Massive Loss for Google After Court Rules It's An Illegal Monopoly with Antitrust Expert Matt Stoller; The U.S. Faces Multiple Crises: Who is Running the Government?; Top Dem Warned That Congress Will Ban Trump If He Wins
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Google Ruled an Illegal Monopoly (6:31)
Interview with Matt Stoller (31:27)
Who Is In Charge? (52:32)
Threats to Disqualify Trump (1:15:24)
Outro (1:24:38)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, punctually at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, a federal district court in the District of Columbia has ruled against Google and in favor of the United States government in the most significant antitrust ruling since the emergence of Big Tech.
In 2020, the Trump Justice Department sued Google in a federal court in Washington, alleging that Google is an unlawful monopoly, both with regard to its search engine and its advertising business, and that Google has been unlawfully abusing that monopolistic power to harm the consumer, deny all the public any choices, all to benefit itself.
The case was brought by the Trump Justice Department, but continued and pursued by the Biden Justice Department.
The ruling by federal judge Amit Mehta was issued earlier today and it held that the government and Google, it was issued only after the government and Google exchanged massive amounts of documents and data and after a nine-week trial was held that began back in October of 2023 involving dozens of witnesses and specialists and expert witnesses and leaders of most big tech companies.
Now, this ruling is certain to have major implications for not only Google, but for the tech industry at large and American corporatism in general.
Judge Mehta will next decide what the punishment for Google should be, which could range from massive fines to preventing future violations to even breaking up Google.
And the decision will almost certainly be appealed, which means abstinent settlement between the company and the government will likely take years for the court proceedings to resolve fully.
But there is no doubt that this is a monumentally consequential decision with massive repercussions for the tech industry, big tech and corporations in general.
We'll tell you about the key parts of this ruling, then speak with one of the nation's most knowledgeable and intrepid specialists in antitrust law, who has written volumes about Google's monopolistic abuses.
He is Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, who will help us break down all of the implications and consequences of today's remarkable ruling.
Then, the U.S.
and the world now face multiple major crises all at once.
The Middle East is on the brink of a potentially major regional war, with the U.S.
today deploying even more military assets to that region to protect Israel in the case that that happens.
Just an hour ago or so, reports emerged that at least several American troops stationed in Iraq—yes, we do still have troops stationed in Iraq—were severely injured, at least, by what appears to be a bomb or a drone or a missile launched by Iran, obviously escalating tensions further.
Meanwhile, the global markets today tumbled today after a new unemployment report generated fears of declining American economic growth.
The U.S.
stock market Today witnessed its sharpest one-day drop since 2022, while Japan's stock market plummeted 12.4%, larger than its Black Monday crash in 1987.
Meanwhile, reports over the last week strongly suggest that Ukraine's front line, remember them, Ukraine and Russia, their front line is again crumbling and withering under sustained Russian offenses.
All of this again provokes the seemingly obvious and rather important question, Namely, with Joe Biden so mentally addled that his own party forced him out of the race against his will, and with the sitting Vice President Kamala Harris obviously focusing solely on her attempt to replace him in November, who is actually making all these decisions about, say, the U.S.
willingness to involve itself in a major Middle East war on behalf of Israel or our response to this global market crisis.
The virtually complete media indifference to this question continues to be remarkable, so we will take a look at it.
And then finally, various tweets and recorded interviews with a top House Democrat, Republican Jamie Raskin, have emerged in which the Maryland Democrat warns the nation repeatedly that Congress not only could but should and perhaps will declare Donald Trump ineligible to assume the Oval Office even if he wins the 2024 election.
While noting that such an attack could provoke what he calls a, quote, civil war, certainly at the very least a possibility, Congressman Raskin nonetheless leaves no doubt that he would urge and support such a measure in the event that the Democrats lose.
Yet again, nothing is stranger than the Democratic Party, of all things, casting itself as the sole guardians of democracy.
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Finally, given all the major events happening this week, including the very high possibility of a serious crisis and war in the Middle East, we will have several guests on throughout the week, including Professor John Mearsheimer on Wednesday, to help us understand all of these events as they unfold.
So take a look for that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Google, very obviously, is one of the most consequential and one of the richest corporations in the entire planet.
And that's why it was such a significant event when the U.S.
government, the Justice Department in 2020 under the Trump administration, initiated a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Google, both in its search engine business and its advertising business, are breaking the law, namely the Sherman Antitrust Act, and abusing its monopolistic power, essentially to harm you, to harm the consumer, by ensuring that you have no choices in the marketplace, that you're basically forced into using Google's search term and forced into its advertising business.
It's been a long time since the government brought a antitrust case of this magnitude.
You probably have to go back to the 1990s when the government in the 1990s was at war with Microsoft over its alleged monopolistic abuses.
But certainly you could argue that this is by far the most significant case, even more than that one was, since it was at the incipient stages of the evolution of big tech.
And it is a remarkable case because you can just imagine that on the one side you have the United States government, which has unlimited resources.
They can litigate with 100 or 200 or 300 lawyers if they need to.
They have unlimited financial resources.
They use your money for that.
And They can litigate forever.
And then the other side you have Google, which is larger and more powerful than most countries on the planet.
And obviously they can do the same.
And so this litigation that has been going on since 2020 Has been a gargantuan war with massive amounts of information, gigabytes worth, passed from Google to the U.S.
government, passed from the U.S.
government to Google.
And it's long been followed by antitrust specialists for obvious reasons, including the person we've had on multiple times when we reported on this case in particular, Matthew Stoller, who we'll talk to in just a few minutes.
But as significant as the initiation of this case was, and again, it was initiated by the Trump Justice Department, And then when the Biden administration took over, they made the choice to continue with this lawsuit.
So there's no politicization of this as conservative or liberal.
Essentially, the Trump administration had committed antitrust officials inside the Justice Department who believe, I think quite rightly, that massive centralization of power in big tech, and Google in particular, are extremely harmful to the country, give Google way too much power over our politics, over the internet, over our speech.
And the Biden administration, as I've said before, one of the only good things about it is that they put people in the Justice Department who feel the same, and that was why they continued the Trump lawsuit.
So as significant as that was, far, far more significant is a ruling that was issued just a few hours ago today that I think very few people expected, certainly with the emphatic tone that this ruling has.
And it handed the U.S.
government a massive victory and Google a major, major defeat in finding essentially that Google is indeed an illegal monopolist when it comes to its search engine business.
And in particular, what the court was specifically disturbed by was that Google pays Apple in particular to ensure that only Google search term sits on Apple products So if you buy an iPhone or they pay other companies for this as well and you begin using it, only Google search term is on the phone.
It's essentially the default search term so that if you want to search anything you automatically go to Google even if you don't choose to.
Search search engine is the Google search engine is what you end up having to use because the default feature on the phone and there's other ways that Google illegally forces consumers against their will or without their knowledge to use Google's search ending and that is why it has come to completely dominate the market and that's exactly what the antitrust laws are designed to prevent.
Not a company from being successful or even dominant in the market.
But a company that gets so large that it's able to use its gigantic power to crush any possibility for real competition.
So I want to show you a little bit about what the Google ruling today said.
And I guess I should note as well that this judge, with regard to the government's claim that it was also an illegal monopolist when it comes to its advertising business, ruled in Google's favor there.
But still it ruled against Google, ruled it was an illegal monopolist on what has made Google the company that it is, which is its search engine.
So let's take a little bit of a look at this case.
Here you see the title of the case which is in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
It's the United States of America versus Google LLC and then some states including Colorado, Here's part of what the ruling says, quote, Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., today has a market capitalization, meaning the value of its outstanding share of stocks, of more than $2 trillion.
Much of that value is due to Google's extremely profiting advertising business.
Google's dominance has gone unchallenged for well over a decade.
In 2009, 80% of all search queries in the United States already went through Google.
That number has only grown.
By 2020, it was nearly 90%, and even higher on mobile devices at 95%.
The second-place search engine, Microsoft's Bing, sees roughly 6% of all search queries, or 84% fewer than Google.
Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance, said the court.
Instead, it has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions.
The result is the industry's highest-quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.
And I put that part in specifically to show you that this judge is not opposed to capitalistic success, for better or for worse.
He admires much of what Google has achieved and succeeded in developing.
But regardless, there are laws in the United States, ones that have been in place for over 100 years, That govern how large corporations like this can utilize its power to grow even further.
And the court ruled that Google violated those laws by saying, quote, but, but Google has also also has a major, largely unseen advantage over its rivals, namely default distribution.
Most users access a general search engine through a browser, like Apple's Safari, or a special widget that comes preloaded on a mobile device.
Those search access points are preset with a, quote, default search engine.
The default is extremely valuable real estate because many users simply stick to the searching with the default.
Google receives billions of queries each day through those access points.
Google derives extraordinary volumes of user data from such searches.
It then uses that information to improve the search quality.
Google so values such data that, absent a user-initiated change, it stores 18 month worth of a user's search history and activity.
Now, I just wanna stop there and say that, you know, people have always been, I think, confused, thinking that, oh, Google is a free search engine.
I can just use Google and they'll give me services and I don't have to give them anything in return.
You don't have to pay for the Google search engine, the basic Google search engine, but what you're giving to Google every time you use that product And many times you're probably using it without choosing to do so because your devices just come with it and force you just to either accept the default feature or go through a lot of work in order to try and put on a competitor onto the phone and get Google off, something that almost nobody, very, very few people who buy Apple's products or other products are willing to do.
I think one of the important points about how that harms competition is that obviously Apple would be a company that is extremely capable of developing its own search engine to compete with Google and give you, the consumer, other choices.
But Google's arrangements are that it provides Apple and other product makers so much money that they become disincentivized to develop their own search engine.
And they just put Google's one on there and so the consumer basically ends up with no choices.
But every time you use a Google search engine, you're giving something to them almost of greater value than if you were paying them to use their search engine.
Namely, you're giving them your, how your brain works, how your mind works, what you're interested in, what you read, how you think.
And Google studies that, it learns that, it stores all of your data because it's of such value.
Not just in terms of the way you can monetize that data to advertise and the like, although it certainly does that, but also in terms of what it can learn about you and your brain and the human way of reasoning and thinking and what people are interested in and what they're not.
And every time you use the Google search engine, you're helping that machine understand more, learn more about how you function.
That's the reason why if you enter a Google search term, you will find that on the YouTube algorithm, which is owned by Google, that the videos that are offered to you will oftentimes relate to that search term that just the day before you ended up entering, because Google is learning about you every time they use it.
And that is an enormous benefit to Google.
Now the court goes on, quote, "These distribution agreements benefit Google in another important way." Quote, "More users mean more advertisers, and more advertisers mean more revenues.
As queries on Google have grown, so too has the amount it earns in advertising dollars.
In 2014, Google booked nearly 47 years $47 billion in one year.
in advertising revenue, $47 billion in one year.
By 2021, that number had increased more than threefold to over 146 billion.
Bing, by comparison, generated only a fraction of that amount, less than $12 billion in 2022.
Google pays huge sums to secure these pre-loaded defaults.
Usually, the amount is calculated as a percentage of the advertising revenue that Google generates when queries run through the default search access points.
This is known as revenue share.
In 2021, those payments totaled more than $26 billion.
That is nearly four times more than all of Google's other search-specific costs combined.
In other words, Google is paying Apple and other similar companies enormous amounts of money to ensure that only Google stays on your phone or whatever other product you buy.
In exchange for revenue share, said the court, Google not only receives default placement at the key search access points, But its partners also agree not to preload any other general search engine on the device.
Thus, most devices in the United States come preloaded exclusively with Google.
These distribution deals have forced Google's rivals to find other ways to reach users.
After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusions.
Number one, Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.
It therefore has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
Specifically, the court holds that, number one, there are relevant product markets for general search services and general search tax ads.
Number two, Google has monopoly power in those markets.
Number three, Google's distribution agreements are exclusive and have anti-competitive effects.
And number four, Google has not offered valid pre-competitive justifications for those agreements, pro-competitive justifications for those agreements.
Importantly, the court also finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging a super competitive prices for a general search tax ad, super competitive prices.
That context has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.
Now, when I first started thinking about monopolistic power and antitrust power in connection with big tech, It does require some thinking to understand why you should care about that.
You might think, as the court laid out in that first premise, that the reason why Google succeeded in the marketplace is simply because they created a better product.
And why should they be prohibited from succeeding in the marketplace because they offer a product better than their competitors?
Why should a company be Punished in that way.
But the issue here is that there is no competition.
That's what antitrust law is about.
If you offered consumers all sorts of different choices, so you have Coca-Cola here and Pepsi here and RC Cola here, they can choose which of those products they like.
And if they like Coca-Cola most, if Coca-Cola does a better job at marketing itself, Or in trying to pitch itself, that doesn't mean there's a violation of antitrust law because the consumer still has other choices.
Coca-Cola can't use their market dominance to prevent other choices from being offered unless, for example, they started paying Walmart Or paying drugstore change or restaurant change only to offer Coca-Cola so that every time you went to a restaurant or every time you went to a supermarket or every time you went to a department store, the only soft drink you could buy would be Coca-Cola's and no other.
The person that would suffer, the reason why that behavior is prohibited is you.
It's to protect you.
It's to protect the consumer.
And in a lot of ways, what even hardcore capitalists will argue is that nothing harms real capitalism, a real free market, more than the elimination of competition.
It's not designed to thwart competition or impede the free market.
It's designed to protect it.
Not in order to protect the profits of major corporations, but in order to protect the consumer from being forced into using products that you may not want to use, that you may dislike using, or simply to ensure that you have a choice.
And obviously a company that gets so big That grows and grows and grows and has its tentacles in so many places, has all sorts of incentives to prevent you from having a choice.
They obviously want to force you into buying their product and the more they grow, the more they can use that growth and that power to ensure that you cannot access any choices and that is what the court ruled today was exactly what google was doing not because they defeated yahoo's search engines or bing's search engine and more people like google than the others in fact the court says oh they deserve credit for that
the problem is that they began engaging in anti-competitive conduct to ensure that consumers have no other choices now there are other ways in which google is a monopoly and violates antitrust laws and there's a lot of other cases pending including ones from the government against other big tech companies but also against private companies that lay out another aspect of google's ability
to destroy the marketplace destroy competitive choice because it's just so big and so powerful so So one of that ways is that every time a major company starts buying Other companies in that realm, it can then obviously use that immense power, that vertical power to prevent any competition from arising.
So Facebook, for example, doesn't just own Facebook, the parent company Meta has bought Instagram, it's bought WhatsApp, it controls the major means of communication in so many ways and obviously can use each one of those companies and the power that they exercise to prevent competition with others.
And the same is true for Google.
Google does not just have their search engine business, they have an endless array of other businesses that people use where essentially they're also collecting data about you, studying what it is that you are interested in, studying what it is that you, how you think, to learn more about you. studying what it is that you, how you think, to They own YouTube, they own all sorts of apps that allow them to collect data on people.
And one of the companies that actually is suing Google in a major anti-dress lawsuit that's slightly different from what the government sued on, although not entirely different, is Rumble.
Because one of the things that happens that Google does is, for example, it ensures that Google can bury any other platforms that try and compete, not just with Google's search engine, but with any of its other products, including YouTube.
One of the competitors to YouTube is Rumble.
Rumble is designed to, as I say every night when we start the show, to be the free speech alternative to YouTube.
And while Rumble is not in the same category of size or profitability as YouTube, it has been growing quite a bit.
And it's becoming a viable place where people now put their eyeballs and now spend their time and give their attention to, rather than giving it to Google, precisely because they dislike YouTube's censorship policies that Google applies to all of its platforms.
So one of the things that Google is able to do is that if you search for, for example, a topic that we cover on this show, you often won't even be able to find it at all on Google search terms, or it'll be buried on the 13th or 14th page, even though oftentimes the The show has massive numbers of views.
It's not that it's a small site, Rumble.
It's used by millions and millions of people.
It's a big company now.
It has a market capitalization of $2 billion or more.
And there's millions of people who every day use Rumble.
Some of the most watched live streams on the internet are hosted by Rumble, are Rumble shows.
And yet, oftentimes, if I try and find one of my own shows on Rumble, and I enter a Google search term, and I remember a lot of the title, what'll happen is that instead of showing me the Rumble video that I'm actually looking for, it will instead show me the YouTube video where we simply put our excerpts.
Now, the lawsuit that The that that rumble has against Google had a major victory in 2022 as well.
Usually whenever anyone sues Google or Meta or Amazon or Apple and alleges antitrust violations, the court typically dismisses the lawsuit at the beginning.
Because what happens is if a lawsuit is not dismissed at the beginning, then what's called discovery is allowed to happen where the two parties are permitted to demand of one another not just internal documents and information, but also to depose, to force, to testify the officials and other relevant executives at the company.
And in 2022, Rumble sued Google, alleging that it was abusing its search engine, Monopoly Power, by burying Rumble's videos in favor of YouTube, by preventing competition with YouTube, because Google has such a dominance on the search engine that if you try and search for anything, and it always takes you to YouTube, it will mean that YouTube will grow and grow and grow, and it will prevent competition.
That's a different way of abusing monopolistic power.
And in 2022, in July of 2022, we reported on, but very few other media outlets did because it's Rumble, that a federal court had rejected Google's attempt to dismiss Rumble's antitrust lawsuit, ensuring that Google would get a vast amount of discovery, which they are getting and have been getting, about how Google manipulates their which they are getting and have been getting, about how Google manipulates their algorithm on Here's the report you see on the screen when we're still at Substack.
A court rejects Google's attempt to dismiss Rumble's antitrust lawsuit, ensuring vast discovery.
Now, one of the reasons that I know and can state with such certainty that Google does, in fact, manipulate its algorithms to bury any competitors to its other businesses, not just to its search engines, but to any competitors to, say, YouTube, is that I've seen it myself but to any competitors to, say, YouTube, is that I've seen it myself over and So I'll just give you one example.
I've talked about this before.
Earlier today...
I wanted to post the interview that I had conducted with Matt Stoller about the lawsuit between the DOJ and Google, the one that the court ruled today in the government's favor on the search engine aspect of the case.
And I went to Google search engine and I typed in, you can see at the top, the search words, Glenn Greenwald, Google antitrust, Matt Stoller, because that's a pretty specific way of searching.
And the first item at the very top that Google presented me was not that segment or that show that appeared on Rumble, but instead we take small segments of our show, small excerpts, sometimes 10 or 12 minutes of each segment, and we put them on YouTube the next day.
And sometimes those have a lot of views, but often at times they have a lot of views, but the views are usually less than the live show of Rumble, the show that we put on here that ends up being watched.
And here you see, this is when we were still at the beginning of our YouTube channel, the total number of views that it got was 16,600 for this segment.
Now, if you go down here, you will see that there's still no Rumble page.
There's a New York Post account on the case that closed both myself and Matt Stoller.
There's my Substack article.
There's my Twitter feed.
So just no Rumble at all.
And in fact, there's about 12 pages that come up if you search this, and I went through all 12, and the Rumble segment just doesn't appear at all.
In order to find the rumble segment, I had to go to YouTube and at every, at the end of, in the note below each video, excerpt that we post on YouTube, we have a link to the corresponding rumble video.
And I had to go to YouTube first and then click on the link to find the rumble video and it took me there.
That's how I always am able to find it because Google buries rumble videos unless you know the exact title.
And oftentimes not even then.
You can replicate this experiment yourself.
Now, in fact, one of the top search engine, top search results was a different YouTube video that was a YouTube video Here's the video you can see at the top here, the search terms I used.
Here's the 16.6 thousand views.
And then here's the New York Post article, which were the first two results.
Now, if you go to the...
Corresponding Rumble video, you will see that in contrast to the 16,600 views that that segment attracted on YouTube, the total number of views on Rumble were almost 200,000.
Close to 200,000.
They're talking about 200,000 versus 16.6 thousand and obviously that's significantly more, almost 15 times more than the YouTube video attracted and yet Google puts that YouTube video at the top of the page and you cannot find the Rumble video at all unless perhaps you know the exact title, every word verbatim, which obviously you're unlikely to have unless you first find the video.
Virtually nobody's going to search that way.
So it's a perfect example to illustrate how you, the consumer, are harmed, as well as Google's competitors, because you may not like YouTube.
You may not want to watch shows on YouTube.
You may dislike YouTube's censorship policies or other things about YouTube.
You may want to have, simply be able to find alternatives, and yet, if you buy, say, an Apple phone, You'll be forced to use Google's search engine.
If you use that search engine, it will continuously force you into YouTube and not to any other YouTube competitors, including ones that are attracting a very large audience that have grown quite a bit.
So, that just gives you one example of how all of this functions and the reason that you ought to care about it.
It's not to protect Microsoft and help Bing.
It's to ensure that there's competition in the marketplace and that you, the consumer, have choices.
Oftentimes, whenever we talk about antitrust or this Google lawsuit, we have talked to the friend of our show, Matt Stoller, who is a scholar with the American Economic Liberties Project.
He also writes a Substack newsletter on monopolies Welcome to the show.
He's the author of a book as well.
He speaks constantly about the Google case, about antitrust abuses in the internet and big tech industry generally.
I'm sure this is one of the happiest days of his life and we're very happy to share it with him.
Matt, good evening.
Welcome to the show.
I know you have that huge smile beaming on your face.
So I wanna hear what your reaction is to this lawsuit and to the ruling today. - Two thumbs up.
It's great.
Google's a monopolist and finally the rule of law is starting to kick in after, I don't know, 15 years.
So, yeah.
Well, this case has been pending since 2020.
It's gone on for, I mean, three and a half years now.
The court held a nine-week bench trial, meaning that there's no jury, that it's a ruling issued by the judge.
And it's a highly respected judge in the federal court system who is actually an Obama appointee.
It was a case brought by the Trump administration and then continued by the Biden administration.
And this judge isn't on some crusade against Google.
In fact, he ruled in Google's favor on the question of whether the advertising services are in fact a monopoly.
But why is this such a big deal that this court ruled in favor of the government and ruled that Google was an illegal monopolist on the search end of business?
Right.
So it's a big deal for a number of reasons.
The first is there hasn't really been a monopolization claim by the Department of Justice for about 25 years.
The last big one was 1998, Microsoft.
So to have the DOJ bring a case, as it did in 2020, was a big deal.
And now that they've won, it is going to have huge consequences in terms of the law.
Big business all over the place.
Now, all of a sudden they have to say, hey, maybe if we're unlawfully monopolizing, we might face consequences for it.
So it's going to have really serious impacts on big business in general.
In terms of Google and the Internet itself, I mean, the fact that you have a company that has 95 percent of market share in search and, you know, was no one did anything about it.
It meant that the web and could develop according to the whims of a small group of people in Palo Alto.
And now that you have a ruling saying, no, they're an illegal monopolist, and this is actually the second ruling, but it's the big one from the government on search.
It means that we are likely to see an Internet where you're going to see more competition in search within five to 10 years.
We're probably going to have a bunch of different rivals who are going to come in and you're not going to have this element of centralized control of the Internet the way that you do now.
So, you know, I think the most common response to people who aren't completely convinced of the validity of these kinds of rules or laws is based in one of the things the judge said at the beginning of his decision, which is, you know, You know, Google didn't stumble into this monopoly or obtain it by happenstance.
They hired a lot of the best computer developers from Stanford and other universities.
They spent enormous amount of money and invested huge sums of putting together the best teams.
And they developed a search engine that is clearly superior to the alternatives that people just simply didn't want to use.
Like Yahoo, a gigantic company, you know, 15 years ago had a search engine that at first was the thing that propelled Yahoo.
And it just simply lost to the marketplace because people preferred Google and why should a company be limited in its success or why should they be punished for the fact that they produced a better product that people like a lot more?
Yeah, it really cuts to the heart of the case, right?
Because Google was arguing people use Google because it's the best.
Maybe we have huge market share, but that's just because people prefer us.
But what the government was alleging is that Google wasn't the best because it just had better quality.
It was the best because they signed deals with everyone that distributes search engines.
So this would be companies like Apple.
When you launch your Apple iPhone and you look at your browser and you put a search term in there, it automatically preset goes to Google.
And Google pays money to Apple so that Google is the search engine there and so nobody else is.
And they do that with Mozilla, they pay Verizon, they pay Samsung, they pay a whole host of people, firms in the industry to make sure that they are the preset default.
And people don't change their defaults.
And this has two consequences.
One, they make sure that Google is the monopolist in the space, right?
They're the only ones who really can play and they can charge pretty much whatever they want for their search advertising.
That's why they make so much money.
But the second thing that happens is they prevent rivals from getting access to users.
And this matters because if you're making a search engine, If a user uses the search engine, you can see what they click on and you can tweak your search engine to make it better.
The more users you have, the more data you get from those users, the better the quality of the search engine.
So what Google was doing was denying its rivals the ability to actually improve their search engines and become as good as Google and compete.
So that's really the Google was paying essentially to buy all the shelf space and thwart its rivals from even being able to enter the market.
I guess one of the questions I have about that argument, and I suppose I'm asking simply because I think a lot of people are thinking about this, not because I necessarily believe it's true, but when you talk about, let's say, Google's closest competitor, and it's almost a joke to call Bing a competitor of Google and it's almost a joke to call Bing a competitor of Google given that virtually nobody uses Bing and the people who do use it because Microsoft has an ability with some of its products to force people
And that's where mostly its users come from, not because anyone chooses to use Bing, but you look at a company like Microsoft, which is a massive corporation as well, and the question is, well, why can't Microsoft just go in and outbid Google to put its own search engine on Samsung's phones or Apple's phones?
Like, why can't they have competition in terms of who pays the most to the product makers to host the search engines there?
Well, so the way that the payment works is you get as sort of a, Apple gets a certain amount of revenue, a revenue share from Google.
I think it's something like 36%.
It's about $20 billion a year.
Microsoft, because of the way that Bing is structured now, because Bing doesn't have the scale, the number of advertisers that Google has, if Microsoft were to bid for that deal, and they did try to bid for it with Apple, they would have to pay more than 100% of revenue that they got from Bing to make it economically viable.
And this isn't From me or from Microsoft, this is Google's own internal analysis, and they called it an Alice in Wonderland quote-unquote analysis of the economics of search.
So Apple never really considered Microsoft as a rival bidder.
They did consider actually making their own search engine.
And they were rumored to be building it in 2020 in response to the potential antitrust scrutiny.
But they decided not to because it was so lucrative to just get that $20 billion a year instead of having to go through the expense of building your own search engine and deploying it and making it better and keeping it running, sucking up all the data and so forth.
I think a lot of people hear about court decisions like this and they're sort of happy about it.
I remember when over the last, say, 14, 16 months, two different federal courts, a lower court district court judge and then an appellate court, ruled that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment by coercing big tech to censor various forms of dissent.
And while a lot of people are happy about that, court ruling, they were very skeptical, like, "Oh, nothing's gonna really happen from this.
No one's gonna pay for anything.
It's just gonna continue in different ways." And of course, the Supreme Court dismissed those two rulings on technical grounds, on standing grounds, and now they don't exist.
So in terms of actual remedies or punishments or outcomes that actually might make a difference in rectifying this problem, Obviously, Google has the right to appeal this decision.
They almost certainly will.
You're talking about appeals of this magnitude of this complexity.
You're talking about things winding its way through court systems for a long time.
What are the kinds of outcomes for Google that are realistic or plausible to expect?
Yeah, so, I mean, last time I came on, I was unreasonably excited about Google losing its first monopolization case.
You remember, it was a shameful appearance.
I was like, it's over for Google.
It was one of your worst, but it actually wasn't your worst, we all agree.
It was like one of your worst, but not quite your worst.
Right.
I mean, they're they're kind of all my work.
Yeah.
Right.
It's really not.
But, you know, the the they Google has lost multiple.
Now it's second monopolization case.
It's lost.
The first was on the App Store.
This is on search.
It's going to face another trial in September on on its control of advertising software.
It's not buying companies anymore.
When Google makes a bid to buy a big company, that company usually walks away and says, it's not worth it.
You're under too much legal scrutiny.
So it's already really changing the market structure.
Apple is likely to accelerate development of a search engine now, or it might if it has the capacity to do that, because they're anticipating that there's now legal uncertainty here.
They're going to start getting asked questions by Wall Street analysts.
Hey, how are you going to replace that $20 billion?
So it's going to have impacts in the market tomorrow.
It's really going to start tomorrow.
You're also going to see... I think you posted earlier today that Apple had lost some massive amount of its market capitalization, right?
Right.
Yeah.
When the news came out, Apple stock went down because it's really it's Apple that's going to lose $20 billion immediately a year.
And Google, you know, they will they will lose out eventually.
But but they're not going to lose immediately.
Right.
Because other companies have to get going and whatnot.
But, you know, I think the this is going to be appealed.
Right.
There are other cases that they lost was appealed.
It's going to, you know, it's going to be heard by the D.C.
Circuit.
It's going to go to the Supreme Court.
I think it'll be upheld.
You know, I'm not sure, but it is a company that has 95 percent of the market and everyone kind of sees that it's a monopoly.
So it's hard for me to see that the district this isn't this isn't like the, you know, the Missouri Biden v. Missouri case.
This is not really a novel issue.
We've had 100 in 1020 years of monopolization cases.
And if Google's not a monopoly, then they've really just destroyed antitrust law.
So I think it'll be upheld.
But it's also one of multiple cases that Google is dealing with just in this country, not to mention those around the world.
So it's I think we're we're likely to see the Google is kind of gradually going to be taken apart because it's just not worth it to keep it together in this in this current brittle arrangement.
Yeah, I mean, that's why I pointed out just the amount of diligence that went into this decision.
You know, a lot of times lower court judges, you know, issue a 20-page ruling.
They're not very well respected.
They're not specialists in the area.
Here, you're talking about a court that delved into the intricacies of Google, how it's...what its business practices were, heard nine weeks of testimony, sorted through, you know, has been...and then wrote a 300-page opinion.
And that's not going to be easy for people to just disregard and say, yeah, other district court judges say, I don't agree with that ruling.
They have to do a massive amount of work and marshal a lot of expertise in order to do something like that.
I think in a case where the government is suing a company like Google, that's the opportunity where an actual ruling that is highly influential gets issued.
Let me ask you about the politics of all this because There's an election for one thing in three months, but also I think the politics are so interesting here.
We've talked about this before, but I want to talk about it specifically in regard to this lawsuit now.
The Obama administration was notorious for being reverent of Silicon Valley.
I mean, they were completely tied to and in love with big tech companies and just thought that those were the geniuses, that's where American prosperity lied.
And then you had the Trump Justice Department, for interesting reasons, shortly before the 2020 election, but nonetheless, initiate this lawsuit.
This came from the Trump Justice Department.
And then, of course, the Biden Justice Department, in part because he actually made some good appointments, not something I say easily, with Alina Khan, but others in the Justice Department as well, who made the decision to continue this lawsuit and to pursue it aggressively.
And we talked before about Lena Kahn, who's become sort of a campaign issue in some way, more than in ways that I didn't expect.
And for people who don't know, she's the head of the Federal Trade Commission, and she's somebody who has been an antitrust expert for a long time.
And she's come in and been a lot more aggressive than certainly the Obama administration, probably the Trump administration, definitely others before it, in terms of enforcing antitrust laws.
So you have people in the Republican Party, like Josh Hawley and J.D.
advance, Trump's Vice President, who have said, "Yeah, I like Lena Kahn.
I think she's doing really good work." And then you have people in the Democratic Party, these sort of corporatists like Kamala Harris' major donors, saying, "We want her gone.
We want her out." So the politics on this are obviously mixed, in part because you have a part of the Republican Party that hates big tech and that thinks they have way too much power, that they're using it for ill.
But what are the chances, obviously, you know, you could have a new administration, the Harris administration or the Trump administration.
How do you read the likelihood of these kind of cases being pursued less aggressively with either outcome?
Yeah, it's a really great question.
I mean, I watched you, you know, have that segment with Lee where you talked about how Trump has sort of stopped pursuing the same populist themes that he pursued in 2016, which is something that I've noticed as well.
And Kamala Harris is, it would be hard to find someone who is sort of more favorable to big tech in the Democratic Party than Kamala Harris.
You could do it.
But, you know, she's generally on the more favorable to monopoly scale, if I had to judge.
I mean, her track record isn't totally clear.
So it is really weird to be in a situation where Both Trump first term and Biden were very aggressive.
And now it's possible that Trump's second term or Biden's successor, Kamala Harris, may really pull back.
And so, you know, Lena Khan and then the head of the antitrust division, Jonathan Cantor, have both been really aggressive.
And they are aggressive in a way that we haven't seen really since the 1970s.
So one question, I think, we saw something like this in the Microsoft case in the 1990s.
So the Clinton administration brought a case against Microsoft.
They won.
Then there was an election, and George W. Bush settled it on terms that were favorable to Microsoft.
So Clinton won a breakup.
That got overturned, and then Bush settled it.
And that was kind of a catastrophe.
Microsoft is very big and powerful and reckless today.
Will something like that happen again?
I don't think it's as likely because during the 1990s, everybody thought that monopolies were good and big tech was good and Microsoft was kind of an anomaly.
But today, you have people in both parties who really don't like big tech, really don't like big business and what big business has done.
And they will fight to preserve these cases.
And if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump does try to drop the case or settle it, get rid of Jonathan Cantor, get rid of Lena Kahn, or in the case of Trump, appoint someone weak, there will be pushback.
That said, I'm really worried.
I mean, to be honest, I'm really worried.
I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats who win, either one, is going to be strong pressure to settle this case and settle a bunch of the others and really to try to go back to the Bush era, go back to the Obama era.
And that's pretty, that would be pretty catastrophic.
I think it'll be hard, but they're going to try.
Yeah, there's certainly, I mean, that's why it's amazing that someone like Lena Kahn, who's not usually, he's occupying a position not typically like a front and center position, especially in major national elections, has become that, primarily because you do have so many powerful people who want her gone, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you know, routinely dumps on her and attacks her, sort of reflecting that traditional business wing of the Republican Party from the Reagan and Bush eras.
And then you have big Democratic donors, obviously, like we saw with Reid Hoffman, who donated or engineered a donation of millions of dollars and then immediately said on the TV show, well, I think Kamala Harris, if she wins, should fire Lena Kahn.
So that's why I find the politics so interesting.
All right, let me ask you one last question before I let you go, which is just in terms of the significance of this ruling, and we talked a little bit earlier about why it's going to be very hard to unlodge this, I think, by other district judges on appeal.
But there are a lot of other significant, like serious antitrust cases pending that the government brought that other companies have brought, not just against Google, but Facebook and Amazon and Apple Tops.
Talk a little bit about what's going on in those other cases and how this might positively affect those.
Yeah, we are in the midst of a renaissance of laws against monopolies, right?
So you have the government has brought cases against Facebook, against Amazon, against Meta, against Ticketmaster.
You're likely to see one against UnitedHealth Group.
You're going to see a case against a company called RealPage, which organizes large landlords and price fixing.
You're seeing cases against seeds and chemicals makers.
You see cases against meat price fixing.
I mean, this is really a, and those are just the government cases.
There are private cases involving pharmacy benefit managers and the NFL has a, you know, it's a big case there.
There's ultimate fighting champ.
There's cases that realtors, they're reshaping our society.
So, you know, those cases are in various stages.
I think some of them are in better shape than others.
But what I would say in general is that judges are really encountering antitrust, most of them for the first time.
And when they see a case like the Google case and a judge saying, a very cautious judge like Amit Mehta, Writing a 300-page decision saying, yes, Google is a monopoly, and they see this press, and they see what people in business are saying, it makes them more likely to say, yeah, I think that maybe there is a market power problem in our society.
It doesn't seem crazy.
It doesn't seem outlandish to rule against monopolies and monopolization.
And so I think it's going to change, really, There's this expression that Richard Hofstadter wrote in the 1960s where he said, you know, every big business person, big business, they do their business with one eye over their shoulder glancing at the antitrust division.
Right.
Which is to say they're worried about whether they're violating the law.
And so they treat their suppliers better.
They treat their customers better.
They treat their rivals better if they're big and powerful.
All right, well, Matt, I presume you have a whole series of all-night celebrations and parties planned to commemorate today's event.
I don't want to detain you from those.
of how what's going to happen the business environment is going to start to change and become slightly more fair to the little guy all right well matt i presume you have a whole series of all-night celebrations and parties planned to commemorate today's event i don't want to detain you from those i hope you enjoy those and i appreciate you taking the time uh to come on and enlighten us about today's events it was one of your better appearances thank you Thank you, Matt.
Good night.
There are all kinds of crises, serious crises, emerging in the world.
In fact, it was very difficult to decide which topics to cover tonight simply because there are so many that deserve serious attention.
We decided we're going to have to spread them out over the week and have guests on to analyze them because it really is true that this is a
series of time of several months now where things have gotten very potentially dangerous in the world more so than usual and That's nowhere more true than in the Middle East where there's obviously been a major war going on since October 7th With the help the United States where Israel has been relentlessly bombing and continues to bomb the civilian population of Gaza largely
Destroying Gaza making it completely uninhabitable all sorts of scandals emerging from that war about raping and detention and abuse and torturing of Palestinian detainees who are given no trial who have no due process and end up in Israeli prisons even Israelis are protesting against that but now of course you have the almost forced retaliation by Iran as a result of the Murder of the Hamas leader that was actually leading the negotiations for the ceasefire.
The person who has been negotiating with Egypt, with the Jordanians, with other intermediaries to try and forge a peace deal with Israel that Israel has been pretending it wanted and that the United States has been insisting it was facilitating.
And essentially imposing on Israel.
And Israel, just to show how little it cared about that, went and murdered the prime negotiator representing Hamas when he was a guest of Iran at the inauguration of Iran's newly elected president.
And Iran, just like was true A couple of months ago when Israel bombed its embassy in Damascus and felt obligated to defend its sovereignty and shoot a bunch of missiles and drones at Israel, though used deliberately primitive and slow ones to not impose much suffering or destruction in Israel.
I think all of the missiles got intercepted.
Maybe one landed harmlessly.
But this time they seem to be unwilling to exercise that amount of restraint and you can see why.
On the one hand, they I have to respond because you just can't imagine what the United States would do if a country bombed our embassy somewhere in the world, just blew it up, which is considered U.S.
soil, and then we invited a foreign dignitary or leader to our country to say attend the inauguration of the new president in January, and some foreign country used that opportunity on our soil to murder that person.
That would be a grave violation of U.S.
sovereignty, and we would, of course, be obligated to react against it.
I'm sure we would act quite harshly in response.
And there have been multiple incidents over the past 10 months when Israel has attacked all sorts of Iranian bases and Iranian soldiers and Iran itself in the region, all but requiring a response.
And the question now is, what will the response be?
They don't feel like they can simply send a symbolic or highly restrained response like they did a couple months ago, because that's not a serious response any longer.
On the other hand, they can't have a full-scale war with Israel because there's a pretty good likelihood, especially with the current Israeli government in place, that they would be obliterated through Israel's use of nuclear weapons.
And so they seem, though, intent on attacking Israel in a way that's a lot more serious.
Nobody knows exactly what that will be.
But to put it mildly, tensions are extremely high in the region.
The U.S., over the last two weeks, has announced a series of military deployments to that region with the obvious intent of ensuring that the United States would be involved in that war that might be happening.
And then at the same time...
You have just today a U.S.
military base in Iraq that was attacked, presumably by a missile or a drone, by the Iranians that severely injured, if not killed, at least a couple of American soldiers.
The reporting on exactly what the nature of those injuries are is a little bit vague.
It just happened a couple of hours ago, but you see just the, you know, powder keg waiting to explode with the United States government posture being that we are going to go to that region and get involved in that war in defense of Israel and to prevent wider escalation.
You have a financial crisis that basically exploded out of nowhere today when a U.S.
jobs report that shot up unemployment rates scared the entire world into believing that the U.S.
is slowing down considerably when it comes to economic growth, put panic in all sorts of global markets including the United States, in Asia, and elsewhere.
And then you have a war in Ukraine that is still going on, that the United States and NATO have made it almost impossible for them not to win, where the Ukrainian front line again is getting pummeled and retreating and withering in the face of a Russian onslaught.
You could go on and on with the serious crises that the United States government is facing, not will face next year, but is facing right now, that can have major consequences.
And so we keep hearing these policies being announced and these decisions being issued.
And we have genuinely no idea who inside the U.S.
government is making those decisions.
And the reason for that is that the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden, is somebody who not just the other party, the Republican Party, but his own party even more so, spent the last two months Increasingly insisting through leaks and explicit statements that he was mentally unfit to run for the presidency.
We all saw in that debate and many other times, though it was called fake news until the media was willing to admit it, that Joe Biden's brain just doesn't work.
It just doesn't work a lot of the times.
And there's been so much reporting about his inability to even stay engaged in meetings.
He just kind of falls in and out of engagement alertness.
You can't be making major decisions about wars and deployment of troops and dealing with a global financial crisis and another war in Europe with Joe Biden's brain.
He's clearly not the one making these decisions.
That goes without saying.
That's why he's not running as president anymore, even though he was intending to do so and wanted to.
He was forced out by that claim by his own party that his brain didn't work.
And then you have his vice president, Kamala Harris, who's very obviously and openly and visibly spending all day from morning to night doing nothing but focused on how she can replace Joe Biden in the November election that's just three months away.
So who are these officials?
We have no elected officials.
That's the president, the vice president, who are making these decisions.
There's no one to come out and explain them.
And we're left with these invisible decision makers, these invisible, unaccountable actors who are bringing the United States closer and closer to war, have plunged the United States at the center of an economic crisis.
And I would say it's a serious crisis of democracy that usually we have a visible figure who, if he didn't make all the decisions, is responsible for the executive branch, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
That person that we have, his brain doesn't function and his vice president spends every day on the campaign trail.
So who is it that is doing all these things?
And by these things I mean things like this, from the Voice of America on October 2nd, U.S.
military sending reinforcements to the Middle East.
U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin late Friday signed orders to move the additional assets and capabilities to the Middle East and parts of Europe, following pledges by Tehran and its proxies to take revenge for the killing this past week of a top Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and the Hamas terror group's political leader on Iranian soil.
The U.S.
moves include sending the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier group to the Middle East, along with naval cruisers and destroyers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.
In addition, the U.S.
is sending an additional fighter squadron to the region and is taking steps to allow for the deployment of land-based missile defense capabilities.
U.S.
officials, we don't know who those are, Seeking to prevent the tensions from exploding into a regional war have repeatedly signaled that Washington would not leave Israel undefended.
So the formal position of our government is that we will do everything possible to defend Israel in the event that this war that Israel has been pursuing since October 7th.
We've had all kinds of foreign policy experts on including Professor John Mearsheimer who I'll have on Wednesday and Jeffrey Sachs and many others who have warned That the real risk of this war in Gaza, aside from the atrocities it contains, is that a wider regional war can break out with Hezbollah and more dangerously with Iran.
And that seems to be the direction in which we're headed.
Not necessarily inevitably, but with a very high probability.
And the United States has made clear that we will consider that war our own.
We will be a belligerent, a co-belligerent with Israel in that war.
Who made that decision?
Obviously the Secretary of Defense is responsible for implementing the war decisions and the foreign policy decisions of the President, but the Secretary of Defense can't decide on his own to take the country to war, so who is it that's doing this?
From the Washington Post on the same day, quote, US forces move toward Israel as Iran threatens to attack.
Quote, five other U.S.
warships are in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and could assist Israel if called upon.
They include the USS Wasp, USS Oak Hill, USS New York, USS Buckley, and USS Roosevelt.
The Buckley and Roosevelt are destroyers with offensive and defensive ballistic missile capabilities, while the other three form the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group, a three-ship team of more than 4,000 U.S.
Marines and sailors that include Marine Corps fighter jets, an infantry battalion, and other combat forces from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Hear from the military journalist Dan Lamothe today.
Quote, two American destroyers, the USS Laboon and USS Cole, so two more destroyers, have shifted from the Gulf of Oman to the Red Sea in the direction of Israel.
Defense officials Say today the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt remained in the Gulf of Oman as of this reporting.
We're very much headed literally physically into war deploying American soldiers into that region in order to defend and protect Israel Which has provoked many of the actors in that region to want to attack, almost force them, obligated to attack Israel.
And that is what we've been hearing from the start is that Netanyahu does not want to leave office.
He faces corruption trials.
He's extremely unpopular.
The only way he can stay in office is if he continues to wage war and then Israel remains united behind him.
They can't have a change of government in the middle of a war.
They have a unified war cabinet across party lines.
And I also think there's a sort of messianic aspect to Netanyahu's intentions, where he's a lot older, he's nearing the end of his life, and he envisions himself as this sort of historic figure in Israeli history where he wants to destroy all of Israel's enemies.
Which, in this case, means a major regional conflagration, if not worse, involving the United States and Iran, which is a country three times more powerful and larger than Iraq.
And in case you think this is all hypothetical, it has been the case that several times over the last 10 months, since October 7th, there have been American soldiers deployed in that region who have been injured or killed.
And Americans have attacked, not just helped Israel attack Gaza, but have bombed targets in Iran, in Iraq rather, and Syria, connected to Iran, as well as many targets in Yemen.
So Americans are already heavily involved militarily in that region.
We've been involved in combat, our soldiers who are deployed there have been injured or killed.
And according to NBC News from earlier today, and as I say, the reporting on this still is, Kind of in the incipient stages and therefore vague, Americans injured in an attack on a U.S.
base in Iraq.
This is today.
American soldiers injured in an attack on a U.S.
base in Iraq.
The White House said President... Oh, don't worry.
The White House has said that President Joe Biden has been briefed on the attack.
Now, the State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, appeared at the podium today in the State Department, where he was, of course, asked about these various conflicts.
And if you want to be comforted and assured, I'm sorry, I can't provide that I'm going to do the opposite of that by showing you what it is that he said.
From your perspective, is any kind of Iranian response an escalation?
I don't want to prejudge from here what our view of a response might be, other than to say we don't want to see Iran take further action.
That's the message we are consistently delivering to our partners in the region.
Thank you.
Thank you, Matt.
Welcome back.
Given some of the tough rhetoric that we've seen reported between the U.S.
and Israel, specifically about whether the U.S.
would bail out Israel should it escalate another time after this one, are there any limitations being placed on U.S.
involvement in what's expected to develop in the coming days?
So I don't know what you mean by limitations.
We have made clear that we will defend Israel against attacks from Iran, against attacks from terrorist groups.
That is part of our longstanding ironclad security, or our ironclad commitment to Israel's security.
At the same time... Alright, now, I just want to make sure you heard what he said there, and what you understand that it means.
Israel can go around and provoke as many wars as it wants in that region.
And of course there are people who always defend Israel, they're always the victim.
If Israel goes and blows up an Iranian embassy in Syria, it's probably because, according to them, there are bad people inside it who Israel needed to kill.
If Israel attacks Iran and operates on their soil to murder people, it's because those people deserved it, etc.
But if you're not one of those people who just instinctively and religiously believes that everything Israel does is the correct thing and actually believes that sometimes they might actually be the aggressor, what it means, according to Matthew Miller, is that even if Israel is the aggressor, even if Israel provokes wars against their enemy, we are committed, we have an ironclad commitment To deploy our own military to defend the State of Israel in any war in which it finds itself.
Why is that?
Who decided that?
Where is this person?
Matthew Miller is not the person who decided that.
He's just the spokesman for the State Department.
Is that a Joe Biden decision?
Is that what Joe Biden recently decided?
We kept hearing through leaks, including in the last week, that Joe Biden's so angry with Netanyahu, he's at his wit's end, lost his patience.
We've been hearing this for a long time now.
Obviously Kamala Harris, who's making these massive critical decisions inside of our government?
Here's the rest of what was announced by the State Department today.
As I made clear in my opening comments, as the Secretary made clear in comments he made on the road last week, we don't want to see any party take steps to escalate this conflict.
By limitations I mean there's a difference between intercepting and defensive actions versus engaging in counter strikes or even preemptive strikes which have been floated by the Israelis as a possibility.
Is there anything that the U.S.
is drawing lines in front of in terms of those actions?
So I'm not going to get into the conversations that we have with any of our allies or partners in the region other than to say there's a general rule we don't want to see escalation and that is a statement that applies to all parties to this conflict.
So he won't even say That if Israel starts the war through a, quote, preemptive strike, which is being floated by Israelis, he won't even say that, no, the U.S.
will not participate in an initiation of the conflict.
He's saying we don't want to see an escalation and we're trying to stop it through negotiation or whatever.
But the Israelis have proven over and over that they don't care at all what the United States thinks.
They don't listen to the United States.
They disregard American red lines, even, that Biden issued.
And they're going to do whatever they want to do.
And we, our government, cannot even say that, no, we won't participate in an offensive war that Israel initiates, even against Iran.
And again, we don't know who these decision makers are.
Now, one of the things that's just so interesting is that when Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, he was warning everybody that Donald Trump would likely take the United States to war with Iran.
Here is what he said in January of 2020.
Quote, And then in another tweet echoing Democrats' posture at the time, he said that Trump doesn't have the right to take the country to war with Iran unless Congress approves and authorizes that war.
And yet, here we are, on the brink of war with Iran, and there's no congressional authorization, no involvement of the Congress at all, no official, no actual decision maker we can identify as the person who wants to take this country to war.
There are American soldiers on their way there to that region with a major deployment.
Here yesterday, CNN's Jim Scudu, who often has sources inside the government tell him what to say, tweeted the following, quote, One source on the call, meaning between Israel and the United States, said, quote, Blinken sounded frustrated when he briefed the ministers on recent talks with Israel over a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.
Blinken said the administration felt it was, quote, Close to a breakthrough before the assassination in Tehran.
Now a deal is needed more than ever, Blinken added.
He was quoting Axios there, which... - Whose Israeli reporter actually won a White House Press Award for Best Journalist by doing nothing but writing down and printing whatever Israeli and US officials have told him over the last year.
And then Jim Scudo says U.S.
influence over Israel is at a remarkably low point.
So he's quote reading actually Laura Rosen who quoted the Axios call and that is true.
I mean U.S.
influence over Israel has obviously been at a low point.
We have no ability to influence let alone control what they do even while we're saying we have an ironclad commitment which we will never break to go to war in order to defend them.
Then we have The war in Ukraine, which is still raging and we're still funding and arming, even though people have forgotten just because it's been going on for so long and there's so many other things to be concerned with, but that war is still going on.
And just about 10 days ago, the Washington Post reported, quote, Russia.
Adapting tactics advances in the Donetsk and takes more Ukrainian land.
The new offensive focus comes as Ukraine faces depleted forces, sweltering heat and turmoil in a potentially consequential U.S.
elections.
Putin's troops are now pressing along an arc of three key points.
And there they list the three points in the different places in Ukraine.
And then they say that, as well, there's a village on strategic high ground seized in May after Russian forces advanced northward, which they occupied in February.
While there's intense fighting elsewhere, including in the northeast and some spots along the southern front, the offensive in Donetsk represents a notable shift in tactics by Russian commanders who appear to have learned from past mistakes and are now achieving steady gains for the Kremlin.
Also threatening Ukrainian cities elsewhere, which sits on a strategic highway.
So you have that other war that's not going well at all, to put it mildly.
And that is a war the United States and NATO have painted themselves into a corner and cannot and will not lose, at least under the current administration.
And we don't have a president with a functioning brain.
And we have a vice president who's only focused on her own empowerment.
And so we're basically having a government that is running on its own with unseen forces, unknown actors, invisible decision makers.
It's the very opposite of a democracy.
It's like we're being governed by this invisible body of people that we didn't elect.
Remember, the Democratic Party is the party that continuously insists That they and they alone believe in democratic values, that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy.
Without them, democracy will crumble.
And yet, even with their own primaries, they haven't had an election.
We have Kamala Harris, who was imposed on the Democratic Party with no votes.
If she wins, she will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee after four years in 2028.
And so the Democratic Party will go basically 10 years without a single vote being cast.
And even in 2020, there was a voting process for a while that ended when Obama forced all the candidates out other than Biden and Bernie Sanders.
And of course, in 2016, the Democratic Party cheated.
They talk all the time about democracy.
And yet their actions are the antithesis of it.
And we have a government now that, I've never seen this before, that is making extremely serious decisions, not like it's a routine time.
It's a time of great danger and consequence.
And we have no idea who is in charge of our government making all these highly weighty choices.
Speaking of Democrats and democracy, one of the Democrats' favorite and most influential members of the House of Representatives, the Maryland Democrat, Jamie Raskin, has started to have a bunch of interviews that he's done, a bunch of tweets that he has posted, unearthed, as we head into the election because he has repeatedly made clear that he believes that if Donald Trump wins the election, legitimately, validly, democratically, in the 2024 election,
That the Democrats should use their majority in the Congress to prevent Trump from being inaugurated by ruling him unfit and ineligible for the presidency under the Constitution by claiming that even though he's not been charged with it, let alone convicted of it, he is actually an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible.
Here's one of the things that Jamie Raskin said in August 2023 on CNN.
We've been saying all along that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment presents a clear and unequivocal statement that anyone who has sworn an oath of office, and by the way, not just a president, but members of Congress and others who hold federal office, who engage in insurrection or rebellion, having sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, can never serve again
So that was when the Democrats were trying to lay the groundwork for having state courts rule that Trump was ineligible even to appear on the ballot in at least some states on the grounds that he was an insurrectionist.
They got the Colorado Supreme Court to so rule by a four to three majority.
And they got other Democratic secretaries of state in blue states to rule in the same way until the Supreme Court said, no, only Congress can do that.
Not states.
States don't have the right in federal elections to decide on their own, state by state, who's eligible to be on the ballot and who's not.
Only Congress can enforce that component of the Constitution.
But this has been a View of the Democratic Party for a long time.
Here's Jamie Raskin eight months later in February of this year appearing at a bookstore in Washington, D.C.
where he says something very similar, if not even more alarming.
Well, last night I was most worried about the Supreme Court's prospective imminent abdication of its very clear duty to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and what that might mean if their decision says that it's really up to Congress on January 5th
January 6, 2025, to disqualify him at the counting of the Electoral College votes, which really could lead to something akin to civil war, if that's what the suggestion is, which is what I think I heard when I went to the oral argument, that they themselves were unwilling to rule whether or not the Colorado Supreme Court was correct in finding that he had engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021.
But that was just last night's worry.
So he was talking there about what he expected the Supreme Court to do based on the oral argument.
You could tell by that oral argument that that was absolutely What the court was going to rule, I believe the ruling ended up being unanimous by a 9-0 ruling.
It's true, they did not rule on the issue of whether Trump actually did violate the eligibility clause in the Constitution by engaging in an insurrection.
They said that it's not up to the Colorado State Supreme Court or any other state court officials to make that decision.
Only Congress can enforce that provision of the Constitution and what Jamie Raskin was saying That he believed the Supreme Court would do and actually ended up doing would mean that if Trump won the 2024 election, Congress would then have to declare that Trump is ineligible to take office.
Imagine you go through an entire campaign.
He's not saying in theory Congress could do this.
He's saying this is what Congress would have to do because he believes that Trump is ineligible.
And what he's saying is so cavalierly Yeah, you'd probably end up with a civil war given that, oh, Trump's followers are so violent.
Meanwhile, it's so ironic because the way in which that would happen is exactly what Trump tried to do in the 2020 election with the electoral college certification, is that he wanted Congress to reject it.
He wanted Mike Pence to reject it by presiding over the Senate, and that's exactly what Jamie Raskin is saying, that we would wait until Trump wins the election, and then when it comes time to certify the election, we would just refuse to do so.
We would reject Trump's victory by arguing that he's ineligible to take office.
And he's even saying, yeah, that could create a civil war.
That would be a really bad thing, but that's what we'll have to do.
I know it seems extremely unlikely, but look at all the other things that they, meaning the anti-Trump establishment, has done to try and ensure that Donald Trump can't run.
They indicted him four times in four different jurisdictions.
They got a Supreme Court of the United States, a state of the Supreme Court, to ban him from the ballot.
They tried to impeach him before he left office to ensure that he couldn't run again.
And what else is left to do?
That's one of the things that Tucker Carlson was saying six months ago.
It seems like assassination, or attempted assassination, would be the only thing they have left.
They're clearly desperate to prevent Trump from returning to power.
And it seems unthinkable that they would do something like go through an entire election, have Trump win, and then just ban him from taking office.
Given everything that they've done, I don't understand why anybody would be doubtful that they might try that.
And this has been going on for a long time from a lot of different places.
Here from CNN in August of 2023, legal scholars increasingly raise constitutional argument that Trump should be barred from the presidency.
Quote, the latest salvo came Saturday in the Atlantic Magazine from liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe and J. Michael Ludig, the former federal appellate judge and prominent conservative, An anti-Trump conservative who argues the 14th Amendment disqualifies the former president from returning to the Oval Office.
Quote, the people who wrote the 14th Amendment were not fools.
They realized that if these people who tried to over-the-curn the country or tried to get rid of our peaceful transitions of power are again put in power, that would be the end of the nation, the end of democracy, Tribe told CNN's Casey Hunt on Sunday.
Ludwig, who's become a strong critic of Trump's actions after the election, called for officials to look carefully at his qualifications for being on the ballot.
I mean, isn't it, even in that quote, they're saying that what's so dangerous about Trump is that he opposes the peaceful transition of power.
I think I'm gonna seize.
I don't know why this happens so often.
Or I might just suppress it, we'll see.
So, the quote was saying, I suppressed it, breaking news.
The article was saying what's so dangerous about Trump is that he doesn't believe in the peaceful transition of power.
That he tries to disregard the outcome of an election, and he tries to pressure Congress to reject the certification by the Electoral College of the outcome of that, and yet that's exactly what they're suggesting should be done.
They were trying to ban Trump from the ballot and failing that.
Once the Supreme Court said only Congress can enforce that after the election, they're now threatening overtly to do exactly that, to reject the outcome of the election.
To impede the peaceful transition of power to the point that they're actually saying we might even provoke a civil war in order to do it.
And so ironically to use the Electoral College certification process as their vehicle for blocking Trump from assuming office.
Again, I know it sounds far-fetched.
I know it's hard to imagine.
But after everything we've seen, unprecedented actions taken to drive Trump from power, the whole Russiagate hoax that went on for years that came from the CIA and FBI, all the different attempts to prevent Trump from running to the point of trying to imprison him, It is impossible if you're sentient and you've been paying attention to put anything past what people in power are willing to do to keep Trump out of office.
And the irony of that is that all these people who are insisting on these things and driving them are the people who continuously do so under the Orwellian pretext of upholding democratic values and saving American democracy.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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