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June 12, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:19:11
Hunter Biden's Conviction Proves Media’s 2020 "Disinfo" Campaign; Joe Biden's Approval Ratings at Record Low After Trump Verdict; Liberals’ Embrace Prison Fantasies to Warn of Trump’s Dangers | SYSTEM UPDATE #281

Watch the full episode HERE Podcast: Apple - Spotify  Rumble App: Apple - Google Donate to David Talbot's GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-david-talbot-after-a-massive-stroke?lang=en_US TIMESTAMPS: Hunter Biden's Conviction Proves Media’s 2020 "Disinfo" Campaign (09:38) Joe Biden's Approval Ratings at Record Low After Trump Verdict (37:17) Liberals’ Embrace Prison Fantasies to Warn of Trump’s Dangers (57:37) News Regarding David Talbot (1:10:08) - - - 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 June 11th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 o'clock p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, in a federal courtroom earlier today in Delaware, a jury very quickly and unanimously returned guilty verdicts on all three of the felony charges brought against the president's son, Hunter Biden.
Now, there are all sorts of points to note about this trial and today's conviction.
First, it's worth recalling that DOJ prosecutors repeatedly tried hard to sweep the case under the rug through absurdly generous plea offers.
IRS whistleblowers insisted that the investigation into Hunter Biden's crimes was far more passive and bizarrely limited than most Americans who face similar tax fraud investigations.
The charges on which he was convicted today are far less serious than many other charges he will face or could face, especially for unregistered foreign lobbying.
And the White House will almost certainly try to exploit this conviction to refute Trump's claims that the Justice Department is being weaponized against him.
After all, they will say, the President's own son was also tried and convicted, proving the justice and blindness of our judicial system.
But one point stands out, at least for me, above all the rest for today.
The prosecution of Hunter Biden relied overwhelmingly on the documents and other materials found on his laptop.
The very same laptop which the New York Post used right before the 2020 election to report on a series of highly sketchy and ethically questionable business deals that the Biden family was pursuing in both Ukraine and China with the very likely involvement of Joe Biden himself.
Those are the same exact documents and laptop which a union of CIA and intelligence officials, the Democratic Party, and the liberal wing of the corporate media united before the 2020 election to falsely brand as Russian disinformation.
Which had the multiple pro-Biden effects of encouraging Americans to ignore the documents as fabrications, to believe that Russia was yet again interfering in our election to help Trump win, this time with forged documents in Hunter Biden's name, and it provided a pretext to big tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to actively censor this reporting about the Bidens from even being discussed, preventing millions of Americans from even hearing about it.
That the FBI and the DOJ were able to enter those laptop documents as evidence in this trial by definition meant that the court concluded the documents were authentic.
Biden's lawyers barely even tried to dispute their authenticity.
And the jury's guilty verdict obviously proves that they too found the documents authentic and reliable.
In other words, it's the final nail in the coffin of one of the most blatant and consequential acts of disinformation in the last decade, all done to ensure Joe Biden's victory before the 2020 election.
As the 2024 election approaches and it appears that liberals' greatest hope to win, namely Trump's conviction in Manhattan, is having little to no effect on the electorate, they, and especially their media, are getting increasingly shrill, desperate, unhinged, and genuinely deranged, shockingly so, in their blind and spastic efforts to find some way to defeat Donald Trump.
Over the past 24 hours, Both Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow have earnestly announced that they fear that Trump will imprison those two dangerous and brave dissidents in the domestic concentration camps that Trump intends to build.
That very sober and serious announcement followed the on-the-brink-of-tears warning, really a plea, from former Bush Cheney spokeswoman and current MSNBC host Nicole Wallace, who said that a Trump victory might likely mean that Trump would cancel her show, ban her from being on the air.
Now, aside from everything else, the irony of all this, that these are exactly the same people who have been drooling openly for years over the prospect of imprisoning Donald Trump, never seems to occur to them.
But it is nonetheless worth looking at to see the genuine level of hysteria and paranoia and obviously emotional instability that is forming much of our elite political and media liberal discourse.
Plus, after that, many Democrats spent the last two years genuinely believing and explicitly claiming that convicting Donald Trump on various crimes is their salvation to winning the 2024 election.
Over and over, they said it openly that if we can get Donald Trump into prison or at least convicted in a court of law before the election, that is our real chance to win.
They got a conviction in Manhattan, and yet polling data after that conviction shows that, at least for now, the electorate seems to care very little about that issue.
And it is very, very, very far from their top concerns when deciding for whom they will vote.
More disturbing for Democrats, a 538 polling survey finds that Joe Biden has reached his all-time low in presidential approval ratings just five months before the election.
Now, think about what all this says about, among other things, the corporate media, how simultaneously out of touch they are with voters believing that the guilty verdict will determine how they vote, not the economy or inflation or immigration or anything else.
Yet it also shows how obviously and rapidly declining their influence over American voters are since they've been telling them for two years that Joe Biden is the salvation, the only way to protect American democracy.
And obviously they're speaking only to like-minded people and therefore the people who don't believe that are not in any way affected by anything that they're saying.
Finally, a discussion that was featured on Barry Weiss's podcast earlier today provides an extremely disturbing window into the mind of many Americans when it comes to rather important and weighty issues like war, nuclear weapons, and delusions of American power.
The discussion that didn't involve Barry, but a guest host and a guest, which we'll show you, featured a lengthy discussion of how easy it would be for the United States to finance and arm groups inside Russia During the Cold War, concerns over a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation was central for decades to U.S.
And then, as they said, quote, "take over Moscow." Now during the Cold War, concerns over a direct US-Russia confrontation was central for decades to US foreign policy.
Yet ever since Russiagate and the hysteria that it generated over Moscow, it has caused so many American policy and media elites to find the prospect of nuclear war.
Remember, Russia is the largest nuclear power on the country.
They find the prospect of nuclear war either nonexistent or just something to laugh at.
And few things illustrate the widespread dangers of this thought about Russia like this conversation.
So we will take a look to show you the relevant parts.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It is not all that difficult.
In fact, it might even be tempting to make the argument that the behavior, even the criminal conduct of the president's son, Hunter Biden, is not all that relevant to our public discourse.
After all, so goes this rationale.
Hunter Biden has never run for political office.
He's not running for political office.
In 2024, parents can't be held responsible for the conduct of their adult children any more than those adult children can be held responsible for the conduct of their parents.
And the fact that Hunter Biden is a, or at least was, I guess the claim goes, a serious drug addict is something that is very well known and it is often the case that people who get addicted to very serious narcotics or who become alcoholics because of those addictions are likely to engage in very morally questionable or unethical and often criminal behavior.
The problem is is that Hunter Biden was charged with federal crimes and was convicted in a federal courtroom, which means that the prosecutors who decided his fate were people who worked directly for the Biden Justice Department, who answered to Joe Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland.
And there has been a lot going on in this case that absolutely does have very significant impact on many matters that are clearly of the public interest.
I've never thought that Hunter Biden's personal life, his sex life, his drug usage was of any relevance to anything that's his private life with presumably all adult consensual partners.
No one has claimed otherwise.
The question, though, is how has this case been handled and what does it say about both the fairness of our justice system and the behavior of the American media?
So just to give you the background on the charges for which he was convicted, we'll use the New York Times report from today.
There you see the headline, Hunter Biden convicted of three felonies.
Quote, President Biden's son, who has struggled with drug addiction, Was convicted in a Delaware federal court on all three counts tied to a handgun purchase in 2018.
His sentencing date has not been set.
Quote, he could face up to 25 years in prison, but first-time offenders who did not use their weapons to commit a violent crime typically receive no jail time.
No sentencing date was set.
In September, Mr. Biden is scheduled to go on trial in Los Angeles for charges that he evaded a tax assessment, failed to file and pay taxes, and filed a false or fraudulent tax return.
It is considered the more serious case against him.
So he has another more serious case with more serious charges that is imminent, will likely be in September before the election.
Today's guilty verdict says the Times in his gun case on Thursday raises the possibility that he would receive a stiffer sentence if a jury convicts him in the tax case because federal guidelines take into account previous convictions and then of course he would no longer be a first-time offender.
Now, One of the things that I think is very interesting is that the court charge that they brought against Hunter Biden here is that he purchased a weapon and under federal law, if you are an active drug addict or drug user, you are not permitted to purchase a firearm.
and he had to fill out a form in which he attested to the fact that he was not an active drug user and the basic charge against him that brought these this trial was that he submitted a false statement in order to obtain a firearm because he was in fact a drug addict at the time that he falsely certified to the government and to under the law that he was not now technically that is a crime
Wouldn't call it a very serious crime, especially since, as the article noted, he didn't actually use the firearm against anybody.
But certainly it was the case that you could say exactly the same thing about Donald Trump.
Name it that.
Altering your internal bookkeeping to cover up hush payments to a porn star might be technically illegal, I would suggest as a misdemeanor, but it's the kind of thing that would almost never be brought against anyone not named Donald Trump.
And interestingly, I saw a lot of conservatives, a lot of Trump supporters today, on principle objecting to The conviction of Hunter Biden by arguing that Americans have the constitutional right to carry firearms and there's no drug addict or drug use exception to that constitutional right.
That essentially the idea that you can't purchase a firearm without proving that you're not a drug addict is a violation of the Second Amendment.
Seeing a lot of conservatives on principle objecting to Hunter Biden's conviction in this case, Something I have to say I did not see or can't recall seeing a single liberal doing invoking in the principle about criminal justice or how courts work in order to make a similar defense about Donald Trump.
That's something I find very interesting.
The other aspect of this is that The real questions about Hunter Biden, criminally speaking, have never been this case, have never been about his attempt to purchase a gun while being a drug addict.
The real issues are the corruption that Hunter Biden engaged in, in places like Ukraine and China.
That was what the New York Post was trying to report in 2020.
When the entire media united against them to disparage that reporting falsely as the byproduct of Russian disinformation, reporting that Big Tech then tried to censor.
The real question surrounding Hunter Biden's criminality is what it was that he was doing in Ukraine, a country where his father as vice president was basically running Remember Biden has often boasted, Joe Biden did, about the orders he gave to the Ukrainian government to remove certain prosecutors that he disliked, the threats that he made to the Ukrainians to withhold a billion dollars in aid unless they followed his command to remove a prosecutor.
I mean, Joe Biden was running Ukraine.
As kind of an imperial overlord, not at even the highest level of generality, but micromanaging all sorts of things at the same time that Hunter Biden was being paid $50,000 a month by a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, despite no involvement or experience in that industry, no knowledge of it.
And there's all kinds of evidence that Burisma tried and succeeded through Hunter Biden in gaining access to Joe Biden.
And then on top of that, you have all sorts of very strange deals that Hunter Biden and President Biden's brother were pursuing together in China.
And one of the memos that the New York Post found from the laptop that the media falsely said was a fabrication, Show that Joe Biden had a potential profit participation in one of those deals.
There's all kinds of sketchiness and potential criminality on the part of not only Hunter Biden, but other members of his family, that in many ways, this trial over these relatively trivial charges seem intended to conceal or to distract from.
Now, the other aspect of it, of course, and we reported on this last week when the charges were first brought and an FBI agent took the stand to explain what the FBI's investigation entailed, and the FBI agent testified at length about how much they relied on the documents that came from Hunter Biden's laptop.
The laptop that the entire media, the CIA, Big Tech united before the election to deliberately lie about, to call it Russian disinformation even though there was never an iota of support to make that claim.
We now know that claim was an absolute lie.
And we've noted for many, actually, I knew it before the 2020 election, media outlets admitted it shortly after Biden was elected.
We've had all kinds of evidence since then that proves the authenticity of these documents.
But the fact that Hunter Biden was just convicted based on the admissibility of evidence that they took from his Laptop, the same one that we were told was Russian disinformation, couldn't be proven.
As you know, I was prevented by my own media outlet from reporting on the contents of those documents based on the Intercept's claim that they got from the CIA, that there was doubt about the authenticity of those documents.
This was something that the media did and very well may have swung the election.
Given that people were already concerned about Democrats and the kind of corruption in which they engaged, and they were simply barred from hearing about this story because the media instead focused on pronouncing it to be Russian disinformation.
When Trump raised it in debate, Biden immediately said, you're doing the Kremlin's work.
And of course, the worst thing of all was that big tech censored it, Twitter for several days, but Facebook Said they were algorithmically suppressing the story and they won't answer questions about how long that lasted, but presumably lasted through the end of the election, something far more consequential than what Twitter did.
And yet this trial now proves this.
From NBC News on June 5th, quote, the Hunter Biden trial highlights FBI agent testifies about Hunter Biden's drug use and large cash withdraws.
The agent, a witness for the prosecution, Testified about the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop, which has been the subject of rumors and speculation for years.
The witness, FBI agent Erica Jensen, testified about the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop, which had been the subject of rumors.
Johnson said the laptop contained evidence of Hunter Biden's drug and gun purchase.
And the FBI agent explained exactly how they confirmed the authenticity of that email, namely subpoenaing Apple and saying that the contents and the serial number were exactly the same.
Now, one of the things that should not be forgotten about all this, because we did end up with a conviction here, is how much was done by prosecutors and other agencies in the executive branch that answered to Joe Biden to cover up and conceal and prevent any of this from ever seeing the light of day.
I think one of the most remarkable things was that the prosecutors who were working for the special counsel Negotiated a plea deal with Hunter Biden that was extraordinary.
They said, if you plead guilty, Just to these gun charges, we will give you full immunity on every other conceivable criminal charge that you might face, even unrelated to these issues, including the ones I mentioned, such as the possibility of lobbying on behalf of foreign governments without registering it, a crime that they convicted many Trump officials, such as Paul Manafort, of having engaged in.
It was a plea deal unlike Once you ever get for an ordinary citizen, and they did it in the back room, they did it just on the phone with Hunter Biden and his lawyers.
And then there was a lot of speculation, a lot of concerns raised by people in Congress and by others, that this deal seemed very overly generous, that it was designed not only to end this case with no jail time, but also to prevent any of the other future charges, the ones that are far more serious, from ever seeing the light of day.
And that plea deal completely fell apart the minute that it was brought into the public light.
Here's the New York Times article from July of 2023 that says, Judge delays Hunter Biden's plea deal.
Quote, the president's son had an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and avoid prosecution on a gun charge.
The judge overseeing the case demanded more information from both sides.
In other words, instead of just accepting the plea deal, she kind of just began questioning in public what this plea deal actually entailed.
"Judge Mary Ellen Norica has delayed a decision on whether even to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden, demanding that the two sides make changes in their deal, clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity of the prosecution clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity of the prosecution offered to Hunter Biden
From the start, the judge seemed highly skeptical of the unusual deal which offered Hunter Biden broad immunity from prosecution in perpetuity.
She was questioning why it had been filed under a provision that gave her no legal authority to reject the plea deal.
When she asked Leah Wise, the prosecutor, if there was any precedent for the kind of deal being proposed, He replied, no, your honor.
And what actually happened was they, in secret, the prosecutor said, you have full immunity on all charges.
But once they had to explain themselves and justify the plea deal to the court upon just a little bit of judicial scrutiny, they were so embarrassed, the prosecutors were, by how generous this plea deal was, that on the spot they reinterpreted it and they told the judge, it does not include Other investigations and criminal activity that Hunter Biden may have been responsible for when it came to illegal foreign lobbying.
And the minute the prosecutor said that, Hunter Biden's lawyers were outraged, correctly, because they said, that wasn't our plea deal.
You told us that it covers all charges.
But the prosecutors were too embarrassed to have the public know just how broad it was.
They had to deny that it included All future charges and that was when the plea deal fell apart and then they took this case to trial.
So there were all kinds of shenanigans as Democrats try and claim, oh, this proves the justice system isn't politicized, it is blind to who they're treating, even convicting the president's son.
Remember how many times, not just that time, but when IR whistleblowers came forward, it was very clear that these prosecutors were doing everything possible to protect Hunter Biden in every way.
Now, One of the things that has long disgusted me about the media's attempt to defend Hunter Biden, and we're seeing it in all sorts of different places now with this trial ongoing and then with the conviction, is the idea that, oh, actually, this is not about his criminality.
It's actually a beautiful and moving story about a father's love for his son, and the struggles that many families in America face in overcoming addiction.
And of course it is true that millions of Americans, either themselves or have members of their family, close family member or friends who struggle with addiction and alcoholism and it can ruin their lives and wreck their lives.
But they don't have the media launching a propaganda campaign to say that they shouldn't have to pay for any of the consequences of that because of this addiction.
And yet, here is what the media has been doing from the start when it comes to Hunter Biden and only Hunter Biden.
Here was the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof when these charges were brought.
He said, quote, the real meaning of the Hunter Biden saga, as I see it, isn't about presidential corruption, but instead is about how widespread addiction is.
And how about a determined parent with unconditional love can sometimes reel a child back.
That can give others hope.
It was not only something that didn't reflect negatively on Hunter Biden and his father, it was actually something that showed how beautiful They are because the crimes that Hunter Biden committed were actually motivated by his addiction, for which we should not have any sort of anger toward him as a society or to seek to punish him, but only empathy.
An idea which, by the way, I generally support that addiction is more of a health problem than it is a penal problem, that addicts should be treated with resources and not put into prison.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that crimes they commit, actual crimes, should be excused because they're addicts.
But in general, I agree that that is the correct approach to drug addiction and alcoholism in the United States.
And I would be celebrating this if it weren't for the fact that it's only being invoked Not on behalf of all American families struggling with addiction and alcoholism, but only in the case of Hunter Biden.
Here's a video of a segment that was done on Morning Joe about the Hunter Biden case yesterday that involved the extremely partisan columnist for the Daily Beast, Molly Young-Fast, who grew up in Manhattan, is the daughter of an extremely famous and wealthy novelist, Erica Young.
And listen to, you can see the graphic on the screen, Republicans are going after Hunter Biden for his addiction, and they're playing a dangerous game.
That was the title of the article she wrote, claiming that Republicans were going after Hunter Biden, not because he committed crimes, not because he was lobbying in Ukraine and China pursuing business deals, but they were going after him because he's an addict.
He was the victim here.
The real victim was Hunter Biden.
Listen to this.
You could talk a little bit more about this.
It seems to me that it would be very hard to find a jury that has been untouched by addiction completely.
Yeah, and the reason that I wanted to come forward and write about this is because even though I've been sober since I was a teenager, Um, I felt that the disease that Hunter Biden has is the same disease that I have.
It's the same disease that, you know, almost 20% of the country has.
And, you know, Republicans do love to talk about, like, fentanyl coming over the border.
Like, there's a reason that these, that, you know, drugs...
are a problem in this country, and it's largely because of addiction.
So this is another part of that.
I think Republicans have really actually not had a lot of success using Hunter Biden to sully Joe Biden, but they have tried.
One of the sort of moments in the debate where Biden ended up really being that Biden that voters really like was when he talked about his son's addiction, and he said, you know, he struggled with addiction.
He's made it through and that he's incredibly proud of his son for that.
And look, I came forward partially because I wanted to destigmatize this.
And I feel You know, for a long time, alcoholism and addiction was this terrible secret we didn't talk about.
I feel like for me, because I've been sober since I was a teenager, I have this ability to talk about it in a way that's a little bit... Okay, she's so brave.
She admitted she was an alcoholic when she was a teenager, and therefore she shares the same illness as Hunter Biden.
Now, as I said, I actually do believe strongly in this model of empathy for addicts, of using our resources to help them recover from that addiction or from that alcoholism instead of just throwing them in a prison cell where it's likely to get worse.
But what sickens me about this is this is fake compassion.
This is fake empathy.
It's politicizing empathy for addiction.
I want you to think about, have you ever heard major television outlets or a huge army of pundits coming forward to defend ordinary Americans who are being convicted of crimes that result from their addiction or from their alcoholism in this way.
And what sickens me even more is this idea that, oh, Joe Biden is a particularly compassionate politician who Americans love when they get to see that side of him.
And he's expressing so much support and empathy for his son's drug addiction.
And that shows what kind of person Joe Biden is.
The irony of that is that there is no single political official in Washington Over the last several decades, who has been a more aggressive, unapologetic, and unyielding supporter of imposing the harshest possible prison sentences, not on major drug lords or drug dealers, but on drug users.
This empathy has never emerged or been seen in Joe Biden's entire life until it came time to defend his son.
And I think the notion that someone has concern or compassion or empathy for a certain behavior only when it affects themselves and wants to throw everyone else in prison, far from being a character virtue, is a very repellent character flaw.
Let me just show you one of Joe Biden's many, many speeches on this issue.
That completely contradict this narrative from 1991 where he was speaking on the Senate floor.
Remember, he's been a senator since the 1970s when he was 29 years old.
Statements, but let's look at the facts.
Since 1986, Congress has passed over 230 new or expanded penalties for drug and criminal offenses in this United States.
230 new penalties.
And these penalties range from an automatic five years in jail for any person caught with With a rock of crack cocaine, a piece of crack cocaine as small as a quarter.
I don't have a quarter with me, but if you visualize what one looks like, yeah, I do have a quarter.
If you have a piece of crack cocaine no bigger than this quarter that I'm holding in my hand, one quarter of one dollar, We passed a law through the leadership of Senator Thurman and myself and others, a law that says, if you're caught with that, you go to jail for five years.
You get no probation.
You get nothing other than five years in jail.
Judge doesn't have a choice.
Now, the fact of the matter is, we've gone from there all the way up to saying, Under the leadership of Senator Thurman and I'd like to suggest that I take some small credit for it myself as well and others the presiding officer that there is now a death penalty and we passed it a couple years ago.
If you are a major drug dealer Involved in the trafficking of drugs and murder results in your activities, you go to death.
Okay, so we've all by now seen the video of Hunter Biden using crack cocaine.
The amount of crack cocaine that he had and was using was far, far, far bigger than that quarter that Joe Biden was referring to.
And in that video, Joe Biden was boasting of the fact That a law that he helped implement required, not permitted a judge, but required a judge to send anybody possessing crack cocaine, even in a tiny amount, to go directly to prison for five years with no possibility of parole or mitigation or any kind of understanding of their situation.
And this is something that he's done his entire career.
He has never apologized for this, rescinded this, said that he was in error.
So this idea that Joe Biden is empathetic to drug users, And we all should be so moved by that, is a complete revision of actual history of the actual behavior of Joe Biden and his attempt to imprison.
And of course, doing that with crack cocaine also had major racial disparities.
It put a huge number of black people in prison who simply, whose crime was nothing other than being a drug addict using crack cocaine that they got hooked on, just like Joe Biden's son did.
And so to watch this kind of serious issue, About how we treat addiction, how we deal with communities ravaged by addiction, trifled with and played with and so cynically manipulated simply to defend Hunter Biden when the real story is how the Biden Justice Department, just like they've been going after Trump, tried to do everything to shield his son, is Truly sickening,
but it gives you an idea of just how these partisan channels are willing to say literally anything to distort reality right in front of your eyes in order to achieve their partisan objective. but it gives you an idea of just how these One of the major reasons we have our show on Rumble is because Rumble is not just a social media platform, but it is also a cause.
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One of the things that you would have thought the 2016 election demonstrated or proved to the corporate media or at least prompted a lot of self-reflection was just how completely removed and out of touch and separate they are from the ordinary voter.
The entire media essentially was united in support of Hillary Clinton's campaign and against Donald Trump's campaign.
They did everything possible to sabotage that campaign, including drowning the country, And yet another disinformation campaign, not the laptop disinformation campaign that was 2020, but the Russiagate disinformation campaign that came from the FBI and the CIA in an attempt to sabotage Donald Trump's candidacy that they really did fear because of the ideology and views and policies he was advocating.
And all throughout the year, they were insisting to Americans that there had never been a candidate as dangerous As Donald Trump, and they were absolutely certain, every newsroom was, that Hillary Clinton was not only going to be the winner of that election, but win by a very comfortable margin.
None of that happened.
Voters obviously had very different priorities than people who are ensconced in studios in Washington and New York, working with very large contracts for major media corporations.
Surprise, surprise, people who are far less economically well off or who live in different places or have different values don't actually feel represented by the media that say 50 or 60 years ago they felt very represented by that actually made an effort to support all sectors of American life.
That's no longer the case.
Everything is segregated.
Liberal outlets, which are most in the corporate media, know that they're speaking only to liberals.
That's their business model.
It's their political activist model.
And so when they drone on and on and on, they're mostly speaking to people who already are on their side, and it changes nothing.
Here we are in 2024, and I don't need to tell you everything that the media has been saying and doing in order to convince Americans yet again that Donald Trump is not just a bad president, but basically a Hitlerian figure, a major threat to American democracy.
It's something we hear over and over and over.
As I mentioned, they were quite certain that convicting Donald Trump on any felony, no matter what it was, would basically sabotage and doom his candidacy.
And at the same time ensure Joe Biden's re-election.
And yet, lo and behold, from FiveThirtyEight, which is the site that Nate Silver founded that analyzes and aggregates polling data, here you see that Joe Biden's approval rating is currently at its lowest ever rate.
Here you can see on the screen, This green line represents his approval rating.
It is going down.
And here's the disapproval rating.
That is going up.
This is from 2020, February 2023, all throughout 2023 and into 2024.
So that his disapproval rating is now 56.6%, while his approval rating is 37.6%.
And this comes in the wake of an onslaught by the corporate media to glorify Joe Biden's presidency, to convince Americans that their belief that they're struggling economically is misplaced and baseless.
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard or seen journalists who work for cable outlets or other major media corporations who have multi-million dollar contracts as their salary for every year, who have large homes in which they live paid off along with their summer homes in the Hamptons or in Georgetown where they live and then in Martha's Vineyard.
Hell, everybody, the economy is doing very, very well.
And you Americans out there who think that you're economically struggling don't understand the data.
And you should actually not be angry at Joe Biden, you should be grateful towards him because of how good your lives are.
And then they're shocked when Joe Biden's approval ratings continue to plummet.
And it really is a reflection not only of how little in common they have with the people who they think they're lecturing and directing and leading, but also just how incapable they are of understanding the priorities of American voters because they're completely different from these media figures for obvious reasons that if you're very wealthy, if you're making a lot of money, Your concern for the economy is much less.
Your belief that the economy is doing very well is much higher because the economy actually is doing well for you.
Which doesn't mean it's doing well for everybody else.
Now, the other aspect, obviously, and we've seen this in polling data over and over and over and over, is that one of the main reasons the American public does not trust Joe Biden, does not want to vote for him for a second term, is the obviously well-grounded belief
That Biden, who is now 81, already the oldest American president ever to serve in that office, 81, who is trying to run for a second term, which will bring him to the age of 85 at the end of that term.
Everyone can see in plain sight that he is rapidly deteriorating cognitively and in every other way as a result of age.
And one of the reasons why American voters are so impervious to being gaslit and told that what they're seeing is not the truth is because this is one of the areas in which Americans have a lot of confidence in their own ability to judge.
They don't need experts to help guide them through that.
That's because most of us have had the experience, I know I have, most people I know have, of having loved ones or family members who get very old into their 80s and 90s Deteriorate in every way, cognitively, physically, and we recognize it.
We don't need journalists to tell us whether it's true.
We can see it for ourselves.
Just that video clip I showed you from Biden in 1991, he's a completely different individual than what you hear now.
And yet, I want to show you just a clip that I found so amazing.
There was recently a Wall Street Journal article that was headlined, Behind Closed Doors Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.
And it quoted a lot of Democrats, although none of them, because they're cowards, would go on the record, talking about how in meetings it's actually embarrassing.
He sometimes rambles and no one has any idea what he's saying.
They're talking about matters of war and peace, or economic policy, or the debt ceiling, or agreements, and he just starts rambling in this very soft voice that almost nobody can hear.
Half the time he's reading from note cards that are the most basic and elementary points that everybody already understands and agree with, and that has nothing to do with the negotiation.
And for long periods of time, he'll just close his eyes and check out.
Or when it's time for him to speak, there'll just be dead silence for 30 seconds.
And even Democrats are saying how uncomfortable it is, how visible it is.
And we're all seeing the same thing in public.
And the White House has been trying to say, oh, don't worry, in private, he's this very sharp, robust leader, even if you don't see it in public.
So the Wall Street Journal was deeply reported.
But the only ones who would go on record were Republicans, even though a lot of Democrats were saying the same thing.
Here's how Joe Scarborough, who let's remember was a Republican his entire life.
He was elected to Congress in 1994 as part of the anti-establishment conservative backlash led by Newt Gingrich.
He was one of those congressmen.
And now he has a multi-million dollar contract with MSNBC and he knows that to keep that he has to essentially engage in anti-Trump propaganda every day, which he does.
But here is he, Joe Scarborough, trying to convince people that not only is Joe Biden not suffering cognitive decline, that he is essentially sharper and more analytically sophisticated and more tuned in to complex issues of economic and foreign policy than almost anybody else in Washington.
Just listen to this.
With House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, his demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next, according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who's quoted in this article.
That this was basically House Republicans whacking- Why didn't they just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene to whack him?
And Lauren Boebert?
It's really shocking, especially when you see what Kevin McCarthy has said repeatedly, publicly, and behind the scenes about Biden on those same days when they were negotiating.
The strong feelings you're seeing about this article comes also because the context of this race and these two candidates, it's interesting.
That's all I'll say.
Anyhow, that flies in the face of what McCarthy said about Biden's effectiveness in the past.
From Politico last year, quote, McCarthy mocked Biden's age and mental acuity in public.
In public, like he did in this article.
While privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.
A contradiction that left a deep impression on the White House.
This from the New York Times.
Privately, Mr. McCarthy has told allies that he has found Mr. Biden to be mentally sharp.
And Joe Biden, Joe Scarborough rather, went on a five minute rant about how he has This is North Korea-level style propaganda.
with House speakers over 30 years and that Joe Biden puts, the current Joe Biden puts every one of them to shame, including Kevin McCarthy, when it comes to his mental acuity, his ability to understand and make strong reasoned decisions on complex.
I mean, this is North Korea level style propaganda.
This is the sort of thing that anybody with a minimal amount of shame would refuse to do.
But these partisan outlets have none of that shame.
I mean, they're counting on trying to tell American people, the American people, that what they're seeing they should not believe.
They should not trust their own lying eyes.
I mean, that is the only strategy.
And every day you see new images of Biden shuffling.
That kind of very slow shuffle.
This is very lethargic, representing just a complete kind of gradual shutdown of the human organism, of the body, which obviously includes the brain as well.
You can see him half the time having no idea where he is, no idea where he's supposed to go, looking extremely confused.
And yet, Democrats, wealthy out-of-touch Democrats really believe that what people are going to vote on are things like Trump's conviction in the Manhattan courtroom and what they probably perceive to be nothing more than a private matter of infidelity, something that during the Clinton years they proved they really don't care about.
What they want in their political leaders are people who are going to make their lives materially better.
They have a positive recollection of the Trump economy before COVID, and they feel they're economically struggling under Biden.
And yet the kind of people who are leading Democrats and telling them what it is that they should say are people like Alexander Soros.
Now if you can find, let's put this tweet up on the screen, if you can find a person who has less in common with almost every other American, let alone ordinary American, average Americans in swing states than Alexander Soros, I'd like to find out who that average Americans in swing states than Alexander Soros, I'd like to He was not only born into multi-multi-billionaire wealth that he did not earn, though inherited,
But every single thing that Alexander Soros has done in his life, everything that he is, is the sheer byproduct, the exclusive byproduct of genetic luck, of having been born to somebody who actually compiled a massive fortune regardless of how they did that.
And Alexander Soros didn't try and go into another field to prove that he was capable, he just followed his father around and how he inherited The Open Society Foundation that his father runs and the way that he exercises political control with billions of dollars.
And even that alone, imagine the Open Society is a big foundation with huge numbers of employees.
You think George Soros' son just happens to be the best person, the most competent person to run it?
Everyone knows Alexander Soros is only relevant and important because he got billions and billions of dollars that he did not earn from his daddy.
He's somebody whose entire identity, entire life, comes not from any of his accomplishments, but purely his father's.
And you would think that would bestow somebody with a sense of shame or at least humility.
Like, maybe I don't actually understand how the majority of American voters reason and what's important to them and what they're going through because I was born into unimaginable billionaire wealth that I've now inherited.
But apparently people like him have no shame.
In fact, what ends up happening is that because of how I'm sure everyone around Alexander Soros has treated him since birth, how elites treat him, knowing that he has more money than almost anybody.
George Soros uses more money in the political system to influence the political system than anybody.
So you can imagine how the doors swing open for Alexander Soros and how they always have.
And somehow that has convinced him Not that he is a byproduct of luck and unearned success, but that he somehow has been endowed with great wisdom as reflected by the power that he has amassed.
And here he is issuing instructions to the Democratic Party, and every day he's posting pictures of him with Hillary Clinton, with Joe Biden, with Nancy Pelosi.
He's always with them, donating money, having fundraisers.
And here he is telling them what Democrats should do to win the election.
This is the decree he issued on May 31st.
Quote, Democrats should refer to Trump as a convicted felon at every opportunity.
Repetition is the key to a successful message, which is an odd thing to say since that was Joseph Goebbels' major insight, that if you just repeat something long enough and enough times, the public will believe it.
And then he goes on to say, and we want people to wrestle with the notion of hiring a convicted felon for the most important job in the country.
Now, if you're Alexander Soros, And you're drowning in billions of dollars of wealth and you have access to every single elite sector.
Maybe the things that you think are the top concerns for voters are not really the top concerns for voters.
Maybe believing that Trump's conviction in the Manhattan trial in a case involving a porn star and hush payments Might not be the most important thing to Americans who weren't born into billions of dollars of wealth, and yet this is how they constantly reason.
That's the way in which these media people are so out of touch with the public who they think they're lecturing into and directing.
Now, here's actual empirical data, polling data, after the Trump conviction that shows what Americans' priorities actually are.
From CBS News on June 9th, quote, Trump and Biden neck and neck nationally and in battlegrounds, which is more or less what we've seen.
We've seen Trump with a lead but within the margin of error throughout the last several months in battleground states.
And CBS says this, quote, among all the factors on voters' minds this election, among all the factors on voters' minds this election, former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict pales in comparison.
Pales in comparison.
To issues like the economy, inflation, and the border, all items on which Trump maintains advantages.
As such, the verdict has not dramatically reshaped the race.
Now, again, if you are a very wealthy liberal, a media elite, or let alone Alexander Soros, none of these issues matter to you.
You don't care about inflation.
You don't even notice inflation.
Let's go back to that graphic, please.
Actually, you can see it here.
The first issue that Americans are concerned about, the major factor, is the economy.
There you see it at 81%.
Inflation, 75%.
State of democracy, 74%.
Crime, 62%.
The US-Mexico border, 56%.
Gun policy, 52%.
65%, state of democracy, 74%, crime, 62%, the US-Mexico border, 56%, gun policy, 52%.
And then here at the very end is Trump's conviction, only 28%.
Look at the enormous disparity between that and all those other issues that have actually affected people's lives.
I'll guarantee you that the 28% who even said they cared that much were overwhelmingly Democratic voters who would never vote for Trump in any event, but whose media keep telling them that's such an important issue.
Now, again, if you're a wealthy liberal elite on the coast, of course you don't think these issues matter.
The economy is doing great for you.
You don't notice inflation because you're so rich.
You live in neighborhoods where crime doesn't really happen.
Can we go back to that graph, please?
The US-Mexico border.
You send your kids to private schools.
You live in the kind of communities where you don't have to deal with assimilating immigrants.
So you can focus on these kind of ethereal issues like these abstract dangers Trump poses because of his conviction.
And this gap Between elite political and media sectors on the one hand, and the entire rest of the country on the other, can't really be understated in terms of its importance.
Historically, it's kind of like the Versailles model, when you have the elite completely clustered in certain exclusive places that have nothing in common with the lives of all the other people over whom they think they have a right to rule, You get extreme levels of hatred, justifiable hatred, from the ordinary people towards these elites.
We covered last night the EU elections.
That was the major driving force.
It's been the major driving force of anti-establishment sentiment all throughout the West since 2016 with Brexit and Trump and even before that and certainly since.
And the more the elite class sees That ordinary Americans, ordinary citizens are disobeying them and voting differently than they're instructed, the more contempt the elite class has for those people.
And that in turn is perceived by the ordinary people and they then hate the elite class even more.
That's exactly what's happening.
It's the reason why almost all institutions of authority have completely lost the faith and trust of the citizenry they once commanded and why media institutions and media corporations in particular are so intensely and pervasively despised.
All right, let me just quickly show you, because I've been talking a little bit about the desperation of liberal discourse and the like, and how the more liberals start seeing things like this, they start panicking and really start getting extremely desperate.
So I want to play for you a video, or rather an audio, if we can pull this up from AOC, where Okay, we don't have that yet, so first let me show you an interview that Rachel Maddow gave.
She gave an interview to CNN's Oliver Darcy, the media reporter.
I'm sure it was a very, you can imagine how adversarial that interview was where CNN's Oliver Darcy interviewed MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
And here is part of the exchange that they had.
Oliver Darcy asked Rachel Maddow, quote, Trump and his allies are openly talking about weaponizing the government to seek revenge against critics and media and politics, with some of his extremist allies even talking about jailing their favorite of their fellow Americans.
Now, I absolutely love the irony where liberals say, oh, we have to prevent Trump From getting into office because if he does, he's going to use the Justice Department to prosecute and criminalize and imprison his allies when that is all liberals have been trying to do to Trump for the last three years.
Trump was president for four years and never once did that.
He ran and would have a chant, lock her up.
The difference though is he didn't do it.
Democrats are actually doing it.
And then Oliver Darcy goes on and says, you, Rachel Maddow, are one of his most notable critics on television.
Are you worried that you could be a target?
And then Rachel Maddow says, I'm worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly allowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people and to, quote, root out what he's described in some human terms as his, quote, the enemy within.
Again, history is helpful here.
He's not joking when he says this stuff.
And we've seen what happens when people take power proclaiming that kind of agenda.
I think there's a little bit of head-in-the-sand complacency that Trump only intends to go after individual people he's already signaled out.
Do you really think he plans to stop at well-known liberals?
For that matter, what convinces you that these massive camps he's planning are only for migrants?
So, yes, I'm worried about me, said Matto.
But only as much as I'm worried about all of us.
So she's basically saying, yes, I'm one of the most notable people on television who criticizes Trump.
And even though he had already had four years in office where he didn't do a single thing like any of this, he didn't build concentration camps or gas chambers.
He didn't round up his critics and put them in prison.
He didn't close newsrooms.
Now suddenly they say, no, this time he's really going to do it.
They were saying these things all before the 2016 election as well.
I think it's very difficult to convince Americans that Trump is a Hitler figure when he was actually just president for four years ago.
And I don't think Americans got the impression.
That he was doing things that made Hitler Hitler, that he wasn't building concentration camps and putting his political enemies in there.
Now, if you think what Rachel Maddow was saying, like, yes, I'm worried about myself and going into a camp, was deranged, I need you to listen to what Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said yesterday as well, when speaking to Kara Swisher.
And listen not only to her words, but also the tone of voice she's employing when saying these things.
What happens to you if Donald Trump wins?
What do you do?
What's your first move?
I mean, it sounds nuts, but like, I wouldn't be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.
Really.
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.
That was her first answer when she was asked, as a congressman, what's the first thing you would do?
And she said, look, I'm probably going to end up in jail.
This guy's going to throw me in jail.
That's how important I am.
That's what a dissident I am.
That's what a threat to establishment power I am that Trump intends to put me, me, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who's basically a glorified social media influencer, She's gonna put him into a—her into a gulag, into a concentration camp.
Listen to the rest.
He's out of his mind.
I mean, he did his whole first campaign around lock her up.
Like, this is his motto.
Oh, he didn't say that, you know.
He said he didn't say that.
Yeah, right?
He — I take him at his word.
I take him at his word.
I take him at his word when he says that he's going to round up people.
I take him at his word when he threatens journalists.
I take him at his word — I feel like what we saw in his first presidency was an amuse-bouche to what his intentions are.
He has learned from his mistakes of appointing professionals, and he will not make that mistake next time.
Amazing that AOC is now saying, oh, in his first term he appointed professionals.
Do you think that was what they were saying about Trump's team during that first term in office?
But anyway, it's not even just the utter narcissism and inflated self-importance that Trump is coming to put Rachel Maddow and AOC into concentration camps because they're such grave threats, such brave dissidents.
It's the I think they really believe it.
It's like a kind of hysteria that they've been feeding on.
Remember, these people only talk to each other and for each other.
They only listen to the same media outlets that repeat all the same things.
It's kind of like a not just a group think or her behavior.
It's like a cult where you just you have this this this message indoctrinated drummed into your head every day.
By your colleagues, by the media, by everyone who can provide you with positive rewards or negative rewards that Trump really is this Hitler figure that they start to believe in even though he was his president four years ago and absolutely none of this happened.
He did not put anybody in prison who were his political enemies.
These are the people who are trying to put their political enemies into prison and they've been doing it going all the way back to Trump's candidacy to his campaign and then to his presidency.
Look at all the people who almost ended up in jail.
Michael Flynn, Trump's incoming National Security Advisor, almost ended up in prison.
He was charged and pled guilty because he picked up a phone and reached out to his counterpart in the Russian government to try and smooth over relations exactly what you would expect them to do in the transition.
They've been wanting the imprisonment of their political enemies and they're getting the imprisonment of their political enemies for years while at the same time they're projecting onto Trump what they themselves are doing.
I suppose if you're somebody who really craves the imprisonment of your own political opponents, maybe I guess you just automatically assume That that's how everybody else thinks as well.
Now, let me just give you this kind of amazing contrast to make this point that I want to underscore.
And again, this is you just get a sense for how unhinged, how demented these people are, how maniacal they are, and the kinds of hysterical claims that they're trying to make, knowing they're seeing the same poll numbers as we just showed you.
Nothing is working.
And so they're just they're getting out of their minds.
At the end of April, just a couple months ago, the former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, Nicole Wallace, who is now a very popular liberal host on MSNBC that has its own interesting dynamic buried within it.
But Nicole Wallace went on the air, and while she didn't say she expects Trump to put her in a concentration camp the way AOC and Rachel Maddow did, this is something that, seemingly on the verge of tears, she was so worried about that she warned her audience might likely happen if Trump were elected.
Listen to this. - I've seen that toast a bunch of times, but it landed very differently this year.
Because depending on what happens in November, seven months from right now, this time next year, I might not be sitting here.
I might not be a White House correspondent's dinner or a free press.
While our democracy wouldn't exactly fall apart immediately without it, the real threat looms larger.
A candidate with outward disdain, not just for a free press, but for all of our freedoms, and for the rule of law itself.
Now, first of all, I think it's so funny that in trying to warn people of just how evil and extreme and dangerous Trump is, she said there might not even be a White House Correspondents' Dinner.
That thing where they all dress up in gowns and pretend that they're at the Oscars and they get to go to the White House.
But she is, again, saying, like, I think Trump's going to take me off the air.
Like, he's just going to order me off the air.
And the reason why I just find that so interesting is because I want you to hear the glee and the joy to the point where she was almost cackling, Nicole Wallace was, in August of 2023.
When she talked about how Trump was not only on his way to jail, but was being put into one of the most dangerous prisons in the entire country, where people have been murdered before, and how gleeful and happy she was.
In other words, she's the one who wants to put Her political enemies in jail.
And I'm going to just leave to the side everything the Bush and Cheney administration did to destroy civil liberties while she was there and defending it.
Listen to what she said back in 2023 when Trump was on his way to a Georgia jail.
Just a few minutes ago, Donald Trump, the disgraced ex-president, the frontrunner for the Republican nominee for president, four times indicted, departed his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
He's en route to Fulton County, Georgia via Newark Airport, we believe.
He will surrender himself for processing at an overcrowded jail with a reputation for violence and neglect, a jail that is accustomed to holding defendants facing charges up to and including violent crimes where stabbings are frequent.
Actually, three people have lost their lives over the last month.
That jail is where the disgraced ex-president of these United States is heading right now.
I mean, do you see that?
Who talks about prison that way?
She's so excited Trump's not just going to prison, but he's going to a prison that's one of the worst, most repressive, most dangerous prisons where people get raped and murdered.
She's the one who wants to put her political enemies into prison, and she and this crowd is doing that very well.
They have nothing to run on.
They're behind a candidate whose brain is melting and everyone can see it.
And they are really spiraling out of control and we're only in June.
Imagine what they're going to be doing in July and August and September if these polling numbers stay the same or even get worse.
I just think it's so important to take a step back and realize sometimes probably most of you don't watch these shows They're only speaking to like-minded people anyway, but I think it's important to note how inside these are some of the world's largest media corporations.
We're talking about NBC News here.
And then CNN, how genuinely detached these people are from reality.
Not just how partisan they are, but how hysterical they are.
They're spreading a kind of, or they're trying to spread a kind of paranoia and sickness into the American body politic out of their desperation that Trump might win that is really disturbing, not just politically, but psychologically and emotionally.
All right, we wanted to go over a segment that was one of the most bizarre I've ever seen on Barry Weiss's podcast that involved a completely deranged conversation about Russia and how the United States could so easily take it over, the sort of thing like, "Oh, we're going to be welcomed as liberators." But given the time, we're going to save that for tomorrow, especially because we have as a final note some very sad news to report.
The legendary journalist and author David Talbot suffered a near-fatal and deeply debilitating stroke yesterday, leaving him entirely unable to write or to speak or even to really minimally function.
It's perhaps a permanent state of debilitation.
Now, I first knew and got to know David Talbott because he was the founder of Salon.com, which I know it's hard to believe, but was actually a truly innovative and interesting online journal at the time that he founded it back in 1998, one of the very first, if not the first, Now, writing at Salon in 2007 was actually the first journalism job I ever had.
It was the first place that hired me after I was writing in my blog and got to know him somewhat then.
He was not really at Salon so much, but he was still the founder, and so I got to know him, really liked him, and respected him.
But even more importantly for me, Talbot is the author of what I really regard, as I've said many, many times, as the single best and most important history of the US security state in the post-World War II era.
That book, which you see on the screen, is entitled The Devil's Chessboard, Alan Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America's Security Government.
And it really does describe how our democracy ended up with this permanent faction of a secret government within our government that has no accountability.
This book was incredibly influential in my understanding of how our democracy ended up being saddled with those kind of people and that kind of agency.
It is a book I have highly recommended many times on this show, on our Locals program, in my personal life, because I really believe that it's vital reading.
Now, we had David Talbot on our show in November of last year.
And the interview was every bit as illuminating as I expected it to be.
We have a short video that I just want to show you, mostly to honor David Talbott, but also to, again, encourage you to really get this book if you haven't yet read it.
Listen to the part of our interview that we had with him in November of last year on the show.
One of the taboo topics in this country, the United States, is the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened almost 60 years ago.
Still, at this late date, the media refuses to, I think, seriously consider the possibility that elements of the U.S.
government killed the president.
Now, why do I think this was organized, the killing and the cover-up, by Allen Dulles?
And by the way, I have a long chapter in my book called The Power Leap.
Allen Dulles would never have acted on his own against the President.
No, I should say, the main topic of his book is not the JFK assassination.
He traces the unbelievable and secret power exercised by the Dulles brothers, Alan Dulles, who was the head of the CIA until John Kennedy fired him over the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, who served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower. who served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower.
Those two brothers basically ran American foreign policy, but in secret.
And then Talbot is sort of taking that proven history and using it to apply it to and question what happened with JFK Obviously, Alan Dulles hated JFK, who fired him.
And here's what he had to say.
Who he despised.
He always acted on behalf of his wealthy and powerful clients.
And I believe that Alan Dulles was not alone in doing this, that he was backed by people who are very powerful in the national security state and on Wall Street, where he'd spent most of his career.
So Alan Dulles was head of the CIA, and he was, as you say, fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous invasion of Cuba.
In April 1961, he was given a medal when President Kennedy was ushered honorably out the door, but he despised the president for firing him.
He couldn't believe that this young, untested president had the temerity to fire someone as senior as him.
Someone as powerful as him.
I believe that he turned his house in Georgetown, the neighborhood in Washington, into an anti-Kennedy then operation.
CIA, high-level CIA operatives, deputies, continued to report to Allen Dulles in the months and years after his firing, including James Angleton and Richard Helms, who later became head of the agency.
I think John McCone, who was put in charge of the agency by President Kennedy, was a figurehead.
He didn't know what was going on.
The people who really understood how the CIA operated were still in charge.
Alan Dahls was still in charge and his deputies.
And then, of course, he goes on to explain the amazing fact That when it was time to form the Warren Commission to investigate what happened with JFK's assassination, one of the people who was put on the commission was Alan Dulles, even though a lot of people at the time We're wondering whether the CIA was involved, given the CIA's incredibly powerful history.
Now, Talbot admitted in this part of the interview, but also in that last chapter of his book on JFK's assassination, that this was not proven, but he was given informed speculation.
But the really valuable part of the book that is not in any way speculative is the way in which the CIA began as this relatively small and limited part of our government, but like all agencies that have unaccountable power, It grew and grew and grew and grew, leading Dwight Eisenhower on his way out to warn of the unaccountable and growing power of the military industrial complex.
He'd obviously seen that throughout his eight years in office.
And this was before the Vietnam War, before the war on terror, before all the wars of the last 10 or 15 years or so.
And when you read this book, you really understand exactly how it is that this part of the government not only formed, but grew to the point where nobody controlled it.
Now, despite that work, David Talbot lived on, until the stroke, a very modest income.
He was a sole provider for his family.
They were obviously navigating an extremely difficult time emotionally, but also financially.
There is a GoFundMe page that has been set up by his family.
Entitled help David Talbot after a severe stroke it talks about the financial difficulties that are now facing including with housing and even some uncovered Medical costs if you are inclined if you have the ability You can make a donation a modest donation that will obviously be a great help to David Talbot and his family the link to that GoFundMe page will be in the bottom of the
Notes to our show, we obviously wish him and his family the fastest and most complete recovery possible.
All right, so that completes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program on those platforms, it really does help spread the visibility of the show.
As a final reminder, 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.
Tonight being Tuesday, we're about to go do that.
That show is where we take your questions, respond to your critiques and feedback.
It's where we hear your suggestion for future shows and guests, and we've done a lot of, we've invited a lot of guests on from those suggestions.
That aftershow is available only for members of our Locals community, and if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those aftershows, but to the multiple interactive features we have on the platform.
It's the place where we publish written, professionalized transcripts of every show we do here.
It's where we first publish our original written journalism.
And it is most of all the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that platform.
For those of you who have been watching this show, we are of course very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m.
Eastern, live exclusively here on Rumble.
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