Candace Owens & the Daily Wire’s Dramatic Break-Up: Free Speech & the Pro-Israel Right. Horrific Terrorist Attack Unfolding in Moscow. ACLU’s Internal Implosion
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Candace Owens Out of Daily Wire Over Israel (8:08)
Horrific Terrorist Attack in Moscow (36:59)
ACLU Implodes Over Internal Drama (48:14)
Ending (58:52)
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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.
As you can see, we are not in our studio tonight.
There is a major thunderstorm that is already underway here and expected to go to the weekend, and we wanted to make sure to prioritize the safety of the people we work with, and so nobody's coming into the studio.
We are here instead at the location I generally use to do interviews We're not at the studio, so it's a little stripped down, more intimate version on this Friday night edition of System Update, but I am confident it will work fine.
If anything, it might be a little bit even more relaxed than usual.
We do have a lot to talk tonight about, including and beginning with the fact that Candace Owens, the extremely popular conservative pundit and activist and broadcaster who has worked for the last several years at the Very popular right wing outlet, The Daily Wire, founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring, is out of a job at The Daily Wire.
And by all accounts, including a lot of reporting that I've been able to do, including speaking to people very close to the situation, the reason is extremely clear.
There's nothing doubtful or ambiguous about it.
The reason is, is that The Daily Wire was founded by two people, Ben Shapiro in particular, who are among The most radical, extremist, vocal, and unyielding supporters of the State of Israel that the world has seen.
That it's about as extremist as it gets.
And at the same time, Candace Owens, ever since October 7th has been increasingly critical of the state of Israel and not so much the state of Israel as much as the policy that the United States has adopted for many decades, including now, of financing Israel's wars and financing Israel's military.
And Candace comes from the part of the Republican Party that has defined itself as being an America first party in terms of Foreign policy and the like.
And she has argued vehemently against funding the war in Ukraine on the grounds that we should not be encouraging and fueling foreign countries' wars.
And instead of making a sudden exception for Israel, she instead has applied those arguments consistently to Israel and said the United States should also not be financing Israel's wars or making Israel's wars our own wars.
She's also been critical of the humanitarian crisis caused in Gaza by the Israeli military.
This has caused a lot of tension at The Daily Wire, and as her criticisms have become more vocal, there has been more and more of an effort to demand her firing by prominent rabbis, by the Anti-Defamation League, and you could see it coming.
It was only a question of time before The Daily Wire, a media outlet that was founded on values of free speech and free inquiry and opposing cancel culture, things like firing people, journalists, Because of disagreement with the views that they expressed, it was only a matter of time before they got rid of Candace Owens because of her dissent on Israel.
And that's exactly what has happened.
And as a result, she is now out of the daily wire.
We will examine what happened there as well as the implications for things like The American right and claims of free speech and free discourse and opposition to cancel culture and whether or not people can really exist on the in a conservative movement in any meaningful way.
And at the same time question this foreign country or criticize this foreign country or the United States policy toward it.
Then we will also look at a unfolding news event, which is a major terrorist attack that took place just a couple of hours ago in Moscow at a very popular Concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow at a concert for a well-known Russian rock band called Picnic.
There are at least 40 Russian citizens or 40 people in Russia who are dead, another at least 180 or so who are wounded.
It's a very early count.
It's almost certainly to increase.
There are a lot of horrific images of that scene that have been circulating.
It was clearly a terrorist attack with people just going with automatic weapons and gunning down anybody they could find, deliberately killing them even as they were cowering.
It was clearly a class terrorist attack.
There were a lot of claims early on, including from prominent media outlets, that the culprit here was Vladimir Putin.
In other words, that he ordered an attack on his own country, that this is basically a false flag where he would be designed, where it was designed to falsely claim that it was Ukraine that did it in order for him to then go and attack Ukraine in all sorts of unprecedented ways.
There's zero evidence for that.
And yet already there are all kinds of claims circulating on the Internet, including from people who work within mainstream corporate media who just decided to spread that conspiracy theory.
Although the United States government now says that ISIS is to blame and we'll look at that as well.
And then finally, the ACLU, which had once been a civil liberties organization, an organization devoted to free speech, has become just the latest in a long line of left liberal
Outlets and activist groups and organizations that has succumbed to almost complete internal implosion because they are filled with people who, rather than focus on the work of the organization, instead love to run around accusing each other of being racist and harassing each other and being abusive and toxic and problematic in the workplace.
And they end up riven by internal conflict instead of by the mission that they claim they are created to do in the case of the ACLU, protect constitutional rights.
Instead, all of their internal resources end up devoted to trying to arbitrate between wars between various left liberal employees who are accusing one another of being racist and sexist and all sorts of other bigotries, and it causes the organization to become completely paralyzed.
The latest case of the ACLU, which was reported today in the New York Times in detail, is almost a caricature that's hilarious if you just look at it on its own in terms of how extreme it is, but it's also such a caricature of what most left liberal organizations are being paralyzed with, They really are a victim of their own creation, just their own frankensteins that are consuming them and eating up.
And we look at this ACLU case as well, because in the case of the ACLU, it actually implicates their core Mission, which is the question of free speech, and in order to justify the firing one of their employees by claiming that this woman, who's an Asian woman, was guilty of anti-Black racism, they need to argue for an expanded definition of the term hate speech.
Obviously inconsistent with the ACLU's core values.
So we're going to take a look at those three stories in the place that is not the place where we normally do our show, but we think we will be able to do it perfectly fine.
In fact, maybe even a little bit better.
We'll see.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
KS Owens is one of the most influential and popular political commentators in the United States.
Her podcast is listened to literally by millions of people.
Millions more are listening on YouTube.
And ever since 2020 or 2021, she has done her work as a member of, an employee of, the right-wing website The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is itself one of the great success stories, at least from a business perspective, when it comes to new media.
It's a company that was formed in 2015 by the right-wing pro-Israel commentator Ben Shapiro and by a longtime conservative filmmaker in Hollywood, Jeremy Boring.
It doesn't exactly have a scrappy startup story.
It was created with the investments of a right-wing billionaire that gave them tens of millions, if not more, of startup cash that it then converted into a very successful site.
Although the key to its success was that for whatever reason it was able to reach an agreement with Facebook where the shows that were on the Daily Wire, especially Ben Shapiro, ended up being aggressively promoted by the Facebook algorithm in a way that spread the Daily Wire show, especially Ben Shapiro's show, far more Pervasively than almost any other program on Facebook.
And as a result of that, and there were meetings between Ben Shapiro and Mark Zuckerberg that were widely reported.
Though Daily Wire became a true new media behemoth that has an audience that competes with the size of a lot of establishment media outlets.
And Ben Shapiro himself and the Daily Wire was created based on an ethos that has become extremely, not only popular, but very lucrative.
Among American conservatives, among people who brand themselves as heterodox, which is that they believe in free speech, they believe in free discourse, they oppose cancel culture, they dislike the weaponization of racism accusations against people who disagree with them.
They believe that the solution to people who disagree with you is not to scream bigot at them, not to fire them, not to silence them, but to engage them in debate.
All these very moving and inspiring and virtuous values that Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire have embraced and branded themselves as defending to the great profit of those who founded that organization.
Starting on October 7th, that model that's very easy to champion, as long as most of the people within your organization are people who agree with you on most of the issues about what you care most, began to be quite strained and tested by virtue of the fact that rather than having a lot of agreement, suddenly they began to have disagreement, not on ancillary issues, but on the issues about which Ben Shapiro cares most, namely the issue of Israel.
After October 7th, Ben Shapiro became probably the most histrionic and emotional and aggressive voice in not only defending every last thing this foreign country does.
He obviously has a lot of roots in this foreign country.
He was in Israel on the day before October 7th.
His family members, I believe his wife is Israeli.
He has real estate in Israel.
He's been asked before why he doesn't move to Israel.
And he said, because he thinks he can do more for Israel by remaining in the United States.
And clearly Ben Shapiro's part of his mission, I don't think this is controversial to say, is to try and convince American citizens to love and support Israel as much as Ben Shapiro does, to try and make sure that Americans continue to believe that the United States should finance Israel's military, should finance its wars.
This is a major part of Ben Shapiro's life mission.
He's a religious Jew and he has talked many times about the importance of Israel, not only to his religion, but to his politics and his identity.
It's probably the issue about which he cares most, certainly one of the top two or three.
And then After October 7th, Candace Owens, who is one of the very few people at the Daily Wire or even on the American right to compete with Ben Shapiro in terms of influence and the size of the platform, began taking a much different view.
She began questioning why it is that we would stand by and watch Israel destroy all of the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and kill huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in Accept that and even more so she was wondering frequently.
Why is it the United States?
is supposed to pay for the military in the wars of Israel which is a question that if you are somebody who is embraced the America first ideology or who in general has Adopted a view when it comes to Ukraine that we shouldn't be financing the war in Ukraine because we have enough of our problems here at home or we're too in debt here at home in order to pay for foreign wars would be an obvious question and
And yet we have been documenting many times since October 7th that not only is that not a question that's permissible in right-wing discourse, a lot of people have been fired for saying things like that.
A lot of people have been censored for saying it.
A lot of student groups have been closed for defending the Palestinian cause.
And obviously the main tactic that is used by the pro-Israel sector of the American right against Israel critics, and this has always been true, is to scream racism and bigotry.
Specifically to accuse anybody who is a critic of the state of Israel or who questions U.S. support for Israel of being an anti-Semite.
In fact, In fact, it is such an automatic tactic that there is literally nobody who has ever had a prominent platform in the United States who has harshly criticized Israel and or who has questioned why the United States should continue to fund Israel, who has not it is such an automatic tactic that there is literally nobody who has ever had a prominent platform in the United States who has harshly criticized Israel and or who has questioned why There are entire organizations that are very well funded, like the ADL and the AIPAC.
That exists to do so and over the last several months you could see an increasing attack on Candace Owens accusing her continuously of being anti-semitic the more and more she questioned Israel, which is what happens to every person who takes those positions.
Now earlier today.
And this has been coming to a head for a long time.
Jeremy Boring, who is the CEO of The Daily Wire, and I should say that when The Daily Wire was created in 2015, as I said, it was co-founded by Boring and by Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro was the Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Wire, which meant that he ran The Daily Wire, but he stopped doing that in 2020.
He no longer was the Editor-in-Chief.
Technically, he wasn't someone's boss.
And Jeremy Boring came out today and said the following, which is, the Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship.
Now, note that he didn't say why, and I think it was very obvious to a lot of people why, but I happen to know the reason, as do a lot of other people, based on reporting I've done, based on people with whom I've spoken, based on people close to the situation.
That the reason is, is that Jeremy Boring, and in particular Ben Shapiro, concluded that Candace Owen's advocacy on Israel, her opposition to the war in Gaza, her questioning of the US war in Israel, has crossed over into the line of racism, and therefore is a view with which the Daily Wire no longer wants to be associated.
Basically, Ben Shapiro's parents and his family were being badgered To try and understand, and there are a lot of rabbis saying this, like Rabbi Shmuley and Rabbi Barkley, who accused Candace Owens of being anti-Semite, and they were constantly saying, why is it that Candace Owens is continuously employed at the Daily Wire?
Here we have Rabbi Shmuley in a tweet, and we went over this last week when we covered what we could see coming.
What's the firing of Candace Owens over Israel?
Here you see, how long would the Daily Wire stand by Candace Owens?
That was Rabbi Shmuley.
There was a lot of pressure being put on Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire to get rid of this woman who is committing the crime of criticizing Israel and questioning the U.S.
support for it.
Here is the Anti-Defamation League, which basically exists to get people fired who are heretics on the issue of Israel.
And they tweeted on March 21st, so this week, quote, White supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes is praising Candace Owens' vitriolic anti-Semitism.
It's hardly surprising, but it does set off alarm bells.
When bigoted people come together to push an anti-Semitic agenda, it adds fuel to the hate.
Now, this is just classic guilt by association.
In other words, Nick Fuentes, who the ADL says is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier, agrees with Candace Owens' critique of Israel, and therefore, that's supposed to be proof that Candace Owens is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier and a neo-Nazi, because otherwise, why would a neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier like Nick Fuentes be praising her?
I think people should be very careful about that line of reasoning.
After all, Nick Fuentes is also somebody who supports, and has expressed support for in the past, Donald Trump.
So if you believe in this line of reasoning of guilt by association, Nick Fuentes is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier and a neo-Nazi.
Nick Fuentes supports Donald Trump.
Therefore, everybody who supports Donald Trump is also guilty of being an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier because they're in agreement with Nick Fuentes.
Or, for example, you could take that and extend it to other issues, such as Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney are vocal defenders of Israel and of U.S.
support and financing for Israel.
Therefore, if you are a supporter of Israel and if you are somebody who believes the U.S.
should finance Israel, then that means that you are a neocon.
Guilty of all the crimes for which neocons have been guilty of.
After all, Bill Kristol and David Frum and Liz Cheney and people like that agree with your view.
This is the stuff of which smear campaigns are made.
Now, one of the claims that was used to try and really put the nail into Candace Owens' coffin this week was the fact that she had liked a tweet, not retweeted it, not commented favorably upon it, not repeated it, not cited it, but simply clicked the heart icon underneath it.
Which was defending her against accusations that she was an anti-Semite, and it said in there something along the lines of, is Rabbi Shmuley continuing to drink the blood of Christians?
And some very pro-Israel, I don't want to call him a journalist, because what kind of people shit online?
Devoted to trolling the social media accounts of people who are critics of Israel to check their likes and then try and link them to that.
But discovered that she had liked a tweet and she gave a long explanation, which you should look at if you're interested on YouTube, that she was basically just liking tweets that were defending her without really reading every word.
And the fact that you like a tweet does not mean you agree with all the sentiments expressed in it.
If Candace Owens is somebody who believes that Jewish people drink the blood of Christians, you should be able to point to her actually saying that.
There's a lot of things you can say about Candace Owens.
One of the things you cannot say is that she's shy or timid about expressing the views that she actually believes.
So the fact that to resort to, she liked this tweet and this tweet that she liked had things that were in it that were anti-Semitic, shows you just how desperate the campaign became to destroy her reputation.
And that's because she is an actually prominent person with a lot of influence in the American right, like Tucker Carlson.
Who has been encouraging people to question why it is that the United States is paying for Israel's wars, even though millions of Israelis have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans.
And it's just something that is unsustainable for people who are fanatically devoted to Israel, like Ben Shapiro and so many people on the American right.
For years, that has been the third rail of establishment discourse.
The price of admission to mainstream acceptability is that you support Israel and support U.S.
financing of it, not just in the Republican Party or in the conservative movement, but also in the Democratic Party as well.
And the irony, of course, of all of this is that the people who got rid of Candace Owens and who are applauding that have spent years with their primary grievance being that the American left and American liberals Use exactly these tactics against those with whom they disagree.
They call them racists.
They get them fired from their jobs.
They de-platform them.
These were all the things we constantly hear from people like Barry Weiss and Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, who, all of whom got very rich.
Very, very rich.
A multi, multi-millionaire rich.
Branding themselves as people who, more than anything, believe in the right to have vigorous, vibrant debates without being threatened with your livelihood.
Only the left does that.
The repressive, authoritarian left.
And yet, all those people I've just mentioned, and we've documented it many times before, have continuously cheered censorship of the exact kind they pretended opposed ever since October 7th in order to defend Israel.
In fact, and we covered this as well, just to illustrate to you how readily Israel supporters of this kind, these fanatics, relinquish or renounce all of their alleged principles the minute their own group can be protected.
The intelligence company Palantir, the intelligence contractor Palantir, announced back in November, and its CEO is also a fanatical Israel supporter, that they were setting aside 180 jobs And the only people permitted to apply for these jobs are American Jews or Jewish students at American College who can claim that they're the victims of anti-Semitism.
It's a set-aside program based on race and ethnicity and religion of exactly the kind that people like Ben Shapiro and Barry Weiss claim to so vehemently despise.
And yet when Palantir announced that program back in November, Ben Shapiro immediately said, I love this.
Because this time it wasn't a set-aside program for groups to which he doesn't belong, and therefore would want to condemn it.
This time it was his own group being advantaged with a set-aside program.
And he cheered it and he said, oh, I love this.
And then over eight hours, his own fans were like, what do you mean you love this?
You've spent your whole life condemning set-aside programs.
You're not supposed to cheer this.
You're supposed to oppose it.
And then he came back and he said, yeah, maybe it's better if the jobs are open for everybody.
And Barry Weiss said the same.
Made a whole drama of the fact that he was leaving the American left, of which he had previously said he was a member, in large part because of its intolerance for free speech and free discourse.
Became very, very rich by doing that, Dave Rubin did.
And yet, after October 7, several European countries, including France and Germany, announced That they were banning, legally banning, protests against European policy in support of Israel, pro-Palestinian protests.
You could protest in favor of Israel, you just couldn't protest in favor of Palestine.
As grave of a breach of free speech as you could possibly imagine, and yet Dave Rubin, who became a multi-millionaire pretending to believe in free speech, This is exactly the sort of thing that we're seeing over and over.
said when he saw the news that pro-Palestinian protests were being banned, he said, ah, maybe the West can be saved after all.
Somebody who claimed for years that the fatal flaw of the West was an intolerance for free debate suddenly said the salvation of the West is censorship now that his own critics and his own enemies were being censored.
This is exactly the sort of thing that we're seeing over and over.
Now, here is a video from Ben Shapiro that gives you a sense from 2020 of the kind of thing he has been saying for years about the things he claims to believe in.
And this is the sort of thing that made Ben Shapiro very rich, was pretending to believe in exactly what he's defending here in this video.
And then you combine that with the cancel culture and you come up with something truly ugly.
So as we'll see, again, I'm just foreshadowing because you need to know where I'm going here.
Okay, the fact is that the cancel culture exists.
It is extraordinarily ugly.
It's particularly ugly for people on the left actually, because if you're on the right, like I know conservatives are not interested in cancelling other conservatives and they're not going to go along with this.
If you're on the left, you probably will be cancelled because your own crowd is going to flee from you screaming and running for the hills with their hair on fire the minute that you are called out as anything approaching a racist.
That's the way that this works?
But the left is going to claim that because Trump mentioned cancel culture at Mount Rushmore, it doesn't exist.
Again, figment of your imagination.
Gaslighting.
So there's Ben Shapiro saying, only the left engages in cancel culture, and now he just had someone fired from his own media outlet that he claimed believed in free speech because she was insufficiently supportive of Israel.
Now, this is not the first time Ben Shapiro has cheered censorship of Israel critics.
In fact, as we've been trying to say for a long time, that although this did accelerate in the wake of October 7th, the reality is that one of the primary targets of censorship in the United States for many years before October 7th Was not just conservatives or Trump supporters, they were definitely among them, and are, but critics of Israel.
One example is CNN fired one of its longtime hosts and correspondents, Marc Lamont Hill, in 2017 because, according to CNN, he went too far in his criticism of this foreign country called Israel.
And one of the people who stood and did not defend Marc Lamont Hill's right to have his views and keep his job in the media, but instead applauded CNN and was happy that it fired Marc Lamont Hill, was Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro does not believe in free speech like so many people on the right, except for views with whom he agrees.
Here is Ben Shapiro.
We're going to put that up on the screen, I believe.
We have that up on the screen now, saying that CNN was right to Fire Markleman Hill.
So you see this very long history of exactly this sort of mindset that free speech is something that can exist for a lot of issues, but not for Israel.
Almost every asserted principle of the pro-Israel right immediately comes to a halt the minute Israel is the issue.
As I said, of course you can find everybody justifying Candace Owens firing by saying she's a racist, she deserves to be fired, she's a bigot.
Which of course is what the American left has been saying for the last decade.
We're only getting people fired who are bigots, who are racists against marginalized groups.
And that's exactly what the sector of the right says.
These people are identical in terms of their tactics and in terms of their views.
Now here I think we have the Ben Shapiro tweet.
Where he was so happy about the fact that Palantir had set aside 180 jobs solely for members of his own group.
There you see it on the screen.
He announced it, and then he says, love this.
And as I said, they got him to retract it, but only after his own followers spent a whole day saying, how can you love this?
This is the sort of thing you've been telling us you hate more than anything.
This is DEI.
But because it's DEI that favors your group this time, now you're appalling it.
That is the American right, at least the pro-Israel sector of it writ large.
It is embedded with and grounding with this kind of inconsistency.
Now, one of the people who's been on our show a lot is the political scientist John Mearsheimer.
In 2005, he co-wrote a book with political scientist Stephen Walt, who has also been on our show from the University of Chicago.
And Professor Meir Scheimer, obviously, when he wrote this book, which documented the power of the Israel lobby, kind of made the point that there are a lot of powerful lobbies in Washington, Big Tech, Wall Street, all kinds of activist groups, and one of them is the pro-Israel lobby, and they wrote a book about that lobby.
Of course, they tried to destroy his reputation by accusing him of being an anti-Semite, so he has a lot of experience In not just watching, but experiencing himself, the fact that the minute you stand up and criticize a real question, you have support for it.
The people on the right who support Israel will call you a bigot and a racist to destroy your reputation and foreclose debate.
And here's what he had to say recently about that question.
I think the chapter or the section of the book where we talk about this charge of anti-Semitism is called The Great Silencer.
That's what we call the charge of anti-Semitism, The Great Silencer.
Who wants to be called an anti-Semite, especially in the wake of the Holocaust?
Do I want to be called an anti-Semite?
Oh my God, no!
And so it's very effective.
But, you know, it is important to talk about these issues, in my humble opinion.
They wanted to silence us.
This is not good, right?
It's not good for Israel.
It's not good for the United States.
And I would argue in the end, if anything, it's going to foster anti-Semitism.
I think you don't want to run around telling people that they can't talk about Israel without being called an anti-Semite.
It's just not, it's not healthy.
Now, I want to ask you if you have any doubts.
That this is done.
And again, the American right, their number one grievance about liberals and leftists.
is that leftists and liberals go around calling everybody racist and we're going to actually do a segment in just a few minutes on the ACLU and how the ACLU is basically riven and paralyzed with internal conflict because all their employees come from this kind of culture and they're all just accusing each other of racism constantly and instead of working on civil liberties they're trying to arbitrate this constant internal strife that most left liberal groups
are faced with from a culture where people are trained to call everyone else racist the minute they disagree with them.
And as Professor Mearsheimer is saying, it doesn't just exist on the left, it's the go-to topic of the pro-Israel sector of the American right, the center of the Democratic Party.
And as a result, I went on to X yesterday or earlier today, and I made this observation.
I was not saying this to be provocative or melodramatic or to exaggerate.
I believe this is literally true.
I wrote, quote, there is something more certain in life than death and taxes.
I guess maybe you can say that's a little bit.
Hyperbolic that it's more certain than death and taxes.
Death and taxes are pretty certain.
So maybe I could have, if I were trying to be super literal, I could have said it's as certain as death and taxes.
Namely that anyone who criticizes Israel or asks why the US has to finance its military in wars will be publicly branded anti-Semitic.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
Racism accusations are the go-to tactic of Israel defenders.
And that's what I meant.
Give me a single example of somebody with a prominent political platform who harshly criticizes, or I don't mean criticizes, Israel in the sense that, oh, they're nitpicking the strategy they're using in Gaza, saying, oh, I think that now we should be more aggressive.
That's a criticism of Israel.
I mean, a fundamental criticism of Israel.
I think they're the wrong party in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Anyone who has said that, or who questions the U.S.
support for Israel, who has not publicly branded an anti-Semite, it doesn't exist.
It's an automatic smear tactic, an automatic accusation.
One of the people who saw that claim is Barry Weiss, and she tried to point to an example of somebody who knows.
She said, look, I can point to an example of somebody who has previously called for a cutoff to aid of Israel who wasn't called an anti-Semite.
Here's what she said in response to my tweet.
She said, This is both broadly, this is untrue, both broadly and specifically.
Here's Jacob Siegel and Leib Leibowitz in Tablet Magazine, the most important Jewish publication in the country, in July 2023, calling to end USAID to Israel.
And she pointed to this article in Tablet.
Now, she was trying to say, look, they called for an end to Israel.
Jacob Siegel and Leib Leibowitz in the most important Jewish journal, the Tablet, and they weren't called anti-Semitic.
As an example of somebody who can.
Now the reason why that's just so funny, and that's all it is, is funny, is because I had Jacob Siegel on my show and talked to him about that article.
I read that article at the time.
And I talked about it on my show.
And Jacob Siegel's argument is a vehemently pro-Israel argument.
He's not criticizing Israel.
He's not saying the U.S.
should cut off aid to Israel even though Israel wants the aid.
He's arguing That this aid is bad for Israel because it constrains the Israelis from doing things they should be doing, like being more aggressive and militarily provocative toward Iran, and that the Israelis, he argued, should turn away from U.S.
aid, should say, we don't want U.S.
aid, and that way the Israelis could finally go do what they need to do, which is bomb Iran.
attack Iran without the U.S.
trying to restrain them.
It wasn't a criticism of Israel.
It wasn't even an argument that the U.S.
should deny Israel's request for money.
It was an argument that Israel itself should reach the conclusion where it no longer wants the aid.
That was Barry Weiss's example of how you can question U.S.
aid and not be called an anti-Semite as long as you're doing it solely from the perspective of how much love you have for Israel.
But if you're somebody who criticizes Israel, as I said, or if you're somebody who argues that even if Israel wants aid, the U.S.
should still not finance its military in wars, then you will automatically be called an anti-Semite.
And the fact that Barry White had to resort to that example as a way of trying to negate what I said, I think is highly illustrative.
Now, Candace Owens is going to be fine.
I don't think she's in any way a victim.
She has millions of people who have watched her and will continue to watch her.
She's already at Local.
She's going to put her show on Rumble.
I have no doubt she's fielding several offers from different outlets and platforms who would love to have Candace Owens employed on their platform.
So the point is not, oh, go pity Candace Owens.
She's going to be fine.
The point is that, number one, It proves that even in the pro-Israel conservative spaces that claim to be most devoted to free speech and anti-cancel culture, Israel is the third rail, the thing you cannot touch.
And it's always been that way.
And number two, while Candace Owens might be fine, because she's one of the most popular podcasters and commentators in the country,
A lot of other people who are nowhere near as secure as she is, who have nowhere near the audience she has in command, nowhere near the amount of platform that she has built, are looking at this and the lesson they draw is a very vivid one, a very powerful one, which is if you want to keep your job in conservative media, there's one topic and one topic in particular that you better not dissent on.
And that's the question of Israel.
And that's the reason why Candace Owens had to be destroyed.
Not because she's going to disappear.
But as a lesson to anybody else who might want to keep one foot in conservative media, that you can do that, but the requirement above all else is that you love Israel, that you support Israel, you cheer for U.S.
financing of Israel, and that's what this episode, above all, illustrates, is that so many of these people on the American right who claim to believe in free speech and oppose cancel culture, That belief immediately halts the minute the issue they care about most, which is Israel, is the one that we're discussing.
Earlier today, there was a truly gruesome terrorist attack in Moscow, in particular in a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow that was obviously planned to take place during a show by a popular decades-old Moscow or Russian rock group called Picnic.
A bunch of people had gathered in order to hear this concert.
And before the concert began, at least five people had.
Heavily armed, went shooting as many innocent people as they could find.
People cowering behind chairs and they were just killing as many people as they could.
Clear classic terrorist attack.
And as a result, now as well, the concert hall is on fire.
So this is a very serious attack.
Obviously, the question immediately arose, well, who is responsible for this attack?
And there are a lot of different candidates.
The Russians have been targeted in the past with terrorist attacks by Islamic extremist groups, in part because their allies of Bashar al-Assad and groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS were fighting against the Russians.
And the fact that the Russians are often targeted by Islamic extremist groups of the same kind the United States is targeted by was one of the reasons President Obama and President Bush, for that matter, argued that the Americans and the Russians actually have important security considerations in common, that there's no reason for us to consider them our enemy.
We can actually cooperate and work together on many different issues.
But ever since 2016, when the perception was created, Hillary Clinton lost because of the Kremlin.
The country has been feeding on anti-Russian hatred and anti-Russian fear and any prospect previously raised by presidents like Bush and Obama and even Trump that the United States could have at least cooperative relations with Russia have all but disappeared and instead we now treat Russia like our enemy.
So there's a New York Times article that gives some of the latest facts and there's very little known other than the fact that there are at least 40 people who are who are dead and at least 140 who are injured in cases like this number typically goes way up and The White House immediately came out and said that we have no indication at all that there are Ukrainians are involved.
And obviously that was the fear that a lot of people had.
We could put the New York Times article on the screen there, you see the live updates, they quote John Kirby, the White House National Security Spokesman is saying we have no indication that Ukraine is involved in any way.
The concern, of course, was that Russia would conclude that the Ukrainians were involved or would suggest the Ukrainians were involved.
There you see the report.
Several camouflage-clad gunmen opened fire at a popular concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday night, killing at least 40 people and wounding more than 100.
Russia's top security agency said that would make it the deadliest attack in the capital region in years.
John Kirby, a spokesman for President Biden's National Security Council, told reporters that the White House had quote no indication at this time that Ukraine or Ukrainians were involved.
Nikolai Podolak, a top advisor to Ukraine's presidential office, said in a video statement that, quote, Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the attack, which is what you would expect the Ukrainians to say.
And I haven't seen any evidence myself, although it just happened a little bit of time before we went on air that the Ukrainians or anyone else were involved.
Now, one of the truly interesting things here is that the U.S.
Embassy in Russia earlier this month issued a warning that seemed to describe this attack with great precision.
Here you see from the site of the U.S.
Embassy in Russia on March 7, 2024, the headline security alert, avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.
The embassy is monitoring reports.
That extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow to include concerts.
And American citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.
Now, it could be that the U.S.
intelligence picked up on these attacks and was trying to warn American citizens who are in Russia, but also the Russians, of this intelligence that they had picked up.
Certainly, it seems like that sounds a lot like what ended up happening today.
Yeah.
But anyway, with electricity, with the internet, in any event, one of the things that's so interesting is that if there's an attack, a terrorist attack on the United States, and the United States claims it was al Qaeda or ISIS, or an attack on a US ally, one of the easiest ways to
Get yourself excluded from mainstream discourse if you suggest that it was actually a false flag attack, that it was the United States government that did that.
There are a lot of people who claim the United States government was responsible for that 9-11 attack, that it was a false flag attack to justify years of war, to justify civil liberties erosions, and anyone who says that is immediately put into the crazy category.
If you suggest that the United States government Ever has perpetrated a false flag attack where they attacked itself and then blame somebody else, you're immediately put in crazy land.
But watch what happens when a US enemy is attacked.
You can be at the most mainstream news organization and just start musing with no evidence and suggest that Russia is engaged in a false flag attack, that Russia really attacked itself.
Here is Nicholas Kristof, who's the longtime columnist for the New York Times, who went onto Twitter in a tweet that is now deleted.
But this is what he decided to say, quote, I have no idea who was responsible for the terror attacks in Moscow.
Do we have this tweet?
Can we put this on the screen?
A different system.
But I want to make sure you can see this tweet because, as I said, the tweet is deleted.
I pointed out this tweet immediately.
I saw this tweet immediately.
I could not believe that somebody from New York Times felt comfortable saying it.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense that they did.
We're having a little trouble with the tweet, but the tweet says the following, quote, I have no idea who is responsible for the terrorist attack in Moscow.
You would think, by definition, there's the tweet, I think.
Is it on the screen?
Yeah.
So you would think any responsible journalist would, we don't have the tweet on the screen, but we're getting there.
Any responsible journalist would stop at that sentence.
I have no idea who was responsible for the terrorist attack in Moscow.
That's my view.
I have no idea who was responsible for the terrorist attack in Moscow, and I would therefore not go on to speculate about who I thought was responsible, especially without having any evidence.
But because it's absolutely permissible to spread insane conspiracy theories and false flag theories about American enemies, especially Russia, Nick Kristof felt completely comfortable to say the following, quote, but given Putin's history of coming to power in 1999 and what appears to have been false flag terror bombings of Russian apartment buildings, questions about this attack have to be asked.
Do you see how, if you're in mainstream American media, you are free to say the most insane things about Russia?
Oh, because it's possible that Putin 25 years ago used false flag attacks, questions now have to be asked, even though I have no evidence whatsoever that perhaps Russia attacked itself.
Are we on?
- John? - What's that? - John?
- John?
against Moscow himself.
This is the sort of thing that is totally permissible, as long as you're talking about an American attacker, Are we on?
Everything's fine?
We might be having some issues, we're not sure.
As I said, there's a storm here, that's why we're not in our studio, so we're doing our best.
Hopefully the Connection and the technical issues are fine.
In any event, Nicholas Kristof immediately deleted that tweet, for he just decided to idly speculate that perhaps the Russians had attacked themselves, with no apology, no acknowledgement, No comment that he had done that, and instead he replaced it with a tweet saying, oh the U.S.
government actually says that ISIS is to blame.
That is the new claim.
It appears as though traditional ISIS channels have taken responsibility for the Russian attack, so we will see where this investigation leads, who the Russians end up saying they think were responsible, but just think at the very least it shows you when we have no, we know nothing about Who did this when the bodies are not even cold yet, let alone removed from the ground?
You have not just standard kind of trolls online, but completely mainstream media figures who feel comfortable saying, oh, this is probably or very likely a Russian false flag attack where Putin attacked his own citizens and murdered his own citizens for his own end.
Something we've seen done repeatedly.
There have been the most unhinged conspiracy theories about Russia, including things like the Havana Syndrome, where they developed 25th century technology to injure the brains of American diplomats, and it turned out to be completely false.
There's never any acknowledgement.
There's never any retraction.
Sky is the limit when it comes to saying whatever you want to say about American enemies and still work in the corporate media.
But if you even suggest that the U.S.
government does anything untoward or unethical, let alone something like a false flag, you are put into the fringe forever.
All right, the last story.
The ACLU is an important organization for me.
It is something that really did play a significant part in forming my childhood politics, my political perspective.
I remember very well, when I was a kid reading about the Decision of mostly leftist and Jewish ACLU lawyers to defend the right of the American Nazi Party to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town filled with Holocaust survivors in 1977, purely on principle, on the ground that the First Amendment has to protect the most hated people among us in order for it to be protected by anyone.
That ACLU is long ago dead.
The idea that it's a civil liberty organization now that's devoted to defending people's rights independent of their ideology.
They still do occasionally some of that work.
They are, in fact, right now defending the NRA against claims of New York State under Governor Cuomo persecuted the NRA for their political views.
So it's not like there aren't any lawyers left in the ACLU still do some of that work.
But by and large, overall, the ACLU is basically just like any other left liberal social justice organization and as such it has become paralyzed by a sort of caricature of a ridiculous left-wing self-indulgent comical culture that constantly finds racism under every rock and bigotry under every rock and as a result they're constantly managing fights among one another
Where they're always accusing one another of being racist and sexist and transphobic and homophobic and these organizations can't get anything done because the kinds of people they're attracting are the ones who have spent most of their time attacking anyone near them.
And anyone who's worked inside a left liberal media outlet like The Intercept or an activist group Governmental organization will tell you that they're often crippled with this kind of a mindset.
And so the ACLU was to target this Times article about a particular lawsuit that I find extremely amusing just in terms of how extreme it is.
But on the one hand, it is extreme.
But on the other, it's very common in terms of what these left liberal Outlets that are drowning in these culture wars that they themselves have bred are now facing.
So let's just take a look at the New York Times report.
It actually just kind of lets the event speak for itself, but clearly the idiocy of it jumps off the page.
So the headline is, The ACLU said a worker used racist tropes and then fired her, but did she?
The civil liberties group is defending itself in an unusual case that weighs what kind of language may be evidence of bias against black people.
Now, basically what's happening here is the ACLU has an employee they fired because they claim she made racist statements against her black managers.
She herself is an Asian woman who has spent years claiming she's the victim inside the ACLU of sexism and other forms of abuse.
But because her supervisors, the ones about whom she was complaining, are black, And they went to the ACLU and said, she's a racist while she was saying they're sexist.
The ACLU had to side with the black managers and say that she was guilty of hate speech and racism and therefore fired her.
And now she's suing them.
And in order to defend itself, the ACLU has to argue for a very broad definition of what hate speech means.
The exact opposite of what the ACLU is supposed to do, which is argue for a very limited view of what hate speech is and a very broad view of free speech.
But this is the kind of idiocy and just the kind of self-negation that these organizations get led into because of left-level culture.
So let's take a look at this.
Quote, Kate Oh was no one's idea of a get-along-to-go-along employee.
She considered herself a whistleblower and an advocate for other women in the office, drawing unflattering attention to an environment she said was rife with sexism, burdened with unmanageable workloads, and stymied by a fear-based culture.
So she envisioned herself a whistleblower inside the ACLU, calling out misogyny inside the ACLU, calling out toxic working conditions inside the ACLU.
Then the tables turned and Ms.
O was the one slapped with an accusation of serious misconduct.
The ACLU said her complaints about several superiors, all of whom were black, quote, used racist stereotypes.
As a result, she was fired in May 2022, a trial and a case wrapped up this week in Washington, and a judge is expected to decide in the next few months whether the ACLU is justified in terminating her.
The heart of the ACLU defense, arguing for an expansive definition of what constitutes racist or racially coded speech, Has struck some labor and free speech lawyers as peculiar, since the organization has traditionally protected the right to free expression, operating on the principle that it may not like what someone says, but will fight to the right to say it.
A lawyer representing the ACLU, Ken Margolis, said during a legal proceeding last year that it was irrelevant, irrelevant, whether Ms.
Bohr, whether Ms.
Bohr, no racist, ill will, all that mattered, he said.
Was that her black colleagues were offended and injured.
Quote, we're not here to prove anything.
Other than the impact of our actions were very real that she caused harm.
Mr Margolis said, according to a transcripts of remark, she caused serious harm to black members of the community.
So, you have this Asian employee.
Who ran around for years accusing everybody of being a sectist, misogynist, abusive.
And of course she was accommodated.
She felt like a hero until the targets of her complaints started to be her black supervisors.
And then her black supervisors ran to the ACLU and said, I think her complaints against us are racist.
And the ACLU said, well, what has she said that's racist?
And the ACLU admits nothing she said was racist.
Doesn't matter, said the ACLU, in order to be a racist, in order to be able to be fired for racism, you don't have to say anything that's racist.
All that matters is that what you say makes black people uncomfortable or offends them.
That's the standard of speech the ACLU is arguing for in order to defend itself from this lawsuit.
Here the New York Times goes on, quote, did her language add up to racism?
Or was she just speaking harshly about bosses who happen to be black?
The question is the subject of an unusual unfair labor practice case brought against the ACLU by the National Labor Relations Board, which has accused the organization of retaliating against Mizzou.
So the NLRB, the pro-worker union, A trial in this case wrapped up this week in Washington.
If the ACLU loses, it could be ordered to reinstate her or pay restitution.
The heart of the ACLU defense, arguing for an expansive definition of what constitutes racist or racially coded speech, Has struck some labor and free speech lawyers as peculiar.
We went over that that essentially what the ACLU is doing is saying, Oh, free speech is way narrower than you previously understood.
Hate speech is way broader.
Hate speech means Not just that you said something that's actually racist, that we can prove harbors animosity toward a member of a marginalized group, such as an African American employee, but if you say anything that even offends them or makes them uncomfortable, you are already out of the bounds of free speech and now into hate speech.
Imagine going back 30 years or 40 years and telling ACLU lawyers that in 40 years ACLU lawyers are going to be in court desperately trying to limit the range of free speech and expand the concept of illegal hate speech for which you can be fired.
And that their definition would be, you become a racist, somebody who needs to be fired, not because you've said anything racist, but simply because you've made black people uncomfortable.
And the fact that it's an Asian employee who herself Has obviously spent years focused almost entirely on accusing her colleagues of misogyny and racism and every other thing she can think of, who's now victimized by that.
It's just so illustrative of the fact that all of this is just all-consuming.
It's unsustainable, this kind of left-wing culture.
And there have been reports, including by my former colleague Ryan Grim at The Intercept, on how a huge number, in fact, you could say most, left-wing activist groups and advocacy groups and media organizations are completely crippled and paralyzed by exactly this kind of internal fighting.
Here from 2022 meltdowns have brought progressive advocacy groups to a standstill at a critical moment in world history.
And if you read that article, he goes on to document many, many cases where even people inside these organizations who are left-wing culture warriors will say that this is so out of control in every one of our own groups that basically we're incapable of operating.
So they unleash us on the world.
They loved when they were deploying all these people to run around screaming racist to everybody and now they themselves are suffering from it themselves.
And I guess before you laugh too hard at the fact that the left is drowning in that, you can also look to the Daily Wire and see the fact that Candace Owens is no longer employed there because her views on Israel were a bridge too far for this valiant free speech organization to see that by no means is this mindset Confined to the left, even though the left tends to be more honest about the fact that they believe in this.
And I think all of this, you can put this all together and kind of see why it is so important that if you are a news organization, if you are an advocacy group, especially one claiming that you believe in free speech, as the ACLU does, the Daily Wire does, that it's very easy to uphold that when it's the views that you're most comfortable with hearing.
But when it's the views that make you most uncomfortable, that is the time when you need to embrace those free speech values the most.
Because if you don't, it proves that you are a fraud.
All right.
That concludes our show, our experimental stripped down, more intimate Friday evening show for this evening.
As we said, we were not in our studio for those in here at the beginning because of very, very inclement weather that we wanted to make sure did not jeopardize the safety of our crew and of our colleagues in our studios.
So we didn't do it from our studio tonight.
I think it worked out pretty well with a couple of technical glitches in the middle, but otherwise it worked out great.
As a reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after.
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