U.S./Russia Conflict Escalates with Subs in Cuba as U.S. Lifts Assistance Restrictions on Azov Brigade; PLUS: Right-Wing TikTok Star John McEntee on Ban
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
U.S. Funding Azov Brigade (6:35)
Interview with Lev Golinkin (21:30)
Interview with John McEntee (43:13)
Outro (1:13:26)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, serious escalation of the conflict between the U.S.
and Russia in Ukraine, remember that, has again taken place.
In response to Joe Biden's permission for U.S.
missiles and other weapons to be used by Ukraine to attack targets inside of Russia, Moscow has deployed several of its most sophisticated submarines, ones NATO has long worried about, off the coast of Cuba to lurk right near the southeastern coast of the United States.
In response, the U.S.
has deployed its own submarines near its military base in Guantanamo, which many of you will recall, is also located in Cuba.
All of this comes as the U.S.
today announced it was signing a 10-year security guarantee With Ukraine that President Zelensky said puts Ukraine on the path to NATO membership.
Now, while it would be a clear exaggeration to equate what is already happening now with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, where let's remember the world and the human species came very close to nuclear annihilation, it is obviously a tense and potentially dangerous confrontation, especially given the utter lack of communication Between Moscow and Washington as well as the sustained and serious tensions between those two nations arising out of a NATO-backed war right up to Russia's border.
The question that will never disappear and that cannot be rationally answered.
Is why is this level of risk and danger worth it?
Why is it wise and justifiable to put Americans and ultimately all of humanity in such obvious danger all over the question of who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine, many of which prefer Moscow and Putin to Kiev and Zelensky?
Meanwhile the U.S.
government's official Twitter account yesterday responded to obviously accurate accusations from the foreign policy activist group Just Foreign Policy.
The group pointed out that the United States now by law has lifted restrictions on arming and funding the exact Ukrainian Militia Group, the Azov Battalion, which the U.S.
government itself, as well as most of the Western press, had spent a full decade denouncing as a monstrous neo-Nazi group.
That's why there was a ban in place on the U.S.
arming them.
The U.S.
government's justification for this, for why they're not actually arming a neo-Nazi group, is so transparently false and so easily disprovable, that one has to see it to believe it.
And to help us examine that, we will speak to the Ukrainian-American journalist Lev Golonkin, who has been on our show before and writes frequently about U.S. policy in Ukraine and the war that has been raging in it for two and a half years now.
Then there is this fascinating aspect of the media ecosystem that many of the people who have the largest audiences to speak about politics, people who speak to millions of other Americans, are often completely unknown to people who work within corporate media, are often completely unknown to people who work within corporate media, including those with far less of an audience They
That's because they are listened to, millions of people who are not on traditional media channels, but instead places like TikTok and YouTube and Rumble.
One such person who has become a TikTok star and one on Instagram as well is John McEntee, a former Trump White House advisor who has millions of followers on TikTok.
They daily listen to his relentlessly conservative and right-wing perspectives about news and culture.
But what he says on many issues is not what one would expect if listening to prominent conservative pundits and analysts on more traditional media platforms.
Among other things, he vehemently opposes the bipartisan bill to either force the sale of TikTok or to ban it altogether, often attacks the GOP establishment as much as he does the Democrats, has extreme doubts About very standard features of US foreign policy, including the wars that we are currently helping to wage, and is an ardent advocate of free speech as well.
In fact, has become one of the leading voices on the right against the TikTok ban.
And he's a free speech advocate, not in the way that many Republicans are, where they immediately justify censorship the minute it comes to the views they hate most.
but seems to be a principled and consistent advocate for it.
We will speak to him about this ecosystem that has become incredibly influential and the ways in which it is different from more standard and traditional means of communicating.
Before we get to all of that, a few program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Ever since October 7th, Ever since October 7th, there has been a massive amount of attention paid to the U.S. financed and armed war that the Israelis are perpetrating in Gaza.
And that's for good reason.
We obviously have covered that war to a great extent, including, for example, last night where we devoted almost all of our show to it and many other times where we have done That war does deserve a lot of attention.
It's a war-funded, armed, financed, and diplomatically enabled by the United States.
Obviously, anyone who's an American, an American journalist covering American news ought to be covering that war extensively.
But the war, the other war that the United States is funding and financing and arming, which is the NATO war against Russia taking place in Ukraine, is still a war that is not just ongoing, but often getting more and more dangerous.
And yet, there's not very much attention paid anymore to that war, in part because it's just become so normalized.
It's become part of the woodwork of American foreign policy.
It's just going to be one of those endless wars that we support indefinitely, in part because Israel has distracted from it.
But also because I think there's an effort to ensure there's not much attention paid to the war in Ukraine because it is not a static war.
It is getting more and more dangerous.
And most importantly, alarmingly of all, it involves rapid escalation.
Between the two countries that, just by the way, have the largest nuclear stockpiles of any country on the planet, which is the United States and Russia, that still operate on archaic and hair-trigger systems built during the Cold War with thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles that are nuclear-tipped, aimed at one another's Major cities.
So obviously whenever tensions between the U.S.
and Russia start to escalate and escalate more and then escalate more, that is something also that we should be paying a great deal of attention to.
And there's a lot going on in this war that affects U.S.
national security and the safety, it's really not an exaggeration to say, of the entire planet and the human species.
So first of all, Today there was a G7 summit meeting where Joe Biden attended with the other six leaders of the G7 countries.
You may have seen video where Biden was yet again looking extremely confused, wandering off, having to be kind of guided and babysat by the other leaders who treat him like basically what he is, which is a fragile grandfather in rapid cognitive decline.
And at this G7 meeting the United States signed a side deal with Ukraine.
Obviously Ukraine is not part of the G7 but Zelensky was there and part of why they were there were to get more money from the G7 which they did another 50 billion dollars in loan guarantees but also in order to sign this 10-year security agreement with the United States where the United States is committing now to defending Ukraine national security for the next 10 years.
So here is the Guardian article from today that describes what it is that happened.
You see it on the screen.
Joe Biden says democracies can deliver as G7 agrees to $50 billion Ukrainian deal.
The president hails a breakthrough as U.S.
and Ukraine also announce a 10-year bilateral security agreement.
And the article explains, quote, Joe Biden claimed democracies can deliver as he announced the leaders of the G7 Western countries, Western economies have finally reached an agreement that will mobilize an extra $50 billion of aid to Ukraine using frozen Russian state assets.
Speaking at the G7 summit on Thursday, Biden hailed the breakthrough as he met Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky and announced the two countries had also signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement ending 12 months of difficult negotiations.
Biden said arrangements We're being made to provide Ukraine with five Patriot missiles defense systems, saying, quote, everything we have is going to Ukraine until its needs are met.
The Ukrainian leader, President Zelensky, described the security guarantee as, quote, a very detailed, legally binding agreement that lasts not just for the duration of the war, but afterwards, too.
He said the deal covers intelligence cooperation and the strengthening of Ukrainian defense interests.
And then here from CNN, added information about this 10-year security deal.
And think about this.
The Ukrainians are right on the other side of the Russian border.
Obviously, the Russians regard the Ukrainians as a threat to their national security.
In particular, Western involvement going back to the 2014 coup that the West engineered to make the leader, the democratically elected leader of Ukraine, a victim of a coup removed before his term ended because he was, in their view, getting too close to Moscow.
And then ever since increasing levels of US and NATO involvement in that country and now we're signing a security guarantee with Ukraine when all Russia really wanted from the start was a guarantee that Ukraine would be a neutral country, a buffer country between Russia and the West.
We are drawing them more and more into our sphere, guaranteeing their security.
In other words, committing to protecting them if ever they have New Wars, short of what a NATO guarantee is, but on the way.
Here's how CNN explains it.
Ukraine signed a bilateral security pact on the sidelines of the G7 in Italy on Thursday.
The deal lays out a path for the U.S.' 's longstanding security relationship with Kyiv, but could also be undone by future administrations.
The agreement follows months of negotiations between the U.S.
and Ukraine.
After signing the agreement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S.
President Joe Biden made remarks and answered questions.
What is included in the deal, the agreement commits the U.S.
for 10 years to continue training of Ukraine's armed forces, more cooperation in the production of weapons and military equipment, The continued provision of greater intelligence sharing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday, and I'm not sure why this article is not on the screen, we're going to try and get it on the screen at some point, but Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that the bilateral security pact that Ukraine and the United States signed on Thursday will serve as a bridge To Kiev's attempt to join NATO.
That's not the article, that's the headline.
Quote, it states that America supports Ukraine's future membership in NATO and recognizes that our security agreement is a bridge to Ukraine's membership in NATO, Zelensky said at a news conference with US President Joe Biden.
So Zelensky is ensuring the world that the purpose of this 10-year security deal is to bring NATO into Ukraine, into NATO, bring NATO right up to the most sensitive part of the Russian border.
Now, all of that is happening at the same time that there is some extraordinary escalation taking place between the United States and Russia that is a direct response to what the U.S.
has been doing in Ukraine, not just a security deal, but also the U.S.
announcing that they would allow Ukrainian missiles, U.S.
provided missiles in Ukraine to be used to attack targets inside Russia.
And all you have to do is imagine what would happen if China or Russia shipped arms to Venezuela or Cuba or Mexico and then said, it's not just for your defense.
Feel free to attack targets inside the United States on American soil.
You can imagine how we would react to that.
Obviously, Russia is seeing that the same way.
And so as a result, this week, according to CNN, Russian ships arrive in Cuba as Cold War allies strengthen their ties, quote, The Gorshkov is one of the Russian Navy's most modern ships, and was followed by the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, a rescue tug, and an oil tanker.
The four Russian ships are now docked and berthed, usually occupied by cruise ships.
It marks the largest show of force by the Russians, with their longstanding ally Cuba In many years, as probably most of you know, Cuba is 90 miles off the coast of South Florida.
The U.S.
assesses that the Kazan does not have nuclear weapons on board, a U.S.
official said.
The vessels will carry out a five-day official visit to the Caribbean island, a show of Russian force, just 90 miles from Florida, as I just told you, as tensions rise between the U.S.
and Russia over the war in Ukraine.
Pentagon and State Department officials have also sought to emphasize that the Russian activity is routine.
And poses no threat to the U.S.
and have noted that Cuba has hosted Russian ships every year between 2013 and 2020.
Still, the Russian transit to the region comes at a particularly tense moment between Washington and Moscow, several weeks after President Joe Biden agreed to allow Ukraine to strike inside Russia directly using U.S.
provided weapons.
Now, this article from Business Insider on June 12, undermines and even negates this attempt by the Biden administration to pretend that this is just a very routine matter of no concern.
Quote, the Russian submarine that just showed up off Cuba is one of a new class of subs that has worried the US and NATO for years.
Russia's Yasen-class submarines, like the Kazan, are formidable threats within Russia's Navy, which have long boasted a rather capable submarine fleet.
The sub's newer, more advanced features make them difficult to track, and they're heavily armed and capable of attacks against land and sea-based targets with little to no warning.
These warships carry Onyx and Caliber cruise missiles and eventually the new Zircon missiles.
U.S.
officials have said that the appearance of these vessels in the area is not a direct response to those developments or an escalation, noting that Cuba has hosted Russian ships and the Russian exercises are routine.
The vessels in this group, however, So you have the U.S.
expanding its role in Ukraine, signing a 10-year security deal, allowing the Ukrainians to use U.S.
missiles to attack and side Russia.
and club submarines is, quote, "one of the big strategic challenges the alliance faces." So you have the US expanding its role in Ukraine, signing a 10-year security deal, allowing the Ukrainians to use US missiles to attack inside Russia.
Russia then sends some of its most sophisticated submarines, including nuclear-capable submarines, to Cuba right off the coast of the United States, And now there's a response from the United States from ABC News earlier today.
Quote, U.S.
submarine pulls into Guantanamo Bay a day after Russian warships arrive in Cuba.
Quote, a U.S.
Navy submarine has pulled into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gather for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
A U.S.
Navy submarine has arrived in Guantanamo Bay in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
U.S.
Southern Command and the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S.
base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a Russian frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker, and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, obviously, when the US and Russia start playing games with nuclear submarines off the coast of Cuba, that ought to be very alarming to anyone who has even a minimal understanding of Cold War history.
Because again, while I wouldn't equate this to or even put it in the same category yet, as the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Cuban Missile Crisis came very close to blowing up the entire world.
And although it included the basing of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba at the request of the Cuban government, many of the factors that almost led to an unintended or miscommunication based nuclear exchange involved Russian submarines in the vicinity of US submarines.
It's an incredibly dangerous game to be playing.
And it's been so predictable from the start that things like this would happen, and there's no explanation about what justifies taking on a risk like this.
Now, at the same time, from CNN yesterday, the US lifts a ban on sending weapons to Ukraine's Azov Brigade.
The ban, which had been long in place, called the Leahy Law, prohibits any military assistance or training to be provided to foreign units held responsible for human rights violations, according to the U.S.
State Department.
And a lot of people have been wondering why that Leahy Law that bans U.S.
arms to human rights violators doesn't prohibit the U.S.
from sending arms to Israel.
But the U.S.
government has determined in the past that it does prevent them from sending arms to the Azov battalion.
Quote, the battalion, named the 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade, was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2023 after the initial formation dissolved.
The unit has been praised for its role in the fight against Russian occupation.
The unit welcomed the lifting of the ban to receiving security assistance from the U.S.
saying in a statement Tuesday, quote, this is a new page in the history of our unit.
In other words, this battalion that has long been described as a very dangerous neo-Nazi force, the dominant strain of fighters inside Ukraine, to the point where the U.S.
government had put it on its banned list for any weapons or money going to it.
Now suddenly they've turned that Azov battalion into heroes who the U.S.
is now openly arming and funding.
Again, one of the main concerns that Russia said it had with this war is the presence of neo-Nazi units, obviously When Russia hears about Nazi or neo-Nazi loyalists right in their region on the other side of the border, given the major trauma that country suffered from the war against Nazis in World War Two, that's something that the Russians are going to take very seriously.
So it's a series of escalations all happening at once.
Resulting in some extremely dangerous moves, including the deployment of nuclear submarine or nuclear capable submarines to Cuba by both countries.
Now, to help us understand all of this, Lev Glonkin is a Ukrainian-American journalist and author born in Ukraine.
He has always had an important and relevant perspective on the war in Ukraine.
He has written some of the most insightful and heterodox and, by the way, informed articles about about Ukraine and the war and the U.S. funding over the last two and a half years.
He frequently writes for journals like The Forward and The Nation.
He is the author of a book as well titled A Backpack, A Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.
We are always happy to have him on our show.
It always helps illuminate what's going on in Ukraine.
Lev, it's great to see you.
Good evening.
Thank you for taking the time to join us tonight.
Thank you for having me.
So let's begin with the last issue that I just discussed, which is the U.S.
lifting of this longstanding ban on providing arms and funds to the Azov battalion on the grounds that, as everybody said, for a full decade until February 2022 was an actual neo-Nazi group, a serious menace inside Ukraine.
I want to show you, because there was a foreign policy group, Just Foreign Policy, that criticized the government's lifting of this ban.
It was through Eric Sperling, who's with Just Foreign Policy, and what he said, and we have the tweet on the screen, citing the Washington Post article, U.F.
lifts weapon ban on Ukrainian military unit, meaning Azov.
He said, quote, we've talked about neo-Nazis before in Ukraine, something the government Sorry, let me, let me just see this tweet here.
He said, Azov was barred about a decade ago from using American arms because they determined its founders were racist, xenophobic, and ultranationalist.
Quote, we cannot ignore our values.
We must live up to them, quoting the State Department.
And then the State Department responded to him, essentially justifying why this wasn't a contradiction of what they said.
And if we can put that tweet on the screen, they said, fact check for you.
The U.S.
government never provided support to the now-disabled militia known as the Azov Battalion.
In contrast, the 12 Special Forces Azov Brigade received arms and equipment after successfully completing necessary security force vetting.
So they say two key takeaways.
One, the two units are not the same, despite persistent Russian disinformation to conflate them, and we are living up to our values.
So what they're saying Lev, as you know, is look, there was this thing called the Azov Battalion.
We warned it was a neo-Nazi dangerous group for over a decade, but now it rebranded.
It's called the Azov Brigade, a totally different organization that is fully consistent with our principles and our values, and that's why we can arm you.
What do you make of that defense?
It's getting to the point where North Korea would be embarrassed to have the kind of propagandists that the State Department has, okay?
Because don't take Levko Lincoln's word for it.
Don't take Glenn Greenwald's.
Azov itself just celebrated their 10 year anniversary from the founding of the original 2014 battalion.
OK, the government of Kiev, the government of Ukraine also celebrated their founding.
So According to the State Department, Azov itself is now part of the Kremlin propaganda, the group that Azov itself admits that it is the same thing as the 2014 battalion.
So the State Department is now lying at the point at which even Azov is not descending to.
And this is the same institution that's telling us to care about disinformation, to care about truth and facts.
And they're lying at a point where even, like I said, even Azov itself admits that they're the same thing.
And, of course, in U.S.
liberal discourse, in U.S.
discourse generally, obviously the worst thing you could possibly be or be called is a Nazi.
People are frequently called Nazis inside the United States for having conservative views or views.
Then they kind of meet the real deal Nazis, like the ones with Nazi collaborators as heroes on their wall like Stepan Bandera and all kinds of Nazi insignia that the Azov battalion and brigade have been caught wearing.
Its leaders still openly do those sorts of things.
So let's show the tweets that you were referring to by Azov.
So as we mentioned, The Twitter feed of what was the Azov Battalion is now rebranded the Azov Brigade, which the U.S.
government says we can arm because it's a brand new, fully vetted organization that has nothing to do with the prior one called the Azov Battalion.
And yet, as you say, we have this tweet on the screen from the Azov Brigade.
Azov, 10 years, they're celebrating their 10 year anniversary, which is very strange for a group that was just newly created.
Quote, this is the path from a few dozen volunteers who had only motivation and faith in justice to a special purpose brigade, one of the most effective units of the defense force.
It celebrates all the places that they have been fighting in.
The path was not easy.
We have someone to honor, there is someone to remember, but there is no time to fold our hands.
Here you have them saying, no, we're not new.
We've been in existence for 10 years, meaning going back to when they were included as Nazis.
And then we have another tweet.
And again, it's so bizarre because they call themselves now the Azov Brigade, to give this impression, but they're very open about the fact that they're not a new group at all.
You see this tweet from this week.
History of the Brigade, the, quote, Azov Battalion, was established on May 5th, 2014.
as a battalion of the special purpose police patrol service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs based on the decision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine.
So they're calling themselves the Azov Battalion and saying, we have a long 10-year history that is exactly the same as the Azov Battalion that the U.S. government is now denying its actually arming and funding.
I mean, it's just hard to comprehend this kind of Orwellian or North Korean propaganda, as you said.
The only reason why it's called a brigade instead of a battalion is because it grew from a battalion to a regiment than to a brigade.
That's the only thing.
It's the same thing, it just reflects the size of the men, the size of the unit.
That is it.
And it's amazing how they're just ready to, the State Department is just ready to tell you that white is black and black is white, even as Azov denies it.
And I think we talked before about also Washington Post and Western media are also just telling lies about how their leadership, they're under new leadership.
And again, it's just easily disproven.
So I guess, you know, if you're somebody who believes that this Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just ethically and legally indefensible, but also some grave threat to all things decent, like Western security and Western freedom, I suppose an American citizen might say, look, I don't care who I'm arming, as long as they're effective fighters against Russia.
We saw a lot of that in Syria, where the United States was actually fighting alongside of and eventually arming Al-Qaeda and even some battalions from ISIS.
And the argument was, look, we have the same goal, which is to topple Bashar al-Assad and we'll fund whoever we need to fund in order to help with our war objectives.
What about that argument?
Like, look, who cares what Azar's ideology is?
As long as they're helping in our security interests and our security objectives, we should fund whoever we want.
The problem is that the Biden administration and pretty much the Western establishment for the past six, seven years has created this paradigm of we are on the brink between democracy and fascism.
OK, we are on the brink between truth and disinformation, between facts and lies.
This is what we are facing.
Ukraine, we're not arming Ukraine to fight Russia.
We're arming Ukraine to protect democracy, to protect freedom, to protect democratic values.
Joe Biden said that the impetus for running for president was after he watched the Nazis march in Charlottesville, Virginia.
That's the story that he's giving out.
That is what forced him to run for president.
That is the impetus for it.
That's what inspired him.
So you're having this entire narrative of, we are fighting fascism and we are fighting lies.
And then you just take this and you completely subvert it and you say, just kidding.
Because when it comes to Ukraine, we will take care of this.
We'll work with neo-Nazis.
We'll arm them.
They're our friends.
And I just want you to pause for a second, Glenn, and just think, like, imagine you're part of the Pentagon or the White House team, okay?
And you're like, you know what?
There's just one brigade here.
There's this one brigade who is known for being neo-Nazi, okay?
Why do we have to arm them?
Why can't we just arm everybody else?
OK, let's just say, why do this?
Why mess with them?
OK?
Or perhaps, you know what?
We're going to arm them.
So you know what?
Why don't we say, hey, you guys, you have to at least change your symbol, the new Nazi symbol that you use.
You have to at least change it.
OK?
Maybe a condition for arming them could be that they no longer They are not even giving the most idiotic, simple, meaningless things.
Even that they're not even trying.
That is what kind of baffles me.
heroes, people who collaborated with massacres of Jews inside Ukraine, like Stepan Bandera, like maybe they could at least make those kind of symbolic concessions, but we don't even demand those.
They are not even giving the most idiotic, simple, meaningless things.
Even that they're not even trying.
That is what kind of baffles me.
I think it's the big lie notion, the Joseph Goebbels thing.
If you're gonna lie, make it as big and proud as possible.
And that's what they're doing.
They're leaning in, I guess, as the term today goes.
Because they could have just asked for a couple of simple little things, okay?
Take a picture of their leaders holding the white fragility book, okay?
Like, do at least something to try.
But they're not even trying, okay?
And as a result, both they and You have the Washington Post saying that Azov is under new leadership.
And in the Washington Post article, the Washington Post quotes a man who is the deputy commander of Azov, who's been there since its inception.
I mean, and who not only that, this person who is now the deputy commander of Azov, he goes back to the neo-Nazi gang that founded Azov in the first place.
Yeah, so I just want to insert there because this is an area that has a very long and rich history, obviously, Ukraine and Russia and this whole region.
And, you know, a lot of times I think Americans don't look at things from the perspective of other countries.
So I remember we interviewed Sarah Wagenknecht, who's a longtime left-wing leader in Germany, who is really split with her longtime party over several things, but principally the German not only funding, but provision of tanks to but provision of tanks to Ukraine.
And what she was saying was, and I think it's something that a German would think about, or a Russian, but not necessarily people in the United States, was, do you know how traumatic it is for Russia?
How like, you know, how strong their reaction would have to be to see German tanks rolling eastward toward Russia through Ukraine?
And she was talking about, you know, what are we doing in risking this kind of extreme Russian reaction?
Now, The other part of that that I want to ask you about is this existence of Nazism inside Ukraine, because when Putin first announced the invasion and explained why, and he was doing so before, he was talking about the eradication of Nazism on the other side of the Russian border.
Immediately, people said that was false, that that was Russian disinformation.
But of course there are actual neo-Nazi groups inside Ukraine.
They're among the most armed and well-trained and dangerous fighters and we've said that for a long time until it was banned to say it in February 2022.
So looking at it from the Russian perspective, Now that the United States is doing things like lifting the restrictions on using American missiles to strike inside Russia, lifting the restriction on arming and banning Azov, how do you think the Russians are, whether they're right or wrong, but how do you think they're interpreting those kind of moves?
From the inception, I mean, if you look at the history, and also thank you for considering the history from a different point of view.
I think it's so important.
Russia Putin needs to hold Russia together because it is a giant multi-ethnic country and it needs to have an idea uniting it.
Okay.
So one of the biggest things is the legacy of World War two.
That's what he has seized on of Russia as part of a Soviet Union fighting back against Nazis.
Okay, and that is something that speaks and this is the part that we forget so much that Millions of Ukrainians died fighting against the Nazis.
So when we say that, you know, Ukraine celebrates Japan Bandera and Ukraine celebrates Nazi collaborators, it's wrong.
It's not Ukraine.
It's this western part of Ukraine that has hijacked the country and is now running it and imposing its own will upon the country.
Saying that Ukraine loves Nazis and worships Nazis, that is the same thing as saying that everybody in America loves Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and the Ku Klux Klan.
It's a denial of reality.
But for Russia, Putin needed something to unite the country.
In the Russian spirit, in the Russian mindset, one of the things that really encourages people and fires people up is the notion of everybody's against us, of we have our back to the wall.
So certainly the images of tanks, German tanks, flowing across Ukraine to Russia, certainly the notion of the West combining and this being a war of NATO on Russia, that is helping get the support for the war because Russia is suffering a lot of losses as well.
So that's the, you know, go ahead.
Yeah, so let me ask you, though, Dan, about The war itself, the battlefield itself, like what's actually happening in the war.
From the very beginning, there was a big doubt about how Ukraine could possibly win, especially given the way NATO and the United States defined victory, which was the expulsion of every last Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea.
It was a maximalist version of victory that seemed to be a pipe dream at best and a very dangerous goal, more accurately.
For a while, including when we were talking, the war was kind of frozen.
It was sort of stagnant.
The front line wasn't moving.
Lately though, it's pretty clear that the Russians have some kind of an upper hand.
They've been advancing.
The Ukrainian front lines are starting to crumble.
What do you make of where this war is and where it could possibly go?
Because on the one hand, you have the Russians saying we will never accept, obviously, they're not going to ever give up Crimea.
And unless Ukraine becomes neutral when they're going in the opposite direction, we'll never accept leaving the eastern province of the Donbass and those other provinces, whereas NATO and the U.S. says we will never accept anything other than a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.
Where is the war in your view and what possible ending could it have in the near future?
Well, the biggest problem with Ukraine, it's not the weapons, it's the people who hold the weapons because they're running out of men.
AND I'M GOING TO PUT IT ON THE BEST.
And the average age is something like 43 of the fighters there.
And there's stories of them, there's videos every day coming out of them, of press gangs rolling through Ukraine, snatching men off the streets and just throwing them in vans and off to the front lines.
So, as always, when you say, like, you know, what does Ukrainians look at for this war, you have to say which Ukrainians, OK?
I mean, Lindsey Graham is saying Ukraine wants to fight to the last man.
And meanwhile, we have videos of men in Ukraine doing everything possible, physically resisting being sent into the armed forces.
So it's two completely different things.
And what you have is Russia has the advantage of time because They just have more men to die.
And the more Ukraine pushes, eventually it's just going to be a question of who Zelensky is going to fight with.
And this brings us to our most dangerous point, because we are now talking about France and the Baltic states sending in advisors and troops into Ukraine.
And that is getting us into a very dangerous World War III point, because we're going to have now a situation in which when Russia is going to be firing on Ukraine, there's going to be Western troops involved on the ground.
That is, I think, one of the most dangerous things imaginable there.
And to me, another thing that's comparable to this is the fact that, you know, you mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis, okay, 1963.
62.
So the difference between the Cuban Missile Crisis and now is that the Cuban Missile Crisis was run by adults.
As Steve Cohen, as my mentor Steve Cohen would always talk about it, he would say that Kennedy asked for dissenting opinions, for what are all the options?
What are we going to do?
And Throughout the Cold War, it was run by people.
Even when things were very, very tense, there were still people who were running the war on both sides who were adults and who understood that we do not want to burn ourselves to a nuclear crisp.
And that is absent.
The war is now being run by people who are like, oh, you're too chicken, you know?
I mean, it's being run by the Lindsey Grahams of this world.
And that is a terrifying thing.
Because these people are dangerous, and what they're doing is, the more men Ukraine loses, the more men are going to pour in from other Western countries.
And what happens then, we don't know.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Ev, it's always great to speak to you.
It's actually refreshing to hear from people who actually have an understanding of Ukraine, who have an understanding of the region.
It's so notable how rarely the corporate media includes people who both have an expertise of the region and who have a different view than U.S.
and NATO foreign policy and the narrative that they insist upon in order to keep that war going.
That's, I think, why independent media exists.
And we are always thrilled to talk to you.
Hope you stay well.
Thanks so much for taking the time tonight.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Yeah, have a great evening.
Thank you.
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John McEntee worked as a production assistant at Fox News and other jobs there as well, and then he parlayed that into various roles in the Trump White House and has often proclaimed the support for programs,
President Trump, upon leaving the White House, he sought to create a dating app for conservatives, largely on TikTok, and it became a massive success with an account that grew to millions of followers, which he now regularly uses to express all kinds of conservative and right-wing views to millions of people who use that app.
And he also has a lot of heterodox views that you don't traditionally hear from people with large platforms and conservative audiences, including Raging against the TikTok bill that passed the ban on TikTok or the forced sale that was supported by both parties.
He's often a harsh critic of the GOP establishment and we thought it was important to bring him on to hear those views that millions of people are hearing in a different media ecosystem than Many of you are a part of, or listen to, or understand, and we are delighted to welcome him to our program.
John, thanks so much for coming on.
It's great to see you.
I'm excited to talk to you about this kind of world that a lot of people don't know.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Sure.
So let me just begin by asking you, the platforms on which you've developed this very large audience are places like TikTok and Instagram.
And I think even for people who use more mainstream online platforms, say like YouTube or Twitter to talk about politics, it's kind of like a different foreign world.
It's really amazing how there are a lot of people with many millions of followers there who are Unrecognizable and unknown to people who work within corporate media, even though a lot of those people have much bigger audiences than they do.
So you've obviously been around, you worked in the Trump White House, you worked for Fox News before that.
Can you describe what you think the differences are in terms of how politics is discussed, how messaging is conveyed, and how it's heard on places like TikTok and Instagram as opposed to the other platforms?
Yeah, so I think something like Twitter is really made for politics, and when you bring that kind of humor or takes to something like TikTok that is very mainstream and normie and young, they think it's really fresh and exciting, especially in the, you know, culture we're living in right now.
All of these takes, a lot of these young people haven't heard, whereas if I posted it on Twitter, You know, everyone would laugh, but they've already heard that take.
So it's reaching a different audience, and it's actually where all of the eyes are.
You know, when we were thinking about how to best promote our app, we're thinking, well, where is everyone?
Everyone is on TikTok.
You know, 170 million Americans and also the demographic that we're going after promoting a dating app.
You know, like, Where's the 25 year old girl that we want on our app?
She's not really on Twitter or Telegram or Rumble, but she's on TikTok.
So that's what we focused on.
And then obviously went to Instagram as well.
And yeah, it's been going pretty well.
So I think one of the interesting parts about your success there is that when people talk about Especially TikTok in kind of more mainstream or establishment type venues.
It's usually thought of as a very left-wing site.
It's a reason, I think, why a lot of conservatives supporting banning it or forcing its sale to a company who the US government could control more.
You saw a platform like Libs of TikTok become a major force, and her name was Libs of TikTok, and she specialized in showing how these kind of deranged left liberals were dominating on TikTok.
That was what she began by doing.
How were you able to find success as somebody who is very openly advocating for right-wing and conservative, even right-wing populist views Is it that that perception of TikTok as a largely overwhelmingly left-wing site is inaccurate?
Or were you able to do something to make you find an audience?
I actually do think it's inaccurate.
I think the country has become more conservative culturally under Biden.
And just those kind of speaking to them and like, you know, giving them something they haven't heard before.
Also, so few conservatives were on TikTok.
So it was easy to take off because Everyone's competing in the same spaces.
And for whatever reason, because of some national security hoax, people weren't comfortable going on TikTok.
And we're like, we'll go on it.
We'll use it.
And we were able to thrive that way.
So one of the things I think, you know, I'm a big defender of independent media, the idea that you can reach millions of people now through the Internet without having to own a printing press or a big satellite and network system that enables you to transmit.
I think that's one of the big innovations of the Internet that has then given rise to independent media.
You don't have to be part of a big corporation to communicate with millions of people.
One of the dangers of it, and of course everything has its imperfections, is that oftentimes the way people succeed is by just kind of planting their flag in a certain ideological or partisan camp, attracting only like-minded people who already are kind of converted, and it's just kind of preaching to the choir.
It can be lucrative, but you're not actually reaching people whose minds need changing.
Do you feel like Your content is actually reaching people who don't necessarily identify as conservatives or right-wing, but who are nonetheless open to the kinds of things you're saying?
Of course, and I think this is actually pretty unique to TikTok and their algorithm.
Our content gets to a wide variety of people, and you can see it in our comments section, you can see it on our app.
You know, I've talked to people that have discovered our app, and they don't go on Twitter, they don't watch Fox News, they might not even know who Tucker Carlson is.
Yet they were willing to download a Republican dating app just because they kind of agreed with our content.
They thought it was funny.
They thought the world is all upside down.
I actually agree with this.
And they might not be a registered Republican, but they're culturally conservative and they're buying into what we're selling.
So I think we're reaching a lot of different people, a lot of normies that haven't been engaged in the political process at all.
And we'll see with Trump coming on the platform if that helps his election as well.
I mean, I don't think it can hurt it in any way.
But just talking to people that aren't usually reached, it's just so valuable.
And yeah, I see us reaching a lot, a lot of different people.
Yeah, it's something I'm so fascinated with having...I've been at Rumble now for about a year and a half.
I came to Rumble principally because I wanted to help support its cause of preserving free speech online, but as part of that, I talk to them a lot, I kind of console with them, and I discovered there's this kind of a whole new world of major, major influencers who are extremely well known, even famous among a huge chunk of the country, primarily young people, but not only.
And yet these people who are extremely famous on the one hand among this kind of fragmented, isolated part of the internet are completely unknown to people who are just always thinking about politics by reading the New York Times or watching cable news.
And in turn, those people are completely unknown to the people in TikTok.
How did you bridge that?
Because you actually came from Fox, you came from the Trump White House.
What made you decide to go that route?
Well, I actually just bought into doing it the TikTok way, you know, their trends, a kind of TikTok style version with like a short video.
And I've never actually really brought up the fact that I worked in the administration or in politics or for Trump and like, 99% of the people that follow us don't even know that.
I mean, they're kind of discovering it as more things come out and articles are written about it.
But our initial audience is just they just think I'm a funny TikToker that, you know, likes to make fun of different situations or different cultural issues.
They don't really know the tie into politics.
And I think that's why it was successful.
You know, a lot of political content on the right gets stale and gets very boomer, you know, and people kind of just reject it.
They see it and they swipe by it or they X out or they don't tune in.
And I think just, you know, dumbing it down a little bit and making it fun and lighthearted.
You don't have to know anything about politics really to follow our page.
You know, I don't do very newsy stuff.
You know, I don't comment on the latest thing of the day.
I didn't say anything about Hunter yesterday.
It's more just cultural.
It's, you know, men can't get pregnant.
COVID was ridiculous, you know, and everyone kind of agrees, or at least a lot of people.
All right, so let me ask you a little bit about the kind of substance of your politics and the political message that you are conveying because I saw a bunch of your videos in preparation for our interview and there's, you know, you definitely are...a lot of it is kind of light and humorous, but there's also definitely commentary on culture but then also on politics.
I think one of the things that people never realized about Trump in his 2016 campaign and now have forgotten, even the people who did realize it at the time, was that Obviously, he was not a standard Republican Party candidate, to put that very mildly.
In fact, he was heaping scorn and contempt on the Republican Party establishment, at least as much as the Democratic Party establishment, starting with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and all those big donors and the like, which he called the swamp.
But even in the general election, he was doing the same, and not just heaping scorn on them, but also their orthodoxy and dogma on foreign policy, on economic policy.
One of the things I did note is about your Political commentary is that it's that's very similar, I think, is that you spend a lot of time either denouncing the Republican Party establishment, but even more so the kind of standard dogma and orthodoxy that the party, the establishment wing has long Pushed and sold.
What do you see as the big differences between this kind of Trumpian, more populist, anti-establishment faction of Republican Party politics inside the Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan establishment wing?
Yeah, so I think it all comes back to the 2015 Trump announcement speech, and then, you know, that segued into the 2016 campaign, which was based around basically this war on political correctness, and the three biggest policies of anti-war, pro-trade, you know, pro-tariffs, and, you know, the crackdown on immigration.
Illegal at the time and also a little bit of legal.
But, you know, build the wall.
We're going to protect our industry and we're bringing the troops back from Afghanistan and wherever else they shouldn't be.
I think those were the three big themes.
And the Republican establishment at the time had abandoned those.
You know, after the Romney loss, they thought we need to double down on immigration to win Hispanics.
It's like Trump took the hardest position on immigration in a long time and actually did better with Hispanics.
Everything they said was a lie.
And I think he actually made it a more working class party, which is good.
You know, I think Republicans championing the working class and being for the American worker and wanting to impose steel tariffs.
I think that's a good place to be.
I think it I think it's good for us.
It's good for industry.
So that was the biggest break.
Yeah, and then when you just look at everything from 2016 or 2015, I think you're right that people forget that part of it.
Beating Hillary was a huge deal.
It was amazing.
But the real thing was each week, each debate in the Republican primary, him taking down each person one by one, week after week.
That was the battle.
Those people that were in the trenches then, they know that was the center of the universe.
That was really the, we're gonna take down the machine and we're gonna have this insurgency and do things a little differently.
And it was really exciting to be a part of it.
I hope we can get some of that back.
Maybe some of it is coming back.
But to kind of just rebuke the Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, were just the establishment GOP that got us into Iraq and all these other problems And it's like, no, we're not doing that anymore.
None of this makes sense.
We're going to be the party for the worker.
You know, common sense.
We're not going to let the war machine rage on.
It was just exciting.
It was a cool time.
And yeah, I'm happy I could be a part of it.
So that's what's so interesting, and I want to show a video of yours that reflects what I'm about to ask you even more so.
Because all that you said, maybe except for immigration, but we should do a lot more to protect the American worker.
We should get out of endless wars.
For a long time, this was a message that I would say was more associated with, say, the American left, like the real American left, not the Democratic Party hacks and establishment wings.
One of the points I've been trying to make for so long that ruptured a lot of my relationship with people on the left, not all but a lot, was that there's actually a lot more overlap between, say, this new populist right and what had been considered the traditional left on things like foreign policy and how Washington works.
Tucker Carlson once said that Nobody wrote meaner articles about him 10 and 12 and 14 years ago that hurt him more than I did.
I hated him so much and he hated me.
And now I spend a lot of time on the Tucker Carlson Show when he was on Fox and, you know, and in other areas as well.
And we find that we have a huge amount of overlap, not because he changed or because I did, but because sort of the context of politics did as well.
So let me show this TikTok video that you did about Foreign policy and American domestic policy.
It's obviously a right-wing message in a way.
You consider yourself a Trump supporter, but let's just listen to this.
this.
I want to give the audience kind of a taste of it.
Welcome to America where we can't afford healthcare, but we can somehow afford to bomb the shit out of the Middle East.
All right.
So that idea, I'm telling you, like 15 years ago, you could have gone to any left-wing convention, party, organizing meeting, and everyone there would have loved the message that, oh, we can bomb the shit out of all these other countries.
We can spend billions of dollars on war, and yet we can't afford healthcare.
Do you see, as somebody who's kind of been around for a while now in both these mainstream political venues and now in these newer ones, a kind of change in how left versus right is understood and anti-establishment versus pro-establishment?
How do you see the political framework as I just described it?
Yeah, I think there's a big tent that nobody's really tapping into yet that is the left and the right.
I think this sort of establishment center is small and a minority and yet those things are still getting pushed through.
When you look at the aid to Ukraine or any of these things, it's like these are almost 80/20 issues.
Everyone is against this.
Mike Johnson pushed that through.
95% of Republicans are against it.
He just said, "I had an intel briefing.
You peasants at home, you don't know what I know." The typical things.
And I think when it comes down to government, it's just about priorities.
And is our government working for us?
Is it working for these other countries?
What are we doing?
You know, we protect Germany, and yet they have health care, so we're indirectly subsidizing German health care.
You know, just kind of rethinking how these things work, where our money's being spent, who's actually in charge.
Is the American government working for us, the American citizen?
As of late, not really.
So just kind of rethinking that.
And I think there's a broad coalition there that people need to tap into.
So one of the arguments that you are making regarding Ukraine is one that I've heard from many conservative members of Congress who I've had on my show, conservative presidential candidates.
It's a very common view, as you said, in the Republican Party politics, which is, look, we're massively in debt.
Communities here at home are ravaged.
People don't have health care.
How can we justify spending massive amounts financing the military and wards of other countries?
And they are very assertive about applying that when it comes to explaining why they're opposed to the U.S.
financing of Ukraine.
And the question I've asked every single one of them is, do you apply that same rationale When it comes to the U.S.
financing of Israel, also a country that has millions of citizens with a much higher standard of living than millions of citizens of the United States, even though we pay for their military on top of them paying for all their new wars.
Do you see that those two countries as similar or do you have this kind of Israel and this special place where none of those principles apply?
No, they're very similar.
I think it's funny that we keep saying, well, these are just loans.
It's like, so we're taking a loan from China to give to these countries.
Why doesn't China just loan them the money?
Of course, it's a loan that's never going to be paid back.
I don't think we need to be doing that.
I think we need to be neutral in every conflict and then see what's best for our country and go from there.
All right.
Let me ask you just a couple more questions in the time that we have.
Actually, I want to ask you about the TikTok ban in a second, but before I get to that, so we were talking about Trump's 2016 campaign, kind of this anti-establishment messaging, and I think it's fair to say even a lot of his most loyal supporters
We'll concede this, that a lot of what happened in his administration, in terms of policy and the like, did not necessarily correspond to a lot of that anti-establishment rhetoric, including, for example, putting very hardcore neocon establishment Republican types in positions of high power with foreign policy, like Mike Pompeo at the CIA and the State Department, Nikki Haley being the UN ambassador To the U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N.
And Trump has made some statements, including, you know, you're talking about Mike Johnson pushing the Ukraine bill through.
He has said, and I think Trump has also said that he kind of, maybe not necessarily agreeing with everything Mike Johnson did, but gave him the sort of green light because he thinks it's important for Republicans to be cohesive heading into the election.
Do you agree that there was a lot of stuff that Trump did in his actual presidency that didn't correspond to the rhetoric?
And do you have any real belief that it will be different this time?
Well, of course.
Yeah, I think when you run that type of campaign in 2016, I was pretty young and I was naive.
You know, I showed up to the White House on the first day and was like, are we building the wall now?
Yeah, I mean, we're a little disappointed.
I think there was a course correction.
He actually put me in charge of personnel and we were able to do a lot of good.
It was unfortunately the last year and we were kind of planning for a second term that I knew would have been better off.
I'll see.
We'll see if, you know, what we do, you know, with Project 2025 and, I think so.
I hope it's up to him to decide, but we're all ready.
Are we going to use that?
Are we going to use that asset now and do things right this way?
I think so.
I hope it's up to him to decide, but we're all ready.
I think all those people that served in junior roles that were really, really good that nobody knows about can take on more senior roles.
I think, you know, we do know who the bad people are and who the good people are.
But at the end of the day, it's his decision and, you know, how far he wants to go is up to him.
I think if you ask every single Republican in the country right now to describe America, they would say it's, you know, degenerate, bankrupt, on the wrong track, this, that.
About to decline, about to implode, and it's like, OK, so when we win in November, do you think doubling up the Border Patrol agents and another round of tax cuts fixes that?
It's like, obviously not.
We have to do way, way more than that.
So let's get it right from the beginning.
And with all these transition projects, like the one I'm an advisor to at Heritage, there's an opportunity to do that.
So we'll see and go from there.
All right, I do have to ask about this TikTok ban because this has been driving me crazy.
There's almost nobody on the American right who's opposed to it.
Trump In 2020 was supportive of it.
He then got a kind of major donation from somebody who has a stake in TikTok.
And then he actually came out against it.
I'm not saying that's necessarily the reason that just describing the series of events.
But other than Trump, bizarrely, there's almost nobody on the American right or in the conservative wing of the Republican Party and the Republican Party who has been against the TikTok ban.
And the reason for that, of course, is that when it was originally presented, the justification was These kind of fear-mongering narratives about China.
Oh, China is our major adversary.
They're using TikTok to both propagandize our youth, to corrupt our culture, to spy on us and collect data on us.
And You have been very outspoken when it came to the TikTok ban.
I just want to read this paragraph, this passage from an op-ed that you wrote.
I think it was last month in the Los Angeles Daily News about this.
You said, quote, It boggles my mind that Republicans would vote to give President Biden new censorship powers.
The bottom line is Republicans got played because they wanted to act like they're tough on China.
In an election year, they gave the Biden administration and Facebook exactly what they wanted.
Now 170 million Americans will have to pay the price for their political theater.
You know the arguments against TikTok, the ones I ran through, that China has direct access to our youth, they can use it to collect data on us.
Eventually, actually, the real reason it passed was because a lot of Democrats became convinced That there was too much anti-Israel speech allowed on the platform and that was why so many young Americans became critical of Israel and the war and that we can't allow.
It's been such an obvious attack on free speech after Republicans waived the free speech ban for so long.
But what do you make of those arguments, the ones that were the most common ones used to justify this bill?
Uh, they don't hold water.
So they'll say, well, China can infiltrate the algorithm.
Well, there's no instance of them ever doing that.
They'll say, well, the Chinese government can access American user data.
Okay, show us the example.
That's never actually happened.
Um, when the Trump administration raised these concerns, TikTok moved all their data to the U.S., they walled it off, they put third-party oversight, they put it with Oracle, you know, they did all these things, and it's like, wait, why is this still going on?
It's like, oh, because this is a political thing.
You know, Republicans want to act like they're tough on China and Democrats want, you know, new power.
It's like, where were these Republican senators super tough on China when Trump wanted to do the tariffs?
They were nowhere to be found.
Where were these serious national security people when we wanted to build the wall?
Nowhere to be found.
So it's just another thing, another hoax, you know.
The national security state just marches on and people say, well, it's bipartisan.
Of course it is.
You know, all politicians love to use fear and scare tactics.
It's why Democrats love COVID.
It's why Republicans love war.
You know, so they found this new Chinese boogeyman and they're going to use it any way they can to get more control.
You know, whether that's new censorship powers or to just overall censor speech and content they don't like.
Like you mentioned, When we saw the congressmen and senators on the House floor, all they talked about was the fact that TikTok had a lot of content, you know, critical of Ukraine aid or pro-Palestine or hashtags they didn't like.
And it's like, OK, so this is really just content moderation.
And you think by banning this app, that solves that.
And we're giving them new powers to ban everything else.
Why can't they say Twitter is acting at the direction of Russia or Rumble or Telegram is because they're being critical of this war?
I think Republicans just fell for it, and I don't believe that Trump, I don't think it had anything to do with what you mentioned.
I think he's actually never fallen for the national security hysteria things, and I think that's because he's been on the other side of it, whether it was the Russia hoax or anything else.
You know, being tough on China to him is trade and tariffs and, you know, protecting industry.
It's not making up these fake things to empower the deep state.
And yeah, I think hopefully with Trump being on TikTok and winning in November, maybe that'll be a mandate to kind of overturn this somehow.
I don't know how that works.
I'm hoping for that because everyone loves TikTok and I think it's just opening the door to way too much power for the government.
Yeah, I still laugh to this day about how Trump was constantly attacked and still is for supposedly trusting the word of the Russian government above our sacred U.S.
intelligence community with such a long history of only telling the truth when it came to things like Russiagate, and of course that turned out to be false, or that he didn't even mention He's obviously more skeptical of the U.S.
security state than almost any president since, I would say, the national security state was created in the wake of World War II, and that's obviously why the U.S.
security state hates him so much.
In fact, he knew from the beginning this story just intuitively was bullshit, and of course, it was proven to be.
So I think you're right.
He's obviously more skeptical of the U.S. security state than almost any president since, I would say, the national security state was created in the wake of World War II, and that's obviously why the U.S. security state hates him so much.
Just one or two more questions.
In that op-ed that I mentioned, you had a sentence where you said, Republicans, quote, haven't done a single thing in the last five years on the most important tech issue, the censorship of conservatives.
Why do you say that that's the most important tech issue, the censorship of conservatives?
Well, being a conservative, you know, you see your representatives wanting to take on big tech.
Well, big tech is Facebook and Google and what are they doing and what's the most harmful thing they're doing?
I think it's been the deplatforming of conservatives.
I think it was banning the sitting president of the United States.
I think that's the free speech issue of our time.
And what are they doing on it?
Nothing.
Instead, they're doing Facebook's bidding by taking out their top competitor.
When I was working there, I mentioned in the op-ed that we tried to—well, we actually rescinded the FCC nomination of somebody who went against President Trump's order, social media order, and they threw a fig.
We saw it through, but it was too late.
We were trying to, you know, get some Section 230 reform or whatever, but these congressmen and senators threw an absolute fit.
They don't believe in the things we believe.
They don't care about the actual issues that matter to conservatives.
They want to just play and go on Fox News and talk tough about China.
It's embarrassing, honestly.
All right, last question.
I asked you before whether you apply these foreign policy principles about funding Ukraine to Israel, and you very consistently said, absolutely.
Let me ask you the same thing about free speech, because you mentioned free speech of conservatives.
I think one of the reasons, there are many reasons, but one of the reasons why I have a lot more conservatives in my audience than I had previously is because I have been defending the free speech rights of right-wing and conservative speech, denouncing censorship aimed at them online and offline.
But one of the things that has been driving me mad, and I mean mad in both senses of the term, angry and insane, is that so many of these Republicans who have been waving the free speech banner since October 7th have been demanding that people be fired because of their views on Israel and then supporting legislation that expands the definition of anti-Semitism to include a whole bunch of views that are very commonly expressed about Israel.
Has the post-October 7th flurry of kind of cancel culture, as we once called it, the demanding of people being fired for their views, but also the kind of formalizing of this censorship regime now applied to Israel critics, is that also a concern of yours?
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes hand-in-hand.
I think it's the same thing.
You see that the media took a very pro-Israel stance.
So when you have the media on your side, all of these right-wing people got very empowered to go hard against the left, whether it was the campus protests or calling for deplatforming left-wing people.
It's just funny to see.
Just, you know, when the media's on your side, you can be very tough and very strong, but where were these people when it was the BLM riots?
You know, where were all these tough guys then?
And that's because the media wasn't on the side of us, you know, on the right-wing side.
So, yeah, of course I'm not on the side of, like, some leftist campus protester.
We probably disagree on almost everything, but on this particular issue, I mean, yeah, they have free speech.
They're allowed to exercise that right.
So I really appreciate coming on.
I did have a kind of suspicion that even though I don't pay a lot of attention to TikTok, that the discourse going on there is different than the discourse going on elsewhere.
And I think having listened to you now for a half an hour or so describe your views as a Trump supporter, as a self-identified conservative, it kind of confirms that suspicion.
I'm sure there are a lot of people in our audience who haven't given much thought to TikTok, even though it is arguably the most influential platform in the country at this point.
So I appreciate you coming on and not just sharing your political views, but also giving us a sort of glimpse into how that world works.
It was great talking to you and I appreciate your time.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely.
Have a good evening.
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