Is Israel Dragging the US in a New Mid-East War? PLUS: Vivek Ramaswamy on FISA, Israel/Iran, Elon Musk’s War w/ Brazil over Censorship
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
New Middle East War (4:56)
Interview with Vivek Ramaswamy (34:07)
Outro (1:12:14)
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Good evening, It's Monday, April 15th, which I'm happy to note is tax day.
I'm sure that makes everybody excited.
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, As we have been reporting for weeks now, Israel's decision to bomb Iran's consulate in Damascus, Syria on April 1st was guaranteed to provoke a retaliatory response from Iran.
There is no country in the world that would fail to respond if their embassy were deliberately bombed and senior officials within it killed.
And in the process, Israel is risking both a wider regional war in the Middle East as well as a substantial chance of dragging the United States into that war.
Last week, Professor John Mearsheimer told us in an interview on this program that Israel has long been trying to do exactly that, getting the United States to fight a war against its arch nemesis in the region.
Over the weekend, Iran did retaliate against Israel with what at first appeared to be a highly provocative and dangerous retaliation, but it turned out that, by design, Iran's attack calls caused almost no damage of any kind in Israel, zero deaths, as Iran deliberately used slow and old weapons that were predictably easy to shoot down, took a long time to arrive, and were otherwise intercepted.
Despite this, Israel is vowing that this is not the end of it, that it will now attack Iran in a still unspecified manner.
What is this risk of this new regional war and what role, if any, should the United States play in it?
We will examine all of that.
Ben, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, on everyone's short list to be Donald Trump's vice president, joins us to talk about this new Middle East crisis involving Israel and Iran.
We also talk about Speaker Mike Johnson's efforts to obtain the $60 billion in aid to fuel the war in Ukraine, which Johnson has long said he opposes.
And it's a policy of which Vivek himself was an early and vocal critic.
We also explore the war that Elon Musk launched against Brazil's censorship regime, the severe threats of prosecution against Musk and Axe by Brazilian Judge Alessandro de Moraes, and what implications all of this has for Americans, and they are substantial.
And then we will examine the prevailing dynamics of the 2024 presidential campaign, which is not all that far away, including what role the VEC may play in it.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Israel has long considered Iran to be its arch nemesis in the region.
For almost two decades now, Israel has been repeatedly warning that Iran is just a few months away or even a few weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon capability, warnings that have never yet come to fruition.
Iran has always been the country that Israel claims is the greatest threat to peace in the region.
It is the country that Israel claims is a terrorist regime that wants to wipe Israel off of the face of the map.
Now the reality Is that while Iran does actually employ proxy agents throughout the region, just like the United States does, the Iranians, for example, do support and fund and finance the group Hezbollah, which people in that region regard as a defensive force against Israeli incursions into Lebanon, which happens very frequently.
But of course, Israel and the West consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization, There are other proxies that the Iranians use, including in Yemen and throughout Syria and Iraq.
Nothing strengthened Iran more than the US invasion of Iraq and occupation of that country.
So it is true that Iran has tentacles in various aspects of that region, just like most countries who are powerful and large have influence in their own region.
But the reality is Iran has not fought a war.
Since the 1980s, which is when they had a protracted and quite vicious war with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a war that the United States supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in.
It's hard to make the case that Iran is some kind of unique warmongering country, given that in those decades, since Iran has had their last war, the United States and Israel have both been involved in various ways in numerous wars, countless wars, in fact.
It's a very similar dynamic to the narrative about China.
We're constantly being told that China is this grave menace to world peace, that they are bent upon military domination.
And yet China has not fought a war since 1979.
That is a fact.
Again, China has influence in its region.
It suppresses the people of Hong Kong and Tibet.
But China has not fought an actual war with any other country since 1979.
Again, think how many wars the United States has fought from Panama and Yugoslavia and Central America and Grenada and Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Libya.
Now the war in Ukraine, bombing Yemen, etc.
Helping the Israelis bomb and destroy Gaza.
The list is endless.
And in fact, when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 years spending trillions of dollars losing the lives of many American soldiers, China released a video mocking the United States For the trillions of dollars it spent on these pointless wars.
The war in Afghanistan did nothing.
Taliban marched right back into power as if nothing happened.
The only two effects of the invasion of Iraq was that Iran was strengthened by eliminating Saddam Hussein, a dedicated enemy of Iran, and strengthening the Shia militias.
With which Iran uses to exert its influence in Iraq.
And then the other effect of the invasion of Iraq was to create a vacuum out of which ISIS emerged.
And the Chinese mocked the United States for spending all of their resources on these endless wars that achieved nothing and pointed out that while the United States was doing that, China used its resources to build high-speed rail that connected
So when we hear these narratives all the time about how China is the aggressor and the United States, which has military bases encircling China, is the innocent victim, the innocent, peace-loving victim, or how Iran is the terrorist state and the United States and Israel are just the peace-loving, Nations that just want the application of world legal systems and peace.
I think it's very important to keep in mind how propagandized we are when it comes to that.
Now, there were all kinds of reactions in the United States to watching Iran launch A variety of missiles and drones at Israel.
Obviously, it was a new event to watch Iran not use proxies to attack Israel, but to actually attack Israel directly.
And there were immediate calls from Republicans and others that the United States, not Israel, but the United States should now go to war with Iran, should bomb Iran.
The reality, however, was that the reason Iran launched those missiles and drones against Israel.
Missiles and drones that caused no damage, let alone any death inside Israel, was because they were essentially forced into that retaliation on April 1st, which is when the Israelis bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria and killed several officials.
Remember here from AP, Israeli strike on Iran's consulate in Syria killed two generals and five other officers, Iran says.
Quote, an Israeli attack that demolished Iran's consulate in Syria on Monday killed two Iranian generals and five officers.
According to Iranian officials, the strike appeared to signify an escalation of Israel's targeting of military officials from Iran, which support militant groups fighting Israel in Gaza and along its border with Lebanon.
Now, Israel has done its own damage over many years to Iran.
They've launched all kinds of cyber attacks that have been very dangerous.
Israel has assassinated scientists, nuclear scientists, in Iran by claiming that they're working on Iran's nuclear program.
And so it isn't as though these two countries haven't done anything to one another.
They have, but bombing an embassy, something that is considered inviolable in diplomatic relations and that by treaty and convention is sacrosanct in international law, something it's almost impossible to remember a country doing.
I think the last time was when the United States, by accident, bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade when they were fighting Serbia and they profusely apologized and insisting it was an accident.
But I can't remember the last time that a country deliberately bombed another country's embassy.
That is a massive escalation, almost guaranteed to provoke a retaliation and a response from Iran as it did.
Now, as I said, Iran wanted to show that it would not sit by passively.
No country could But the actual reality of what Iran did in responding to Israel was far more restrained and moderate than almost any other country's reaction would have been.
Imagine what Israel and the United States would do if a foreign air force deliberately flew a fighter jet over an American embassy or an Israeli embassy in the world and shot missiles at it and destroyed it and killed top American or Israeli officials.
I guarantee you they would do a lot more than what Iran just did.
By all accounts, Iran's response, while intended to be dramatic and to look like it was a show of real force, was in fact engineered and calculated by Iran to cause as little damage as possible inside Israel in the hope of avoiding rather than provoking further escalation.
Here's the New York Times from earlier today, a show of might in the skies over Israel, quote, Iran's retaliation for Israel's killing of senior military leaders was a highly choreographed spectacle.
But fears of wider war still loom.
The more than 300 drones and missiles that hurtled through Iraqi and Jordanian airspace Saturday night before they were brought down seemed designed to cause maximum drama while inflicting minimal damage, defense officials and military experts say.
Just to highlight there, the point of the Iranian response was designed to create maximum drama while inflicting minimal damage.
Which party seems to be the more restrained, the more rational, the more moderate, the more eager to avoid regional escalation?
The Israelis that bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed senior leaders?
Or Iran, which deliberately responded in a way that seemed dramatic, seemed to be a resolute show of force, but was one which in fact was guaranteed, as the Iranians both knew and intended, to cause almost no damage inside of Israel.
Quote, just as they did back in 2020 when retaliating for the U.S.
killing of General Soleimani, Israeli leaders this week gave plenty of warning that they were launching strikes.
Iran also sequenced the attack, a retaliation for airstrikes on Iranian embassy building in Syria on April 1st, in such a way that both Israelis and Americans were able to adjust their arsenal aerial defenses once the Iranian missiles and drones were in the air.
The result?
A lot of bang, but relatively little destruction on the ground.
Few of Iran's drones and missiles found their intended targets.
An inaccuracy level that military experts and defense officials say probably was by design.
Let's emphasize that part as well.
The fact that there was no damage was an inaccuracy level that military experts and defense officials say was probably by design.
So unlike the Israeli attack on Iran, which blew up their building and killed their senior officials, the Iranians responded in the most harmless and benign way possible, on purpose, by not using their most powerful weapons, by not using fighter jets.
By not shooting missiles from Hezbollah, their proxy, which has over 100,000 highly precise missiles aimed at almost virtually every Israeli city.
There's no doubt Iran could cause a lot of damage inside Israel if it wanted to.
And the reason it didn't was because they purposely used the kinds of drones and missiles with advanced warning.
Everybody knew exactly when the attack was coming because Iran signaled it.
That would be designed to avoid escalation.
Quote, Iran planned the attacks in a way that would send a warning to Israel and create deterrence but avoid sparking a war.
According to two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Biden has made clear to Israeli leaders that while the United States is committed to defending Israel, he has no interest in attacking Iran.
In fact, the president and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation, are advising Israel that its successful defense against the Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S.
officials said.
Now, I have not given Joe Biden credit in almost any instance that I can remember over the last six months since October 7th.
He has financed and armed the Israeli devastation of Gaza with no limitations of any kind, with no red lines, with no conditions as he has done throughout his entire adult career.
But it seems like American officials understand what Netanyahu tried to do here to purposely spark a major retaliation with Iran that would then lead to a wider regional conflagration in which the United States would feel duty-bound to join a war fighting Iran, which is what the Israelis have wanted for a long time.
Hear from Axios yesterday, quote, Biden told Bibi U.S.
won't support an Israeli counterattack on Iran.
Quote, the official said that when Biden told Netanyahu that the U.S.
will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran and will not support such operations, Netanyahu said he understood.
U.S.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke on Saturday with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Golant, and asked that Israel notify the U.S.
ahead of The United States and Western countries have major interests in avoiding a regional conflict involving Iran, just to begin with.
The spike in oil prices that it would cause would be highly destabilizing to the American and Western economies, which is obviously something Joe Biden seeks to avoid heading into an election just a few months from now.
But on top of that, the United States has seen repeatedly the futility, in fact, the counterproductive outcomes of involving American military and American service members directly into a Mideast war.
And so both the West and the United States are saying to Israel, look, it's your choice what to do, but we don't think you should engage in a serious retaliation against Iran.
We'll see what Israel does.
Unfortunately, there are members of both political parties, the wing of both parties that constantly wants to bring the United States to war, that supports every single conceivable conflict that the United States might get involved with.
Here is Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican of Kentucky.
On April 13th saying the following, Iran has begun launching drone strikes on Israel.
President Biden, we must move quickly and launch aggressive retaliatory strikes on Iran.
Tennessee.
Sorry, did I say Kentucky?
I meant the Republican from Tennessee.
So here is Marsha Blackburn not just saying that Israel should go and start a war with Iran and do a major attack on Iran, but that the United States should.
Even if you want to blame Iran for everything and claim that this harmless attack on Israel was some sort of grave act of war that merits massive retaliation in the Mideast war, why does the United States have to treat an attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States?
Iran isn't threatening the United States.
Iran has repeatedly made clear diplomatically and through its behavior that it seeks to avoid a war with the United States.
In fact, when President Trump launched that highly provocative attack on Iran when they killed General Soleimani, a major figure of great importance to Iran, The Iranians were being urged by hardliners in the country to respond in an extremely aggressive way, and yet they mostly did to the United States what they just did to Israel.
They had to show their dignity in not letting it go, but they purposely responded in a way that would be restrained and moderate and designed not to provoke future conflict.
In addition to Marsha Blackburn, we have Senator John Fetterman, the Democrat from Pennsylvania who, for reasons that should be studied at some point, has become one of the most fanatical and extremist supporters of Israel.
He's almost never willing to criticize Joe Biden, and yet Senator Fetterman has repeatedly criticized Joe Biden for not doing enough to fight for Israel.
The New York Times editorial board published an editorial saying, quote, military aid to Israel cannot be unconditional.
Now, the New York Times is owned by the Sulzberger family.
They are self-described Zionists.
They have been editorializing in favor of Israeli wars, including the Israeli war in Gaza after October 7th.
The New York Times is very pro-Israel and yet John Fetterman thinks they're insufficiently supportive of Israel and in response to the New York Times calling on military aid to be conditioned on the Israelis not Ignoring all humanitarian considerations, not bombing aid workers, not using famine as a weapon.
Fetterman responded, no, no conditions.
We should just arm Israel without limitations of any kind.
Even if we believe that their behavior is harming American interests, that shouldn't matter to us.
Israel should be the priority, not American interests.
Because there are many times when U.S.
support for Israel conflicts with and undermines U.S.
interests, and so often politicians in Washington insist that it's not American interests that should be prioritized, but Israeli interests.
Earlier today, the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom, the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, appeared on an interview where he was denouncing the Iranians for this grave escalation, and he was asked a question and gave an answer That I regard as highly revealing.
This is actually yesterday.
He was on Sky News.
And here is what Foreign Minister Cameron had to say.
And I think a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done.
And I think the whole world can see all these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran?
It's there in black and white.
What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?
Well, we would take, you know, we would take the very strong action.
And Iran would say that...
I mean, isn't that amazing?
It was a 28 second clip to watch David Cameron contradict himself almost in an unselfaware manner.
He began by saying basically Iran has no right to respond to the destruction of its embassy and the deliberate killing of its senior officials in Syria by the Israelis.
And then the reporter asked him, what would the United Kingdom do?
If somebody did to a British embassy what the Israelis just did to an Iranian embassy.
And David Cameron said, obviously, he would respond with great force.
And I think a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done.
And I think the whole world can see all these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran?
It's there in black and white.
What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?
Well, we would take, you know, we would take the very strong action.
And Iran would say that...
Is it possible, this is what I always wonder about in these kind of exchanges, whenever the United States or Britain or other Russian countries so flagrantly, often within two minutes, makes clear that they believe certain standards and rules apply to other countries but not to the United States and Great Britain, like the right to respond aggressively when your embassy is flattened.
I genuinely always wonder whether there's any self-consciousness about the fact that they are clearly engaging in a form of self-contradiction that is so incredibly obvious, or whether they're so inculcated in this kind of propaganda that it's just so instinctive to them to say these things that they have no idea what it is that they're saying.
One of the most telling examples I've ever seen about this was on February 27, 2022 on Fox News, so just a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Fox News host, Harris Faulkner, hosted an interview with the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for the Bush-Cheney administration, Condoleezza Rice,
And she was not only occupying those positions, but Condoleezza Rice was one of the most aggressive advocates for the invasion of Iraq, which at the time nobody argued was a country, Iraq, that was threatening the United States.
The idea was, well, at some point in the future, they may be able to pose a threat to the United States.
And therefore, we're taking a preemptive action to impede that.
Something that was unrecognizable in international law, the idea of preemptive Or preventative invasion of a sovereign country that isn't threatening you at the time, but in some speculative sense might.
She went around the country, Condoleezza Rice did, saying, look, people are asking for proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
The problem is we can't wait for that proof to materialize in the form of a mushroom cloud over the United States, meaning that Iraq was going to hand nuclear weapons that it did not have to terrorist groups who would then nuke the United States.
She was a leading defender of the invasion of Iraq and to this day believes that the United States had the right to invade that sovereign country.
So here is this conversation three days after Russia did not pack up its military and go attack a country on the other side of the world.
That wasn't threatening it.
They attacked the bordering country based on the perception that what the United States was doing in Ukraine, the promises to expand NATO up to the Russian border, was a threat to the Russians.
And here's what Harris, Faulkner, and Condoleezza Rice had to say about that Russian invasion.
Well, and I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.
I mean, I think we're at just a real basic point there.
Well, I agree.
It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.
And that's why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it.
And I think the world is there.
Certainly NATO is there.
He's managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn't think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.
Really?
Yeah.
Let me just play that question again that caused Condoleezza Rice to nod in agreement.
I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.
I mean, I think we're at just a real basic, basic point there.
So she's saying to Condoleezza Rice, just as a general principle, in fact, Harris Falkner is saying it's so obvious, like self-evident, that if you invade a sovereign country, by definition, you're a war criminal, you're committing a war crime.
And she's saying this to Condoleezza Rice.
And I think neither of them have any conscious sense that the behavior they're condemning is behavior in which Condoleezza Rice was centrally involved.
And you can always question, is this just a cynical and Machiavellian attempt to use propaganda while understanding fully what they're doing?
I don't think it is that.
I think people like Condoleezza Rice and Harris Faulkner, who are so drowning in American propaganda for so long, are incapable of seeing anything outside of it.
And so, they really do believe that when Russia invades Ukraine, that makes the officials responsible war criminals, and they're incapable of applying that rationale to what they did in Iraq.
The human brain should not be capable of that kind of self-negation.
And yet, you see it all the time.
American officials go around condemning Russia for having relationships with repressive regimes, when the closest American allies are some of the most savage, brutal dictatorships in the world, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
And there's just no sense of that contradiction at all.
Because the United States and top foreign policy makers really do believe that the standards they impose on other countries don't apply to themselves and the problem with that is that the rest of the world increasingly is becoming very resentful of that.
And increasingly, because of the role of multipolarity and the rise of an alternative alliance led by China and BRICS, these countries have the opportunity now to express that resentment, and increasingly are moving toward China, which expertly exploits this kind of resentment.
But it's just amazing to watch in such explicit form and the idea that Iran somehow did something evil and outside the bounds of decency in responding to the bombing of their embassy when every single country on the planet, certainly the United States and the UK, would have not just responded but far more aggressively and violently and destructively than what the Iranians did is so illustrative.
of how countries, even ones that don't like to think of themselves this way, are propagandized to the point where people inside of that system can't even critically evaluate it any longer.
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Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't really need an introduction.
He is a highly successful entrepreneur who surprised and I think angered much of the political and media establishment when he announced his campaign for the Republican nomination and based on a platform that was highly heterodox and dissenting from establishment orthodoxies, did far better It's good to see you, Glenn.
How have you been?
Someone who is a new candidate, someone who had just appeared on the scene, somebody who refused to endorse establishment dogma.
And we're always happy to talk to Vivek.
It's always illuminating and interesting, and we are happy to welcome him back to our show.
Vivek, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for talking to us.
It's good to see you, Glenn.
How you been?
Very good, thanks.
So there is an international crisis.
I think it's very easy to call it that in the Middle East, where you have the Israelis who bombed an Iranian embassy in Syria on August 1st, killing several senior Iranian leaders.
Iran did what I think any country would almost have to do, which is not sit silently by, but retaliate.
But they did so in a way that was really designed, as every military analyst says, not to cause any real damage inside Israel, but to kind of symbolically and dramatically Display Force.
The Israelis are now threatening to retaliate against Israel and of course the question as Americans is what role, if any, should the United States be willing to play in the Middle East in the case that this conflict escalates further?
Yeah, look, I think that I'm, in the most recent days, waiting to get all of the facts.
As you know, these things have been hazy, and I want to react not in response to partial news stories, but offer with you what my general principle is.
Israel is an ally of the United States, and I've said for a long time that Israel has a right to defend itself.
But the U.S.
intervention in a specific war, I think, is something that shouldn't be a top priority for the U.S.
It shouldn't be something the U.S.
should be doing.
So for a long time, when people have talked about the aid packages to Ukraine, to Israel overall, I don't think that that serves the interests of the United States.
I don't think it serves the interests, arguably, of even our allies.
But I tend to look at things, Glenn, from a pretty America First perspective.
And to me, America First doesn't come with special asterisks in certain kinds of situations.
Every decision we make, from our border policies to our foreign policy to domestic policy, comes down to one question.
What advances the interests of U.S.
citizens?
I think our own public policymakers should ask one question.
They owe one moral duty.
It's to the citizens of our country.
And I think that there's A lot of foreign policy questions is not an isolationist position.
There's a lot of ways in which you engage in foreign policy diplomatically or otherwise, but the lens has got to be what advances the interests of our own citizens.
And that's where I land rather than being some sort of international arbiter of justice, whether it's Ukraine, whether even what's happening selectively, you look at a place like Armenia, Azerbaijan.
I don't really hear a lot of Republicans or Democrats, for that matter, clamoring for U.S.
engagement on one side of that conflict.
And though I've been critical of a lot of what Azerbaijan has done to Christians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, I'm not an advocate for U.S.
intervention militarily either.
In fact, a lot of what led to that situation was too much U.S.
intervention in ways that actually Upset what I think could have been an equilibrium that would have settled itself out in other ways.
And so I tend to be a non-interventionist.
That doesn't mean I'm an isolationist, but that means I'm a non-interventionist.
And I think that we shouldn't intervene unless it directly implicates American interests in any conflict around the world.
That's generally where I stand.
So one of the really interesting dynamics about Republican politics, I think, and about American politics generally, is that that principle you just enunciated was the centerpiece of Donald Trump's campaign in 2016, at least with respect to foreign policy.
He ran against Neocon orthodoxy, the endless amounts of wars that the United States has fought in the Middle East.
He not only got the nomination, but won the presidency based on it.
Every poll, when you ask Americans, show that they think we fight too many wars, that they want to withdraw from endless wars, unless a country is threatening the United States and threatening our homeland to attack us.
And yet, at the same time, we're constantly given this long list of countries that we're told we should consider not only evil, but threatening to the United States.
We hear that about Russia.
We hear that about China, even though it hasn't fought a war since 1979.
It's obviously an adversary of the United States, but hasn't attacked the United States.
We hear that about Iran.
With respect to the Iranians, who obviously are not an ally of the United States, but have gone out of their way To avoid confrontation with the United States in that region, how do you see Iran in terms of whether we should consider them the kind of enemy that is enough of a threat for us to consider military action against?
So look, I mean, I think there's a lot in that question.
I don't know where you and I land on some of these views.
I think China is an absolute adversary of the United States.
I think China's long run goals are to undermine the United States, not militarily, but through other means, increasing our dependence on China for our modern way of life.
That's something that I reject.
I think one of the things that I do stand for, that the U.S.
should be doing, is reducing our dependence on critical areas from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to you could even think about other areas.
Our military industrial base should not depend on an adversary to provide it.
And that's the situation that we're in.
And so I look at these things strategically from what stands in the U.S.'s interest.
You brought up Russia.
I think that we're driving Russia further into China's hands as a consequence of our own broken policy.
So even many Republicans who will agree with my, I would say, tough posture with respect to dependence on China are committing the very mistakes that further strengthen China by driving Russia further into China's hands by isolating Russia.
My view is we should totally reevaluate that paradigm and that worldview and take a look at the fact that maybe if we reopened economic relations with Russia, Maybe if we reopened diplomatic relations with Russia.
Actually, not maybe, I believe we would be highly likely to secure not only a peace deal in Ukraine, but use the peace deal in Ukraine to move from a bilateral international world order between the United States and China to a trilateral one where neither of Russia nor China nor the United States are necessarily aligned, but that actually could set up more stability globally and better advance U.S.
interests as well.
And in that scenario, China's going to have to think twice before it goes after Taiwan, because Russia's no longer in China's camp.
And so that's a complete subversion of the current foreign policy doctrine.
I think that those are, you know, far more pressing questions for the United States than any question in the Middle East right now.
And I do think that once you've sorted out the relationship of decoupling Russia's relationship with China, pull Russia out of its military alliance with China, then I think a lot of the other alliances that we worry about are really the product of our own creation.
Whether you're talking about Iran or in other countries, I think that those are secondary to me from the number one issue, which is dismantle the Russia-China relationship.
I think that can be done diplomatically.
And I think that that is achievable in the same way that Nixon did that in reverse in the 1970s.
He pulled Mao Zedong out from the clasp of Brezhnev-led USSR.
I think Putin can be like the new Mao, and I think that should be, I believe, the top foreign policy focus, certainly diplomacy focus, of scoring a near-term win.
And I think that we can achieve it if we subvert the classical view that we're not supposed to engage with Russia.
We're actually pushing Russia further into China's hands, which is the single greatest risk factor to increasing World War III.
And I do think we're closer to World War III than we've ever been in my lifetime, Glenn.
And I do think that dismantling that Russia-China alliance — that's really where my focus is, more than anywhere in the Middle East — that actually restores, I think, at least a level of equilibrium that is unlikely to lead to further escalation to World War III.
Yeah, I didn't mean, just to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that China was not a serious adversary to the United States when it comes to economics and trade and even influence in the world.
I was just rather questioning whether China is a military threat that we should even be considering something like a war with.
And on your point about Russia and China... And my point on that, Glenn, is just one point, just to really put a fine point on that.
Now, irony is that the people who might disagree with you for saying something like that, They are the very people who are increasing the risk of such war, or of China's strength in such war, by pushing Russia further into China's hands.
See, Russia and China are in this military alliance with one another, okay?
Our own policies towards Russia, which has greater nuclear stockpiles than the United States, hypersonic missile capabilities ahead of the United States, Absolutely.
whether I believe forced to be in a stronger relationship with China as a consequence of the policies adopted by the same bipartisan establishment that will warn you for being too soft in your position vis-a-vis China.
So that's the ultimate irony of the boneheaded US foreign policy establishment of the last 25 years. - Absolutely, if you look at the Cold War, one of the main strategic goals was to avoid driving Russia and China into one another's arms.
That was considered to be the worst possible outcome.
And yet, with this obsessive fixation on an antagonistic relationship with Russia, we managed to do exactly what we were able to avoid doing during the entire Cold War.
Just one other question about the Middle East before we move to other areas.
Can I have one more quick response on that?
Absolutely.
This is just so important, people forget it.
There's a temptation now, and I think this is sort of a weird perversion on the American right, that in the same way on the left you used to hear the word racist and ist at the end to silence debate, that's become effectively isolationist is the new racist, if you know what I mean, on the right, to silence debate about the very questions that we're talking about here.
George Kennan, however, he was the architect of realist policy that brought us to the end of the Cold War.
Before his death in the late 1990s, he said that the single greatest policy error of the United States was increasing in the post-Cold War foreign policy was NATO expansionism in the post-Soviet era.
See, so this is not some sort of isolationist George Kennan saying that the United States should disengage in all respects diplomatically and otherwise from the world.
It's looking at this through the prism of U.S.
interests, pushing Russia into China's hands, or China into Russia's hands, was as bad of an idea during the Cold War as it is in the post-Cold War era.
And yet I see much of the, I would say bipartisan, but including neoconservative establishment, Dismissing that kind of talk is calling it isolationist in the same way that the left will talk about mathematics or whatever they don't want to talk about is racist.
I think in some ways both sides are are guilty of using this labeling exercise as a way of stifling actual debate on the merits.
It's just different topics that are considered the third rails that you can't touch.
Yeah, you need insults to anybody questioning American war.
One is isolationist, the other is appeasement or even calling people Kremlin agents for suggesting that it's not an interest to have an antagonistic relationship with Russia.
So just as far as this is the last question in the Middle East and I want to go into other things.
The war in Gaza has become far more controversial around the world and inside the United States than it was, say, for the first three months of the world, in part because of the number of civilians who have been killed in Gaza, the number of women and children, the destruction of the entire civilian infrastructure of Gaza, the killing of aid workers, the use of famine as a weapon of war.
If you have an American First prism, it would be very easy to say, look, that's a war between Israel and Palestinians that have been going on for decades.
It's on the other side of the world.
It's not really our business to intervene and adjudicate.
The problem, of course, with that view is that the United States Pays for Israel's military, finances Israel's wars, provides it with the bombs that Israel uses, and everyone in the region knows that, and that costs the United States a lot in standing in the region.
If you were the president, or just even if you weren't, just as a kind of citizen, would you consider, would you continue Joe Biden's policy of arming and financing Israel in this war in Gaza without conditions and indefinitely?
Well, Joe Biden's policy, let's just put that to one side because it's a completely ambiguous and amorphous what that is.
And whether that's strategic or not, I believe it's not.
I think it's a matter of incoherence.
We'll put that to one side.
I believe that the U.S.
and Israel do have an important allied relationship.
Both sides get something important out of that relationship.
But I've argued, Glenn, that it is important both for the U.S.
and Israel for us to be clear about who makes the decisions about Israel's defense.
That decision belongs to Israel.
And so that's why I've been clear, and I've said some things that are probably going to make different people mad for different reasons.
But that's why I've said it is neither in the interests of the United States nor in the interests of Israel for the United States to pass this pending aid package.
I'm dead set against the Ukraine aid package.
But I think even both for the U.S.
and for Israel, it's a bad idea for the U.S.
to pass the aid package to Israel.
From a U.S.
standpoint, it's some of the same reasons you and I have talked about before.
From Israel's own standpoint, the thing that's rate-limiting Israel's own ability to achieve its war objectives right now is not money, actually.
That's the ultimate irony of this.
It's not that Israel's financially constrained, they're actually diplomatically constrained.
And so no, I don't think it's the U.S.' 's job to tell Israel, this is what you can't or can't do.
I don't think it's the U.S.' 's job to go micromanage Israel and its war strategy.
I don't think it's the job of the UN, and I don't think it's the job of the EU to do that either.
I do believe that Israel has a right to defend itself.
Israel has a right as a nation to exist.
But our job as the United States of America is to, as an ally, but looking after our own long-run interests, ask what advances US interests.
In this particular case, I think it works better both for the U.S.
and for Israel on both sides of that allied relationship for the U.S.
not to be funding this aid package that's being proposed.
It pops up in the Ukraine aid package and the other aid packages.
They keep just popping up in one form or another.
That's not because I'm against Israel doing what it needs to do.
I'm for Israel doing whatever it needs to do, just as I'm for every nation standing up for its own interests, and especially an ally of the United States.
But that's a different question from whether or not we should be underwriting a war-specific check, which I don't think is in anybody's interest here in this situation.
So let's move to Ukraine.
You have been a vocal critic of the Biden policy, which has bipartisan support as well, of financing Ukraine and its war against Russia and the general posture of having an antagonistic relationship with Russia for the reasons you said.
Another person who has been a stalwart critic of that policy is the current Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
He just by chance was on my show a couple months before becoming House Speaker and we interviewed him about a lot of things, one of which was Ukraine, and he was very steadfast and articulate about his reason for opposing further billions of dollars being sent to Ukraine, that it's futile, that we're not accomplishing anything, we should have a diplomatic resolution.
Mike Johnson becomes Speaker, and within a short amount of time after holding up the aid, he's now saying he actually is guaranteeing that he'll do everything possible to get another $60 billion of aid to Ukraine.
It's hard to speculate about someone's motives, but in terms of the dynamic in Washington, what do you think accounts for that bizarre turnaround?
And it's been a while since we talked about the war in Ukraine, so how do you see how it's developing in light of everything that you were concerned about?
It's becoming an unmitigated disaster for the United States to continue funneling money into a black hole when we have no idea what we're going to get out of it.
Remember, we were being sold by Zelensky that this is not aid, this is an investment.
Well, if it's really an investment, we've got to ask ourselves, what is our return on that investment?
You've got other countries in Europe, like Germany, 17 other NATO members that aren't even spending their minimum of the 2% of GDP that they're committed to spend on military expenditures.
And if you were in their shoes, I guess you wouldn't blame them, Glenn.
If I were in their shoes, I wouldn't blame them either if they know that they're being subsidized by the United States to provide their blanket of security.
And our engagement in this Ukraine war is just contributing to that level of both moral hazard in terms of under expenditures of Europeans to protect their own Western European interests.
But also moral hazard in the case of Zelensky, who has an interest to be able to really chain gang us into a broader conflict with Russia that's not in the interests of the United States of America, especially when we are a closer to World War Three than we've ever been in my life.
We're driving Russia further into China's hands, strengthening the Russia-China military alliance.
And everyone forgets this.
Our own homeland is as vulnerable as we have ever been to a whole host of threats.
Nuclear missile attacks, missile attacks of other kinds, cyber attacks, super EMP attacks.
The very people who are protecting Ukraine's border have very little regard for not only protecting our own border, but to protect our own electric grid, to protect our own cyber security systems.
We're short on that at home, more vulnerable than we've ever been.
So I think the right question to ask if you're looking at this from a return on investment perspective is, what is the next $100 or $200 billion going to achieve in Ukraine that the first $100 or $200 billion did not?
To be clear, I was against the first $100 billion.
I was against the first $200 billion.
I'm also a guy who is pragmatic.
I don't believe we can change the past.
I guess they call that a pragmatic view, if you will.
But going forward, one of the things I would ask to even people who did support it, looking to change minds, is what will that next $100 billion do that the first $100 billion didn't?
We have not gotten a good answer to that question.
But even worse and more appalling, Glenn, is the fact that that question has not even been asked by any serious Republican in the United States House of Representatives or in Congress.
I take some people who actually opposed the first, you know, have been vocal about this.
There are lone voices that have maybe pointed it out.
But as leadership, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, for that matter, has not even stopped to ask that most basic of questions.
And then the further question is, if that next $100 billion goes in, and even if Ukraine wins the war, what does winning the war mean?
Nobody's defined what victory looks like.
And even if victory is achieved, what is the rebuilding effort?
Is this just the beginning of a multi-hundred-billion-dollar, if not trillion-dollar investment, to then rebuild a nation?
We've had that experience in the past.
And so I think this is in some ways going to be worse than Iraq because the stakes are even far bigger for global conflict with the nuclear superpower on the other side.
Failing to learn the lessons of our failure of endless engagement in Iraq, we're actually signing up for even worse risks and consequences this time around.
So pragmatically, what do I believe we should do?
End this war as quickly as possible with a reasonable peace deal in Ukraine.
that requires Russia to exit its military alliance with China, and in return, yes, makes reasonable agreements that end this war, including the fact that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO.
And the thing that I found most appalling recently is Blinken, with many Republicans cheering it along, by the way, it's not a Democrat versus Republican point, Blinken saying that NATO—he's not hedging out anything, no caveats attached.
NATO will admit Ukraine.
Ukraine will become a part of NATO.
That's what Blinken said.
It's just a matter of time.
I think that that is a disastrous decision where NATO is, you know, people will point to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, citing that as some basis for continuing to fork over military aid to Ukraine.
That's the memorandum which codified Ukraine's protection vis-a-vis Russia in an agreement with the US, the UK and Russia.
People don't pay attention to the fact that in 1991, James Baker, the Secretary of State of the United States, made a commitment to Gorbachev that NATO would expand not one inch past East Germany, and yet here we are with Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State of the United States, definitively stating that Ukraine would itself become a part of NATO.
So I think that this is bipartisan, boneheaded foreign policy that is not reducing, but Materially increasing the risk of major conflict with the nuclear superpower, and dare I say it, materially increasing the risk of World War III.
And I do think that there's an opportunity, still diplomatically, to bring some sense to this, to reverse this.
Of all the people who have run the country in the 21st century, by far the most clear-headed about this has been Donald Trump, under whose tenure in his first term we stayed out of major wars.
And he, I think, had a very pragmatic view with respect to diplomatic engagement So I just, I want to return to the question about Mike Johnson, not because I want you to speculate about his motives personally or anything like that, because it's impossible to do.
But, you know, you, I think one of the appeals of your candidacy was that you were and are an outsider to Washington.
And it wasn't just in the war in Ukraine, but Mike Johnson also, when he was on my show as well and other places, was ranting and raving about the abuses of the US security state and the dangers of warrantless surveillance.
And now he also became the key vote in enabling warrantless surveillance, saying he had one classified briefing and they changed him.
This is my question.
We have seen so many times when people get into power and they radically reverse their anti-establishment views and become servants of the establishment.
Barack Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to uproot and cancel and deny a whole variety of war and terror policies.
And then he gets into office and he embraces and even expands most of them.
races and even expands most of them.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary based on her vow to subvert the Democratic Party from the inside.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary based on her vow to subvert the Democratic Party from the inside.
And now there's every article in Washington heralding her as the ultimate party insider, the ultimate partisan troop.
And now there's every article in Washington heralding her as the ultimate party insider, the ultimate partisan troop.
What is it about Washington that can take these people and with just a little bit of scent of power, radically change them into advocating views that just a few months ago they were vehemently rejecting?
So, look, I'll say it's the piece of substance on the Pfizer...
Yeah, I do want to talk about that next.
Okay, maybe we'll go to that next.
Yeah, because that should make your blood boil.
It's far worse than even meets the eye.
But what does it make take to make somebody reverse their position on that on Ukraine and countless other questions?
The truth is, I don't know, because I haven't been in there, right?
Glenn, I'm an outsider for a reason.
I want to keep it that way.
I think we need more outsiders to come in with fresh eyes.
Get in and then get the heck out of there before the corrupting influence actually applies to you.
Maybe we're all human beings.
I think part of the problem is that money remains the mother's milk of politics.
That is a big problem.
And I think that the national security state's overexpansion has always been tied with a certain establishment wing of both parties that's perfectly fine with the overexpansion of that national security state.
I think part of that is what's at issue in Ukraine.
I think that part of that's what had been at issue for a very long time, even in places like Iraq.
But put that to one side, I can only speculate, right?
So I don't, I haven't been in there.
I haven't, I've put, I wouldn't win.
When I ran for president, it wasn't the easiest thing to do.
I took over $30 million of my own money and put it into the campaign.
But that allowed me to have a sense of independence to be able to speak my own opinion.
And my view is I would rather share my views and lose an election than to win by playing some fake game of political snakes and ladders.
But eventually we would like a system in which some of those people eventually are able to win and govern.
And I think Donald Trump brought a big element of that in 2016, and I think that that's part of why I'm backing him.
He is an outsider.
Yes, he's been in there once for one term, but fundamentally he's at least wired as an outsider, who's at least, you know, his tenure as a businessman makes him financially independent from that system.
That's what we need more of in Washington, D.C.
And I think that it's a shame that all the other people you named are professional career politicians, that ultimately the business model of politics comes down to how much money you're actually able to raise.
I'm against the super PAC system.
I said that during the presidential campaign.
I don't think it's a good influence on American politics.
But I think more generally than that, I think that the influence of a small handful of gatekeepers in American politics, both in the corporate media As well as in the way that our elections are funded, I think are in part responsible for why politicians who say they're going to do one thing end up going in and doing a very different thing.
So I can't speculate on any one of the individuals you mentioned.
I haven't been in there myself, and that's part of why I also say If I ever did get in there, my goal would be to get done what we wanted to get done, and then get the heck out.
And if I'm in there for X number of years, and say I want to, you know, camp out for longer, play back this tape and say that it's my belief, ex ante, before going in, that politicians should serve for a limited period of time.
I'm in favor of term limits.
Three terms for Congress, two for the Senate.
I'm in favor of term limits for the bureaucracy.
I think it's good the President of the United States cannot serve for more than eight years.
That's a good thing.
But if the president can't serve more than eight years, neither should most of the federal bureaucrats who are reporting into that U.S.
president either.
Eight-year term limits for most positions in the federal bureaucracy.
So I'm not one of these term limits is a panacea people.
There's no such thing as a panacea.
But I also think it's a reasonable thing to do.
It's a bipartisan idea.
Now, why are most congressmen and most senators against it?
It acts against their own interest.
How would we ever enact those term limits for congressmen?
One thing I've said is at least you can make it, and there's a whole set of policies you could put in this category.
I would put bans on trading individual stocks.
What's the public policy argument for why a congressman should be able to trade individual stocks?
They all oppose that type of legislation, but nonetheless, how do you get that passed?
Here's my best idea for doing it is I don't love it, but it's the best way to practically get it done is to say that, okay, we'll pass this bill, but it doesn't apply to you who pass it.
You get grandfathered in, but whoever comes after you is bound by those same constraints.
So I don't love it, but I do think that if you set it up that way, that type of bill on term limits, on bans on congressional trading, on bans on becoming a lobbyist afterwards, I think that would be a helpful ban as well.
If they didn't apply to the people who are sitting in those seats, it's only their self-interest that's stopping them from voting for otherwise wildly popular policies on both sides of the aisle.
And then I predict it would actually pass in an instant.
So if we're serious about getting it done, at least as a first step, that would be a good way to do it.
Yeah, sometimes if you look randomly, arbitrarily, at members of Congress, especially the ones who head committees, it's shocking how many of them have been serving since the 1980s.
They're like on their 24th term in Congress.
You know, they're just permanently there, which was never supposed to be the model.
All right, let me ask you about this FISA bill and the substance of it.
It's obviously an issue very near and dear to my heart.
When we did this noted reporting, we were able to show the evidence for the first time of how much abuse there is when it comes to Section 702, how often it's exploited to do what the Constitution we all thought prohibited, which is spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law.
Congress just Renewed this FISA law with almost no reforms despite a mountain of evidence of how often it's abused.
What do you make of the dangers of this new renewal?
Well, I think the dirtiest part about this is that they stuffed it through on a Friday afternoon.
And the thing that irritates the heck out of me, Glenn, is that the Republicans had all the pageantry of saying that they were against this, right?
That's what made the news headlines.
Republicans were rejecting FISA reauthorization.
And then they wait for a Friday afternoon press dump.
It's like a it's like a criminal that's trying to burn the paper trail.
OK.
They, on Friday afternoon, jammed that through with actually far more glaring provisions.
So there's one expansion here, for example, of the authority that allows the NSA to co-opt private businesses in the NSA's own spying activities.
Historically with the bill, it's always been in the in FISA, was to say that communications providers, right, companies like Google and Verizon, would have to turn over data if asked.
Now they say it's any company, whether it's a communication provider or not, that has access to such data.
Could be a router, could be otherwise server data.
You're talking about thousands of small businesses in this country.
If this bill becomes law, can be co-opted as the tentacles of the NSA without Choice on the matter.
I think most people in this country don't know that.
I think many people in Congress who voted for it may not have known that.
That's the way this ends up happening.
And so everyone gets what they want out of it.
You got a lot of people virtue signaling in both parties Republicans and Democrats alike of being civil libertarian protecting rights protecting voter.
votes that they're casting the first time around, all get to do the rounds on cable television, many of whom then come around voting for the thing anyway on a Friday afternoon after having extracted concessions, some of which weren't concessions at all, but actually made the bill far worse than even the status quo of even just reauthorizing FISA 702 without making any change, as bad as that but actually made the bill far worse than even the status quo of They didn't just make those changes, they actually took a step to make it even worse, expanding the government's surveillance authority to be able to co-opt private businesses to do their bidding.
And so I do call on everybody in the Senate to reject this.
Everybody with a spine who cares about civil liberties and the Constitution of the United States deserves to take a long, hard look at that, and with the benefit of some space.
And I would say the same thing with some other poor legislation that's come out of the House.
Hopefully our system works as it should, and the Senate Republicans, and some Senate Democrats, hopefully too, step up and kill that provision.
But I do think that that is an example of a bipartisan consensus that really doesn't give a damn about the Constitution, actually.
And I think the Constitution is the greatest form of governance known to mankind to protect our freedoms.
That's proven based on how far we've gotten, 250 years into this American experiment.
And the irony and the dirty little secret that I see in Washington DC, Glenn, is that the worst ideas and the ones that pose the greatest affront to the Constitution are actually the bipartisan ones, the ones that get support from both parties.
And so the bickering between the parties is in some ways just a smokescreen to deflect attention from the worst of all, be it the interventions in places like Ukraine right now, or the expansion of surveillance state through the Pfizer reauthorization.
And I won't even just call it a reauthorization.
Reauthorization and expansion.
These aren't the partisan ideas.
The greatest damage that we're doing to the Washingtonian vision of America First foreign policy and to the constitutional vision of our civil liberties are actually not through Republicans or Democrats defeating the other, but a bipartisan consensus of both that actually leaves our Constitution as the casualty itself.
Yeah, what's so infuriating is I, you know, I had conversations and exchanges with members of Congress and the ones who voted for it will insist That there were all these great reforms inside this FISA bill.
And not only are the quote-unquote reforms completely trivial and entirely irrelevant to the abuses, as you say, and you ask any privacy activist or people who study this issue for a long time, if anything, in substantial ways, the FISA bill actually increased the power to spy on Americans without warrants.
And I think this outright lying is a reason why people hate Congress so much.
And I also think it's an important point that On so many key issues, there's far more bipartisanship than partisan differences, even though the media constantly says, oh, the two parties can't get along on anything, and they're constantly at each other's throat.
The reality is they agree.
That's part of the game.
Yeah, it's the game.
It's pure theater.
Just a couple more questions.
Vivek, go ahead.
Just a couple more, and then we'll continue.
Yeah, yeah, just one or two more.
Elon Musk last week initiated a major war against the censorship regime of Brazil, which in many ways is a similar model to the one used increasingly in the West, but also in the United States, the way far more extreme version.
Obviously, I live in Brazil.
I do a lot of reporting and have denounced this judge for a long time.
And Musk basically said, we're not going to comply any longer.
We don't want to be an an arm of your censorship regime.
Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube, actually closed last year in Brazil to avoid that.
The Supreme Court acted very harshly.
They declared Elon Musk a target of a criminal probe.
It threatened all employees of Twitter in Brazil with arrest and criminal prosecution.
Obviously, you can look at Brazil and say, It's kind of far away.
But the reality is what's going on in Brazil is a laboratory for where the Europe and the United States is going.
In the scheme or on the spectrum of problems and dangers and negative trends that our country faces, where do you rank this increasingly systemic effort to control and censor political speech and the flow of information on the Internet?
Well, I think the threats to free speech are arguably the most important issue of our time, because if you don't have free speech, then the rest doesn't matter, right?
We could talk about the substance of any other policy question, including any other one we've debated.
The substance doesn't matter if we don't have the ultimate protection, they put it first in the Bill of Rights for a reason, the First Amendment.
It's the most important one.
If we don't have the right to, if we don't have the open right to debate it, the rest is cooked.
And I think it's the stifling of that debate that then is the best way to be able to ram through whatever other policy objective they need to get through.
So your question is, where does this rank in my list of priorities?
It's at the top of the list.
Without free speech, we're not the United States of America.
And I think without free speech in the United States of America, the rest of the world has no hope as well if the supposed bastion of freedom, that shining city on a hill, no longer has the light that still shines for the rest of the world to even take example from.
Now, what we're seeing right now is unfortunately a pattern that's not unfamiliar in the United States.
It's just gone to a further extent in Brazil, where the government uses its own power over technology companies to be able to exert its own political agendas through the back door when they couldn't do it directly through the front door.
Kudos to Elon, and I respect the heck out of what he's doing, standing up with a spine, saying that, you know what, this is a free speech platform, and if that's a conflict with the country that doesn't value free speech, we as a company are still going to stay true to our mission.
And so I respect that.
But there's also a lot that the U.S.
can do to be able to help other free speech platforms or free speech minded individuals.
You would think that's the United States of America.
Here's one thing the U.S.
could do is anytime a government It's the US government.
Maybe it's the Chinese government, right?
You could think about whichever that comes up in a different social media context.
Maybe it's the Brazilian government.
Anytime a foreign or domestic government makes a demand upon a social media company, just say it to the public.
All we have to do is have a disclosure requirement that if a government is co-opting you or coercing you or pressuring you to take a specific course of action with respect to moderating, eliminating, or amplifying speech, just let the public know.
I think it's a beautiful answer to the question, because that's not a government regulation.
It's a government constraint on government action itself, such that if any government were doing it, at least the company has a mandate to be able to disclose publicly what's actually happening.
Now, that may put certain companies then in a position to say, We may not have to be able to do business in certain countries, but at least it allows those companies to be able to warn their users that you don't have to wonder whether or not the rumor mill of certain countries causing a social media company to promote or amplify or suppress certain content is real or false.
The U.S.
government, if you're a U.S.-based company or a company that has operations in the U.S., you just have to disclose it.
And if it's the U.S.
government telling you to do it, great.
We would have done well to know that during the COVID-19 pandemic.
all the things that the US government was pressuring to social media companies to censor or suppress.
If the social media companies are required to say so publicly, we would already know that publicly.
And whether it's Brazil or China or any other country doing the same thing, that transparency is at least, I think, a step in the direction of actually protecting free speech over the long run. - Last quick question.
I hate pundit questions.
I feel almost embarrassed to ask, but I'd be remiss if I didn't.
You're obviously often mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate for Donald Trump.
Have you had any conversations about that prospect, either with Trump or people close to him?
I want to be respectful of the actual conversations I've had, but I'll say at a high level, I want to serve this country in whatever way I can.
And there are many ways to serve this country.
I think the most effective thing I can do as it relates to politics for the next seven, eight months is do everything I can to make sure Donald Trump is successfully elected.
As the next president of the United States, when we think about a sensible foreign policy, when we think about keeping us out of major conflicts, when we think about actually protecting the freedoms that we enjoy as Americans, he is undoubtedly hands down the choice to do it.
And so I view it as my duty as a citizen, somebody who ran against Donald Trump in the primary, somebody, you know, I would say we agreed on, as even I said, a majority of policies, Did I have different things that motivated my candidacy?
Of course I did.
But when I dropped out of the race, it was a clear decision through my support behind Donald Trump.
I'm going to be as focused as I can on making sure that he's elected as the next president of the United States.
And however I can help him have a successful second term, it's probably the best way that I'm going to be able to impact this country.
And so whatever maximizes positive impact, I'm looking to do it.
You know, whatever that entails.
A lot of people get obsessed about what specific titles or what they want to speculate on.
I want to focus on ensuring a successful election, and then we'll see what comes after that.
Vivek, it's always great and interesting to talk to you.
Really appreciate your taking the time to join us, and I hope to talk to you again soon.
Thank you.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
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