RFK Jr. Quits, Endorses Trump, Condemns DNC As Anti-Democratic; Neocons Celebrate Kamala's Foreign Policy Speech; US-Backed War in Russia Expands
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
RFK, Jr. Ends Presidential Campaign (5:47)
The Darling of Neocons (37:54)
War Inside Russia Expands (1:02:46)
Outro (1:19:23)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, The independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
announced this afternoon that he was removing his name from the ballot in at least 10 different swing states as a part of ceasing his independent presidential candidacy.
And he, in doing so, condemned the Democratic Party for a series of what he called anti-democratic acts that he said made his campaign all but impossible to conduct.
In this announcement, RFK Jr.
also endorsed Donald Trump for president, citing the many areas of agreement he said that they have, but which the Democrats do not, including the issue of free speech and censorship online, the need to keep the U.S.
security state out of our domestic politics, as well as allegiance of the Democratic Party to Big Pharma and Big Tech.
It is worth remembering that RFK comes from a large family, not only who are all Democrats, but whose names and careers for generations have depended upon exercising power and influence within the Democratic Party.
That is why RFK Jr. originally chose to run for president as a Democrat.
He wanted to challenge Joe Biden for the nomination from within his own party, only to discover that his lifelong party, the Democrats, would not permit any primary challenges, would not hold any debates, would not even allow any real votes to take place, announcing instead that Joe Biden would be the nominee no matter what.
Well, take a look at RFK's withdrawal, what motivated it, and what it means for the 2024 election.
And then, Kamala Harris last night accepted her party's nomination to be its presidential candidate in the upcoming election, just a little more than two months away.
Despite having campaigned for and received no votes, she has quickly become a beloved figure among every sector of that party.
That most definitely includes the so-called never-Trump Republicans and neocons, who are now not only Democrats but the thought leaders in the party when it comes to foreign policy.
They were particularly enamored of Kamala's foreign policy vision that she laid out in her speech last night, and for good reason.
As they said, and as Kamala herself made clear, she believes, she says, in the standard establishment pre-Trump Republican view about militarism, war, and the role of the United States in the war, and pledged to reinstate and to embrace the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has so destructively governed Washington for so many years.
We'll show you not only her foreign policy vision as she laid it out, but also the very understandable and reasonable joy from neocons over what she said.
We will also show you a couple of interviews with various Democrats conducted by our roving political reporter, Michael Tracy, that illustrates how prevalent those views of neoconservatism and militarism now are in this party.
And then finally, I know everyone is tired of talking about it and barely talks about it any longer, but there is actually still a war in Ukraine that is raging along.
And it's not now only a war in Ukraine, but it's also a Ukrainian war, a U.S.-backed Ukrainian war inside Russia.
That is because Joe Biden lifted restrictions on the ability of Ukraine to use U.S.
made and delivered weapons so that Ukraine can now use American weapons on Russian soil.
To kill Russian citizens and destroy Russian infrastructure.
And that is exactly what Ukraine is attempting to do.
And what makes for a somewhat impressive, though quite dangerous, sideshow, this idea that now Ukraine has invaded Russia, it is all masking the fact that in reality, the Ukrainian front line in Ukraine continues to crumble.
As the Russian army takes more and more vital cities and expands the amount of Ukrainian territory they now control and rule.
Even two years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the United States to send weapons to a country with the explicit intent of using those weapons to invade and bomb Russia.
Before we get to all of that, a few quick programming notes.
We're encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
the dangerous game that, quote, Joe Biden, with the support of most Democrats and Republicans in Congress continue to play.
Before we get to all of that, a few quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
A lot of people were excited by the decision of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first to challenge the Democratic Party and Joe Biden from within the party trying to foster a primary challenge that there could be an intraparty debate.
about the direction of that party, but then were even more excited when he announced that he would leave the Democratic Party due to the fact that it would not allow a primary of the kind he wanted to run and instead run as an independent candidate.
And that's because there are a lot of people in the United States, including people who might favor or lean to one party or the other, who nonetheless believe that we have to do everything possible to break or subvert what we now call the duopoly, the idea that power only can pass from one party to the other.
These two parties, the Republicans and Democrats, who, as most of them will tell you, really, you know, don't have all that many differences at the end of the day in terms of what they're actually going to do.
They have differences in their rhetoric.
They have some differences in culture war issues.
But President Obama has said this.
Many other people in both parties have subsequently said that essentially the two parties do nothing more than fight within the 40-yard lines or the 45-yard lines, that there really is no reason to have all this vitriolic rhetoric thrown back and forth because at the end of the day, Washington is structured to avoid any real radical change, that even if you elect Washington is structured to avoid any real radical change, that even if you elect somebody within those parties who wants to be a disruptive force, Washington is structured the permanent power faction and Washington is there to prevent any kind of real movement That's what establishments do.
And so a lot of people want there to be a meaningful, viable way to have third parties, to have alternatives to those two parties.
And for a while it looked like RFK Jr.
was going to be able to accomplish that.
He had as much as 10 or even 15 percent sometimes in polls.
He had that inside the Democratic Party before he left.
Reflecting how few people, even in the Democratic Party, wanted to vote for Joe Biden.
But then he also had that, once he left as an independent, and that's usually what happens with independents, is their whole structure in our politics are designed to exclude them.
So he wasn't allowed on the debate stage, even though he had serious polling numbers for a third-party candidate larger than what we've seen in quite some time.
He wasn't allowed to participate in those debates.
He wasn't really on television.
He just wasn't presented as a viable choice.
And as the election gets closer and closer, people start believing that the third party is there as an irrelevancy and stop considering it as a viable alternative.
And that's because the system created by the Republicans and Democrats obviously has been designed and continues to be fortified with the one goal in mind of preserving that duopoly, of ensuring that there cannot be any third parties or fourth parties or multi-party system inside the United States.
Now, Now, RFK Jr.' 's candidacy was largely fueled financially, at first by a couple of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, but then by his choice of Nicole Shanahan as his vice president.
We had her on our show a couple months ago.
I found her reasonably impressive.
She, aside from being a lawyer in her own right, is also the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, the founder of Google.
And as a result of that marriage that is now over, she's worth at least a billion dollars and she's been pouring tens of millions of dollars into the RFK campaign, a lot of which has gone to fighting court battles against the Democratic Party that has been trying to keep RFK off the ballot in multiple states.
So he had everything a third party can want, obviously wide name recognition as a result of his famous political family.
He had a lot of cross-ideological support as a result of the fact that he had certain views that were clearly sort of traditional liberal views.
He was an environmental lawyer.
He had that going for him.
But he also had become an outspoken opponent of and dissident from COVID orthodoxy and the question of vaccines.
So he had appealed for both the right and the left, the kind of thing that you need to do if you want to run an independent candidacy.
And he had a billionaire on the ticket with him that could self-finance the campaign and was doing so.
And yet he found that there was no way to sustain, let alone maintain a plausible independent candidacy, even with all of those benefits.
That's how suffocating the system is.
And so as a result, he announced today that he was discontinuing that independent campaign.
And instead, he decided that he would endorse Donald Trump.
Now, notably, his vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, has said that she is not yet endorsing Donald Trump, that she would refuse to do so unless Trump apologizes for or renounces The program that he sponsored called Operation Warp Speed that was responsible for the delivery of COVID vaccines to the United States to the American citizenry in an extremely short period of time, as Trump always says, and in this case it's true, far faster than anybody ever predicted.
So he was essentially the president that sponsored the vaccines that both RFK Jr.
and Nicole Shanahan believe ended up being dangerous and far less effective and a gift to Big Pharma.
So she's saying I can't in good conscience support Trump or endorse Trump until he admits he made a mistake in terms of vaccines, which is so ironic.
That in her mind, Trump is the symbol or the embodiment of the pro-vaccine movement in the United States, given how often he was depicted as some sort of anti-science president who was encouraging people not to take vaccines, but to swallow bleach or use sunlight, inserting lamps inside their bodies as a means of getting COVID or using ivermectin.
It was always the case that Trump was very proud of that vaccine he developed.
He encouraged people to take the vaccine.
And yet the depiction of him though was anti-vax, that he was anti-science, etc.
And so she remembers the truth about Trump's role in delivering the vaccine.
Now you can Have whatever debates you want about the vaccine.
I never thought the problem was the vaccine itself, only the vaccine mandates and the punishment for people who didn't want to take the vaccine.
But it is true that Trump was largely supportive, at least at the beginning, of a lot of the COVID orthodoxy as formulated by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the scientific establishment.
And so she's saying, I won't endorse him until he acknowledges that and admits he was wrong, whereas RFK Jr. decided that he was going to endorse Trump.
Now, when he dropped out, he obviously explained a big part of the reason why, and he blamed a lot of his decision on the Democratic Party, and in particular, what has become its anti-democratic ethos, its opposition to democracy, its belief that only elites should choose and pick our leaders and that voters really its belief that only elites should choose and pick our leaders and that voters really don't have any Here's part of what he said today when announcing his withdrawal. - Yeah.
of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.
In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party.
He's talking about Trump here.
He's saying, during the course of my discussions with Donald Trump, we both realize that we have a lot of things in common, not everything, but a lot of things in common that he, RFK Jr., regards of the greatest importance. - Yeah.
In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.
In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party.
We talked about Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals.
That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and furiously, if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.
I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches.
upon which we continue to have very serious differences.
We are aligned with each other on other key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemic, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting The U.S.
intelligence agency is out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections.
Now, you can take note of how interesting that list of policy agreements he says he has with Trump is because almost all of them at Not just a distant part of our history, but in a very recent part of our history, were considered not right-wing views, but left-wing views.
Keeping the U.S.
security state out of our domestic politics, preventing them from surveilling American citizens.
If you talk about that now, it does absolutely code as a right-wing view.
Democrats adore the deep state.
We showed you an interview that Michael Tracy conducted last night with a Democratic Congresswoman who asserted that Iran was behind some of the pro-Palestinian protests inside the United States.
And when he asked her what the evidence was, she just said, well, that's what the CIA and the FBI told us.
We trust the CIA.
We trust the FBI.
If they say it, we don't need to see evidence.
We believe it.
That really is the mentality of the Democratic Party.
They have no concern about the role of the CIA and the FBI in interfering in our politics because they interfere in order to advance the interests of the Democratic Party, particularly to sabotage and undermine Trump.
So that has become a right-wing concern to talk about the CIA, the involvement of the U.S.
security state in the United States.
Just 10 years ago when I did the Snowden reporting about the abuses of the NSA and spying on American citizens, there was a huge amount of leftists, liberals, leftists, Who were outraged by that and supported the Snowden reporting as a result.
That is almost completely gone from the Democratic Party.
So is the issue of free speech and censorship, which RFK Jr.
said he finds full agreement with Trump on as well.
The idea that you should not have centralized power factions with the power to police and control and censor our political discourse online or anywhere else.
The free speech movement came out of American left-wing movements in the 20th century.
And if you advocated this sort of absolutist view of free speech, it typically identified you as somebody either on the left or in alignment with the left on that issue.
Now, you talk about free speech or the evil censorship, that too codes as a right-wing view.
The same is obviously true for things like, quote, the need to stop endless war.
Democrats of all factions inside the Democratic Party adore the U.S.
war in Ukraine, want the U.S.
to continue to fund and fuel the war in Ukraine forever.
A major part of the Democratic Party, including its leadership, also believe in fueling the war in Israel, of getting involved in the Middle East if there is a war and an outbreak of an escalation on behalf of Israel.
So for RFK Jr.
to drop out of the race as an independent and endorse Trump, obviously that's viewed as a right-wing Move, but you listen to what he's actually saying, and I think it really illustrates how archaic and really useless these left-right terms have become.
How little currency they have, how little utility they have for describing our current political debates.
It's really much more of an anti-establishment or pro-establishment sentiment.
I've never seen a political faction more pro-establishment in lockstep than the Democratic Party.
I would say the same about the establishment with a Republican Party, but essentially there are very few differences between those two.
Here is RFK in a different part of his speech talking about some of what motivated him to drop out of the race.
After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates, both in favorability and also in head-to-head matchups.
But I'm sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, and for our government, and most sadly at all for me, the Democratic Party. and most sadly at all for me, the Democratic Party.
In In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win.
In a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.
Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions.
It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.
I think sometimes we forget the amalgamation of acts of the Democratic Party that have made it so fundamentally anti-democratic.
And by the way, I should just say, as a point in passing, I probably should have mentioned when I was talking about RFK's views and agreements with Trump on things like the need to stop endless wars.
RFK Jr., though an opponent of the war in Ukraine and a believer that the U.S. is...
is antagonizing China on purpose to sustain a cold war and potentially even a hot war, he is a fanatical supporter of the war in Israel, of the U.S.
paying for and arming The Israeli war in Gaza, so I just wanted to say that but on this issue this growing anti-democratic and tyrannical ethos inside the Democratic Party I think is hard to Appreciate because it sort of goes step by step and in each instance people sort of complain and don't see the trends from 2016 when the DNC quote rigged the election to ensure that Bernie Sanders didn't win and Hillary Clinton did.
That was the word of people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and former DNC Chair Donna Brazile.
In 2020, forcing every other candidate, centrist establishment candidate, out of the race and leaving only Bernie and Liz Warren to divide the anti-establishment vote to make sure that Joe Biden won.
Refusing to have, in 2024, any kind of primary.
We've shown you many times before, the video where Simone Sanders, the former Biden, and Kamala Harris' aide went on MSNBC to say there will be no primary.
There will be no debates.
The DNC has said that when the sitting president says he wants to run for election, he will be the nominee, period.
And then having forced that candidate onto the party by not allowing even RFK Jr.
or Marianne Williamson or others to get on the debate stage and debate or even campaign, Having done that, once they realized that Joe Biden was likely to lose the election, they just forced him out of the race, didn't ask the party who they wanted, and just imposed Kamala Harris, decreed her as the new candidate.
Completely invisible, in an anti-democratic way, in a back room.
And then there's the fact that the Democratic Party has been single-mindedly devoted To trying to ban Trump from being able to run, first by convicting him of insurrection, of indicting him, trying to put him in prison.
Then creating legal theories that convinced the Democratic Party judges on the Colorado Supreme Court to ban him from the ballot, following suit then were other Democratic Secretaries of State and Blue States, to the point where the Supreme Court had to intervene by a 9-0 ruling.
And say that the states had no right to ban Trump from the ballot, but they tried everything they could to get Trump off the ballot, their primary political opponent, off the ballot and in prison.
And whenever we hear other countries doing that, oh, the government is trying to put the opposition party in prison or has banned them from the ballot, we all say, oh my God, that's so anti-democratic.
What must it be like to live in a country where that happens?
The Democratic Party has done that.
And then on top of that, Their response to RFK, the fear they had that he would siphon off Democratic Party votes or just convince people to vote for him was so acute that they forced them to spend the money that they had that people had donated to the campaign fighting the endless amount of money that the Democratic Party has with Democratic Party big firm partners and Democratic Party appointed judges.
You basically have to spend all your time just for the right to get on the ballot, to even participate in the democracy.
And he understands that it's the Democratic Party, while claiming that only they and they alone can save and preserve and protect democratic values, that has become a party that has condemned and scorned for the democratic process.
And nothing illustrates that more than how they conduct themselves in elections, including in their own primaries.
It ran a sham primary.
That was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.
Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election.
They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
My uncle and my father both relished debate.
They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas.
They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days.
This is profoundly undemocratic.
Okay.
are people to choose when they don't know whom they are choosing?
And how can this look to the rest of the world?
My father and my uncle were always conscious of America's image abroad because of our nation's role as the template for democracy, a role model for democratic processes, and the leader of the free world.
Okay, that's a bit much.
There were lots of different coups that took place under the government of his father and his uncle.
They invaded Cuba and tried to overthrow the Castro regime in the Bay of Pigs.
They sponsored coups through the CIA all over the place throughout the 60s.
They partnered with and supported some of the most brutal dictators in the world, including here in Brazil in 1964, when the elected president of Brazil was overthrown as a result of a CIA plot with right-wing generals because he had become a little bit too left-leaning.
Things like land reform and rent control, that was something unacceptable to the Johnson administration.
The Kennedy administration had warned the Brazilian government in advance that if it became more liberal in its economics, they were going to take action, Washington would.
So the idea that the US was this symbol of democracy, this kind of force against authoritarianism under his father, that's a bit ahistorical, to put that generously.
But it is true.
I've gone back and watched before, I obviously wasn't alive then, but I've gone back and watched The first televised presidential debates ever held, which was in 1960 when Kennedy was running against Nixon.
And I believe there were four of them, three or four of them, and they were incredibly substantive.
They were incredibly substantive.
And they were extremely well-versed in everything they were talking about.
They were not reading from a script.
They were answering each other's questions.
And then you can see them going on Sunday shows all the time and answering questions about their beliefs, speaking constantly without a script.
RFK Jr., senior rather, his father, was doing the same when he was running for president in 1968.
Going around the country, engaging in all kinds of debates about the Vietnam War, about why the Johnson administration had gone so wrong.
So that part of it is true, and that is what is unbelievably missing from the Democratic Party now.
I know I say this almost every night, but I continue to be in disbelief that we're about two months away from a national election where the person who is now leading many of the polls, if not most of the polls, has not uttered a word of an unscripted statement.
In the five or six weeks since she's become the presumptive nominee, she hasn't uttered a word, she hasn't answered a single question from a journalist, she hasn't gone on a single news show.
And that's because, as he says, the ethos of the Democratic Party has become radically and fundamentally anti-democratic.
Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon nothing.
No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.
There, in Chicago, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day.
Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?
In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.
And we showed you last night as well the kind of vibrant debate that took place even on the stage of the Republican National Convention.
Something that would be unthinkable at the unbelievably lockstep and controlled Democratic National Convention.
Now I just want to show you one more clip of R.K.
Jr.
where in this part of his announcement he talks about what has become of the Democratic Party, how it's so radically different from the one that he thought he knew or was taught to know.
Our party was a bulwark against big money interests and corporate power.
True to its name, it was the party of democracy.
As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with.
It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.
When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.
The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision.
Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent because each state poses an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures.
I would need over a million signatures, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved.
And then I need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC.
So again, you see, now again, this idea that, oh, the Democratic Party has become the party of war.
The Democratic Party is the party that oversaw the Vietnam War that happened under Lyndon Johnson primarily, but also under his uncle.
And certainly under the Obama administration and the Clinton administration, there were plenty of wars that the United States got itself involved with unnecessarily, whether in the Balkans or in Libya and Syria and on and on.
But the rest of that, I think, is quite true.
And that was the decision of the Clintons to convert the Democratic Party from what had previously been, at least nominally, a party of the working class into the party of big corporate power.
And that is exactly what they have become.
Now, one of the things that I think is so interesting is sometimes when elites become very smug and they get together and they talk, they forget about what they're supposed to pretend to think.
And actually, instead, just when they're amongst each other, They kind of get very smug and very self-satisfied and they kind of let the mask slip and they actually talk about what they really believe.
That's what happened earlier today when the governor, the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, went on to the Democratic Party podcast Pod Save America with three former Obama officials who host it but who are hardcore Democratic partisans and This is what they had to say about the way in which the Democratic Party chose Kamala Harris to be their nominee.
There's an intangible.
It's different.
How are you feeling about the switch?
I mean, the switch.
Now we went through a very open process, a very inclusive process.
It was bottom up.
I don't know if you know that.
Yes, that's what I've been told to say.
Yes, it was a blitz primary, I believe.
That's what they called it.
It was a very, very fast blitz.
It was a blink primary, so we saw that.
Can you believe that?
30 minute convention between that tweet and another tweet.
It's amazing how it happened.
Yeah, it's been amazing.
But what is amazing is how unified everybody is.
Yeah.
I mean, it's next level.
So can you believe that?
They're tackling.
They're making fun of the party for, you know, they're saying, oh, of course, it was a very bottom up process.
And then they said, yeah, it's like a 15-minute primary, 30-minute primary.
Now, some of that might come from bitterness and resentment, because a lot of people thought that Gavin Newsom would make a good candidate, but he didn't have any chance to run.
The choice had been made of Kamala.
And they're just sitting around like giggling about how all this like pro-democracy rhetoric is for the idiot masses.
But all the people in the know, of course, know that's not how things function at all.
I think they forgot they were talking in front of cameras because that was a big mass dropping moment.
But the fact that at the end he says, but we're so unified now, that's the part that's so unbelievable.
I mean, I'm amazed.
at how what cheap dates Democratic Party voters are.
They don't even need to hear any political views.
They don't need to hear anything of substance.
The centrists, the neocons, the corporatists, the militarists, the leftists in the party, self-identified leftists, are equally excited and enamored of this presidential ticket, even though they say nothing of substance and purpose, even though it was done and selected in the most undemocratic way possible, which has become the way of the Democratic Party.
Nobody really knows what the effect will be on the 2024 election of RFK not only dropping out but then also encouraging his voters to support President Trump.
It's very unclear what the ideological voting base is of RFK Jr., whether they're just people dissatisfied with the two parties, whether they actually support him because of his COVID and vaccine views or some of these other heterodox views that he holds.
It's unclear how many of them are willing to be oriented by him or guided by him and his endorsement of Donald Trump.
But I do think polls have been showing that.
Although at the start, RFK was taking away a lot of Democratic Party voters, as time went on, he was sufficiently demonized among liberals and Democratic Party voters, and a lot of his support were clearly coming from people who, if forced to choose between Trump and Kamala Harris, would choose Trump.
I actually saw a poll today, I believe, I don't want to vouch for it too much because I didn't look in depth at it, but there was a poll suggesting that Something like 65% of RFK voters, when asked who they would vote for if the forced choice was Trump or Kamala, said Trump.
Something like 25% said Kamala.
So I don't think it can hurt Trump for sure.
It can only help how much it helps.
I don't think anybody knows.
But the much more interesting part here is not that punditry or horse race prediction, but the very substantive and I think insightful critique that RFK Jr.
made both of our political process, but also of the extremely anti-democratic sentiments that now drive and govern the Democratic Party as Gavin Newsom giggled about with his friends from that Pod Save America podcast.
Speaking of the cause of free speech and censorship, as many of you know, the reason why our show is here on Rumble, the reason why we moved from Substack to Rumble is because of our genuine belief in how authentic Rumble's commitment the reason why we moved from Substack to Rumble is because of our genuine belief in how authentic Rumble's commitment is to defending free speech in its most robust and genuine format, even if it
And one of the ways that Rumble is under attack is there is a very systemic effort on the part of corporate media to depict it as some sort of Nazi site or far-right site.
And therefore drive away corporate advertisers.
And one of the things that Rumble is doing to guard against that, to make this model of protecting, preserving free speech somewhere on the internet financially viable, is now offering their own products that they hope people who support their not just platform but this cause will patronize.
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I think one of the most notable political developments over the last eight years has been the very vocal and visible migration of the group of people who had been called neocons in the Republican Party.
Back when I started writing about politics, started following politics very closely in the wake of 9-11.
and These are the people inside the Bush and Cheney administration who were maximalist supporters of the war on terror, wanted to torture and kidnap and have due process-free camps.
They were the ones who not only were advocating the invasion of Iraq and the changing of the government of Iraq before 9-11 and then used 9-11 as the excuse to do so, but they also wanted to topple multiple other countries, all of whom coincidentally happened to be adversarial to Israel throughout the Middle East, and their main goal was to go from Baghdad, where we had toppled Saddam Hussein for who knows what reason.
Into Tehran to do the same to the Iranian government.
These are the people who believe that war is always the answer, who support endless war, who see the world through this militaristic lens, and they had always been, for good reasons during the Bush and Cheney era, part of the Republican Party.
They had previously, many of them, been connected to not just the Democratic Party, but the left-wing political movements back in the 60s and 70s.
Until they kind of grew up and decided that they wanted to make sure that the U.S.
military was constantly being used to interfere in and apply American force all throughout the world.
Never their families, but other Americans' families.
And now you have kind of the spawns of these neocons who don't have that same pedigree, who don't have that same trajectory, but who very much embrace the worldview and vision of the neocons.
And when I started writing about politics, Liberals talked about neocons even more viciously than they now talk about Trump.
They were constantly compared to Hitler, Nazis, bloodthirsty sociopaths, Bill Kristol and David Frum in the Weekly Standard.
And all these kind of militaristic think tanks, people like from the Bush administration itself, like the beloved MSNBC host, Nicole Wallace, or Joe Scarborough, both of whom were very much advocates of this view.
Almost all of them, not all of them, but almost all of them have migrated to the Democratic Party, who particularly are driven by hatred of Trump, but now have become not just haters of Trump, but hardcore Democratic partisans.
And obviously during her speech, Kamala Harris was required to at least say something about the things she thought about foreign policy.
And in her speech, she continuously affirmed the core worldview of these neocons, of these militarists, about the U.S.
role in the world, about what the United States president is obligated to do, about how we see ourselves.
In a way that very predictably and understandably provoked enormous praise from exactly those neocons who back in the day were hardcore supporters of George Bush and Dick Cheney because that's who was pursuing the militaristic neocon agenda back then.
These people haven't changed any of their views.
Not a single view.
They don't apologize for any of their views.
They haven't changed their views.
They just now recognize that, unlike before when the Republican Party was their optimal vessel for implementing this worldview, now the Democratic Party is.
They don't trust Trump to do it.
They don't trust him to stay in NATO and to fight wars that way, to fund the war in Ukraine, to use U.S.
force all around the world.
They trust the Democrats far more to do so, and Kamala Harris gave them even more reason To be excited about the Democratic Party because the foreign policy vision she laid out could have come directly out of the mouths of George Bush.
In fact, pretty much did.
Both at the 2000 and 2004 Republican Convention and then out of the mouth of John McCain in the 2008 convention.
So let's first take a look at Kamala Harris reading from her teleprompter a speech somebody wrote for her about her animating views on foreign policy.
With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.
And let me be clear.
No, that's a totally fake proclamation.
Joe Biden has said the same thing many times.
Obviously, the United States could force a ceasefire at any moment by simply stop giving the Israelis the arms and money on which they depend to prosecute the war.
The bombs Israel drops on Gaza are American bombs.
They come from the United States.
We deliver those bombs to the Israelis specifically for that reason.
Joe Biden has been saying for 10 months now that he wants a ceasefire, but none is coming because the Americans aren't willing to do anything to actually make it happen.
So that statement, even though people cheered like dumb seals, as though she were saying something profound or important, is just standard Democratic Party tripe.
Their view is, oh, Israel wants a ceasefire too.
The problem is Hamas.
Here's the rest of what Kamala Harris said after throwing that little crumb to the dumb left.
Let me be clear.
And let me be clear.
I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself.
And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.
Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.
Can you believe that there have been people on the liberal left wing of the Democratic Party who have been trying to deceive and lie to young voters and Muslim voters and leftists by telling them that Kamala Harris secretly has a different policy than Joe Biden does when it comes to Israel, even though everything in Kamala Harris's career suggests exactly the opposite?
And then they issue a platform for the Democratic Party where the section on Israel sounds exactly like the Democratic Party view of Israel for many decades.
We will give everything Israel needs.
We will pay for Israel's military.
We'll give them all the weapons they need to make sure that they maintain military superiority over all their neighbors.
We will intervene in order to defend them.
That's just saying, I will never allow Israel, never allow Israel To be without the United States and be without our promise and commitment to defend Israel and everything we do.
That is the view of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, obviously.
She doesn't have any different views than Joe Biden, and yet these people have gone around for 10 months calling this war in Gaza a genocide.
Are not just voting for the people who have administered it and funded it and armed it, but the people who are promising to continue to do so.
Imagine how little self respect you have to have to do that.
Unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.
So many innocent lives lost.
Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again.
The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, Okay, so that was the first part.
Very standard pro-Israel speech with a little rhetorical acknowledgement to the fact that she believes the Palestinian people are humans, I guess, but continuing to provide the arms to destroy their society and kill all the innocent people as she feels very terrible about it.
That's the policy of the Democratic Party of Joe Biden and of Kamala Harris.
Here is the next clip where she talks about her view of foreign policy.
And know this, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.
I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump!
Who are rooting for Trump!
Because you know, they know, they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.
They know Trump won't hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.
And as president, I will never waver in defense of America's security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.
So this is the kind of thing that, for example, if she were to sit down with a competent journalist, a competent journalist might say, well, you were saying in your speech that you will never side with tyrants the way Donald Trump does, that you you were saying in your speech that you will never side with tyrants the way Donald Trump does, that you believe the role of the United States and the world is to undermine and subvert tyranny and authoritarianism and
And yet just two weeks before you said that, your administration authorized the largest sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, one of the worst despots on the planet.
How can you reconcile arming and funding and protecting and propping up The regime of Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia at the same time that you're issuing this rhetoric about the role of the United States in the world being to undermine tyrants and the like or the same with General Sissi in Egypt or all the other tyrannies with which the Democratic Party and the Biden administration have long been aligned.
This is the benefit of just reading from a teleprompter.
You get to say things that are blatantly untrue.
You hire speechwriters to make it sound uplifting.
You animate this empty-headed audience filling this convention who are like hypnotized with happiness and glee.
But there's no accountability.
There's no requirement to actually answer any questions.
But this is the kind of rhetoric that neocons love.
This is what justified the war in Iraq.
The reason we're going into Iraq, besides the lie about weapons of mass destruction, the other reason that we were told is because Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, which he was, and the United States wants to go and liberate the Iraqi people and bring them freedom and democracy because that's who we are as a people.
We go to war benevolently.
We go to free people to remove dictators.
This is the propagandistic framework that has justified pretty much every American war over the last 60 years.
That was the claim in Vietnam.
We were freeing the Vietnamese people from the communists.
We were freeing the Libyans from Muammar Gaddafi.
We were freeing the Syrians from Bashar al-Assad.
We were freeing the Ukrainians from the tyranny of Vladimir Putin, etc., etc.
Even though the United States has always been and continues to be in bed with every single pro-American dictatorship that exists.
In fact, we impose those dictatorships.
Just last year, my former colleagues at The Intercept, Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, broke the story that the very popular Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, had been overthrown by the Pakistani military and put in jail in collaboration with the CIA and the United States government.
We don't go around the world spreading democracy, we go around the world subverting it.
But obviously, if people know that, no one's going to support wars.
What are these wars for?
People want to feel good about the wars, and this is the rhetorical framework that justifies it.
You may recall that Trump, at the beginning of his presidency, was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, and he asked Trump, why are you so eager to have a good relationship with Putin when he kills people?
He's a murderer.
And then Trump said, you don't think we kill people?
You think we're so innocent?
That kind of candor is devastating to the neocon worldview, to the rhetorical framework that permits wars to constantly be waged in the interest of nobody other than a tiny elite in Washington.
And the fact that Kamala Harris in such an excited way is reading from the script that affirms that is one of the reasons why, as we're about to show you, neocons were over the moon with all the foreign policy passages that she read from the teleprompter in her speech.
Here's one more of Kamala Harris talking about foreign policy.
As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.
And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families.
And I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.
Probably for, I mean, even go back to the Clintons, for as long as I can remember, the Democratic Party view was we spend too much on our military.
We go into massive debt for our military.
We spend close to a trillion dollars every year on it.
It goes to corruption.
We cannot even audit where it goes.
It's wasted.
We don't need to constantly be on a war footing.
We can use that money instead to benefit the lives of American people.
There's no more of that in the Democratic Party, none.
The idea that we will outspend everybody to make sure our military is the biggest, largest, most expensive is standard Democratic Party dogma now, and that's why the people not only were happy that Kamala said it, but they themselves were cheering for it, because they think that that is the role of the United States, that we go around the world waging wars for good reasons, like we're doing in Ukraine, and they want that to continue.
One of the longtime Republican operatives, Tim Miller, who worked for people like Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates until Donald Trump came along and he turned into a Democratic Party booster, even though he hasn't changed his ideology at all.
Here he is talking to Jen Psaki on MSNBC about all the reasons he's so happy With her foreign policy, remember, this is a career Republican operative who is now, for good reason, finding himself far more comfortable within the Democratic Party.
What did you make of her Trump argument tonight, and the pieces in it?
Was anything missing?
Was anything you didn't think needed to be in there?
No, I thought she was phenomenal tonight, honestly.
I think that from a never-Trumper perspective, our people were a few bullions.
I mean, they were just overjoyed.
It was like a speech.
Yeah, it was right down the plate for what I think the kind of former Republicans, Independents, these types of swing voters were looking for tonight, particularly in the critiques of Trump.
And you showed that very long...
The Never Trumpers, the former Republicans, the establishment Republicans who hate Trump and have joined the Democratic Party were over the moon!
It was just right down the plate what Kamala Harris fed them.
And for good reason.
If you're someone like this, who is a supporter of John McCain and worships Mitt Romney and the whole Bush-Cheney administration, this is the kind of thing exactly that you want to hear.
And you don't hear that much in the Republican Party, although you hear it from Republican establishment politicians, but not the faction in control.
That's why they've left the Republican Party or in the Democratic Party, and not just in it, but leading it.
As evidenced by the fact that their worldview, their neocon, militaristic worldview, is now the predominant vision of the Democratic Party and its adherents.
Which is why they're saying, we didn't just like this speech, we were all over the moon with it.
These never-Trump Republicans.
All that was good.
There was my favorite one you didn't include though, which was when she said, I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un who are rooting for Trump.
And she stopped on that line and she was like, they're rooting for Trump.
Like that's real.
Like really think about that.
Like the dictators are rooting for him because they see him as one of them.
I thought that was a very powerful attack line in speaking to this kind of national security type of Republican, these types hopefully some of these people will see on the campaign trail, former Republican types.
And a lot of them I don't think knew a lot about Kamala Harris' foreign policy.
Something I've been saying in the secret never-Trumper meetings for like three months.
Yeah, we have basement meetings, yeah, there's sex chains, there's secret meetings, and at all of them I'm like, I don't think you realize how strong she is on this stuff, how aligned she is with kind of the bipartisan tradition of American strength, working with our allies, and how hostile she is to this So when he's talking about these secret rooms of Never Trump supporters, he's talking about Bill Kristol, who's his boss.
He writes for Bill Kristol's website, The Bulwark.
That's who he's talking about.
Some people that I was gonna be like, whoa, that's news to me.
This is pretty good, all right? - So when he's talking about these secret rooms of never Trump supporters, he's talking about Bill Kristol, who's his boss.
He writes for Bill Kristol's website, The Bulwark.
That's who he's talking about.
Bill Kristol, who just 10 years ago, liberals viewed as the root of evil, the living and breathing manifestation of Satan, who had been plotting and planning every conceivable American war.
And that's what he's saying.
It's in these secret neocon chats.
They've been saying for months that they know that Kamala Harris is one of them.
And when she gave her speech saying so, they were as ecstatic as could be.
If you believe in the neocon worldview, you should absolutely vote for Kamala Harris.
That's what all of these people are telling you.
Here is Bill Kristol himself.
During the convention last night, he was referring to a speech by Leon Panetta, who ran the CIA under Barack Obama, and who is a, not just a CIA director, but a hardcore believer in militarism.
And he said, Leon Panetta now quoting Ronald Reagan, my kind of democratic convention.
And it is Bill Kristol's kind of convention.
One of the speakers who spoke was also a former Republican member of Congress and a very hardcore militarist, Adam Kinzinger.
He was forced out of Congress because he was going to lose the way Liz Cheney did from a challenge in his own party.
He just sort of slinked away.
He got a CNN contract.
Now he's speaking at the Democratic Convention where he belongs, who shares the same worldview.
I'm sure he's in these Never Trump foreign policy groups.
And here's part of what he said.
They gave him a primetime slot, Adam Kinzinger, and here's what he said.
Our democracy was frayed by the events of January 6th as Donald Trump's deceit and dishonor led to a siege on the United States Capitol.
That day, I stood witness to a profound sorrow.
The desecration of our sacred tradition of peaceful transition of power.
tarnished by a man too fragile, too vain, and too weak to accept defeat.
How can a party claim to be patriotic if it idolizes a man who tried to overthrow a free and fair election?
How can a party claim to stand for liberty if it sees a fight for freedom in Ukraine?
An attack pitting tyranny against democracy.
A challenge to everything our nation claims to be.
And it retreats.
It equivocates.
It nominates a man who is weirdly obsessed with Putin.
And his running mate who said, quote, I don't care what happens in Ukraine.
Yeah, he wants to be vice president.
Yeah.
How can a party claim to be conservative when it tarnishes the gifts that our forebears fought for?
So, in other words, the Democratic Party is the real conservative party.
That's the message that Adam Kinzinger is giving.
And his rationale for that, in part, is Unlike Donald Trump, who wants to get the United States and extricate it from foreign wars, which is an unpatriotic thing to do, the Democratic Party is the party that wants to go around fighting Russia and fighting other countries in foreign wars in Europe and everywhere else.
And that's why Adam Kinzler is Democrat.
Here's a little bit more of what he has to say.
Make the right choice.
Vote.
Vote for our bedrock values.
And vote for Kamala Harris.
God bless you.
Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger is with us now.
He's a senior CNN political commentator.
For other Republicans, Independents, people on the fence, or undecided who were out there in the television audience listening, what do you think the impact of her speech is tonight?
Look, I thought her speech was good.
Here's—actually, really good.
But here's what I thought was interesting is Donald Trump has ceded so much ground that used to be traditionally Republican ground.
So let's talk about national defense, Ukraine.
This is all stuff Donald Trump should have been talking about at his convention if he was a little more of a traditional Republican.
Kamala came in and took that ground.
I mean, she wasn't scared to do, like, kind of the, uh, well, we don't want to get too... She took the ground on immigration.
She reminded people that he tanked the immigration bill.
She took the ground on Ukraine.
And I think if you're a undecided Republican out there, you look and you're like, it's gonna be tough for me to not vote for Kamala now because she literally gave me the things that I was concerned about.
I agree with that.
That's what I'm saying.
If you are a kind of pre-Trump establishment Republican, the kind that loved George Bush and Dick Cheney, that loved John McCain, think John McCain's foreign policy and John McCain himself are heroic, it is absolutely the case that you should vote for the Democratic Party.
As Bill Kristol said, this is my Democratic Party.
And it is.
And it's not just, for me, this incredible development that so many neocons, who 10 years ago were considered to be fascist and Nazis by the standard American liberals, who are now Democrats.
Nobody cares to ask why that is.
No Democrat is saying, wait a minute, why is it that all these people who started all these wars, who we were saying were fascist and bloodthirsty monsters just a decade ago, none of whom have changed their views about anything?
Why are they so excited about our party now?
And they go on there, they say the Democratic Party is the conservative party, meaning conservative in the sense of the conservative activism and militarism of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And the Democrats are so happy to hear that because that's what they believe as well.
That is what the party is.
And so when these neocons are celebrating, they're not doing that to pretend.
They're doing that because they understand they've taken over this party, but this party is theirs and the party has been recreated in their image.
All right.
Speaking of militarism and war and all of that, there is this ongoing war in Ukraine that has become, that has always been very dangerous.
It is a...
Sneezing on camera.
It's one of my favorite things.
I do it at least once a night, so I'm glad I got that over with.
This war is an extremely dangerous war.
It always has been.
It's always been a proxy war between the United States and Russia, or NATO and Russia, over Ukraine.
But it's gotten so much more dangerous because now, after Joe Biden lifted what had been the two-year restriction, on using American weapons to bomb Russia, to attack Russia, to invade Russia.
The Ukrainians are now using American weapons to do a pretty sustained invasion and assault on Russian territory.
And the Russians obviously know that this is all being done with American permission and American weapons.
Imagine what the United States would be doing if some foreign country had invaded and seized a part of the United States equivalent to the size of Los Angeles, which is what the Ukrainians have done in Russia.
Now, it doesn't mean the war is turning.
In fact, the diversion of Ukrainian troops, of which there are very few now fighting worthy troops, has meant that the Ukrainian front line continues to crumble even further and the Russians continue to advance Westward into more and more parts of Ukraine.
They already control something like 24, 25% of the country.
It's sort of like a theatrical sideshow, but it's a very dangerous one.
Because what would the United States do if some country, foreign country, had invaded the United States and taken over part of American territory where American citizens live, and we knew that some foreign country was behind it, arming it and funding it and giving the green light to use those weapons on our soil?
That's how the Russians are obviously seeing this.
From The Economist on Monday, quote, Russia's double punchback against Ukraine's shock raid.
It is bombing Ukrainians in Kursk and advancing in Pokrovsk.
Quote, to assess Ukraine's shock raid and its prospects, The Economist has interviewed soldiers involved and sources familiar with decision making.
By General Sersky, Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief, a picture emerges of a daring gamble born of desperation and in great secrecy.
It has boosted morale and shown that Ukraine has developed some effective new tactics.
But 12 days in, progress has slowed and the outlines of a new front line are emerging.
It is unclear whether troops can dig in or are overcommitted at the cost of front lines elsewhere.
The biggest danger is around Pokrovsk and the Donbass inside Ukraine where Kremlin forces are gaining ground fast.
Soldiers from the 82nd Brigade, the second of four involved in the opening assault, say fighting has grown increasingly intense after the initial euphoric gains.
In the early exchanges, there had been only one serious fight when Russians tried to ambush them from maze fields near the first village.
The Ukrainians, who somehow had a monopoly of reconnaissance drones in the sky, saw the enemy and ordered them to surrender.
They didn't.
So they fired everything they had until the maze stopped rustling and silence fell.
Then the Ukrainians moved on.
The plan to invade part of Russia did not come from a happy place.
In early July, General Sersky, Ukraine's newly appointed top commander, was under pressure.
For months, he had been grappling with a less-than-ideal inheritance from his predecessor, and the Army's leadership was at odds with the President over mobilization policies, leading to significant manpower shortages.
In the American Congress, they had delayed support.
Avdivka, a stronghold north of Donetsk, had consequently fallen.
Front lines in the Donetsk region were crumbling, most especially around the logistical hub of Pokrovsk.
Rumors circulated that General Sersky was on the verge of being dismissed with attack dogs associated With the all-powerful Chief of Staff of Zelensky even suggesting he had been, quote, lying to his bosses.
Evidence of an intensifying response inside Kursk is now clear.
Ukrainian soldiers on the ground inside Russia say they are already beginning to see a different level of resistance.
Losses are increasing.
The Russians have reinforced with better trained units, including marines and special forces.
They had studied the area.
This belated Russian response to the incursion has forced it to divert some troops from strongholds inside Ukraine and the Donbass.
Reflecting this, a Ukrainian government source says military activity in the Donbass has significantly decreased since August 16th.
However, there is a big exception.
Pokrovsk, the town near where Russia is making steady advances before the incursion and where it is seeking to maintain heavy pressure on Ukraine.
No one understands the strategic rationale behind diverting Ukrainian troops who are in extreme shortage inside Ukraine into Russia when eventually they're going to be driven out.
And as they're doing it, as expected, the war, the front line in Ukraine is continuing to crumble.
Hear from The Economist today.
Quote, the Kremlin is close to crushing Pokrovsk, a vital Ukrainian town.
Even as Ukraine raids Russia, it is losing another key battle.
The crossroads town of Pokrovsk, population 59,000, has had a front row seat on the full-scale Russian invasion since 2022.
But it is only in the past month that its future has come under serious threat.
Russia views its capture as a strategic goal, opening up advancements toward other big cities.
Ukraine's great hope was that a surprise Kursk offensive would relieve the pressure if anything Russia's advance had accelerated.
And here you see the map. - Yep.
All of this here, this pink, is all controlled Russian land inside Ukraine.
You can see how significant this landmass is.
And of course, this doesn't even include Crimea, which the Russians have had since 2014 and almost certainly will not give up.
And the town that the Russians are on the verge of taking is here.
So you see them pushing westward.
As the Ukrainian front line, which is here, continues to crumble.
And here.
So this is a extremely serious situation, because here's the Ukrainian incursion into Russia.
Here's Kursk.
So they kind of sent troops across the border here into Russia, and they're now using American weapons inside Russia, inside Russia, in order to wage a war against Russia inside their territory with American weapons.
And we just don't even talk about this war anymore, except that Democrats cheer wildly when Kamala Harris says she's going to continue to fund this, presumably indefinitely.
Outside of the DNC this week, there were some supporters, fanatical supporters of the war in Ukraine who were actually angry that the Democrats aren't doing enough.
And Michael Tracy interviewed a couple of them.
And before we show you that, we're going to show you his interview with Congressman Frank Polone of New Jersey, the Democrat from New Jersey, where Michael asked him about several of these issues.
As you are, what do you expect for his replacement?
Has there been any talk about it in the New Jersey Democratic Party yet?
Well, I don't really want to talk about it because to me the most important thing is to talk about his legacy, which was really so crucial.
He was a friend.
He accomplished so much.
You know, one of the things that he was very strong about was helping the police and fire and setting up these grants that, you know, exist for many years now to help local towns with police and fire grants.
But there were so many things that Bill Pesko worked on, so thank you for it.
Yeah, so I did want to ask you quickly about Ukraine.
There's now an incursion of Russia happening that the Ukrainians have launched, and they're using U.S.
armaments.
The Biden administration has suggested initially that U.S.
munitions would not be used to strike Ukraine.
There was a policy shift on that as of May.
Does this raise any concerns with you about escalation or what the Russian reaction might be?
I think the best defense is an offense, to be perfectly honest.
So I think it makes sense to take an offensive position against Russia.
Even if that means an invasion of Russia?
Well, I mean, you could argue that it's an invasion, but I think the main thing is that whatever the Ukrainians can do to take, you know, to have some advantage over Russia.
But I gotta get going.
I mean, this is what we showed you last night, too.
These people are so cavalier about a military invasion over Russia.
We had on a couple weeks ago a professor who wrote a book And we talked to her on the 79th, I believe, anniversary of the US dropping of nuclear atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He was saying the nuclear war is by far the greatest danger that the United States or that humanity faces.
Donald Trump said the same thing in his interview with Elon Musk.
And it's hard to imagine how to flirt and play with that risk more.
Then authorizing U.S.
weapons to be used to invade Russia, to bomb Russian citizens, to kill Russian civilians, to destroy Russian infrastructure.
And yet this member of Congress, this Democratic member of Congress is like, yeah, I don't know, best defense is good offense.
Yeah, sure, they should invade Russia.
We need whatever advantage they can get.
Last night he spoke with Lois Frankel, the Democratic Congresswoman from South Florida, and she had voted for the funding of the war in Ukraine.
She didn't even know that this condition on the use of American weapons inside Russia had been lifted.
And when Michael informed her, this member of Congress, that that had been lifted four months ago, she said, I don't know.
I trust Joe Biden.
I trust the State Department and the Pentagon.
I mean, these people are dangerous.
They're reckless.
Here are some of the people protesting outside the Democratic Convention who believe that the Democrats should be doing a lot more to help Ukraine.
Hi, sorry about that before.
I spotted a congressman, so I had to go run and interview him.
You can see that one of them has a sign that says Free Azov.
Azov, of course, is the battalion inside Ukraine that from 2013 until 2022 had been called by every single Western media outlet a neo-Nazi organization.
There was legislation banning any American weapons from getting anywhere near the Azov battalion because of the fact that they were actual Nazis.
I don't mean Nazis in the way that liberals call their political opponents Nazis.
I mean actual Nazis.
They have Nazi insignia.
Their leaders collaborated with the SS inside Ukraine to slaughter tens of thousands of people.
All their heroes are these hardcore nationalists who continue to identify with the Nazi party in Germany.
That's who we're arming.
That's who these people are protesting in favor of.
And here's part of what they said.
Where?
The protestors?
The protesters?
Ok.
They're like debating.
Okay.
I'd rather talk to you.
Okay, so in terms of the U.S. has provided an enormous amount of support for Ukraine.
Do you think it hasn't been enough?
We appreciate all the support, all the weapons, but I guess it only will be enough when democracy wins, when Ukraine wins, and when Russia is destroyed.
Because even then, the conflict, the war, full-scale invasion is like frozen, or it has some other So when you say Russia is destroyed, what would that look like exactly?
Russia more time to prepare better for the next invasion.
So when you say Russia is destroyed, what would that look like exactly?
Russia would no longer exist?
I don't know.
Like, for me it's like a dream, but in terms of what we have now, I don't see it soon.
But at least we can do anything to change something in government, I guess.
But it can only be done with power.
So would you want the US to try to implement some sort of regime change in Russia where the government is overthrown?
Yeah, and maybe at least do something better for them even.
Like, for example, what our forces are now doing in Kursk.
So that's small steps to that, I guess.
Right, so the Ukrainians, with U.S.
support, have launched an incursion, or invasion, or whatever word you want to use, into territorial Russia for the first time.
No, we want to just protect ourselves.
We want to have our borders back.
To free our people and take all the territories that were taken from Russia.
So what do you think will the difference be between Kamala Harris, if she gets elected, versus Donald Trump on Ukraine?
I'm not a political expert, so I don't know.
But in my opinion, Donald Trump is like the freak that we don't want.
What can we expect from him?
So that's why it's put us in danger because all that he's been saying Like it's lies.
It's completely lies.
So that's why I guess it will better Go with the democracy go with the Camilla All right, it's a rousing endorsement Yeah Alright, are you from Chicago?
Yeah, I live in Chicago.
Are you with a particular organization?
No, I'm just a Ukrainian activist.
What's your name?
Olena.
Alright, good to meet you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Okay, so that was the charming Michael Tracy.
I know for sure he finds the views very dangerous, but he seems to have had a certain soft spot for the protesters, so it was a very kind of polite and even affectionate interview, which is always good to have a kind of connection.
He wasn't interested in talking to any of the people, it seemed.
He was very interested in interviewing her, but in any event, you kind of see the mindset here, and it's been the thing that, since the beginning of this war, has always amazed me.
The utter indifference to the dangers here.
And at some point, it's kind of like Iran, where the Israelis crossed a point where they bombed their embassy in Damascus and then engineered a murder of someone who they had invited into their country to attend the inauguration of the newly elected president.
You push a country that far and you force them to retaliate in a certain way just to defend their sovereignty.
And obviously that's what NATO and the United States is doing with Russia.
And the Democrats want more.
They're cheering wildly as Kamala Harris continues to vow to do that indefinitely and even further.
And there's never once a mention of any of the risk.
In fact, you see these Democratic Congress members who are voting for it who don't even understand that there are risks, who just are oblivious to them.
And so that's what the Democratic Party Convention was.
It was a reaffirmation of the worldview.
That insists that international wars, that the U.S.
involvement in them, that fighting endless wars, is the way in which we somehow validate our national purpose.
And that is the core neoconservative view.
And that's why neoconservatives are so enthusiastic, not just supportive of, but so enthusiastic of a Kamala Harris-led Democratic Party.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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