Ben Shapiro’s Uniparty Foreign Policy Aligns With Biden WH. Child Porn Scandal Rocks Leading Dem Streamer—What Is This Sub-Culture? w/ the Vanguard
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the self-identified conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, on his quite popular Daily Wire show, delivered what he seemed to conceive of as his state of U.S.
foreign policy address.
It was quite notable because despite the common claim that Shapiro is some sort of far-right extremist, the vast, vast majority of Democrats in Congress, and most of all the Biden White House, would agree with literally every word he uttered, at least in this address.
Indeed, Shapiro did not even pretend to express any disagreements with Joe Biden's signature foreign policies, and that's because he has no disagreements with it.
His only criticism of Biden was about his rhetorical skills, that he lamented that the president is no longer with the capability to convince Americans of why Biden and Ben Shapiro are right to support all of these wars all over the globe.
Shapiro not only defended the past wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, but also Biden's current foreign policy of financing and arming Ukraine's war with Russia, Biden's policy of arming and financing Israel's war in Gaza, Biden's policy of bombing Iran-related targets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
And Biden's policy of confronting China by, among other things, militarily encircling that country and being the first ever president in history to explicitly threaten China with war over Taiwan.
All of this is so worth examining not because Ben Shapiro himself matters, although he does, he carries a lot of influence in Republican politics, but because, as always, the central truths governing Washington are also the most suppressed ones.
The establishment links of the Democratic and Republican parties, despite their claims that they agree on nothing, are actually in full agreement Not only on every important individual foreign policy question, but on the overall foreign policy vision and mindset that governs the uniparty system of endless war.
And Ben Shapiro is a great advocate of that worldview, from Ukraine to Israel and everything in between.
Hillary Clinton sounds exactly like Nikki Haley.
Nancy Pelosi sounds exactly like Marco Rubio.
Joe Biden, meaning those who control the brand Joe Biden, sounds exactly like Mitch McConnell.
And while Ben Shapiro pays a little bit of lip service to the idea that the so-called left in the United States provides opposition to this establishment foreign policy outlook, he correctly recognizes that at least when it comes to power centers in Washington, the only real opposition to this pro-war, endless war mindset of constant intervention comes not from the left in Washington, but from the populist right.
And that is why increasingly both the Democratic and Republican establishments are being increasingly open about their unity and their overarching desire to keep establishment dogma, especially on foreign policy, steadily in place no matter what.
Then, many politically engaged young Americans, especially Democrats and Liberals, do not get their news any longer from corporate newspapers or even cable news.
Instead, there is a sad and depressing but increasingly influential subculture of online political streamers whom they follow like cult leaders.
Mostly people who, prior to the emergence of Donald Trump, built online streaming audiences by talking about and playing video games all day, but now spend literally 7 or 8 or even 10 hours every single day streaming online while creating communities that, at their core, are organized around nothing more interesting or less but all than doing everything possible to elect candidates of the Democratic Party.
In this space of left, liberal, largely Gen Z, and young millennial followers, there are three primary political commentators who are streamers.
Hasan Piker, the nephew of the Young Turks founder and Democratic presidential candidate, Cenk Aygar.
The streamer Destiny, whom I debated several weeks ago on this channel about January 6th and the insurrection.
And then a person named Ian Kuczynski, who is known better by his online streaming name Vosh.
Several weeks ago, Vash, who just a couple of months ago was meeting and organizing with leading Democratic politicians such as Congressman Ro Khanna of California, became engulfed in a tawdry and humiliating scandal when, during one of his endless daily streams, he accidentally opened an archive filled with his pornography, and among he accidentally opened an archive filled with his pornography, and among his downloaded files were animated images of child
This dark and depressing episode has been covered in many places, and I really don't intend to delve into the details of it, or even the substance of the story.
Those interested can find many online reports about it elsewhere, but what I do think is very worth examining is this online left liberal streaming subculture out of which all of this emerges.
While most journalists have very little idea who the people are who dominate these spaces, they are not insignificant, Indeed, they command often larger audiences than many of the far more known media brands that have no idea who they are.
Yet these communities are shaped and defined by so many of the worst social pathologies that are causing so much mental health struggles and other forms of dysfunction for younger people in the West and the United States, largely based on endless online addiction.
And the unhealthy use of parasocial relationships and leaders in communities in lieu of actual, genuine, real-life ones.
We'll examine this subculture and talk to the host of one of my favorite left-wing YouTube political programs for the young online left.
The show is called The Vanguard.
It's co-hosted by two very smart and funny young leftists, and one of them, Gavin Charles, will join us tonight to talk about this scamble and, more importantly, the broader streaming communities and the issues that it raises from which all of this emerged.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Many times on this program, I have covered the central media myth that the reason the United States is such a vibrant, free democracy is because we have these two political parties who have completely, free democracy is because we have these two political parties who have completely, radically different They can barely agree on anything.
This is how fundamentally and extreme their divergences are on how they see the world about pretty much every issue of substance.
And that's why you should be so grateful That we have the political system that we do because every two years or four years, you get to go to the ballot and the box and choose between these two parties and decide which of their radically different worldviews will end up emerging dominant.
Now, the reason why I say that is such a myth is not because there are no differences between the parties.
Obviously on cultural issues such as abortion and gun control and some marginal LGBT issues, there are serious differences and I don't mean to downplay those issues.
Those can be important to a lot of people, although I seriously call into question how much the outcome of elections actually ends up affecting Those issues, if you look at every election over the last, say, 30 years, the effect on those issues has been pretty marginal.
I guess the best case you could make is that it affects the Supreme Court, which can affect those issues.
And those are certainly important issues.
But they don't really go to the way in which political and military and economic power is structured or dispersed in the United States.
That is something that really resides in the foreign policy and the economic policy of the United States, and particularly when it comes to foreign policy.
How we view the role of the United States in the world, how we view the role of our military, how we view the role and our obligation or our right to go around the world, interfering in other countries, dropping bombs on other countries, fueling and financing wars all over the globe.
Increasingly, the two political parties, the establishment wings at least of the two political parties, are not only overwhelmingly aligned, but almost completely indistinguishable.
And we have spent a lot of time documenting that and reporting on that in the show, analyzing why on the major foreign policy questions that shaped the Biden administration.
And anyone can easily identify what those are.
The question of whether the United States should be financing and fueling the Ukrainian war against Russia in Ukraine, whether the United States should be financing and arming Israel's war in Gaza, whether the United States should be deploying its soldiers and its military resources as it's doing all throughout the Middle East and engaging in actual combat by dropping bombs on multiple countries, including Yemen and Iraq and Syria.
In the name of keeping sea lanes safe or combating Iranian-backed militia or protecting Israel from regional escalation?
And on the question of whether the United States should try and have a diplomatic and constructive competition with China or view China as an enemy by doing things like militarily encircling it with military bases all throughout the Pacific and deploying nuclear-armed submarines in the region or threatening China with war over Taiwan.
On all of those questions, the key foreign policy questions that have shaped the Biden administration and will continue to shape the next administration as well, there is virtually no disagreement of any kind.
Between the views of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party.
And that's why all the people I identified at the start sound alike.
Now, one way to really understand this is to listen to this foreign policy address that Ben Shapiro decided to craft and share on his program on Daily Wire.
And I say this because I want to give Ben Shapiro the credit that he deserves.
He has built a pretty significant and large audience of not just Republican voters, but conservatives who listened to him.
And for a long time, Ben Shapiro was depicted in corporate media and mainstream media as being this far right extremist, as being somebody so far outside of the acceptable range of political ideology and opinion that he really shouldn't even be deemed someone who can be recognized or heard in mainstream political as being somebody so far outside of the acceptable range of And in fact, it's rare to hear him on places like CNN or The New York Times editorial page, despite the influence that he wields, but that influence is real.
And he does represent a faction of American political life that I consider to be still quite significant, which is a sort of traditional pro-war, pro-interventionist, aggressive foreign policy that calls on the United States to project military force all throughout the world to dominate the world through military force.
He was an advocate of all the war on terror policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons from the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan to everything like Guantanamo and torture chambers.
And he has continued that throughout the next 15 years.
He is one of those people in public life like Lindsey Graham or Nikki Haley, that whole faction, Marco Rubio, who never sees a war that they do anything but cheer for and want to promote.
And as it happens, that view, despite often being depicted when it comes out of Ben Shapiro's mouth as being extremist, is in fact The dominant foreign policy vision in the United States and that is why in this foreign policy address the key passages of which we are about to show you.
You will see that everything Ben Shapiro believes, I don't mean every last detail, but I mean the fundamental conceptual vision that he believes in as a traditional Republican pro-war neocon is actual policy in Washington.
He may disagree about how it's sold, he may disagree about some of the details on the margins, but about the fundamental policy itself he agrees with Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell and
Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton and Nikki Haley, this entire blob that continues to ensure that no matter who you go and vote for, no matter who wins the election, unless the populist right does, there will be no resistance or restraint or dissent to most of these key foreign policy positions.
Let's listen to a little bit of this to see what it is that I mean.
Damn, but Russia has always been an empire since the time of Muscovy.
And now you are watching as Vladimir Putin tries to expand the boundaries of what he sees as his new empire.
So this is one of the key questions that is facing the United States is how do we see Russia?
Do we see Russia the way Barack Obama for eight years suggested that we should and that Donald Trump for the next four years suggested that we should?
They were very similar on this question.
Which was, as a country with whom we have some differences but also a great deal of grounds for agreement, we have a lot of common policies, a lot of common enemies, and therefore Russia is a country with whom we can partner and work even though we might have some differences.
That's one way to look at it.
Or do we see them the way we saw them in the Cold War?
Even though they're a tiny fraction of what they were in the Cold War when they were the Soviet Union dominating all of Eastern Europe.
When they had the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact and were the great rival of the United States for 50 years until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Do we continue to see them as this grave existential threat?
That is an endangerment and a threat and a menace to all things decent in American political life.
That became the dominant foreign policy view of the Democratic Party in 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran on the accusation that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russian government and this kind of anti-Russian hatred began becoming the dominant ideology of Democratic Party politics.
But it's also Long has been and continues to be a policy view of the establishment wing of the Republican Party as well.
John McCain and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham were constantly accusing Barack Obama of being soft on Putin, of being unwilling to confront Putin, because Obama, to his credit, He took the position that there is no reason why we should risk confrontation with Russia over countries like Syria or Ukraine in which we have no vital interest.
So there was always this longstanding Republican animosity toward Russia in the establishment wing of the Republican Party, the part of the Republican Party that Donald Trump ran against and defeated and vanquished in 2016, although it really hasn't gone anywhere.
And so you have this longstanding Republican animosity toward Russia.
Now perfectly aligned with this fixation in Democratic Party politics against Russia as well, that is aligning and uniting in this view that confronting Russia, going to war with Russia, consider Russia our grave enemy, a grave threat to all things decent in American political life, therefore we have to fund the war in Ukraine until the very end.
This is something that not only Joe Biden thinks and that Hillary Clinton thinks and Nancy Pelosi thinks, but also something Ben Shapiro things listen to him explain in his own words the fact that he believes this self compared himself to Peter the Great just a couple of years ago after the invasion of Ukraine When you watch the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, where the first 35 minutes is dedicated to his idea of Russian claims to Ukraine, in which he actually sort of makes the claim that Russia has claims to Poland and Hungary as well.
When he says that sort of stuff, we ought to take that seriously.
He's actually spelling out what he actively thinks.
Now there are a bunch of people on the left who think that Vladimir Putin is doing this because he is offended.
by the muscularity of the West.
That if only the West had been more conciliatory toward Vladimir Putin, then Russia would not, in fact, be an adversarial force.
That everything that Vladimir Putin does is blowback to the West.
That is the theory of people on the left who are very much vacillating with regard to what Vladimir Putin is trying to do.
And then there is a theory that Russia is actually a bulwark against secular leftism.
Okay, so there's Ben Shapiro articulating this view that Russia is this expansionist country that it wants territorial conquest, that it's aimed at Western Europe.
Russia has been fighting for two years just to hold on to 20% of Eastern Ukraine.
That was always Barack Obama's argument was Russia is not the country that it once was.
It's a regional power at best that has an economy that's smaller than Italy's.
Russia is not the capability.
Russia is not the Soviet Union from the 1960s and 1970s to go marching through all of Eastern Europe and then into Western Europe.
This is insane fantasy.
This is fear-mongering of the kind that tries to convince Americans that Russia is knocking on our door and that we have to continue to spend a trillion dollars a year on our military, that we have to continue to support endless war in Ukraine to try and undermine Russia.
This is fantasy, but it's bipartisan dogma and orthodoxy.
That Ben Shapiro, this quote-unquote far-right extremist, supports because this was once confined to the establishment wing of the Republican Party and now it is bipartisan, uniparty doctrine.
So you can go and vote for a candidate like Nikki Haley or any of the other candidates that were running against Donald Trump and you would get this foreign policy just like you will get it if you vote for Joe Biden.
Now here is Ben Shapiro trying to pay lip service to the fact that somehow there's parts of the American left that disagree with him on Russia.
It's a very difficult case to make given that every single member of the Democratic Party, both in the Senate and the House, every last one of them, Voted yes on funding the war in Ukraine and continue to support that policy of funding the war in Ukraine and viewing Russia the same way Ben Shapiro does.
There's not one member of the Democratic Party who is questioning that or who dissents from it.
Of course there are some leftists who have no power in Washington who might.
But Ben Shapiro wants to pretend that he has both opponents on the left and right and in reality the only real resistance to this worldview comes from the Trump-led populist right.
That's where all the no votes came.
on voting to whether to fund the war in Ukraine.
And that is where the resistance to sending another $60 billion exclusively come from.
Ben Shapiro's primary opposition in foreign policy is not Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
It is people like Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump and Jim Jordan and the entire Republican House caucus, the part of it that is blocking sending $60 billion to Ukraine.
Let's hear the rest.
That Russia actively is is a highly religious country that is that is very anti much of the left-wing ideology with regard to say gender and sex and sexuality that the West has fallen for.
And so they've built up in their minds a lot of people the idea that because Russians are socially conservative as a general matter, which they are, that this is somehow what Vladimir Putin represents, as opposed to he has a population that is socially conservative and also that is not his actual ambition.
His actual ambition is not in defense of, say, social conservatism.
His ambition is in defense of Russian territorial ambition.
What?
This is... Okay.
We have covered sufficiently on this show the debunking of this claim that Russia has these grand territorial ambitions of conquest.
What have they conquered?
We have covered many times the reason why they went into Ukraine, the reason they want a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine against expansion of NATO all the way up to their border.
But even if you want to see their two-year effort to hold on to a few provinces in eastern Ukraine as expansionists, the idea that they are some big, powerful country that has the capability Let alone the intention to continue to expand westward and threaten our allies in Europe or the United States is not even a viable argument.
It's not even a reasonable debate.
And yet this view that Ben Shapiro has of Russia That Vladimir Putin is this traditionalist Russian leader and the footsteps of Catherine the Great and all these conquests, these imperialists that conquered all these other countries is exactly the view that Washington on a bipartisan basis wants to sell you to ensure that this war in Ukraine continues.
It's a category error, in other words, for many people on the right.
Many people on the right have made that same category error, for example, with Sharia law countries in the Islamic world.
Now here's where we get to the real point.
The reason people like Ben Shapiro and Bill Kristol and David Frum, the kind of traditional neocons as they've always been called, at least for the last 20 years since I've been writing about politics, care so much about convincing Americans to adopt a militaristic and expansionist mindset by trying to convince them that all of these countries, Iran and China and Russia,
Have to be militarily confronted, never by them going to fight, but the reason we have to go fight the war in Iraq, as he's about to tell you, the reason we have to stay involved in the Middle East, is because there's a threat of radical Islam backed by Iran.
It's always a coincidence that somehow the most devoted enemies of Israel Are also in this worldview coinciding perfectly with the enemies of the United States so that our foreign policy has to be constructed in order to constantly fight the same enemies that Israel all the way on the other side of the world has.
And so what Ben Shapiro is doing here is what Washington does all the time.
It's the core of the Biden foreign policy, which is linking the threat of Russia to the threat in the Middle East to basically say we have to finance and fund and arm Ukraine for the same reason we have to finance and fund and arm Israel.
We have to keep troops and bases spread all throughout Eastern and Western Europe as a guard against Russia to fight Russia for the same reason that we have to keep troops, again, not troops, American troops from Ben Shapiro's family or Ben Shapiro himself, but just other people who We have to risk their lives to keep them in Eastern and Western Europe and also fighting in the Middle East because we should look at both Russia and Iran as grave threats to the American way of life.
Because those countries are quote-unquote socially conservative, that somehow those countries have a commonality with say American conservatism, American Christian conservatism.
And the answer there is no, they really don't.
Their ambitions are not the same as your ambitions.
And what this really reveals is a schism in the United States broadly written, and in the West broadly written, Europe as well.
A schism about whether the West has any sense of internal solidity.
What are the values of the West?
Because if Putin is able to split the West on the basis of perceived values or perceived anti-Westernism...
That says there are a lot of people in the West who really don't like the West very much, on the one hand, and a lot of people in the West who believe that the greater threat to the United States might be their neighbors who disagree with them about social politics, as opposed to people like Vladimir Putin.
Not that Vladimir Putin is a direct threat to people in the United States, like right this instant, but he's a very large indirect threat to people in the United States because geopolitics actually matters.
When you cut off shipping routes, when you destroy the sources of international trade, When you threaten American allies, these are things that actually will matter to American citizens writ large.
That the history of the United States since World War II is if you can split the American public, you can win.
And it doesn't matter how weak you are.
All you have to do is outlast.
Outlasting is the strategy.
So what Ben Shapiro, what he's trying to say there is that we have to remain united behind our government.
And constantly cheer for all of its wars and for it to fight its wars without end until it wins.
In Ukraine against Russia, in the Middle East against Iran, in the Pacific against China.
And what we can't do is argue amongst ourselves.
We cannot be divided.
We can't be concerned about our own government and the threat that it poses.
We can't think that the greatest threat comes from the NSA and the FBI and the CIA.
Or the federal government?
That's what Vladimir Putin wants us to do.
He wants to divide us as Ben Shapiro.
What we have to do is remain united, united behind our president.
Whether it's Joe Biden or Nikki Haley or whoever believes in this bipartisan foreign policy that Ben Shapiro is advocating here.
What he's trying to do, he understands that a lot of conservatives have turned against this foreign policy.
And he is desperate to try and lure them back in, to seduce them back in to the fold of wanting to support endless war to finance all of America's allies, finance the war of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine, finance the war of Israel and the wars of Israel, based on this same mentality that both the Democratic and that part of the Republican Party are trying to sell Americans, that all of our threats are external,
And that even though nobody is attacking the United States, even though nobody can attack the United States, for some reason we're supposed to think that the true threat to our freedom comes not from these agencies that interfere in our politics and spy on us and increasingly take away our liberties or global institutions that do the same.
We're supposed to focus on these foreign countries that for some reason are a threat to us.
Russia, Hamas, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, all these countries in the Middle East.
So that, and you're about to hear him say, what's important is that we don't get tired of funding these wars.
We have to fund these wars to the very end, year after year after year after year.
Otherwise, Putin wins.
In Vietnam, it was true of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It was true of Sharia law Iranian forces in Iraq.
If you can outlast the United States, you will win.
And the time for outlasting is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
So it used to be that in order to outlast the American public, you would have to wait a decade.
And now, because of the velocity of social media, And because of the ability of people to see these arguments in real time and split from each other and polarize very quickly, what you're seeing is that the West is sapped of its will incredibly quickly on nearly every conflict.
When there is a conflict with true evil, you see western powers immediately leap to fight the evil and then pretty quickly start to doubt themselves and figure okay i think we're done here we need to move on with our lives now this would be a time when political leadership actually matter but there's a complete dearth of political leadership on both sides of the political aisle okay now he knows he's defending joe biden's foreign policy and hillary clinton's foreign policy They also want to keep funding the war in Ukraine.
They don't want to get tired of the war.
They're not tired of the war in Ukraine.
They're not tired of funding the war in Israel.
They're not tired of keeping troops in the Middle East and bombing Yemen.
They all want to continue to do that.
And Ben Shapiro is on board with all of that.
Now, that's going to confuse his conservative viewers.
They're going to think to themselves, wait a minute.
It sounds like you support all of Joe Biden's foreign policy, so this is where he's going to explain, oh why, oh no, he's a kind of iconoclast.
Ben Shapiro does not like or trust the Leadership of either party in Washington, even though he just got done for four minutes or five minutes defending and affirming their core worldview and their core agenda when it comes to what they want the United States to do in the world, how they want the United States to keep spending and borrowing billions and billions and billions of dollars in pursuit of endless war.
He has a very trivial and nitpicky and rhetorical difference that he's going to try and pretend is some Grand difference so that he can continue to posture as some kind of anti-establishment figure, even though his ideology is dominant in Washington and will continue to be, even if, probably especially if, Joe Biden is reelected.
On these matters, it has formed a de facto coalition with China and Iran at this point.
And that de facto coalition threatens America's allies all around the world and threatens freedom of the seas, for example, everywhere from the Taiwan Strait to the Straits of Malacca to the Red Sea.
So we showed you four minutes of that.
You can watch all 15 minutes of it, and I promise you will not hear a single word that Joe Biden would object to.
Again, Joe Biden meaning the brand Joe Biden that Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton would object to, let alone people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
This is who is representative of that worldview and who are trying to lure in conservatives back into supporting this ideology knowing that there is an increasingly growing strain on the American right as he says that it is tired of these wars and no longer wants to be part of them.
Here is Hillary Clinton, rather Nancy Pelosi, excuse the confusion, I'm sure you understand, who was just interviewed about Joe Biden's ongoing support for Israel and its war in Gaza, even as rhetorically he claims that there are certain parts of what Israel is doing that is bothering him.
And yet, The policy of Joe Biden is exactly what Ben Shapiro wants it to be, which is continue to arm and fund Israel without end.
Nancy Pelosi is not part of that war at all.
She wants to stay united behind Joe Biden's policy in Israel, just like Ben Shapiro wants to do.
Here is Nancy Pelosi sounding exactly like Ben Shapiro when it comes to this support.
The White House has escalated its rhetoric pretty sharply last week.
Mr. Biden said Israel's conduct of the war was over the top.
There are a lot of innocent people who are starving.
He said there are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it's got to stop.
Can Mr. Biden make it stop?
Well, we have a... I don't want to call him mister because I've lost so much respect for him, Netanyahu there, who seems to be... You've lost respect for him?
long time ago but nonetheless uh he seems to be calling the shots and he and his very extreme right wing i wouldn't even say conservative because that's a legitimate place to be in the world of thinking on the spectrum but right wing radical right wing of cabinet
so i would hope that hearing from a friend of israel as joe biden has always been and all of us have been that he would respect the lives of the people who are innocent collateral damage in this war But there are levers that Biden could use which he hasn't used there are levers which previous presidents have used when Israel has in their view crossed the line.
For example?
Go back to 1956 Eisenhower threatened sanctions if Israel didn't pull its forces out of Sinai.
Reagan you know, held up delivery of fighter jets over Israel's action in Lebanon.
George Bush Sr. blocked loan guarantees because of settlement building.
He did.
I was there the day that...
And we've been through this history before of how Republican presidents, beginning with Reagan, but especially Bush 41, have imposed actual consequences on Israel for failure to comply with instructions that the United States has have imposed actual consequences on Israel for failure to comply with instructions that the United States has given them by virtue of the fact that they get
And we've shown you, reported on at length, what that really interesting history was of Reagan withdrawing troops from the Middle East despite Israel wanting us to remain there after 242 Marines were killed in a terrorist attack on Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1982 by Hezbollah.
And instead of getting involved in a broader Middle East war against Iran and Lebanon the way Israel wanted, instead Reagan withdrew those troops and was attacked by a lot of people on the right who are devoted to Israel for having done that, he was a very good one.
He also withheld fighter jets if Israel continued their expansion in the West Bank.
And then the most amount of resistance came from Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft and George Bush 41, who told Israel that If they don't cease expansion of settlements in the West Bank, which would forever destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, which was critical to U.S.
national security interests in the Middle East, that they would cut off $10 billion in loan guarantees that the Israelis were demanding and had obtained.
And it created this huge scandal where Jim Baker was continuously maligned as an anti-Semite And that was when the pro-Israel lobby really showed its power and there has not been a presidency since, an administration since, willing to impose any real consequences on Israel even when Israel does exactly that which the United States says it should not do because doing so would harm our national security.
So Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden know they have an angry left wing that they need to assuage.
In a presidential election who are infuriated by their support for Israel's destruction of Gaza.
And yet it's empty rhetoric because, as Nancy Pelosi is saying here, the Democratic Party refuses to take any of those actions that it could take where it exercises its leverage against Israel.
And when Nancy Pelosi sarcastically asked, oh, like what?
The interviewer, to his credit, went through that history and said, here are all these things that have been done before that you could also be doing.
And here's her explanation.
Well, you're going back to 1956.
So these levers are there, aren't they?
Well, there's some, but the President has said something about the settlements.
He has said something about the settlements.
But staying and blocking weapons supplies, for instance, are very different things, aren't they?
Well, it's a path.
It's a path.
I mean, there's just, there's no answer.
And obviously when you ask them about Ukraine, when you ask Democrats about Ukraine, they're even firmer in their support for the same view that Ben Shapiro has about the urgent need to confront Russia because this is threatening expansionary power.
And that was one of the reasons why the establishment centrists of Washington were so eager for Nikki Haley to be the Republican nominee, because that way you could go to vote for Joe Biden, you could go vote for Nikki Haley, and you will get exactly the same foreign policy.
Nikki Haley is an ardent supporter of the view that we have to fund Ukraine until the end.
She obviously is a full-throated supporter of the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the need and responsibility.
I don't know where it comes from, but the United States to pay for that war and to pay for Israel's military, even though millions of Israelis live better than millions of Americans do.
And...
And the broader Middle East policy of aggression and bombing Yemen and Iraq and Syria, there's just no differences between the establishment wings of the two parties.
And despite Ben Shapiro's branding as some sort of anti-establishment outsider,
What he and many other people at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens, accepted, which is why there's so much attack on her now, but what the Daily Wire is trying to do, many of the people, certainly the people from Ben Shapiro's faction, is seduce conservatives back into their support for this foreign policy that Donald Trump and the populist right have been increasingly opposing, as evidenced by their refusal to allow this money to go to Ukraine.
And even the opposition, not by any people in the Republican Party, for sure, all of whom are unified in support of Biden's policy in Israel, but at least some significant right wing voices like Tucker Carlson in Canada, so on and others, questioning why it is that the United States should be paying for and funding Israel's war questioning why it is that the United States should be paying for and funding Israel's war and its military, as well This is the role that Ben Shapiro is playing.
saying he's a spokesperson for this uniparty foreign policy despite his branding as an anti-establishment outsider.
And you may agree with him, you may disagree with him, but it's important to understand the faction for which he's speaking and it's anything but anti-establishment or outsider.
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One of the primary objectives of our program is something I have always encouraged my readers to do and my viewers to do, and something that I try very hard to do myself is to make sure that I and something that I try very hard to do myself is to make sure that I am exposing myself to the best of every political ideology and political viewpoint that I can possibly find, to try and find the smartest,
Every political ideology said that you can, even if you're completely certain of the core values that shape your politics, subject it to as much challenge and as much dispute as you can because at the end of the day that will either lead you to question what you believe in a way that you probably should be questioning it or it will fortify your convictions because you've subjected it to the best possible challenge.
And I think it's important to note that it's not enough to say, "Oh, I'm going to read some conservatives and some liberals or some people on the right or the left." There's a lot of different variants, as we just covered, with the difference between, say, Ben Shapiro or Candace Owen or Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson when it comes to things like how to view the U.S. security state and U.S. foreign policy.
And there's also a lot of gradation as well between older people and what kind of political content they consume and what younger people consume.
There's, for example, if you say, oh, I'm going to try and expose myself to the right, there's a big difference between, say, National Review and, let's say, The Charlie Kirk Show.
They're both nominally part of right-wing media, but you would get very different views and very different ways of getting them.
One of the programs that I most like to watch that is a program that is increasingly popular among young online leftists is a YouTube show called The Vanguard.
I've talked about it before.
I've been on their show several times.
It is hosted by two very smart and very entertaining and very well-informed, thoughtful people.
And one of them, Gavin Charles, who is a co-host of The Vanguard, is with us tonight in order to talk about this Somewhat tawdry and creepy scandal that has emerged within this subculture of online left liberal political streaming and we want to spend a lot more time talking about what this subculture is and what it kind of says about how young Americans are getting their news and forming communities then on the top and then on the scandal itself but we do have to spend a little bit of time on that.
Gavin has done a lot of great reporting on it and we are delighted to welcome you Gavin to your debut episode appearance which I hope won't be your last on System Updates.
Nice to see you.
Well, thank you so much, Glenn.
Really appreciate the intro.
And yeah, it's great to be here.
This is a perfect topic to have me on to unpack.
I think we've spent a lot of time in the trenches of online lefty discourse and done a lot of videos and debates with Vaush himself, one of the people we're going to be discussing tonight.
So yeah, once again, thank you so much for the invite, Glenn.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, so let me just give you kind of my background.
I've been aware, you know, for a while of this kind of left liberal streaming which I kind of differentiate even from say a show like yours where you go on the air, you go on a few times a week.
I don't know how exactly how long your show are but I think you have like a two hour, two and a half hour live stream and then you have kind of segments where people consume it in 15 or 20 minute segments on YouTube.
To me these kind of left liberal Streamers are different because one of the things that kind of shocked me and I became familiar mostly with Destiny because over the past few months I debated him twice, once as part of a group and then as part of a one-on-one, is that these people spend 7, 8, 10 hours literally every single day streaming about every single part of their life.
They have a very significant Audience, mostly I think of young people who nominally share their politics.
And I want to talk about that culture, that subculture, and how it kind of is evolving and what its characteristics are.
But before we do, the reason why a lot of people are paying attention now to this subculture is that there is a scandal involving, I think you could say fairly, that there are three kind of leading people who occupy this space.
Hassan Piker, who's Jen Geiger's nephew.
Destiny and then this person who calls himself Vosh and Vosh recently had this scandal where he exposed unintentionally his pornography file and among the images he kept on his computer appeared to be some animated images involving underage girls.
So tell us who Vosh is and why people who haven't heard of him before should know of him and what this scandal is in kind of a summary way.
Yeah, well thank you so much for the intro.
And Vaush is an interesting character.
He's someone that Zach and I have debated a few times on our show, The Vanguard.
The first time we had him on, it was actually to debate U.S.
airstrikes.
He was, I believe, defending extrajudicial murders by America for, you know, foreign Middle Eastern terrorists and the sort.
We were pushing back a little bit on that.
The second time, he was cheerleading the duopoly, basically.
arguing that everyone on the left needs to fall in line behind Joe Biden.
We came on to defend the merits of voting third party, especially in an election season where Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to be our options.
Seemingly, we were advocating for a third party vote, specifically the Green Party or Dr. Cornel West.
Either way, he's a real, you know, servant of the duopoly, in my opinion, a real cheerleader of the Democrats specifically, and someone who oftentimes pushes back on leftist foreign policy perspectives, despite claiming to be a socialist.
So he's an interesting guy.
You know, we disagree with him a lot.
Sometimes we've agreed with him as well.
But recently he really made the news when, as you said, Glenn, he quite embarrassingly Revealed his porn stash to the audience, which didn't just contain the normal kind of pornography.
As you said, it also contained images of animated children, what's often referred to as lolly content.
And this opened up an entire can of worms that led to a lot of people finally condemning Vaush.
He's always been a quite controversial figure on the online left, but this, I think, really was the last straw.
All for many.
Luckily, most people in the space universally condemned this, called him out over it.
And despite his repeated attempts to kind of gaslight and talk his way out of the situation, as I said, luckily, most people on the left condemned this, called him out over it.
And I don't think he'll ever recover entirely as a streamer.
You mentioned that he was one of the top three lefty streamers alongside Destiny.
And Hasan, and while I would agree with that up until this point, I think that there's definitely going to be a shift in the landscape going forward because, as I said, it's pretty hard for him to come back from this.
For sure, and as I said, people who want to really follow the gruesome details of exactly what happened here, of how he tried to defend himself, can go and find a lot of people talking about this online.
People have written about it.
Just to give a kind of visual component to what we're discussing, here is a screenshot from Vasa's channel that he called the context video, where he sort of tried to defend himself from these allegations and these concerns.
As I mentioned before, One of the things that, you know, I think is so notable is that there's the political ethos of these streamers.
You know, usually I think it's fair to say that historically in the United States, say for the last hundred years, younger people have tended to be more radical, have pursued a more radical Politics.
That's true both on the left and I think you can even say on the right.
It's certainly since like the 60s and the 70s where left-wing politics started coalescing around opposition to the Vietnam War, drove the incumbent president Lyndon Johnson out of the presidency by making it possible for him to be re-nominated by refusing to support him because of opposition to the Vietnam War.
There hasn't been this sense of like supporting the establishment in young leftist politics It's been this more outsider anti-establishment against the system sort of ethos to politics.
And although you have, I guess, a kind of political gradation among this streaming community, I would say Hasan Piker is probably more to the left And then you have Vosch, who kind of identifies as a socialist, but certainly supports almost everything Biden does.
I mean, he was an opponent of the war in Israel, but a big supporter of the NATO war in Ukraine, and in general, actually organizes to get people canvassing for Democratic Party voters and for Joe Biden.
And then Destiny is just a pure Democratic partisan hack.
And even Hassan, the most left-wing of them, You know, at the end of the day, we usually tell his audience, his young audience, go vote for the Democratic candidate.
Even when it's somebody like Gavin Newsom in a very blue state of California, he usually ends up, you know, kind of devoting himself to the Democratic Party.
I'm curious, as somebody who is part of that generation that these kinds of communities target, and as someone who is not by any means a servant of the Democratic Party, in fact, as you just said, you've often advocated abstaining from voting for Democrats or voting for third parties.
Do you think that the political ethos of your generation, at least this online component of it, is less radical and more kind of subservient to or captive of the Democratic Party establishment than previous younger generations have been?
Well, it's definitely interesting.
I think that specifically when it comes to Israel, we've seen a lot of people from my generation really breaking off from the democratic establishment and kind of questioning whether or not these two options are actually the best for us.
But I think that you're definitely on to something specifically when it comes to this kind of generation of streamers.
A lot of people refer to the space as BreadTube.
There's also a lot of folks on Twitch, which is an emerging platform hosting lots of live streamers from across the political spectrum.
And you're absolutely right, Glenn, that there is this increasing reticence to call out American intervention abroad, specifically with the Ukraine war.
I think we saw a lot of people that nominally claimed to be on the left coming down on suspiciously establishment sort of positions when it came to the funding of this war, when it came to pushback coming from real left wing commentators like myself and Zach at the Vanguard people that when it came to pushback coming from real left wing commentators like myself and Zach at the Vanguard people that were warning about what this, you know, renewed escalation, sorry, escalation with Russia Right.
And yeah, we saw a suspicious amount of cheerleading in the direction of basically just the establishment Democratic Party line, which is that we need to fund Ukraine more.
We need to give Zelensky everything he wants, a blank check, essentially consequences be damned.
And not only was there this odd call to basically just adopt the Democratic Party line as it relates to this foreign policy issue, this incredibly complex foreign policy situation.
Not only that, but there was a lot of smearing of people who pushed back.
Right.
Almost kind of hearkening back to the era that I grew up in, the lead up to the Iraq War, where people who were dissenting from America's invasion of Iraq were called unpatriotic and You know, their loyalties were questioned.
It was frankly bizarre and shocking to me to see people like Destiny, to see people like Vaush, pulling some of those same moves on critics of America's involvement in this conflict and our continual funding of this proxy war.
I was completely shocked.
To be fair, I think that Hasan Piker has done a much better job.
As you mentioned, Glenn, he's been pretty good on Palestine.
And, you know, actually he's gotten some heat from guys like Vaush and Destiny recently for pushing back on some of the logic revolving around America's position in Ukraine and kind of our role in general as the world police, something that we've pushed back on a lot and tried to, you know, remain staunch in as a fixture of left YouTube.
I'll be very interested to see whether Hasan Piker tells his audience, despite telling them for months that Joe Biden is an enabler of genocide in Gaza, that despite all that, it's now time for them to do their duty and go vote for Joe Biden.
And I want to kind of ask you about my hypothesis about this.
kind of feature of left-wing politics in the United States, especially as it's defined by, say, like younger millennials and Gen Z voters, which is, you know, I'm not very familiar with the history of people like Vash and Destiny, but from my understanding, they were basically building up a streaming audience by more or less focusing almost they were basically building up a streaming audience by more or less focusing almost entirely on video games and anime and like playing video games and talking about that and kind of started to become political with the
And that's true of a huge number of Americans who were apolitical or didn't pay much attention prior to Trump and who really got convinced that Trump was this singular evil, this unprecedented threat to the United States, and whose worldview is kind of singularly shaped by...
Donald Trump, like it's the metric, the framework through which they understand everything.
So if there are people or institutions who seem aligned with the cause of defeating Donald Trump, people like neocons or the US security state, the way Russiagate came from the CIA and the FBI.
Global institutions like NATO, things that the left had long prior to Trump opposed, there's not really much opposition any longer to those political factions and in fact there's a lot of hospitality among some of these left-wing factions precisely because they seem like they're Allies in the only political cause that matters, which is defeating Donald Trump.
Is that something you think explains this kind of strain of left-wing politics that seems more captive to the Democratic Party and to some of these institutional power centers than previously?
I think that that definitely has something to do with it.
I feel like most of the streamers we're talking about kind of got involved in politics more because of Bernie Sanders and the potential that he represented for the left rather as sort of, you know, a space to talk about Donald Trump.
That certainly came later.
But when we're talking about people like Destiny, Hassan, and Vaush, I would say that Their content focused more originally on Bernie and his movement.
Of course, when that fizzled out, they had to go in other directions.
And yeah, of course, Trump has dominated so much of American discourse on the left and right that it's pretty inescapable to talk about him.
And you're right that it does give people an easy excuse to basically just propagandize on behalf of the Democratic Party and lead their audience back to that position over and over again.
And, you know, to be fair, in my own opinion, I think that there's some level of fairness behind that argument.
I'm definitely not a supporter of Donald Trump's.
But you're right, we do see an increasing amount of trust in the deep state institutions, which are classically distrusted by the real left.
So yeah, I do think that's probably part of the reason why we've seen these trends occur and part of the reason why we see a lot of these prominent voices on the left, such as Destiny, just siding with the institutions of power, with the Deep State.
I think Destiny specifically is probably the main one that you're spot on about.
Glenn and his just total fealty to the Deep State and the establishment.
I mean, he won't entertain any skepticism of the CIA or the FBI, for example.
So yeah, I think that's Probably part of it.
Yeah, and there's a lot of polling data that shows that people who just identify as left liberals, people on the left, people who are liberals, adherence to the Democratic Party, just have a much higher opinion of the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, prosecutors, foreign policy, NATO, the Pentagon, than any kind of left-wing politics over generations previously have had.
You just see it in polling data, among other things.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this kind of streaming culture as something that seems to me to be a little different is, and here just to give you a kind of sense of, I think it is important to note that these streamers actually do command a pretty decent-sized audience.
I think for a lot of people under 30, these people have, these streamers have a lot more influence than a lot of recognized political brands.
Just recently, Ro Khanna, who is someone who tries to kind of be innovative in the way that he organizes both his own political brand and the Democratic Party, actually sat down with a bunch of different streamers, including Emma Vigland, who's the co-host of the Majority Report, but also Vosh.
And here from Vosh's stream, you can actually see it.
And one of the things that really got me interested, as I said, was kind of looking a little bit more at what this subculture was as a result of my debating destiny.
And here, I don't think you can see it, Gavin, but here's just the last four days.
It's not like I picked some unusual or unrepresentative sector.
Here's just the last four days.
Every single day, Destiny has streamed.
He streams every single day.
Today he streamed for eight hours.
Yesterday for seven and a half hours.
The day before that for seven and a half hours.
The day before that four and a half hours.
And we have that up on the screen.
And there's a lot of studies now, a lot of data about the addiction of young people of Gen Z and younger millennials to how much time they spend online.
Here's from the Economic Times.
Gen Z is addicted to YouTube.
Pew survey finds one in 16s.
visit the video sharing portal.
Daily, there here is a study that recently came out that internet addiction may indicate mental health problems.
There's data about how people who are under 30 Gen Z are far more likely to have mental health pathologies like depression and anxiety.
And this seems to me these kind of streaming communities seem to be something different in kind Then, say, the way people have related to celebrities or maybe even watch a show like yours or mine or watch a show that they like on TV, there's obviously some kind of parasocial relationship.
Anytime you watch anybody who you like, there's kind of a feeling of intimacy from podcasts.
But when you're spending eight hours every single day and your identity is formed around these online communities, And I saw a lot of this from Destiny's followers, this kind of like supreme allegiance, not to any political ideal, but to sort of him as a person and to this community.
It seems like these are starting to become kind of replacements for actual offline human connection.
There's, Yohan Hari has written several books about these mental health problems in younger people and the role that the internet plays.
And he kind of analogizes the way in which people who seek friendship and communion and community, all things we need as human beings and social animals, the way people get that online, it's kind of like the same thing, the difference between, say, pornography and actual sex with somebody you love.
Like, pornography is kind of a Do you think that is a real problem for people of your age, the dependency on the internet?
And are these screaming communities as kind of unhealthy as they seem to me as somebody who is not their target audience but who has begun kind of paying more attention to them over the last year or so?
It's a really interesting question, and I think that it's a bit of both, right?
Like the internet in general, there are, of course, lots of pros and cons.
I think that the pro of these sort of spaces is the robust conversations and debates that often do occur on them, right?
For all of the criticism I have of a guy like Destiny or a guy like Vosh, there are going to be a lot of interesting political debates you're going to have access to if you're watching Twitch shows like that or YouTube channels.
Like that.
And even though they can go on for a really long time and get a bit monotonous, specifically if you don't agree with the streamer in question, I still think it's, you know, one of the more substantive forms of entertainment that Gen Z is consuming.
If you compare it to a lot of the mindless drivel on Twitch or TikTok or even YouTube, I think that it's a good thing for people to be paying attention to these sorts of discussions as aggressive as they might Like I said, we've debated some seriously substantive issues with people like Vaush, including the merits of third party voting and American foreign policy.
So it's not just a totally mindless area.
But as I said, for every pro, there is definitely cons.
And even though I think the probably vast majority of people who tune in to someone like Destiny or Hassan, I think the vast majority of them are normal people who are just consuming the content in sort of clip form.
Or they'll jump into the live stream for 30 minutes to an hour and kind of watch it as they might system update or the Vanguard.
Obviously, you're going to get the people who also just, you know, their life begins and ends there.
And that's when the bizarre parasocial relationships begin to develop.
Something that we saw specifically with the Vosch controversy that we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation with him accidentally exposing the problematic, you know, containment of his or rather what was contained within his porn folder.
And all of a sudden there's all these channels and all of these kind of orbiters and Vosch super fans out there defending him and gaslighting them.
The rest of us, those of us who had the obvious and normal reaction to what was in Vosch's folder, right?
And it's like, why would you be doing that?
Why would you be devoting your time to defending such a bizarre aspect of this man who you don't know, this person's life, right?
And that's where the parasocial stuff kicks in.
That's where we get the people who just obsess over this and devote their whole life to becoming defenders of, like I said, people they don't even know.
But ultimately, Is it any worse than the, you know, constant 24-7 cable news that is preferred by older generations?
I don't think so.
I mean, if you think about it, previous generations had the radio, which was almost always on.
They could listen to that.
And of course, cable news, you know, CNN, Fox, and all these other 24-7 live entertainment programs, all, you know, completely sponsored and captured by corporate interests.
I don't think that tuning into streamers, even streamers like Destiny and Hassan.
I don't think it's any worse than that.
If anything, I find it to be more intellectually stimulating as you are getting exposed to viewpoints that aren't just, you know, the approved viewpoints that you can have on TV.
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with a lot of what you said.
I think if you're spending time engaged in political debate, and obviously one of the reasons I decided to debate Destiny was because I know he has a political audience that I wouldn't be able to reach, and I thought I wanted them to at least be exposed to those kinds of things, and I've heard Vaush doing the same thing.
But honestly, like, one of the things that kind of shocked me is when I began paying attention to Destiny it was I guess right around the time when he was divorcing his wife and I bring that up only because so much of his stream while I was watching it to try and get a sense of what this community was ended up being things like him actually just litigating his divorce like for hours online like showing texts from his wife and like message it, like deeply personal and intimate things.
And, you know, like the scandal with Vosch too didn't just come out of nowhere.
It kind of like is something that he has talked about his lot, his like obsession with a certain kind of pornography that is involving like anime drawings of animals and things like that.
And it did just, and like, and I guess like the reason I don't, you know, in part it's not really abstract to me, right?
Like, I'm raising teenagers.
I'm very aware of, like, the dangers of just letting your kids stay online all day.
And I also know there's this dynamic where everyone in an older generation looks at whatever is new of younger people and always kind of looks at it with a lot of skepticism and dislike, like, oh, what are these kids doing?
These things seem very unhealthy.
And I'm very aware of that dynamic and trying to avoid it.
At the same time, there is this data about this kind of explosion of mental health pathologies among people who are younger with all kinds of disorders that seem to me to be coming from somewhere like they have to be have some kind of a source and if you look at the way in which the world changed in the way in which people's lives are lived the main difference is seems to me
Is that people who are born into a world in which the internet is the primary means by which we interact with one another and form relationships with one another and form communities with one another has to be having some kind of an impact on our mental health.
So I don't mean to like paint with you out of a brush or suggest that there's nothing positive or healthy in these communities.
But you know we're putting on this Other than this graph now that says, over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems?
Feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge?
Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?
Thought that you would be better off dead or thought of hurting yourself in some way?
And by far, people who are in Gen Z and younger millennials have a much higher incidence of self-reporting these kinds of mental health pathologies.
I'm just wondering what you make of that and the extent to which And I don't just mean now to single out these specific streaming communities, but just the over-reliance on online activity in lieu of meaningful interpersonal connection and the role that it might be playing in this kind of mental health crisis.
Oh yeah, I can certainly speak to that.
I mean, as a member of Gen Z who's terminally online myself, I think that I even can notice a lot of the mental health effects that come with the territory of just being as terminally online as I am.
Not only because it's something I've always enjoyed, you know, consuming this sort of political content and just being online a lot, but also now that I have to constantly be focusing on everything newsworthy for my job, you know, it can definitely weigh you down and you can start to just exist in this online echo chamber or bubble where all the news is bad news and everyone is constantly doom and gloom.
And, you know, it can be refreshing just to go outside and be like, yeah, if it if it wasn't for the online debates I'm embroiled in and the news cycles I'm paying such close attention to, you know, everything seems fine out here.
The people are happy, the sun is shining, life is going on as usual, right?
But if you spend all day inside just doom-scrolling Twitter or, you know, watching YouTube videos or live streams, it can, you know, result in this distorted view of the world that everything is constantly falling apart, that we're only five minutes from, you know, Complete climate disaster or nuclear annihilation or whatever the media is talking about or fear mongering about, sometimes justly, right?
These are important things to be focused on.
But when you hyper fixate on things and obsess on them, and all you're hearing about is negativity, then I think that can absolutely result in a very distorted Yeah, I think it's a huge problem, Glenn.
with just the obvious unhealthy parts of being inside all day, you know, the lack of vitamin D, the lack of all this sort of interpersonal communication and relationship that you're talking about that has largely been replaced by podcasts.
So yeah, I think it's a huge problem, Glenn, it's a huge problem.
And as much as I enjoy the online spaces and the sorts of conversations like the one we're having right now, which are made possible by the internet, I think there's definitely a lot of cons as well.
You know, I'm really glad to have grown up right before the internet and cell phones just totally took over, right?
Smartphones didn't really hit the mainstream until I was in about eighth or ninth grade.
So while the internet has always been, you know, Part of my life to some extent.
I am really grateful that I had those early developmental years where I wasn't just constantly absorbed into a cell phone screen or into a TikTok feed or, you know, just digesting what the algorithm is recommending to me 24-7.
I think it's incredibly unhealthy and I'm really, you know, not looking forward to seeing the long-term consequences down the line specifically for this generation with how much they're absorbed into the interwebs.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm no lunatic.
I mean, I owe my career to the internet, like the ability to kind of have a free and independent voice, to not have to go work for big media corporations if you want to reach a large audience, like the way that's democratized, the way we share information, the way we communicate, the things that it makes possible, like there's hugely positive components to this technology and to the advent of internet and And social media advocacy, obviously keeping that free is a major cause of mine.
That's how I looked at the Snowden reporting to keep it free from government surveillance, keeping it free of government and corporate censorship is an important cause of mine.
So there's a lot of value to it.
It's just you look at this data, and especially as a parent, as I said, of teenagers, you end up wondering what explains this, and it has to be.
People have families later.
It's the economic conditions make all of that more difficult, the things that generally people found fulfillment in and purpose with and gratification from, whether it be like labor unions or church or different offline communities or family, like a lot of that is being delayed or made more difficult in so many different ways.
And it's replaced by this kind of facsimile of online connection that I think causes a lot of the problems for all the reasons that you said.
All right, let me ask you one last question.
You referred to it earlier.
It's the political question about the election.
There are a lot of people on the left, young voters, left-wing voters, Muslim voters, Arab voters who are enraged by Joe Biden's ongoing support for the destruction of Gaza.
And I've talked about it on my show many times.
I think the single worst thing that I've seen in my lifetime as a political matter to just watch an army destroy basically unarmed civilian population, seemingly with no regard for human And this is something that Joe Biden has stood behind from the very beginning.
Most politicians in both parties have stood behind it from the very beginning and continue to.
And there are a lot of people who are swearing and vowing that they will not vote for Joe Biden as a result of this.
Obviously, the strategy of the Democratic Party, which needs these voters, especially in key states like Arab voters in Michigan, other states where younger and left-wing voters are necessary in swing states, is going to be to try and convince them that the evil of Donald Trump is so great that they have to kind of Relinquish their vows and go to the polls and vote for someone that they've spent the last five months believing and insisting is actually supporting a genocide.
And I'm wondering what you think the outcome of this will be, like the extent to which you think that the people currently vowing that they won't vote for Joe Biden will eventually succumb to those pressures of the Democratic Party and in the name of stopping Trump will end up voting for him anyway.
It's going to be really interesting to see.
I'm definitely inspired by Representative Rashida Tlaib's efforts in Michigan to kind of sway Michigan voters to write uncommitted on the ballot rather than just straight up affirming their support for Joe Biden, hopefully to send a message that would scare him into changing his policy on Israel and Palestine.
Because, you know, ultimately to me, that's what matters most is stopping this horrific war, stopping the bloodshed and trying to reduce the amount of casualties.
Unfortunately, I believe that whether Biden or Trump wins in November, that Israel policy will largely, you know, go on unchanged.
I don't believe that either the Republicans or the Democrats are anti-war on this matter.
And unfortunately, neither is the most prominent third-party candidate in the race.
Robert F. Kennedy, who over and over again- He may be the most extreme when it comes to Israel. - Yeah.
Yeah, unfortunately he might be the worst despite having such a, you know, alternative perspective on the war in Ukraine.
Seemingly that does not translate to an alternative perspective on the war in Israel.
But it is going to be really interesting, Glenn, to see how this goes.
I think a lot of people, myself included, are watching very attentively the efforts of third-party movements, specifically Jill Stein and the Green Party.
I think that Dr. Jill Stein has proven herself to be the most serious candidate running as a third-party option, at least on the left, as much respect as I have for Dr. Cornel West.
I think his campaign has largely been run like a circus.
you know, largely been run like a circus.
I don't think he's done much to secure ballot access in a serious way that would make his campaign worth supporting, at least financially.
I don't think he's done much to secure ballot access in a serious way that would make his campaign worth supporting, at least financially.
But I am hoping, as I have in years past, that with all of the dissatisfaction directed towards the two-party establishment, specifically as it relates to foreign policy this time around, it could actually give the Green Party enough of a momentum to get to that 5% number, which would at least secure them federal it could actually give the Green Party enough of a momentum to get to that 5% number, which would at Now, I've been disappointed by the Green Party in years past.
Jill Stein was the first candidate that I ever voted for for president in 2016.
I followed that up with the vote for Howie Hawkins in 2020.
And unfortunately, in both of those election cycles, the Green Party proved incapable of reaching that 5% threshold.
So I understand when people don't take efforts like the Greens very seriously, there's not much historical precedent, unfortunately, to point to as far as success is concerned.
But if you're someone who's concerned about humanitarian causes, if you're someone who's concerned with genocide, frankly, then, you know, I consider it incumbent upon you to support a leftist third party.
But I don't think at this point it's frankly palatable to support Joe Biden.
the Democrats, but the Republicans as well, that this will not stand.
This foreign policy is not acceptable.
Our taxpayer money cannot continue to fund this genocide.
So it's not an easy answer.
It's not one that will even necessarily result in the foreign policy means and ends that we want it to.
But I don't think at this point it's frankly palatable to support Joe Biden.
If you have to go in there on election day and vote for him.
And you look all throughout all Europe or the same thing even countries like the UK where there's maybe three parties but four and five in France and Germany and the like.
And you look at the United States, and it's obviously something very deliberate that the two parties collude on in order to ensure that they have no competition other than the other.
And so often, that means that they, as Barack Obama said, play with only in the 40 yard lines, and everything else is kind of off limits.
And I do think that's the perfect description for our political Framework.
Gavin, I am a fan of your show, as you know, by virtue of the fact that occasionally when you mention me, I sometimes write to you with my own response and the way that we communicate.
I love going on your show.
I really encourage people to watch it.
It is genuinely a thought-provoking and an entertaining show, both of those things.
I think you guys do a great job.
I'm glad to see your audience growing.
I hope that continues.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
I super appreciate your coming on and talking to me tonight.
Oh, thank you so much, Glenn, for having me on.
It was an absolute pleasure to chat.
We've always loved hanging out with you and talking on The Vanguard.
Looking forward to many more discussions in the future.
And, of course, you guys can find the show on YouTube.
It's just called The Vanguard.
Have a lot of interesting discussions about streamers like Vaush and kind of getting into the nitty gritty of online political drama.
So, yeah, thank you so much, Glenn.
Had a great time chatting.
Have a great night.
Yeah, we'll put the link to the show so that people can find it in the notes to our show as well.
Have a great night, Gavin.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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