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Aug. 23, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:27:35
Obamas Warn America of Perils of Wealth and Privilege; DNC Remains a Dissidence-Free Affair; Interview with DEM Officials
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Good evening.
It's Thursday, August 22nd.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
There are many inspiring sermons coming from the podium of the Democratic National Convention as you might expect, but none more moving than the two speeches delivered on Tuesday night by former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.
Both of them warned of the evils of greed, of massive wealth accumulation and wealth disparities, and especially those who seek fame and fortune.
Michelle specifically told a story of how her mother always taught her to look with suspicion, unquote, folks who take more than they need, and said most of us do not enjoy what she called the affirmative action of generational wealth.
Now the point of all of this, needless to say, is to tell Americans what the Democratic Party represents, what the Obama legacy represents, and what the values and character are of those who lead the party.
One problem, of course, is that both Obamas, since leaving the White House in early 2009, have lived the exact lives which their lectures were designed to denounce.
They are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, They jetted into Chicago from one of their several $15 million sprawling estates around the country, or more likely from the yacht of one of their many billionaire friends off the south of France or in the Caribbean, and that's to say nothing of the cavalcade of privileged vessels, the Pritzkers and the Soroses and the Kennedys, who are the living, breathing embodiment of generational wealth and taking more than one needs.
And they were dominating the podium in the party.
It's also to say nothing of the massive corporations and hedge fund billionaires who have always funded that party, at least since the Clinton years, and still do.
And then there's the party's deeply anti-democratic practices, which stood in stark contrast to Michelle Obama's announcement that the Democratic Party, unlike the other party, does not cheat to ensure that it gets the results that it wants in an election.
So it's really worth examining what this party actually is by comparing it to the self-serving image the Obamas created of both that party and of themselves.
At last month's Republican National Convention, several prominent speakers ascended to the stage to deliver speeches full of criticisms of and deviations from the Republican establishment's ideology, such as the speeches by David Sachs and Tucker Carlson in primetime, both of which ranted against U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine and the neocon doctrine of endless war generally.
The contrast with the DNC could not be any starker.
Everything about The organization of this convention is designed like the party itself to enforce strict conformity and lockstep ideas to the point that the party will not even allow a single Palestinian American to ascend to the podium and speak, even if they promise, as they are doing, To say nothing other than to heap praise on Kamala Harris.
Michael Tracy has been covering the convention on the ground for us, as you probably know, and we will show you some of how this dissent is being purged.
Then finally, we also have several interviews that Michael conducted that I find quite fascinating with various Democratic Party officials and members of Congress who are at the convention.
He speaks to them about a wide range of topics, including Ukraine, Israel, Foreign policy, Kamala's bizarre ascension to the Democratic nominee despite having gotten no votes, and a lot more.
And we will show you key clips of the most enlightening parts of that interview.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
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For now, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the innovations of Bill Clinton back in the early 90s that made him such an effective, if not a particularly noble politician, was that he decided that the Democratic Party needed if not a particularly noble politician, was that he decided that the Democratic Party needed to become the party of Wall Street, the party of big corporations, the party of billionaire donors, in order to have the best chance for him
And ever since then, that is exactly what the party has become.
For that reason, they've been bleeding working class voters, especially white working class voters, but multiracial working class voters who have been migrating to the Republican Party.
And in return, they have not only been getting the massive big donor financing of dark money groups and big PACs and hedge fund billionaires and the like.
But the party elites are almost entirely taken from that same group of people and shirm those same exact interests, which is why I found the sermons that were delivered by former First Lady Michelle Obama and her husband, former President Barack Obama, who clearly, the latter does, exercises immense power and influence in the Democratic Party.
By all accounts, in 2020, he was the one who drove out all of the other candidates besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to allow them to split the vote and make Joe Biden the winner.
He has played an immense role in the policy of the Biden White House, especially as Joe Biden has become increasingly incapacitated.
And there's reporting from every direction about how much Kamala Harris relies on his advice not only for her campaign but for how she might form her government if she wins.
So these are not just ghosts from the Democratic Party past.
These are people who continue to be central to the Democratic Party.
In fact, they're the most popular politicians in that party.
And so the speeches that they gave in primetime on Tuesday night were intended not only to define themselves, but also to define the values of this political party that they represent.
And they had a lot to say about what this party is, the values for which it stands, the kind of people who composed it and who it represents that seem, let's just say, erotically disparate when comparing it to the lives that they lead, to the values that they defended, to the donors who fund them, and pretty much everything else about the Democratic Party.
So first, let's take a look at Michelle Obama's speech that got rave reviews, not just from the party, but from the media as well.
Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward.
We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.
I think it's really important, not only what she said there, but the very sustained and intense ovation that that decree prompted.
We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.
And yet, every night, people who go in are the featured speakers of this party, the people who are funding this party.
And now, the Obama family itself are great beneficiaries of massive generational wealth.
It's what the party elites and the party leadership not only comes from, but then bestows on the next generation by exploiting their political influence in the private sector to make millions of tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in the cases of the Obamas.
If we bankrupt a business, if we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third or fourth chance.
If things...
Okay, so if we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second chance, said Michelle Obama.
Many of you might remember that the start of the Obama presidency was defined by the 2008 financial crisis caused by the reckless betting practices of Wall Street barons and tycoons who have been funding the Democratic Party.
And many of them had been at the highest levels of executive branch power under the Clinton administration, and the first thing Barack Obama did was pick, as his Secretary of Treasury, the favorite regulator of Wall Street bankers, Timothy Geithner, and surrounded and filled his entire administration with people who served Wall Street and big finance.
And all those Wall Street executives Who in the words of Michelle Obama bankrupted their company and choked in a crisis were absolutely saved.
They got more than a second chance.
They continue to be the richest people in the world.
That's because Barack Obama advocated for and then defended a massive Almost trillion dollar bailout, not of the American middle class who was suffering from the crisis, who were the victims of it, but primarily aimed at benefiting and keeping afloat and giving more than a second chance to the very people who bankrupted those companies and those banks on Wall Street and caused a financial crisis that reverberated around the world.
Those were the people that the Obamas were closest to.
Those were the people they acted first and most of all to help.
It's like every sentence of what she's saying sounds so lovely.
It's a nice, uplifting thought.
But the reality of the Obama is the reality of the Democratic Party in every sentence is essentially the opposite.
Don't go our way!
We don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead.
No!
We don't get to change the rules so we always win.
If we see a mountain in front of us, we don't expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top.
No.
So we, the Democratic Party, don't change the rules to ensure that we will win.
On his way out in 2016, Barack Obama presided over the Democratic primary in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that even the most loyal party insiders like Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile said was a process that was rigged, that the DNC cheated to get the result they wanted.
They were petrified that Bernie Sanders would have won after that cheating and he likely would have.
And the Obamas were supporting Hillary Clinton and so they helped cheat to get the result that they want.
They did obviously the same thing in 2020 when Obama drove out all of those candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar with promises of who knows what in order to drive them out of the race to make sure that Joe Biden, the candidate that Obama wanted in 2020, would actually win the election.
The Democratic Party has tried doing things like putting their political opponent in jail, getting him barred from the ballot, And then in 2024, they simply banned any primaries at all to make sure Joe Biden would get the nomination.
And then once it turned out that he was likely to lose the election, they just forced him out of the race and imposed Kamala Harris on the Democratic Party without having a single vote.
That is nothing but over and over breaking and changing the rules to make sure that you get the outcome that you want.
We put our heads down.
We get to work.
In America, we do something.
And throughout her entire life, that's what we've seen from Kamala Harris.
All right.
So like I said, it's a very stern speech.
She's undoubtedly, no denying she's a very fine order, but the content itself, the words itself are complete frauds.
When you look at who is speaking them and on behalf of what party they're being spoken.
Now, Someone else who is an undeniably talented orator is our husband Barack Obama and he spoke as well on the same night at the Democratic Convention and stirred up the crowd in very similar ways and here's part of what he said.
I know these ideas can feel pretty naive right now.
We live in a time of such confusion and rancor with a culture that puts a premium on things that don't last.
Money, fame, status, likes.
Okay, so we live in an era of rancor where people are at each other's throats.
And our culture encourages people, unfortunately, to chase things that really don't matter, like money and wealth and fame and status and likes.
I remembered this a couple weeks ago, and it's amazing how rarely it's spoken of, but when Barack Obama was running for re-election in 2012 against Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, one of the primary strategies of the Democratic Party was to have Harry Reid, the very senior senator from Nevada who had served as the majority leader of the Senate and then the minority leader for the Democratic Party, stand up and invent a complete lie
that the Democratic Party campaign was then based on, which is that he knows for a fact that Mitt Romney never paid any taxes.
It was just a lie.
It was a total lie invented out of nowhere.
The media talked about it all the time.
Of course, Romney angrily denied it.
He even then released his tax returns to disprove that claim, but that was the core accusation on which the Democratic Party ran.
But if you look at, say, what Jimmy Carter decided to do when he left the presidency, which was devote himself to building homes, I mean, physically with his own hands, building homes for people who didn't have them, And going around the country giving speeches, not for a million dollars each or $500,000 each, but inspirational speeches on behalf of his NGO.
Working internationally to guarantee and oversee the integrity of elections, internationally and nationally as well.
And then you compare it to what Barack Obama has done, which is he's become an influencer, an extremely rich, arguably the richest influencer.
Maybe only Mr. Beast is richer at this point than Barack Obama when it comes to being an influencer.
His whole life is about accumulating massive amounts of wealth by copying the path that was pioneered by Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton after they left the White House in 2000.
And he got massive deals from Netflix.
They became influencers.
They put out every year a list of books that people should read, of music that they should go and buy.
And they have gotten extremely rich doing it.
Almost all of their activities since leaving the presidency have been devoted to their own self-enrichment.
Which is their legal right, I guess.
But then don't go around giving sanctimonious lectures like these to other people.
Here from the Chicago Tribune, you can see a picture there of this massive, sprawling, beautiful mansion in Martha's Vineyard.
And you see there the Obamas buy a Martha's Vineyard mansion for $11.75 million.
To be clear, this is not their primary home.
This is kind of like a weekend home or a summer home or something because they had previously purchased a multi-million dollar mansion in Washington where they were staying in order to continue to influence the government once Donald Trump left the office.
But so this is just kind of like an extra house.
The Obamas had rented the estate this past summer and had been long-time summer guests on Martha's Vineyard, renting homes there for all but one of the years they occupied the White House.
Features in the new mansion include eight baths, vaulted ceilings, a living room with a stone fireplace, a master suite with a fireplace, and a private sun deck, an outdoor fireplace, a pool, and two guest wings.
The L-shaped property also has a private beach and a boathouse on Edgerton Great Pond, which is in the southwest corner of Martha's Vineyard.
The other two properties that the Obamas own are their six-bedroom, 6,200-square-foot mansion in the Southside Kenwood neighborhood, which they purchased for $1.65 million in 2005.
and their nine-bedroom, 6,400-square-foot mansion in Washington, D.C., Calorama neighborhood, which they purchased from one-time White House press secretary Joe Lockhart and his wife, Giovanna, in 2017 for $8.1 million.
Michelle Obama's mother, she said, taught her to look with a suspicious eye at people who take more than they need.
And what they've been doing since they've left office is collecting multi-million dollar mansions.
Here is a couple of details about the mansion that they own in Washington, which was intended to be part-time residence as well.
They are from NBC News in 2017, right after the Obamas left the White House.
The Obamas just bought an $8.1 million mansion in Washington, D.C.
Take a look inside.
Now, do you think it's healthy?
If you really want to take a look inside, you can go online and see it.
It's very grand, as grand as you would expect.
There's a picture of there, the backyard.
It's very, very spacious.
It has a bunch of outdoor expensive furniture.
Now, I don't know.
If one couple with adult children buy multiple sprawling $15-$10 million dollar mansions, maybe they have more than what they need, which is what Michelle Obama said her mother taught her to be very suspicious of people who do that.
And I don't know, it seems as well like the daughters of the Obamas are going to benefit a lot from what Michelle Obama called the affirmative action of generational wealth, to say nothing of being the children.
I'm a former president and a highly popular first lady.
So this is a very odd lecture coming from them and it would be one thing if they were this wealthy before they entered the presidency, it's just the Clintons were in debt throughout the 1990s and within about six seconds after leaving the White House, they were wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
Same with Tony Blair when he left the Prime Ministership in the UK.
As I said, he followed the Clinton's path of consulting with foreign governments, of giving $700,000 speeches, speaking for 45 minutes, getting almost a million dollars or half a million dollars in return.
Hillary's speeches are well documented.
The Obamas have done exactly the same thing, but they also have specialized in collecting extremely rich Friends, lots of billionaires, lots of celebrities, that's the people with whom they surround themselves.
Obama was talking about the perils of a society that encourages people to chase things that don't actually matter like wealth and fame and status and likes.
Here from NBC News, in February of 2017, the Obamas kite surfed with billionaire Richard Branson in the Virgin Islands holiday.
For eight years, former President Obama was barred from water sports by the Secret Service, but on his first post-White House vacation, he let fly on a kite board.
On the billionaire Richard Branson's yacht, on other yachts, oftentimes surrounded by very wealthy billionaire celebrities like George Clooney, people like that, that's pretty much the Obama's lives.
Pursuing massive generational wealth by exploiting their political influence and political prominence in order to do so.
And that's why I say they seem like very Unlikely messengers for this extremely uplifting sermon about the evils of people who seek too much or who chase fame and wealth and status and who take more than they need.
Here from Axios in 2017 is a little bit of a glimpse into how Obama got part of that wealth corporation.
Quote, Barack Obama to make $1.2 million from three Wall Street speeches.
Quote, less than a year after leaving the White House, President Obama has spoken at Wall Street's Northern Trust Corporation and Carlyle Group LP.
Next week, he'll speak at the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP's health care conference.
For each speech, Obama has received about $400,000, according to Bloomberg.
Obama's relationship with Wall Street Hasn't always been friendly.
Yes, it actually has always been friendly.
He slammed, quote, fat cat bankers after the 2008 crash, but did not prosecute anyone on Wall Street over the financial crisis.
He did the opposite.
He drowned them all in tens of billions of dollars of bailouts.
More than many of them even said that they needed, while letting huge amounts of people in the middle class and the working class have their homes foreclosed because none of those funds, even though they were designated and earmarked for that, were actually used, very little of it was, to help the middle class.
So it's not just the people with whom they surround themselves or their personal wealth, but it's the interests that they have always served in the pursuit of power, once in power, and then once leaving power.
That I think is very illustrative of what the Democratic Party, not just the Obamas, stand for as well.
Here from the New York Post in September of 2023, Michelle Obama earned nearly $750,000 for a one-hour speech.
Quote, the 59-year-old former lawyer spoke to an estimated 5,000 attendees on how to, quote, push past self-doubt.
While discussing the importance of inclusivity and diversity at the annual Bits and Pretzels Forum in Munich, for her speech, Obama was paid 700,000 euros, which is roughly equivalent to $741,000.
$1,000 to unidentified sources close to the conference organizers told the Daily Mail.
Michelle Obama could usually be booked for the very humble and modest speaking fee of $200,000, while her husband would cost $400,000, Axios reported in 2017.
Can you believe that people whose lives are that, who serve those interests, have the audacity, to borrow a term, to stand up and depict themselves as these humble public servants who accuse their political opponents to stand up and depict themselves as these humble public servants who accuse their political opponents of standing for wealth and wealth disparity and benefiting from generational wealth and serving the billionaire class when that's
Speaking of the affirmative action of generational wealth, one of the speakers on last night's schedule at the Democratic National Committee was Jack Schlossberg.
He is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy Jr., a family notorious for their generational wealth, for passing on enormous fortune that was earned by John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy.
through things like bootlegging and dealing with the mafia.
That's how the Kennedy family got their massive fortune that they've been able to pass down.
That's called generational wealth, which Michelle Obama said her mother taught her to look at people who have that with suspicion.
Oh, that's actually sorry.
That's people who take more than they need.
But she was saying we, Democrats, us, the normal people of America, we don't benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.
Jack Schlossberg does.
He spoke last night in primetime at the Democratic National Convention.
His mother was Caroline Kennedy.
His grandmother was Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Onassis because she ended up marrying one of the richest men on earth, the shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis of Greece.
She's talking about massive generational wealth, not just from the Kennedy side, but also from the Onassis side, from his grandmother.
Passed down to his mother, Caroline Kennedy, who then married a man whose last name is Schlossberg, and that's how Jack Schlossberg, JFK's juniors, 's grandson, got the name Jack Schlossberg, and here's part of what he had to say.
I'm Jack Schlossberg.
President John F. Kennedy is my grandfather, and he's my hero.
JFK was the youngest person ever elected president and the first Catholic.
He sent a man to the moon, fought for civil rights, and navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis peacefully.
Most of all, he inspired a new generation to ask what they could do for our country.
Tonight, JFK's call to action is now ours to answer.
Because once again, the torch has been passed to a new generation.
To a leader who shares my grandfather's energy, vision, and optimism for our future.
That leader is Vice President Kamala Harris.
I mean, talk about the affirmative action of generational wealth.
You will not find many symbols or pictures more vivid of it than that.
Although I'm about to show you one who's even much more prominent within the Democratic Party, who actually does surpass Jack Schlossberg when it comes to the living, breathing embodiment of The affirmative action of generational wealth.
Before we get to that, let's hear what the socialist and independent from Vermont Bernie Sanders had to say when he ascended to the platform to urge everybody on the left to vote for Kamala Harris.
And this is part of what he said was the reason.
When the political will is there, government can effectively deliver for the people of our country.
And now we need to summon that will again, because too many of our fellow Americans are struggling every day to just get by, to put food on the table, to pay the rents, and to get the health care they need.
Brothers and sisters, bottom line, We need an economy that works for all of us, not just the billionaire class.
Now, first of all, when Bernie first ran in 2016, he used to rave against a political class that serves the interests of millionaires and billionaires.
That's what that phrase was that he repeated constantly.
The problem was Bernie became a millionaire through his political fame and influence.
Wrote books, bought houses.
And so he had to take out that millionaire's part because he now is one, like pretty much everyone in our political and ruling class becomes if they're not already.
And so now his speech is about the evils of a political class that serve the interests of billionaires.
You would not know from listening to Bernie Sanders or from this convention that the party that has run the government and the country for 12 of the last 16 years is this party, the Democratic Party.
So to the extent that we have a politics that serves the interest of a billionaire class, who has done that?
Who has created that politics?
Who's responsible for it?
It's the party that Bernie Sanders is urging everybody to vote for.
based on, again, on an appeal to values that are the very opposite of what this party represents.
Now, speaking of the epitome of affirmative action of generational wealth, one of the lefts, the left-wing part of the Democratic Party, most popular leaders, is the governor of Illinois, J.D. Pritchard.
Pritzker, who is a billionaire, but not because of anything that he did, other than being born into a family of billionaires, where he became the heir to a billionaire fortune, not unlike, say, Congressman Dan Goldman, who represents Manhattan.
Of course, Nancy Pelosi, one of the most influential people in the party, is filthy rich as well, for a whole variety of reasons that we covered previously.
But the Pritzker family is the living, breathing embodiment of the affirmative action of generational wealth, as Michelle Obama put it.
And yet here was Governor Pritzker and his multi-billionaire net worth speaking at the Democratic National Convention last night.
Donald Trump thinks that we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich.
but take it from an actual billionaire.
Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.
Trump is rich in only one thing.
I don't even know what to say about that at this point.
I mean it kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, pretty much the entire convention.
We're trying to say that the Democratic Party is the party of the working class, that they are not a party of billionaires, that they have to work for what they get, they don't benefit from generational wealth, and here you have not only An heir to one of the richest families in America.
And just to be clear, here is a Forbes summary of the Pritzker family.
They have a net worth of $41.6 billion.
If we can put that on the screen there, you see the Pritzker family, $41.6 billion.
They're one of America's richest families by net worth.
And that's where Pritzker got his money from, as Forbes says, quote, With his sons, A.N.
Pritzker, who died in 1986, created Hyatt and invested in industrial conglomerate Marmon Group, now owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
Thomas Pritzker serves as chairman of Hyatt.
His son, Jason Pritzker, also sits on the company's board.
J.B.
Pritzker became governor of Illinois in 2019.
His sister, Penny Pritzker, was secretary of commerce in the Obama administration.
So the person who ran the economy or commerce for the Obama administration was not someone who struggled from the working class, who had to work to overcome all sorts of barriers.
The person who the Obamas chose to run commerce in the United States was the living, breathing embodiment of, in Michelle Obama's words, the affirmative action of generational wealth.
But the remarkable thing about that Pritzker speech was he boasted of being a billionaire.
He's like, take it from me, I'm a real billionaire.
And they went wild.
They all applauded.
I mean, you can say what you want about Donald Trump.
He definitely was born into a very wealthy family, nowhere near the wealth of the Pritzkers.
And he was able to take that money and build it into this kind of real estate empire that had a lot of failures, a lot of successes.
And now, just based on truth social alone, the stock that Trump holds is worth several billion dollars, just based on that.
So this idea that the Democratic Party spends its whole convention saying how disgusted they are by people born into wealth, by people who serve the billionaire class, but then the minute one of their leaders gets up and brags about the fact that he's a billionaire, not because of even anything that he did, not because of anything that he created, But because his grandpa and his daddy built this billion dollar empire and he just got it for no reason.
And the Democrats are cheering that.
That is the values of the Democratic Party that I would say are quite antithetical to the values that all those speakers we just looked at.
We're touting.
Now, one last point about people who have benefited from the affirmative action of generational wealth.
I suggested just a moment ago that Governor Pritzker might be the leading breathing embodiment of that, but I want to take that back.
I want to retract that because there is somebody who was at the Democratic National Convention who has funded it, who was all over it.
Who, if you look in the dictionary under the term Affirmative Action of Generational Wealth, you will find his picture.
That is Alex Soros, whose daddy is George Soros, who became a multi-billionaire by wrecking a couple countries' economies and currencies.
And now he's the biggest funder of the Democratic Party.
And now he has stepped down in his old age.
I believe he's in his late 80s.
And he has chosen as his successor his 39-year-old son, Alex, who is now in charge of all those billions of dollars.
And he has immediately become a very prominent figure in the Democratic Party.
Here he is with pictures of all the Democratic Party leaders, including Bill Clinton and others.
And my guess is that Alexander Soros is not central to the Democratic Party and is not able to fund the Democratic Party because of his great achievement and great merit.
I also think you can pretty much say that Alex Soros is somebody who has taken more than they need.
All these people are perfect examples of that.
The whole Democratic Party.
And it's not just that they're composed of those kind of people.
You could be someone like, say, FDR, who came from a very wealthy family, and advocate for the poor.
That's not what this party is.
That's not what they do.
That's why they cheer wildly when they hear a Democratic Party official boasting of being a billionaire, because they think that's something that's so admirable.
They want those to fund their party.
And that is who funds their party.
That's who runs their party.
And those are the people whose interests shape and determine party policy.
And so to watch these people just one after another parade around with these fraudulent speeches designed to deceive the public into believing that the party is the exact opposite of what it actually is, that their lives are the exact opposite of what they want to depict it as being, is at minimum pretty nauseating.
And at the very least that's worth kind of dissecting because in the section you see not only the fraud of those people, but also the reality of the party.
One company that has not benefited from the affirmative action of generational wealth is Rumble, the platform that our program is on.
And one of the reasons we are on it, one of the main reasons, is because of their genuine commitment to free speech.
And it's for exactly that reason, that genuine commitment to free speech, that they have been under attack by media outlets and all sorts of other interests because they don't censor, because they allow a wide range of views to be heard, including trying to drive corporate advertisers away.
And so Rumble has always been looking for ways to combat that, to make sure there is a sustainable financial model, even though you're allowing free speech and refusing the orders to censor that the entire establishment and its power sectors want you to accept and obey.
It's part of the main reason there's so many attacks on Elon Musk as well.
But Rumble's more vulnerable.
They're not, as I said, a company that was formed by a multibillionaire.
They're not a company that is run by someone with billions of dollars.
And one of the strategies they have for how to make themselves financially successful as they pursue this agenda of free speech is by marketing and creating their own products that the media can't cancel, can't drive corporate advertisers away.
And one of their main products is their very own 1775 coffee, which is a coffee that both defends free speech and is also great tasting coffee.
It's ethically sourced from a family farm in the high altitude mountains of Bolivia.
There are a bunch of roasts to choose from, different flavors.
I talked in the past about how my favorite Roast was dark, the dark roast, but I have been sampling others, as I've said before, and I'm starting to like a bunch of others as well.
You should definitely check those out and see which one appeals most to you.
If you do so, and as we always say, we're not asking you to just buy products for the sake of buying them.
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One of the ethoses of the Republican convention that I have to say actually surprised me was the lack of tight messaging control.
You could often hear one or two speakers at the podium speak about various policy views or ideological views defending, say, the war in Ukraine or U.S.
funding of the war in Israel.
And then the next speaker would get up and take the exact opposite position because there are actually different factions within the Republican Party that vibrantly debate issues and that have wildly different views.
The exact opposite is true of the Democratic Party.
You would never, ever Hear or see a person be permitted to speak at the Democratic Party who had even an iota of divergence or difference or critique of a policy of the Democratic Party, not even in the slightest.
Even if they wanted to critique the policy of the Democratic Party as Bernie Sanders did, you have to pretend that that's not what you're doing.
You have to pretend that you're defending the Democratic Party and that those kind of policies, say, that serve the interests of the billionaires are only what the Republicans think.
And the way that they've done that is by creating a party, not just at the convention, but in general, that is brutally intolerant of the slightest dissent.
Everything about this party, the way it's constructed, the way the convention is running, is intended to purge that dissent.
That's why you never, ever hear, say, people who ran for Congress on the platform of criticizing the Democratic Party, like AOC, ever criticize the Democratic Party anymore.
Because it's not permitted within the Democratic Party.
You get punished, or in the case of people like Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush, you get removed from Congress.
And I haven't seen a convention quite as dissent-free, both in terms of its ethos, but also in terms of its structure as the DNC.
Now, one of the things that has been happening is there is a small group of people within the party who have actually been engaging in activism around the war in Gaza from the very start.
I'm not talking here about the liberal YouTubers and Twitch streamers and the like who have benefited a great deal.
By talking about and pretending to be concerned about the war in Gaza only to now drop it completely and demand everybody vote for the people who have been arming and funding that war that they've been calling a genocide because they care most about partisan allegiance.
I'm not talking about those people.
I'm talking about the people who actually care about the war in Gaza.
They're there.
They're trying to make their voices heard.
They're calling themselves uncommitted.
They're staging protests outside and one of the things that they asked for Really the only thing a lot of them have asked for is for a single Palestinian American just to be able to go up on the stage and speak.
Not to speak critically about Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, but just to heap praise on the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party is so fearful.
That the mere presence of a Palestinian American on stage, even one who is a member of the Democratic Party, who is a candidate in the Democratic Party, who worships Kamala Harris and is doing everything possible to urge people to vote for Kamala Harris, their mere presence might signify implicitly some kind of a dissent.
against the Biden-Harris policy of funding and arming Israel in this war in Gaza, and they just won't allow them.
People are begging them at this point.
Democrats, please just let us go on stage for 90 seconds.
We will praise you, Lord.
Nope, not allowing that.
that.
Here from the Jerusalem Post today, quote, uncommitted DNC delegates stage a sit-in in protest of the refusal of permission to address Gaza.
Quote, Abbas al-Wally and other uncommitted delegates held a press conference on the sidewalk outside of the convention center.
Can we put that article up on the screen as I read it?
LA, said he would remain in front of the convention center until Vice President Kamala Harris and party leaders changed their minds and allowed for Palestinian voices to speak about Gaza in the same way That the Golden Pullins were given the opportunity to speak about their son, Hirsch, and call for a hostage deal.
That was an Israeli couple that went up onto the stage and spoke movingly about the pain of their son being held hostage in Gaza, but they actually said they also spoke about the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
The only people who have basically done that, but they were still, they were Israelis, they were Jews, they were talking about it as a parent suffering from their son being held hostage in Gaza for 10 months now.
Obviously desperate to get him back, as any parent would be.
But no Palestinian has been able to go up and speak about the pain from the Democratic Party's policy of arming and funding Israel and giving them the bombs they're using to bomb Gaza.
Quote, the Democratic Party platform said that it valued every Israeli and Palestinian life equally.
Halawe said, and they asked for a Palestinian speaker, was, quote, made every which way.
Quote, I've been in touch with top DNC staffers.
I've been in touch with advisors to Vice President Harris.
I know she knows about this ask.
We're not even asking you to change the policy right now with this specific task.
Yes, we want you to change the policy, but we just want to be heard.
Jeremiah Ellison, an uncommitted delegate from Minnesota who also sits on the Minneapolis City Council, Michael Tracy interviewed him, and that was one of the interviews we posted on Locals.
Here is the uncommitted national movement.
Here is the uncommitted national movement.
They have been the movement during the primary that said, don't vote for Joe Biden.
Demand that the Democratic Party change its Israel policy or withhold your vote, which was a wise strategic.
thing to do.
That's what you do when a party is pursuing a policy that you find deeply offensive and immoral, in this case that you've been calling genocide, is you withhold your vote from the party until they change.
You don't pledge your unconditional loyalty to the party in advance while getting nothing in return.
Which is what most of these left liberal media influencers do.
And here's what they said today.
Quote, the Democratic Party has ignored Palestinian voices, canceling meetings, belittling protesters, and now blocking a Palestinian speaker from appearing at the DNC.
We won't let that happen.
Palestinian Americans have watched for 10 plus months as Democrats have spent their own tax dollars supplying Israel with weapons to kill their loved ones in Palestine.
Refusing to give them just five minutes at the DNC is shameful.
Hashtag sit in for an arms embargo.
Once Joe Biden was forced from the race, there was a group that formed that called itself Muslim Women for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Muslim Women for Harris-Walz.
They're saying, we're Muslim, but we are here to support the Harris-Walz ticket and to encourage other Muslims to vote for them.
But here's what they said today.
We cannot in good conscience continue the group Muscle Woman for Harris-Walls.
In light of this new information from the Uncommitted Movement, that Vice President Harris' team declined their request to have a Palestinian-American speaker take the stage at the DNC.
The family of the Israeli hostage that was on the stage tonight has shown more empathy toward Palestinian-Americans and Palestinians than our candidate or the DNC has.
This is a terrible message to send to Democrats.
Palestinians have the right to speak about Palestine.
We pray that the DNC and Vice President Harris's team makes the right decision before this convention is over for the sake of each of us.
And just to underscore just how little The people who are purporting to speak, the Democratic Party hacks, who are purporting to speak on behalf of Palestinian Americans, I want you to see how pathetic and minimal and trivial what they're asking for is.
And they're begging, they're begging on their knees, almost literally on their knees, just to be given 90 seconds for a Palestinian to go up to the stage and to urge Support for Kamala Harris.
That's all they're asking for.
Here's Mehdi Hassan, who has been purporting to speak on behalf of Palestinians for a long time, his whole career, basically.
And his far more powerful and primary allegiance is not to the Palestinian cause, but to the Democratic Party, because that's what keeps his good standing in media.
And here's what he said today.
Reporters are being briefed, it seems, that the DNC accepted Democratic State Representative Rua for Georgia as a Palestinian speaker for tonight on the stage, but Uncommitted turned her down.
Now, Rua for Georgia is a Palestinian-American and a Democrat who's running for office in Georgia, and she has made clear she just wants to go up on the stage in order to talk about why everybody should vote for Kamala Harris.
She doesn't even want to criticize the Democratic Party.
Which is remarkable.
If you got the opportunity to go up on the stage, you wouldn't criticize the Democratic Party for arming and funding Israel and giving them the bombs used to destroy Gaza, even though you say that's your number one cause.
But these people are hardcore party hacks.
They're saying, we'll go up and speak.
We won't utter a word about any criticism of Democrats.
We just want to be one of the people who gets to go up on stage and herald our new leader, Kamala Harris.
Matty goes on, quote, it is simply not true that the Uncommitted group turned her down.
It's a lie.
He said, quote, being told, I assume by DNC spinners now on the defensive, Uncommitted are the ones who pitched her.
And there's still time for the DNC to put Rua for Georgia on stage tonight for only just two minutes.
He just wants 120 seconds.
Mehdi's begging.
Just put a Palestinian on stage for 120 seconds to let them urge votes for Kamala Harris so that you can deceive everybody into believing that Palestinians support the Democratic Party because they're better on Israel.
It's a ask of deceit.
Mehdi wants to be able to advocate for Kamala Harris's election, as do other people like him.
By pretending that the Democrats are better than Biden on Israel now.
And the way they do that is by getting some token Palestinian Democrat to go up on stage and say, for 90 seconds or two minutes, please vote Democrat.
It's urgent for us that you do so.
And they won't even let them do that.
He said, quote, There's still time for the DNC to put Rua for Georgia on stage tonight for two minutes if they have time and space for a former Republican congressman and for Israeli family members of a hostage.
They have time and space for an elected Palestinian Democratic lawmaker.
Anything else is straight up a racism and erasure.
So do you see how much they've reduced their ask?
And converted their tone not to demand, but to pleading and begging.
And still the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, the convention leaders will not allow a Palestinian to go up on stage because their very presence might be construed as some kind of an implicit criticism of the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris.
And that's the thing that they will not permit.
Now, again, just to give you a contrast, here is David Sachs, who is one of the original founders of PayPal.
He's become extremely wealthy, billionaire type from Silicon Valley.
He's been on our show before talking about Ukraine.
He's become a vocal opponent of U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine.
And he's a supporter and funder of Donald Trump.
And I think that's the reason he was given a speaking slot at the RNC, although he's also the host of an extremely popular and influential political podcast called All In that he does with other Silicon Valley billionaire types like him.
So it could be for that reason as well.
But here is what he was able to say at the RNC.
First, President Biden botched the Afghanistan withdrawal, displaying incompetence and weakness for the whole world to see.
Now you hear how quiet that is because he's not just saying that the U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine was wrong, he's blaming the U.S.
and the Biden administration for, in his words, provoking the Russians to invade by threatening to expand NATO up to the Ukrainian border with Russia.
It's a very radical position to take, including in the Republican Party, but they let him go up and say it in very stark terms.
And there wasn't a lot of applause, but that message was heard.
Afterward, he rejected every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it broke out.
Now the war is deep into its third year with no end in sight.
Hundreds of thousands of people are dead.
Hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars have gone up in smoke.
President Biden sold us this new forever war by promising it would weaken Russia and strengthen America.
Well, how does that look today?
Russia's military is bigger than before, while our own stockpiles are dangerously depleted.
All right, so now you may say that there's a lot of vocal conservatives in the Trump base who are opposed to the war in Ukraine, and that's true.
But the vast, vast, vast majority of Republican senators and Republican House members support Biden's policy in Ukraine.
They've been voting to finance it, to fund it.
The overwhelming majority of the Republican Party's view is that we need to finance the war in Ukraine until the very end, whenever that is, and never stop.
And so to allow someone like David Sachs to go up on the stage and say the exact opposite, that actually it was the U.S.
that provoked that war, shows you how fewer controls there were, to put it mildly, at the Republican Convention, and the better and greater tolerance there was for dissent.
Speaking of that, here is Tucker Carlson in a prominent primetime slot, Was allowed to say and he was very clear and I know this for a fact, he did not write his speech in advance and therefore could not and did not give it to anybody to approve.
No one asked to vet it.
No one asked to approve it.
He went up and just said whatever he wanted off the cuff and a lot of it was also contrary to the orthodoxy of the Republican Party.
Democracy on television?
Actual democracy is the proposition that the citizens of a country own that country.
They're not renters, they're not serfs, they're not slaves, they are the owners of the country.
And for that to be true, their leaders have to represent them, which is another way of saying they have to do what the people want them to do.
Or a close approximation thereof.
But if they completely ignore what people want, not just one year, but generationally, say for 50 years, then it may be, I don't know what, it's not a democracy.
And so I think the entire Trump project, paradoxically, is attacked as an enemy of democracy, is to return democracy to the United States.
Hey, let's pay attention to what people actually want.
And the lack of interest in that question in Washington is something that ultimately drove me out of the city after 35 years.
Lawmakers stepping over the prostrate bodies of their fellow citizens OD'ing on drugs to go cast votes to send money to some foreign country.
Yeah, actually, we've lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II.
Our bloodiest war.
More than we lost in World War II.
Does anybody care?
It is pathetic.
It is pathetic.
And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it?
We know where the drugs are coming from.
We know the supply routes.
The U.S.
military spent billions bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
You don't see our commander-in-chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country or the lives of its citizens.
No!
That's for Ukraine.
And it's too much, actually.
It's too insulting.
It's too insulting.
It's a middle finger in the face of every American.
It's a very clear statement, which is unmistakable.
And that is, we don't care about you.
And Donald Trump Whatever you say about him, and I think he's a wonderful person, I know him well.
By the way, the funniest person I've ever met in my life, actually.
You can't be funny without perspective, or without empathy, which is true.
But everything else about Trump aside, he actually cares.
Because he's interested in the people who live here, because that's his job.
A father's job, his duty is to his family.
An officer's duty is to his men, a president's duty is to his citizens.
And he seems to be the only one who thinks that.
So obviously he's praising Donald Trump there, which is what you'd expect at a convention, but he's doing it by essentially saying that there's nobody in Washington, including the Republican Party, that cares about the United States citizens at all because they ignored their issues in order to send billions of dollars to foreign countries like Ukraine.
And although we didn't say it, like Israel.
And he was criticizing the Republican Party, clearly, as much as he was the Democratic Party.
Imagine a speaker being allowed to do that at the Democratic Convention.
It's inconceivable.
Instead, what you have is not just the delegates and the people who are invited into the Democratic National Convention Hall who are being so giddy and swooning in favor of the leaders, also people who are called reporters.
This is an NBC News reporter, Jacob Soboroff.
I just want you to look at his posture, how happy he is to be on the floor of the Democratic National Committee, surrounded by delegates swooning for Kamala Harris.
He's happier than they are.
This is the mood inside.
Even the journalists are swept away in their adoration for the Democrats and for Kamala Harris.
Watch this.
This is somebody who at some point in their lives, when they were like 20 or 22, at some point they decided, I want to be a journalist.
And presumably when they did that, they had like this idea in mind of what a journalist does.
I don't know what was in his head, but I seriously doubt it was this.
I need to go to the Minnesota delegation right now because I think that Jacob Soboroff is about to be crowd surfing or something.
You OK?
Rachel, I can't hear a damn thing, but I'll save one of these for you.
They're handing out Tim Walz's head.
Guys, how are you feeling?
He's going to save a gigantic cardboard photo of Tim Walz's head and give it to Rachel Maddow as a present.
She's very excited to receive that.
This is not an MSNBC opinion host.
This is an NBC News reporter.
And just look at him.
I'm telling you, this is like the best day of his life.
He's happier than the delegates.
Fabulous!
How you doing?
How you feeling?
Excited about our new leadership.
Excited about democracy for America.
Excited about it.
Like I said, I cannot hear a damn thing that anybody's saying, but everybody is very, very excited in the Minnesota delegation.
Coach!
I'm speechless.
So for me, Jacob.
If you need help, I actually don't even know what I'd tell you to do.
If you need help, just try to get away.
That's all I can tell you.
We got you, Jacob.
We already got you, Jacob.
All that's going to be left is a little tuft of hair and those glasses, but he's going to die happy.
Man up!
Yeah!
I did that for my mom!
He was chanting with them.
I don't know if you noticed that at the end.
He was chanting with the delegates.
He was having the time of his life.
The peak of his career was to be around the Democratic National Convention and the politics of joy.
And Rachel Maddow could, I mean, honestly I think she has some sort of like cramps in her cheeks from how much she was smiling the whole time.
And these are the people who are covering the convention.
This is the mood of the Democratic Party and those people who are hangers-on of it as well.
There's never an ounce of dissent, of questioning, of criticism.
They don't even vote for their leaders.
They're told who their leaders are and they fall lockstep behind them and cheer.
And that's what the Democratic Party ethos is and that's what this convention is as well.
Here is a video of a journalist.
I'm not sure which journalist this is.
I think it might be Jack Posobich, who is in the convention with credentials, press credentials.
And he spots Eric Holder, who not only is the former attorney general for the Obama administration and an extremely wealthy and powerful, influential Washington lawyer, but he is also someone who has been working on the Kamala Harris campaign, including vetting various people, including leading including vetting various people, including leading the vetting process for the various vice presidential choices.
And he tries to question Eric Holder.
And watch what happens.
Excuse me, H.E.
Holder.
H.E.
Holder, why didn't you vet Tim Waltz?
Why didn't you vet Tim Waltz?
What about his stolen valor?
Why are you hurting me?
What about stolen valor?
Why didn't you vet him for Stolen Valor, A.G.
Holder?
So, Eric Holder is surrounded by these thugs, presumably these armed thugs, who are acting as his security, which is fine if Eric Holder thinks he needs armed security.
I guess he has the right to do that.
It's kind of odd, I always think, for a party that constantly warns against the dangers of people having guns.
They always are interested in making sure that they're protected with them.
But he's surrounded by A bunch of people who are clearly there to physically intimidate anyone who might get near him.
He's not even a member of the government.
He hasn't been a member of the government for almost a decade now.
He was Attorney General for the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2016.
And there's no attempt on the part of the person asking the questions to be physically intimidating, to try and get into his space, let alone threatening any kind of physical And here's the rest of it.
against Eric Holder, and yet his thugs, the people who are walking around him, for whatever reason, they feel entitled inside the Democratic National Convention Hall to start accosting and physically assaulting and pushing and being threatening to, very physically threatening to, someone who's just asking a question, a very legitimate question, which is why didn't you vet Tim Walz someone who's just asking a question, a very legitimate question, which is why didn't you vet Tim Walz properly and see that he had And here's the rest of it.
It just gets worse.
You know, you're a fool, okay?
Why do you lie?
Why did he lie about deploying to Iraq, AG Holder?
You can stop pushing me now.
You can stop pushing me now.
Why did he lie about deploying to Iraq?
Excuse me, I'm press.
I am press.
I am press.
I'm back, here they're coming up on me.
He's the one who cursed me, I want to answer the question.
Why did Tim Walz lie about going to Iraq and you didn't vet him?
You didn't vet him Eric Holder.
You did not vet Tim Walz.
Why did you not vet Tim Walz's stolen valor?
Why didn't you vet his IVF?
He lied about IVF!
He lied about his rank!
Eric Holder couldn't do his job!
Have I been aggressive in any way?
And what about yourself?
What about yourself?
Vocal on press!
So I think it's so illustrative of the Democratic elite mindset.
And also a lot of people come from the Republican Party.
These people get out of office and they immediately monetize their influence in Washington that comes from being in public service.
They become extremely wealthy immediately, like the Obamas did, like the Clintons did.
From nothing to immense wealth overnight.
And then they believe they're sort of part of this permanent aristocratic class.
They retain their titles.
If he gets interviewed, Eric Holder, people will say, Mr. Attorney General, even though he hasn't been Attorney General for a decade.
In fact, Jack Posevich was doing that as well, A.G.
Holder, using this title, this lifelong title, like these are part of the land of gentry.
And what gives people like this the right to have armed guards or physically imposing guards push people and physically block them when all they're trying to do is ask a question?
People who are credentialed as members of the media.
It's these people are isolated and separated and believe that they have intrinsic to them these immense privileges that nobody else has and where do those come from?
Why does Eric Holder get to walk around with a group of thugs who push people and physically assault them for asking Eric Holder questions?
Especially at a public event like a Democratic National Convention when you have credentials to the media and the person has them.
Here is what happened when Ryan Grim, the journalist, tried to question one of the speakers, Julia Louise Dreyfus, who, speaking of the affirmative action of generational wealth, was born into one of America's richest families.
Her father was a multi-billionaire.
He was an investment banker.
He had founded an investment bank.
And so she's yet another Democrat who comes from a billionaire family.
She was, she's a speaker there.
She's not just there as a citizen.
She's being a speaker on behalf of the Democratic Party.
So Ryan Grimm, being a journalist, tried to ask her questions, and this is what happened.
- I think we just got a couple of questions.
- I don't know.
- So, - - Hello, I'm-- - - Julia, Julia, we have one quick question for you.
- No, we're not gonna do press.
It's a real quick question.
One question is...
No, thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
This is the media area, by the way. .
No, it's so funny because Julia Louise Dreyfuss starred in that HBO show Veep where she played a hapless vice president surrounded by sycophants, including a very aggressive aide who would constantly push people out of the way whenever Julia Louise Dreyfuss's vice presidential candidate Got anywhere near the media and that was, the character's name was Amy.
She had a little Amy there saying, we're not taking any questions.
You cannot get near her.
She's in the media area where journalists are supposed to be.
She's speaking at the convention and yet there's no sense from her that she should have to answer questions.
Michael Tracy also interviewed Rick Wilson, who's one of the founders of the Lincoln Project.
He was a long-time Republican campaign operative.
He's now a fanatical supporter of the Democratic Party.
He's gotten extremely rich through donations from liberals who have drowned his organization with many millions of dollars, only a tiny percentage of which have actually gone to airing ads against Trump or against the Republican Party.
They mostly just take it.
He also, Rick Wilson did, had a GoFundMe page where he said he was collecting money from the public for an anti-Trump film that he said would devastate Trump, would reveal all Trump's secrets, would destroy his candidacy.
He got $65,000 in cash from just small donors in the public who really thought he was going to produce a devastating anti-Trump film.
He never produced that film.
He pocketed the $65,000.
Okay, so Rick Wilson, Lincoln Project.
First of all, have you ever seen a worse organized convention logistically?
and you'll see something very similar happen as what happened with Ryan Grimm and Jack Posovich.
- Okay, so Rick Wilson, Lincoln Project.
First of all, have you ever seen a worse organized convention logistically?
- Actually, about four times before in my life.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- There were all RNC conventions where I used to be a Republican.
The Houston Convention?
Raging shitshow.
The San Diego Convention?
Raging shitshow.
The New Orleans Convention?
Drunken shitshow.
Those three stand out particularly.
This is not disorganized by any sort of historic standards at all.
Conventions are large, multivariate, complex machines.
This one is not extraordinary in any way in terms of good or bad.
What I am seeing is it's stressed to the max by the fact that millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people, want to be in that room.
This is a bigger line than I've ever seen Any other convention, Republican or Democrat, that I've been to.
And I've been to conventions since I was 8 years old in 1972.
So I've been around the block on these things a few times.
I've worked conventions several times.
I've been in the SPEN team on the Republican side in two Democratic conventions.
So this is pretty well run actually.
And what they've accomplished so far I think is pretty extraordinary.
Well, we covered the RNC last month, and I'm not making any partisan point, but I don't think we ever waited more than, like, four minutes to get through one of the security checkpoints.
There weren't that many people interested in being there then, obviously.
Yeah, we're done.
We're done.
We're not playing.
No, no, no!
We're not playing this!
Okay, look at this Whitney person.
She's like the Amy for Julia Louise Dreyfuss, like those thugs who are around Eric Holder.
It's fine to say, look, we Don't want to answer any more questions.
That's absolutely this prerogative, but she just like this Whitney person barges in and just starts grabbing Michael's microphone and sort of pushing him away.
We're using like the same kind of physical aggression.
Where do these people get off doing this?
It really is illustrative of their mentality.
Watch this behavior.
There weren't that many people interested in being there then, obviously.
Yeah, we're done.
We're done.
We're not playing.
No, no, no!
We're not playing this!
Good night, guys.
Let's go.
Whitney, I got this.
I was just making an innocuous observation.
Alright, listen.
Whitney, let's go.
Whitney, let's go.
No, no.
Whitney, hold on.
Jeff?
No, we're done.
The person who was filming that is our producer and the social media manager on our staff, Megan O'Rourke.
She's as polite a person as you will ever meet.
And after trying to grab Michael's microphone and push him away from Rick Wilson, not exactly one of the most powerful and influential people on the planet, she just began, like, pushing Megan's camera and putting her hand in front of it.
Where do these people get off doing this?
Like they have the right to just use physical force or physical intimidation to shield people who are at a convention trying to exert influence over our politics to just force people who are there as part of the media to ask questions.
But this is the ruling class mentality.
This is the mentality of Democratic Party elites.
They do think that they are elevated, that they have rights that nobody else has, and the way in which the convention is structured, the way in which the Democratic Party functions.
They had a candidate who was handed to them, who never campaigned for their vote, who ran for president four years ago, and it was a disaster.
No one voted for her, and the Democratic Party elites who met in secret said, here's your candidate, and they all swooned for her now.
They're not at all bothered that she doesn't answer questions or speak to the media.
Everything is lockstep loyalty, lockstep obedience to party orders.
And you see that mentality permeating every part of this convention.
All right, now having said that, there were a couple of people who were quite gracious in their time and in their willingness to speak to Michael.
And as you know, he generally asks probing questions of the kind that they're not generally accustomed to hearing.
And even though it's a perfectly pleasant interview, it's still kind of shocking, a couple of these.
Including with the very longtime Congresswoman from a district in South Florida that I know very well.
I grew up there.
It's a heavily Jewish district.
It covers, I believe, Boca Raton and parts of West Palm Beach.
She's fanatically pro-Israel, but she was very pleasant, very well-behaved, and not at all rude.
Actually came across as a nice lady.
But some of the stuff she said was unbelievable.
So I just want to, I wanted to show you a couple of these interviews, and because we're running out of time, what we're going to do instead is show a couple of them on the after show, put them on local.
So if you want to see that content, at least for now, we'll probably make it available publicly in a couple days, but you can join our local community but here i wanted i do want to show you this interview uh because it's a wide-ranging interview about ukraine and israel and war and kamala harris and it's just amazing this is a member of congress who gets to vote for billions of dollars to go fund wars and it's kind of shocking what she has to say okay we're with congressman lois frankel of florida how are you ma'am i'm doing well um so you know there's been a debate
i guess you could say in the democratic party which i guess you're sick of hearing about at this point but is it uh is the democratic party still You actually just referenced that in your remarks.
The substance of the policy of the Biden-Harris administration seems to me it's an overwhelming yes.
You referenced sending military assets into the Eastern Mediterranean and so forth, lots of military aid that which you've also supported.
Are the people who are protesting and the small handful of uncommitted delegates, the people who are voicing these criticisms, are they really a minority?
Are they being dwarfed by the overwhelming pro-Israel sentiment?
What do you make of the status of that debate?
Well, first of all, this is a democracy.
So you have to say, hey, if you want to keep your democracy, you have to accept there's going to be differences of opinion.
As long as the protest is peaceful, it's acceptable.
But harassing students going into school, trying to stop kids from going to school, that's not acceptable.
Or trying to stop people from going into the convention, I don't like that either.
But speak in your mind.
That's part of the American process.
I mean, that's our democracy.
We also know this.
Much of this protest comes from really people just feeling bad about the casualties of the war.
I mean, that's part of it.
And then you have some instigation from Iran who have whatever, whether it's through the Internet or on the ground or are trying to rev up.
What's the latest evidence?
By the way, the reason I find that so funny that she's saying that these protesters protesting the American funding and arming of the war in Israel, the war in Gaza by Israel, are instigated by or being funded by or directed by whatever Iran is.
I mean, she says some of these people are genuine activists, but she blames Iran for having instigated a lot of these protests and a lot of this activism.
The reason I find that so funny is because back in February, Nancy Pelosi went on CNN and blamed Russia.
There were a bunch of protesters outside our house protesting the U.S.
policy of arming and funding Israel.
Nancy Pelosi went on CNN and said, a lot of these people are doing Putin's bidding.
They're controlled by the Kremlin.
And the CNN was like, what?
They're controlled by the Kremlin?
And Nancy Pelosi was like, yes, these people are loyal to Putin.
And then like two months later, when she confronted them outside her house, she kind of pushed them away and made it through to her car.
And she said, go back to China.
That's where you're from.
Those are the people who rule you.
So first she blamed Russia, then she blamed China.
And now this Democratic Congresswoman is blaming Iran for these protests.
I mean, they just always look for some foreign villain or foreign source to blame for whatever dissent there is inside the United States.
And here's what Michael asked her.
Whatever, whether it's through the internet or on the ground or trying to rev up.
What's the latest evidence on that?
What instigation has Iran been doing?
I mean, this is what we hear from the CIA and the FBI is that there is instigation from Iran.
It's part of it.
So Michael asked her, what's the evidence for this claim that you just made, this quite serious allegation that these protesters are being incited or instigated by Iran?
Like, what evidence is there for that claim?
And she's like, yeah, I don't have any evidence.
It's just like we hear that from the CIA, the FBI.
The Democratic Party is the party of the U.S. security state.
Whatever the CIA tells them, whatever the FBI tells them, they believe that automatically.
They don't need evidence.
She's like, yeah, the proof of this being true is that the CIA and FBI told me that it was true.
There's also genuine grassroots feelings about this.
I think some of it is really based on information.
I mean, the internet's gone crazy on this work.
Do you want the social media platforms to crack down on speech more, or are you more on the First Amendment side, or what's your point on that?
I'm not talking about cracking down on anything.
I tell you, I am a Jew.
As a Jew, it's very frustrating to me when the protests are against Israel.
Not against Hamas, not against Iran, not against the Houthis.
That's very troublesome to me.
I have to say, why is that?
Could it be because the United States is funding Israel, arming Israel, but they're not funding Iran, right?
I have a different theory, which is, you know, For Jews, there are threats other than what's happening in Israel, and that's called anti-Semitism.
And so I, you know, so look, I'm not going to point fingers, but I think a lot of the reaction is just anti-Semitism.
And think about all the problems in the world.
What's happening?
The suffering.
Sudan.
Millions of people are dying from starvation.
You have violence in Haiti.
You have women's rights taken away in Afghanistan.
We could look at China.
I mean, so many bad things are going on.
Why are the protests only against Israel?
So look, I mean, like I said, she seems like a very nice lady.
I know a lot of Jewish women like this.
I think I even have some aunts who are kind of similar to this.
And like, you know, she's doing a good job engaging the questions.
She's being very polite, as I said.
But she can't process the fact that the United States Is the country that is arming and funding Israel far more than it is any other country?
I mean, now we give more to Ukraine than we do to Israel.
But over years and decades, Israel is by far the biggest recipient of U.S.
arms and U.S.
aid.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars every year.
So, yeah, there's a lot of suffering around the world.
But when you're an American citizen, you look to see which suffering your government is responsible for, which suffering is the policies of your government causing.
Because that's a suffering you can do something about.
And so he's trying to explain to her, well, maybe the reason that there's a focus on Israel's destruction of Gaza is because our government is actually funding and arming that.
And she says, no, no, it must be because of anti-Semitism.
Okay, so one of your potential future colleagues, George Latimer, is here.
He won the most expensive primary race in American history recently against an incumbent, Jamal Bowman, and there were a lot of people who were pro-Israel who funded his campaign.
I've spoken to some of your colleagues like Ro Khanna, Al Green, who are saying that they are thinking that maybe House Democratic leadership, Hakeem Jeffries, should think about trying to implement some kind of agreement where you kind of limit that kind of spending on races in the future because it really tilts the scales.
What do you make of proposals along those lines?
When you look and see how much money is put into campaigns, the money that AIPAC is spending is dwarfed.
AIPAC is an interest group, and their interest is the security of Israel.
But look at every other PAC that's being used, and the millions of dollars are being spent to not only elect members of Congress, but the President.
So why are we just Why do people pick on AIPAC?
How about the NRA?
I'm not going to pick out groups, but if you take a look at the unions, even the pro-choice groups, they all spend a lot of money.
I mean, a lot of money.
I mean, I have colleagues.
They'll be in $16 million races.
There's not a penny coming in from AIPAC.
Well, AIPAC, I mean, they did spend a lot of money on what has now become the most expensive race in history, so there's something a bit unique about that.
But listen, why are the complaints only coming about AIPAC?
Look, if people want campaign reform, I'll go along with that, absolutely.
Republicans wouldn't allow it, the Supreme Court wouldn't allow it.
So you have big money coming in, obviously, from PACs.
But yes, campaign reform, finance reform, probably needed, but not because of the AIPAC, but just because of the amounts of money that's going into campaigns.
Do you think a ceasefire is obtainable if the U.S.
just keeps Why do you ask me whether a ceasefire is possible because of Hamas?
Why is it just you're talking about Israel right now?
The U.S.
is funding Israel.
Category weapons for at least a time we were told there was controversy over that But you know is a ceasefire achievable with Netanyahu and the current Israeli government if the u.s.
Just keeps sending them the armaments of the requesting why do you ask me whether receive fire is possible?
Because of Hamas, why is it just you're talking about Israel right now?
This is funding Israel It's not funny come us so so there is a there is a Plan that's being proposed right now is Israel has accepted it.
I know the President's waiting for Hamas to accept it.
Listen, both parties have to agree, and that's just something that's...
Well, it's not in my control, let's put it that way.
Okay, last question.
On Ukraine, you also voted for the supplemental funding bill on Ukraine in April, along with the Israel funding.
There's now an invasion of Russia, or an incursion of Russia underway by Ukrainians, which is kind of crazy when you think about it.
I mean, if I had told you two years ago this would be going on, you would have been probably shocked.
I know I would have been.
So the armaments that you voted to fund, and that $61 billion, are going now to invade Russia.
I mean, do you have any reservations about that?
I mean, they're still the biggest nuclear-armed state in the world.
Who knows what could happen?
It could go haywire.
Any concerns about that?
I mean, there really has been a condition of our funding that the military not be used against Russia.
I mean, you raise a concern, which is, you know, is Russia going to react back to the United States?
But I'm going to leave that to others to figure out, to our State Department, to our Defense Department, and we'll see what they have to say.
But didn't President Biden remove that condition?
He's now allowing cross-border strikes into Russia by Ukraine, using U.S.
armaments, right?
I'm sorry, I'm not really sure about that.
Okay, I do want to compliment her.
I've never seen actually somebody indulge Michael for this period of time with great patience.
So credit to her for that, genuinely.
But do you hear what she just said?
She said, I voted for $60 million to send weapons to Ukraine.
And when Michael asked her, but now those weapons are being used to attack Russia, inside Russia, to attack Russia with American weapons, aren't you kind of concerned?
She said, no, no, there's conditions on the weapons we're sending where Ukraine's not allowed to use them to attack inside Russia.
And Michael said, no, actually, Joe Biden lifted those conditions.
We covered that when he did.
And she said, yeah, I don't know about that.
How can a member of Congress funding The war in Ukraine not know something that immensely consequential.
And then when he kind of challenged her, she said, yeah, I'm just going to leave that.
I trust George Joe Biden.
These are the kind of people who really do fill Congress.
They kind of just like are they start off in their community.
They're kind of inoffensive people.
They work their way up through the party machinery.
When there's an opening for Congress, they run, they get the support of the party machinery.
They just kind of have the views of the district that they represent.
These are supposed to be the people who like oversee the CIA, oversee the U.S.
security state, oversee the...
Executive, the President, for questions of war and foreign policy, these people have no idea what they're even talking about.
Like I said, she's a nice lady.
And Michael doesn't have the benefit of our stylist that he had while he was here, so I know a lot of you are commenting on the chat on this kind of ratty, wrinkled polo shirt that he's wearing under a blazer.
We all have our own stylistic preferences, but she's being very responsive, unlike a lot of the people that we showed you before.
It's just that her answers are so disturbing.
They're so vacuous.
They're so vapid.
They don't evince an understanding of anything.
And I think a big reason for that, and I think it's part of the benefits of the way Michael does interviews, is they're used to answering certain questions, but not from the direction that he asks those questions.
And they don't have talking points for it.
They just don't know what to say.
And so I think you see that illustrated quite vividly.
Now, he did also interview George Latimer, who was the Westchester County Executive in New York, who just removed Jamal Bowman from Congress.
He ran against Jamal Bowman.
And Michael referenced that as being the most expensive congressional race in history because AIPAC poured $14.5 million into that race to fund George Latimer's campaign to remove Jamal Bowman from Congress.
And Michael asked him about a lot of that.
There's a couple other interviews like that that I wanted to go through, but we just don't have time.
We're kind of at the end of the show, so we're going to put those on Locals for now for those of you who want to see them.
And right after the show, we will move to Locals for our standard after show.
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