Dems Against Democracy, Biden's Gaza Problem, Ken Klippenstein: Should Biden Step Down as President?; Michael Tracey Joins From the Studio
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Democrats Against Democracy (2:49)
AOC Gone Wild (9:04)
Harris Doesn’t Solve “The Gaza Problem” (16:44)
Briahna Joy Gray Interviews Ken Klippenstein (22:55)
Michael Tracey Joins From the Studio (48:01)
Outro (1:04:04)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday to Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Now, your esteemed host Glenn Greenwald is out on vacation this week, and it really is an honor and a pleasure for me to try to fill his very big shoes As guest host today, if you're not familiar with me from past appearances on System Update, my name is Brianna Joy Gray.
I host my own podcast called Bad Faith and until recently co-hosted The Hills Show Rising before I was censored for reporting news that was critical of Israel.
Prior to my own show, I worked as the National Press Secretary for the Bernie 2020 campaign And before that, I worked with Glenn at The Intercept.
And like Glenn, I started my career as a lawyer practicing in New York for about seven years before leaving to become a journalist.
So I felt very supported by Glenn early in my career and considered him to be one of the most ideologically consistent, intelligent, insightful, and courageous voices in this space.
So really, it is a pleasure for me to be here with you today.
Coming up today on the show, we'll be covering the Democrats' anti-democratic maneuvering to oust Biden and replace him with Kamala Harris, and how the group of politicians that sold themselves as the anti-establishment left have really shown themselves to be frauds in many respects.
Especially Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We're also going to assess whether Kamala solves Biden's Gaza problem, that is his unpopular handling of the war in Palestine, before being joined by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who has written a recent Substack post asking whether Joe Biden will be in his presidency altogether who has written a recent Substack post asking whether Joe Biden will be in his presidency altogether now, if it's too
Stick around after that because Michael Tracy will be taking over as guest host to conduct an interview with Ro Khanna.
I understand Ro Khanna is the first Democrat to come on System Update, so that's bound to be a really good interview.
We'll be right back with my take on the current political moment, but first, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Shows are published in the morning after they air here on Rumble.
If you like System Update and would like to support the show, you can do so by joining Glenn's Locals community on the red join button below on the Rumble player or on greenwald.locals.com.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
First up, as you probably know by now, Joe Biden did something unique among politicians this weekend.
He actually listened to voters who overwhelmingly wanted him to drop out of the presidential race.
He made the announcement on Sunday and simultaneously endorsed his VP, Kamala Harris, to take his place at the top of the Democratic Party ticket.
Now, Glenn Greenwald called in from his much-deserved vacation last night to weigh in, and I echo many of his sentiments.
I won't repeat his well-made points here except to say the Democratic Party's hand-wringing about democracy under threat has been totally exposed by the fundamentally undemocratic suppression of the Democratic primary process.
You probably remember this now-famous clip of one-time Bernie press secretary-turned-Democratic Party booster, Symone Sanders, announcing there will be no primary.
I really think that the mealy-mouthed Democrats, as I like to call them, and some of my progressive friends who would like to live in a fantasy land, they need to come back to reality.
And the reality is this.
The sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat.
A Democrat that would like to run for re-election, so much so that he has declared a re-election campaign.
In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process.
There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else to serve Well, we're going to have another Bobby Kennedy in an empty chair in the debate, right?
There will be no debate.
Yeah, no debate.
The Democratic National Committee administers the debates and they're not going to set up a primary process for debates.
Of course, ironically, the integrity of the Democratic process was the excuse she used to defend Joe Biden remaining in the race, even when back in 2022, a full two years ago, three-quarters of Democratic voters didn't want Biden to be the nominee.
Take a listen.
So, Simone, if you're in that meeting right now, if you're a member of the Biden campaign and you're trying to convince these skeptical senators, hold your fire, what's your best argument?
Look, I think your best argument is there was a primary process, and you can have qualms about how open you think that process was, but there was a primary process, and Democratic voters cast their ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
And talking and asking the Senators in that realm, have they heard from the delegates?
Have they heard from the voters in their states?
Because the Senators, thanks to my former, former, former boss, former Senator Bernie Sanders, the Senators and members of Congress, they no longer have A vote on the first ballot when it comes to convention.
They're all superdelegates.
They're unpledged delegates and unpledged delegates do not have a vote on the first ballot.
And so I do think that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the process here.
In fact, depending on how you slice it, Democrats haven't truly allowed their voters a real choice in a primary since maybe 2008.
For eight years now, progressives and independents who supported Bernie's 2016 and 2020 runs have complained that those primaries were rigged.
We've been told we are merely delusional losers for years, so it's been a real trip to see Biden supporters openly admitting that Bernie would have won as they rallied to support Biden in what we now know were the final days of his campaign.
Now, why were they suddenly admitting this?
Well, as big donors increasingly called for Biden to drop out, Biden chose to dismiss them, framing their claims as mere elite priorities.
In other words, elites wanted him to drop out, not normal voters.
Now, of course, big donors are elites definitionally, but Biden's framing ignored two things.
One, that that particular elite opinion happened to have been shared by the majority of Democrats polled.
And two, those were the same elites that rigged the 2020 primary to ensure that he, not Bernie, was the nominee.
Listen to D.C.
Congressman Adam Smith say exactly that.
I gotta make one other point.
Yeah.
So the President talked today about how now it's all the elites who are trying to force him out.
Right.
Let's remember what happened in 2020.
Okay, the President did not run a great primary campaign.
He lost badly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
He came out of Nevada and Bernie Sanders looked like the presumptive nominee.
And this exact same group of people- The elites.
That the President is now deriding as elites.
And by the way, they're not.
They're Democrats.
OK, their party operatives, their donors, their volunteers decided and to all the Bernie supporters out there, I'm not judging this positively or negatively.
They decided they didn't want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.
They decided that Joe Biden would be the better nominee and credit again to the president.
He decided to go to the because he did eight years as vice president.
He did the years in the Senate.
He had the record to be a strong president.
And so they, through their support behind Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar, and I may be forgetting a few others, stepped aside for the candidate who was better.
This myth that somehow Joe Biden came in and rescued us, it has been a nationwide movement since Donald Trump was elected president.
And in 2020, that nationwide movement said, Joe, you're the best guy, let's go.
Right now, they don't think he is.
In the words of one of my all-time favorite I-Think-You-Should-Leave characters, he admitted.
But look, that's all old news at this point.
Biden's out, and now the Democratic establishment is coalescing behind Kamala.
All 24 blue state governors have endorsed her, as have Democratic Party heavy hitters Senator Chuck Schumer, former House Leader Nancy Pelosi, and current House Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
If there was any hope that But here's the crazy thing I can't quite wrap my mind around.
be an open convention and now seems dead on arrival, killed by the same party acolytes that killed Bernie's left populist insurgency.
But here's the crazy thing I can't quite wrap my mind around.
While establishment figures like Adam Smith and Joe Manchin were calling for Biden to drop out, so-called progressives like AOC and Bernie had Biden's back.
Perhaps most embarrassing on Thursday night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filmed a 50-minute Instagram live video where she made a series of truly incomprehensible arguments as to why Biden should be the nominee.
Now, I just did a full episode on this on my own podcast, Bad Faith, so I won't belabor it here, but here are some of the highlights of AOC's very, very bad faith arguments.
She argued that it was simply too late to replace Biden, saying that things would be different if the calls to drop out had happened a year ago.
But of course, she omits that she endorsed Biden over a year ago, well before primary season—the primary we were never allowed to have—started, giving up any leverage she might have had in exchange for seemingly nothing.
She went on to use identity politics to argue that Democrats shouldn't risk swapping out Biden because her community didn't have the privilege to lose an election.
Super embarrassing given that the same day MSNBC covered a poll showing a 31% drop in support for Biden among, guess who, Black women from 2020 to 2024.
Perhaps most embarrassing of all, though, AOC implied that the debate format was unfair to Biden because, get this, there was no audience.
Trump, who, if nothing else, is an amazing showman, is widely understood to have benefited from having audiences at debate.
They often cheer and clap for him, no matter how hard the moderators try to keep them quiet.
He's a natural entertainer.
If you'll indulge me, a classic Gemini.
But before Biden dropped out, the enthusiasm gap between Biden and Trump was even larger than Trump's lead in Nevada.
And yet, AOC expected us to believe that had there been a crowd in the room, they would have rallied behind this?
In a 10 year period, we'd be able to right wipe out his debt.
We'd be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look, if we finally beat Medicare.
Thank you, President Biden.
President Trump?
He's right.
He did beat Medicare.
He beat it to death and he's destroying Medicare.
Truly embarrassing stuff.
And for what?
Days later, Biden dropped out anyway, taking her strategic credibility with him down the drain.
Yet she still hasn't shown any humility.
AOC lashed out at an ostensibly left-leaning lecturer at Harvard University's History of Science department, After he tweeted, quote, cannot believe how badly Bernie and AOC effed this up.
Never want to hear about their political instincts again.
To which AOC replied, maybe you should think harder.
Lashing out and insulting the intelligence of people in your base that disagree with you?
You really are looking more and more like an establishment Democrat every day, AOC.
I think the Hest of Sci professor had a good point.
What did AOC and Bernie gain by defending Biden against the electorate?
Ostensibly, progressives got Biden to adopt a range of sort of broadly popular but ultimately pretty incremental policies in the last few days of his campaign.
But those were all contingent on things that were highly unlikely to happen, like Biden winning the House and Senate, getting rid of the filibuster, or, you know, winning re-election at all.
And after doing a 50-minute monologue in defense of Biden on Thursday night, here she is yesterday, all in, on Kamala, again refusing to use her leverage to actually get something for the people she's supposed to represent.
I trust the president's judgment.
I trust his decision-making.
I trusted his decision-making when he was in this race.
And when he has decided to not be in this race, I trust his judgment and decision-making there as well.
And I know that Vice President Harris is more than up to the task and ready to be president.
An elected official who is a prominent woman of color.
I've seen a lot.
And I know that the Vice President has seen a lot.
And so it's going to be very important that I think we brace ourselves for some of the unfair, misogynistic, and racial undertones, overtones, explicit attacks, and implicit attacks that she may be subject to.
And it's important for us to keep our eyes open for what is fair, but also what is unfair.
Oof.
Please excuse the eye roll.
Look, there's at least one progressive woman of color who isn't bending the proverbial knee.
Unlike AOC and progressive caucus leader Pramila Jayapal, who also offered a premature endorsement of Kamala Harris, Rashida Tlaib is using this moment as a real outsider, anti-establishment figure should, to win something for her constituents.
She issued a statement saying, quote, I welcome the opportunity to engage Vice President Harris as my team and I work to inspire our Democratic base in the 12th Congressional District.
They want to see a permanent ceasefire and an end to the funding of genocide in Gaza.
She went on to say, quote, I support a transparent Democratic process at an open convention next month and hope there is a fair vote on the resolution at the DNC that calls for an arms embargo to stop the Israeli government's war crimes.
Given that Tlaib stands nearly alone in that request, I'm not holding my breath for an open convention, but one example in contrast she at least presents.
Now, it certainly feels like most Democrats, including a lot more leftists than I'd like to admit, are all in on Kamala.
They're coconut-pilled, as the kids say.
Look, emotionally, I get it.
what used to feel like cringe, memeable content.
You know, the famous, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree line, now feels kind of light and maybe even fresh after weeks of holding our collective breaths every time Biden paused in the middle of a speech while squinting at a teleprompter.
Popular singer Charlie XCX tweeted out, Kamala is Brat, Brat being the name of her chart-topping album, and launching a fleet of op-eds about Kamala's potential cultural impact and the potential for saving Democrats from Biden's dismal youth poll numbers.
Now, I'm about five or ten years too old to be able to help you understand what Brat is, actually, but here's what I can tell you.
Even some on the left who railed against Kamala back in 2020 are describing themselves as coconut-pilled.
But here is why they absolutely shouldn't.
First of all, I know memories are short, but Biden's poll numbers didn't just start to dip after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
Long before I was censored by The Hill, we were covering damning swing state polls that made Biden's path at 270 look nearly impossible.
The debate was merely the nail in the coffin.
And one of the huge factors that drove Biden's low polls, particularly among youth voters and in swing states like Michigan, Where America's largest Muslim population lives is the war in Gaza.
And guess what?
Things have not gotten better in Gaza over the last weeks.
The school is out for summer and headlines about police arresting gray-haired professors and billionaire-backed Zionists funding violent mobs who bloodied student journalists are gone for now.
Any voter with internet access is still seeing a non-stop horror show on the ground in Palestine.
80% of Gaza is under evacuation orders or designated no-go zones, and with nowhere to go, Palestinians are being killed by the dozens daily.
Seventy were killed yesterday by Israeli tank salvos, even after humanitarian aid workers, including an American, were killed in the now-infamous strikes on Jose Andres Central Food Kitchen caravan workers.
More humanitarian aid workers who also coordinated in advance with the Israeli government were struck in recent days.
Two clearly marked UNICEF vehicles were hit with live ammunition today as they were en route to reunite five children, including a baby, with their father.
The Lancet Medical Journal now estimates that the death toll in Gaza may exceed 186,000 people.
American surgeon Mark Perlmutter told CBS on Sunday that he's witnessed a stunning number of toddlers with headshot wounds.
He told them he reviewed CT scans to confirm what he saw because he, quote, didn't believe this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.
As the doctor put it, no toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best snipers.
It's not just students and Arab voters who are upset.
As of March, a majority of Americans, 50% to 36%, disapproved of the Israeli military's actions in Gaza.
And just today, seven major labor unions, including the UAW and SEIU, called on Biden to halt all military aid to Israel.
Democrats see Kamala as a relief valve of sorts, a way to create distance between Biden's unpopularity on this issue and the Democratic Party itself.
But too many people are presuming a Kamala Harris administration represents a real policy shift from the Biden administration.
As journalist Jeremy Scahill recently wrote at his new drop site news platform, quote, the truth is that like most Democrats, Harris has supported Biden's policies, even if she has raised tactical objections or expressed moral unease with the horrifying death toll.
Soon after being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris earned a reputation as an ardent defender of Israel.
She spoke two years in a row at AIPAC conferences and co-sponsored legislation aimed at undermining a U.N.
resolution condemning Israel's illegal annexation of Palestinian land.
One of her first international trips as a senator was to Israel, where she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017.
At an AIPAC conference that year, she said, quote, I support the United States' commitment to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance over the next decade.
I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us.
As long as I'm a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel's security and right to self-defense.
As long as she's a United States Senator and perhaps also as President of the United States of America.
Now despite this, the public has largely taken for granted that Kamala's rhetorical softness on this issue, at least as compared to Biden's posture, means a real policy shift.
Netanyahu arrived in the United States this week for a much-anticipated address to Congress, and some media sources interpreted the Vice President's planned absence from this address as evidence that she was breaking from Biden's bear-hug, BB strategy.
However, as leading Israeli paper, Haaretz reported, quote, "Harris will be meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu this week at the White House." White House Jewish liaison Shelly Greenspan was quoted in Haaretz as saying that "Harris, quote, will reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel." Kamala being not Biden does not solve the Democrats' Gaza problem, no matter how memeable she is.
She could solve it if pushed, but while AOC has boldly tweeted that she will not be watching war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu address the joint session of Congress, she of course endorsed Biden, who considered Bibi a close personal friend, is endorsing Kamala before securing any commitments that she'll continue his policies.
And it's unlikely that we'll see any change.
Now, stick around.
We've got more with Ken Klippenstein coming up next.
He's asking an important question for the security of the Republic.
If Biden lacks the stamina to run for president, is he fit to be president for the remainder of his term?
up next.
All right, Ken Klippenstein, it's really great to be with you.
Welcome to talking to you on a new platform.
We've talked a lot on my own podcast and used to talk together on Rising quite a bit.
It's good to see you here.
I'm going to be here.
How are you?
Hi, can you hear me?
I can't hear you.
I think there might be something wrong from an audio perspective on Ken's Inn.
Please be patient with us.
We are driving a new car.
I'm trying to take good care of Glenn's ship today.
We're going to get this worked out for you ASAP.
Ken, can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
Now I can.
Okay, great.
All right, Ken, I was just saying welcome to the show.
I want to talk to you about It's on your own substack titled, Should Biden Resign?
In it, you address an argument that's been made by some people on the right side of the aisle saying that if Biden can't finish out this presidential campaign, then he obviously doesn't have the stamina to be president in the first place.
You disagree that that's a strategic benefit for the right to get Biden to step down.
But first, can you lay out who is making this argument and what these Republicans are saying?
What's interesting, I think, is the way in which public opinion has gotten flattened by the kind of Washington narrative around this, which was that the debate happened and the country saw that Biden had slowed down and then they were ready to throw in the towel.
And I did a story previous to the one that you put up there showing that public opinion, the majority of American public opinion, as well as the majority of Democratic public opinion, thought that Biden should run for a second term, going back to at least last year.
So and when you look at the numbers subsequent to the debate, those numbers didn't change that much.
They changed a little bit.
But for the most part, the American people were more or less in consensus.
We're talking about 70 percent or so that Biden wasn't up to the job.
And so to speak to your point now, the kind of intent behind the story I wrote was kind of confusion at the Republican leadership, led by majority led by House Speaker Johnson calling for Biden's resignation.
Now, what I don't understand about that is that would be the best thing to happen for the Democratic ticket, in my view, because that would allow, that would make Kamala Harris, who is now vice president, that would make her president and give her a chance to distance herself From the Biden administration and the plummeting polling numbers that he's having with young people, with the base generally, and give her a chance to differentiate herself on questions like Israel-Palestine, domestic policy.
Also, I didn't make her the commander-in-chief.
It just opens up all kinds of doors for her to put distance between this administration, which has become relatively unpopular looking at the polling, And there's some sense that she views things differently than him.
And in addition to that, there was reporting very early on in the administration that she was sidelined by Biden and not given the opportunity to do the sorts of things that historically vice presidents have done, which is play a very significant role in formulating foreign policy as a trusted advisor.
You could look at examples like Dick Cheney and even Biden himself when he was vice president to former President Obama.
And none of that was an opportunity that was afforded to Harris.
Instead, Biden assigned her to basically two or three things.
And one of the portfolios he gave her, which was handling diplomatic engagement with three countries in Central America to address the root causes of migration, is pretty much the most politically radioactive thing that I could imagine that you could give a politician.
And that has led to her depiction by the right and the Republican Party as they call her, the border czar.
And if you look at polling recently, Gallup just showed that Americans list immigration as their number one concern out of everything, including even Economic, inflation, and, you know, that's not the way I view the world, but that apparently is the way that a lot of Americans do.
And so to give her that portfolio at a time that the Trump administration has as its centerpiece, immigration, that they can just hammer her with, it seemed almost like a poison pill on the part of the Biden administration.
And so him resigning would give her the opportunity to say, no, look, I represent more than just that.
I have different views on the world and different I mean, I take your point that if Biden were to drop out, it would constructively give Kamala sort of the power of incumbency.
But on the other hand, I mean, to the example that you point to with respect to immigration, where she has been given Some degree of independent to control and we can quibble and maybe not just quibble, but have a meaningful debate about whether or not you really have very much latitude there to kind of solve the immigration problem.
There is evidence that where she has had control, it hasn't gone very well.
And, you know, you heard in my remarks probably before we started this interview that I expressed some skepticism about how much she is going to be willing to distance herself from Biden's approach in Gaza simply because the long You know, 70-year history of American foreign relations with Israel has all run along a very narrow path.
So, might Republicans have a point that if Kamala actually has to run the country for the next six months or so, she'll have opportunities to, one, prove that she isn't actually going to be to the left of Biden in a way that would disappoint the base further, and that she actually sort of is being advantaged by being able to play this middle ground, or two, that There could be some real crisis that, let's say, any president would struggle with.
That could be used to further indict her.
Yeah, so I would say that she doesn't have to be substantively different in policy to be able to acknowledge some of the views of particularly younger people that, again, the numbers are just falling off a cliff for Biden.
So I'll give you an example.
In the case of Israel-Palestine, I share your skepticism that there would be any sort of meaningful departure from her approach to that Issue.
However, one thing she could do, as former President Obama did during the Black Lives Matter protests, he actually invited some of the people to talk to them.
Now, that didn't lead to, you know, a tectonic shift in policy, but just acknowledging people in a way that President Biden has not, I imagine, would help her somewhat.
I mean, Biden has just completely ignored it.
He hasn't even spoke to it.
And speech after speech, he won't even address it.
He actively avoids it.
Much less, you know, inviting someone to the Oval, which as Vice President Kamala can't really do.
And so, you know, that's one example that I would point to as, you know, something that she can change in terms of the articulation of the views and, you know, treating different, you know, groups with, frankly, respect that Biden has not.
And I mean, look at how his resignation was handled.
He puts out the statement on Twitter and takes three or four days.
Now, granted, he has COVID, but he just ghosts the country for several.
I mean, that is not a professional way to handle things.
And that's not a way that is going to, I think, you know, leave a good taste in people's mouths.
And so for anything she can do to take the reins and give her the power to actually formulate, I mean, not even just policy, but just, you know, White House messaging and decision making for a couple of months.
I agree with you could make or break her, but I think it's good for I think it gives a good opportunity for her and for the country to see what she actually looks like in in in office and running things.
Yeah, I mean, some of these conspiracy type theories aside, I definitely agree that Biden's exit has been strange at best.
It feels very much Homer Simpson backing slowly into the hedge meme for him to have disappeared in at least video format the way he did expressing himself through tweets.
And I think also there was like a radio show kind of call-in format that he's participated in in the last 24 hours or so.
But I don't know that I'm entirely sold on the idea that Kamala Harris kind of coming out and saying, I see you, I hear you, will be enough.
Or maybe what I'm really expressing is that I'm afraid it will be enough and that she will successfully kind of sap the momentum of the uncommitted movement and the abandoned Biden movement by kind of performatively or rhetorically offering an alternative to Biden's Rhetoric without actually being in a position to say, call firmly for a permanent and enduring ceasefire.
Remember, there was this moment some months ago now where they trotted Kamala Harris out to kind of test the waters and using the word ceasefire.
But even then, the Biden administration reportedly made her soften her remarks.
And it became went from I want something that sounded sort of like a permanent ceasefire to you know, temporary ceasefire exchange of hostages, the kind of thing that has been holding up the process for, you know, the better part of a year now.
So what do you say to that?
I mean, is there a risk from a progressive perspective or from an anti-war perspective, a group that now includes a lot of Republicans in their midst?
Is that actually a losing scenario to have Kamala be president and be able to, in the short term, do the whole I see you, I hear you routine and basically pull the blinds potentially over the American public?
All right.
I think there's something to that.
I mean, the extent to which she offers substantive concessions to the demonstrators and the colleges and across the country, that will, you know, deflate some of the pressure.
But, I mean, that's kind of, that's just how, to some extent, that's how concessions work.
And, you know, there's a whole, there's a decision that has to be made by the advocates for the people of Gaza for them to, you know, assess.
Uh, you know, what, what those concessions are, you know, how, how are we going to respond to that?
So I don't think anything is inevitable, but yes, I think, I think that that's a concern.
And again, I agree with you.
I mean, the, you know, the, the power centers in the country will remain what they are regardless of who's in the White House, at least in the near term.
And whoever sits in the Oval is going to be responding.
to those power centers.
So I don't want to overstate, and I think anybody who does say that there's going to be some kind of sea change is selling you a bill of goods.
That said, looking at Kamala Harris's background, just like no two people are the same, no two presidents are the same, I do see a little bit of space between them on this.
And, you know, is it going to, you know, end this special relationship?
Of course not.
But she's not someone that came up through Washington.
She was not the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as Biden was for decades and decades.
She's not steeped in the same type of, you know, great power competition, as the think tanks call it, think tank Washington culture that Biden was.
What that means, probably marginal.
You know, she's a California Democrat, probably cavorting with a lot of rich people on the West Coast, just like people on the East Coast have to do and in Washington have to do.
So that's limited, but all I'm saying is it's not exactly the same.
And to the extent that she's able to communicate that and articulate that, I think that'd be interesting and useful, not just for her and the Democrats, but for the country to see.
Let me ask you about something else you mentioned in your article, which is this idea of Kamala derangement syndrome.
On one side, we have this kind of over-the-top coconut-pilling that has united the two segments that were once enemies, the Bernie Bro faction and the K-Hi faction, I think, who came together over a desire, a mutual desire, for Joe Biden to step down.
You're seeing all of these Charli XCX memes, you know, articles are proliferating.
The super cuts of Kamala talking about falling out of a coconut tree went from being kind of cringe posts to being set to like fun trap music.
And people are saying, no, they should cut this into an ad and really run it.
That's one side that I would argue is a kind of derangement syndrome.
its own.
But on the other side, you have Republicans that are seemingly going to new kind of rhetorical strategies to take swings at her.
I have someone who's been criticizing her since the beginning, literally, of my journalism career.
I think the first piece I ever wrote for Current Affairs magazine was about how she was weaponizing identity politics to paper over her prosecutorial record.
But this feels a little bit different.
I think we have a clip of J.D. Vance actually describing why Kamala Harris isn't good for the country that sort of captures what's been going on here.
Let's take a look if we can.
What he's saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
And it's just a basic fact.
You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.
And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?
And it's not just that.
They're from, of course, Republican VP nominee J.D.
Vance.
Laura Loomer tweeted, quote, it's time for Republicans to start talking about Kamala Harris' sexual history and the reason why she likely doesn't have any children of her own.
I'm willing to bet she's had so many abortions that she's damaged her uterus.
A woman who has no biological children of her own should not be allowed to make decisions in the White House for your children, et cetera, et cetera.
What do you think's going on here?
It's wild, because I am not, if you've followed me on Twitter, somebody that is a fan of respectability politics, I love a good burn, I love a funny ad-homme attack, you know, I'll laugh with anyone else, but this is just cruel.
Like, and ironically, It's in reverse.
Conservatives like Vance complain that the left and liberals do to them, which is that they say they, you know, flatten them into one thing and they have different views and it's not as if, you know, they complain about being called authoritarians and Nazis because their views are actually different than that.
They're doing the exact same thing in reverse.
With this cartoon image of some lonely graduate student, or whatever it is, and the reality is that every political persuasion is way more variegated than it's given credit for, particularly in Washington media, but as in the case with Vance, but on every side.
And so that's a frustration I have with that debate in general, the idea that You know, cancel culture or unfairness is only applied to one political faction.
It's just not true.
It gets pointed at everybody.
And it's, I don't like any of it.
But to pretend like it's only, you know, it only afflicts one side is silly.
And that's what that shows us.
And, you know, as you said, there's plenty of stuff to hit her on, not just with respect to policy.
But again, if you want a funny at-home, I can think of some funny ones that you could deploy against her.
Oh yeah?
You're going to give us the type 5 right now, Ken?
Well, I don't know.
I'm never much of an insult comic in the way that Trump is, so I'll leave it to them.
But there are funny ones you could do.
I'm not against that stuff, but this stuff is just cruel.
I don't even see the point.
It seems to help her, because it's just going to make people crazy.
It does seem also just kind of wrong.
It's confusing.
J.D.
Vance brought up Pete Buttigieg.
He has kind of famously two twins, so unless we're saying that adopted children don't count, which of course implicates so many conservatives, it seems to undermine and cut across the sort of pro-life movement, which tries to emphasize adoption as an alternative to women being able to receive abortions.
And then, of course, Kamala Harris has the stepchildren that she inherited through marriage.
Again, so many American families are blended families, and I don't know that your family isn't legitimate.
Your children aren't really legitimate to be seen as children or stepchildren is a message that is going to go over very well, even in the most conservative corners of the United States.
Yeah, again, it gets back to my first point.
I don't see how this is helping the Republican Party.
I'm sort of puzzled as to why they're doing it, aside from my very visceral response, which is like, come on, man, you're making me sympathize with these elected officials who I generally have a lot of contempt for?
Do you know how hard that is to be a reporter who has to dig through the skeletons in these guys' closet and for me to be like, hey, man, come on?
So in that sense, I'll give them credit, because I didn't think that was possible.
Sorry, your audio cut.
I can't seem to hear you, unfortunately.
I can't see you, unfortunately. unfortunately.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah, so sorry guys, the audio dropped here.
I guess I'm just gonna freeform for a minute.
But yeah, I mean this stuff...
When you punch below the belt to that extent, again, not someone who's opposed to having fun and roasting people.
And you know, these are elected officials.
It comes with the territory.
They should expect it.
But I mean, even I'm shocked at some of this stuff.
And I've been a denizen of the internet gutter for the last 10 years.
So in a way, it seems like a benefit to her the same way that Trump benefits from Trump derangement syndrome.
Two, three.
All right.
All right.
It looks like I'm back.
Sorry about that, guys.
No problem.
Ken, I wanted to ask you about something else you've written about, which is the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and what's been going on with the head of the Secret Service.
Now, she's been sort of filibustering, and it looked like she wasn't going to step down, Kimbler Cheatle.
She did finally resign today.
You wrote a piece about how, in the wake of the What seems to be at very least some lapse in judgment from the Secret Service.
There was an initial push by Mayorkas to use the opportunity to get more funding for the Secret Service and did a piece about all the other functions.
The Secret Service doesn't seem to sort of implicitly make the argument that maybe when a department makes a horrible mistake, they shouldn't get more funding.
We should maybe look at all of their other functions and see if they should be pared back at all.
Tell us a little bit about what's been going on there and how you've been covering it.
Yeah, so Secret Service has actually seen their budget more than doubled over the last 10 years.
So when I heard Mayorkas and the different advocates for the Secret Service insinuate that there was some kind of resource problem, I bristled because I knew that bit of context.
And in addition to that, Secret Service does a lot more than simply protect the president.
I submit they should, and that that is part of the problem, and that that should be part of the solution would be getting them focused on protecting the president, protecting former presidents, maybe their families, and little else.
So to give you a little bit of context, after 9/11, George W. Bush and the Congress created what's called the Department of Homeland Security.
And so they took Secret Service, which had been a subcomponent of the Treasury Department, and moved it to the Department of Homeland Security.
And here's what's interesting.
They didn't leave behind their Treasury responsibilities.
For example, going after counterfeit currency, financial crimes, now cryptocurrency crimes is a big thing that they're focused on.
They brought that with them.
So these agencies have a tendency to only grow and never pare back the stuff that's perhaps not relevant to its mission anymore, as I think that the Secret Service is under Homeland Security.
So two things happened.
They kept those currency and financial crimes focus that they had.
In addition to that, they were assigned a bunch of new counterterrorism responsibilities and missions after being sent to the Department of Homeland Security.
So all of that to say, they have had their mission diluted diluted in a way that is just as important of a problem.
And it is also a resource problem in another sense, not the sense in which Homeland is asking.
They're asking for more money across the board for the entire agency.
But another approach to this would just be showing them up to focus on what the popular imagination and what I think they should be doing, which is protecting the president, protecting important nominees, particularly maybe the president's family And that's something that I haven't heard voiced anywhere in the major press, as far as I can tell.
Okay, so interestingly, I mean, it felt like the tipping point might have been this kind of colloquy that happened in a congressional hearing where Ro Khanna asked a pretty pointed question about her sort of responsibilities here that may or may not have kind of paved the way to her deciding to step down after over a week of saying she wasn't going to.
Do you have any insight into that decision?
Was it expected after having held out for so long?
And do you have any sense whether some really tough questioning by Democrats, not just Ro Khanna, but actually AOC, who I've given some flack to over the course of this episode, asked a really pointed question about why it was that a sniper that was trained on the shooter had less of a range than the shooter's own asked a really pointed question about why it was that a sniper that was trained on the shooter had less of a range than the shooter's own gun was able to go, basically questioning the kind of capacity
Thanks.
It was an extraordinary hearing for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that the majority leader and the minority, what's called a ranking member, Jamie Raskin, very, you know, liberal Democrat, both ended up calling on her to resign.
It was the rare moment where a party held its own To account, and it's something you see very, I mean, I watch these hearings all the time.
I can't think of the last time I've seen something like this.
And they gave her a chance.
Several Democrats, and I think one Republican as well, said that they hadn't recalled her to resign before the hearing because they wanted to give her a chance to, you know, tell her side of the story.
They ended up having to subpoena her to even get her to show up.
But so over the course of this hearing, which went on for like two or three hours, she stonewalled on virtually every question.
And it was just the, you know, perfect embodiment of the problem with the national security community, the national security state, which is their over-reliance on secrecy.
Now, of course, the nuclear code should be out there.
Of course, certain things should be classified to protect what's called sources and methods.
That makes sense.
But they abuse that to such an extent that, you know, when I'm filing a FOIA request, the Freedom of Information Act request, or even when powerful people in Congress that have oversight responsibilities, as the Oversight Committee has, are asking her basic questions like, how many personnel were working at the time?
You know, what time did this happen?
When did they notice this?
And she's saying, oh, for security reasons, I can't disclose that.
For security reasons, I have to talk about it.
And they got so frustrated that at one point a Democrat even just sighs and goes, you know, you're not making it easy on us.
So this was extraordinary because it was their own party who lost their patience with somebody from their party's White House and conveyed that frustration and said at multiple points, and there was a Democrat from Florida, I forget his name, who said, look, I don't know who trained you, who coached you on how to answer these questions, but just, you know, this whole stonewalling tragedy is not going well for you.
Your best chance now is to try to come clean to the extent that you can and explain what happened, and she just didn't.
And maybe that provides the Secret Service Director insulation in a legal sense, but it certainly didn't in the court of public opinion, where it just looked like she was your standard, you know, national security, high-level official, refusing, thinking that they're above the public and the public doesn't deserve to know because they need to hide behind secrecy.
Yeah, it's an incredible moment.
I mean, I guess one time when bipartisanship is something that can get behind so often that centrist establishment members of both parties kind of hide behind the veneer of bipartisanship when they're trying to smuggle through something that's really detestable to the American public, usually an expansion of the security state, for instance.
And in this instance, it does seem to have at least yielded some accountability for It's hard to see it as anything other than mouthpieces of what happened the other weekend with former President Donald Trump.
Ken Klippenstein, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
And viewers should stick around.
We're going to go to Michael Tracy now.
He's going to close out the show.
Thank you for listening and I hope to see you elsewhere on the internet.
Hello there.
I'm Michael Tracy.
We had planned to interview Ro Khanna.
He was apparently on the line.
By the way, I'm filling in for Glenn Greenwald, who's away on one of his luxurious holidays.
Well-deserved.
Unfortunately, Ro Khanna seemed to prematurely abort the interview for not fully explained reasons.
So hopefully that could be resolved if Congressman Khanna out there is listening or anybody around him is listening.
The invitation stands.
I was going to conduct a very respectful interview, actually, and even commend him for being unusually willing among particularly Democratic members of Congress to do ideologically diverse independent media.
So the offer stands.
I guess now that we have a bit of time, if the staff are willing, I was just going to go through a little bit of what I was asking him and maybe kind of merge it.
Transition into a slight editorial on my part.
You know, one of the interesting aspects of Kamala Harris being privately coronated at rapid speed, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is that as Ro Khanna is probably well aware, having been the co-chair of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Kamala Harris got a grand total of zero delegates in that race when she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
Likewise, she's received zero delegates in 2024, at least on the basis of delegates that are allocated by popular vote outcome in primary state elections.
And so Kamala Harris really, just objectively speaking, is unprecedentedly anointed, being anointed by pure insider machinations with almost no actual voter input.
You really have to strain to find even a remotely apt parallel in American history for a major party nominee who receives the nomination without even bothering to attempt to contest the public portion of a nomination contest.
People bring up 1968, but for a little bit of a history lesson, Hubert Humphrey, who ended up becoming the Democratic nominee in that year, went on to lose narrowly to Richard Nixon in the general election.
He was the incumbent vice president at the time under Lyndon Johnson, who withdrew from the race.
But even Hubert Humphrey, who was kind of the party establishment favorite, even he had to go around and contest state conventions that were then one of the primary methods used to apportion delegates before the advent of the modern primary system.
Kamala Harris has done nothing of the kind.
She's been Anointed nominee, evidently, over the course of, I don't know, 24, 36 hours without having to do any public campaigning.
It's just been this total Dem insider elevation of her without even thinking that maybe they should pause for a second to consult the electorate.
So it's rather remarkable.
That's that's one of the things I wanted to ask Ro Khanna about and we have a clip of Ro Khanna in New Hampshire in January of 2020 that I was also planning on asking about if we could play that please.
Hopefully that can be retrieved, that clip.
I was asked, and I'll end with this note, I was asked by someone in the press, you know, do people in New Hampshire hold a grudge?
Are they upset at the president with the DNC and the first in the primary?
I was asked, I mean the press asked that, and I said, You know what?
I don't think you understand the voters in New Hampshire.
Because the voters of New Hampshire take their responsibility really seriously.
And they're not going to make a decision about who should lead the free world, who should lead the United States of America, based on whether they agree or disagree on the primary calendar.
It's not that parochial.
They're looking at who should lead this nation.
Well, we've got wars in Ukraine, wars in the Middle East, an economy that isn't working for people.
And they have made the assessment that that person is Joe Biden.
And they're putting aside any disagreement to do what is right for the country.
That, to me, is the ultimate form of patriotism.
And that's what all of you are doing.
By working to have Joe Biden written in, I am confident because of your efforts, he's going to have a big win.
A win is a win, but a win, a decisive win, a decisive win on Tuesday.
And that's going to propel him to have a big win in November.
Because at the end of the day, I am a believer that Americans love this country and love our democracy and love and want a positive vision of the future and that that's going to work and win over the cynicism and anger that is represented by Donald Trump and the other side.
Okay, so as context, that's Ro Khanna speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in January of this year, on behalf of what was then called the Right in Biden campaign.
Because what happened was the DNC, which was effectively under the control of Biden and his surrogates, decided that they were going to upend the primary calendar in 2024 to create the most seamless path to victory for Biden.
And because in 2020, Biden was boosted by his performance in South Carolina, what the DNC for this cycle wanted to do is displace New Hampshire, which has traditionally, and actually by state statute, by New Hampshire state statute is required to go first in the primary cycle.
They wanted to do away with that, displace New Hampshire, where Biden doesn't perform as well, or hadn't in 2020, and put South Carolina first.
So what they did was, they sent a, the DNC did, you know, again, under the control, effectively, of Biden, sent what could only be described as a threat letter, and this could be pulled up as well, to the state Democratic Party in New Hampshire, where the DNC to the state Democratic Party in New Hampshire, where the DNC directed the state party to effectively inform New
New Hampshire citizens that the election, the New Hampshire primary this year was to be understood as meaningless.
That's the exact quote in the letter that was sent.
But nonetheless, this is what I was going to raise with Ro Khanna.
Ro Khanna went to New Hampshire.
And campaigned on behalf of Biden vis-a-vis this write-in Biden campaign.
So even though the official Democratic Party apparatus was seeking to negate the Democratic primary in New Hampshire this year, Ro Khanna went to New Hampshire and was encouraging Democrats to write in Joe Biden because he didn't technically appear on the ballot because the DNC wasn't even recognizing the validity of the election.
But Ro Khanna was so committed to promoting Joe Biden at that juncture, in the name of democracy and, you know, the well-being of the nation and all this stuff, he went and was advocating for this Right in Biden initiative.
And he was Extolling the virtues of New Hampshire voters by saying, look, they take their obligations so seriously and we ought to rely on their wisdom in choosing how to best express their say in the process for picking the leader of the free world.
So what I was simply going to ask him, and I think this is a reasonable question.
If anybody disagrees, I know I'm open to criticism, including from the congressman.
But what I was going to ask him is, New Hampshire and every other state now has zero say, at least in terms of the primary electorates, right?
I mean, no president has ever withdrawn at so late a point in the election cycle as Biden has, voluntarily, on his own accord, we were told, with his mysterious letter that he issued over X, which, by the way, wasn't X supposed to have been subverted by right-wing disinformation or something when Elon Musk took it over?
But that's neither here nor there.
The point is, Biden had already accumulated about 99% of pledged delegates that are apportioned by primary election outcome in the individual states and territories.
So if the rationale for Ro Khanna going around and campaigning for Biden at that point in January, because it was so important for the voters to have their say, How does he react to the voters having their say effectively obviated by this latest Democratic insider push to pressure or coerce Biden to withdrawing under duress?
Remember, it was just like 24 hours before that Biden and his operatives were absolutely adamant that he was going to remain in the race.
And, you know, what does it say that Kamala Harris really stands alone in American history as having been anointed by no voters as a major party nominee?
It's staggering.
And she's without peer in this regard, at least in the modern primary era, which only really began in the 1970s, but even arguably before that, because even when there was more insider maneuvers that led to how primary elections or contests were resolved and nominees were chosen, there was some semblance of a public process where you had to go around to state parties and jockey with delegates and petition various factions within the party to obtain a majority of delegates. there was some semblance of a public process where you
Kamala Harris has barely done any of that, at least not in public.
All she apparently did was immediately start getting on the phone calling up Democratic governors and senators the instant that the Biden letter went out on Sunday afternoon and And, you know, she's now raking in the cash.
And everybody thinks that she's such a breath of fresh air, apparently, in the media sectors that were agitating for Biden's ouster, because she can go around screeching about abortion, I guess, more capably than Joe Biden.
What is Kamala Harris' foreign policy prescriptions?
How do they compare with Biden?
Do they differ at all?
That's one of the questions I was going to raise with Ro Khanna.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, right?
I mean, wouldn't you want to know a little bit of information about what a major presidential nominee, major party nominee would do in the domain of foreign affairs?
Right.
Shouldn't you?
They'd be asked a couple of questions, perhaps, about what their plans would be in that regard.
We have several hot wars raging that the U.S. is deeply operationally and financially and militarily involved in.
And we know next to nothing about what Kamala Harris's individual prescriptions would be for those conflicts.
Now, of course, you can relate her to the Biden administration's record, of which she's a member.
That's certainly a fair inference to make as to what her future plans would be.
The whole point of a primary process, in theory, would be that she would have to debate and take questions and go around and present herself to different interest groups, to the media, to all other kinds of interested parties, so we can ascertain at least a little bit of what her independent agenda would be, if any.
But we have no information in that regard.
Nonetheless, the entire punditocracy, the democratic punditocracy, has gleefully consolidated around her because, again, I guess they love hearing her sermonize about abortion, because that's all they care about, as though the president has unilateral authority over, you know, abortion laws in Oklahoma.
I don't know.
I mean, I guess these Democratic insiders are hoping that Kamala Harris is going to issue an executive fiat and then, you know, Alabama and Mississippi and Oklahoma and, you know, South Dakota are all going to have to reinstitute Roe versus Wade era abortion laws or something like that.
They don't really work out the precise policy details of what it is that they're so Desperate for a President Kamala to do in the realm of abortion, but my point is the president has awesome unilateral authority over the Nuclear codes for instance the the US military is the key or she potentially is the commander-in-chief and
Article 2 of the Constitution endows the President with awesome unilateral powers over a specific issue set, which is international relations, foreign policy, military, etc.
And we don't know virtually anything about what Kamala Harris would be endeavoring to do on her own individual terms, apart from what she kind of just subordinately would sign on to as a result of her being the vice president in the Biden-Harris administration.
That's another thing I was going to ask Ro Khanna.
Every single Democrat, including Ro Khanna himself, voted yes on the $61 billion in supplemental appropriations for Ukraine in April, joined by lots of Republicans and, by the way, partially executed by Donald Trump, who also signed off on that massive partially executed by Donald Trump, who also signed off on that massive disbursement of monies So, you know, is the Kamala Harris agenda or the plan to simply be plowing ahead?
You know full speed on the current status quo with regard to Ukraine.
How about Israel?
Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be is in the United States this week meeting with whomever and You know one of the plans supposedly for the Kamala Harris Proponents in the Democratic insider pundit strategist realm was to portray her as perhaps slightly less vociferous in her support for Israel
compared to Biden because it's created consternation within certain elements of the Democratic activist base.
But we have no real empirical evidence that she diverges virtually at all from Biden.
So that's another potentially pertinent question to raise with the nominee who's just been anointed out of thin air, more or less.
So that's something that potentially, you know, Ro Khanna could have addressed as somebody who is a Democratic member of Congress and is in the mix of all this kind of stuff.
Now, those seem like reasonable questions to me.
I don't know precisely on what basis he exited the interview.
I saw him on the screen over here, so he was definitely here and waiting to be interviewed, but he left.
So, you know, unfortunate, but what are you going to do?
Those are the... Sometimes you have to let the chips fall where they may in this industry, to use a bizarre cliché that I just invented on the fly.
I guess for now I will just note that I'm going to be guest hosting for Glenn Greenwald for about another week or so while he's, again, on his much-deserved vacation and probably snickering from a distance at my foibles.
So I'm sure he's enjoying that.
So tune in tomorrow and you'll get lots of great content from me, Michael Tracy, who is once again guest hosting for Glenn Greenwald here.
