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May 1, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:19:20
Dems Vow to Save Mike Johnson and Jill Stein Talks Campus Protests, PLUS: Interview with Lee Fang

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Dems Save Mike Johnson (4:40) Interview with Lee Fang (26:25) Interview with Dr. Jill Stein (48:05) Outro (1:18:06) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good evening, it's Tuesday, April 30th.
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.
For months, Democrats were accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson of being all the things Democrats always call people whom they dislike, a racist, a fascist, a religious fanatic, a pro-Kremlin asset, et cetera, et cetera.
But then Speaker Johnson began radically reversing many of his longstanding views in order to become the most valuable tool and the most reliable ally of the Biden White House and the U.S.
security state.
And now, for understandable reasons, I don't blame them.
Congressional Democrats speak of Mike Johnson not with scorn but with affection.
And now, in response to a motion by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Thomas Massey of Kentucky, one that's designed to exploit the thin majority that Republicans have in the House in an attempt to remove Mike Johnson from his speakership, similar to the way they did Kevin McCarthy before him, House Democrats today, led by their Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, announced that they would protect Mike Johnson and keep him as Speaker by giving him all the votes he needs in order to remain.
That Johnson has become such a popular and useful fellow among Democrats and the intelligence agencies and the Biden White House speaks volumes about how Washington works and how easily it exploits those like him who are desperate to cling to any modicum of power.
We'll tell you about the latest with this bizarre spectacle and examine all of its implications.
The intrepid independent journalist Lee Fong has a new article today on how the gutting of the American industrial base is one of the reasons the U.S.
is bizarrely incapable of keeping up with the Russians when trying to arm Ukraine.
We'll speak to him about his latest report as well as the genuinely disturbing trend of so many Republicans and conservatives embracing the very censorship and safetyism theories they long claimed to loathe All in order to restrict free speech and the right of protest in the United States in order to protect the foreign country called Israel.
Finally, Dr. Jill Stein, an actual medical doctor, not a Dr. Jill Biden type of doctor, is running for president again this year on the Green Party ticket.
She's the only Jewish candidate running of the major presidential candidates.
Earlier this week, she was arrested along with dozens of students at Washington University in St.
Louis while protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza and U.S.
support for it.
Dr. Stein will be here to talk about all of that, as well as the other primary issues driving her presidential campaign and how she sees the 2024 election.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The transformation of Mike Johnson, the radical transformation that took place in such a short period of time, is one of the more bizarre spectacles that I have seen in Washington for many years.
It isn't as though Mike Johnson was in that position for 15 or 20 years and slowly evolved over time.
The way that happens to so many members of Congress who arrive claiming to believe in a certain ideology and then become more and more integrated into and indistinguishable from the establishment that they end up serving, that's very common.
What makes Mike Johnson's reversal so striking is that they happen in an extremely short period of time.
He's been a member of Congress who for years has been going around doing things like opposing further aid to fuel the war in Ukraine, saying that we don't have the money to finance foreign wars, that we should be spending that money here at home instead, including to secure the American border and to improve the quality of lives of American citizens.
He ran as a constitutional lawyer.
Similar to the way the 2008 victorious presidential candidate named Barack Obama did, and he vowed, using his constitutional expertise, to oppose the encroachment by the U.S.
security state into our domestic politics, only to then turn around and become the linchpin Of the ability of the Biden White House and the CIA and the FBI to have their warrantless domestic spying powers aimed at the American people renewed without any warrants or anything other reforms required by law.
He became the, not just a vote in favor, but the person who maneuvered to ensure its passage, just like he did with the $60 billion to Ukraine, which is the top Democratic priority, party priority.
And as a result, there are a lot of members of his caucus who feel very betrayed, who voted for him, who worked alongside of him, heard him say all of these things for so many years and that have watched him immediately get into office and be more accommodating to the Democrats than almost any speaker going back to John Boehner or even further back.
And to do so, he just completely reversed, abandoned so many of the positions he claimed to passionately believe in as a core value.
As a result, there is now an effort underway by some of the more anti-war and populist members of the House Republican Caucus to use their very slim majority that the Republicans have and withhold their votes in favor of Mike Johnson, which would deny him a majority of the House if he just had three or four Republican defections.
That's how they ended up deposing Kevin McCarthy.
And there's only one way, if that happens, for Mike Johnson to save his job, and that would be to convince Democrats to vote for Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House to ensure that his speakership is protected from the dissatisfied members in his own caucus.
That the Democrats would vote for Speaker or would engage in procedural votes designed to ensure that Mike Johnson, who they were calling a fascist and a racist and a white supremacist and a religious fanatic and a pro-Russia asset, up until about two months ago, To ensure that that same person remains as House Speaker.
And the most striking part about this is it's not hard at all to understand why Democrats are doing that.
If I were a House Democrat, I would also do everything possible to try and keep Mike Johnson in that position and to save his speakership because there's nothing more valuable to my agenda than Mike Johnson as Speaker.
Here is the leader of the House Democrats, the Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, in a press release.
Today, he's a congressman from New York who would become House Speaker of the Democrats, take over the majority in 2024, and he issues a statement on behalf of the Joint Democratic Leadership
On the motion to vacate, meaning the motion by Congresswoman Greene and Congressman Massey to remove and vacate Mike Johnson's speakership, he says, quote, For months, House Republicans irresponsibly delayed critical security assistance to our Democratic allies in Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, while simultaneously blocking humanitarian assistance to civilians in harm's way in places like Gaza, Haiti, and the Sudan.
Thanks to a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans led by President Biden, we were finally able to meet the national security needs of the American people.
Apparently the national security needs of the American people depend on sending another 60 billion dollars to Ukraine to fight Russia, sending 26 billion dollars to Israel on top of the billions we spend we send to them every year to destroy Gaza, And then spending another multi-billion dollar package to strengthen the military of Taiwan in case they end up having a conflict with China.
The Democratic statement goes on, quote, from the very beginning of this Congress, House Democrats have put people over politics and found bipartisan common ground with traditional Republicans in order to deliver real results.
At the same time, House Democrats have aggressively pushed back against MAGA extremism.
We will continue to do just that.
At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of pro-Putin Republican obstruction.
We will vote to table Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's motion to vacate the chair.
If she invokes this motion, it will not succeed.
Which is another way of saying that Mike Johnson is one of the good Republicans, even though they were calling him all these same names, including being a MAGA extremist up until about two months ago.
When he decided that he would rather hold on to his speakership by getting Democrats to vote for him and keep him in office than by serving the views of his own caucus, the views that he spent years pretending to believe in.
Now, it is personally striking to me to have watched all this because by somewhat of a coincidence, We interviewed Mike Johnson just a few months before he became House Speaker.
It was in July of 2023.
We had him on our show.
There you see the screenshot.
He's over there on the right.
There you see Congressman Johnson.
He wasn't the feature, the attraction of our show, because he was somewhat of an obscure congressman at the time.
But I had been watching his work with some degree of admiration.
On that day, the FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before Congress and Mike Johnson was relentless and unrelenting in his interrogation of the FBI about all of their attempts to abridge free speech in the United States and to abuse their spying power.
And so I had him on my show and he proclaimed himself to be a civil libertarian, a devoted civil libertarian.
We talked about how bizarre it was that Democrats had become such admirers of and servants to the U.S.
security state, especially when it comes to their efforts to intervene in American politics.
The Mike Johnson from July of 2023, who was on this show, not even nine months ago, bears no resemblance To the Mike Johnson who is now depending on Democratic Party votes to cling to his speakership.
Here is just a part of the discussion that he and I had on that day.
And as I said, the fact that this is the same person who just turned around and became the critical vote enabling a renewal of warrantless eavesdropping with no warrant requirements or any other reforms is mind-boggling.
Unless you realize that this is how people desperate for power function.
They make themselves incredibly accommodating, even abandoning their supposedly core views.
In order to advance their own political career.
If you go back and look at the real time writings in the late 1940s when this national security state was created in the wake of World War II with the National Security Act of 1947 and the like, people were very aware that they were doing something rather radical.
They were creating a part of the government that was going to operate with great secrecy Obviously, the FBI predates that, but the rest of the U.S. security state was created, especially the CIA, during that time.
And I think a lot of the powers and postures of those other agencies began to kind of contaminate and infiltrate the FBI.
But even if you talk to the people who work in these agencies, they will tell you that what was always inculcated, first and foremost, in their brains is that you do not use these powers against the American people.
The FBI, of course, is a domestic law enforcement agency.
But even there, the idea was always the worst possible thing the FBI could do was to use those powers for political ends.
You have a lot of these kind of whistleblowers, obviously the one I work with, Edward Stone at the NSA, others from the NSA, who say the reason they're coming forward is because that has been abandoned.
That these agencies are now more political actors than they are anything else.
What do you make of that critique?
I think that's exactly right.
And that is what keeps us up at night, Glenn.
We're worried about what has become of these agencies that have such broad and expansive powers.
Do you see what I mean?
He's not just saying he's going to vote yes or no.
He's saying, this issue, this concern is so pressing to me that it keeps me up at night.
The secrecy of the FBI, the ability of the U.S.
security state to spy on American citizens with no limit.
It keeps him up at night, he said, just in July of 2023.
You know, the top law enforcement agency in the country that is supposed to be protecting and serving the American people is being used against them.
It's violating the privacy of Americans.
It is trampling upon their fundamental constitutional rights.
And it goes without check.
Because, you know, what so many people are frustrated about is, you know, they asked me today, why can't you guys get accountability?
Why can't you bring some order to this?
Well, you know, the political reality is here that people sometimes forget is we only have the majority in one house of Congress right now, and it's a bare majority at that.
We don't have in Congress the ability to indict someone for violating the law or to put them on trial in a court.
All we can do is put them on trial in the court of public opinion.
That's what the hearings are.
And then bring legislative reforms to do our best to ensure that these abuses cannot happen again in the future.
He said the only thing we can do is bring legislative reform to ensure these abuses Do not happen again.
He becomes Speaker.
There is pending legislation to do exactly that.
That has bipartisan support.
To do exactly that.
To reform the powers of the U.S.
Security States so they can no longer spy on us in secret.
And abuse their spying powers and other powers for politicized domestic ends.
He said that's the thing I'm eager to do.
Because this keeps me up at night.
Their ability to abuse their spying powers in secret with no checks.
That's what he told me.
And then he becomes Speaker and there's legislation that has the support of both parties designed to do precisely what he said he was so eager to do.
And then he not only becomes a yes vote or a no vote rather on the reforms, a yes vote to renew the powers with no reform, he becomes the primary to ensure that it passes the House.
Remember, the reforms, the warrant requirements and the like, failed to pass because it was a vote of 212 to 212.
He acted as House Speaker, he made sure to cast And so the FBI, for example, wants this multi-billion dollar new headquarters.
with, the Biden White House and the NSA and the CIA and the FBI, to ensure that none of these reforms made it past Congress.
Here's the rest of what he told me.
Sure.
Ultimately, too, and this is important, we have the power of the purse.
And so the FBI, for example, wants this multi-billion dollar new headquarters.
I don't think they deserve that.
If they can't even show us that they can respect the constitutional rights of the people they're supposed to be serving, it's gotten out of control.
Do you have any doubt at all that Mike Johnson will now ensure that the FBI gets all the funding they want for their shiny new headquarters that he told me just several months ago?
Why wouldn't he switch on that and change that view?
He's changed on everything else.
If the Biden White House wants something badly enough, if the U.S.
security state tells him they need it, he will serve them.
And that's why it's not only the case that Democrats are now so eager to save his speakership, it's also very rational for Democrats to do that.
Nobody is confused about why they would.
Here's Congressman Massey, one of the most principled members of Congress since Ron Paul left, on April 28th saying the following, quote, Speaker Mike Johnston enlisted a majority of Democrats to override a majority of Republicans so he could, one, pass an omnibus bill that spends more than Pelosi did, including a new FBI building, so he already has actually done that.
He's ensured that those funds for the FBI building that he told me just several months ago they don't deserve actually were appropriated to the FBI.
Two, reauthorize warrantless spying on Americans.
Three, send $60 billion to Ukraine.
It's unforgivable.
Here is Congressman Massey explaining all of that and why, in part, he decided that he couldn't support Congressman Johnson any longer as Speaker.
That's the video that Congressman Massey attached to his statement where he was showing that the Democrats in Congress, and I believe the Republicans here as well, were celebrating Speaker Johnson's success in getting $60 billion more to Ukraine by waving the Ukrainian flag, not the American and Ukrainian flag, this foreign country's flag inside the American Congress to show you what a priority it is for these people to keep that war continuing.
Thank you.
He also worked with the Biden administration to ensure that the TikTok would either be banned, which would be the greatest infringement of free speech rights in decades if the U.S.
government were to ban the social media app that authoritative Americans use voluntarily to communicate with one another and express themselves and organize, or to force a sale of it to a company that will do the bidding of the American government when it comes to things like content moderation.
There you see NPR House approved sell or be banned TikTok measure attaching it to Foreign aid.
So there has been a series of steps that Mike Johnson has taken.
Obviously the most accommodating one is the foreign aid package that he led the way in ensuring got to the House floor after spending months vowing he opposed it.
from AP on April 21st, "The House passes billions in aid for Ukraine and Israel after months of struggle next to the Senate." The House has approved $95 billion in foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and other U.S. allies in a rare weekend session as Democrats and Republicans banded together after months of hard right resistance over renewed American support for repelling Russia's invasion.
With an overwhelming vote Saturday, the $61 billion in aid for Ukraine passed in a matter of minutes.
A strong showing as America's lawmakers race to deliver a fresh round of U.S.
support to the war-torn ally.
Quote, we did our work here, and I think history will judge it well, said a weary speaker, Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who risked his own job to marshal The package to passage.
Now, he didn't really risk his own job because of the fact that Democrats had made clear that they were going to protect him in the event they serve.
He served their number one political interest, not their number one foreign policy interest, their number one political interest, which is feeding that war to ensure that Ukrainians have to die to try and weaken the Russian Economy in the military the opposite of which is actually happening.
Here's congressman Massey again on April 12th, which is the day that the vote Happened to renew warrantless eavesdropping.
Thanks to Mike Johnson without reforms the opposite of what he told me quote This is how the Constitution dies by a tie vote the amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans goes down in flames This is a sad day for America.
This speaker doesn't always vote in the house, but he was the tiebreaker today He voted against warrants Now obviously, in Washington, as I've said many times before, the worst lie and myth that we're constantly fed by the media is that the two parties are so radically opposed to one another, they can't work together on anything, they can't agree on anything, they're always at each other's throats.
When in reality, most of what is done, of significance and consequence in Washington, happens because the two parties are in complete agreement on most things.
And obviously that illustrates yet again that but what it really illustrates even more is the ability of Washington to take somebody who by all appearances seems to be firm and steadfast in their convictions that come from years of study and work as a constitutional lawyer and a ideology and a mindset against war and foreign war spending that he could convince you he really believed and the ability of Washington to take this person
And through a combination of threatening his position in power however they did it, combined with the carrot of promising him that he will remain as Speaker at least until the next election, by being protected by Democrats as long as he plays ball and becomes useful to the Biden White House, can take a person and just so easily twist them into a complete, unrecognizable reversal of who they said that they were for years.
And that is the most dispiriting thing, to watch these people who get there.
And I think a lot of times they do have genuine convictions, but the system in Washington is constructed so effectively to exploit anybody who is a careerist, who wants advancement, who wants to cling to that power.
I mean, of course, he feels so important and so purposeful getting invited to these secret rooms.
Down in the Situation Room in the White House or deep in the bowels of the NSA and the CIA where they give him secret briefings.
It feels so important, but he knows he can only keep that as long as he serves them and gives them what they demand.
And he was more than happy to do so in a way that wasn't just jarring, but really kind of humiliating and cringewall to actually have to witness.
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Li Feng is one of the nation's most intrepid journalists.
And we're always happy to have him on our show.
He has a new report out today that we are going to talk about, as well as other items and news events taking place in the United States.
We're always thrilled to have him.
Lee, welcome.
Good evening.
Great to see you.
Hey, thanks for having me, Glenn.
Good to see you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you have a new article on your Substack, which is where you do your independent reporting, and the article is entitled, America's Wall Mortification of War, where you say the subheadline, records show the U.S.
factory, crucial for artillery munitions, was bought by a defense conglomerate and slowly downsized.
And you wrote a tweet about it where you said, Earlier today, quote, US and NATO have 12 times Russia's defense budget, yet Russia produces three times the artillery munitions vital for the Ukraine war.
How is America so easily outpaced by Russia, which has a fraction of our economy and defense spending?
It's partially a story of corporate consolidation.
Now, this has been the thing I have to say that I have been confounded by as well.
The Knowledge has been there from the very beginning of this war that one of the major disadvantages Ukraine faces is a shortage of munitions, of artillery, which is crucial for this kind of trench warfare.
Russia has a gigantic advantage, and it would be one thing if that shortage were visible at the start of the war, but then the US and NATO got together and increased their industrial capacity and was able to compete with Russia, at least, if not surpass them, given how much more money we spend on our economy than they.
And yet, The Americans joined with NATO are completely incapable of catching up to Russia.
It's a major reason the Russians are winning this war.
And it does seem extremely difficult to understand not just why we have a munition shortage at the start, but why we can't ramp up production even in two and a half years into this war to even compete with Russia.
So what is going on here?
Well, as you mentioned, this war has progressed as kind of a World War I trench-style conflict, where artillery shells are traded every day, thousands of them.
At some point, Ukraine was reported to fire 3,000 shells every day, and Russia was even outpacing them.
We've known for a very long time that this would likely be an artillery-based conflict.
Even looking back to 2014, after the Maidan revolution, And to me, it's surprising to me.
I generally haven't understood why the U.S.
who were advising the Ukrainian military on tactical artillery usage.
So this should not have been a surprise.
But what has been, I think, surprising to the public and to anyone watching this military conflict.
And to me, it's surprising to me.
I generally haven't understood why the U.S. can't rectify this, but they can't.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, as I understand it, manufacturing these 155 millimeter shells that are used in this kind of standard howitzers artillery on the front lines in Ukraine is a very specialized process.
You need very You know, particular machines and skilled machinists to make them.
The shell casings are made in a factory in Pennsylvania.
The explosives are kind of loaded and manufactured in Tennessee.
The then finished product is created at another factory in Iowa.
And this is a military industrial problem that the U.S.
has thought about and really concentrated on for much of the 20th century.
It really wasn't until The 80s and early 90s with the boom in mergers and acquisitions when the U.S.
Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission took their finger off of antitrust enforcement and in some cases actually encouraged major corporate industries to merge so that there would only be one, two or three major players in any particular market.
That seemed to be a big part of this problem because one of the major defense contractors, General Dynamics, this is a company that started out as a submarine manufacturer that's brought its, you know, focus to other ships, to tanks, they do a lot of information warfare, but they also have attempted to corner the ammunition medium and high High-powered munitions market.
In 2006, they bought two different companies that are involved in the munitions manufacturing, including that really crucial Pennsylvania factory that is really the only facility in North America that's making these metal casings that are used for these howitzers, and they almost immediately started downsizing it.
Just like all the other kind of mergers and acquisitions you see in other parts of the economy, including in the defense space, but in many others, When companies come to consolidate, they find efficiencies and cost savings, and a big part of that is laying off workers, closing down plants.
General Dynamics and its competitors in the space, as they've merged, they've closed down plants, they've fired workers, they laid off many of the employees at this Pennsylvania plant.
It had 400 employees in 2005.
It had 400 employees in 2005.
In a few short years, it had less than 200.
And they really did not focus on the upgrades necessary to meet the kind of capacity, the production demand for this war.
There are recent reports that the U.S.
can only produce 26,000 shells per month.
Russia can produce 250,000.
So, you know, even combined with our NATO allies, we're not even coming close to half of the production of the Russians, even with emergency funding to bring the capacity up by the end of this year, early next year.
So the Russians are going to have an advantage in this field for a very long time, potentially all the way through the end of 2025 if this conflict continues for the next year and a half.
Well, it really gives the lie to the propaganda that we've been hearing about this war from the beginning, but especially more recently when Americans have been questioning why it is that this war is worth fighting, why it actually helps our country's interest and the way of life of American citizens.
And the claim increasingly has become, oh, it's a great war.
We're not dying at all.
We're just sending increasingly unwilling young Ukrainian conscripts to go and become cannon fodder and die on the front line.
But the benefit that we're getting is that we're weakening one of our adversaries, which is Russia, to such a great extent.
Now, I don't know why Russia is considered an adversary of the United States that we actually want to weaken through a war, but even if that is the goal, what we're actually seeing is so obviously the opposite, which is that the Russians have gone on a war footing, in a war economy, and completely strengthened their industrial base and their industrial capacity to the point that, as you say, they're able to produce almost 10 times the munitions
That the United States can produce, it doesn't really seem like Russia is weakened as a military force, but the thing that I have to say honestly disturbs me, I mean, I will admit it, even though I'm a vehement opponent of financing this war from the start, and obviously a vehement opponent of the United States spending close to now a trillion dollars a year on our military, which is more than, you know, depending on how you count, the next 15 countries combined, I always assumed
Of course if there was a lot of waste and the like, and the Pentagon can't even pass an audit, so of course there's all kinds of waste going on and grifting and graft and all kinds of things, but I assume that at the very least our military was actually equipped with the basic Components of war, which even if you think about war as a more modern endeavor, obviously would include artillery because you could have a ground war at any moment.
That's the kind of war that the United States should be prepared to fight given how much we spent.
So it turns out that not only don't we have that capability at the beginning, but even knowing that we have to ramp up We still are unable to notwithstanding how much more we spend on our military than any other country.
What does this say about the whole process of our military spending?
The U.S.
went through sequestration cuts in 2011-2012.
That was the big budget cuts that were mandated by the Tea Party Congress that were elected, you know, to reduce the budget deficit.
Well, with this mandate to reduce costs, what did the big defense conglomerates do?
They lobbied Pentagon officials and they used their allies in Congress to prioritize the big-ticket expensive items, some of which are obsolete.
They prioritized the Abrams tanks, the F-35, the F-22, some of the Freedom-class battleships that are supposedly great at hunting submarines but allegedly don't work at all.
These are multibillion-dollar projects.
Each of these Abrams tanks cost as much as $10 million.
What do they do?
They let the kind of basics of warfare, the ammunition depots and manufacturing plants wither on the vine.
The U.S.
once had many of these types of plants.
The three I mentioned at the outside of this is pretty much it.
There used to be far more facilities in Kansas and other parts of Pennsylvania that were producing these very munitions and other vital munitions for the front lines.
But we let that wither, and by basically empowering these big defense conglomerates to use their influence, whether it's through campaign finance, through the money to think tanks, their influence in the media, obviously campaign contributions, to really set the process.
The big problem here is that the Pentagon isn't even in control of their own budget.
These defense contractors act in a kind of predatory way to shape the spending priorities through their control of Congress.
And the Pentagon can't even say, no, we don't want this project.
We'd rather focus on another area.
Well, no, Congress sets the purse strings so they can compel action.
And who controls Congress?
It's the big donors like General Dynamics.
So it was interestingly as I think you know I was ill over the last week and I really wasn't able to do much other than lie in bed waiting for this dengue fever to go away and I was kind of just with no ability to actually move physically I was just spending a lot of time watching documentaries and interviews from real time from
The Bush administration from earlier in the 90s, the controversies like Waco, and there was this very conservative Democrat from Mississippi, Gene Taylor, who was kind of the representative at the time of all the ways that the Democrats had become so conservative, especially in the South.
And he was a stark and steadfast proponent of the war in Iraq.
He wanted to go into Iraq.
He thought that that was the right thing to do.
But he was also indignant about the inability to get the Bush-Cheney Pentagon to spend the most basic expenditures that would have protected our troops in Iraq from the thing that was really killing them the most, which were the roadside bombs and IEDs.
And he was describing all these different very cost reasonable measures that could have been taken to shield the tanks and the jeeps and the vehicles carrying these soldiers from these IEDs.
But he was basically saying that the way the Pentagon budget works is it has nothing to do with national security needs.
It's just the lobbyists from these arms industries who come and, as you say, pressure the Congress through donations and lobbying to not make the expenditures that would actually strengthen the American military.
But that would be the most profitable for the arms industry.
And it's like, in a way that, you know, is so kind of offensive no matter what your view on the Iraq War is that we're going to send our soldiers to Iraq and to Afghanistan and have this hundreds of billions of dollars spent and not give them the most basic things that other countries have already to protect them from the thing that was most killing them.
I mean, is that your sense of how It would be one thing if you had a gigantic military budget that was really being spent to build up the military, but it seems like every consideration goes into that military budget except for what would enable the United States to actually fight in wars.
No, that's right.
I mean, just look at our recent experience in Afghanistan.
I mean, there's just a laundry list of wasted items from the civilian defense contractors who were, you know, building up Afghanistan's infrastructure, who were tasked to, who were essentially just looting those funds with fake projects, you know, ghost schools that were only half constructed, ghost hospitals that didn't have plumbing or lights.
Or also many of the military contractors that were tasked with building up the Afghan defense forces.
I also have a recent story on my sub stack.
I just took a look at the chatter from investment banks and defense contractors on their earnings calls and other investor events discussing the new $90 billion supplemental and the expectation for how this money would be spent and how it would impact their bottom line.
And one of these major defense contractors was discussing the prospect of escalation of the war in Ukraine.
And they were saying, you know, that's when we can get into the big money.
You know, we're not really getting the big contracts right now.
You know, I'm paraphrasing.
You can look at the transcript on my sub stack.
But they're saying, you know, they were comparing Afghanistan to Ukraine and said, you know, we really got people on the ground and made a lot more money once we were building up the Afghan Air Force.
You know, they were completely unconcerned with the fact that the Afghan Air Force was a complete failure.
You know, eight billion dollars lost.
These, you know, Afghan pilots were not trained to fly.
They were not military ready.
Of course, they surrendered immediately to the Taliban.
I mean, it was a fiasco.
But if you look at the way that they talk, these defense contractors talk to their investors, they think it's a success because they made a lot of money.
And that's what they hope for in Ukraine.
Yeah, the fact that the military budget is being driven by lobbyists working for these armed industries who don't care at all about America's warfighting capabilities and then you have these soldiers who are being deployed overseas who are completely vulnerable and unprotected or these gigantic boondoggles of major acquisitions that can't even be used on the battlefield is, I mean, should be really disturbing to anybody regardless of their views on All of these war budgets.
Now let me just switch gears a little bit and ask you about the nationwide protests that are increasingly proliferating on college campuses in opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza and specifically the U.S.
government's policy, the Biden administration's policy of financing Israel, of arming Israel, of protecting Israel at the U.N., even if it means isolating the U.S.
from the rest of the world.
What we're now seeing, obviously, is a very concerted effort on the part of a lot of pro-Israel Democrats, joint at the hip, yet again, with all kinds of Republicans, to try and create theories that justify the shutting down, the silencing of these protesters and the criminalization of these protests.
And that fact that it's coming from the wing of American politics, which is the American right, that has spent a decade now claiming that they're stalwart defenders of free expression and committed opponents of the evils of censorship.
It's just, I mean, I don't even have words for it any longer.
What do you make of this kind of assault on these encampments and these protest movements on campuses?
I mean, we talked a little bit about this last year, after October 7th, when we had a few documented cases of, you know, pro-Israel groups organizing to cancel pro-Palestinian speakers or members of Congress from coming onto campuses and even just giving a speech.
And you looked at the kind of messaging used, it was almost a...
Perfectly parallel to the types of weaponized victimhood that the left has used for over a decade saying that, you know, if a pro-Palestinian speaker comes to this campus, Jewish students won't feel safe and we need to create a safe space for students on campus.
So therefore, you know, we can't have this speech happen.
Well, you know, this dynamic has escalated.
I mean, exponentially, and just in the last week, members of Congress who were applauding the very disruptive efforts to block roads by the Freedom Convoy, the Freedom Truckers in Canada who were protesting vaccine mandates, the Freedom Truckers in Canada who were protesting vaccine mandates, other forms of conservative speech that have been shut down by Democrats or people on the left, they've taken the other side of this.
They're hurling the term anti-Semitism in the exact same way that the left has hurled the term racism.
They're claiming victimhood to shut down You know, even the most anodyne and peaceful protester, and of course there are some of those protesters that have said ignorant or bigoted things.
There's ignorant and bigoted things from both sides of this debate.
But the violence from the police and the attempts by university administrators and members of Congress to shut down speech across the board because they don't agree with the political message, I mean, it's just the height of hypocrisy.
The thing that really strikes me is, if you know anything about history, you know that these kind of protests on college campuses are... Hold on, I... Oh, you can't hear me?
I don't hear you.
Are we able to figure out... I think Lee can't hear me.
We need to figure that out.
Alright, we're gonna get this fixed in just a second, Lee.
I know you can't hear me.
Still not.
We're gonna have that fixed in just a second.
Okay, I think you're back.
Okay, great.
So what I was saying was if you know anything about American history, recent history, you know that these kind of protest movements on college campuses are extremely common.
It's something that young people naturally do.
They are more anti-establishment.
They feel more of an anger against the US government's policies.
They feel more kind of energetic about protesting.
It's something that you do when you're young.
It's student activism of a kind with which we're very familiar.
And in fact, we've seen way more disruptive and enduring protests on campuses that have been far more rule-breaking than this one.
Things like the years-long disruptions on American college campuses in protest of the Vietnam War, massive protests against the invasion of Iraq, In the 1980s, there was a massive campaign demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa that helped bring down that regime that was basically centralized on American college campuses and driven by the kind of protests we're seeing now.
And yet, there really wasn't the kind of widespread calls to shut down those protests.
The way we're seeing now, it's almost like it's kind of okay to engage in these raucous protests as long as your target is the U.S.
government, but the one thing that you really can't do without triggering all hell falling on your head from both political parties is criticize this foreign government in Tel Aviv.
Doesn't that seem kind of bizarre to you?
It's bizarre and I think indicative of the power of pro-Israel groups that Israel lobby.
I mean, just think of any other foreign government, ally or adversary, for very good reason, the U.S.
was apoplectic when there were one or two instances of the Chinese government on pro-Chinese groups shutting down pro-Tiananmen Square, pro-critics of China's speech at university campuses.
They couldn't stop the speech, but they sent students to shout them down and kind of harass them off campus.
That led to a national investigation and crackdown on these Confucian centers, on Chinese think tanks, on the whole kind of apparatus of the U.S.-China student exchange program.
But those are so minor compared to this.
I mean, you're seeing people who are essentially like you've seen the clip of Glenn Beck pleading to be Israeli citizens.
Other Americans saying they're essentially more loyal to this government than their own and that any critic of Israel needs to be thrown off campus or arrested.
I mean, it's very extreme.
And, you know, I think these tactics are likely to create more of a backlash.
And if you're concerned with this pro-Palestinian speech, you know, it kind of doesn't matter where you stand on the issue.
Perhaps you support the Israeli government's actions in Gaza or the West Bank or so forth.
The simple optics of this all, of police dragging nonviolent professors, of attacking these students, many of whom are completely nonviolent, is only garnering more support, and that's why we're seeing more of these protests taking off on campuses around the country.
Absolutely.
Lee, great work as always on this new report, which people could find on your Substack, where I hope they'll not only read those articles, but support your efforts to continue to do independent reporting.
And it is always great to talk to you.
Appreciate your coming on tonight.
Good to see you, Glenn.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you too.
Have a good evening.
Dr. Jill Stein is one of the best-known independent politicians in the United States.
She has twice run for president as a Green Party candidate, both in 2012 and 2016, and is doing so again this year.
She is a medical doctor, having graduated from Harvard University, and then she practiced internal medicine for the next 25 years, although Democrats who can never accept responsibility for their own losses blame her for the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and frequently call her all kinds of names, including being a Russian asset.
We consider her to be one of the most important and interesting independent voices in this country, especially when she is a presidential candidate, as she is this year, and we are delighted to welcome her to the show.
Dr. Stein, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Great, Glenn.
It's really wonderful to be with you.
Great honor.
Absolutely.
So let's begin with the somewhat dramatic episode that happened to you this week.
You were exercising your First Amendment rights as an American citizen by participating in a protest on Washington University's campus in St.
Louis.
And along with dozens of students who were participating in that protest as well against the Israeli war in Gaza and U.S.
support for it, you ended up being arrested.
Why did you end up getting arrested?
What happened there?
I had been at a campaign event at a public library just a couple blocks away.
There were some wonderful students there from the encampment and, you know, just speaking in a really eloquent way about what they were doing.
And on the way out from the library, another student from the university asked me to stop by.
And I said, of course, you know, we so support what the students are doing, who are really the moral fiber of America at the moment.
And when we arrived at the campus, the students who were at the encampment then asked us, would we please go and try to de-escalate the situation with the administration?
So myself and two of the aldermen for St.
Louis, who were also there to support the encampment, went over to try to negotiate.
It wasn't really successful, I will say.
After that, the students asked me to join the circle around the encampment to defend their constitutional rights to free speech and the right to protest on a subject of absolutely critical importance to the moral conscience of the nation and our values and so on.
So, as we were standing there, basically the police assaulted us with bicycles as a weapon They did appear to specifically single me out and say to get her, and you can see in the footage that they were basically pushing me and my campaign colleagues around me and the students, they were pushing us over and were about to flip me.
Backwards, onto my head, and one of the cops at that point bent down and picked up one of my feet in an effort to, you know, come in for the final blow and jerk me into a backflip, basically, onto the ground.
You know, in the effort to recover my balance, I wiggled out of his grip, and then he informed me that I had just assaulted him.
Apparently, my foot may have made contact with him as he was trying to assault me.
My foot made contact, and he told me that I was assaulting him and, you know, that I would be so charged.
They eventually toppled me and all of us over, cuffed us, you know, face down on the ground, and then walked us over to the paddy wagon.
We were processed, you know, and there were about a hundred of us, actually.
Everyone eventually at the encampment wound up at the jail.
We were processed, which went on for like five hours.
And at the end of that time, I was then separated from the group because they hadn't said anything about this assault charge.
I was then separated and I was told to go in a different direction.
And there was one other person there who was a professor also in his 60s.
I'm in my 70s.
He was in his 60s, not a particularly vigorous man.
There's footage of his assault as well, where he was basically a number of officers just lunged at him.
He was just taking photographs.
He wasn't even part of the circle around the encampment.
He was just a bystander taking, you know, documenting what was going on.
And they assaulted him, knocked him down on the ground, cuffed him, and then face down dragged him by his feet.
And he was quite, you know, injured and beaten up.
And the two of us were the ones that were, you know, being booked, I guess, for assault charges.
Although it's hard to say because it's not on my yellow slip, but we were separated.
We were, you know, we had our mug shots and our fingerprints and urine sample, medical admission.
It looked like we were being admitted to the jail.
And then when all that processing was done, they said, "Okay, now go out that door." And that door was an exit.
So sure enough, we were being turned loose.
The paper doesn't say anything about assault charges, but it does appear as though I'm going to be charged with assault for having been assaulted with a bicycle by these riot police who were creating a riot.
Well, I've long said that I consider you to be a very physically imposing and intimidating figure, especially when it comes to confronting armed agents of the state like these police officers, so I'm sure they were quite petrified for their safety.
Let me ask you, Of the major candidates, meaning the people who are recognizable, the people who have a demonstrated ability to run a serious campaign, you are the only Jewish candidate of the presidential candidates in the 2024 race.
I know that you're familiar with what is being said about what's happening at these protests and these encampments, namely that it's driven by bigotry and hate speech and extreme violence toward an attempt to intimidate Jews and Jews who are on campus.
Did you see any of that there as a Jewish, a well-known Jewish political figure yourself?
To the contrary, I'm constantly hearing expressions of community, love, and appreciation, especially for being a Jewish voice.
And, you know, Jewish voices are certainly in the leadership now of these encampments, of these protests, of the demand to end the genocide in Gaza committed by the apartheid state of Israel.
I don't hear or see any anti-Jewish sentiment, I hear lots of really pro-Jewish support and gratitude for what I consider to be a basic Jewish value, which is that genocide is unacceptable.
That was certainly what I was taught growing up within the Jewish community outside of Chicago after the Holocaust.
I was growing up shortly after the Holocaust.
My parents were the children of refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe.
My grandfather's name was Israel.
We were very mindful that genocide is really kind of an existential You know, just a crisis, really.
It's a crisis of civilization.
And, you know, to people growing up in the wake of the Holocaust, it was really difficult to come to terms with, and one of the ways that our community came to terms with it was by resolving that it would never happen again, not to anybody, didn't matter who, but that genocide is the responsibility not only of the perpetrators, but also of the bystanders.
And I just grew up with that in my bones, and there was no way That I could stand by, and I feel like I have felt so much gratitude from the Muslim community in particular, and from students who are up in arms about this.
I feel so much gratitude from them.
To me, the problem is that the Zionist community is trying to hide behind Judaism.
And Zionism is not Judaism.
And to say that being against genocide is anti-Semitic is the biggest anti-Semitic slur of all, because that essentially says that it's okay with Jews for genocide to happen.
Yeah, if you look at things like the Nuremberg Trials and the principles that were established after World War II, they were very much not about the idea that one particular group is particularly vulnerable to these kind of evil acts.
It was about the nature of humanity being such that any nation, any group of people at any time could perpetrate Hold the line now!
of this kind, and it was our responsibility to enforce these principles universally against any group, including, they said, the nations that were present and acting as the perpetrators of justice at the Nuremberg trials.
We do have some video of your arrest that I just want to quickly show so that people can see it with their own eyes, what you've described.
Let's go ahead and put that up.
Hold the line now!
So for people who aren't watching, you can see there the bicycle being held by the police officers and Dr. Stein standing with students being pushed back with that bicycle.
It definitely looks to me like the police officers are very much in physical control of the situation.
The idea that they're being endangered or assaulted seems To be quite visibly false.
But yeah, that definitely illustrates more or less exactly what you were describing.
All right, let me ask you, this is not a new thing for you.
You have been a longtime critic of the treatment by the Israelis of the Palestinians.
It is not new that the Israelis are bombing Gaza.
They have done so many, many times over the past several decades.
First when they were occupying it, now when they're blockading it.
On the scope of things that you have seen, moral atrocities and war and the like, both in terms of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and then more broadly, modern day war in the 21st century, where do you rank the current destruction of Gaza by the Israelis on that list?
I think it is the most horrifying thing that we have witnessed.
This is a genocide that's being live-streamed.
I feel like, as a medical doctor, I feel like I'm on a death watch right now for two million people, and this is extremely comfortable.
Extremely uncomfortable.
It's actually intolerable.
I don't think I could stand to witness this without fighting it with every fiber of my being.
I also feel this as a mother, as a parent, as an uncle or an aunt.
It's just intolerable to witness the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale.
So, you know, it's both the fact that this is live streamed in real time, as well as the intensity of the onslaught here, you know, and that's been documented time and again, that the degree of the violence, the intensity of the violence, the intensity of the bombing, the fact that some eight times the number the fact that some eight times the number of bombs dropped on Iraq in six years, you know, so that full volume of bombing has, the volume of bombs dropped on Iraq has been exceeded eightfold in the first 100
has the volume of bombs dropped on Iraq has been exceeded eightfold in the first 100 days.
You know, this is just like unbelievably monstrous what's taking place, the elimination of hospitals, the assault on hospitals, the mass graves of hundreds of innocent civilians, patients, doctors and nurses.
are there by the hundreds in mass graves in at least two of the hospitals that have been destroyed.
And pretty much all of the hospitals have been destroyed.
The ambulances, the ambulance drivers, the universities have been flattened, the schools.
I mean, what's going on now is it's almost beyond compare from anything I have ever seen or heard.
The entire, you know, the survival of an entire people, their culture is being erased, flattened, pulverized.
It's a monstrous event that's taking place, and I think it really challenges us.
What is our moral fiber here?
What is our moral core?
Because what happens in Casa, they are normalizing.
The torture and murder of children.
They are normalizing the violation of international law.
They are normalizing the, you know, the abolition of human rights.
So to sit by and let this happen in Gaza is basically to say that this is okay, you know, for the future of the world.
Obviously, as an independent candidate outside the two-party system, as a Green Party candidate, one of the foundations of your campaign is that you critique the bipartisanship of both political parties and the way in which they agree on things and impose destructive things in the world.
Apparent differences or the claimed differences between the two parties is that Democrats have increasingly embraced theories of censorship when it comes to things like online expression.
They've worked with the security state to impose a censorship regime on the internet, whereas conservatives and Republicans were saying how profoundly opposed they were to this kind of suppression of free political speech.
Since October 7th, what we've seen is not a debate, but essentially a union between those two groups yet again to essentially insist that criticism of Israel should be deemed hate speech, that it should be deemed to be inherently violent.
There's now a concerted effort to shut down these political protests, including ones that are entirely peaceful.
What do you make of this kind of unity between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to questions regarding Israel and even attacks on our free speech rights in the name of shielding it?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, unfortunately, this is an example of where Democrats and Republicans converge basically on an agenda of war and Wall Street, you know, and they both share the agenda of bailing out Wall Street whenever it needs it.
The Democratic and Republican consensus after the crooks crashed Wall Street in 2008, you know, they were quick to bail them out to the tune of trillions of dollars, even while the American public was screaming, don't do it.
You know, so Wall Street got bailed out and every day people got thrown out, losing their homes by the millions.
You know, appropriations for Ukraine or for Or for Israel, you know, they're a dime a dozen and, you know, the Republicans may grandstand based on, you know, usually not compelling issues like they wanted to militarize the border before they provided the funding for Ukraine.
But, you know, on basic issues, unfortunately, there's a widespread agreement here.
And they're both very much in the pocket.
Joe Biden appointed a former member of the Raytheon board of directors to be the secretary of defense.
So they're both really joined at the hip with the war industry, the war profiteers, and with Wall Street.
So the differences between them, I think, are pretty shallow and superficial.
Unfortunately, they're all pretty much taking their marching orders from AIPAC and the war profiteers and ignoring the overwhelming consensus of the American people that they want an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated solution.
Just a couple questions more with the time we have left.
There was just a recent poll out this week from one of the more credible polling agencies that says that 70% of Americans think that the economy is going poorly and a similar percentage, 66%, disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy.
Now, and this is very consistent with polling data that we've seen for over a year now.
Now, if you listen to liberal pundits, the sort of loyalists of the Democratic Party, they will insist that the data shows that the economy actually is doing quite well.
And there are actual metrics and data that you can point to that suggest that there's been improvement in the economy since the COVID pandemic and the like.
And they basically in this kind of very now characteristic democratic way, are almost saying that the people in the country are stupid, that they don't realize how good they have it, and they're kind of malcontents.
Why do you think that even though you can point to some data that suggests that some things have improved, that so many Americans on such a widespread basis believe the economy is going so poorly for them?
Well, I think there's a lot of data to show that if you're not in the upper 10% or so, you know, if you're not heavily invested in the stock market, the economy really is pretty devastating for most working people.
Most working people are living with incredible insecurity right now.
You know, if they make ends meet, it's generally by going into debt.
So we know 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
We know that half of all renters are severely economically stressed, trying to keep a roof over their heads, paying more than 30% of their income just to pay their rent, which doesn't leave much money to pay their student debt, which is also, you know, just really devastating to 44 million Americans, 100 million Americans who are in medical debt.
You know, 87 million Americans who are either underinsured or not insured at all.
Child poverty rates have doubled.
Homelessness is at a record high.
And you know, and if you poll young people, people under 25, 50 percent of young people say that they are hopeless about the future.
One quarter of young people say that they have considered harming themselves because of this fact within the last two weeks of the poll, which is an absolutely terrifying metric about the state of our society.
Things are not going well once you get beyond, you know, sort of the upper crust.
So there may be these macroeconomic indicators that are OK because the upper crust is doing so well.
But the vast majority of people are pretty desperate now and only becoming more so, while Congress appropriates almost $100 billion at the drop of a hat in order to conduct more war, which is impoverishing us 50 percent of our congressional budget.
In fact, more of that is being spent on the endless war machine, which is doing nothing but creating failed states, mass refugee migrations, continuing terrorist threats and not making the world a safer place.
In fact, making the world a much more dangerous place.
So what's wrong with this picture?
You know, what's wrong with this picture is that our our electoral system, our democracy has pretty much been sold to the highest bidder.
And this is what's driving policy, why we have Congress voting in pretty much lockstep to continue funding this stuff, while the needs of the American people are just desperately met.
So fortunately, a lot of people are saying enough is enough, and it's really time to stand up.
There are going to be three pro-war, pro-genocide, anti-worker campaigns on the ballot, that is, RFK, Biden, and Trump.
And our campaign is the only anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-worker campaign that is on track to be on the ballot across the country.
It is likely to be a four-way race.
If the vote is split four ways, in fact, it can be won with as little as 26 percent.
Recently we've been running 8% in the most recent poll in Wisconsin and 22% among people 30 and under.
Bernie Sanders percolated along at 2-3% until he broke through in 2016 in the primary.
So I'd say, you know, hold on to your hats, we don't know what's happening You know, what the outcome of this election will be.
But the American people are in uprising now for a very good reason, in spite of the propaganda of the Democrats to just tell you to sit down, be good little boys and girls and, you know, be happy with your very screwed over life as it is.
Yeah, I mean, there's no question there's massive evidence of systemic discontent with both political parties, and there's a huge opening, I think, more so than ever before.
Just one or two questions left.
You mentioned a couple times the war in Ukraine.
You know the argument against pulling out or ceasing to fund it.
The Republicans and Democrats just united to send another $60 billion.
to Ukraine, they got Mike Johnson to just switch completely the view that he had claimed for years he believed in, not just on that, but on warrantless eavesdropping and the like.
So we're sending another $60 billion to fuel that war to keep it continuing.
The argument, of course, is that if we don't, the Russians would just overrun Ukraine, that the Ukrainians would lose their country, that Russia would annex it and take it over and that we can't allow that to happen.
What's your response to that critique?
Well, that is a mythology, you know, and experts in the region, John Mershimer and people like that who know the region, you know, are pretty clear, as the evidence is clear, that Russia actually cannot afford to expand as an empire.
It can't take that on.
Russia is defending its border.
which the U.S. has done as well.
When Russia put nuclear missiles in Cuba, we had launched the nuclear bombs into the air.
We were not going to allow our border to be threatened by nuclear missiles.
And with the expansion of NATO eastward, there are nuclear compatible missiles now on Russia's border.
Russia did not want to see that happening along the very extensive Ukrainian border as well.
Russia was very clear from the outset what it wanted was neutrality, explicit neutrality for Ukraine after the war was begun.
You know, and Russia, at has been offering to basically make a deal and hold to a deal before the war in an effort to avoid it.
This war was predicted.
It was understood to be an inevitable consequence of violating the promise that was made to Gorbachev, you know, whenever it was the - And the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. - Exactly.
That the reunification of Germany was dependent on the guarantee that NATO would not be expanding further to the east.
And that began to be violated shortly after the agreement was made.
And especially under Clinton, NATO began to march to the east.
And it was clear that this war was in the offing.
But all that needed to be done was to abide by that promise that was made at that time to Gorbachev.
So this was an absolutely avoidable war.
Russia simply wanted to defend its border.
It's been invaded across that Ukrainian border many times over the course of history.
And most recently, they lost 27 million people.
They are touchy about their border.
It would have required absolutely nothing from the U.S. would have been no loss of power or status or anything to simply have respected the Minsk Accords, which were negotiated on that basis, or simply the request for neutrality for Ukraine.
from the U.S. would have been no loss of power or status or anything to simply have respected the Minsk Accords, which were negotiated on that basis, or simply the request for neutrality for Ukraine.
This would have been an easy win here.
This would have been an easy win here.
But for very just wrongheaded reasons, the U.S. has an explicit military policy known as full-spectrum dominance that we will not allow competitors to emerge in any region of the world and will suppress those competitors.
And the U.S. has been quite insistent on suppressing any further development of Russia and the potential for Russia to emerge as a regional power.
We didn't want to see that.
So we've been bleeding Ukraine in order to bleed Russia.
And this is just a disaster for the people of Ukraine.
And it's really shameful.
We could You know, Russia is not a threat here.
It's not a threat.
Unfortunately, to end the war now, because a lot of territory has been taken, as was predicted, as Barack Obama himself acknowledged, this wasn't an area to begin a fight, because Russia has every reason to defend its borders here, and we do not.
This is not our territory.
This was predictable.
It's going to be more difficult to negotiate a solution right now.
But Russia has, you know, continued to negotiate even after the war.
And, you know, there will be more concessions at this stage of the game.
But, you know, what are we going to do?
bleed Ukraine to death, you know, and we've got two wars now and potentially a third, you know, if the warmongers get their way, they're warmongering against China as well.
This is nuts.
This endangers us all.
There are nuclear threats here, the potential for this to explode into a nuclear conflict.
And likewise, there is also in the Middle East with Netanyahu trying to drag us into a wider war with Iran and attacking the Iranian embassy and Iran is networked with Russia.
So this could all get very complicated and potentially nuclear at the drop of the hat.
It's very important for us to say, you know, this is over.
This is not Advancing security for the people of Ukraine.
It's really a horrible, terrible, costly mistake that the U.S.
bullied its way into this war to start with.
Yes, it was illegal and criminal for Putin to launch the attack on Ukraine, and that is absolutely war crimes that are being committed here on both sides, of course, but this was absolutely Avoidable.
Russia wanted to prevent this war, and the U.S.
insisted on forcing it forward.
And when there was an opportunity to negotiate, and there was a treaty which was ready to be signed, the U.S.
disrupted it in order to keep the war going.
We need to stop.
Enough is enough.
Enough Ukrainians have died.
Yeah, and as sensitive and touchy as you said about how the Russians are with that part of the border, they get even touchier when they hear German leaders vowing to pursue the glories of victory over the Russian army until the end and then sending German tanks eastward through Europe into Ukraine right up to the Russian border as the Germans have been doing.
Last question.
There are a lot of things Democrats are not very good at.
One of the things they're particularly poor at is accepting responsibility for their own defeats.
They, in 2000, to this day, blame that 2000 loss not on themselves, but on Ralph Nader.
In 2016, they blame, to this day, that loss on a variety of people, WikiLeaks, The New York Times, Russia, but especially you.
And you know the argument, which is that your candidacy, however Eloquent you may be, and however noble your platform might be, that the only actual effect of it is that you are stealing votes that the Democrats are entitled to, that they apparently think they own, and because of your candidacy, a bunch of people who would vote for Biden are going to vote for you instead and therefore jeopardize Biden's ability to beat Donald Trump.
What is your answer to that?
No one owns your vote.
No one is entitled to your vote.
Politicians need to earn your vote.
And anyone who tries to intimidate you or to extort your vote based on the notion that they own it doesn't deserve even consideration of your vote if they are trying to prevent you from doing what you need to do and you want to do.
Your vote is not meaningful unless it expresses what you want to do.
And silence is not a political strategy.
Let me point out that starting with Ralph Nader, you know, he put Medicare for All, called single payer at the time, on the map, on the political map.
In our campaign, we put free public higher education and abolishing student debt on the map.
We put reparations on the map and ranked choice voting, a way to make this issue and this question of vote splitting absolutely a moot problem entirely.
Greens have made a very powerful impact on the political agenda.
The Democrats adopt that agenda, but they don't actually fulfill that agenda.
And here we are, you know, continuing to go down the tubes.
So I'd say it's important to stand up and fight back against anyone who's trying to silence your political agency.
Because, you know, power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has and it never will.
We need to stand up.
For what we need.
Not simply against who we hate the most, which is kind of how our system works right now.
We need to stand up for what we need and support a candidate who's actually going to deliver that.
Otherwise we are not going to move forward and we are continuing to basically go over a cliff right now.
We're on a trajectory which is extremely dangerous and I think people are more ready than ever to stand up and fight for what it is that we need.
The world Our lives depend, our world depends, I think, on our changing course right now, and a lot of people know that and are ready to act on it.
Well, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that there are a lot of people who may not agree with every last one of your positions and platforms, but who are so happy that there are people who are willing to try and expand our discourse and our debate beyond this kind of dreary bipartisan consensus that keeps us all imprisoned in this In this kind of jail cell that is so suffocating and so limiting.
I'm so happy that you're doing what you're doing.
I think it takes a lot of courage.
I think you are having a very positive effect on our country's politics.
And I hope and I'm sure that you will continue.
And as you do, we will continue to report on it and hope to have you back on the show.
We really appreciate your taking the time to be with us.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
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Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show that's designed to take your questions and comment on your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions from future shows.
That after show is available only from members of our Locals community, and if you wanna join, which gives you access, not only to those twice a week after shows, but to the multiple interactive features we have there to stay in touch with our audience It's the place where we publish transcripts of every program that we broadcast here.
We publish transcripts there.
It's the place where we first publish our original written journalism and as I've said we have a bit of reporting that I think will make a big impact that we will likely publish Thursday morning on that
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