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May 3, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:00:44
Daily Wire Obtains Secret Gag Order While Publicly Negotiating Debate; PLUS: David Sirota on Corporate Control of DC

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Daily Wire’s Fake Debate Negotiations (6:21) Interview with David Sirota (31:19) Outro (59:47) - - - 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 Thursday, May 2nd.
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...
We reported earlier this morning on our Locals platform what appears to be the deceit of the news site The Daily Wire when it was pretending to publicly negotiate a debate between its co-founder Ben Shapiro and its former host Candace Owens regarding Israel, U.S.
support for Israel, and how anti-Semitism should be understood.
That debate, which was first proposed by Candace Owens on April 5th, was to focus on the pair's differences over all of these issues regarding Israel, including the Israeli war in Gaza, the new law defining anti-Semitism, and whether the U.S.
should finance Israel's war.
It was those differences with Shapiro that led to Owens' departure from the site in March, despite her being one of its most popular hosts.
Many people, especially Daily Wire fans, were eagerly anticipating a debate between these two, between two of the right's most influential figures, on this series of issues that has really recently split the right.
Two weeks after they agreed to the terms of the debate, readers of Bull Shapiro and Owens began noticing that it had not yet taken place and began asking why.
Owens addressed these inquiries by publicly reiterating her desire to have the debate, but noting that Fideli Wire had thus far failed to offer any dates for it to happen.
In reality, what we learned and confirmed and reported this morning was that shortly after the Daily Wire publicly negotiated this debate with Owens, they ran in secret to an arbitrator and requested a gag order be placed on Owens, preventing her from speaking in any disparaging way about either Ben Shapiro or the Daily Wire, which would obviously preclude a debate.
And to do so, they allege that the way she requested the debate And other statements that she had made constituted, quote, disparagement of the Daily Wire and of Ben Shapiro.
The arbitrator sided with the Daily Wire and did impose a gag order of prior restraint on Candace Owens, as the Daily Wire had requested.
In other words, at the same time that the Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro were posturing publicly as wanting a debate about Israel and anti-Semitism between Shapiro and Owens, they were in secret Ensuring that this debate would never happen by obtaining a prior restraint gag order to prevent Owens from questioning or criticizing Shapiro in any way.
The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro have become major forces in conservative politics.
They have built their platform and media brand and persona based on a media profile of seeking debate with anyone about anything while vehemently opposing any attempts to silence people, especially in media, due to their political views.
The fact that they, as we exclusively learned and then reported today, secretly and forcibly compelled Owen's silence, all while pretending in public that they wanted to debate her, is obviously newsworthy unto itself, but it also reveals a huge gap that we have been talking about for months on much of the pro-Israel right between their purported championing of free speech on the one hand and their continuous efforts to silence criticism of Israel on the other.
We'll explain our reporting and its implications.
The independent journalist David Sirota and his news site Lever News have become exemplary illustrations of how independent journalists can succeed not through mere punditry but through dogged investigative reporting.
The site specializes in the entirely nonpartisan project of tracing corporate cash in Washington and exposing its effects on a bipartisan basis on our lawmaking process.
Over the past week they have broken major stories involving efforts to block In Congress, consumer-friendly reforms of the airline industry, specifically how members of Congress from both parties who receive massive donations from the airline industry, have taken the lead in blocking reforms that would be of great value to passengers.
Sorota also has a new podcast, Lever Time, in which he documents how the Democratic Party used some of the most anti-democratic means imaginable to crush any possibility of a primary challenge to incumbent President Joe Biden.
And he's also been reporting on various issues involving the failures at Boeing.
We'll speak to Sorota in just a bit about all of those issues.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
For the last decade or so, it has really been American conservatives and the American right who have led the way in defending values of free speech.
And that's because, especially since 2016, the Democratic Party has explicitly embraced a framework of censorship, both censorship in general and particularly censorship of dissent online.
The Democratic Party has worked with, as we've reported many times, the U.S.
security state and with big tech.
To ensure that dissent from liberal orthodoxies cannot spread and are not heard online to the point that a federal district court judge and then a three-judge unanimous appellate panel found last year that the Biden administration had directly assaulted and violated the First Amendment's free speech guarantee through its program of coercing and threatening big tech to remove dissent on a wider range of issues through the FBI, through the CIA,
through health agencies, through the White House, that they regarded as dangerous.
And so what once had become, what once had been, a free speech issue that was really affirmed by Americans across the political spectrum has taken on, for the first time at least in my lifetime, a left-right tinge to it.
Because conservatives have been objecting, because the censorship has largely been directed at them, while liberals have been Largely embracing it, but we have said even before October 7th that there is a problem in the American right, in sectors of the American right, when it comes to a professed belief in free speech and opposition to censorship and cancel culture and namely that there's a gigantic glaring Israel exception
Where the American right starts to sound exactly like the liberals they claim to loathe when the question becomes critics of Israel.
There have been people fired at universities over many years, professors who have been denied tenure, student groups that have been closed down by virtue of criticizing Israel.
And obviously since October 7th, these efforts have escalated.
We reported on a couple of weeks ago a new proclamation by Governor Greg Abbott of Texas who said there's not going to be any anti-Semitic views in Texas and issued an executive order essentially criminalizing views that he regarded as anti-Semitic.
And then yesterday in Congress, as we reported extensively last night, the House overwhelmingly voted With 70 no votes in the Democratic Party and only 20 no votes in the Republican Party, a bill that, if it passes the Senate and goes to the White House, will be arguably the most severe legislative assault on free press, on free speech, in many years.
And there are a lot of conservatives who were supporting and are supporting this because they believe that the priority of protecting Israel from criticism is a higher priority than free speech.
And this has been playing out in so many different ways.
Now, the reporting that we did this morning concerned the Daily Wire's position on all of this.
And we have very often documented Ben Shapiro's inability to, when it comes to Israel, to align his views with his claimed values.
And one of the issues that we covered is the fact that Candace Owens, who became a vocal critic of the Israeli war in Gaza and of US support for Israel, as well as what she argues is the weaponization of anti-Semitism accusations, similar to the way liberals weaponize racism accusations, that everybody who questions Israel or criticizes Israel is instantly branded a racist or an anti-Semite.
And at first, The Daily Wire said, early on, After October 7th, when a lot of their most strident Israel supporters were calling for Candace Owens to be fired, they said, we're not going to fire somebody from their job at The Daily Wire because they don't have the views that Ben Shapiro has about Israel.
Hosts are allowed to have different views.
A mere four months later, Candace Owens was gone from The Daily Wire, and that's because she had crossed lines, according to The Daily Wire.
What Ben Shapiro described as the Overton window, the limits on what you can and can't say, she went over those lines, exceeded those limits when it came to Israel and questions of anti-Semitism and therefore was no longer compatible with the policies of the daily wire, which apparently require at least some degree of support for Israel.
Now, after Candace Owens left the Daily Wire, a lot of people were encouraged by the fact that she wanted to debate these issues with Ben Shapiro.
And obviously having two major figures in American conservatism with gigantic audiences debating whether or not support for Israel, its war in Gaza, finance against war, finance against military, calling everybody who questions it anti-Semitic, is or is not compatible with conservative values and right-wing dogma.
That would have been a great debate to have.
And the Daily Wire said that they also thought it was a great debate to have, which is why they originally accepted Candace Owens' offer.
And they proceeded to negotiate over days this debate that everyone said that they wanted.
What nobody knew though, and what we were able to report in this article that we published on Locals this morning, was that exactly
Immediately after Candace Owens went to Twitter and said, I'd like to have a debate with Ben Shapiro about Israel, the Daily Wire ran into an arbitration proceeding and requested that an arbitrator put a gag order on Candace Owens and order her blocked, banned, from criticizing the Daily Wire or Ben Shapiro in any way.
And none of this was disclosed by the Daily Wire.
They had led their audience to believe that they actually wanted a debate with Candace Owens.
And yet at the same time, in secret, they were arguing to the arbitrator that the way in which Candace Owens asked for this debate, the expressions of criticism she had voiced about Ben Shapiro, the fact that she had liked
Multiple tweets that were criticizing Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire meant that Candace Owens, by negotiating and asking for this debate, had in fact engaged in disparagement of The Daily Wire in a way that violated her contract and they therefore convinced an arbitrator in secret that they were likely to win if they sued Candace Owens for breach of contract and the only remedy possible would be to gag Candace Owens from talking about The Daily Wire or Ben Shapiro in any way critically.
So, this was the article that we published because obviously, if a major media outlet like the Daily Wire is presenting itself as one thing in public, but then doing the opposite in private, that's obviously something journalists should be reporting on.
Of course, part of our job is to report on what major media outlets are doing.
But it's also so important, not as a gossipy drama between Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, but as an illustration of the way in which Prominent sectors of the pro-Israel right are incapable of aligning with and adhering to their ostensible belief in free speech and free discourse the minute this one foreign country enters the picture.
So here is part of what we reported, quote, due to a I mean just the Daily Wire in secret and unbeknownst to its readers sought a gag order to be placed on Owens after she had called for a debate.
They did this under the cover of secrecy before a private arbitrator at exactly the time that they were claiming in public that they wanted this debate and were even negotiating the terms with her.
To this date, the Daily Wire has not informed its readers, seeking to understand why the much-anticipated debate had not yet happened, that they had suddenly obtained a gag order against Owens.
Now, just to remind you of the timeline, it was on April 5th, just a couple of weeks after Candace was ousted at the Daily Wire when she went to Twitter, and in that interval, Whenever anybody would ask Candace Owens to confirm reports about how she left, and I was one of the people who did, she would say, I'm sorry, I'm not able to talk about that.
I can't confirm anything.
I can't deny anything.
And her position was, we have agreed not to talk about my departure from the Daily Wire.
And when Ben Shapiro first was asked about it on Piers Morgan, he said, I'm sorry, Piers.
I'm not going to answer that.
I'm not able to talk about that issue, and I'm not going to.
But then Ben went on subsequent shows, including with Dave Rubin, and began insisting that Candace Owens had veered into anti-Semitism, that she had transgressed the lines That the Daily Wire had imposed, unbeknownst to her, when it comes to what you can say about Israel or U.S.
support and financing of Israel, the war in Gaza, or anti-Semitism.
Candace was ousted at the Daily Wire just a couple of days after she engaged in a debate, first with Rabbi Shmuley and then another rabbi, where both of them strongly implied that the Daily Wire should fire Candace Owens because she's anti-Semitic.
So in response to these public statements that the Daily Wire was making about Candace Owens, including a one hour video published by the Daily Wire host, Andrew Klavan, where he basically hurled every accusation he could think of about Candace Owens, including calling her a dishonest person, a bigot, an anti-Semite, a liar.
She then decided she had to publicly defend herself, and to do so, she went on to Twitter, and she said the following on April 5th, quote, I would like to debate Ben Shapiro on Israel and the current definition of anti-Semitism.
Can someone make that happen?
And in reply, Ben Shapiro said that night, quote, sure, Candace.
I texted you on February 29th offering this very thing.
Let's do it on my show this Monday at 5 p.m.
at our studios in Nashville.
90 minutes live stream.
Now this was a Friday.
Ben Shapiro was saying, be at our offices on Monday morning at 9 a.m.
and we'll do it on our channel.
And Candice said, look, I'm in London.
You know I'm in London.
I can't make it.
It's Friday now.
I can't make it there by Monday morning and also I don't want to do it on the Daily Wire show.
And in response, the CEO of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring said the following, quote, "I don't know your international travel schedule, Candice.
"I know when you wanted to talk to someone in the past, "you've flown across the world to make it happen.
"You asked for a debate, been agreed to a debate.
"You don't wanna do it on a Daily Wire channel?
Fine, we can live stream it to your channels.
You don't want to shoot it at Daily Wire Studio?
Fine, we'll rent a studio in Nashville.
You don't want a Daily Wire crew?
Fine, we'll hire a local crew.
You don't want Daily Wire to pay for it?
Fine, you're rich, you can pay for it yourself.
You don't want to do it on Monday?
Fine.
Let us know how long you need to prepare.
We will not agree to a moderator, no third party to put their finger on a scale.
We will not agree to a virtual event or edited video live in person, one on one.
The rest of this is just noise.
So he obviously cast the appearance publicly that he was very interested in this debate taking place.
And then immediately Candice Owens responded by accepting those terms.
She said, quote, barring the odd insinuation that you didn't know your own employees were booked on international flights to come join me in London to film for your platform.
This is great.
I fully accept.
No moderator.
I will get in touch privately to get this set up.
Major win.
And you see the emojis there.
Celebrating the fact that this debate is going to happen, she posted an American flag, essentially expressing the view that this is in spirit with the American tradition of openly and freely debating political issues between people who have disagreements about them.
People were expecting the debate to be scheduled.
It never got scheduled.
And then people obviously started asking, wait, what happened to this debate?
Why hasn't this debate happened?
They were asking this of Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro and people at the Daily Wire.
People at the Daily Wire didn't respond for reasons you're about to see, but on April 24th, more than two weeks later, almost three weeks later, Candace Owens went on to ax and said the following, quote, for the very many of you who keep asking for an update regarding my debate with Ben Shapiro, my team reached out immediately suggesting the first week I was back in the States.
We were informed the proposed date could not work for Ben due to the holiday but have not heard back regarding dates that do despite multiple emails.
We are still very keen to make this healthy debate happen regarding Israel and the definition of anti-Semitism at his earliest convenience.
Now, unbeknownst to the public, the reason why the Daily Wire had withdrawn from its purported and feigned desire to arrange a debate between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro is because instead they went behind the the reason why the Daily Wire had withdrawn the back of everybody, including their own supporters, and ran into that arbitrator to ask that she be silenced with a gag order, a prior restraint,
based on the accusation that the way in which she asked for this debate, the fact that she was liking other tweets that were critical of the Daily Wire, and the fact that she defended herself against that one-hour video posted by Andrew Claiborne, that basically and the fact that she defended herself against that one-hour video posted by Andrew Claiborne, that basically maligned her character in every way, according to the Daily Wire, they said all of that constituted disparagement of the Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro in
And therefore insisted that there be a gag order on Candace, and then the arbitrator agreed with the Daily Wire and silenced her, obviously making a debate impossible.
Now, it's quite a turnaround from what the Daily Wire said back in November of 2023, just about a month after the October 7th attacks, when people began noticing, obviously, that Candace Owens was making statements questioning U.S.
financing of Israel but also the Israeli war in Gaza itself.
She was saying things like no country has the right to commit war crimes.
Saying that it is obviously a tragedy to watch babies being blown up.
And a lot of Israel supporters began demanding that candidate Candace Owens be fired enough that it forced Jeremy Boring, the CEO of the Daily Wire, to have to take a break from his leave to say the following, quote, I am currently on a leave of absence from my executive duties.
At Real Daily Wire while overseeing producing.
In my current capacity, I cannot fire Candace Owens.
That's something Ben and I have in common since he is also not an executive in the company and cannot hire or fire people.
But even if we could, we would not fire Candace because of another thing we have in common.
A desire not to regulate the speech of our host even when we disagree with them.
Candace is paid to give her opinion, not mine or Ben's.
Unless those opinions run afoul of the law or she violates the terms of her contract in some way, her job is secure and she will be welcome at the Daily Wire.
Now, one of the things that really angered the Daily Wire is that when Candace Owens first asked for a debate, she did so by putting that invitation over a tweet Where the very popular comedian Andrew Schultz was talking about Ben Shapiro's statements about Candace.
And he was very harshly critical of The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro.
Even though Andrew Schultz is not even close to being on the left.
And this is what he said.
He makes the argument for censorship.
He calls it something else.
Yeah, I forgot the term.
And I should say that Again, this was in response to Ben Shapiro's decision to go around while Candace Owens was saying nothing and justifying why she was ousted at the Daily Wire.
You might remember what we covered at the time.
We had that whole thing about the Overton Window, meaning the limits of political debate that exist at the Daily Wire that you cannot cross when it comes to Israel.
And he said Candace Owens crossed those invisible lines.
So after four months of the CEO of The Daily Wire telling the public we're never going to fire Candace Owens because of her political views, only if she breaks the law or violates her contract.
She hadn't said anything about The Daily Wire negatively or disparagingly.
Apparently that all changed.
So when Candace asked for this debate with the Daily Wire, she did so above a tweet, not her own, that had this video in it from the comedian Andrew Schwartz reacting to Ben Shapiro's comments about why Candace had to go.
For censorship.
He calls it something else.
Yeah, I forgot the term.
I have it in my phone.
I don't even think he's using the term right, but he's basically like, there's a window of ideas we accept.
Yes.
And we accept ideas between this, uh, this, I guess this is, if I get window, you're looking like this.
So we accept ideas between here and here and anything outside of that window, well, you're fireable.
That's censorship.
What?
But he's acting as if this is like a justified reason for firing people when you built your identity and platform off of no censorship and freedom of speech.
Facts don't care about your feelings and all this shit.
It's also funny that that window happens to end where his beliefs end.
Isn't that interesting?
But hey, not being pro-Israel, that's where the window ends.
That's also your specific personal belief.
What?
I just don't see.
So you can't have an opinion on your platform that is not pro a country that is not ours?
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
Crazy.
So is the Daily Wire an American media platform or is it an Israeli media platform?
I'm just asking.
This guy's cooking.
If the rule is, I'm just saying, if the rule is you cannot be critical, because he has no problem being very critical of America.
He's critical of the left in America.
Leftist half the country has no problem eviscerating half of the country.
That's the current party in power.
But you can't criticize Israel as a country?
That's just another country.
Unless you're saying and you're clearly admitting that the Daily Wire is an arm of the Israeli, I guess, media or propaganda machine?
Is that?
Are you manipulating the religious right in America?
Are you manipulating the right-wing conservatives in America and selling them country western movies and putting on your little cowboy hat and fake moving in Nashville so that you could take all their money and then in the process restricting free speech?
One of the core tenets of the American identity?
Ben, Ben, Ben!
It's Benjamin, Benjamin.
What is happening?
There's trouble in paradise.
No, obviously one of the things that he is referencing there is that, well two things that I think are so notable.
One is that Ben Shapiro feels very free to say the most vicious condemnations of the U.S.
government and of American political leaders.
Listen to how he talks about Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
and the government of the United States in general, you can say the most vicious things you want about the United States and still be perfectly fine at the Daily Wire.
They do it all the time.
What you can't do is criticize this one foreign government.
Then you're outside of the Overton window and then you have to leave.
And this is the ethos that the American right in general, the pro-Israel sector of the American right, working with the Democratic Party, has been implementing.
That is what is so repressive about that law that we covered last night.
It's so aligned with this view, which is this formal definition of anti-Semitism that says you are perfectly within your rights to criticize any government on the planet.
You can say that the United States Had a founding that was immoral and unjust and should not be recognized as a country.
You can say that about any country in the world, just not about Israel.
You can say that evangelical Christians, because of their religion, prioritize Israel above and beyond even the way they value the United States, but you cannot say that about American Jews such as Ben Shapiro.
In other words, what Andrew Schultz just said about Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire is now formally illegal under this new anti-Semitism definition that the Congress explicitly enacted and made part of anti-discrimination law.
You can say that Great Britain, or the United States, or Russia, or Iran, or China, or any other country on Earth, except one, seems to be similar to Nazi atrocities, or Nazi abuses, or the Nazi mentality.
What you cannot say, though, is that the way in which Israel is attacking other people and bombing other places, or starving populations, has attributes in common with what the Nazis did during World War II because that too is now formally deemed anti-Semitic.
None of those views are allowed about Israel and about Jewish Americans even though you're free to express those same exact views about every other country.
This is the attack on free speech that is happening and the fact that it comes from people like Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire that built their entire persona and media brand based on a claim that they and they alone are so eager to debate To go to colleges and take on 18 year olds and show how triumphant they are and that they oppose any effort to silence people because of their political views.
The fact that they then turn around and do exactly that by ousting Candace Owens and seeking a gag order.
reflects the rotted hypocrisy not only of Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire but just in general the willingness of large sectors of the American conservative movement working with the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party to gut the core civil liberties and free speech rights of American citizens all in order to shield this one foreign country from criticism and activism against its policies.
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David Sirota has worked in journalism, politics, and the entertainment industry for many years.
He has previously worked for the independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both when Sanders was a House member and then as a presidential candidate.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work co-writing the 2022 Netflix film, Don't Look Up.
Sarrota founded the Laver News back in 2020.
It was under a different name at the time, and it is a reader-supported site that specializes in original investigative reporting that follows the influence of corporate money in Washington.
And it is subscriber and reader dependent, and yet has grown It's great to see you.
19 reporters and editors.
Sirota just launched a new podcast called Lever Time as well.
We will talk to him about all of that as well as recent reporting he has done on how airline-funded members of Congress are trying to block critical consumer reforms as well as some of the problems inside Boeing.
We are always delighted to have someone who is doing so well, kind of being an exemplary figure of what independent media can achieve.
David, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
Thanks so much for having me, Glenn.
Sure, so before we get to these individual stories, which I absolutely want to focus and spend the bulk of our time on, let's talk about the lever, because obviously independent media and independent journalism is a major focus of mine.
It's something that I believe is absolutely critical for our country, the ability to do real reporting, not just punditry, without relying on major media corporations and all the constraints that they have.
So just talk a little bit about the origin story of The Lever and how it's grown into this kind of behemoth that's really breaking some significant stories. - Yeah, I mean, I was working on Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as you mentioned, and after the campaign, I wanted to go back to journalism.
I had taken a hiatus from journalism when I worked on Bernie's campaign, and I wanted to start an independent media outlet that focused on money at the center of it.
By that, I mean following the money.
Our stories, if you read them at levernews.com, you'll see almost all of them have money and corporate power at the center, and the reason A reader-supported entity, I think, is necessary for that is because a reader-supported entity gives you a foundation that's sustainable to report on power and money.
Power and money doesn't usually fund adversarial investigative reporting about power and money.
So that's why our model exists the way it is.
And I think the stories we're going to discuss will illustrate the kinds of stories that we do and that in a lot of ways other corporate media doesn't do.
Yeah, and I think a lot of times, too, there's a perception in independent journalism and independent media, often true, the easiest way to succeed and to develop a very enthusiastic subscriber base is if you kind of plant your flag in one political party or the other or one side of the ideological spectrum or the other and just kind of feed people the validating claims that they want to have.
Your site, I think, above all, avoids that.
You are Very bipartisan in the targets, and one of the stories that you actually broke and had a major impact on in terms of debates in Washington and on various news networks is the story about the attempt by some people in Washington to reform the airlines industry, one of the worst industries to have to deal with.
I know personally I do everything possible to avoid domestic flying inside of the United States because of how miserable it is, how abused you are, how impossible it is to even be treated like a human.
So there's now some reforms being proposed and yet there are members of Congress who like to posture as populist but who receive massive donations from the airline industry who are now blocking it.
So this is what you've been doing is tracing this money, tracing the way in which these people are trying to block these consumer and passenger friendly reforms.
Talk about what these reforms are and how they're being blocked.
Yeah, so this story, and you're right, it does deal with both parties.
This story starts, I think, way back in the 2022 Southwest Airlines debacle, where Southwest Airlines went down during the holidays, its software went down.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Administration Department of Transportation Secretary, had been warned that he needed to get tougher with airlines in the lead up to this.
He sort of ignored those warnings and he got, rightfully so, and we broke that story way back then, he got a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism and a lot of pressure to actually do his job.
And for a while he kind of pretended like he didn't have any power to deal with the airlines, but after enough pressure and scrutiny, guess what?
He does have power to actually crack down on airlines.
And so he ended up, in my view, doing the right thing.
He put forward a rule that says, it's kind of amazing that it hadn't been on the books before that, but that basically said, listen, if your flight gets canceled or significantly delayed, the airlines have to automatically refund you your money.
And let's underscore automatically.
So the Biden administration put that rule out about a week And I think we should say that electioneers tend to foster these kinds of policies because there is an election in about six months and giving consumers and passengers something that they deserve, I think, is more likely an electioneer.
But go ahead.
A hundred percent.
A hundred percent.
And this seems like common sense, right?
If the airlines don't render you a service, they have to immediately, automatically give you your money back.
A lot of celebratory headlines.
And then about a week later, we broke the story that in a must-pass aviation bill dealing with the FAA, the oversight agency, forced lawmakers four of the six top recipients of airline industry money, inserted a line into this massive bill
that, if you read the bill, you might not even notice it, but it was eight words that basically says, the passenger whose flight was canceled or significantly delayed can get a refund upon request of the airline carrier.
Now, this seems like a small little detail, but to my mind and to the Biden administration's mind, it is everything.
I mean, the Biden administration, when they announced their rule, they talked a lot about how it would avoid forcing customers into the cumbersome Kafka-esque process of trying to get a refund.
So here's what ultimately happened.
Here's what really happened.
The airlines gave a lot of money to these four lawmakers.
The Department of Transportation put out its rule, asked these lawmakers to enshrine the Biden administration rule in law.
Those lawmakers ignored that request and put eight words into this giant bill that puts the onus back on passengers to request the refunds.
Now, why would the lawmakers do that?
Why would the airline lobbyists want that?
Well, because as we know from the past, during the pandemic, the airlines sat on $10 billion, that's billion with a B, $10 billion of unpaid refunds and travel credits.
So the airlines know that the harder they make it for you to get a refund back, a refund that you are owed, The more red tape, the more cumbersome a process, the fewer refunds they will have to pay because they know that the harder the process is, the more it will deter some subset of the population that's owed money from actually going through the process of requesting the money.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds in the abstract, in kind of theory, like it's not that big or burdensome of a requirement.
All you have to do is ask.
But of course, as you say, it's like dealing with health insurance companies or any insurance companies.
The request ends up being something that requires hours of your time.
If you want to call because something has gone wrong, you wait on hold for an hour, you often get disconnected.
They're extremely rude.
They make it as difficult as possible, not necessarily when you want to buy a ticket, but when you want something that is yours to get.
Now, I saw Ted Cruz being interviewed on CNBC because I believe he, I don't know if he's one of the four people that you mentioned.
I want to ask you who those four people are.
So he's one of the people being funded by the airline industry and has proposed, advocated this change that would basically gut the entire reform, and his argument was...
Look, it's actually not good for the passenger, for the consumer, to automatically refund their ticket because a lot of times when people's flight gets canceled, they don't want a refund.
They just want to go on the next flight.
And by forcing them into a refund, you're basically preventing them from doing what they want, which is just going on a flight, which is why the better solution is to only give refunds to people who say that they want them.
What's your answer to that?
Well, the answer to that is that that's just fundamentally false.
That's just not actually true in any way.
The way that the rule was written was they have to offer to rebook you, and if you say no to a rebooking, they have to immediately give you So the notion that getting an automatic refund or at least having the responsibility for an automatic refund on the airline somehow will harm travelers is just a lot of nonsense.
It's a lot of distraction.
And look, the reason is because, to my mind, in my view, is that Ted Cruz is running for re-election in Texas.
He's getting some scrutiny and pressure and public criticism for this.
And he wants to have a rationale to say why he did it.
He can't just come out and say, I did it because my airline funders asked me to make it harder for my constituents to get refunds.
He can't just come out and admit that.
So he's got to come up with a rationale for it.
Yeah, and all these people run on a platform, you know, Republicans and Democrats now are standing up to big corporations and trying to protect the little guy.
And this is the kind of thing that actually happens in Washington is behind the scenes.
This is how the legislation gets written.
And a lot of times it's done in a way not to be noticed.
And I think that's one of the things that's so important about your reporting.
By the way, so Ted Cruz is one of the four.
Who are these?
I think you, I saw something in one of your articles that Senator Maria Cantwell, the Democrat from Washington, is as well.
Is she one of the four and who else is leading this?
Yes.
Yeah, it's the four members, the two members of the House, two members of the Senate, who oversee the transportation committees.
And that is Chairwoman Senator Maria Cantwell.
Ted Cruz is the ranking member, a Republican, on the committee.
And then in the House, it's Congressman Sam Graves from Missouri, a Republican, and Congressman Rick Larson from Washington.
I just want to shift gears a little bit to something else that's been going on in the airline industry, which is the very serious and alarming problems that Boeing aircraft have had near catastrophes with Alaska Airlines.
I think a lot of people Who question whether or not there's too much federal regulation and too much intrusion into the free market.
Think that there is some legitimate functions for government.
Making sure planes are safe would be one.
Making sure medications are safe is another.
And yet, it seems like there were these massive oversights that basically Boeing was just left to their own devices.
They were able to cut corners for profit.
You had an article in The Lever by Freddie Brewster, the title of which was, Airlines filed 1,800 reports warning regulators about Boeing 737 Max, which is the plane that has caused a lot of these problems.
Well, two reasons.
even though the regulators were being notified of these safety problems, these planes were continuing to fly in such unsafe conditions?
Well, two reasons.
Boeing is one of the biggest spenders on influence in Washington and has over many years essentially bought a deregulatory policy in which Boeing gets to do so-called self-inspections, that the FAA, the oversight agency, is so understaffed the oversight agency, is so understaffed and under budgeted that the agency has effectively outsourced the inspections of these planes to the companies themselves.
I mean, self-inspection should be, you know, Ronald Reagan talked about the, you know, the nine most terrifying words are, I'm from the government, I'm here to help.
To my mind, the most terrifying words are self-inspection of an airplane.
Right.
And the thing is, as we reported as well, that within the manufacturing affiliate of Boeing, Spirit Air Aerosystems, there were workers who were also warning about safety concerns in the manufacturing process of the fuselages.
And so What we really see with Boeing, and Boeing is a monopoly, that's another part of the problem here, in that Boeing is a monopoly that is under-regulated, spending a huge amount of money on influence in Washington, and spending ever more money on things like stock buybacks and executive compensation, rather than capital investments in its own capital infrastructure.
It's really a perfect storm of bad, and the hope is that the reporting that we and others do makes it a little bit better, at least pressures the government to actually do a better job at this.
You know, I had Lee Fong on my show a couple days ago, and he published reporting addressing the question that I think a lot of people are very confused about, which is, we keep hearing that one of the reasons Ukraine is having so much difficulty on the battlefield against the Russians, aside from the population difference that prevents Ukrainians from sending men to the front line, is that they just can't keep up with the artillery production of the Russians.
So you have the United States that spends more money than the next 15 countries combined on our military, and even joining with NATO, we have no industrial capacity to provide the Ukrainians with artillery, even though we're now two and a half years into the war.
And one of the reasons, as Lee described it, was very similar to what you're saying, but just to illustrate the point, that the way in which This $1 trillion military budget gets spent is not by assessing the national security needs of the United States or the needs of the military, but by having lobbyists, including from Boeing and Northrop Grumman and all these major military contractors, come into Washington and lobby for the purchase of the most expensive weapons systems, including ones that end up being archaic and never working.
And the real national security needs end up getting completely neglected.
So I think So often a lot of people talk about corporate influence and it's very easy to forget about it because a lot of times these concrete examples aren't really visible and I think one of the things you're doing best is just making this very visible, how easily they are able to influence and manipulate the lawmaking process.
And I'll just add to that on the Pentagon question.
I mean, Freddie Brewster, the same reporter, broke a big story last week about this very little-noticed program in the Pentagon itself where top Pentagon officials are going to work at times inside of defense contractors in roles in which they are then influencing the Pentagon to purchase
materials, equipment, et cetera, et cetera, from those contractors they are working at, which at one level seems, I mean, it seems maybe not a big deal, but at another level, it just underscores what you've just said, which is our decisions about purchasing, about what equipment is needed.
Are they being made on the basis of national security and governmental interest?
Or are they being made on the basis of who has the most influence?
Who has that influence to make the to compel the government to pay the highest prices for things in lots of cases that the government doesn't actually need?
Yeah, and of course the Secretary of Defense who oversees the Pentagon came directly from the Board of Directors of Boeing in order to take the position as Pentagon Chief under President Biden.
Let me switch gears a little bit because you have this relatively new podcast out where you talk about a lot of your reporting and other things as well and I was looking at some of the episodes in preparation for your coming on and one of the most recent ones you did focused on this question that I don't think has gotten nearly enough attention.
About just how anti-democratic the Democratic Party became in 2024 in this election cycle to ensure that there could never be any debates or challenges within the party to the incumbent President Joe Biden, even though all polls show how weak of a candidate he is.
What is it that the Democratic Party did that is special or different in order to ensure that there was no challenges possible?
Well, a couple things.
I mean, I think in the lead up, in the last few years, the Democratic Party has done a very good job, at least the top of the Democratic Party has been successful, at essentially sending the message that if you run a primary against party-backed, establishment-backed candidates, you will be spent into the ground.
You will potentially be blacklisted.
Your career inside of democratic politics will essentially be over.
We have seen that over and over down the ballot.
Now, with regard to this current presidential election, I think what that has done is, first and foremost, it's said to any potential major candidate, and by major, I mean, you know, a senator, a governor, candidates that have run in primaries in the past, it has said to them, if you even candidates that have run in primaries in the past, it has said to them, if you even float your Now, on top of that, you saw the Democratic Party front-load its primaries, front-loading primaries.
The effect of that, putting states all up front, up at the top, has Having all the primaries happen in very short order.
It makes it harder for candidates to, in the past what they've done is they've won smaller states to build momentum, build name recognition, build a fundraising base to run in future primaries.
By front-loading the primaries, it makes that process, that prospect, much harder.
In some states, the Democratic Party essentially canceled primaries.
Didn't just the party basically said we're not putting other candidates on the ballot other than Joe Biden, which is, to my mind, one of the most undemocratic things you can do.
And meanwhile, And meanwhile, one last thing I would say is that the Democratic media machine has spent is now sort of it's sort of an assumption that anybody running in a primary against any party establishment backed candidate is a fringe, is a joke, is something to one last thing I would say is that the Democratic media machine has spent You see that on MSNBC.
You see that that framing all throughout sort of corporate media in general is It's become kind of a religious assumption.
And the thing to understand, Glenn, and I think this is really important, Is that this is, in some ways, extremely ahistorical.
As we trace in our podcast, which folks can go find at LeverTimePod.com, as we trace, the Democratic Party had a culture of primaries.
I mean, you had Eugene McCarthy run against Lyndon Johnson.
You had Ted Kennedy run against Jimmy Carter.
Same thing for the Republicans, by the way.
You had Ronald Reagan run against Gerald Ford.
You had Pat Buchanan run against George H.W.
Bush.
That culture seems to be gone from American politics, and I don't think that's a very good thing.
And I want to add one other thing.
The argument is that by having a primary, it hurts the general election nominee.
I think it's the exact opposite.
I think a tough, competitive primary ends up battle-testing and making sure the general election nominee can actually compete in the general election before they become the general election nominee.
Yeah, and you saw, you know, even though the former president, Donald Trump, was running in the Republican Party, they had a lot of, he had a lot of challengers to his candidacy, and as a result, even though he didn't participate, the Republican Party got in front of cameras and got in front of an audience and sold the Republican Party repeatedly while the Democrats were silent.
You know, I remember early on, Simone Sanders, this is when RFK Jr.
was still a candidate in the Democratic primary, and he was polling at 15 to 20 percent.
And Cornel West was also a declared candidate within the Democratic Party, and Marianne Williamson as well.
And you add, you know, 25 to 30 percent of Democrats saying they didn't want to vote for Joe Biden, and I saw Simone Sanders, who used to be Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's top White House aide, now works at MSNBC, the normal path, go on air and basically just say, We're not having a primary.
Our nominee is Joe Biden.
And, you know, I listened to it and I was wondering to myself, how can the DNC just declare that there's not going to be a primary?
And as you say, they did everything possible to ensure that it didn't happen at the same time that they're insisting that they're the only ones who can save American democracy.
David, let me ask you something about what I had alluded to earlier, which is this kind of New sentiment within the Republican Party, I think in the Reagan era, Republicans were defined by Reaganomics, by this idea that you do everything you can to help the bottom line and the profits of large corporations, that a rising tide lifts all boats, that was supply-side economics, that eventually that profit for the highest and richest people would trickle down to the lower
Classes and I think very little of that happened and so now you have within the Republican Party when Donald Trump ran in 2016 He challenged not only Bush Cheney foreign policy, but even Reagan economics at least rhetorically and you've had senators like Josh Hawley and JD Vance who have ran on who have run on a position of economic populism and when Bernie Sanders held up the COVID relief bill and said he would filibuster it unless they had direct payments to the American people.
Josh Hawley was the one senator who stood on his side and I believe Senator Hawley as well is defending these reforms to the airline bill.
Do you see any real emergence of a kind of populist or anti-corporate or pro-consumer sentiment within the Republican Party even though it may not be the dominant strain?
Look, I think on Trump, I think he at times said things, he echoed rhetoric that was an appeal economically to working class people.
And he did veto that COVID bill.
Because the $600 that Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley got, he said, weren't enough.
And he said, I want $2,000 in this bill.
So there were occasional acts as well.
But I take your point about the prime minister.
Yes.
I mean, I don't think he got right.
I don't think he governed much differently than than past Republicans when it came to economics.
But I will say.
I do think you are right to say that the Democratic Party on economics has clearly decided that it wants to appeal to, it really doesn't want to talk very much about economics, it wants to talk about cultural and social issues to appeal to kind of affluent voters.
And I think what that's left is a kind of vacuum and a competition for working class voters.
Now I think I think what's gone on is that the Republican Party has oftentimes tried to attract working class voters with purely cultural appeals while mixing in Reaganomics that hurts working class voters.
So I think the senators that you mentioned see a potential opportunity.
They see an opportunity to make an economic appeal to working class voters.
Will they follow through and actually follow that path?
I mean, that to me remains the big question.
It also remains a question to me is where is the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party?
Where did that wing of the Democratic Party go?
And by that I mean the populist economic wing of the Democratic Party that existed into, at least into the early Obama administration.
I think the answer to that question is that Wall Street doesn't like that part of the Democratic Party and has worked very hard to rid that part of the Democratic Party from the party.
So it has created a huge opportunity for the Republicans.
But I will say one last thing I just want to say on this.
I'm not convinced that the Republican Party as a party, its leadership, its establishment, is really serious about economic, working class economics, because it is a party that has been just, if really, more aligned with corporate interests up until this point.
But again, I think things can shift.
It's going to remain to be seen whether they will.
Yes, like I said, it's a strain, but it's by no means the dominant faction, but you hope it grows.
If you ask Josh Hawley or J.D.
Vance, those people of the world, they will tell you they think their future, the Republican Party, is to have affluent suburbanites migrate further to the Democratic Party, as they've been doing, and to have the Republican Party become the party of a multiracial working class.
And there's some voter trends that suggest that.
That's happening to some extent, but I think there are people in the Republican Party who believe that that's the path to electoral success, whether that is matched by policy.
I mean, I just remain, I will tell you, I remain mystified, or not mystified, I'm not confused about why, but it remains the The major weakness of the Democratic Party, to my mind right now, is that it comes off as a party that is not interested in speaking economically to working class voters, and that is a huge vulnerability.
They are betting, and I'm not saying in the short term it's necessarily a bad, not smart political bet, they are betting that, for instance, the reproductive freedom, choice, abortion, etc., etc., that that argument about how the Republicans have gone so far to the I think that's a dangerous gamble for the long haul.
If you don't have a message about what people are dealing with economically, what the working class is dealing with economically, you may be able to win an election here or there on Cultural issues, social issues, which are important.
You may be able to win some of those elections, but over the long haul, the question always comes, typically in America, comes back to, are you better off than you were four years ago?
And better off meaning better off on the economy.
Are you able to survive?
Yeah, exactly.
I think the Democrats had some success in low turnout elections where the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and some of the Republican proposals in the wake of that got people to the polls and they won some elections based on it.
I think it's much different in a presidential election where people in much larger numbers go to the polls.
And there, you know, as Bill Clinton and his war room famously put on the wall, it's the economy, stupid.
And that's generally the way that elections are determined.
All right, David.
I really appreciate the conversation.
Please let people know where they can go to find and support both your work and your new podcast.
You can find our website at LeverNews.com and you can go subscribe to our podcast at LeverTimePod.com.
Glenn, thanks for having me.
Yeah, congratulations on the big story with the airlines reform.
I'd love to see you guys continue to do that work and it's always great to see you.
Have a good evening.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
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