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Sept. 10, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:29:54
Dick Cheney's Kamala Endorsement; Kamala's "Issues" Page Finally Posted; Jill Stein Interview on Dems, 2024, and AOC

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Dick Cheney Endorses Kamala (6:50) Interview with Jill Stein (51:43) Outro (1:28:14) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good evening.
It's Monday, September 9th.
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.
As you can see, we are back in our normal studio.
I'm very happy to be back, despite how well I think the studio that we used while I was traveling worked, but always good to be home.
Former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney followed his daughter Liz in announcing over the weekend that he was not merely refraining from voting for Donald Trump, but instead intends to vote for Kamala Harris.
Dick Cheney then issued a written statement explaining why others should follow suit and do the same.
Now, the most relevant and revealing part of this whole episode was that it was completely unsurprising, not in the least bewildering or difficult to understand, but instead this all makes complete sense.
In terms of what the Democratic Party, on the one hand, and the Trump-led Republican Party are in relation to Dick Cheney's worldview, which has not changed.
If I believed what Dick Cheney believes, I would also publicly advocate for Kamala Harris, and it wouldn't even be a close call.
Now, if it were only Dick Cheney and his daughter among so-called conservatives or Bush-Cheney era Republicans who were endorsing Kamala, one could possibly write this all off as a personal grievance that the Cheneys were seeking vengeance against Trump and his movement for dealing Liz Cheney one of the most humiliating defeats a member of Congress has ever suffered in the history of our republic, namely losing to a primary challenger in her own party by 36 points.
in a state, Wyoming, where her dad was the dominant political figure for decades.
But the opposite is true.
Among Bush-Cheney-era conservatives, especially neocons and militarists, which the Cheney family certainly is, there is a huge segment of those GOP elites, arguably a majority, who not only oppose Trump now, but have become full-fledged, vocal, and enthusiastic supporters of the Democratic Party.
Not just on the level of the races where Trump wins, but also for Senate and for the House, and in general have just become Democrats.
None of this says much about these neocons and Bush-Cheney operatives.
They really haven't changed any of their views at all.
It's very easy to understand what they believe.
It's the same thing they believed for decades.
But it says a great deal about what the modern Democratic Party has become and why it is that people like Dick Cheney once regarded by almost all Democrats as to the holy mix of Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler, now see the Democratic Party, quite rationally, as their best vehicle for advancing their agenda and interests.
We'll take a look at all of this, including a reminder of how Democrats once saw Dick Cheney compared to their celebration of him and other Bush-Cheney meocons as some sort of beacon of American democracy, as if their love of democratic values is what is causing them to reject Trump and endorse Kamala.
Then, speaking of Kamala Harris, she finally did something today that she has thus far refused to do.
She posted a page on her campaign's website entitled, quote, Issues.
And it reports to finally advise the country, advise Americans on what she actually believes and intends to do if she becomes president.
The problem is that the page really does nothing of the kind.
It is as cliched and vapid as it is vague and evasive, thus compounding her growing problem that Americans, for good and obvious reason, say they have no idea who she really is or what she actually stands for because the real answer is she believes in and stands for nothing.
And we'll look at the issue page that our campaign finally posted that provides more corroboration of that fact.
And then finally, the Democratic Party continues to portray itself as the sole protector of American democracy, without whom the United States will collapse and cease to be a representative democracy.
Democrats do this even as they work hard to ban all their opponents from appearing on the ballot so that people can't vote for them.
Not just Donald Trump or RFK Jr.
before he withdrew and Cornel West but also the Green Party candidate Jill Stein who they still blame for Hillary's 2016 loss to Trump.
We will be joined tonight by Dr. Stein to discuss these anti-democratic efforts to ban her and her party from the ballot.
We'll also talk about this preposterously vague identity on which Kamala is running, her differences, if any, with Joe Biden, the recent attacks on Dr. Stein by AOC, who volunteered once again to become the battering ram of the Democratic Party.
She was once a Green supporter, AOC was, before becoming a DNC operative.
And we'll also talk about the 2024 election in general.
Agree or not, with Jill Stein's politics, there are few people with more fixed principles and the ability to well articulate what she believes than she.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It is really hard to overstate how much Democrats and liberals, every sector of the Democratic Party, hated Dick Cheney with all of their might, every sector of the Democratic Party, hated Dick Cheney with all of their might, especially during the first Bush term, but even into the second
They hated him far more than the president, George W. Bush, because they perceived that George W. Bush was too stupid to even know what he was doing or where he was, and they believed that Cheney was the mastermind, the evil, malevolent mastermind behind all of the policies that Democrats Before Obama embraced a lot of them, pretended to hate.
Not just things like the Iraq war, but the entire panoply of attacks on basic civil liberties and democratic values carried out under the pretext of the war on terror.
Dick Cheney to them was everything that they now say Donald Trump is.
They talked about him as being a Hitler figure, as sending Americans to die in multiple wars solely to drive up the stock of Halliburton.
of letting New Orleans drown in a hurricane because New Orleans was primarily filled with black people who Dick Cheney never cared about and never valued every possible hideous thing that you can say about a person what was said in consensus by Dick Cheney at the time I agreed with a lot of it and still do
In fact, my journalism career basically started primarily in order to cover these assaults on civil liberties and on democratic values carried out by George Bush and Dick Cheney under the guise of the War on Terror.
And that's why, on the one hand, it's kind of amazing, but on the other, completely unsurprising to watch not only Dick Cheney
What was it who was always described as this far right right-wing extremist Republican come out and say that he is endorsing Kamala Harris and voting for Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump but also to watch the reaction of the same Democrats and same liberals celebrate Dick Cheney's endorsement and not just endorsement but Dick Cheney himself
Saying things along the lines of, look, I didn't really agree with Dick Cheney on a lot of things, but the one thing we agree on is our love of American democracy and the rule of law.
Actually claiming that Dick Cheney is now some sort of beacon, some noble embodiment of American democracy and the rule of law, and that's the reason Trump offends him so much.
as opposed to the real reason, which is that he fears that a Trump-led Republican Party will reject many of his core foreign policy views and views of domestic policy as well, whereas Kamala Harris will be a lot more faithful outside of cultural war issues, which nobody really cares about at the end of the day, a lot more faithful to his which nobody really cares about at the end of the day, a lot more faithful
And there are a lot of like-minded people, people like Dick Cheney, who were talked about in the same ways as he was, who have also become not just people opposed to Donald Trump, but full-fledged supporters of the Democratic Party, not because they've changed any of their views, but because the Democratic Party and their perception, rightly so,
Aligns more with those views here from CNN over the weekend September 6 quote Dick Cheney Says he's voting for Kamala Harris in November and Trump quote can never be trusted with power again quote in our nation's 248 year history There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump Cheney said in a statement He tried to steal the last election Using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
He can never be trusted with power again.
Now, beyond all the crimes and immoral policies that I enumerated, not just the invasion of Iraq, Which killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not more, of innocent Iraqis that destabilized that region that even Tony Blair admits was what gave rise to ISIS and this power vacuum that the United States and its allies created under Dick Cheney.
Just not only those things, and not only the assaults on civil liberties as well, but let us recall that the perception of almost every Democrat and liberal who you heard from in mainstream discourse was that Dick Cheney was everything but some sort of passionate supporter of American democracy.
In fact, their view of the election that brought George Bush and Dick Cheney to power the 2000 election, and their view was one that was stolen by the Supreme Court by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court by a five to four vote, and stole the rightful victory from the actual winner of that contest.
Tennessee Senator Al Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman, And that was when Republicans overthrew American democracy, essentially instituted a judicial coup, and took power undemocratically.
And now Dick Cheney is celebrating himself as someone who prioritizes the values of American democracy and the necessity of integrity on elections above all, and liberals are celebrating him for the same.
Now, Dick Cheney's endorsement of Trump was preceded by just a day or so by Liz Cheney's endorsement of—I'm sorry, Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala was preceded by just a day or so by Liz Cheney's endorsement of Kamala, and that's unsurprising.
There'd be no Liz Cheney.
No one would know who she was if it weren't for her dad.
As I said, her dad was the dominant force in Wyoming politics for a long time, going back to the 70s, when he was a member of Congress, the only member of Congress at large from Wyoming.
He worked in the Nixon White House.
He became a major voice in the House of Representatives.
And then, of course, he was chosen by George Bush in 2000 to be his vice presidential running mate.
So to have the last name of Cheney in Wyoming is a virtual guarantor of dynastic succession, and that's what she used, the only thing she used to become a politician who was known at all until she got booted out, as I said, in the most humiliating defeat arguably by any member of Congress, elected member of Congress in history, by losing within her own party by 36 points in a Republican party in a state, Wyoming, that her father had long dominated and controlled.
She spoke at Duke, and she made clear for the first time that she was not just refraining from supporting Trump, but was actively supporting Kamala Harris.
And then she, of course, was fetted by the news media.
Why is she even a relevant voice at all, aside from the fact that her entire career is nepotistic?
She's not a member of Congress.
She doesn't represent anybody.
Her own party kicked her out of her party by 36 points in the primary.
She doesn't represent anybody and yet of course she's everywhere in media because she gets presented as the token Republican, the conservative who is voting for Kamala Harris.
So of course ABC News couldn't wait to have her on and here's what she said when invited on a couple of days after her own announcement of her support for Kamala Harris.
We've been talking about economic policy.
You know, you look at national security policy.
And again, there are certainly areas where I disagree with Biden administration, national security policy, where I've disagreed with Vice President Harris's position on issues.
But when it comes to fundamental alliances, when it comes to the importance of NATO, for example, and how important it is for the United States to lead in the world, we've seen a sea change.
We now have a Republican Party that is embracing isolationism.
that is embracing Putin, that, you know, we've seen just in the last week, the Republican vice presidential nominee willing to appear, willing to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson, who is platforming pro-Nazis, is himself pushing pro-Nazi propaganda.
That is not the party of Ronald Reagan.
Now, I think what she's saying here is so important, because for so long, what began as this, quote-unquote, never-Trump movement, pretended that they have every bit as much of an ideological and policy difference with the Democratic Party as they always had.
And their whole shtick was, well, we are people who put country before party.
And even though we still vehemently disagree with everything the Democrats stand for, the fact that Donald Trump is such a degradation of our republic, We just are opposed to him.
We're still Republicans.
We're still conservatives.
We just can't stand Trump.
And so for a long time, when he pointed out, hey look, remember all these neocons and militarists and corporatists in the Republican Party, the establishment wing?
Who just 10 years ago you were calling Nazis and fascists and accusing of starving babies in order to maximize corporate profits or starting new wars for all kinds of sinister motives.
Remember those people?
They're all now supporting the Democratic Party.
Doesn't that say something about the Democratic Party?
They would say, oh no, no, these people don't support the Democratic Party.
They're not at all aligned with our ideology or our politics or our policies.
They're every bit as much antagonistic to that worldview as ever.
They just are antagonistic to Trump because Trump is someone who wants to overturn American democracy.
That used to be the pretext that they would all use.
Both Republicans who supported Democrats and Democrats who had to reconcile why people they were calling fascist and Hitler and racist ten years ago are now such enthusiastic supporters of their party.
And here Liz Cheney is saying, no, no, that's not the reason why I'm supporting Kamala Harris.
It's not just because I dislike Trump.
She just got done explaining.
It's because Kamala Harris' foreign policy, the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, is more aligned with my foreign policy worldview than the Trump-led Democrats.
They want to preserve all of these imperialistic alliances, use NATO, use international institutions to continue to exert American power and military force all around the world in places that have no threat to the United States.
And then she used the term isolationist, which people like Liz Cheney have always used, to describe Trump's view that the United States should not fight wars, but instead should focus inward on the lives of our own citizens, who Liz Cheney doesn't care about at all, and never has, and should only fight wars when our countries threaten not to change or improve or save other countries around the world.
So Liz Cheney is saying what I've been saying forever.
Which is that this idea that the only reason people like this support the Democratic Party is not because they hate Trump.
It's because they have now far more in common with the core policy, foreign policy, domestic policy worldview of these liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party, of these warmongers in the Democratic Party, wanting to fuel the war in Ukraine.
Wanting to constantly expand NATO to dominate the world through military force, spend trillions of dollars on our military while our cities fall apart?
That has always been the Cheney's worldview.
Always.
Since as long as I have heard of Dick Cheney, going back into the 70s, to say nothing of when he was vice president.
These people haven't changed their views at all.
The Democratic Party has transformed.
That's why there's a realignment.
That's why all of the working class voters, not just the white working class but increasingly the Latino working class, the black working class, are migrating away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
And the working class in general has done so in droves since Trump began to be the representative in the face of the Republican Party.
It's why The only place that you hear contempt for neocons or skepticism of the U.S.
security state is in the Republican Party.
The only place you hear opposition to the war in Ukraine is in the Republican Party.
Because these parties have transformed their ideology mostly as a result of Trump.
And here Liz Cheney is telling you, in as clear a voice as she can, That she's endorsing Kamala Harris not only through opposition to Donald Trump, but because increasingly she believes more in the worldview and the foreign policy of the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party, even though neither Dick Cheney nor Liz Cheney have changed a single one of their views.
It's not that they've moved further left, whatever that means, and now find more alignment in the Democratic Party.
They're exactly where they've always been.
I defy anyone to tell me a single view that Liz Cheney or Dick Cheney advocated.
Not just central, but an ancillary view, or that Bill Kristol or David Frum or Nicole Wallace, any of these people who are core Bush-Cheney operatives, who are now Democrats, I defy anyone to describe, identify a single view that they've changed.
They've not changed a single view.
The Democratic Party has moved toward them.
All right, I just, I think it's so important to realize the significance of this.
what Liz Cheney is here to tell you while she explains on ABC News why she and her father both endorsed Kamala Harris.
Let's hear the rest of this.
And I believe strongly that if you're talking about a national security set of issues and you care about America's leadership role in the world, a vote for Vice President Harris is the right vote to make.
All right.
I just I think it's so important to realize the significance of this.
The Cheney family for the last 25 years was the primary embodiment of a foreign policy that not just left wing people or liberals, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party as a whole identified not just as a counterproductive or misguided foreign policy, but as an evil foreign policy.
And Liz Cheney is saying, from the perspective of the national security ideology that I have lived my life believing in, Anyone who shares my foreign policy should be voting for Kamala Harris.
I agree completely with Liz Cheney.
As I said at the top of the show, if I were Dick Cheney, and I believed what Dick Cheney has always believed and still believes, I would absolutely vote for Kamala Harris.
And I would believe that she and her party are the much more reliable vehicles to advance my ideological agenda and my interests.
They're making rational choices.
And that's why I say it says far more about the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris than it says about them.
Now, Kamala Harris could not have been more excited.
She could not have been happier and prouder to have learned that the Cheney family, not just Liz Cheney, but Dick Cheney, both endorsed her.
Here's what she said about that when she spoke over the weekend about it.
-This is still a French official. -How can President, please look at the Cheney's endorsement, ma'am. Liz Cheney and Kim Cheney have endorsed me. What do you think about that? -I'm actually -- I'm honored to have their endorsement, and I think that what they both, as leaders who are well-respected, are making an important statement that it's okay and it's not important to put country above party.
And I'm honored to have their support and I think it's an important statement right now.
A lot of what I think is happening, and I was just talking with some folks here in Pittsburgh about it, is that people are exhausted about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans.
And them stepping up to make this public statement I think is courageous, but also for people like the folks I was just talking with, it really reinforces for them that we love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.
Not even a nod to the pretense that obviously the Cheneys have a far different ideological worldview than I have.
That's not what she says because that's not what she believes because it's not true.
They don't have a different ideological worldview.
As I said, you could probably find some culture war issues where they differ, although Dick Cheney never cared about culture war issues.
In fact, Dick Cheney was the first major American politician to publicly endorse The legalization of same-sex marriage, which he did in his 2000 vice presidential debate with Joe Lieberman far, far before people like Barack Obama or Joe Biden endorsed that idea, took them a decade.
He cited these libertarian principles about how people, adult Americans, have the right to marry whom they want.
He was obviously motivated by the fact that his daughter is herself a gay woman in a relationship with another woman.
And yet when Liz Cheney ran for Congress, knowing that that was not helpful to her bid to become the Congresswoman in the Republican Party from Wyoming, she condemned same-sex marriage even though her own sister was in one and even though her own father had a decade earlier supported it.
So Dick Cheney never cared about cultural issues, culture war issues.
But outside of culture war issues, abortion or whatever, you can Pretty much take to the bank the fact that Dick Cheney is far more in alignment with Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.
And that's what Kamala herself said.
She called Dick Cheney a respected, a well-respected leader.
And he preys on all the things that he represents.
That's what the Democratic Party is.
They really do believe that that establishment wing of the Republican Party is far more aligned with them.
Then say the left wing of the Democratic Party who are going to vote for Jill Stein or even refrain from voting for Kamala Harris or people who are on the populist right who are supportive of Donald Trump.
It's the Kamala Harris wing, sort of Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party.
Who are far more unified than they are different.
That's what Kamala Harris just got done saying.
We have far more similarities than we do differences.
Somebody who for a long time claimed to be a representative of the actual left in the United States, Bernie Sanders, who in 2016 ran a campaign based on a promise to initiate a political revolution.
And he was very clear, not just against Republicans, but against Democrats, and is now a very faithful surrogate of the Democratic Party, went on Meet the Press, where he was also asked about Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris, and here's what the independent senator from Vermont had to say.
Senator, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about her recent endorsements by two people who are not progressives at all.
Of course, I'm talking about Dick and Liz Cheney this week.
They said they're going to support her.
They're going to vote for her.
It's worth noting.
If you are only listening to this and you're not watching, The minute that Liz and Dick Cheney were mentioned, Bernie broke out into this gigantic TV grin.
He was so happy to hear what he was being asked.
You can see it on the screen.
He's still there.
It's like 10 seconds after he moved his mouth into that position, he kept it there.
Like, yeah, let's talk about Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney.
It's amazing.
They're endorsing Kamala Harris.
Here's what he said.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney voted with former President Trump more than 90% of the time.
It was quite critical when President Biden picked her as his running mate.
Would you welcome seeing Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail?
Well, Kristen, what I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it's not just issues.
Cheney and I agree on nothing.
No issues.
But what we do believe, that's just a total lie.
It's an absolute total lie.
Bernie Sanders is a vehement, vocal supporter of the NATO war in Ukraine and the need of the United States to finance that war until its end.
And so is Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney.
It's one of the things Liz Cheney mentioned when explaining why she's more aligned with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party when it comes to foreign policy issues.
And just in general, Bernie's foreign policy, which is very much aligned with the mainstream and Democratic Party, is also the Cheney family's view as well.
So there certainly are differences.
I'll even concede more differences between, say, Bernie and the Cheneys.
But the idea that they have nothing in common is an absolute lie.
They have a lot in common beyond this idea of protecting democracy.
But let's hear the rest of what he says.
Is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations.
And it's not just changing.
I think there is a significant number of Republicans that say, well, you know, I may not agree with the vice president on this issue or that issue, but I cannot support somebody who's a pathological liar, somebody who fomented a insurrection to overthrow the country.
throw the election return.
So I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy, obviously on all the issues.
We have very different points of view.
Now, just a couple of things to note about that before I get to the main point that I want to make here.
First of all, the idea that Bernie Sanders is saying how much he appreciates the endorsement of Liz and Dick Cheney and how much liberals are saying that stands in very stark contrast as Bernie Sanders' 2020 press secretary and friend of the show, the idea that Bernie Sanders is saying how much he appreciates the endorsement of Liz and Dick Cheney and how much liberals are saying that stands in very stark contrast as Bernie Sanders' 2020 press secretary and friend of the show, Brianna Joy Gray, mentioned when
questions.
The Democratic Party erupted in rage because there was one commercial that the Sanders campaign constructed and aired that mentioned in passing, or showed in passing, this Rogan statement in favor of Bernie Sanders.
And he was forced to repudiate Joe Rogan's endorsement on the grounds that Joe Rogan is some sort of unspeakably evil, outside of the mainstream reactionary, and that no one who wants to be the representative of the Democratic Party could possibly accept an endorsement from such a person.
So apparently Joe Rogan is beyond the pale for Democrats to accept an endorsement from, whereas Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are people that everyone expresses gratitude for when it comes to their endorsement, including Bernie Sanders.
But the thing that just drives me the most insane about all of this is you heard Bernie Sanders there very clearly say, unlike Liz Cheney, who would say, no, we have a lot in common.
Bernie was trying to maintain this pretense that the Democrats and the Cheneys couldn't be further apart, et cetera, et cetera.
But the reason he said he's so happy about the endorsement and the reason he believes the endorsement happened is because Dick Cheney even despite differences with the Republican Party, with the Democratic Party, The party is a devoted believer in and protector of American democracy and the necessity for things to be decided by free and fair elections to respect the integrity of election outcomes.
That's what he said about Dick Cheney.
Oh, Dick Cheney's endorsing Kamala Harris because Dick Cheney, whatever else you might want to say about him, he's Hitler, he's a warmonger, he's willing to starve and kill people for a little bit higher of a stock price to become a little bit richer.
He's a racist and a white supremacist and a fascist.
You might think all this, but one thing about Dick Cheney, Bernie said, is that he believes he's a noble supporter of the foundation of American democracy.
Now, the very idea that Dick Cheney gives the slightest crap about American democracy, and that somehow that's why he's motivated to endorse Kamala Harris, is so insultingly stupid on its face that I'd like to say it's beneath Bernie to try that, but I don't think anything is beneath Bernie at this point, like AOC.
But the reason why it's so astonishing is, as I said, the consensus of the Democratic Party, every sector of it, the left, the liberal wing, the centrist wing, the more conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the consensus in 2000 was that Bush and Cheney stole the election, that the rightful winner was Al Gore.
He would have been declared the winner of Florida had the recount been permitted to proceed.
And yet, essentially by a 5-4 vote, there were a couple aspects of the decision that were 7-2.
Republicans who formed the majority of the court stopped the vote counting and declared Bush the winner simply because Republicans wanted to steal the election and they used Republican Supreme Court to do so.
That it was a coup.
It was an overthrow of American democracy.
That's what every Democrat thought at the time and said.
So now Dick Cheney went from instituting a coup And overthrowing the legitimate results of an American democracy to 25 years later being so impassioned in support of American democracy that he's willing to endorse Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and people like that are willing to go on television and make that claim?
For people who weren't paying attention to politics, who were too young to remember, who have forgotten it, here's the Washington Post January 7, 2001, obviously shortly after The Supreme Court was asked to stop the voting.
There you see the headline in the Washington Post, Gore presides as Congress tallies votes electing Bush.
So this is basically the January 6th of the 2000 election.
Ralph Gore was the sitting vice president under Bill Clinton.
He therefore presided over the Senate the way Mike Pence did on January 6th.
And he presided over the acceptance by the U.S.
Congress of the certified electoral college that declared George Bush the winner of Florida as a result of the Supreme Court's decision to stop the recount.
The headline is, "Black Caucus Members Object as Florida Numbers Are Accepted." "When it comes time to count Florida's votes, House Democrats, most of them members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one by one to object to the awarding of the state's 25 electors to Bush and his running mate, Richard B. Cheney.
While the House Democrats knew that their objections would not be accepted, some of the lingering bitterness from the 2000 election filtered through the electorate proceeding." Words like, quote, fraud and disenfranchisement could be heard above the din of Republicans calling for, quote, regular order.
The Democratic protest was led by black caucus members who shared the feeling among black leaders that voters in the largely African-American precincts, overwhelmingly carried by Gore, We're not counted because of faulty voting machines, illicit challenges to black voters, and other factors.
It's a sad day in America, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois, said as he turned toward Gore.
Caucus members argued in a news conference yesterday that they had no choice but to challenge Bush's election.
There comes a time you have to take destiny into your own hands, no matter what is being said by whom, said Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Democrat of California.
The black lawmakers mocked the idea that they should put the election behind them.
Quote, we will never get over this, said Congresswoman Corrine Brown, Democrat of Florida.
And they vowed to challenge Bush's cabinet choices and appointees.
That's the person they're now saying is so motivated by a love of American democracy and the integrity of American elections that he was driven to endorse Kamala.
All sorts of books are written at the time.
That liberals loved, characterizing the 2000 election as a stolen election, as one that overthrew the results of American democracy.
Here's just one example by a liberal academic named Douglas Kellner.
Title was Grand Theft 2000 Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election.
There were so many of these books.
Here is NBC News publishing An article by a sort of centristy pundit of the Democratic Party, Will Selliton, who long wrote for Slate, kind of positioned himself as this Democrat at the end of the day, but one who chides the left and liberals for their poor behavior.
And in the course of denouncing them for claiming that Bush and Cheney stole the election, he Here's what he wrote, quote, the complaints among Democrats are spreading and becoming more shrill.
At last Tuesday's debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, this was the 2004 Democratic primary, Carol Moseley Brown, who at the time was a Democratic Senator from Illinois, said Bush, quote, was not elected by the American people.
On Saturday at a Democratic steak fry in Iowa, several presidential candidates stood behind Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Ohio, Iowa, and also a presidential candidate at the time, as he charged, quote, Bush stole the election.
We know what the Republican strategy is.
Suppress the vote.
Look what they did in Florida.
Look what they're trying to do in Texas.
Look what they're trying to do in California.
Former President Bill Clinton told the crowd that in 2000, five justices of the Supreme Court, quote, thought it was time for the minority to have the White House.
They stopped counting votes in Florida and they just gave it to them.
Again, this was commonplace, mainstream views of the Democratic Party that Dick Cheney, now the noble embodiment of American democracy, its protector and guardian, Use the Republicans on the Supreme Court to basically institute a coup and steal an election that they lost.
Here from the New York Times, January 21st, 2001, the day after Bush and Cheney were inaugurated, quote, the inauguration, the demonstrations, protesters and the thousands sound off in the Capitol.
Many of the demonstrators were upset by the ballot procedures and Supreme Court ruling that led to George W. Bush's becoming president.
As President Bush's limousine passed, many waved signs proclaiming, quote, hail to the chief.
As Mr. Bush was taking the oath at the Capitol, more than a thousand people attended a rally led by the Reverend Al Sharpton in a nearby park.
Quote, George Bush was not elected by the people, Mr. Sharpton said.
He was selected by the judges of the Supreme Court, and those judges ought to know that they cannot rob from us.
This has been driving me crazy for so long, this complete revisionism.
of recent political history in order for Democrats and liberals to reconcile why it is that the people they were calling Nazis and fascists and insurrectionists and coup mongers just 20 years ago are now among the most vocal and influential supporters within the Democratic Party.
In 2020, I wrote this article entitled, quote, No matter the liberal metric chosen, the Bush-Cheney administration was far worse than Donald Trump.
This is on November 7, 2020.
And essentially the argument broke down.
Everything that the Bush and Cheney administration did that Donald Trump never got close to doing.
Just the Iraq war by itself.
The destruction of American credibility by doing it on a false pretense of claiming there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never were there.
Torture and due process free imprisonment.
And kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured, all in the name of the war on terror, droning people, killing innocent people by the dozens and the hundreds and the thousands under Obama, all with no due process at all.
As I said, these were the things that caused me to start writing about politics.
Among my earliest articles when I created my blog in late 2005, and this is what enabled me to quickly develop a large audience of liberals and democrats, was that I was arguing that the Bush-Cheney administration was lawless and anti-democratic, largely by virtue of their systemic attack on the basic protections of the republic and the constitution and the founding.
Here was one of the first articles I wrote in November of 2005.
The headline of it was, True Tyranny Defined, The Bush Administration vs. Jose Padilla.
Jose Padilla was an American citizen born in the United States and he was arrested in the United States on American soil at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.
And John Ashcroft told the press conference he was in Moscow and accused Jose Padilla of being a dirty bomber, someone trying to smuggle radiological weapons into the United States shortly after 9-11 in order to detonate a radiological weapon.
It was called the dirty bomber, which of course is a crime.
And if an American citizen is detained by the U.S.
government on American soil, one of the foundational guarantors of our rights under the Constitution is that we are immediately entitled to due process.
To a trial, to accusations to be clearly stated, to a lawyer, to the evidence be presented against us, all of those rights.
But instead, George Bush and Dick Cheney created a theory that as long as they call somebody an enemy combatant, even an American citizen, you can detain them indefinitely.
Indefinitely.
And Jose Padilla was detained, imprisoned for three and a half years, no charges presented against him.
He was detained in a military brig.
He was tortured in a military brig.
He was denied access to any conversations or communications with anyone outside of the prison, including lawyers.
It was only when the Supreme Court was finally about to rule on that case did the Bush administration finally bring charges, none of which included these accusations that he was the dirty bomber, the original justification for imprisoning him.
It was things like that.
Overturning the foundational guarantees of American democracy that caused me to write about George Bush and Dick Cheney in such negative ways.
So when I hear now it being said that, oh, I didn't agree with George Bush and Dick Cheney, but they were always American patriots, believer in democracy, I want to vomit.
Here's another article I wrote January of 2006, an article entitled An Ideology of Lawlessness.
Where essentially, I wrote about how their theories of executive power, including the right to ignore congressional laws, to violate congressional laws, as they did when they spied on Americans without the warrants required by the FISA law, essentially transformed the American president into a monarch.
And then I spent the last eight years watching the architects of these theories, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, David Frum, Nicole Wallace, all of those scumbags from the Lincoln Project, We're at the center of all of this.
They started writing articles about how they hated Donald Trump because he was somehow a threat to American democracy that they loved more than their own party.
And this transformation has been going on for a long time.
This is what I want to stress about the Dick Cheney endorsement, why I'm spending so much time on it.
It's not some rapid, sudden development that came out of nowhere.
It is an ideological realignment of the Democratic Party and neocons that have been going on for a long time.
And to illustrate that point, I want to show you this New York Times op-ed by Jacob Heilbrunn, who has been a opponent of neocons for a long time, a scholar of them, he studies them.
In July of 2014, as the 2016 election approached and everyone knew Hillary was going to run and likely win,
Before Donald Trump was in anyone's minds, before he descended down that escalator at Trump Tower in that first appearance and announcement of his being president, called for a wall to be built, and then exploded in popularity, before anyone even thought about Donald Trump, there was this article entitled, The Next Act of Neocons, that described how neocons were preparing to support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton because they knew that Hillary Clinton
was a much more aggressive advocate for the neocon worldview than any of the Republicans who are running would be.
This is what the article said.
And here, by the way, is a picture of Hillary Clinton and Robert Kagan.
Robert Kagan is the longtime neocon partner of Bill Kristol.
They were advocating for an invasion of Iraq before 9-11.
They always wanted American power to invade the Middle East and change the Middle East coincidentally to benefit Israel.
This is what their worldview has been forever.
Robert Kagan, you may recognize that last name because he's married to, he's married to Victoria Newland, who is the, I believe Victoria Newland actually is the brother, the sister-in-law of Robert Kagan, but they're all in the same family, the Kagan family.
And of course, Victoria Nuland ran foreign policy for Hillary Clinton's State Department.
Before that, she was the primary foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
And here's what the New York Times said, quote, Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat, aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign in a bid to return to the driver's seat of American foreign policy.
Neocons have followed Robert Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton.
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in the New Republic this year that, quote, it is clear that in administration councils, Hillary was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya.
And the thing is, these neocons have a point.
Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq War, supported sending arms to Syrian rebels, likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, wholeheartedly backs Israel, and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.
That's all the way back in 2014, laying out how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party that was shaped by her was becoming far more in greater alignment with the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton than with the Republican Party.
Back in 2017, July of 2017, just six months after Donald Trump became president, was inaugurated as president, I wrote about this new DC policy group.
That was composed on the one hand of Democratic Party loyalists to Hillary Clinton and on the other to Bush-era neocons.
They jointly created a foreign policy think tank in order to advocate for neocon foreign policy.
This was the top level of the Democratic Party foreign policy infrastructure.
And all of those neocons who Democrats said just a couple years earlier were the root of all evil.
Quote, this union is far more than a marriage of a convenience that stopped Trump.
This is what I wrote in 2017.
It was far more about is about far more than just stopping Trump.
It reflects broad based agreement on U.S.
hawkishness toward Russia and beyond.
When it comes to this new group, the Alliance of Democrats with the most extreme neocon elements is visible beyond the group's staff leadership.
Its Board of Advisors is composed of both leading Democrat foreign policy experts along with the nation's most extremist neocons.
Thus, alongside Jake Sullivan, who had been the national security advisor to Joe Biden and the Clinton campaign and now is the national security advisor to President Biden.
Along with him was Mike Morrell, Obama's acting CIA director, and Michael McFaul, Obama's ambassador to Russia.
Sit leading neocons such as Mike Chertoff, Bush's Homeland Security Secretary, Mike Rogers, the far-right supremely hawkish former congressman who now hosts a right-wing radio show, and Bill Kristol himself.
So you can see this alignment taking place at a very substantive and planned realignment of the Democratic Party with neocons and Bush-Cheney Republicans going back years even before Trump, and obviously Trump was an accelerant to it.
And that's the most important thing I think is necessary to realize about this Dick Cheney endorsement of the Democratic Party.
The reason Dick Cheney and so many people like Dick Cheney Our support in the Republican Party is not just because of their antipathy of Donald Trump.
Instead, as Liz Cheney herself acknowledged and at length explained in that ABC interview, it's because the core foreign policy worldview of neocons and Bush-Cheney militarists are found and have much more reliable support With Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party than it does with Republicans and the Trump-led GOP.
And it is amazing to watch all of these people on the left, and whoever, who support the Democratic Party that now is the party where people like Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol feel most comfortable, rationally, say to people like me, why have you changed?
You've changed so much.
Because I, 20 years ago, was warning about the unique evils of people like Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol and now do not support the party that they rationally have concluded is the party with the ideology closest to their worldview.
I've talked before about the importance of never stopping studying and learning.
There's this kind of sense that after college or law school or graduate school, you're supposed to go into the workforce and your time of studying things and learning new things is over.
There's that old phrase about how you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
And one of the things that I think is so crucial is, for your mental health, your intellectual capacity, is to always continue studying, always continue learning.
Sitting down as if you are a college student, taking courses, reading books, studying different topics, different languages to keep your brain growing and active.
And that's why I've always been genuinely excited that one of our sponsors is Hillsdale College, which offers more than 43 online courses and many of the most important and substantive topics that any American, any adult has great benefit from being able to study.
It includes things like a course in how the Founding Fathers designed the Constitution.
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If you enroll now in Constitution 101 or any of those other courses, I think our country really does need more Americans who understand the Constitution substantively, who are able to defend it and think about it from the actual original understanding of it and how it evolved over time, as well as all the other historical and theological and political debates that continue to shape our society.
You can go right now to hillsdale.edu slash glenn to enroll.
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That's hillsdale.edu/glenn to register.
Dr. Jill Stein is one of the most influential and important independent politicians in our country.
She is currently the presidential candidate representing the Green Party, the same thing she did both in 2012 and 2016.
Dr. Stein is also a medical doctor.
She practiced internal medicine for 25 years after getting her MD from Harvard College, and as a result of the fact that Democrats hate nothing more Then third-party candidates from the left or...
who want to transcend the two-party system.
She has also become one of the politicians with the thickest skin by necessity.
She continues to pursue what she believes are her principles, what she believes are the improvements necessary to our political system, no matter how viciously and falsely she continues to be attacked.
And that's just one of the things we respect so much about her.
And there's a lot going on with the Green Party, with Dr. Stein's candidacy.
And as always, we are delighted to welcome her to our show.
Dr. Stein, good evening.
It's great to see you as always.
Great to be here.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
Good to be on.
So one of the things we've been talking about is that The primary claim of the Democratic Party, and you saw this this weekend when people like Bernie Sanders explained why they were so happy to get Dick Cheney's endorsement, is that essentially the main concern of this election is not ideology, it's not policy, it's none of those things.
It's that the Democratic Party is the sole vehicle for preserving American democracy.
And of course the irony of that is at the same time they're saying that, They've done everything possible to essentially get every one of their opponents banned from the ballot.
Donald Trump and RFK Jr.
when he was running in the Democratic Party race, other people in the Democratic Party race.
Obviously, they have spent a lot of efforts to get you and your candidacy in the Green Party banned from states where you have double or triple the amount of signatures required.
Can you talk a little bit about the recent conflict in Nevada, but also the broader attempt by the lovers of democracy in the Democratic Party to get you banned from the ballot so nobody can vote for you?
Yeah, it's so emblematic of, you know, this Democratic Party that prides themselves on, you know, being the vehicle for democracy and defending democracy around the world.
But of course, here at home, they're doing everything in their power.
They are arguably the anti-Democratic Party, which is pulling out all the stops to throw their opponents off the ballot.
They've hired an army of lawyers.
They proudly announced back in June they are That clueless that they're actually proud of this and and boldly announced that they had hired an army of lawyers in order to throw their competitors off the ballot based on lawfare.
Basically, you know, trivial details that they're searching for violating the spirit of the law in order to suppress their competition.
They have boldly advertised for infiltrators and spies and for paid positions to manage such infiltrators and spies in order to mess up our ballot drives and arguably our organizations as well.
We've suspected for a long time that this has been going on, but we never had the evidence to prove it.
They also hijacked our public funding.
And kept us off of actually a couple of ballots where we have to now run write-in campaigns instead of being on the ballot because the money that we had earned through public funding, which should have been paid to us about two months ago, was held up by ridiculous excuses by the Department of Treasury, you know, That is, again, within the Democratic Party that found excuses, essentially, to delay that funding.
So we expect to be getting it in the coming week or two, but after, you know, after the ballot lines and deadlines are basically passed.
So they're doing everything that they can.
Um, most recently we had qualified in Nevada by getting 30,000 signatures and voters in Nevada who wanted to see an anti-genocide choice on the ballot, a pro-worker, a actual climate emergency choice, an anti-war choice, which the other campaigns that are on the ballot, certainly Biden and Harris and RFK, do not represent.
So we would be that one challenge actually at the And so we got three times the number of required signatures and the Secretary of State for Nevada approved our ballot line and announced that and then the DNC Basically through the Democratic Party in Nevada, then challenged both the Secretary of State and the Green Party to get us thrown off the ballot.
They changed the reason for their case midstream.
I'm not sure how kosher that is, but they were allowed to change their argument when they discovered that their original argument wasn't going to hold water.
They challenged our distribution.
You have to meet certain distribution requirements with the signers to show that they represent voters across the state.
And they saw that they were not going to make it on that basis.
So then they challenged us based on the footnote in the petitions that were used.
Now, the story there is that the Greens had used the correct petitions, and then the Secretary of State's office Corrected us with the wrong petition.
So they swapped out what was initially correctly done by the Green Party of Nevada.
They swapped out the correct petition for a petition that only differed in a minor way Uh, basically a an attestation that the petitioner confirmed that each signer was a resident of the county in which for which they were signing.
This is just normally in the process.
of collecting signatures.
This is a routine part of signature collection.
And when the case went to the district court, they basically agreed with the Secretary of State that this was a, you know, a distinction without a difference, that this was not a substantive reason to deny 30,000 voters their choice on the ballot.
And they approved it.
The Democrats then took it to the Court of Appeals, which flipped the decision and basically validated this effort of the Democratic Party to silence 30,000 voters in Nevada and basically deny the entire state of Nevada an anti-genocide choice, an anti-war choice.
A pro-worker and climate emergency choice.
So we're now in the process of exploring on a very tight timeline whether we can take this to the Supreme Court.
We'll see.
But we will fight this for all it's worth.
Nevada does not have a write-in process.
So if in fact our ballot line is denied by this very partisan and outrageous anti-democratic decision.
It will really be outrageous and a real tragedy for the voters of Nevada. - Yeah, very strange behavior from a party that portrays itself as the sole guardian of democratic values, because as you say, we have two major wars, one in Ukraine because as you say, we have two major wars, one in Ukraine and one that we're finding in Israel
And whatever one might think about the war in Israel and Gaza, all the other candidates, the major candidates are unified in their view on that war.
And if you actually believe in democracy, you would hope that there would be an option for people who I think it's also so notable how at the same time they're trying to keep you off the ballots, they were fighting to keep RFK Jr.
for whom they can vote, which would be you.
And of course, the Democrats have made sure that there is no such choice on a lot of these ballots.
I think it's also so notable how at the same time they're trying to keep you off the ballots, they were fighting to keep RFK Jr. on the ballot even after he said he didn't want to be on and is now supporting Trump, almost as if they're not actually motivated by any fixed principle, but instead manipulate the democratic process
Let me ask you, one of the reasons I think the Green Party is so important is it's really the only third party, maybe the Libertarian Party as well, to a lesser extent, that has demonstrated an ability to systematically get on ballots, which of course the two parties have deliberately made an extremely difficult and expensive task, as you know better than anybody.
How many states, I know a couple are in dispute at the moment, but how many states are You likely to be on, and how many of the swing states, say of the eight or nine swing states that will determine the election, will you be on?
So as of now, we are on all the swing states.
They've challenged us also in Georgia, so they're trying to get us thrown off the ballot, and we are fighting there as well.
I don't even know what the basis of that case is yet.
This just happened a couple days ago, but they are trying to get us off in Georgia.
But From where it stands now, we're actually on the ballot in all of the swing states.
We are on the ballot, actually, if you include the write-ins, and there will be something like eight states in which we have to conduct a write-in campaign.
We'll be on in 48 states.
And it'll be about 95%, maybe 96, 7% of voters.
So effectively, we're going to be a full-bore challenge to empire, oligarchy, and genocide, which is what you need to do You know, we've been essentially ignored.
We've been blacked out.
We've been canceled from this entire race.
Even the likes of Democracy Now, you know, supposedly a, you know, a progressive, you know, media outlet.
They have chosen not to have us on ever.
I think because for the very reason that you identified, we are a progressive force that actually knows how to fight this battle.
And we've been able to challenge power by being on the ballot.
If you're not on the ballot, you're not actually challenging power.
You may be, you know, promoting good ideas and You know, helping to circulate the ideas of certain kinds of resistance.
But you're not actually challenging empire to do that.
You have to be on the ballot.
And the Greens are actually the only people powered political party that has been able to do this.
Now, the Libertarians have done this as well, but they are not an exclusively people powered party.
They take big money.
They use victory funds, for example, where a single donor can write a check for a million dollars.
And any donor who's writing a check for a million dollars is going to come with a lot of influence, you know, pay to play, etc., that just goes on behind closed doors.
Libertarians also work with super PACs, which is another conduit for actually unlimited quantities of money.
So, you know, the Libertarians play that game.
The Greens do not.
We put our money where our mouth is, you know, which is we believe in people powered campaigns, not corporate powered, not billionaire powered, not oligarch powered, but actually people powered.
And so we have a grassroots network of regular everyday working people.
And on that basis, we can actually stand up for the things that Working people desperately need like Medicare for all, a health care system that would provide health care for everyone as a human right.
We are fighting for housing as a human right with a federal program of rent control, you know, because the rent is too damn high.
And 50 percent of Americans now are 30 to 50 percent of their income every month just to keep a roof over their heads, which doesn't leave much money then for your health care, for your pharmaceuticals, for, you know, to pay your student loans, et cetera.
You know, these are real issues of great struggle, not to mention the military budget, which consumes half of our congressional dollars.
And so we are spent on the endless war machine, which delivers the likes of the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, which could eminently have been avoided and which could have been, you know, brought to a peaceful conclusion within two months of the start of the war, you know, which the U.S.
and the U.K.
basically disrupted.
So, you know, this is this is what our bought and sold political system is democracy, if it's being bought and sold in spite of what the Democrats say.
So at any rate, it's really important that those choices be on the ballot.
And You know, we're seeing the Democrats here pulling out all the stops, particularly, you know, through ballot access.
And I should mention also, you know, we had more choices.
So, in the early 1900s, we had socialist candidates who were mayors and Governors actually, senators, congresspeople.
We had socialists at all levels of government making a huge impact.
You know, labor rights and child labor laws and the 40-hour work week and so on, you know.
So there was real political muscle behind that working people's agenda and During the red scares in the early 1900s, laws were passed for ballot access that basically made it impossible for people-powered campaigns to gain access to the ballot.
So, socialists were beaten back from having representation at all levels of government, all across the country, to now where there's a socialist city councilor here or there, but you can count them basically on one hand.
You had the Peace and Freedom Party, which emerged in opposition to the Vietnam War, and the Peace and Freedom Party had as many 13 lines during the period of war.
It is so difficult, so expensive, so unbelievably labor-intensive to maintain ballot lines under these really oppressive rules that peace and freedom was beaten back.
I think they only have ballot status now in one state, that's California.
You know, so we've seen people-powered parties just totally slammed and the Greens have been able to fight that, you know, really starting with Ralph Nader's campaign in 2000.
He attained ballot status, I think, in like 40, 42 states.
And that was the real emergence of the Greens as a anti-corporate force, as a people-powered force.
And for 20 years, basically, we have been able to continue that fight.
So when the Democrats, you know, seek to You know, disparage Greens as being, you know, quote, ineffective or spinning our wheels.
That's actually not true.
It takes incredible energy and organization and strategy to maintain our ballot status.
Not to mention that we have elected over fifteen hundred candidates to local office.
I just, you know, had a A discussion, I should say, a debate with Mehdi Hassan this afternoon about this fact, you know, because he's quite, you know, an apologist for the Democratic Party in spite of being, you know, trashed by MSNBC and the rest.
But, you know, there are so many people who buy this party line that if you're not, you know, if you're not being elected to major offices, that your work is Meaningless?
Well, no.
It's a reflection of how incredibly corrupted and tilted the playing field is that it's unbelievably difficult for a people-powered party simply to maintain the fight and to live to fight another day because it is a moving target.
People are waking up to the fact that the Democrats are The Democrats really are the, you know, are today's Dick Cheney's neocon party.
They are pushing the envelope for cop cities, for the militarization of our police, for the- So if I could just ask about that, because what you said just now is the perfect kind of segue into what I wanted to ask you about as well.
By the way, just as an aside, I'm as surprised that Democracy Now! refuses to put you on the air, that radical progressive network, as I am that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris, but just to say, not at all.
I think I was the most frequent guest on Democracy Now! from 2008 to about 2017.
And when I began dissenting on Resigate, I just became banned from that show, except maybe once to talk about some reporting I did in Brazil.
Like so many of these previously independent institutions in the Trump era, so many of them have just made themselves completely subservient to the Democratic Party and sadly Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!
are among them.
You mentioned Ralph Nader, I did want to ask you about that.
Because, you know, in my lifetime, the only third-party candidate that really was able to get a large percentage of the vote in the election was Ross Perot in 1992.
And he, of course, was a multi-billionaire, able to fund his candidacy, which is why he was able to do that.
Absent that, it's almost impossible.
You had George Wallace winning five states, but that was sort of its own separate thing.
That was before I was born anyway.
You know, the system is so constructed to make sure that third parties have as little effect as possible, the two parties work together to make sure of that.
One of the things, of course, about Ralph Nader, who had been a longtime hero of American liberals and the left because of his consumer advocacy and work on auto safety and a whole bunch of other issues, is that he basically became the devil because although they accused Dick Cheney and George Bush, the beacons of democracy now, of stealing the 2000 election, they also blamed Ralph Nader on the grounds that, oh, had Ralph Nader not run and all these people who voted for Ralph Nader had instead voted for Al Gore, he would have won, the Democrats would have won the election.
The same exact excuse Democrats made in 2016 when Hillary lost.
They had a lot of villains.
They blamed Russia and WikiLeaks and the New York Times, everyone except the Clinton campaign.
But obviously, you were one of the main villains because the argument was, had you not been on the ballot, all those votes that you got would have gone to them.
There's kind of this foundational view of the Democratic Party that they are entitled to these voters, that you are stealing illegitimately, and that, in the same with Ralph Nader, those Those were their voters.
They own those voters.
And Ralph Nader, like you, are stealing them.
I don't know if you can give me a percentage of any kind of precision based on any sort of data, but you've been a candidate with the Green Party, around the Green Party for a long time now.
What is your sense of, roughly speaking, how many of the people who will vote for you, who have voted for you in 2016, would have voted, say, for Hillary Clinton or will vote for Kamala Harris had the Democrats succeeded in getting you off the ballot?
slope.
So that data actually exists.
There were exit polls done in 2016 that answered that question.
And the statistics that stick in my head is that 61% of people who voted green would not have come out to vote.
And then those that would, would have been divided about two to one to Clinton So the numbers were very small and the benefit to Clinton is to some extent counteracted by the benefit to Trump.
And if you actually crunch the numbers in the swing states, it does not amount to a different outcome in any of the swing states.
So, you know, this is really a nonsense argument that is part of the Democrats propaganda armamentarium to try to blame and shame people who actually vote on behalf of their own interests.
And to try to force people into drinking the Kool-Aid and voting for the same, you know, zombie candidates and zombie political parties that have, you know, created the mess that we're in right now, which they have no intention whatsoever of fixing.
So this is, you know, this is just a nonsense argument.
There is no data to support it.
In fact, there's a lot of data to And by the way, even if there were data showing that all your voters would have voted for Kamala or Hillary absent you, you still have every right to run and those voters have every right to choose who they want to vote for.
Speaking of previously independent-minded outsiders who in the Trump era have become subservient instruments of the Democratic Party, they sent somebody out to try and attack you and demonize you in a very personal way that they thought would have an effect.
on younger voters, more left-wing voters.
And her name, of course, is the congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who actually worked for the Green Party and promoted the Green Party and used to campaign for the Green Party before she found herself able to access the levers of Washington power by becoming a hardcore partisan loyalist to the Democratic National Committee.
And I just want to show some of what she said about you because it was shockingly personal and And about your character and integrity, and then I know you've responded a little bit, but I want to ask you a question about what it is that she said.
Let's show a little bit of that.
Y'all, this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts.
I feel like I should save this for a life.
I'm not coming for people who are thinking about this.
You, I'll talk to you.
What I have a problem with is the fact that if you are running for president, you're the de facto leader of your party.
And first of all, trust me on this, I run as a third party candidate in New York.
I'm also run as a working families party candidate in addition to running as a Democrat.
Because trust me, I've been on record about my criticisms of a two party system.
So this is not about that.
You are the leader of your party.
And if you run for years and years and years and years and years in a row, and your party has not grown, and you don't add city council seats, and you don't add down-valley candidates, and you don't add state electives...
That's bad leadership.
And that to me is what's upsetting.
Because if you have been your party's nominee for 12 years in a row, four years ago, and four years before that, and four years before that, and you cannot grow your movement pretty much at all,
and can't pursue any successful strategy, and all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you're just showing up once every four years to do that, you're not serious.
You're not, to me, it does not read as authentic.
It reads as predatory.
I'm sorry, I'm just saying it.
Because as a person, I endorse Working Families Party candidates.
I endorse DSA candidates.
I take risks and I endorse even in primaries against Democrats when it's merited.
What does this person do to grow power?
All right, I'm sorry to subject you to that.
I know you've heard that before.
It's difficult to listen to.
I just want to note, before I ask you, this hilarious attempt to establish her bona fides by saying, in addition to running as the Democratic Party candidate, she also runs on the working families line, as though only radicals would do that when pretty much so many mainstream standard Democrats do exactly the same thing.
It's just kind of a formality at this point.
And of course, you can ask her the same question, like, what have you done other than become Joe Crawley, the person that you decided to replace and then now basically serve the same function as he does, although much more effectively for the Democratic Party?
But you alluded earlier to some of the progress that the Green Party has made.
And I think that even if all you did was show up once every four years, to give Americans a different, more broader, a broader range of choices, that would be something quite valuable.
But what is your response to her obvious attempt to diminish and minimize your significance, your integrity, by saying that you don't ever accomplish anything?
I mean, I wonder why, if you're so irrelevant, why she felt the need to disparage you that way.
But what is your response to that just overall attempt by her to act as though you're some kind of fraud?
Well, you know, it really is laughable.
I think, you know, it's very humiliating to AOC that she just kind of exposes herself as an attack dog for the Democratic Party.
Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC, previously tried to smear us on social media.
You know, Jamie Harrison, the lobbyist for fossil fuels, for war contractors, for big For Big Pharma, you know, he's smearing, tried to smear me as a Russian agent.
Well, that was laid to rest, actually, by a three-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee that found absolutely nothing incriminating whatsoever in my dealings with Russia, in my visit to Russia, and in the campaign in general.
That was extensively investigated for three years and laid to rest.
And there they are, trying to resurrect that dead horse again.
It's just laughable.
And Jamie Harrison got himself hugely ratioed on social media by trying to smear me.
And I think AOC accomplished the same thing.
She really just makes a fool of herself and shows how little she actually understands about independent politics.
The Working Families Party, you know, and no harm intended here, but they are not a third party.
They are second ballot line for Democrats, largely for existing Democrats or for independents on their way to becoming Democrats.
And they have all sort of sophisticated funding mechanisms.
They are not a people-powered party.
And above all, they are not Subject to the smears of the Democratic Party, the army of lawyers throwing them off the ballot, the hires to sabotage their campaigns through spies and infiltrators.
So they're just operating in a totally different universe.
It shows how actually Oblivious she is to the realities of people-powered politics.
Knows nothing about it whatsoever.
And, you know, I think she was very well exposed.
I did launch her to a debate.
I actually just haven't heard anything from her about that, you know.
There was nothing.
Maybe Amy Goodman can host it on Democracy Now!
That's a great idea.
I love that.
All right, let me ask you guys as the last question.
You know, we've seen Donald Trump now for eight years as a political figure.
He's run for president three times.
He was president for four years.
For better or worse, we have a pretty decent understanding of who he is, what he believes, what he intends to do.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite.
She didn't campaign for a single vote to become the nominee in 2024.
She didn't participate in debate.
She didn't explain herself to the party as to why she should be the nominee.
She was selected by a secret backroom of Democratic Party elites like used to happen 50 and 60 years ago.
And her strategy thus far has been to basically avoid having to say anything about what she believes, except that there's this whole series of policies that she said she believed in when running for the Democratic nominee.
Now in 2020, 19 such as banning fracking and plastic straws and single-payer health care that through spokespeople she now says are no longer views that she holds without actually explaining that.
The one thing we do know because she said it is that she has no differences with Joe Biden at all when it comes to Israel and Gaza that she continues that she would always prioritize using U.S.
resources to arm and fund Israel.
When it comes though to Kamala Harris, I know it's hard to kind of wrap our arms around it precisely because of what I just said, but she has been in elected office for a while.
She was the San Francisco District Attorney, the California Attorney General.
She was in the Senate for a couple of years, the Vice President for four years.
If you look at, say, What she pretended to be in 2019, when she had to run to Joe Biden's left because he occupied the mainstream centrist lane, and it was the only way she could make space for herself, sort of, in between, I'm not as radical as Bernie, but I'm more leftist than Joe Biden, that version of Kamala Harris versus the one that she's now presenting, whatever that is, what do you think is the real Kamala Harris, if there is a real Kamala Harris at all?
You know, as is the case for so many Democrats and Republicans, they are what their donors want, you know?
It's their donors that give them their firepower.
Kamala Harris has more billionaire donors than ever on record.
They've been raising money hand over fist at absolutely record numbers.
If you saw the footage from the floor of the DNC up there, there was that ring of corporate suites costing anywhere from half a million up to five million dollars per suite.
That's where the money is.
That's, you know, that's what's driving this bus.
And that seems to be, you know, kind of the sum total of Kamala Harris's actual, you know, policy concerns.
She's a chameleon.
She's been Kamala the cop.
She was extremely, you know, regressive, kept people in jail longer than they needed to be in jail when she was the attorney general.
For nonviolent offenses.
Exactly, yes.
And she prohibited the use of, I think it was DNA data that could have been, and eventually she was forced to actually allow this data to be used to exonerate someone who was on death row.
She was actually standing in the way of that.
She stood in the way of reforming the The cash bail system, you know, this is someone Oh, and she also, you know, safeguarded Steve Mnuchin, who I think had contributed generously to her campaign.
She safeguarded him from investigations after, you know, after the Wall Street bailouts and his You know, his hand in the very abusive mortgage policies in California and his bank, you know, she protected him and did not investigate him when there were various compelling reasons to do so.
So, you know, that's Kamala Harris, who just kind of blows with the wind and goes with what big funders want.
And this is, you know, this is like not incidental.
This is basically what our political system is about.
It's about the best democracy money can buy, which is no democracy at all, that has delivered endless war, that has delivered a budget which is consumed by the endless war machine, which has delivered a genocide, which stands in the way of health care as a human right.
Keeps us, you know, mired in the Affordable Care Act, which is not solving our critical health care crisis, which, you know, if you develop cancer, the odds are over 40% that you will have spent down your life savings within two years, you know, and Cancers are now skyrocketing among young people, as well as just about every other form of chronic disease, you know.
So we are in deep trouble in this system, which has basically been hijacked by corporations, billionaires, oligarchs.
We do not have a future under this system.
The American people have had it.
They are tired of being thrown under the bus.
They are demanding other options, and the Democrats are trying, and the Republicans are really trying to lock down this conversation.
and prevent the American people from understanding that they do have a voice here.
They have a voice.
They not only have a voice, they actually have majority power on every one of these issues, you know, getting money out of politics to, you know, election reform.
There are huge constituencies that can move all of these policies forward, virtually all of them, you know, enough that in a way that would just totally transform our lives, solve the climate crisis with the Green New Deal, cut the military budget, put those dollars into healthcare and housing and education here at home.
We can do this.
You know, we can actually create an America and a world that works for all of us.
We have enormous public sentiment to do that, and Democrats are working overtime to try to intimidate people out of casting a vote on their own behalf, really trying to extort the vote To stay the course and talk people into voting for genocide.
And we just want to remind people that every vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is an affirmation of genocide.
It is an endorsement of genocide.
It is holding your nose and supporting genocide.
And if ever there was a red line and a wake-up call, this ought to be it.
We're normalizing genocide.
torture and murder of children on an industrial scale and the destruction of international law, which, by the way, we're going to need because we are no longer top dog in this, you know, in this global situation.
We're going to need the benefit and the protections of international law and human rights.
So there's every reason here to stand up and do the right thing and to reject the propaganda that the Democrats are really trying to force feed us here.
You know, we can't stand up and demand that there are real choices enacting, you know, a much better agenda.
And however far we get, we build from there.
This is all about building.
We don't have to win the election to win the day.
However, I wouldn't rule anything out in this, you know, completely unpredictable, upside-down election.
We're going to have three pro-genocide candidates on the ballots in just about all states.
That is Trump, Harris and RFK.
Maybe they'll be splitting the pro-genocide, pro-war vote and allow the anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-worker, climate emergency votes to come together and just really throw them all a curveball that they did not anticipate here.
Well, I would say to people who don't identify necessarily as socialists or leftists, may not agree with you on a lot of issues or some issues, that anybody who's working toward creating a system where we have more choices, because at the end of the day, what the establishment wants more than anything is an election that is the illusion of a choice, but actually isn't.
They love things like Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, or Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton, which, of course, they were hoping for in 2016.
Someone like, say, Tim Scott or Mike Pence against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, they love to contract the choice as much as possible.
And so anybody who's working on behalf of the people to expand that to make the choices wider to make the options broader, is somebody who should be applauded.
And there are a few people doing that more effectively than you are.
If there's anyone, and I really respect the work that you're doing in that regard, and I know you get a lot of attacks for that, and the fact that you continue to do it despite those attacks makes it even more admirable.
I'm always appreciative of the time you take to come on our show and talk to us, and I hope you have a great evening.
Really appreciate it.
I just want to mention jillstein2024.com for people who want another choice and a different way forward.
So come and check us out.
Thanks so much.
All right.
Have a good evening.
- Good evening, Yachtime.
Thanks. - All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
I did want to go over the incredibly vapid and cliched new issues page on Kamala Harris's website that she finally got around to posting, but I thought it was really important to cover this kind of, in an in-depth way, what the meaning of Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris was, as well as talk to Dr. Stein about a lot of these issues that affect our election so much.
So we will cover that tomorrow and we'll preview the First ever and probably the only ever debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
We'll preview that tomorrow night as well.
That'll take place after our show live.
And as a reminder, we will have a reaction and analysis to that debate once it is concluded that we will post first exclusively.
on Locals for our members only.
So if you want to see that, that's original content that we will post there, you can always join.
So as a couple of reminders, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our show there, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, where we have our live interactive aftershow.
That aftershow is available solely for members of our Locals community, so if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those aftershows, but as I said, to original content like we'll have tomorrow night, All right.
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