Supreme Court—For Now—Sides w/ Texas in Biden Border Dispute. Pro-Israel Right Orders Daily Wire to Fire Candace Owens. Elon Musk v. Don Lemon
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
SCOTUS Sides With Texas (9:07)
Pro-Israel Right Comes for Candace Owens (28:29)
What Elites Think of Free Speech (1:00:35)
Ending (1:24:53)
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Good evening, it's Tuesday, March 19th 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 state of Texas is currently involved in complex, protracted, and highly consequential litigation with the Biden administration.
The core issue is whether Texas has the right to take the matter of illegal immigration into its own hands, as it has done by passing laws that authorize the state to build a barbed wire fence around the Rio Grande to keep out Immigrants trying to enter the country illegally as well as allowing state police officers to arrest those who are illegally entering the United States and specifically Texas from Mexico.
The Biden administration has objected to all of this and began cutting down Texas's fences with homeland security agents.
Then they went to court and argued that only the federal government has the right to act on the question of immigration, that states have no rights to do anything.
In late January, the Supreme Court, in a five to four ruling that we covered at length, seemed to side, at least for the moment, with the Biden administration when they issued a ruling with no rationale, no explanation, that allowed Homeland Security agents to continue to act against Texas's anti-immigration measures, including giving the green light to Homeland Security agents to cut down Texas's barbed wire fences.
But today, the case returned to the Supreme Court.
And this time the court sided with Texas, effectively giving the state the green light, at least for now, to enforce all of its anti-immigration measures against those entering the United States and Texas illegally.
Now, because these rulings so far have gone up and down the courts and have been largely procedural, at least on the level of the Supreme Court, They are anything but clear, but we will nonetheless explain the latest ruling to you today, given its importance and where it leaves this obviously consequential legal dispute where a lot of states will now start to want to turn to take matters into their own hands in reaction to what they perceive to be the federal government's failure to protect their state from a wave of illegal immigration.
Then, ever since October 7th, which was the day that Hamas killed several hundred Israeli civilians, and then that was followed by Joe Biden's vow to have the United States finance and arm Israel's war in Gaza, there has been increasingly intense attacks on anyone inside the United States who either criticizes Israel or who dissents from Joe Biden's policy of paying for Israel's war.
Now, while much of that dissent has come from the American left, some of it has come from the American right, especially the sectors of the American right that had been identifying as an America First movement and therefore opposed forcing Americans to finance the wars of foreign countries, whether that foreign country be Ukraine or Israel or anything else.
One of the most prominent right-wing dissenters of U.S.
policy toward Israel is Candace Owens of The Daily Wire.
From the start of the Israeli-Gaza War, this has created obvious tension.
After all, The Daily Wire's founder and its most public face is Ben Shapiro, one of the country's most fanatical and extremist pro-Israel supporters.
Who demands that the U.S.
finance both Israel's military and all of its wars, independent of the fact that millions of Israelis have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans.
Now, recently, Candace Owens has become even more vocal in her criticisms of both Israel and the support for it inside the United States from the Biden White House and from people in both parties.
And that has caused some on the pro-Israel right to dispense with any pretense That they believe any longer in free discourse, or that they oppose cancel culture, exactly as they did with Tucker Carlson just a couple of months ago, when he too expressed opposition to some of the core pieties on Israel.
This part of the American right, this pro-Israel part of the American right, has launched a campaign to brand Candace Owens a racist and an anti-Semite, and many are now demanding that as a result, the Daily Wire fire her for her views.
The way in which the pro-Israel right has embraced many of the same censorship and cancellation tactics that they spent years condemning the liberal left for wielding has been a frequent focus of ours on this show.
And we will review some of the latest controversies surrounding Candace Owens, attacks on her by various rabbis and other supporters of Israel, and her views on Israel as a window for understanding these increasingly unsustainable dynamics when it comes to Israel and large parts of the American right.
Also, earlier this week, former CNN host who was fired from CNN, Don Lamont, announced that Elon Musk had fired him or terminated a contract, which X had extended to Lamont in order to broadcast his new podcast on the platform.
According to Lamon, this happened after Elon Musk sat for an interview with him that was designed to help Lamon launch his new show on X.
And according to Lamont, the reason Musk canceled the contract before it was even signed was due to Elon Musk's irritation at many of Donald Lamont's questions.
Yesterday, Lamont released the full interview with Musk, and some parts of it are really worth examining.
Those are the parts where Lamont struggles in the most intense and almost pity-inducing ways to try to process and comprehend the most basic concepts of free speech and censorship.
concepts that have become utterly obscured and anathema and rejected in the left liberal circles in which Don Lamont exclusively resides.
Last night, we spent a lot of time on a New York Times article about censorship to illustrate the prevailing establishment view on free speech and censorship.
And Don Lamont's comments really do exactly the same thing.
And then finally, the nominally independent senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, announced this week that he is launching a new podcast in which he told his predominantly left-wing followers, to the extent they're on the left, that, as he put it, it's okay to be angry about capitalism. that, as he put it, it's okay to be angry THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE
All of this reveals the only real function at this point of both Bernie Sanders and his House counterpart, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, namely, to seduce angry leftists into believing That Sanders and AOC still empathize with their anger toward the Democratic Party, all with the goal of herding them into the Democratic Party and continuing to march behind Joe Biden.
In so many ways, this rotted duo, who came to prominence promising to disrupt and subvert the Democratic Party establishment, have instead become its most valuable and loyal tools.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
So much of what happens in the American judiciary is of the highest importance.
So often our most inflammatory and consequential political disputes are resolved there.
And yet at the same time that that's happening, that so many of our political disputes go to courts in order to be resolved, They are discussed and treated in a way that almost is impossible for the public to understand unless you have extensive legal training.
And a lot of that is often purposeful.
designed to take the court and remove it from public discourse by treating things in an extremely legalistic way that make it very difficult for the courts to be understood by the public whose interests they so often affect and then when you add on top of that the fact that the supreme court is not open to the public in the sense that it cannot be televised and now can be listened to by audio but it is not televised
it creates this institution that has an enormous impact on people's lives even though it is often increasingly more and more difficult to see and to understand and to And that very much is the case with a dispute that is currently taking place between the state of Texas and the Biden administration over one of the most
significant and inflammatory political debates that we have, which is the issue of what to do about illegal immigration, the entrance of millions and millions of people into the United States without any legal right to enter.
The view of the state of Texas, which just a few years ago was treated as some kind of outlier, far-right, white nationalist view, Namely that illegal immigration is a gigantic problem for the people who live in border states and increasingly in states even removed from the border and that more needs to be done to keep out people who are trying to enter the country illegally.
That view was just a few years ago.
Under the Trump administration, what was routinely described as being a racist and white supremacist and white nationalist view has now become the predominant view, not just among most Republican states and cities, but many of the most significant and the largest Democratic states and cities ever since people who are entering the country illegally began arriving in large numbers, not only in border states, but also in American cities like New York and Chicago and Washington.
Democratic governors and Democratic mayors have started to sound exactly like Republican governors and Republican mayors, namely complaining bitterly that the federal government is not doing nearly enough to either keep the people out of the country who don't have a legal right to enter or to provide resources to cities and states to accommodate them, to assimilate them, to even provide them basic means of living.
And one of the things that several states have now done, led by Texas, is they have said, well, look, if the federal government isn't going to act in order to solve this problem and keep our citizens safe from the dangers that waves of illegal immigration bring, if they're not going to protect our budgetary interests, Because we can't afford to take care of huge numbers of people that we can't even keep track of, we're going to take matters into our own hands.
We have a sovereign right as a state to protect the security of our citizens as well as to protect other considerations such as cultural and social concerns, budgetary issues, and all other kinds of issues involving how people in that state live.
Texas enacted some pretty innovative laws that had never really been enacted before by states to deal with immigration, including authorizing itself to construct barbed wire fences and other means of keeping people from crossing into the Rio Grande.
They also have now recently authorized their own state law enforcement officials To arrest people who are illegally in Texas and to remove them to Mexico, obviously a role that has traditionally been performed by the federal government, by the Immigration and National Relations Service or by customs agents and border agents.
But as a result of the perception that the federal government is failing, Texas has now decided that they have to, in order to protect their citizens, take these matters and take care of it themselves.
And the Biden administration saw this.
They saw things like the construction, not by Homeland Security, but by the state of Texas of a fence around various parts of entry into Texas.
They saw Texas state agents arresting illegal immigrants and they went into court and they argued that what Texas was doing was illegal.
But before they went into court, Homeland Security physically acted against Texas.
They started destroying their own Texas' fences.
Homeland Security agents dispatched by the U.S.
federal government went into Texas and began taking down the fences that the state of Texas had constructed pursuant to laws enacted by the state of Texas and trying to impede other measures that Texas had undertaken to keep out illegal immigrants.
This all went to the courts on January 31st.
It reached the Supreme Court for the first time.
We showed you the program that we did covering that.
If you want to go and watch those issues examined in detail, here's the program that we broadcast unpacking the Texas Biden Supreme Court border dispute.
And at the time, on January 31st, something very strange happened, which was that a five-justice majority of the court, the three liberal justices, joined with two of the conservative justices, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, and they seemingly sided with the Biden administration by telling the Biden administration that they had the right to continue to act against what Texas was doing.
After that, however, an appellate court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had ruled in favor of Texas, had said this Texas law is constitutional, that Texas has every right to protect its own citizens that the federal government failed to.
There was an order that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued that barred the U.S.
government from continuing to act against Texas.
And the Biden Justice Department appealed that to the Supreme Court today and asked the Supreme Court to vacate this injunction and the supreme court today by six to three ruling with the six conservative justices on one side the three liberal justices on the other and there you see the caption of the case united states versus texas this time sided with texas but on a very narrow procedural ground which i'm going to explain to you because it's important to know
but the ultimate result is that as a result of the supreme court's actions today texas is now permitted to continue to enforce its laws They're allowed to continue to arrest people illegally entering the United States through Texas who are found in Texas.
They're permitted to continue to construct fences and other barbed wire devices to keep people from illegally entering the country.
And the U.S. federal government is barred from interfering in what Texas can do.
Now, ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide the core constitutional question here, which is, is it only the federal government that has the right to act with regard to immigration?
The Biden administration is saying things like immigration affects foreign relations with other countries, including Mexico.
It's a matter of national security.
Only we, the federal government, have the right to take action here.
Texas and no other state has the right to do so.
And Texas is saying it's not just an issue of immigration, it's also an issue of security for our state, for the citizens of our state, in terms of just common crime.
It's an issue of protecting our budget.
It's an issue of protecting our culture, of our society, of our resources.
And so the Supreme Court's going to have to decide, in this extremely important issue, what states are permitted to do, if anything, when the federal government fails to act against illegal immigration.
The Supreme Court has now had two different opportunities to decide that, and each time they avoided and sidestepped that question, opting instead to simply rule on procedural issues that just confuse the public and create all kinds of confusion among the states as well in terms of what they can and can't do.
Now, the only thing the Supreme Court technically decided today was the following.
Oftentimes when a court issues a ruling, it will also issue a stay of that ruling, meaning the Fifth Circuit will issue a ruling, as it did in this case, authorizing the state of Texas to enforce the law and banning the federal government from interfering.
But then it will say, because we know you're probably going to try and appeal to the Supreme Court, We're going to go ahead and either freeze our order and not have it implemented until the Supreme Court gets to weigh in, or they'll say, no, we want our order to take effect immediately, even though the Supreme Court might overturn us.
That's usually what happens.
And then the Supreme Court gets that and they have a test for deciding whether or not they want to vacate the stay or impose a stay pending appeal.
And that would be a pretty easy, normal procedural dispute.
But what happened instead was the Fifth Circuit did something that seemed designed to ensure that Texas could continue to enforce the law and not give the Supreme Court any opportunity to weigh in until it weighs in on the ultimate issues, which is instead of issuing a stay,
they used a different device to freeze everything in place called they used a different device to freeze everything in place called an administrative stay, which usually is just a tool that appellate courts have for freezing things for a few days just in order to be able to hear a case or to be able to administer their It's not usually something that stays in place for weeks or even months at a time.
And so the Biden administration went to the Supreme Court today and said the Fifth Circuit is abusing its power with administrative stays because what they really are trying to do is to let Texas continue to implement this law to arrest illegal immigrants, to continue to build these fences,
And even if they ultimately lose at the Supreme Court level, once the Supreme Court gets around to deciding it, all this time, Texas will be able to do a great deal of work in keeping illegal immigrants out or even removing them from their territory.
And so all the Supreme Court today technically decided was whether the Fifth Circuit was abusing its power.
If they had found that the Fifth Circuit had abused its power, it would have meant that they would have stopped Texas from enforcing its law and allowed the Biden administration to continue to interfere in what Texas was doing.
But instead, the sixth justice majority of the court, composed of the conservative justices, said that maybe the day will come when this is an abuse of power, but that day has not arrived, and therefore they refuse to overturn or disturb in any way what the state of Texas had decided to do.
Now, here's the ruling.
For those of you who actually want to go through it, there is a written opinion that was signed by Amy Coney Barrett and she essentially explained why she didn't think the 5th Circuit had abused its power and why that order should remain.
And then there were two dissenting opinions.
One, a very aggressive, acerbic, bitter dissent that was written by Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Ketanji Brown Jackson.
And then a separate dissent by Elena Kagan that had the same conclusion but was just a little bit more politely phrased that essentially said the Fifth Circuit was abusing its power and this administrative state should be vacated.
Now, I was going to read a couple of excerpts, but they're very legalistic.
I did want to explain that, but here's what you need to know about the current state of affairs.
We're going to put the link to the full case in the chat if you actually want to read it.
But what you need to know is that as of now, Texas has the right to continue to enforce all of the laws it enacted that are designed to protect Texas citizens, as they describe it, from the dangers and harms of illegal immigration.
And the Biden administration is prohibited from interfering in any way in what the state of Texas has done.
Now, at some point, the Supreme Court, as I said, will have to decide on the merits, namely, what rights do the states have, if any, to act and protect their citizens when the federal government fails to.
But because the Supreme Court is not yet ready to decide that, And instead decided this very seemingly boring and very legalistic procedural issue that in fact has a great deal of impact on the country.
Texas can now continue to arrest people who are in Texas illegally, to remove them from Mexico, to continue their construction of all kinds of barbed wires and fences designed to keep out illegal immigrants and homeland security in the Biden administration.
is barred from doing anything about it.
From interfering in the arrests, from stopping the deportations, from removing the fences.
And all of this has happened because even according to Democratic mayors and governors, the Biden administration simply refuses to use the authority it has to enforce immigration laws and to keep people from illegally entering the country.
Now, the Biden administration is going to claim throughout the election year that they had reached a deal with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans that would have solved the problem.
But Donald Trump oppose the deal and therefore Republicans voted against it and it's their fault that the border is not secure.
I don't think anyone really believes that that bill would have done anything meaningful about border security, nor do I think people will end up blaming Donald Trump for what's happening at the border given that Joe Biden is not only the president for almost four years now, but also has in his hands all sorts of authorities that he just doesn't but also has in his hands all sorts of authorities that he just doesn't use for all But that is going to be the political argument.
But the reality now is that Texas does have this power.
They are asserting this power.
The government is barred from continuing to interfere in them.
And it's really an extraordinary state of affairs when you have states basically empowered to run around arresting people who have illegally entered the country and building their own fences because the federal government simply refuses to do so as we have talked about very often
the reason that we decided to leave substack in 2022 and come here to rumble and produce a nightly show and to publish our written journalism no longer on substack but on locals which is part of rumble is because of how important we believe rumble's mission of protecting free speech is I think Substack has been
Very noble in that regard as well, but because Rumble is a platform that can accommodate not just written journalism, but all kinds of shows and programs increasingly with bigger and bigger capabilities and a bigger audience, the fact that they're so devoted to this mission is very, very important to me, to our show, I think to our audience as well.
And like any platform that genuinely devotes itself to free speech, and Rumble has gone so far as to lose access to France Because it refused to obey the orders of the French government to de-platform RT and other Russian state media, telling France, we're not going to take orders from you about what media we can offer to our adult listeners.
And they lost access to Brazil as well for very similar reasons, namely that we're not going to obey your censorship orders that you're sending us to every day.
Rumble has really proven that they are a genuine free speech platform.
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There's obviously been a lot of criticism of the Israeli government over the last six months since October 7th, in particular criticism
of the huge number of innocent civilians that the Israeli government has killed in Gaza, the apparent recklessness or disregard of humanitarian considerations in terms of the number of children and women and innocent men that they've killed, the destruction of infrastructure.
And now, probably most horrifically of all, the fact that there is now the imminence of mass famine in Gaza for one simple reason.
Because Israel has made good on its promise that the defense minister made at the very beginning of the war to blockade food and water from entering Gaza.
There are all kinds of countries, including the United States, and all kinds of aid groups that are trying to get food and water into Gaza and yet cannot do so by land because the Israelis are blocking access.
And a lot of this dissent, this criticism of Israel has come from the left, which has not only criticized Israel, but also has continuously asked the same question we on this show ask all the time about the war in Ukraine.
Which is, why is this war the responsibility of American citizens to pay for and to finance and to arm?
Why are we paying for Israel's military?
Why are we financing their wars?
Why are we giving them the bombs that they use to conduct these wars?
And obviously that is a question that has come from the left, but it has also been a question that increasingly has come from the right.
After all, ever since Donald Trump's emergence as the dominant faction of the Republican Party, branded under the slogan of America First, And defined explicitly, based on the view that America should no longer be involved in the wars of other countries, that we shouldn't be paying for the wars of other countries, we should prioritize the interest of our own citizens above the interest of foreign governments.
There have been a lot of people on the right who have been consistently applying that view, not just to Ukraine, but to Israel, and to say, why is it that we're paying for Israel's military over the last six or seven decades?
Why are we transferring tens of billions of dollars to Israel?
Why are we, every time there's a war that breaks out between Israel and its neighbor, we pay for their war as well?
We feed them the weapons?
Now, it has long been the case, and we have covered this since before October 7th, that one of the most repressive debates that we have in the United States, there's a lot of repressive debates where people who dissent from orthodoxies get fired, or get canceled, or get censored.
And one of those debates is the Israel debate.
Many of the people who have been fired most frequently in media, in academia, in government, in other jobs, have been people who have criticized Israel.
Over the last six months in the United States there have been campus groups shut down because they're critics of Israel or supporters of the pro-Palestinian cause.
We have spent a long time on this show over the last six months documenting and denouncing this obvious severe inconsistency on the part of some American conservatives
Who have been around against things like cancel culture and censorship and victimhood narratives and racism grievances who suddenly in the name of Israel embrace all of those things in order to demonize critics of Israel or people who question or criticize the Biden administration's policy of paying for Israel's war.
One of the people on the American Right who has been very vocal about this is Tucker Carlson.
And there was an effort for quite a while to brand Tucker Carlson an anti-Semite, to expel him from the American Right due to his heresies on Israel.
We covered that.
We interviewed Tucker about that.
I was on his show early on in the war to talk about this embrace by parts of the American Right of the same censorship.
And cancelation tactics that had been associated with the liberal left for so long in the name of protecting Israel.
But another person who has been as vocal and probably even more so is Candace Owens, who is a very prominent conservative voice and what makes the fact that she has become a leading dissenter On the question of Israel and U.S.
support for it, so notable is that the outlet where she works, The Daily Wire, was an outlet that was founded by Ben Shapiro, who continues to be the public face of that news outlet.
It's not actually, Ben Shapiro does not run The Daily Wire.
He's not actually the CEO.
He's not Candace Owen's boss.
I think he has a relationship to The Daily Wire similar to the one that I had with The Intercept.
Where I founded The Intercept with Jeremy Scale and Laura Poitras.
I was the public face of it, but I didn't run it day-to-day.
Nobody reported to me there.
I wasn't the editor-in-chief.
I wasn't hiring and firing.
So Ben Owens, Ben Shapiro is not the person who hires and fires.
That's Jeremy Boring who does that, but he obviously has a huge amount of influence inside the DeliWire.
And now you have the DeliWire, founded by Ben Shapiro, arguably the most Steadfast and loyal supporter of Israel in the United States in terms of prominent platform.
Somebody who defends Israel and always has no matter what it does.
Someone who fervently believes that American citizens have the duty to finance Israel's military, to finance Israel's wars, to isolate itself as Joe Biden has repeatedly done from the rest of the world at the UN to protect Israel.
And then you have on the other hand Candace Owens Who alongside Tucker Carlson and others like Congressman Thomas Massie, the Republican of Kentucky, who's currently a target of AIPAC, has been applying conservative principles consistently, saying, why are we censoring critics of Israel in the United States?
Why don't American citizens have the right to criticize Israel, defend the Palestinian cause if they want?
Why are people getting fired for criticizing Israel or criticizing Joe Biden for financing Israel?
And why should Israel not be held to the same humanitarian standards in the way that they're conducting this war as we hold other countries to?
And this has obviously created a lot of tension on the right.
The fact that one of their most prominent pundits and journalists, Candace Owens, has become such a radical and outspoken dissident on a policy that has long been Embraced by most American conservatives by definition, which is that the United States should always pay for and finance and support and protect Israel.
This week, there was an article in Mediaite by Isaac Shore, who I would describe as a conservative, but most definitely would describe as a ardent Israel supporter.
Who wrote an article clearly with the intention of calling for Candace Owens to be fired by the Daily Wire.
The headline was, how long will the Daily Wire stand by Candace Owens?
And he wrote, quote, over the last six months, Owens has worked earnestly and incessantly to cultivate a following on the anti-Semitic right.
Now, let me just stop here and say that one of the primary grievances of American conservatives over the past decade, and it's a grievance that I think has validity and that I have supported and shared,
Is that many people on the liberal left, the kind of faction of the liberal left that remains loyal to the Democratic Party, has one primary tactic when it comes to their opponents, people who see things differently than they when they engage in political debates, and that is to brand their opponents racists, bigots, white supremacists,
It's like sometimes in left liberal discourse, it seems like the only objective is to take anyone who sees things differently with you and just call everybody a racist and a bigot.
To accuse everybody of seeing things differently than you because they're harboring hatred for a minority group.
And this tactic has been rightly condemned by conservatives as an attempt to destroy the reputation of people who disagree with liberals and to shut down debate.
Nobody wants to get called a racist in public.
Nobody wants to be branded a bigot.
And so it's an attempt to create a repressive atmosphere where everybody is afraid to question liberal orthodoxy or Democratic Party orthodoxy.
That is exactly the tactic.
Exactly the tactic, down to the detail, that Israel supporters of the United States have always used and continue to use.
Against anyone who criticizes Israel, against anyone who questions why the American government is supporting Israel, you will immediately be called a racist.
Not by liberals, but by pro-Israel conservatives.
You'll be called a racist and an anti-Semite.
And that will be true whether you're not someone who's Jewish, as Candace Owens is not, she's a Christian, or even if you are a Jew and a critic of Israel that is not immunity at all, they will accuse you of the same thing.
Automatically, every critic of Israel Or someone who opposes the U.S.
finance of Israel will, like Candace Owens just got done here and many times in other places, will be called an anti-Semite.
That is the go-to tactic by the same people who complain incessantly when the left and American liberals do that.
This article goes on, quote, Owens has emerged as a fierce critic of Israel, arguing its war in Gaza constitutes a genocide.
Now, I believe That as an American citizen, which Candace Owens is, she's allowed to be a fierce critic of Israel.
Israel is a foreign country.
You can be a fierce critic of Russia, you can be a fierce critic of Iran, you can be a fierce critic of China, you can be a fierce critic of Paraguay or South Korea, and you can be a fierce critic of Israel.
And in fact, you ought to have more space, not less, to criticize Israel given That every American taxpayer, by definition, helps to pay for Israel's military and its wars and its government and therefore gives you a right to criticize that country if you wish.
The article goes on, quote, her commentary has been laden with amateurish claims.
She recently alleged that the historic Muslim quarter of Jerusalem is a state enforced ghetto, for example.
The article then goes on, and I had pointed this article on Axe, and I said, look, it seems like the pro-Israel right is now calling for the same sorts of things that they claim only the left does, namely for people to be fired who disagree with their views.
And the author of that piece, Isaac Shore, said to me something like, well, are you saying you agree with what Candace Owens is saying?
And I said, I'm just defending her right to say it.
This difference, this distinction is crucial and it's basic and it's been recognized for as long as free speech has.
The fact that you're defending someone's right to say something obviously does not signify your agreement with everything they said.
But I said to him, why can't you just admit that the purpose of your article is to get her fired, is to call for her firing because she's a critic of Israel?
Now, one of the people who actually first led the way in calling for Candace Owens' firing is someone named Rabbi Shmuley who, in the pantheon of fanatical Israel supporters, is one of the most extremist People, there is.
He's somebody who enjoys using inflammatory and offensive rhetoric to call attention to himself.
He is somebody who, I would say, is even more extreme in defending Israel than Ben Shapiro.
There's not much space there to Ben Shapiro's more pro-Israel side.
If anyone is, Rabbi Shmuley is.
And ironically, Rabbi Shmuley has become the primary advisor to RFK Jr.
When it comes to questions of Israel, RFK Jr.
often runs to Rabbi Shmuley in order to embrace him.
When Democrats call RFK Jr.
anti-Semitic, he runs to Rabbi Shmuley and he vows to do everything possible to support Israel.
And here is Rabbi Shmuley, and many times he has done so, yesterday, posting, how long will the Daily Wire stand by Candace Owens trying to agitate for her firing?
Now, one of the things that Rabbi Shmueli said about Candace Owens this week, and I just want to give you a sense of just how much open season there is on Candace Owens now as a result of her obviously influential critique of Israel.
As we just got done seeing, and I can show you a million examples, there's a very sensitive radar for picking up anti-semitism on the part of Israel critics.
In fact, as we're about to show you, Candace Owens did a interview slash debate with a rabbi this week who accused her of being anti-semitic for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that she had referred to Rabbi Shmuley's daughter as a quote, hag, H-A-G, hag.
And the rabbi said, well, your use of the word hag is anti-semitic.
And Candace Owens said, what?
The word hag is anti-Semitic now?
And he explained why there's this 17th and 18th century genesis of the word hag that was used to demonize Jews, in particular Jewish women.
Very sensitive hair trigger for accusing people of being racist and anti-Semitic.
So I want you to look at what Rabbi Shmuley said this week about Candace Owens, the adjectives that he chose to use to demonize her.
This is what he said, quote, I did this video so that Candace Owens, troglodyte, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal, anti-Semitic thug followers, who for days have tried to deepfake my voice with AI racial slurs, but have thus far failed miserably since they're a bunch of morons, might get my voice more accurately so they can actually persuade people.
I'm trying to be helpful, guys, so listen to my message.
What he's saying here is Candace Owens supporters are accusing Rabbi Shmuley being a racist and he's saying, but I'm not a racist.
And yet I want you to look at the adjectives that he chose to use for Candace Owens, a black woman.
Now, anybody who has read my work, anybody who has watched my show, Know is that I very rarely voice racism accusations or bigotry accusations.
It's just not a tactic that I think is very helpful.
It doesn't mean I don't think people are bigots or harboring racist thoughts or other kinds of bigotries.
I know that those are around.
I just, in general, I don't think it's a productive way of trying to engage in discourse, which is why I oppose that when left liberals do that as a way of winning debates, calling everybody racist and white supremacists.
And why I also hate it when Israel supporters run around calling everybody anti-Semite who disagrees with them on Israel.
But what Rabbi Shmuley said about Candace Owens, especially if you're somebody who has a hair trigger for anti-Semitism, you see it lurking everywhere where Israel critics appear.
The adjectives he chose to use are so blatantly designed to invoke stereotypes about black people when demeaning Candace Owens, that it's impossible not to notice.
Here's, again, the adjectives that he chose to use about her.
She's a troglodyte, and of course, he's gonna say here that he's talking about her supporters, but you see the word Candace Owens, that's followed by troglodyte, knuckle-dragging, neanderthal, and thug, her thug followers.
So I point this out simply to show you that there are now open calls for Candace Owens to be fired because of reviews on Israel by an American right that has long claimed that it defends free speech, not just censorship from the government, but the idea that people should be fired, especially in journalism, because of people disagreeing with their views.
And it's now open season on Candace Owens, her character, And her job at the Daily Wire.
To the point that you can invoke the most racist insults possible against Candace Owens and it's totally fine.
It's fine.
Because Candace Owens is a critic of Israel.
And there are no limits as a result of what can be done.
Now, here is the...
I don't know if we have this rabbi's name.
I need this rabbi's name.
It's on my mind.
We're going to get it for you.
We're going to get it for you in a second.
But basically, he tried to present himself as what I would say is kind of like the reasonable, moderate version of Rabbi Shmuley.
He definitely is there to say that Candace Owens is an anti-Semite.
Every critic of Israel is an anti-Semite.
Anyone who questions why the United States government is paying for Israel's wars, absolutely an anti-Semite.
But he tried, you know, he's wearing a suit, he tried to adopt a tone that was designed to convince her that she was an anti-Semite.
Rabbi Shmuel will just call her a monkey, basically, and be done with it.
This rabbi was trying to be more It's Rabbi Barkley.
And so essentially what happened was he was one of the people, one of the voices that said Candace Owens is an anti-Semite, questioned why she's associated with the Deli Wire.
And so she invited him onto her show to explain or argue or to persuade her why she is an anti-Semite.
And so I just want to give you a little bit of taste of the dialogue that ensued because it really is such a window into the climate that we have in the United States right now and the space or lack of space that exists for people who want to exercise their absolute right to criticize this foreign country and to question why the United States government is paying for its military and its wars.
Here is this Can someone play that for me?
...but not condemn these horrific events?
You don't condemn them uniquely evil.
You put them in para-pussu relationship.
So you're saying that even though I did...
So now you're admitting that I did condemn Hamas, even though he refused to condemn Hamas...
What condemnation is?
Is this where you really want to go, is have an English discussion about what condemnation is?
Because when you put that, the moment you say that they have a moral equivalency with anything else, that's not condemnation, no matter what you're saying.
It's not condemnation.
You see what happens there, and trust me, I've had this lie said about me a million times.
The October 7th attack by Hamas in Israel happened on October 7th, which was a Saturday.
Most people heard about it Saturday night into Sunday morning.
The very first show that we had after October 7th was Monday, October 9th.
And I spent, I would say, the first 30 minutes of that program Constructing an argument as to why it is that even if you're somebody who believes that Israel has been abusing the Palestinians over decades, as I do, by occupying illegally the West Bank that does not belong to Israel, by expanding settlements in the West Bank rapidly in a way that makes a two-state settlements impossible,
Even if you're somebody who believes that the Israelis have turned Gaza into an open-air prison by bombing its airport, preventing anybody from leaving by air, killing them if they try and leave by sea, closing the borders along with the U.S.-supported dictator in Egypt to prevent them from leaving, so they're trapped in this little tiny space of land, so it's an open-air prison.
Even if you believe, as the former head of the Mossad, chosen by Benjamin Netanyahu, argued in September of 2023, the month before October 7th, that Israel is an apartheid regime, that was his words, the head of the Mossad, the former head of the Mossad.
Even if you believe all those things I argued on October 9th, you still can't justify any targeting of civilians inside Israel or anywhere else, because the targeting and deliberate killing of civilians as a weapon of war is always unjustified.
And I argued that on October 10th and October 11th, and that has always been my view.
I didn't just say it in passing.
I constructed a long argument as to why I could not find moral justification.
Obviously, if Hamas attacks military installations or police stations inside Israel, those are legitimate targets of war.
And Hamas did a lot of that.
But doing things like going to a rave and recklessly shooting and killing a bunch of civilians or doing them in kibbutzes, kidnapping people from Israel to hold them as hostages in Gaza, that I argued at length could not be morally justified.
It's always been my view and I can't tell you how many times I've heard in the context of my criticism of Israel or U.S.
support for Israel, people say, you've never criticized Hamas or denounced what happened on October 7th.
And my reaction is just what Candace Owens' reaction is, which is, it's just a lie.
Why do you feel justified in just outright lying?
So when this rabbi said about Candace Owens, and she read the statement, she has never condemned Hamas or October 7th.
She said, I've condemned Hamas repeatedly for what they've done on October 7th, and then he switched to, the problem is you don't condemn it the way we demand you condemn it, meaning you don't agree that it's a singular evil, that what Hamas did on October 7th is unlike anything that has ever happened in history before, that there's no comparison to it.
And that is obviously insane and preposterous.
What Hamas did in October 7th in Israel was morally unjustifiable, but it is not the single greatest act of evil in human history to which nothing can be compared.
And if you compare other events to October 7th and to Hamas in the course of denouncing what Hamas did, including things that Israel has done to the Palestinians, it doesn't give people the right to then still falsely accuse you of not having condemned Hamas.
And that's exactly what this rabbi is saying is, okay, you maybe have condemned Hamas, but because you compared it to other things and said, you don't just lament what Hamas did, but you've lament what Israel did as well in killing innocent people.
The fact that you're in some way comparing them means that I have a right to not only falsely accuse you of not having condemned Hamas, but also being an anti-Semite.
Listen to the rest of this.
She wrote, she refused to condemn Hamas.
These are your words.
Because when you put that, the moment you say that they have a moral equivalency with anything else, that's not condemnation.
I didn't.
I said it's sad when an innocent... It's not condemnation.
I'll just ask you a question.
Is it sad?
Is it sad?
Sure.
I don't want to cut each other off, okay?
Because clearly what we are having here is just a disagreement.
There's no reason to get angry.
Do you think it is sad?
So this is the statement of Candace Owens that caused Ben Shapiro to attack her publicly on several occasions, including going to a college and saying that she's a moral idiot.
Candace Owens said, I think it's sad when any innocent child is killed.
She was obviously referring to Israelis and Palestinians and everybody else, but because it was not a statement geared toward only condemning Hamas and to the killing of Israelis, but she also instead made the mistake of recognizing that Arab and Palestinian lives have value as well.
Including the Palestinian Christians who have been killed inside Gaza.
There are Palestinian Christians, there are churches inside Gaza.
The former Michigan Congressman Justin Amash, who is of Palestinian descent, is now running for the Republican, in the Republican primary to be a senator from Michigan, is of Palestinian Christian descent.
Part of his family were among the Palestinian Christians killed in Gaza.
And so she made a general statement that she thinks is lamentable when innocent life, especially innocent children, are killed, and that somehow offended Israel supporters.
And this rabbi is arguing to her that that statement somehow made her an anti-Semite.
Candace, I cry every day.
And it's not just for Israel.
Okay, so she asked him, do you agree with my statement that it's a tragedy when Innocent children are killed.
And here's what he tells her in response.
Candace, I cry every day.
And it's not just for Israel.
And this is one of the things you clearly do not understand.
The same way most don't, who are anti-Semites, you don't get it.
I cry for what's going on in Israel.
I cry just as much for what we are forced to do Golda Meir had a great quote.
She said that one day we may be able to forgive them for killing Israeli children.
We will never be able to forgive them for making us kill their children.
So what about my statement of saying that I also cry for Palestinian children is wrong to you if you also admit it is sad when Palestinian children die?
It's painful, but it is not.
So, I want to, I think the important thing in this exchange is the following.
That is the anti-Semitic bigotry.
But I didn't say that.
I just want to be clear.
People are watching.
It's just not what came out of my mouth.
But I'm not going to, I don't want to get hung up.
I don't want to get hung up on that.
I want to now point to, you said I wanted to talk about the depravities.
So I want to, I think the important thing in this exchange is the following.
Candace Owens condemned October 7th.
And then according to the rabbi, and she denies it, but let's assume it's true.
So just for the moment, Candace Owens compared what Hamas did in killing Israelis on October 7th to what Israel has done in killing innocent Palestinians.
And maybe you don't agree with that.
Maybe you think that Hamas, when they kill Israeli citizens, are moral monsters.
And when the Israelis kill innocent Palestinians, they're angelic or benevolent or they're just doing it reluctantly.
There are a lot of people who do believe that.
And this Golda Meir quote has always made me so sick.
Made me sick.
Because what it says is, When we go and kill Arabs and Palestinians and kill children and women and starve them to death, we're not doing that because we're deciding on our own agency to do it.
We're doing it because they forced us to do it.
And that's that Golda Meir quote.
Oh, look, we'll forgive them for killing our babies, but what would be much more difficult is forgiving them for forcing us to kill theirs.
Now you may, again, disagree that there's things to compare October 7th to.
You really might think that, for whatever reason, when Hamas killed several hundred civilians, and that's how many civilians were killed by Hamas inside Israel on October 7th, it wasn't thousands.
The number was originally 1,400 of dead people they gave.
They lowered it to 1,200.
At least 400 to 500 of them are members of the military and the police.
You're talking about active members.
You're talking about 700 civilians or so.
And many of them were killed by the Israeli military.
So Hamas killed hundreds of Israeli civilians.
It was morally unjustifiable.
There were atrocities committed.
But I don't believe that it was something that nothing can be compared to, that it was the act of singular evil.
But even if you do believe that, it's not anti-Semitic to say, I condemn what Hamas did, but I also lament the killing of innocent babies by Israel and Gaza as well, or in the West Bank as well.
You may disagree with the comparison, but how is that in any way, shape, or form anti-Semitic?
And this is actually the problem, is that What has been done in the Israel debate is that there is an imposition of obligations about how you can talk about Israel, about the extent to which you can criticize it, about how you're allowed to question U.S.
government policy for supporting it.
And if you step out of those little lines that have been drawn for you by other people like this rabbi or Rabbi Shmuley or Ben Shapiro or whomever, you won't be debated, you won't be engaged with.
You'll be branded a racist and you will have your job at risk of being fired, of being censored as so many people have.
And the fact that it is the American right who has been marching under the banner of anti-cancellation and free speech and free discourse and stop calling people racist is now leading the way and doing this to Candace Owens as punishment for the fact that she has opened up some space for criticizing Israel and the American right.
I think is highly illustrative of what's taking place inside American conservatism, where a lot of people who claim to believe in a whole wide range of values, when it comes time to criticize their political opponents on the left, embrace exactly those tactics in defense of Israel.
And they haven't only been doing it since October 7th, they've been doing it for many years before that, as we've documented many times before.
It's accelerated after October 7th.
And even if you're a supporter of Israel, and I want to be very clear that there are a lot of supporters of Israel who do not do this, who are not guilty of this.
Even if you're a supporter of Israel, you should not be in support of these kind of tactics.
Putting people's jobs in risk because they don't support the war in Israel, or because they question their own government's financing of Israel, or they get called anti-Semitic.
And I think what's happening with Candace Owens is highly illustrative of that and we will continue to follow that story for sure.
Hope to have Candace actually on the show sometime next week to explore in a little bit more detail exactly what she does and doesn't think but this is something that has been happening over and over and over since October 7th and we absolutely oppose it and denounce it for the same reason we do when it comes from other political factions in defense of other political causes.
All right, so speaking of people who seem incapable of applying their stated principles consistently, the former host of CNN, Don Lamond, who was fired by CNN for all kinds of reasons, beginning with the fact that nobody watches his show,
The precipitating event, as you might remember, was that he was hosting The Morning Show with two female colleagues, Poppy Harlow and some other CNN host, and he said Nikki Haley is beyond her prime as a woman.
Women, the prime of women, he said, are in their 30s and 40s, and she's beyond her prime.
And he had had a lot of very abusive arguments with people who work at CNN, both in front of the camera and behind it.
And CNN fired him, but they ended up agreeing to pay him $24 million, which was the amount left on his contract.
CNN was paying Don Lamont something like six or seven million dollars a year even though nobody was watching his show.
I think he had three years left on his contract.
Maybe it was eight million dollars a year that paid him 24 million dollars left on his contract.
And then Elon Musk obviously wanting some mainstream credibility for acts as an effort to bring back advertisers.
I think that's the reason probably.
Offered Don Lamon a contract to pay him a lot of money to put the Don Lamon Show on X, just like Tucker Carlson has his show on X, although Tucker Carlson's not getting paid by X.
I don't know exactly what the contract was.
It was never actually signed, but they did agree to it orally.
And as a result, Elon agreed to sit down with Don Lamond to be interviewed as Don Lamond's debut show.
Obviously that would bring a lot of attention to Don Lamond's show and that was something Elon wanted because the idea was to put this Don Lamond show on X. But Don Lamond sat down with Elon and was exactly The same person as he was on CNN.
It's incredible that so many people who leave their media outlets, I've talked about before how when I left The Intercept, there were all kinds of ways that I had been constrained that I didn't realize until I left and I became freer.
You can obviously see Tucker Carlson now that he's not at Fox any longer.
So much more liberated in terms of what he's willing to talk about and how he's willing to say it.
And even Chris Cuomo, who was at CNN and got fired.
And now is more on his own.
He's at News Nation.
He sat down with Tucker last week for a two-hour conversation.
And even in that conversation, you could tell Chris Cuomo was willing to say things that he would never have said had he still been at CNN.
Even just talking to Tucker, he would never have agreed to talk to Tucker when he was at CNN.
That would have been immediate cancellation by CNN's liberal audience to even talk to Kirk Carlson.
So you see a lot of people changing when they leave the constraints of their media corporations, not Don Lamond.
He was not a CNN person because he was at CNN.
He was at CNN because he's a CNN person.
And so you can take Don Lamont out of CNN, but you can never take the CNN out of Don Lamont.
And so he basically was just being a CNN host, spouting the most banal liberal pieties in the most pompous and entitled and vapid ways.
And so at the end of the interview, Elon Musk, not because he was being challenged, but because he was talking to an idiot.
wrote a text to Don Lamond's representative saying contract canceled.
And so Don Lamond went and released the entire interview.
A lot of it was him badgering Elon Musk about whether he's a drug user.
Elon Musk has talked about how he uses a prescription of ketamine to address symptoms of depression.
And Don Lamond tried to take that and suggest that Elon Musk was a drug addict.
It was a very tawdry interview, but it was very predictable what happened because Elon Musk is public enemy number two To American liberals after Trump and Donald Munch is an American liberal and that is all that happened.
But they did have conversations in which Donald Munch was attempting to condemn Elon Musk for his failure to censor more on the platform that I do think is worth watching just because of how illustrative it is of the liberal mindset about censorship.
Last night we covered The oral argument that the Supreme Court had yesterday, and people like Tanya Brown-Jackson and other liberals on the court, seem to be explicitly endorsing the idea that the U.S.
government has to censor speech on the internet.
The New York Times published an article over the weekend preparing its readers about that Supreme Court case, where they basically did the same thing.
I had Matt Taibbi on the show last night.
We covered that New York Times article in depth because all it was doing was offering justifications For the idea that we can't allow the internet to be unconstrained with censorship because it's too dangerous if there's free speech.
This is gospel now and establishment thought.
Don Lamon is somebody who oozed out of establishment sewers and so he's talking to Elon Musk and he's saying the things that he has been immersed in for the last two decades.
And in this exchange, you can really see this core debate that we as a society are having about free speech and censorship.
Here's part of what was said.
You recently called content moderation, though, a digital chastity belt.
Do you think that you believe that X and U have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform?
I think we have a responsibility to adhere to the law and we have a responsibility to be transparent about when things are shown, why they're shown.
So that's why we open sourced our algorithm.
I think once you start going beyond the law, now you're putting a thumb on the scale.
And we don't want to put our thumb on the scale.
It doesn't concern you that hate speech is gone?
Research shows that it's gone up on the platform since you took over.
That's not concerning to you?
I believe that is false.
In fact, the research that I've seen says it went down.
The study from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue found that anti-Semitic tweets doubled from June 22 to February 2023.
One study reported that as many as 86% of the posts reported for hateful content remained up after being reported.
Hate speech?
on the platform is up. - So what they will typically do is they will count the number of posts but not count the number of views.
So what matters is, was that post given high visibility or did like one person see it?
And if you look at the number of views, how many times was his content viewed on our platform It is down substantially.
Well, that's not what the study shows.
And you said you like transparency.
I'm going to show you this.
Don, you can get a study that will tell you whatever you want.
These are just a handful of extremely, if you look at those anti-Semitic and racist tropes and tweets.
All right, so Don Lamont is complaining that there's a anti-Semitic racist trope and tweet that is up on Twitter, and he shows them several examples, and these are from random users of the platform.
What Elon Musk is saying is that if speech is illegal, if somebody publishes child pornography onto X, which is illegal, or somebody publishes a direct threat, here's the address of the senator, go and murder them, then you take it down.
Then it's illegal.
But if it's not legal, if it's not illegal, Why should we be censors?
Why should we be removing political speech?
Now, what Elon Musk is actually saying is, we will suppress it.
We'll make sure it's not visible in terms of advertisers having to be associated with this content.
And if anything, you could criticize Elon Musk for intervening even to that extent by suppressing speech.
Why should they be acting as arbiters of which speech should be suppressed and which speech should be more seen?
And you can criticize Elon Musk because he has done a good job of reducing the amount of censorship on that platform compared to what it was like before he bought it.
There's no question about that.
But he has not really fully adhered to the standard that if speech is illegal, it will be permitted.
That's why people like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West have been banned from the platform, not because they said anything remotely illegal, but because they expressed views that Elon Musk doesn't want Twitter to be associated with.
There have been other examples of people who have criticized Israel or who have expressed other kinds of views that people have deemed offensive, who have been banned or suspended.
If anything, the way to criticize Elon Musk is by saying, you know, the principle you're defending is extremely commendable.
And, you know, you paid a lot of money for this platform, not because you thought you were going to make money from it, but because you wanted to promote this principle and you deserve credit for that.
But actually, there are a lot of times where you've fallen short of the principle that you've said you would uphold, namely where people were censored even though the speech wasn't illegal.
But that's not at all what Don Lamont is interested in.
He, like every Democrat that exists basically in the United States practically, has only one grievance, which is that you're not censoring enough.
And he got to sit down with one of the most influential people in the world, Elon Musk, and decided to use his time, even though he considers himself a journalist, to agitate for more censorship.
To argue over and over again that what the society is lacking is more censorship.
We need more censorship.
We have too much free speech.
Here's the argument he made.
Just a handful of extremely, you look at those anti-semitic and racist tropes and tweets, and as of this morning, they're still on X. And from your own content policy, these posts should have been deleted.
So why haven't they been deleted?
Why are they still there?
Uh, we delete things if they are illegal.
These have been up there for a while.
Are they illegal?
They're not illegal, but...
So, I think what people like Don Lamont don't understand when they say that is that every single political view has the potential to incite violence.
to radicalize.
So, Don, you love.
So, I think what people like Don Lamont don't understand when they say that is that every single political view has the potential to incite violence.
We've talked about before how the person who went and shot up a softball field in 2018 and almost killed Steve Scalise, who did shoot Steve Scalise and tried to murder as many Republican members of Congress as he could, did so because he was feeding on speeches by Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow, of whom he was a huge fan.
And they were telling him over and over that the Republican Party is a fascist, white supremacist party beholden to Russia, and he believed them.
And decided he should go and kill Republicans because of how radicalized he got by that speech.
In Holland, there have been a couple of right-wing politicians who were murdered by environmentalists, by radical environmentalists.
So someone stands up and gives a speech like Greta Thunberg and says, the world is ending and your children are endangered because of people who oppose environmental reform.
You could easily go and inspire someone to engage in violence.
against people who are opposed to environmental reform.
After all, you've been told that those people are endangering your children.
This standard can be if you go and you say, people who oppose abortion are endangering the lives of women.
You could easily inspire someone to go and try and bomb a pro-life office as has happened.
If you tell people that Opposing the rights of transgender people puts at risk the lives of transgender people.
It could inspire a transgender person to go and attack a Christian school in Tennessee and kill six people, as actually happened.
Any kind of political speech has the potential to inspire violence and actually sometimes does.
But this is not an idea that Don Lamond can recognize because these kinds of things never enter that world.
The only thing Don Lamond understands or believes is that only right-wing speech, the things that he disagrees with, are capable of inspiring violence.
And so to him, it's just so obvious that any views that Don Lamond disagrees with are views that should not be heard because they're dangerous and he is incapable and he is not unique in this.
of understanding that he's advocating basic censorship for exactly the same reason that censors throughout history have urged the suppression of speech with which they disagree because they just don't want any dissent from being circulating and ultimately that is what Elon Musk told him because that really is the only conclusion.
They're not illegal but they're hateful and they can they can lead to violence as I just read to you the shooters you know in all of these mass shootings attributed social media to radicalizing them.
- So Don, you love censorship is what you're saying? - No, I don't love censorship.
- Then why are you asking? - I believe in moderation, but I don't believe in- - Censorship is a, moderation is a propaganda word for censorship.
- But don't you think free speech is- - This is something, I'm so happy to hear that out of Elon Musk's mouth.
It is amazing that obviously liberals want censorship, They say it all the time.
It's classic censorship.
They say, we want this information censored and silenced and banned and prohibited because it's hateful or because it's disinformation.
And then when you tell them you're advocating censorship, even though by definition they are, no one wants to believe they're a censor, They have been given an Orwellian propaganda term that describes censorship, but it's just a different word.
They say, no, we're not in favor of censorship, we're in favor of content moderation.
And as Elon said, and I've been pointing this out for years, content moderation is the liberal euphemism for censorship.
And you just see it here.
I mean, I think a lot of people have trouble when I say things like Don Lamon can't process these ideas because he's not exposed to them in his world.
And people think, no, no, you're underestimating how sinister he is or how cunning he is.
I don't think Don Lamon is cunning.
I think he is genuinely incapable of processing these ideas, in large part because liberal discourse is completely closed.
These ideas never penetrate the world of CNN.
Don Lamont spends all of his time in the Hamptons with the host of The View and everybody who agrees with him on every core issue about Donald Trump and the American right and populism and censorship.
There's no dissent in his world.
To them, these are not just other views because they don't know anybody who expresses these views.
These are hateful views, dangerous views.
And they have come to truly be convinced in their core, genuinely, earnestly, not manipulatively, that the only solution to keep society safe is to not permit the expression of views that they dislike.
And because they have been given a propaganda word to describe it, content moderation, They can say I'm not advocating censorship even though what they're advocating by definition is censorship.
"Censorship is a propaganda word for censorship.
But don't you think free speech is one thing, right?
Or not, you know, not censorship." "Look, if something's illegal, we're going to take it down.
If it's not illegal, then we're putting our thumb on the scale and we're being censors.
You're putting your thumb on the scale for moderating hate speech.
I mean, you don't put out child pornography.
That's not, it's illegal.
Some people would say that's considered censorship.
I'm just saying.
There's absolutely nobody on the planet who believes that not permitting child pornography is censorship.
And do you see how Don Lamond's brain, like, froze there?
Elon Musk said, if it's illegal, we're going to take it down.
If it's not illegal, we're going to leave it up.
Otherwise, we're putting our thumb on the scale of political speech.
And then Don Lamond said, well, what about child pornography?
I don't know if Don Lamond didn't realize child pornography is illegal.
I just think that he's incapable of engaging in this argument.
To him, it's so obvious, like it is to almost every liberal that exists.
That this speech isn't speech you disagree with, it's speech that you ban.
Don, you know, I literally said, if something is legal, okay, we will obviously remove it.
Okay.
But if it is not legal, the laws in this country are put forward by the citizens, we're a democracy.
If those laws are put in place by the people, we adhere to those laws.
Okay, I agree.
If you go beyond the law, you're actually going beyond the will of the people.
Okay, agreed.
With the law.
But if you are doing something that promotes hate and violence and ultimately leads to killing, you don't feel you have any responsibility not to do that?
When the people who are doing it admittedly are saying... I think the mainstream media does articles all the time that lead to violence and killing.
Don't they?
Shouldn't they?
It's like you're applying a differential standard to... But that would never, that would never be in mainstream media.
These types of images, that type of language, those things would never be, we'd never, when I was in mainstream media, we'd never promote things that would be anti-Semitic.
In mainstream media, we would never publish any hateful ideas.
We don't spread hate.
Don Lamont went on TV every night and basically described half the country as being white supremacists and fascists and criminals and insurrectionists.
They have spread conspiracy theories of every kind.
Almost every American war happened because the mainstream media spread hate and lies that provoke the support of the American people for things like the war in Vietnam, for things like the war in Iraq, for support for the endless war in Ukraine, all based on propaganda and lies that that part of the media spread.
And I just, I think that This is why I say I think that this is so illuminating because he can say with a straight face, we in the mainstream media don't do anything that spreads hatred or division, only you're doing that.
Obviously the other issue is that when you're a media outlet of course you're picking and choosing what kind of views you want to air.
That's not the role of a social media platform.
Elon Musk said Twitter is, and now X, is a public square and the worst thing that I could possibly do as the owner of Twitter or the owner of X is to pick and choose which views Should be heard, and which one shouldn't be.
Now, again, the criticism of Elon Musk, the valid one, the valid line of questioning is, why are you censoring as much as you have?
What about this case, and this case, and this case, where you seem to have deviated from that principle?
But Don Lamont only wants more censorship.
We would never promote things that would... Did you not see those?
You said promote.
If content is on the platform, that doesn't mean we promote it.
But that wouldn't be on a platform for mainstream media at all.
No, but you can think of... That's because the mainstream media has like, whatever, 20 articles a day.
We have 500 million posts a day.
Okay, understood.
500 million.
Does it bother you?
How do you feel about that, when you see it?
I obviously disagree with that.
I think it's not good at all.
It's terrible.
But you don't want to get rid of it on the platform, or at least moderate it?
The rules... What you're suggesting is censorship that goes beyond the law.
And what I'm saying is that we, I guess, have a disagreement.
Because I do not believe in censorship that goes beyond the law.
And you do.
We have a difference of opinion in that regard.
I understand that.
But these are your own rules on your own platform.
These go against the rules on your platform.
That's why I'm asking you.
If you said, listen, we allow everything.
But that's not what your content rules say.
And that's why I'm asking you why they're still there.
Your own content policy.
That's why I'm asking you that.
Which part of our content policy says that we should delete these things?
Your content policy talks about hate speech.
Yes, we don't promote hate speech.
And so you don't consider that hate speech?
I guess you're not understanding what I'm saying.
You can sign up right now and do a hundred things that are hateful.
But if nobody reads it, it doesn't matter.
So, you can think of X as being, it's much like the internet.
It's not some tiny publication with like 20 articles a day.
It's 500 million.
But everyone has the opportunity to read a D-Lot.
Everyone has the opportunity to read the internet.
Are you suggesting we should shut down the internet?
No, but you don't own the internet.
I'm asking you about you and your responsibility and your platform.
So, I see how you feel now.
You don't agree.
We don't agree on this.
I mean, I think it's really worth listening to because if you actually force somebody to say what it is they think, they will eventually end up saying, I want more censorship.
And even if they haphazardly avoid the use of that word, it becomes very manifest that that's what they want.
And as I will never tire of pointing out, One of the most extraordinary facts is that it is the people who call themselves journalists who are the leading agitators and activists for censorship.
Here's a person who proves that so vividly.
And there's nothing unique about Don Lamont.
That's why he stayed at CNN for 15 years.
He fits perfectly into that culture.
And he is expressing a view that almost every Democrat and liberal I know that I hear from Shares and believes, which is that censorship is not only a societal good, it is a societal necessity.
And that the problem we have in the United States is not that we don't have enough free speech, that we have too much censorship, it's the reverse, that we have too much free speech and not enough censorship.
And liberal political activism led by journalists is largely about controlling the flow of information and censoring and silencing political dissent because they don't want to engage in political debates.
They don't want to have to account for their views.
They don't want to have to persuade anybody.
Their strategy for winning, and Don Lamont is saying this over and over, as did the New York Times over the weekend, as did many of the justices in the Supreme Court, as has the Biden administration.
Their strategy for winning is not to persuade.
It's not to engage in debate.
It's to forcibly silence the views with which they disagree.
And on some level, it's probably the first time in Don Lamont's career that he actually did something in the public service because Being forced for six straight minutes to explicitly advocate censorship that way, I think, gives a perfect window into how these people really think.
And this is, in my view, one of the top two or three threats we face is the fact that the people who wield power, who define orthodoxy, are people who do not believe in the value of free speech at all.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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We had intended to do a last segment on AOC and Bernie and Bernie's new podcast and what it reveals about the function of those two perform in the Democratic Party simply for time reasons, especially because we're about to go do our live after show.
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