 gives them the power to appoint their own electors as they see fit.
But if they're going to use a federal constitutional qualification as a ballot access determinant, then it's creating a federal constitutional question that then this court decides.
And other courts, other states, if this court affirms the decision below, determining that President Trump is ineligible to be president, other states would still have to determine what effect that would have on their own state's law and state procedure.
Well, I mean, if we affirmed and we said he was ineligible to be president, Yes, maybe some states would say, well, you know, we're going to keep him on the ballot anyway.
But I mean, really, it's going to have, as Justice Kagan said, the effect of Colorado deciding.
And it's true.
I just want to push back a little bit on, well, it's a national thing because this court will decide it.
You say that we have to review Colorado's factual record with clear error as the standard of review.
So we would be stuck, the first mover state here, Colorado, we're stuck with that record.
And, you know, I don't want to get into whether the record, I mean, maybe the record is great.
But what if the record wasn't?
I mean, what if it wasn't a fulsome record?
What if, you know, the hearsay rules are, you know, one offs?
Or what if this is just made by the Secretary of State without much process at all?
All right, so you get the flavor there.
That is an argument Essentially saying that what Colorado did has the real possibility of preventing the person that the country actually wants to elect from getting enough votes simply by making a ruling about the 14th Amendment that has obvious federal consequences that it's not the state of Colorado's to make.
And while the lawyer for Colorado is saying, well, no, you should make it, the Supreme Court is saying, but you're not actually asking us to make it.
We can't make a ruling starting from scratch because we're bound by the factual record of what Colorado did if you were to win.
And what if Colorado has a bunch of weird rules about evidence and hearsay?
And now we're stuck with this weird ballot that somehow is supposed to govern the entire country and the right to choose a candidate.
That was always one of the weirdest parts of what Colorado did.
Is it so obvious that this is a federal election?
That it belongs on a federal level with Congress or the federal courts?
And the judges, not just Amy Coney Barrett, but Elena Kagan, seem very emphatic about that.
I mean, this goes on for another two, two and a half minutes like that.
And there is barely an argument raised in favor of Colorado throughout the entire Uh, hearing today.
And usually that's why, as a lawyer, you go into an oral argument, you come out, you kind of try and read the tea leaves, but a lot of times you think you win, you won, and then you end up losing, or a lot of times you walk out saying, yeah, I think they're gonna roll against me, and they win.
In this case, it wasn't hard to see, they weren't pushing both sides, they were only pushing one, and they were pushing them hard, and that was the state of Colorado.
Here is Justice Gorsuch, Who had a lot of contempt for, actually, this is Justice Roberts first.
We're going to show you him given that he's generally considered to be a swing vote.
And let's listen to what he had to say.
But what do you do with the, what I would seem to me to be plain consequences of your position?
If Colorado's position is upheld, surely there will be disqualification proceedings on the other side, and some of those will succeed.
Some of them will have different standards of proof.
Some of them will have different rules about evidence.
Maybe the Senate report won't be accepted in others because it's hearsay.
Maybe it's beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever.
In very quick order, I would expect, although my predictions have never been correct, I would expect that a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, you're off the ballot, and others, for the Republican candidate, you're off the ballot, and it'll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election.
That's a pretty daunting consequence.
Well, certainly, Your Honor, the fact that there are potential frivolous applications of a constitutional provision isn't a reason... Well, no, hold on.
I mean, you might think they're frivolous, but the people who are bringing them may not think they're frivolous.
Insurrection is a broad term, and if there's some debate about it, I suppose that will go into the decision, and then eventually, what, we would be deciding whether It was an insurrection when one president did something as opposed to when somebody else did something else.
And what do we do?
Do we wait until near the time of counting the ballots and sort of go through which states are valid and which states aren't?
There's a reason Section 3 has been dormant for 150 years, and it's because we haven't seen anything like January 6th since Reconstruction.
Insurrection against the Constitution is something extraordinary.
It seems to me you're avoiding the question, which is other states may have different views about what constitutes insurrection.
And now you're saying, well, it's all right, because somebody, presumably us, are going to decide, well, they said they thought that was an insurrection, but they were wrong.
The lawyer actually is reminding me a lot of that YouTuber I debated about January 6th, Destiny, who was, I think he thinks he's some kind of like giant of journalism and also a constitutional scholar.
He was like so definitive and certain that it's so obvious.
You just like read the 14th Amendment.
He was saying it's like so clear that Trump can't run.
He's guilty of an insurrection.
And like the entire Supreme Court is looking at this and saying, this is insane.
And just on like the very first issue, About whether Colorado even has the right to decide this, let alone on all of the other issues about whether Colorado, if they did have the right to decide, actually made this decision accurately to be able to say, well Trump wasn't charged with insurrection.
He wasn't convicted of insurrection.
He never had all the rights of a criminal trial that the Constitution guarantees when you're alleged to have committed a crime.
And nonetheless, we're not, we're going to find, just kind of invent out of the air after like a civil and evidentiary hearing, the last three days that the President of the United States is ineligible to run for office.
It is such an obviously anti-constitutional and anti-democratic posture, and it's very relieving to see the Supreme Court heaping this kind of scorn on it.
And Jess Roberts is very soft-spoken.
He was being pretty aggressive because he was not getting his question answered in lieu of these kind of streamer arguments like, well, it's so obvious this January 6th, nothing like it happened before.
But if anyone else claims it's an insurrection, that would be frivolous.
That's like a high school debate argument.
None of these justices are even letting this lawyer speak, barely, because his arguments don't command any respect or any credence.
Here is probably the most hostile of the exchanges, and it was with Justice Gorsuch.
You rarely hear any judge treat a lawyer like this, let alone a lawyer that gets to the Supreme Court and is presumably qualified.
And this judge actually, this lawyer rather, actually clerked for, I believe a Supreme Court justice, but for sure an appellate court lawyer.
He's a well-regarded lawyer in the legal world, and yet actually corked for Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court, and you saw how she treated him.
So here's how Neil Gorsuch treated him. - It operates, you say, there's no legislation necessary.
I thought that was the whole theory of your case, and no procedure necessary.
It happens automatically. - I mean, so this is an important point, which is, the question is, how did Donald Trump become an insurrectionist?
When did this happen?
And how?
By what procedure?
Like I said, there was never any process that was given to lay out the case against him.
Jack Smith charged him with many crimes.
None of them was the crime of inciting or engaging in an insurrection, even though that is a crime in the U.S.
Code.
He could have charged him with that, but didn't.
One would think that if Jack Smith thought he could convict Trump on that charge, he would have charged him, and yet didn't.
And in that debate, I repeatedly asked why he wouldn't, and finally there was admission that, well, he probably doesn't think he can get a conviction.
Okay, well, that's a pretty significant concession.
And so the theory that Colorado invented and that its defenders concocted to try and justify what Colorado did is, oh, you don't need a procedure, it's just automatic.
It's self-executing.
The minute someone commits an insurrection, they're banned from high office.
And they have to say that because Colorado has to admit there was never any procedure, any finding that he committed an insurrection other than Colorado's own process.
There was no trial.
There were no rights given.
And so Gorsuch is going to spend his time trying to understand how it could possibly be that Trump became ineligible for office instantly on January 6th, even though there was no process.
It just magically happened out of nowhere.
It was self-executing.
You say there's no legislation necessary.
I thought that was the whole theory of your case and no procedure.
It happens automatically.
Well, certainly you need a procedure in order to have any remedy to enforce the disqualification.
That's a whole separate question.
That's the de facto doctrine.
It doesn't work here.
Okay, put that aside.
He's disqualified from the moment.
Self-executing.
Done.
And I would think that a person who would receive a direction from that person, the president, former president, in your view, would be free to act as he or she wishes without regard to that individual.
I don't think so because I think again that... What he's essentially saying is, if Trump became guilty of insurrection on the day that he did it, then it shouldn't even be the case that people inside the government would obey the orders of Trump, even though he was the inaugurated elected president.
Because it's just self-executing.
The minute a president does an insurrection, you don't need a trial.
It just is like an inherent thing that just materializes in the air.
This is the Colorado lawyer's argument.
And Neil Gorsuch essentially saying, well, wouldn't that mean that everyone in government can just ignore anything Trump says or does because he's now no longer eligible to be president?
He's not even the president anymore by virtue of having committed an insurrection.
If that could really happen that way that it's just self-executing, it just materializes.
I don't think so, because I think, again, the de facto officer doctrine would nevertheless come into play to say this is... No, de facto, that doesn't work, Mr. Murray, because de facto officer is to ratify the conduct that's done afterwards and insulate it from judicial review.
Put that aside.
I'm not going to say it again.
Put it aside, okay?
I think Justice Lee is asking a very different question, a more pointed one, a more difficult one for you, I understand, but I think it deserves an answer.
On your theory, Would anything compel a lower official to obey an order from, in your view, the former president?
I'm imagining a situation where, for example, a former president was, you know, a president was elected and they were 25, and they were ineligible to hold office, but nevertheless they were put into that office.
No, no, we're talking about Section 3.
Please don't change the hypothetical, okay?
Please don't change the hypothetical.
I know I like doing it too, but please don't do it, okay?
Well, the point I'm trying to make is that- He's disqualified from the moment he committed an insurrection.
Whoever it is, whichever party, that happens.
Boom.
It happened.
What would compel, and I'm not going to say it again, so just try and answer the question.
If you don't have an answer, fair enough, we'll move on.
What would compel a lower official to obey an order from that individual?
Because ultimately, we have statutes and rules requiring chains of command.
The person is in the office, and even if they don't have the authority to hold the office, the only way to get someone out of the office of the presidency is impeachment.
And so I think if you interpreted Section 3 in light of other provisions in the Constitution, like impeachment, while they hold office, impeachment's the only way to validate that they don't have the ability to hold that office and should be removed.
I mean, I can't put into words how self-destructive that whole exchange is for Colorado's theory.
The whole point, as Neil Gorsuch started off saying and then got increasingly frustrated when he couldn't get an answer, was that the only way Colorado can justify what they did Is if their view is, we don't need a trial, we don't need a conviction, because the minute a person in the office of the presidency engages in an insurrection, they are, from that point on, ineligible to hold that office.
And so then the question became, well, why, the minute January 6th happened, would anybody in the government have to obey Trump?
After all, they would say, oh, he committed an insurrection.
He's now ineligible to be president.
He can't hold the presidency.
And the lawyer's argument was, no, you need a remedy.
You need Congress to actually go do something.
You would need Congress to impeach him based on the finding that he committed an insurrection.
And that's the whole point of the Supreme Court about why what Colorado did was so obviously baseless.
Because there never was an act like that, finding that Trump was guilty.
There was no act like that from the Congress.
Remember, they acquitted Trump on those charges, on the charges of impeachment.
There was never any court ruling in a criminal context charging him, just Colorado just decreed it based on Colorado's little idiosyncratic state rules.
And so the minute that lawyer said, He wouldn't be automatically rendered powerless as president because he committed an insurrection unless you had an act of Congress that removed him.
The whole case is gone because you're then saying that it's not self-executing.
You need an act of a legitimate body to determine and decree that he actually committed an insurrection and that's exactly what Colorado does not have here.
It's such a, I mean, I just, I want to take note of how extraordinary it is that the strategy of the Democratic Party is to get Donald Trump removed from the ballot.
Banned from having people vote for him when they're looking at polls showing that the vast majority of Republicans and a majority of Americans, or at least a plurality who vote, want to vote for Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden.
And if Trump were convicted of a crime that the Constitution says renders you ineligible, that would be one thing.
But to do that in the absence of any kind of a judicial ruling that says that, other than what Colorado decides in its state court system it's going to do, with none of the triggering of protections that a defendant gets when they're accused of a crime, is mind-bogglingly anti-democratic.
With no basis in the Constitution, even though a lot of liberal YouTubers and tweeters and the like will insist that it's such an obvious victory for Colorado, that it's so obvious Trump can't win, when you finally get non-state judges, judges on the Supreme Court, to take a look at this, they reacted with horror, with kind of shock and contempt.
And I hope it is a unanimous ruling, or 8 to 1, which looks like it could be, because I think that'll be an extremely justified comeuppance for this attempt.
Now, I think even the most partisan journalists, the ones whose mission in life The way a Christian's mission in life is to evangelize on behalf of their religion, these journalists' mission in life is to prevent Donald Trump from returning to power by any means.
They'd be thrilled if he got banned from the ballot.
Or imprisoned.
Here is one of them, David Corn of Mother Jones, who was the journalist most responsible for contaminating our discourse with the Steele dossier hoax.
Obviously there were no career consequences to that.
Here he is today knowing that the Supreme Court is going to rule against Colorado and this is his excuse for it.
Bottom line, the authors of 14-3, meaning the authors of the 14th Amendment, 3rd clause, clause 3, screwed up!
They never figured that a sitting president would incite an insurrection to retain power and that there would be an argument afterward about what happened and that voters would still be enthralled with such an authoritarian demagogue.
It's the fault of the framers of the 14th Amendment because they didn't anticipate a scenario like this, which is essentially a concession that the 14th Amendment does not in fact permit Donald Trump to be banned from the ballot.
Here is how one CNN analyst decided to frame what happened here.
Quote, Supreme Court faces its greatest test yet from Trump.
That was the headline after the oral argument, that this is some great test for the Supreme Court, some moral challenge, some litmus test of whether they're credible.
Quote, the four times criminally indicted Trump repeatedly sets out to lean on or discredit institutions that can hold him accountable, restrain his power, or contradict his incessantly spun alternative realities.
He draws them into his vitriol and falsehoods in a way that has harmed their purported reputation for being above the fray.
The prospect of being dragged into the hyper-politicized arena of a presidential election is a nightmare enough for Chief Justice John Roberts, who is often sought to guard the high court against reputational damage from the country's raging politics.
But an election case involving Trump in a time of far greater partisan fury than the bitter aftermath of the 2000 election could be an even graver matter, especially if any of the court's rulings eventually go against Trump.
Hal Trump leans on judges.
Any judge that delivers verdicts contradictory to Trump's view risks becoming a target.
In several cases in which the justices declined to hear or rejected Trump's allegations about the 2020 election, he has had a tense relationship with the high court.
I mean, are they actually, she actually, is this person actually suggesting?
I think they are.
That the only reason why the court might rule against Trump, or in favor of Trump and against Colorado, is because they're fearful that Trump will post things on social media that are critical of them.
That's why Elena Kagan and John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett are going to rule against Colorado even though they know deep down they should rule in favor of Colorado because they're afraid Trump's going to criticize them.
They just got done pointing out It's like an even more destructive argument than that Colorado lawyer made, that repeatedly during the 2020, post-2020 election fraud campaign that Trump went on, the Supreme Court repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of Trump and rule in favor of Trump in the fraud claims.
And every time they did that, as that CNN writer just said, Trump insulted them on social media.
Apparently, though, they didn't care about that because they never then said, oh my God, Trump's attacking us.
We better intervene on behalf of Trump and save him.
Otherwise, he's going to keep criticizing us.
These justices have tenure for life, which is done precisely to immunize them from being concerned about whether politicians criticize them.
They don't care about that.
It's one of the geniuses, actually, of the Constitution, that you cannot remove a Supreme Court justice except for extreme malfeasance, corruption and the like, taking bribes and things like that.
So it's just bizarre to watch liberals now have to cope with the fact that what they thought was such an obvious legally and constitutionally justified maneuver to win the election by cheating Got before the Supreme Court, and not just the ones they hate, but the ones they respect, and found that these justices scoffed at and scorned that ruling.
And so this is them trying to grapple with that.
Ever since the internet emerged then, it empowered people, ordinary people, to be heard.
The elites, who are usually insulated from criticism, and who are typically accustomed to being able to do whatever they want without having to hear attacks on their character, integrity, or morality, or anything else, have hated the internet forever, precisely because it gives ordinary people a platform, sometimes a bigger platform than these people have, To be heard.
And it's definitely bigger when people unite, as they often do, against somebody that they dislike.
I remember so well when I was reading blogs in 2002 and 2003, and then when I started my own in 2005, it was this constant dynamic where corporate journalists, because most blogs, left or right, were genuinely, generally motivated by a critique of corporate media, saying corporate media was doing a biased job or a poor job in their reporting.
And as blogs grew, you saw how differently these corporate media people reacted to the fact that these uncredentialed citizens had a platform that they couldn't ignore, often a bigger platform than they had.
And at first, they would ignore the blogosphere.
It's that cycle of... And blogosphere, by the way, is a cringy title for what was really just like the emergence of an internet faction that was doing citizen journalism and critiquing media outlets.
But at first, they ignored them.
They tried to just say, oh, these people are beneath us.
We don't have to pay attention to them.
But then they found that everywhere they went, online, in person, to events, they would hear from people who were there to express those criticisms that they got from those blogs.
And so they couldn't ignore it anymore.
So they would then mock these blogs, like, oh, they're just dirty bloggers in their mother's basement.
You know, it's kind of the arrogance of people who want to cling to their baseless credentials.
And then when that mockery didn't work, they went to war against bloggers and started saying, you know, they had to engage with constantly.
And then they ended up complaining.
That blogs and the internet was full of hatred, was making their job so difficult, was causing them depression, it was unjust that they have to hear these things.
These are people who work at the most powerful media corporations, whining that for once they had accountability as a result of the internet.
Now ultimately, what happens is first you ignore them, then you mock them.
And ultimately you join them and a lot of these media outlets then hired those bloggers because they had bigger audiences than those journalists who worked at media corporations did.
Or those journalists became bloggers.
They started writing blogs.
And that has been the dynamic, not just with journalists, but with all elites.
So imagine if you're a billionaire.
Obviously everybody around you constantly is just yessing you to death because they live off of and depend upon your largesse.
When you're a billionaire, you're funding probably hundreds if not thousands of people's jobs.
And one of those billionaires is Mark Cuban, who's the founder of AOL, or the co-founder of AOL, back in the 1990s.
That's where he made his first fortune, and then he bought the Dallas Mavericks.
And he's worth eight or ten billion dollars, turned himself into a celebrity and a public figure by owning the Dallas Mavericks, did a, by all accounts, good job, brought them an NBA championship.
But what happened was he stuck his head up on X, In order to defend DEI, which are the diversity, equality, and inclusion programs that corporations have adopted and academia has adopted and media has adopted, basically to say that we're only going to hire people who meet our racial and ethnic and gender quotas.
So we're only going to hire more black people for these jobs or more Latino people or more women, but not white men.
And obviously it's created a lot of anger among a lot of people, not just white people, but a lot of people who find it offensive.
And Mark Cuban appeared on Twitter to respond to Elon Musk, who was criticizing his programs in order to defend them.
And when he defended them, he hurt a lot of people, thousands of them, vehemently denouncing his ideas, which is exactly what you want billionaires to have to be exposed to, given their extraordinary power, not just financial power, but political power.
And he, as a result, went on a campaign where he suddenly began whining that Elon Musk and X allow unique levels of hate speech, unlike any other platform, because they don't censor enough.
Here's what he said in an interview on February 6, which was a couple of days ago, about his experience on Twitter.
Now, you know, social media has changed.
It's no longer social.
And since Twitter became X, I mean, like I was telling you Yasmin, like when I get Jew ban, I get you're not white, you're Jewish.
I get tell the Jew to shut the fuck up.
I, you know, and I just bookmark them.
Twitter has become just a cesspool for hate.
And so trying to go there and change people's mind.
I mean, I've seen people try and then everybody just gangs up.
And Instagram, just people avoid it.
And then same with LinkedIn.
It's just not that platform.
Social media, I don't see as being that place.
I think you've got to go face to face.
You know, I'd rather, that's why when I have these conversations, I go where I know people are going to disagree with me.
You know, whether it's DEI or whatever.
Imagine being worth $8 billion.
Just think about what $8 billion is for a second.
Sometimes I think that these numbers are so abstract, they are difficult to process.
So imagine you have $10 million.
For most people, that's an extraordinary amount of money.
And then you multiply that by 10.
So now you have 10 of those $10 million.
You're only up to $100 million.
You then have to multiply it by 10 again.
You have a hundred million dollars.
Stacks of a hundred million dollars.
You have to multiply it by ten.
You have ten of those in front of you.
Only then do you get to a billion.
He has eight of those stacks.
Eight billion dollars.
It's obviously more money than you can ever spend in your lifetime.
I remember when we founded The Intercept and the person who was funding it was the multi-billionaire who founded eBay, Pierre Omidyar, and he gave an interview and he announced, oh, over the course of several years, I'm going to devote $250 million to this new media company.
Not only to The Intercept, but he wanted to create a media company and did that had a lot of other different components to it.
And the media went wild, like, oh my God, he's going to spend $250 million on this new media outlet, which was the same price Jeff Bezos had just paid for The Washington Post, $250 million.
And I remember early on talking to his chief financial officer when we were creating The Intercept, and he said to me, you know, it's so funny the media reacted to Pierre Omidyar saying he's going to spend $250 million when for someone who's worth $8 billion, it's like pocket change.
Just by having $8 billion, you make $1 billion every year from interest, from return on investments, very safe investments.
Like $250 million, you don't even notice.
But that's the scale of the kind of level of financial power that then turns into political power that people like Mark Cuban have.
And imagine amassing that level of wealth and that level of power and then going on an interview in front of cameras and whining about the fact that social media enables people to criticize you and sometimes criticize you in ways that you think are unfair or is too harsh.
And he singled out Axe because he has been getting into conflicts with Elon Musk.
But this is a common accusation against Axe that by allowing free speech, there's an overflow of all sorts of hate speech and disinformation.
And I saw this.
And what happened here was incredibly obvious to me.
I'd seen it many times.
It was the dynamic I just explained.
And I tweeted the following, quote, Elites of all kind have been whining that social media platforms are full of hatred since social media existed.
That X is somehow uniquely fostering hate speech is solely because Musk refuses to censor as much, and because of Mark Cuban's anger that he's not universally adored here.
Over my tweet, he posted the following.
He said, we disagree.
It's not about censorship.
I've never asked for censorship.
It's about hate speech, crowding out people who don't want to be where hate is.
And if I wanted to be adored, this is not the place to go, LOL.
But that's what he's saying.
He's saying he's not going to use X anymore.
He prefers threads.
Because threads, or LinkedIn, or I guess Instagram is a place where people disagree.
Peacefully?
Have you ever looked at a Threads argument?
There have been media reports claiming that Threads has hate speech on it.
People block comments all the time on Instagram because they're mauled by all... This is Cuban nature.
This is not causing hate, social media.
It's reflecting how people respond.
And in particular, they respond, especially to powerful people, and they don't treat them deferentially.
And these powerful people interpret that as some kind of moral crime.
He then went on.
And if I wanted to be adored, this is not the place to go.
LOL.
Despite Elon Musk being a nonstop joyride of positivity to me.
Like, haha, Elon Musk is a joyride of positivity toward me.
And while social media as a whole may reflect the world, this platform certainly does not.
It's not only become an echo chamber, in many cases it's hard to know whether a post is originated by a bot.
I've been active here for a long time.
The nature of conversations and my replies and shown to me has changed considerably, including many people who used to be active here rarely are no longer posting.
I think it's because the algorithm is designed to reward the largest account and those who, particularly paying users, who engage with it.
To some, that is a huge positive.
To me, the platform would have better served if Elon kept on posting but removed himself from the algo.
His posts influence what the entire site sees.
Removing them from the algorithm would democratize the site considerably.
Every entrepreneur makes their own decisions and time tell if they are right or wrong, so we will see.
You heard what he said.
Did it have anything to do with that much more selfless and high-minded point about which would better serve, how well X does in the future?
No.
He was winding and complaining that so many people were cursing at him and hurling invective at him.
Now, what is amazing about this is if you go and look at anybody who is even in the public eye a little bit, People who have nothing to do with politics, people who write about food or TV or sports or culture, they get just as attacked with invective.
In fact, I have never seen the kind of invective that tennis players get on Instagram or other athletes get on Instagram, largely from people who bet on them, like bettors who just bet all day on, bet their paycheck on competitive sports competitions.
And when they lose, they go to these tennis players' sites and they just heap immense amounts of scorn on them.
Just the most hateful things you've ever seen.
I mean, bile spewing, like accusing them of being drug addicts and cheating and fixing and losing on purpose because they're paid to lose, just like intense rage.
And there's this new podcast called The Changeover Podcast, which is buying about tennis players who are ranked 300 in the world or 500 in the world, 800 in the world.
They basically make no money.
They find ways to get money to go around the world and play in tournaments, but they don't ever climb up the rankings to make a lot of money.
They're poor.
Basically, they're just grinding on the lower levels of the tennis tour.
And they get a lot of this invective and hatred, too.
And here was three of these tennis players, or four of them, all ranked in the very low end of the ranking, making no money, talking about the hate they get on Instagram when they lose.
And just listen to the difference in their attitude about the hatred they get compared to what Mark Cuban was whining about when he went on that interview.
Alright, we have a few Instagram questions.
The first one is from Henry.
How do you handle the pressure and expectations from being a rising star?
Do you even feel like you have?
I don't know if I handle it or not.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
I guess I don't take input from what other people think.
I think that it's an internal struggle to try and be as good as you can.
So when I think about my goals, I think there's like zero of it is predicated on how other people expect me to do or how other people want me to do.
An internal drive, so you know if I don't do well, then I'm kind of like it sucks I didn't do well But I must have done something not good enough, or if I do do well, then it's like that's great that I did You know did something well, and I can keep on going, but I don't think that any of it is Based on how other people think Even though there's a lot of Instagram haters out there A lot today Crazy today yeah a lot today
Yeah, and the close matches sometimes, it's just brutal.
I think they gave up on me, I don't get that many anymore.
The best are the ones when they're like, they hate you, and they start like, they start cussing you out, and then their friend like, hops on like, yeah, like this guy blah blah, and then you actually end up like winning.
It's like, you were up like 5-2, and now it's like 5-6, you suck, like quit tennis forever!
And then the guy's like, Let's go!
You won the set!
One thing later, you're sitting there scrolling on your phone like, wow, these people are insane.
We had a funny one today.
I didn't tell you.
The funny one today was on the Instagram page.
We have a partnership with Pro Stringer.
Ruben Statham is who owns Pro Stringer, I guess.
Like a couple weeks ago I guess he lost a match and we have like on Instagram we have a collab with Prostring on one of our posts so I see like oh Ruben Statham so trash blah blah blah talking about Ruben Statham and I guess I wasn't paying attention normally I delete them but I just didn't delete this one and then today you played and then they came to the same post and the same response is like also Evans is trash too!
Alright so they're laughing about it.
on the same post. - The double whammy.
On the post that's not even-- - That's two birds, one stone. - Yeah, that's so funny.
And people that don't understand it, like some of, even like family friends sometimes. - All right, so they're laughing about it.
They're saying, "Haha, these people are insane.
They come and hurl the most disgusting invective at us." And these are like poor tennis players who make no money.
And Mark Cuban is whining endlessly about the unfair treatment he gets on X.
And again, it's really because, and I've seen this dynamic so many times before, that people who are media elites or political elites or financial elites think that they're supposed to be treated by the public the way the people they surround themselves with treat them.
And when they find that they express opinions and people get angry at them, They really think some kind of moral crime has been committed, that there's something wrong with social media, that there's something wrong with journalism, with the internet.
And I told you I've seen journalists for so long.
Before the internet, think about what it was like to be a corporate journalist.
You worked for the New York Times, you worked at ABC News.
You never heard any criticisms from the public for anything that you did.
The most you got was like a letter to the editor of the New York Times that would criticize an article and they would throw it into the garbage and laugh at it.
Excuse me.
And so, It's easy to understand why people like this would end up hating the internet because for the first time they actually had to hear criticisms from the public.
This is what's behind the drive to control the internet, to censor social media, are people like this who can't stand the fact that they have to hear criticism.
And for me, that's the biggest benefit of internet era journalism is that you do have to hear from people.
Telling you that you're wrong.
Telling you that you're biased.
Telling you that you're terrible.
And even if it sometimes goes onto the edge of excess or invective or hatefulness, it's nonetheless the case that overall it's much healthier to err on the side of having our most powerful elites hear more criticisms rather than less or none.
It used to be that they heard none.
The internet happened, social media happened.
Now they hear a lot.
And the response of the unhealthiest ones is to start going around complaining and whining about how unfair it all is.
Whatever happened in Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin, and we're going to show you segments of it, excerpts of it.
It was just released about two hours ago.
It's an incredibly interesting interview.
There are parts of it that are very surprising, and I think it's really worth hearing.
I would highly recommend you watch the whole thing.
It's two hours, but we're going to show you the parts that we found most interesting.
But no matter what happened there, it would have been impossible To equal the unhinged, insane reaction that establishment liberals and the corporate media and the political class have been spewing for days.
They've been gradually and in stages, visibly having a nervous breakdown over the fact that Tucker Carlson was going to interview Vladimir Putin.
Here was Hillary Clinton Who sat down for an exclusive interview as though she's never been on MSNBC before with Alex Wagner, who is a host that fills in when Rachel Maddow is not there.
She has a show a few times a week.
She's totally indistinguishable from anybody else on MSNBC, so I don't need to explain what she's like.
Here she is asking Hillary Clinton about what Hillary Clinton thinks about Tucker Carlson's interviewing Vladimir Putin.
Tucker Carlson is in Moscow right now interviewing Vladimir Putin, the first American, I'll say, journalist to interview Putin since the war in Ukraine began.
What does that tell you about Tucker Carlson and right-wing media and also Vladimir Putin?
Well, it shows me what I think we've all known.
He's what's called a useful idiot.
I mean, if you actually read translations of what's being said on Russian media, they make fun of him.
I mean, he's like a puppy dog.
You know, he somehow is, after having been fired from so many outlets in the United States, he, I would not be surprised if he emerges with a contract with a Russian outlet because he is a- Is there, let me just ask you this.
Is there anyone more repulsive in public life than Hillary Clinton?
I mean, a lot of people say repellent things occasionally.
It's an inevitability that if she shows her face and begins talking, she's going to say repulsive things.
Oh, he's going to end up with a contract with a Russian media outlet.
Why would he?
Ever since he was fired from Fox and started his own media outlet.
He has millions and millions of viewers for every single thing that he does.
The reason they're so upset about Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin is because they know so many more people are going to watch that than all of the interviews, the sycophantic, coddling interviews they did with President Zelensky combined.
And here she is just casually insinuating that he's some sort of useful idiot for the Kremlin, or serving the Kremlin, or going to end up with a contract on Russian TV, talking about how being fired from the world's largest media corporations is some sort of shameful act.
In fact, it's a badge of honor.
He got fired from Fox despite having the biggest audience because he was questioning establishment orthodoxy, something that as the maven of establishment piety she hates.
Here's the rest of this, and I'm sorry to subject you to it, but it's so illustrative.
Useful idiot.
He says things that are not true.
He parrots Vladimir Putin's pack of lies about Ukraine.
So I don't see why Putin wouldn't give him an interview because through him he can continue to lie about what his objectives are in Ukraine and what he expects to see happen.
It's really quite sad that not just somebody like Tucker Carlson, who has, as I said, been fired so many times because he seems unable to correlate his reporting with the truth.
Oh, is that why you get fired from media corporations?
Because your reporting doesn't correlate to the truth?
I can promise you that's not why you get fired from media outlets.
It's the exact opposite.
The way you stay at media outlets is if you correlate your reporting to their propaganda.
The reason you get fired from media outlets is because you refuse to correlate your reporting to what Hillary Clinton wants you to think is the truth.
Also, is she saying that Fox News fired Tucker Carlson because Fox News does not tolerate people who go on air and speak falsely?
They only want people who are on air?
With their views correlating to the truth?
Because that is what she's saying.
She started off trying to smile and act like this doesn't bother her at all.
Like, you know, he's a useful idiot.
They talk about him like he's a joke.
They make fun of him because he's a puppy dog.
And now she's like showing her deep hatred for him.
Because she knows that he has a lot of influence.
He obviously talks very, very critically of her, to put that mildly.
And she's just so filled with bitterness.
Like, just the most bitter, hateful person that exists is Hillary Clinton.
And you saw how she started out, like, here was her, you know, kind of posture, like, all trying to be smiley.
And then by the end, she gets that, like, hate in her voice, and she just, like, repeats that he's gotten fired.
And someone like Tucker Carlson.
Let's listen to the rest.
Because it's a sign that there are people in this country right now who are like a fifth column for Vladimir Putin.
And why?
I don't know.
I mean, why are... Now, I'd like to just stop here and say the following, that in 2001, when Andrew Sullivan had a very widely read blog, and he became just an extreme supporter of the war on terror to Bush and Cheney,
One of the most notorious things Andrew Sullivan ever did in his career, and he ended up apologizing for it, was he said that people in the United States who oppose Bush and Cheney and who oppose the war on terror are basically a fifth column for radical Islam.
Basically, that means they're traitors to their country because they were questioning the government's policies.
And liberals were enraged.
If you bring up Andrew Sullivan to any liberal, they will mention that.
When he said, oh, he's the one who said that liberals form a fifth column in the United States because they were questioning government policy.
And now that comes from liberals, that rhetoric.
You wind up a liberal like Hillary Clinton and they will, within seconds, be accusing their critics of being traitors to the country because they question Joe Biden's war policies, including in Ukraine.
I don't know.
Do you have a working period?
Oh my God!
Oh my God!
Why are, you know, other Americans basically believing Putin?
Why did Trump believe Putin more than our 11 intelligence agencies?
I don't know.
Do you have a working theory?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Why would anybody not believe our intelligence agencies?
I mean, and look at her.
She's like, I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you have a theory?
Like, they're so smug because they only talk to people who think the same way.
Look at that.
Look at her.
She's like, so happy to be talking to Hillary Clinton.
She has that like, I don't know.
I don't know.
You tell me.
And what they're shocked by is that Donald Trump would even entertain the idea That something that was said by our intelligence agencies known around the world for the highest integrity and their devotion to the truth might not actually be true.
There must be something very sinister going on for anybody to think that what the CIA or Homeland Security says may not actually be true.
She lived through the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton did.
She voted for the Iraq War and she claimed afterwards the reason she did was because she was misled by the intelligence agencies.
She blamed them, and now 10 years later, she wants to claim that you must be disloyal to your country if you don't trust the intelligence agencies.
Please get the camera off of the host, because I can't stand watching her do that anymore.
You're a working theory.
But it's more than just the political partisan advantage.
There is a yearning for leaders who can kill and imprison their opponents, destroy the Does she not know that the people who are trying to imprison their opponents is not Donald Trump, but the Democratic Party?
I just want you to think about the cognitive dissonance that goes on these people's heads.
That's what I was saying earlier when I covered the oral argument about banning Trump from the ballot.
These are the people who constantly tell you that they are the only ones who can protect democracy from Trump.
And so when she says these are the people who want to imprison their political opponents, she's not talking about herself.
and her political party they're the only ones trying to imprison their political opponents trump was president for four years he never once tried to do that it's the biden justice department now trying to imprison donald trump while he leads biden in the polls but how can these people hear those words imprisoning political opponents and think it applies to trump and not to them for leaders who can kill and imprison their opponents destroy the press
uh lead a life that is one of impunity unbound by any laws there's a yearning among certain people in our country for that kind of leadership and i find that absolutely gobsmacking terrifying that is somebody who is so angry that she lost Twice.
In 2008 to Obama and 2016 to Trump.
That she's saying there are people in this country, in fact a lot of them, that want lies and want fascism.
That's why I lost.
Because they want lies.
I don't lie.
I'm Hillary Clinton.
Now, here was the Guardian earlier today.
With this headline, quote, Tucker Carlson interview with Putin to test EU law regulating tech companies.
The EU law obliges social media platforms to remove illegal content with fears that the interview will give the Russian leader a propaganda coup.
This is the EU, the liberal wing of the EU, overtly and explicitly suggesting That Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin may be illegal under EU law.
It may be a crime.
That's why he might face sanctions and a travel ban.
And they're also saying that these new laws the EU enacted, which ban social media companies from permitting the dissemination of disinformation, if social media companies permit this interview to be heard, it might actually violate EU law for allowing disinformation to be spread.
If you're at the point, as a country or a government, We're talking about an interview with a foreign leader being illegal under your laws.
You are an authoritarian country by definition.
There's a shocking headline to see.
But this is how much meltdown they are undergoing out of fear that millions of people are now going to hear from Vladimir Putin for the first time in the West.
Quote, the EU's far-reaching new laws to regulate tech companies, including X and Facebook, will face their first big test on Thursday night when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin is aired in the U.S.
A spokesman for the European Commission said it anticipated that the interview would provide a platform for Putin's, quote, twisted desire to reinstate the Russian Empire.
Asked if the Putin interview was not a justifiable opportunity to counter the quote one-sided media operating in Brussels, as Carlson has characterized it, the foreign affairs spokesman said Putin was killing people, bombing infrastructure and conducting a disinformation campaign that quote is directed against the European Union and is considered as a threat to our societies.
All of these countries in the EU have either themselves done or financed other countries doing.
Exactly that which he's saying Russia is doing.
Killing people, destroying civic society.
In fact, they're doing that right now in the Middle East.
The idea that it's illegal to interview Vladimir Putin is a sign of just how extreme those countries have gone.
And believe me, they want to do exactly the same thing in the US.
The problem is they have the First Amendment.
And they're working very hard to get around that.
Now, here is the interview.
with Vladimir Putin that Tucker Carlson released on his new website for the Tucker Carlson Network that he created.
And there were a lot of things here that were surprising, including the fact that Tucker spent, I would say, 10 to 15 minutes imploring Putin To release the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gosevich, who has been in prison on espionage charges for almost nine months now, maybe a little bit longer.
And he not only implored Putin to release him, but argued vehemently that the imprisonment was unjust, that it degraded Russia, that it was obviously keeping him as a hostage.
Can you imagine any American journalist confronting Joe Biden that way about Julian Assange?
So, they hadn't even seen this interview, they were condemning it without seeing it, claiming it was illegal, claiming that Tucker was a Putin sycophant just there to give him a platform to unchallenge, and Tucker spent 15 minutes of the time he had with the Russian leader arguing for the release of this 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter.
I don't just mean once asking him about it, but I mean persistently insisting that Putin should release him.
Let's show the beginning of the interview where Tucker explains what happened at the beginning of the interview because I think it's important to hear Tucker's explanation of what the context was.
So let's first go to the very first part of the interview where Tucker explains about the interview.
Shot February 6, 2024 at about 7 p.m.
in the building behind us, which is, of course, the Kremlin.
The interview, as you will see if you watch it, is primarily about the war in progress, the war in Ukraine, how it started, what's happening, and most presently, how it might end.
One note before you watch.
At the beginning of the interview, we asked the most obvious question, which is, why did you do this?
Did you feel a threat, an imminent physical threat?
And that's your justification.
And the answer we got shocked us.
Putin went on for a very long time, probably half an hour, about the history of Russia going back to the 8th century.
And honestly, we thought this was a filibustering technique and found it annoying and interrupted him several times.
And he responded he was annoyed.
By the interruption.
But we concluded in the end, for what it's worth, that it was not a filibustering technique.
There was no time limit on the interview.
We ended it after more than two hours.
Instead, what you're about to see seemed to us sincere, whether you agree with it or not.
Vladimir Putin believes that Russia has a historic claim to parts of Western Ukraine.
So our opinion would be to view it in that light, as a sincere expression of what he thinks.
And with that, here it is.
All right, so let's go ahead and start with, we picked out some excerpts we want to show you, we want to comment on.
We have a couple of transcript excerpts that we'll read for you so it's not just the video.
But obviously this is an extremely important interview.
The first interview by a Western journalist with the Russian leader since the West basically went to war with Russia through Ukraine.
Now the West is not really at war with Russia in any legal or constitutional sense.
But the reality is that what the United States is doing is a proxy war to weaken Russia.
That's what even its defenders now admit is its objective.
So here's the first excerpt that we found extremely illuminating.
We'll show it to you then have a few comments on it.
The second point is a very important one.
I want you as an American citizen and your viewers to hear about this as well.
The former Russian leadership assumed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and therefore, there were no longer any ideological dividing lines.
Russia even agreed voluntarily and proactively to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And believe that this would be understood by the so-called civilized West as an invitation for cooperation and association.
That is what Russia was expecting, both from the United States and the so-called collective West as a whole.
There were smart people, including in Germany, Egon Barr, a major politician of the Social Democratic Party, who insisted in his personal conversations with the Soviet leadership on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that a new security system should be established in Europe.
Help should be given to unify Germany, but a new system should be also established to include the United States, Canada, Russia and other Central European countries.
But NATO needs not to expand.
That's what he said.
If NATO expands, everything would be just the same as during the Cold War, only closer to Russia's borders.
That's all.
He was a wise old man, but no one listened to him.
In fact, he got angry once.
If, he said, you don't listen to me, I'm never setting my foot in Moscow once again.
Everything happened just as he had planned.
So that is a critical part of history that people have often emphasized, including in the West.
It's well documented that what he's describing there is exactly what happened.
When the Soviet Union disbanded, Russia said we're no longer going to be a communist country.
We're giving up communism.
That's what he said.
There's no ideological divide anymore between us and the West.
And the one thing Russia said
When they disbanded, when they agreed to the reunification of Germany, which, if you know Russian history, was an extraordinary concession for the Russians to make, given that Germany, a united Germany, had twice, during the 20th century, attacked Russia and killed tens of millions of its citizens, including, obviously, in the Second World War, where the Soviet Union played a major role and lost 50 million of its citizens in fighting off the Nazis, along with the United States, the British.
But the idea was, in the view of the Russians, and Putin was around for that then, he was close to Boris Yeltsin, and then became the Russian leader in 2000, not long after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, was, look, we're no longer a communist country.
We no longer have an ideological war with you.
We're a mercantilist country now.
We're a capitalist country, just like you.
So there's no reason for us to repeat the Cold War anymore.
And the one thing we want that you will agree to, and as you said, a lot of Germans were saying this as well, is that there's no reason for NATO to now expand up to the Russian border, because as he said, if the West expands eastward beyond Germany, which they promised they would not do, not one inch beyond Germany, not one inch to the east, and then immediately in the Bush administration they became obsessed
with expanding nato in fact the u.s ambassador to nato was a person named victoria newland in the bush administration and they were talking about expanding it through to ukraine and did expand it and then it expanded more uh the clint administration even talked about expanding it but it really happened in the bush administration through the obama administration
an expansion of nato up to the russian border including openly talking about ukraine was the red line that the russians always said would mean that the Cold War would be rejuvenated.
Why do you need the NATO alliance against us anymore?
We're not your enemy anymore.
We're not your ideological enemy.
We're not communists.
A capitalist society we are we want to be part of your institutions Your economic institutions even your military institutions that you're about to hear that It has been reported before and Putin confirms that he talked to Bill Clinton about the possibility that Russia could join NATO Because they had common enemies like in the Middle East and they were threatened by Muslim terrorism So we're going to show you that in a minute but
A lot of people believe, and obviously Putin is one of them, that when the West decided that it needed NATO, even though there was no more Soviet Union, and that it would now just replace the Soviet Union with Russia as the enemy, that was when the Russians realized that their hope for cooperation with the West would evaporate.
And instead they started getting besieged by a military alliance that had only previously existed as part of the Cold War to target the Soviet Union.
Alright, let's listen to the next segment.
I don't mean you personally when I say you.
Of course, I'm talking about the United States.
The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward.
But it happened five times.
There were five waves of expansion.
We tolerated all that.
We were trying to persuade them.
We were saying, please don't.
We are as bourgeois now as you are.
We are a market economy and there is no Communist Party power.
Let's negotiate.
Moreover, I have also said this publicly before.
There was a moment when a certain rift started growing between us.
Before that, Yeltsin came to the United States, remember?
He spoke in Congress and said the good words, God bless America, everything he said were signals, let us in.
Remember the developments in Yugoslavia before the Yeltsin was lavished with praise?
As soon as the developments in Yugoslavia started, he raised his voice in support of Serbs, and we couldn't but raise our voices for Serbs in their defense.
I understand that there were complex processes underway there.
I do.
But Russia could not help raising its voice in support of Serbs, because Serbs are also a special and close to us nation, with orthodox culture and so on.
It's a nation that has suffered so much for generations.
Well, regardless, what is important is that Yeltsin expressed his support.
What did the United States do?
In violation of an international law and the UN Charter, it started bombing Belgrade.
It was the United States that let the genie out of the bottle.
Moreover, when Russia protested and expressed its resentment, what was said, the UN Charter and international law have become obsolete.
Now everyone invokes international law, but at that time they started saying that everything was outdated, everything had to be changed.
Indeed, some things need to be changed, as the balance of power has changed, it's true, but not in this manner.
Yeltsin was immediately dragged through the mud, accused of alcoholism, of understanding nothing, of knowing nothing.
He understood everything, I assure you.
Well, I became president in 2000, I thought, okay, the Yugoslav issue is over, but we should try to restore relations.
Let's reopen the door that Russia had tried to go through.
And moreover, I said it publicly, I can't reiterate.
At a meeting here in the Kremlin with the outgoing President Bill Clinton, right here, in the next room, I said to him, I asked him, Bill, do you think if Russia asked to join NATO, do you think it would happen?
Suddenly, he said, you know, it's interesting, I think so.
But in the evening, when we met for dinner, he said, you know, I've talked to my team, no, no, it's not possible now.
You can ask him, I think he will watch our interview, he'll confirm it.
I wouldn't.
I mean, that history is also well known that Boris Yeltsin was beloved by the Americans.
He was celebrated on Time Magazine when he was elected as having been elected with the help of American political operatives.
We interfered in Russia's election because we wanted Boris Yeltsin to win.
He came to Congress.
He was given a standing ovation.
Russia was considered an ally of the United States.
And during the Clinton administration, when they began bombing The longtime historical and religious ally of Russia, the Serbs in Belgrade, the Russians objected.
And what also happened besides the United States basically saying, oh, these international law concepts about not invading other countries, not bombing other countries unless they attack you, these are all outdated.
We don't believe in these rules anymore.
Only now invoke them when it suits them.
What also happened was the United States and the West took the position that Kosovo, which had always been part of Serbia as part of Yugoslavia, ought to be separated from Serbia and declared an independent state because the people of Kosovo had a different culture and a different language and didn't want to be part of Serbia.
And Putin warned at the time, publicly, That this was an extremely dangerous precedent because all throughout Europe, there are all sorts of states that have been cobbled together of people with different languages and different histories and allegiances and cultures.
Obviously, that was true in Georgia, where those two provinces that broke away had far more allegiance to Russia than to the state of Georgia.
They were Russian speaking.
They wanted Russian passports.
It's true in even places like Belgium, where half the country speaks one language, half the country speaks the other.
It is true in Ukraine, obviously, which had been in a civil war since the U.S.
aided coup, as he'll explain in 2014, when the part of eastern Ukraine that speaks Russian, that identifies as Russian, that was always culturally Russian, that is far closer to Moscow than it is to Kiev, especially once there was a coup, I'm describing Ukraine.
I might have said something else, but I'm talking about Ukraine where the western part of Ukraine is filled with Russian-speaking nationals who are religiously and historically and culturally far closer to Russia than they are to Ukraine, which is why there's been a civil war
For eight years, ever since that coup in 2014, because the people in those Russian-speaking provinces in the western part of Ukraine that Russia now, in the eastern part of Ukraine that Russia now controls and occupies, feels a different sentiment about Kiev, just like the people of Kosovo didn't want to be part of Serbia.
And Putin said, that was the precedent you set, and that's the precedent we're now using, both in Georgia and in Ukraine, the one that separated Kosovo from Serbia.
And that was an example where NATO, a defensive alliance, started bombing Yugoslavia, started bombing Serbia, even though obviously Serbia never had any posed any threat at all to NATO or to the West.
And that also created these fault lines where the Russians were put on one side and the West on the other.
All right, let's listen to the next segment.
It was a colossal mistake.
Surely, it was political leadership's miscalculation.
They should have seen what it would evolve into.
So, in 2008, the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine.
In 2014, there was a coup, they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup.
They created a threat to Crimea, which we had to take under our protection.
They launched a war in Donbass in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians.
This is when it all started.
There's a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above.
They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one.
When they failed, they started to prepare the next one.
All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO's doors.
How could we not express concern over what was happening?
From our side this would have been a culpable negligence.
That's what it would have been.
It's just that the US political leadership pushed us to the line we could not cross, because doing so could have ruined Russia itself.
Besides, we could not leave our brothers in faith, in fact, a part of Russian people in the face of this war machine.
What was the, so that was eight years before the current conflict started.
So what was the trigger?
Probably the central propagandistic lie of the United States and the West about this war in Ukraine has been that this war began in February of 2022 when the Russians sent a large number of soldiers into Ukraine.
The reality is there has been a war in Ukraine since 2014.
A war between the eastern provinces right over the Russian border that are Russian-speaking and Russian-allied and the government in Kiev that was installed with the help of the United States.
We've shown you the videos of John McCain and Chris Murphy and others going over and saying, we support what you're doing and trying to remove the elected president before the constitutional end of his term in 2015.
And you've all heard the audio of Victoria Nuland speaking to the ambassador, the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine, planning who the government would be instead.
And there has been a civil war right over the other side of the Russian border involving citizens of Ukraine who feel an allegiance to Russia and who Russia feels an allegiance to as well for deep historical and linguistic and cultural and religious reasons.
And that war has been Going for a long time.
And that has been going on since 2014.
And then you had all kinds of US provocations of continuing to talk about opening Ukraine's NATO to Ukraine, which would put NATO right on the other side of that border.
Attacking and oppressing the people of Eastern Ukraine?
That is the conflict.
If you want to actually understand the conflict, instead of US government and media propaganda about the conflict, this is the context that you have to understand from the Russian perspective.
Of course they're going to feel threatened when, right on the most sensitive part of their border, there is a US-installed government bombing people who consider themselves Russian.
And that's a threat to their security and it's a threat to what they believe their obligation is.
But whatever else is true, the war did not start in 2022.
It escalated in 2022.
It began in 2014 with the overthrow of the constitutionally elected government, the annexation of Crimea and the decision by the government in Kyiv to start attacking the people of eastern Ukraine and to align themselves with neo-Nazi groups of the kind that now compose the largest and most devoted segment of the Ukrainian fighting force.
With pictures of Nazi collaborators and SS collaborators on their wall, he talks about how the Canadian parliament had Zelensky there and Justin Trudeau and they stood and gave a standing ovation to a Ukrainian Canadian hero of World War II who fought against Russia and it turned out he was a member of the SS, he talks about how the Canadian parliament had Zelensky there and Justin Trudeau and they stood and gave a standing All right, let's show the next clip.
Alright, let's show the next clip.
Oh, I'm afraid, I'm afraid.
Please don't.
What is there to talk about?
Do you think NATO is worried about this becoming a global war or a nuclear conflict?
At least that's what they're talking about.
And they're trying to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat.
This is an obvious fact.
And thinking people, not philistines, but thinking people, analysts, those who are engaged in real politics, just smart people, understand perfectly well that this is a fake.
They're trying to fuel the Russian threat.
The threat I think you're referring to is a Russian invasion of Poland, Latvia, expansionist behavior.
Can you imagine a scenario where you sent Russian troops to Poland?
Only in one case: if Poland attacks Russia.
Why?
Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else.
Why would we do that?
We simply don't have any interest.
It's just threat-mongering.
Well, the argument, I know you know this, is that, well, he invaded Ukraine, he has territorial aims across the continent, and you're saying unequivocally you don't.
It is absolutely out of the question.
You just don't have to be any kind of analyst.
It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war.
And a global war will bring all humanity to the brink of destruction.
It's obvious.
There are, certainly, means of deterrence.
They have been scaring everyone.
All right, so take that what it's worth.
That's Putin absolutely denying what the U.S.
and its media have been claiming, and the West has been claiming for two years now, that his real intention is to go conquer all of NATO, to start a world war, to go and invade Poland, to go and invade Latvia, to go and invade, I guess, Hungary, and then Germany and France, knowing that that would provoke a world war between nuclear powers.
And he's saying, that's obviously insane.
Why would I ever do that?
You can believe the U.S.
media about what they claim is that he's a Nazi figure, and that if we don't stop him in Ukraine, we're going to have to fight him in Poland.
Or you can listen to what he said about what his true intentions are and decide what you believe there.
That's the benefit of this interview, is that you don't just get to hear about Putin, you get to hear from him.
Alright, we're going to just, for a couple of these last excerpts, just read the transcript.
Here is Putin explaining an important part of history about what happened with Yanukovych, which was the 2014 coup.
So here's what he says.
Quote, the US told us calm Yanukovych down and we will calm the opposition.
Let the situation unfold in the scenario of a political settlement.
We said, all right, we agreed.
Let's do it this way.
As the Americans requested, Yanukovych did use neither the armed forces nor the police Yet the armed opposition committed a coup in Kiev.
What is that supposed to mean?
Who do you think you are?
I wanted to ask the U.S.
leadership.
And then Tucker said, they did that with the backing of whom?
And Putin said, with the backing of the CIA, of course.
The organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand, we should thank God they didn't let you in.
Now, there were a few instances where Putin used information that he obviously had about Tucker.
I mean, it's not like a dossier, but it has private information.
It's well known that Tucker actually did apply to the CIA at the start of his career.
His father was a journalist with the US.
The U.S.
Press Office, I believe, the part of the government that does information for Europe and the like, and Tucker wanted to go join the CIA and he applied and got rejected.
And so when Tucker said, who is it that actually engineered the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, he said, oh, it was the CIA, that organization that you wanted to join and they didn't let you in.
And we should be thankful that they didn't.
So he did that a couple of times with Tucker, reminding him of his past and of his history to sort of put him in check.
But it's an interesting part of history that the U.S.
government was basically trying to say, we don't want a coup of Yanukovych.
Tell Yanukovych to be calm.
We'll tell the opposition to be calm.
But it was the CIA that undercut that narrative and instead engineered the coup in 2014.
All right, here's the next excerpt.
Here is Putin saying the following, quote, "When I was in the U.S. at the invitation of Bush senior, it is even easier to learn from someone I'm going to tell you about.
I was told, it was very interesting, I said, quote, "Just imagine if we could settle such a global strategic security challenge together.
The world will change.
We'll probably have disputes, probably economic and even political ones, but we could drastically change the situation in the world.
And he, Bush Senior, said yes and asked, are you serious?
And I said, of course, we need to think about it.
I said, go ahead, please.
Then Secretary of Defense Gates, former director of CIA and Secretary of State Rice came in here in this cabinet right here at this table.
They sat on this table, me, the foreign minister, the Russian defense minister on that side.
And they said to me, yes, we have thought about it.
We agree.
I said, thank God.
Great.
But with some exceptions.
And then Tucker asked this question.
So twice now you've described US presidents making decisions and then being undercut by their agency heads.
So it sounds like you're describing a system, meaning the one in the United States, that's not run by the people who are elected and you're telling.
And Putin said, that's right, that's right.
And Putin has been dealing with the American government since 2000.
I think it's very important to note as well.
That if you go back and look at what American presidents have said about Putin, Bill Clinton said he's a very calculating and rational actor who can be trusted.
George Bush said he met with Putin.
I looked the man in the eyes and into his soul and I saw a good person.
Obama constantly talked about the ridiculousness of treating Russia like an enemy and said how important it was that the U.S.
and Russia partner on common goals.
Trump, of course, wanted to have peace with Russia.
He ran on that platform and was called a Russian agent for it.
And then the Biden administration gets in after feeding the Democrats have been on six years of anti-Russian hatred because they blamed Putin for the 2016 election.
They still think Hillary was the rightful winner and they only want loss because of Putin.
And now suddenly Putin is the Nazi, Putin is Hitler, Putin is this grave threat that nobody can trust, the epitome of evil, everything that the government never said about Putin, the opposite of what they said about him for 20 years.
They turned on a dime.
When it suited their interest and got the entire media to think that Vladimir Putin was Hitler, when every American president prior to him was saying he was nothing of the kind.
Think about how potent propaganda is that they can just rewrite history in an instant and get huge numbers of Americans to believe them.
And what Putin is saying there is like, look, I've dealt with American presidents and they don't really have the power.
They say they want to do things, but then the agencies, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department say, you're not going to do that.
And they don't.
There's a permanent deep state that does not allow the elected president to do what they want.
So here's the next passage.
Tucker says, who blew up Nord Stream?
And Putin says, you for sure.
And Tucker said, well, I was busy that day.
I don't think I blew up Nord Stream.
Thank you, though.
And Putin said, you personally may have an alibi, but the CIA has no such alibi.
And Tucker says, did you have evidence that NATO or the CIA did it?
I don't know why we don't have Putin's response.
But what Putin basically says is, we haven't released evidence.
So you can take that for what it's worth.
He's asserting it was the CIA who blew up Nord Stream 2.
Of course, that was Seymour Hersh's reporting.
And when pressed on what the evidence is, he said, there's things we can't release.
So take that with a grain of salt, but it's certainly consistent with Seymour Hersh's reporting.
And at this point, who do you think blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?
Who got damaged by that?
The Germans and the Russians?
Do you think the Russians blew up their own pipeline?
And if it was the Ukrainians, do you think they would have done it without the Americans?
Their main patron and sponsor that they don't do anything without?
There were a lot of other very interesting parts of this interview, including Putin describing how close he and Zelensky were, how close he and the Ukrainians were to a peace agreement.
He said that was why they pulled out of Kiev.
And then the Americans and the British came in and put a stop to that peace deal, which has also been reported in many cases, including by the former Israeli president, Naftali Bennett, and many others.
And he really talks a lot about the US-Russia relationship.
And as I said, Tucker devoted the last 10 to 15 minutes of the interview confronting Putin about the imprisonment of this Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gassovich, who's imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage.
And he basically appealed to Putin in multiple ways.
Imploring him to release him, saying he's a 32-year-old kid, no one thinks he's actually a spy, even if he violated some of your laws, he's not somebody who belongs in a Russian prison, he should be allowed to come home, why won't you let him come home?
Vehemently arguing with Putin's justification for keeping him in prison, saying that we all know that he's just a hostage for you to get Russians back.
Tucker confronted Putin in a way that no American journalist who would ever have the chance to confronts Joe Biden.
Imagine an American journalist going to interview with Joe Biden and spending 10 or 15 minutes of the interview demanding that Jelena Sanjh be released.
It's inconceivable.
So they were all mocking Tucker beforehand as some kind of Russian asset, and I think he did more to extract meaningful information And I don't suggest you should believe everything Putin says.
You should not.
He's the president of a country involved in a war.
Every country in war emits propaganda.
You should treat those claims with skepticism.
Want to see evidence for it.
But there's a lot of what he said that is well substantiated that we've talked about before here that we've reported.
And of course it all gets called Russian disinformation because it's adversarial to the U.S.
government.
So I really recommend that you watch this interview if for no other reason than clearly Power senators in the West do not want you to see it to the point that they're thinking about making it criminal and illegal.
But if you're going to think about whether you support a war against a foreign country, I think it's very important to hear from the leader of that country, explain the perspective that is much different than the one you're going to get if you're a citizen of the West, where they tried to ban RT, they tried to ban Sputnik, and they even tried to make interviews with Vladimir Putin criminal.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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