Israeli Attack: Self-Defense Or Terrorism; Jordan Chariton On Flint Water Crisis & Gaza's Effect on 2024; PLUS: Hillary's Repressive Dream
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Self-Defense or Terrorism? (6:03)
Interview with Journalist Jordan Chariton (32:25)
Outro (59:24)
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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.
And when we say 7 p.m.
Eastern, that's exactly what we mean.
As you can see tonight, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Israel severely injured more than 4,000 people and killed at least 12 in the suburbs of Beirut today.
In the suburbs of Beirut, including an 8-year-old girl.
Perhaps more notable than the casualty number itself, which is obviously quite high, is the means Israel used to gravely injure and kill so many people.
Namely, the Mossad somehow intercepted the supply chain used by Hezbollah and others to purchase wireless pagers.
After intercepting those devices, Israel apparently installed bombs in thousands of them.
And then program the bomb so that Israel could detonate them remotely all at once, whether in people's pockets, in their hands, wherever they might be.
And earlier today, East Coast time, that is exactly what Israel did, where thousands of mobile pagers and the like instantaneously exploded as people walk in shopping areas, cafes, restaurants, shops, pedestrian heavy streets, and anywhere else those devices happened to be.
This was not on a battlefield.
This was in the suburbs of Beirut.
Now, Israel and its loyal supporters in the U.S.
claim, as they always do, no matter what the conduct in question is, that the Israeli attack was not only justified as a means of attacking Hezbollah, but was also extremely calibrated to avoid civilian armies because the IDF is the most moral army in the world.
They hate killing civilians.
I suppose one could say that this attack today was, quote, targeted by comparing it to the utterly indiscriminate mass bombings and killings that Israel has carried out in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank over the last year, utterly destroying all civilian infrastructure in Gaza, flattening apartment buildings in entire neighborhoods and killing tens of thousands of people, but blowing things up remotely without having any idea where those devices are and knowing full well
That many of them are almost certain to be used in many civilian areas is the opposite of targeted bombing.
We'll explore the claim of Israel supporters that this attack was legitimate and targeted self-defense, and explore whether instead it's more akin to terrorism, which is currently what it would be called, if carried out by any other nation in any other part of the world.
Then, Jordan Chariton has been one of the independent journalists who most uses classic shoe-leather investigative journalism and on-the-ground reporting to inform Americans of issues that few others are covering so in-depth for years, going back to the Obama years.
Charity made numerous sustained visits to Flint, Michigan to cover the years-long poisoning of that community's water supply and the government's apparent utter indifference.
He has a new book based on that reporting entitled, quote, We the Poisoned, Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans.
We will talk to him about that, as well as speak to him about the extensive on-scene reporting he has been doing this year in Michigan, speaking to the crucial Arab and Muslim voters in that state about how the Biden-Harris administration's full-scale funding and arming of the Israeli war in Gaza may affect their voting decision, and with it, the 2024 election.
And finally, Hillary Clinton went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program last night and I can barely express how challenging and atmospheric the interview was.
I'm sure you can imagine if you haven't seen it.
Hillary, almost in passing, vehemently advocated that Americans whom she believes are spreading disinformation and propaganda should not only be civilly sued by the government but also criminally prosecuted, put in prison.
If that dystopic authoritarian vision were ever to be implemented in the U.S.
as Hillary wants, the very first people who should be sharing a jail cell are Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow, who drowned our country and its political system in one false conspiracy theory after the next.
From the Steele dossier, to the secret alpha bank server that Trump was using, to many other demented, debunked lies.
We'll show you what Hillary said and what the implications would likely be, though we may not have time on our show because I will be on Jesse Waters' Fox News show tonight at the top of the hour, which means 8 p.m., so we're only going to have an hour for this show.
So we've run out of time.
We will do that segment about Hillary and her call for censorship on our locals community right after that Fox appearance following tonight's show.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Ever since October 7th, I have interviewed all sorts of people, experts in the region, scholars and the like, journalists who cover the region as well.
And one of the things that many, if not most of them, have repeatedly said is that one of the most dangerous risks of the Israeli war with Gaza, the all-out war with Gaza that is now spreading to the West Bank, is that there are a lot of people in Israel who don't just want war with the Gazans or the Palestinians, but also really want war with Hezbollah on their north.
They have disputed territory that are part of the Golan Heights that they've had for a long time, which Lebanon claims, which the Israelis claim, which the Syrians claim.
Israel has made brutal incursions into Lebanon and all sorts of bombing raids on Lebanon, including on Beirut, some really brutal and deadly ones, and Hezbollah sees itself as a defensive force to keep Israel out of Lebanon.
They have been having all sorts of border skirmishes since the beginning of the war, with Hezbollah sending some rockets, by no means their most sophisticated or damaging ones, into northern Israel primarily, and then the Israelis sniping back.
But increasingly over the last couple of weeks, with Benjamin Netanyahu's government seemingly falling apart, and with increasing pressure on him to end the war and bring the hostages home, that's the war in Gaza, and with his obvious determination to continue the war as a way of staying in power and therefore out of prison, which he and with his obvious determination to continue the war as a way of staying in power and therefore out of prison, which he might be waiting him because of a corruption trial that he has been immune from while president, there's been a growing sense that Israel not only wants to provoke a war
But also involved the United States in that war, which the United States has made very clear by deploying military assets to the region, by promising through Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton that it would do everything to defend Israel, including in a war of this kind.
So if Israel does provoke Hezbollah successfully into a war with it, as many comments throughout this last week from the Israeli government and various officials have suggested they intend to do,
That won't just involve a new front in the Israeli war in the north and they have very exhausted reserves and fighters who have spent a year now in Gaza fighting often street to street against Hamas which continues to flourish whenever the Israelis leave but they would then open a front against the much more effective fighting force in Lebanon
that is Hezbollah and so it's hard to understand why this would be in Israel's interest other than because it's in the Netanyahu government's interest but the Israelis carried out an attack today that was really unprecedented in terms of the way it was carried out but also in terms of just the indiscriminate damage and casualties that took place.
It was, you've got to give credit where due, quite ingenious although we need to figure out exactly how it was carried out before we can Give that kind of credit, but certainly it was a sophisticated operation.
As I said, an unprecedented one.
The Wall Street Journal earlier today explained it well in this headline, Hezbollah pagers explode in apparent attack across Lebanon.
Eight people were killed and 2,750 wounded, the country's health minister said.
Now, this is earlier today.
Those numbers have been updated, as usually happens in cases like this.
There's certainly more than 3,000 reported deaths.
I've seen 4,000 from various people on the ground, journalists and the like, and hospitals.
There's at least 4,000 casualties.
That death number has gone up to at least 12, including a couple of children.
So we'll see what the death knell and what the casualty knell actually ends up being once everything is sort of processed, but here's the Wall Street Journal's reporting.
Quote, the affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days.
People familiar with the matter said a Hezbollah official said many fighters had such devices, speculating that malware might have caused the devices to explode.
The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.
Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attack.
Both said civilians were killed, and Hezbollah threatened to retaliate.
The Israeli military declined to comment.
Lebanese Health Minister Faraz Abyad, appearing on Al Jazeera television, said exploding pagers across the country injured 2,750 people and killed eight, including a child.
The government said hundreds of people were injured.
We're in critical condition.
Now, one of the things I think is very important to note is that Hezbollah is similar to the Taliban in the sense that you cannot isolate who's a member of the Taliban and who isn't.
The Taliban is basically an integrated part of the Afghan population.
And then you have people who are official fighters of it.
You have people who are supportive of it, particularly when there's a foreign army invading, people who are kind of tangential to it but still work with the Taliban because it's the governing body in a lot of areas.
It's the same for Hezbollah.
And so even if it were true, and it's clearly not, given the death of children and all sorts of people in civilian areas, that the only people injured were quote-unquote Hezbollah fighters or people associated with Hezbollah, that would still include a lot of people who are not fighters, who work with the governing group or the group that's considered Lebanon's protection from Israel.
But clearly it was far more indiscriminate than that.
We're going to show you that in just a bit in terms of where it happened, how many people were affected, what kinds of people.
The State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked today about what role, if any, the U.S.
had in this attack.
And here's what he said.
So we are gathering information on this incident.
I can tell you that the U.S.
was not involved in it.
what happened.
The U.S.
There have been a series of deaths and injuries apparently from exploding pagers.
Was the US have any knowledge?
What does it know now and when did it know about what was happening?
So we are gathering information on this incident.
I can tell you that the US was not involved in it.
The US was not aware of this incident in advance and at this point we're gathering information.
And what information have you gathered so far?
We'll continue to collect information.
I don't have any public readout to give now, but we're collecting information in the same way that journalists are across the world to gather the facts about what might have happened.
Now that's just insultingly deceitful.
The U.S.
government is gathering information the same way journalists are?
The U.S.
government is the government on whom Israel depends for their funding, for the payment of their military, for the arming of their wars.
Obviously the U.S.
government has the easy, direct, immediate means of finding out, quote unquote, what happened here and who was responsible by picking up the phone and calling the Israelis and demanding that they explain to them what it is that they did.
He kind of smirks as he says, like, hey, we don't know anything.
We're figuring out like you are.
We're writing, we're doing some journalism, figuring things out.
That's preposterous.
Everything the Israeli military does, everything, where its intelligence agencies do, has U.S.
involvement by virtue of the fact that none of that could happen without the U.S.
worker paying for it by force through taxation policies and then transferring billions and billions of dollars to Israel or billions and billions of weapons that the American taxpayer also pays for.
Just to give you a sense for, in case you are imagining that these pagers went off on some sort of battlefield where a bunch of uniformed Hezbollah fighters were, here from Reuters is just a very illustrative video of the kind of places that it happened and where it happened.
If you don't like seeing violent scenes, I would encourage you to look away.
But for those who want to get a sense for how this was carried out and who would affect it and the kind of civilian infrastructure in which it took place, here's a video that is clearly at a kind of fruit market where there's a bunch of civilians and employees sweeping up, people shopping for produce and the like.
And then one of the people there had one of these pagers.
I mean, so that explosion was not a joke. so that explosion was not a joke.
I mean, so that explosion was not a joke.
If you have a pager like that in your pocket or in your hand, it's going to blow off a limb, at least.
That's why you have at least hundreds of people severely injured and some untold number dead.
Now, among the injured, according to Reuters, was the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, which, according to this headline, was injured by one of those pager explosions called...
Quote, Iran's ambassador to Lebanon, Mushtabi Amani, was slightly injured on Tuesday by the explosion of an electronic pager, Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported, as numerous such devices exploded across Lebanon.
Quote, Amani has a superficial injury and is currently under observation in a hospital, Fars quoted a source as saying.
Now, note that about a month ago, everyone thought, because the Iranians were insisting, But they were going to retaliate in a very serious way against Israel as a result of the killing of a Hezbollah, of a Hamas leader inside Iran that Iran had invited as a guest of their inauguration of the new president.
And obviously if some foreign country carries out a murder of a guest that you invite of a leader of some group or some country onto your soil, it's a violation of your sovereignty.
And if everyone sees it and you do nothing, Then you're essentially signaling that that's not a red line for you, that you're either scared to or unwilling to or unable to.
retaliated in any meaningful way.
And so Iran was making very clear that they would retaliate seriously, not in a sort of way calculated, not to do much damage.
It's when they shot those slow, primitive drones and other weapons after the Israelis bombed their embassy in Damascus, knowing that they would be shot out of the sky very easily, as they were.
Kind of just a symbolic retaliation.
But in this case, they vowed retaliation and they have not Done anything apparently.
And of course, Hezbollah is now vowing the same.
Here from Reuters also today, Hezbollah vows to punish Israel after Padre explosion across Lebanon.
Quote, Lebanon's Hezbollah promised to retaliate after blaming Israel for detonating Padres on Tuesday that killed at least eight people and wounded 2,750 others, including many of the militants groups fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.
Lebanese information minister Zayed Makkari condemned the detonation of the pagers used by Hezbollah and others in Lebanon to communicate as a quote Israeli aggression.
Hezbollah said Israel would receive quote its fair punishment for the blast.
The Israeli military which has been engaged in cross-border warfare with Iran-backed Hezbollah since the start of the Gaza war last October declined to respond to Reuters questions about the detonations.
Now it should be noted that unlike Hamas, which has some capacity to attack inside Israel, but not a very sophisticated capacity, Hezbollah has extremely serious missile capability.
Very large, destructive, precise missiles that not only can reach into northern Israel, which has been the area where Hezbollah has typically been aiming its missiles over the last year.
Prior to that, based on the idea that part of northern, what's called, what the Israelis consider northern Israel is actually occupied territory, but they have the capacity to strike very destructively in major Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv.
Now obviously if they were to do that, there'd be a massive response from the Israelis, but you can provoke a war of that kind at some point, especially a humiliating attack like this.
You have a very good chance of provoking a serious reaction, although Iran had repeatedly vowed and people expected that Iran would do so, and then they didn't.
Now some of the reactions from Israel's most fanatical supporters in the United States are so telling.
Even as they were hearing that the casualty count was in the thousands, even as they were hearing that it injured or severely or killed young children, they couldn't hide their giddiness, their glee.
They're so happy.
Especially over the psychosexual part of this attack, namely that, oh, Hezbollah fighters had their testicles blown off.
This was a major source of celebration from these kind of deranged supporters of Israel who often express their views in that manner.
Here from Eric Reiner, who is a very wealthy hedge fund manager, although he is an American, an American citizen born in the United States, this is what he said, quote, we were inside of Hania's bedroom, referring to the killing of the Hamas leader in Israel, and now we are inside of Nasrallah's pants.
referring to the Hezbollah leader.
So, we were inside of his bedroom and now we're inside his pants.
Now, the disturbing psychosexual imagery of that is obvious, no one needs to point it out, but the question I had and I asked, I haven't gotten an answer from him yet, is, congratulations, who is the we in these two sentences?
You're talking about an American citizen who apparently considers the we, not his own country, not the American government, that he is subject to and supposed to be loyal to as a citizen, but apparently Israel is someone that he considers we.
I think obviously there are a lot of American Jews and American evangelicals who think that same way, even though under this new law that the House passed, that the Senate is preparing to pass, one of the prohibited ideas
that would be constituted as anti-Semitism under this new free speech attack to protect Israel, as we've covered when the House passed it, is one of the ideas that is now off-limits that would be instantly deemed anti-Semitic is to suggest that any American Jews have equal loyalty to or more loyalty to Israel than they do to the United States, even though so many of them say exactly that, admit that, make that so clear.
Here is an official account of the Israeli War Room, and they simply posted the phone emoji, obviously taunting and celebrating the people who they blew up today.
Here's Ben Shapiro speaking of American Jews who have at least as much loyalty, if not more so, to Israel.
I'm going to say that while it's still legal.
And he went on Twitter and said, quote, breaking, Hezbollah has been forced to rename itself Heza after losing all of its balls.
So you kind of see the nature of this attack and the reason why it's arousing so many of Israel's most fanatical supporters, even if you think it's unjustified.
attack knowing that there were so many civilians who were injured or killed should, in any decent person, preclude this kind of celebration, but these people are the opposite of decent.
Speaking of whom, Constantine Kizin, who is a British and Jewish supporter of Israel, to say, put that mildly, said, quote, what use is 72 virgins when you have no balls?
The longtime American neocon Eli Lake, also a fanatical supporter of Israel, said, So they were having a lot of fun with this show of strength, and obviously they identify very much with Israel.
Even though they're not Israeli citizens nominally, they're citizens of the U.S.
or the U.K.
Probably one of the most deranged people, but I don't even think he's more deranged, I think he just hides it less, is the actor Michael Rappaport, who has become One of the most obnoxious and vocal, attention-seeking supporters of Israel.
And as the news proliferated today that there were thousands of casualties, including children killed, this is what he went onto his phone and then social media to do.
do.
Beep beep.
Beep beep.
Alright, these people are just deranged.
They're degenerates to respond to violence including the death of children in that manner.
Here is The reaction of Edward Snowden, who particularly has an interest in things like mobile devices and telephones, that was a big part of his work, and he was very disturbed in particular by the way in which now not just our devices are vulnerable to surveillance or to malware that can allow governments or non-state actors to monitor and surveil everything that we do, which is something they do try to do, but also now the
Vulnerability that this shows that just ordinary supply chains have in terms of you can purchase devices at any sort of retail store and it may now be the case that that has been turned into a remote weapon.
They may not be targeting you, but obviously when you send a bunch of rigged bombed devices inside Lebanon, you're obviously realizing that there's a good chance that you may end up Having those purchased by people who have nothing to do with Hezbollah, who are very ancillary to Hezbollah, which seems to be the case.
And here's what he said.
Quote, what Israel has just done is, via any method, reckless.
They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving, meaning cars out of control, shopping, your children are in the stroller behind, standing behind him in the checkout line, etc.
Indistinguishable from terrorism.
And he had added earlier, quote, as information comes in about the exploding beepers in Lebanon, it seems now more likely than not to be implanted explosive.
Why?
Too many consistent, very serious injuries.
If it were overheated batteries exploding, you'd expect much more small fires and misfires.
And I think it turned out to be right based on all the sort of reporting that we've been able to see about exactly how this was done.
Now, it remains to be seen Where these devices came from, there are suggestions that they came from a Taiwanese tech company.
Which would suggest that the United States, which of course is the case, is very well integrated into the Tunis tech and defense industry, and the Israelis are as well.
There was other suggestions that it came from Motorola, which has a long and notorious history of working with the U.S.
State Department and the U.S.
Pentagon and the intelligence community.
So we're going to find out what the exact supply chain is that the Israelis were able to intercept and how.
But I just want you to imagine what we would say If, let's just pick China, Iran.
Let's pick China, Iran.
One of the bad countries.
Purposely knew that cell phones were coming to the United States.
Let's say they knew they were coming to the U.S.
military.
The U.S.
military was importing a bunch of devices, mobile devices, and the Chinese were able to intercept or collaborate with the manufacturer and put remote-controlled bombs inside each device, thousands of them.
Which means, you know, they would not only be with generals and military officials, but with rank and file soldiers, but also just civilians who work near them, maybe their families, or anyone in their vicinity.
If they're at a supermarket, which soldiers do go to, if they're at a shopping mall, they could injure and endanger anybody else around them.
Obviously, what would we call that?
We would call that terrorism.
Nobody would actually be saying that that was some targeted In fact, even when people do attack U.S.
military installations and kill only American soldiers, we call that terrorism.
There have been several during the War on Terror where people went and entered Marine bases and killed a dozen or so Marines as well as other people who were there.
That was called terrorism.
The flying of a plane into the Pentagon.
A classic legitimate military target that was called terrorism.
And obviously a lot of the October 7th attack, even though it was purposely distorted, By trying to say, oh, 1,400 Israelis were killed, itself involved a lot of targeting of military and police bases by Hamas.
A lot of those people, not 1,400, it's been downgraded to almost 1,150, almost half of them, if not more, turned out to be active duty soldiers in the military, the Israeli military.
Now, obviously, there were a lot of civilians killed in Israel, not just killed, but targeted purposely.
There were Hamas fighters who committed more crimes by purposely targeting and killing civilians but the ratio of legitimate military targets to civilians was better than one-to-one which is often the argument that israel makes for why what they're doing in gaza is justified even though that ratio is a lie now just to underscore how we can think about this
after 9 11 noam chomsky wrote a book that surprisingly became a bestseller or maybe not surprisingly since he was one of the very few people deviating from the narrative about why 9 11 happened what it means what our role of our foreign policy is and And he has been talking a long time about how terrorism is wielded, how freedom fighters are wielded, how resistance fighters are wielded.
We called the Mujahideen in Afghanistan freedom fighters.
They were invited by Ronald Reagan to the White House to be celebrated while they were fighting against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
And the minute they started fighting against American occupation, they instantly turned into terrorists.
We took people from Afghanistan, who were in Afghanistan, who were doing nothing more than defending their country and fighting against American forces occupying it, and brought them to Guantanamo and called them terrorists, even though they were targeting and fighting against, not civilians, but American soldiers in their country.
That's how manipulated and flexible and meaningless this term is, terrorism and the like.
He did a series of interviews with a lot of very adversarial people who were horrified by the things he was saying, and it gave him an opportunity to really lay out the premises of what he was saying.
This was now 22 years ago.
Noam Chomsky has said a lot of controversial things since then.
People in public life for 60 years, there's almost nobody who will, to try and set aside whatever you think he's done or said that was bad, that's unrelated to this topic, and just listen to what he was saying in the beginning of 2002, just a few months after the 9-11 attack, when he, among very few people, were willing to say this, and the fact that he wrote a best-selling book made his platform among the largest.
You seem to see this moral equivalence the whole time between Bin Laden and Bush, don't you?
Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible.
You say there are plenty of Bin Ladens on both sides.
Pardon?
You say there are plenty of Bin Ladens on both sides.
Oh, there are Bin Ladens all over the world.
That's moral equivalence.
That's a polemic, isn't it?
It's not moral equivalence.
There is no such notion.
There are many different dimensions.
criteria.
For example, there's no moral equivalence between the bombing of the World Trade Center and the destruction of Nicaragua or of El Salvador, of Guatemala.
The latter were far worse by any criterion.
So there's no moral equivalence.
Furthermore, they were done for different reasons and they were done in different ways.
There's all sorts of dimensions.
But why, when the U.S.
is considering what to do about this, do you always go back to past... Not past, present.
You mentioned Nicaragua.
I mentioned that because it's uncontroversial, since there's a World Security Council resolution.
But I can take cases, since it's uncontroversial, that's a good example.
I mentioned these cases... Are you kicking the US when it's down?
No, I'm asking that we accept the definition of hypocrite given in the Gospels.
I think that's correct.
The hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others.
I don't think we should be hypocrites.
To what aim do you do this?
To what aim do you wish to point this out?
Because I think we should try to rise to the level of minimal moral integrity.
Once we can rise to the level of minimal moral integrity, then we can discuss these issues seriously.
If we can't even rise to that level, there's any point to talking.
Minimal moral integrity requires that if we think something is wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.
All right, so that is basically the premise of Chomsky's dissent from US foreign policy for many decades.
And if you just apply that to what happened today, you just imagine, as I said, China shipping in thousands of rigged phones with bombs that they then remotely detonate, regardless of where those phones are or who's carrying them.
Or if Hezbollah or Iran did that inside Israel and killed and injured thousands of people, including civilians, and detonated those bombs in restaurants and shops, supermarkets, and street fairs, the way that Israel did today in the suburbs of Beirut.
It's not very difficult to imagine exactly what everyone, by consensus, would call that.
And the only thing different in these cases, in those actions, is who's doing it and against whom it's being perpetrated.
And there's almost more of a reflexive instinct in the United States to defend anything and everything that Israel does as a noble act of terrorism or self-defense, almost more so than defending our own government itself.
And I think that's a big part of why they want to implement a law banning a lot of different criticisms of Israel, including suggesting that there are Americans who seem to be more devoted to defending Israel than to their own government.
Our guest tonight is somebody who has made a name for himself in independent journalism for many years now, going at least back to the Obama administration, where principally he became known for doing extensive, sustained, on-the-ground reporting in Flint, Michigan, where, as some of you probably remember, there was a crisis, an ongoing crisis, actually, where the water supply in Flint was poisoned
And the government, federal government, state government, didn't matter, Republican, Democrat, simply didn't seem to care much.
And he was giving voice to the people in Flint.
He's written a book, a new book, that is based on the reporting that he's done, the in-depth analysis of that scandal entitled Poisoned, exposing the Flint water crisis cover-up and the poisoning of 100,000 Americans.
And at the same time, over the last year or so, or the last six months at least, he spent a lot of time in Michigan interviewing a Jordan, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
women Americans and Arab Americans who principally reside in Michigan, trying to understand what they intend to do in the 2024 election and how the Biden-Harris policy of supporting Israel affects that.
We'd like to talk to him about that as well.
So we are delighted to welcome Jordan Territz into our show.
Jordan, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Congratulations on the new book.
Hey, thank you for having me.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's start with the new book.
And before we get to the, let's say, substance of the book, I want to ask you about the media angle because
You're somebody, you worked with the Young Turks, I think that's where you got your start, but for a long time now, you've been working completely in classic independent media, and even the Young Turks back then was hardly some big network, and you've been able to do this kind of reporting that has typically been the province of establishment media or traditional media, of doing just sustained, on-the-ground interviews with people, covering meetings and, you know, city council meetings, oftentimes without much company.
How have you been able to do that?
What do you think that says about the capacity of independent media to be a real alternative to traditional media?
Yeah, to the Young Turks credit, I mean, the initial beginning of my reporting in Flint was with them.
So I certainly didn't have the money, like as an individual at that time, to keep going back to Flint.
So definitely I had the benefit of being with the Young Turks.
After that, once I started my own outlet, Status Koo, to tell you the truth, I mean, it was really bootstraps in the beginning.
I was taking reporting trips to Flint, just kind of dipping into my own limited savings.
I would drive 9-10 hours instead of flying to save money.
And, you know, a lot of it was really just kind of Losing money on the front end, not that these kind of stories make much money anyway, but it was really just kind of going into my own wallet to go there, build sources, build relationships with residents, to the point where I was able to build, you know, a decent small dollar, you know, paid membership to help sustain it, you know, GoFundMe as well, small dollar membership.
But it's been very difficult.
And for some of the stories I broke, I think it actually took me longer to get mainstream outlets to partner with me on publishing those outlets than it did for me to actually do the reporting.
So, a big part of the challenge, beyond just the reporting and the news gathering, building sources, obtaining documents, has been getting larger media outlets, frankly, to care and help spread the reporting.
Yeah, my hypothesis in that case and in similar ones is that, in general, traditional media, corporate media, only covers issues or controversies where the two parties seem to be disagreeing.
And you can put a Republican on, a Democrat on, and they fight with each other, and it gives the appearance that there's all kinds of free and passionate debate in our country over every issue, where you have both sides just representing completely different views.
And in this case, The indifference toward the poison water supply in Flint came under a Democratic president, Barack Obama, who was elected basically promising to represent the people in communities like that who had been suffering.
And not only did he do very little, he, as we're about to show in the video that I want to get your reaction to as well, He kind of went there and mocked the whole notion that there was something wrong there to the face of the people in that community who had a lot of high hopes when he came there.
But also you had then had a Republican governor, Republican administration in Michigan and various state agencies, at least for part of the time is my recollection, And so you have this kind of, nobody was really, nobody, no Democrats, no Republicans really were raising this problem that these people had poison water supply inside the United States and no one seemed to be doing anything about it.
Let me just show the audience for people who haven't seen.
This was when, when did Obama go to visit?
2014 was it? 2015?
2016.
2016.
Okay, so here's Obama.
He made a big showing out of the fact that he was going to be the president, he was going to go to Flint, Michigan, kind of bring attention finally to the Flint water crisis that had been going on for quite a while, and instead this is what he did.
Let's show the video.
Now the reason I know I'm okay is because I already had some Flint water.
There we go.
I really did need a glass of water.
This is not a stunt.
Now, I'm going to talk about this.
Everybody settle down.
This is a feisty crowd.
You know, it was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen Paul do.
I mean, he made a big showing out of how he was going to drink the Flint water, and he kind of barely put it to his lips in about a millisecond, didn't seem to swallow anything, basically just wet his lips and put it down as a demonstration that these people, his claims that they were being poisoned, basically should be mocked.
Why do you think there was so little interest in the part of the bipartisan ruling class in fixing a problem that obviously should not happen in the United States that a hundred thousand people or so have poison water supply.
Yeah, there were so many levels to this cover-up, and like you said, it's ongoing.
I mean, to this day, there's problems with the water, there's no criminal justice, and frankly, cancer is surging in Flint.
So it is an ongoing disaster that has just been whitewashed by the media, by politicians.
With Obama, you know, I can't get in his head, but I really think Obama was a creature of kind of meritocracy, and kind of The EPA, for example, was feeding him, uh, you know, the lead levels are going down in Flint and everything's improving.
And I think, you know, to his, you know, to his naivete, uh, he trusted that, uh, despite the fact that based on my reporting, uh, the state of Michigan was manipulating the data.
They were manipulating the water testing to get artificially lower lead levels.
So do I think Obama kind of woke up in the morning and said, let me let you know, let me ignore those, you know, poor black people in Flint and let them continue drinking that poison water.
I don't think it was that direct and malicious.
I just don't think he cared that much.
I don't really think he cared to investigate.
I don't think he cared to do anything other than go there, you know, for a photo op and, you know, to take a sip of water.
Yes, you're not going to die from taking a sip of contaminated water, but you will get very sick if you're drinking it day after day for two years and bathing in it for two years like those residents.
So I just think Obama, frankly, A stark departure from his community organizer days.
Just became very disconnected from the very types of communities that a lot of people thought he was going to fight for.
And he trusted the wrong people who told him the situation was improving.
At that time, based on my reporting, the situation in the water was actually getting worse.
So I remember from that time period and then reading your book kind of remembering even more vividly a lot of what was happening because this is the Obama administration 2016 was eight years ago or so there's obviously a lot that's happened since then that makes that seem very long ago but I remember watching interviews including I'm certain ones that you conducted with residents of Flint Who the population is largely overwhelmingly black, black Americans.
And here is the first black president ever coming to Flint.
And they had very high expectations of what he was finally going to do.
They thought, OK, finally, someone's recognizing our problem and is coming here.
How did they react to sort of that excerpt of what we just saw, as well as just Obama's general PR trip there?
Yeah, I mean, residents to this day that I talked to, black and white, but particularly the black residents, are just frankly disgusted.
Not just with Obama, also with the current governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who for, you know, a hot five minutes was rumored to be Biden's replacement when Biden was dropping out.
She made a lot of promises to Flint when she ran for governor.
They were, you know, very excited to vote for her because the the Republican governor who presided over the coverup was leaving.
So they were, you know, thought that a Democrat would, at the very least, clean their water.
She abandoned the promises to them.
She promised to reopen the free water stations in Flint, which residents desperately depended on.
You know, you remember seeing those lines of residents lined up.
She didn't reopen them.
She, frankly, retained most of the previous administration's officials who helped cover this whole thing up.
And also, her attorney general, you know, technically they're independent of each other, but based on my reporting, not so much.
Her Democratic attorney general, who just spoke at the DNC and is beloved by the MSNBC crowd, her name's Dana Nessel.
Uh, she's helped kind of tank the criminal investigations.
So from Obama to Democrat Governor Whitmer to Democratic Attorney General, uh, Dana Nessel, you know, I think too much, so much, so many times with Flint and so many other things, it's just people wear their blue hat, people wear their red hat and they don't want to see anything in the middle.
But with Flint, This is a bipartisan scandal.
It's a bipartisan cover-up.
You know, yes, it was a Republican administration locally that presided over this, but like you said, Obama's EPA, Obama, they could have stepped in.
Based on my reporting, Obama's EPA knew that the state of Michigan's Environmental Department was basically covering this up in real time, and instead of stepping in, Notify the EPA, notifying Flint residents your water is toxic.
They looked for legal opinions of the EPA to see if they could take over and they just kind of sat on their hands.
They did not notify the residents.
In my view, what is the point of having a federal government Yeah, people inside the United States don't have access to clean drinking water.
It's amazing just to even think about that, let alone how long it's endured.
Now, just to that point, you referenced earlier the fact that this is actually ongoing, and I know when I first heard about your book coming out, I think in some part of my mind I had assumed, without necessarily having heard, but just because so little attention gets paid to this, that at some point it kind of got gradually resolved, that there may still be problems with the water supply, but by and large that crisis got resolved.
And by reading your book, I learned just how little has actually been done, how much work there still is to do to get these people who live there a healthy, clean supply of drinking water.
Again, inside the United States.
And there was this NPR article, I think it was from April of 2024, that's headlined, 10 years after Flint, the fight to replace lead pipes across the U.S.
continues.
So, you know, Jordan, this is the thing that I think is most interesting about this story, most horrifying about it, is that we are a country, the richest country on the planet, which is why we spend, by far, the most amount of money on our military, have the most foreign investment, have the most billionaires, et cetera.
And at the same time, we cannot seem to just build basic infrastructure, not just for roads and airports and the like, but for people's basic health, to give people clean drinking water in the United States.
To me, it says so much about the ruling class and its mentality and its priorities.
What does it say to you about them?
Yeah, and I also want to zero in on something, because you said, I just assumed it was being fixed, and that's, you know, it's out of sight, out of mind.
When the media stops covering things, people just assume, all right, it's got to be getting fixed.
I mean, this is a massive cover-up.
I don't say that to sell books.
Based on my reporting, this makes Watergate look like child's play.
I mean, Watergate was a bunch of knuckleheads that broke into an office.
Describe some of that cover-up, because obviously your book goes into it at length, but just give people a sense of what you mean by that.
There were politicians who paid off sick Flint residents to keep them quiet.
So political payoffs, you had politicians destroying their phones right before the launch of a criminal investigation.
I mean, imagine, imagine if officials in the Trump administration if their phones were erased around the time that COVID became a thing.
Can you imagine the freakout on MSNBC?
That happened here.
Nothing was done about it.
You had witness tampering.
You had residents, top activists, their car brakes mysteriously being cut.
You had residents being surveilled by the state government.
You had the former governor of Michigan, based on my reporting, actively presiding over a cover-up, along with his top officials, to stop residents from learning about the deadly Legionnaires outbreak.
That was the waterborne pneumonia that killed a lot of people.
So from payoffs to destruction of evidence to witness tampering, I mean, I've been told by, you know, people in film that you could not make this stuff up.
And there was also a major financial scam, a privatization scheme to privatize the water system in Michigan that most people don't know that was the dark underbelly of the Flint water crisis.
That's why Flint was even using this Flint River in the first place because a new unnecessary water system was being built.
And in the short term, they said, we'll just use the river that GM and every company has been dumping their crap in for 100 years.
And we'll just use the water plant, which was the equivalent of these Boeing planes that are falling apart midair.
The water plant was not equipped to treat the water.
So there's multiple layers.
Federal government, like I said, the EPA knew there was a problem very quick and sat on their hands.
State government covering it up.
Also, Wall Street banks were involved with this because they issued bonds, municipal bonds, for that new water system and helped create kind of this, not to get too in the weeds, but there was basically a financial fraud to create a fake emergency that would allow Flint, which was nearly bankrupt during this time but there was basically a financial fraud to create a fake emergency that would allow Flint, So, So the media has basically reported this as, oh, this was some kind of tragedy born from a city trying to save money.
It's actually the opposite.
This was a massive for-profit.
This was not to save money.
This was to make money.
And that's why today, 2024, I'm still fighting with the, again, the Democratic Attorney General of Michigan, Because the investigation is over.
The Democratic Attorney General, it's all laid out in the book.
She kind of sabotaged the investigation.
She fired competent prosecutors that were building an actually strong case against the Republican governor for involuntary manslaughter, which would have been a first in American history.
They were also, based on my reporting, close to filing RICO charges.
That's financial racketeering, which first became a thing in the 1970s to go after organized crime.
She fired those prosecutors, she dismissed charges, and she did not pursue the financial charges.
Based on my reporting, you know, it seems because the state of Michigan would face hundreds of millions of dollars of liability if that financial case went forward, and the banks, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo in particular, could face hundreds of millions of dollars in liability for their role.
So, the short answer is, essentially the media in America chooses not to cover things after the initial explosion.
Whether it's a mass shooting, a railroad blowing up with toxic chemicals, or a city being poisoned.
Yeah, they'll continue covering it, maybe do an anniversary special a year later, five years later, but the deeper dive investigation, that generally doesn't happen anymore.
And that's why this city, ten years later, let me repeat, The infrastructure has not been replaced in Flint 10 years later.
They still have mostly corroded, damaged pipes delivering their water.
They also, all the criminal charges were dropped.
They don't have free health care, and I talk to residents that are going bankrupt because it's very expensive when you've been poisoned.
And then add on the fact that cancer is through the roof in Flint, and the media, I've seen headlines, well, could it be from the water?
I mean, it's certainly not from the weather.
So I hope that, you know, through the book, people realize that, yes, this is about Flint.
The book is about Flint, but this is about something much bigger.
The United States government, Republican, Democrat, together through a financial scheme, they basically poisoned the city.
And 10 years later, they have basically covered it up and they are allowing the residents to slowly die, And I'll just add, this playbook is currently being used in other places.
If you recall, in East Palestine, Ohio, which voted for Trump by 70%, a conservative area, poor, mostly white people.
On Norfolk Southern, they unnecessarily detonated five rail cars that were carrying toxic chemicals over a year ago.
The residents are very sick.
I was just there a couple months ago.
I got sick.
I'm talking to a man who got double breast cancer.
I'm talking to an 18-year-old girl who was healthy before, now having seizures.
At resident, after resident, many different symptoms and illnesses.
And the EPA and the state government are doing the very same thing they did in Flint.
Nothing to see here.
And as you said, it follows the same playbook in the sense that there was this explosion of attention.
Politicians went there for the first week or two to exploit it with their cameras, and then cameras kind of lose interest, go on to something else, and then the problem continues.
Unresolved.
And what you said about your book is exactly what I was going to say, which is obviously you learned everything there is to learn about the crisis of poison water in Flint and the indifference of the ruling class.
But to me, it's really kind of a massive insight into how the bipartisan ruling class functions, not just here, but in general.
With the time that we have left, I do want to ask you, and we'll obviously put the book, which I highly recommend, In our notes, the link to it, and it'll be promoted as well as part of our show.
But speaking of Michigan, since you know that state, I imagine almost as well as you do any other state at this point in the United States, you've been spending a lot of time there this year as part of an attempt to understand how this crucial voting bloc in Michigan, other states as well, but particularly Michigan, which are Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, are thinking about the U.S.
support for the role for the Israeli war in Gaza for Israel in general that has been supported.
Basically, Limitlessly by Joe Biden and now by Kamala Harris.
And I wonder if you could give us a sense for, there's a lot of talk about people who vote Democrat traditionally, who aren't going to vote for Democrats this time, who might vote for Democrats if they see something that they're unlikely to see, who might vote for Jill Stein.
What is your sense, not just anecdotally, but if you could give us kind of a broader sense, given how much time you spent there of what you've been hearing and what you think is likely to happen in those communities.
Yeah, so Michigan, I think, has a lot more cascading factors than Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.
There is the Arab-American community in Dearborn.
There's also a decent Arab-American population in the city of Detroit, in Flint.
So people rightly focus on Dearborn because it's the largest, but there are a decent Arab-American population throughout Michigan.
And I was just in the room a few weeks ago after Kamala Harris, you know, replaced Joe Biden.
And the sentiment I was getting, and this was not from a few people, this was from quite a lot, was, you know, your sympathy is not going to stop the bombs.
And most people I spoke to either were not voting, in the presidential election, or we're looking into Jill Stein or Cornel West.
And some of the top activists I spoke with talked about that people they know are not going to vote for Kamala Harris.
Of course, this is not the entire Arab American population, but that was the sentiment I was getting, and polls that have come out since then seem to support that.
Outside of the Gaza issue, you know, I think Trump generally, you know, in this evolution of 2016 to now, both on the national level and state level, there's been a pattern of under-polling him, and for whatever reason, them missing his base by 1 to 2 percent.
And I think that would apply to Michigan as well, because from what I'm seeing from interviews I did in Detroit, In particular, which traditionally if a Democrat's going to win in Michigan, they have to do very well in Detroit.
There's a not insignificant number of black men that seem to be moving over to Trump.
Variety of reasons, but some of the men I spoke with, it was as simple as, you know, prices were lower under Trump.
You know, obviously there's context and different factors for that, but they're not political diehards, and they just look at it simply, you know, costs were lower under Trump, and I'm tired of the high prices.
Others had specifics.
They liked the child tax credit under Biden-Harris, but that was only for a year, and they're mad it expired, which goes to kind of neoliberalism.
Why would you create this program for a year and allow it to sunset without fighting for it?
Yeah, it's so interesting because you're talking to actual voters, you know, black voters, Arab voters, Muslim voters, and one of the things that always strikes me is this gigantic gap between sort of the elite pundits who are anointed or the NGO leaders or group leaders who are anointed to speak on behalf of these people
And the huge gap between what they insist is important, the prism through which they see things, and the prism through which ordinary voters who aren't as politically connected, who don't work as political professionals, see things as well.
And I think a lot of times people do forget, as they're watching the migration of black and Latino voters to the Republican Party, despite all these claims that Trump is a white supremacist, is that these people have the same exact concerns as everybody else, including white ordinary voters, which is They're worried about inflation.
They're worried about health care costs.
They're worried about the economy for their kids.
And, you know, I don't know that they're so focused on these kind of racially divisive issues that oftentimes are emphasized by the elite who are self-anointed to speak for them.
And we see that in polls.
We see that in a lot of the journalism you're doing.
Let me ask you the last question.
I think part of the Biden-Harris strategy heading into the 2024 election, 'cause remember now we're a full year into the war in Gaza, is they really assumed that the war would end before the election, so it would kind of be on the back burner It would be out of people's minds.
Or at the very least, they could pressure the Israelis to try and end it before the election, claim this kind of breakthrough that they did on behalf of the people in Gaza.
I think they're still trying that.
But I don't think the Israelis care very much about what the Biden-Harris administration thinks.
They've demonstrated that multiple times.
I certainly don't think they care about their political prospects.
In fact, they would love to probably see them lose, which is ironic since they've been so loyal to them.
But leave that aside.
Since this war does not seem to be ending anytime soon, certainly not before the election, and now we have things like an expanding war, this horrific attack today in Lebanon by Israel, do you think that the more that kind of happens with Israel and its neighbors and these conflicts and wars, the worse this problem gets for Democrats when it comes to Muslim and Arab voters who had traditionally supported the party?
Yes.
And I also think, going back to black voters I spoke with, people also are just kind of sick of spending all this money everywhere else, as their groceries are $200 for just a few items.
I've spoken with so many, not just black voters, but all voters in Michigan and elsewhere, who are like, why are we giving all this money to Ukraine and Israel and et cetera?
But, you know, prices, gas is a little lower now, but it's been high.
groceries, I mean housing on the moral aspect.
I t left the station.
I think a ceasefire announced to lose a significant porti American population.
I think if there was a ceasefire announced today, they would still lose a significant portion of the Arab American population.
Understandably so.
I mean, I spoke with people in Dearborn that have lost 15 to 20 family members.
But then again, but then on top of that, there's the financial and pocketbook issues of people are just sick of spending all this money and being told, you know, we have to do this to save democracy and the world alliance, because they don't care about that.
They care about food on the table.
So I think if this continues, I think it could be the deciding issue, the defining issue that reelects Trump and defeats Harris.
I totally agree.
And I mean, I think they're right to care more about the issues that affect them in their immediate neighborhoods and their lives and the lives of their children than some foreign wars overseas that they're told for some reason they have to pay for.
Jordan, the book is We the Poison, Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans.
I think the thing I appreciate most about your book is that you are somebody who, despite whatever ideological views that you have when it comes to your reporting, you just follow it.
wherever it goes, whosever doorstep it lands at.
And I think that's what journalism is missing more than anything.
And I think you do that extremely well.
And I think, like I said, this book is kind of an insight, not just in the Flint water crisis, but to the problems with our U.S. political house in general.
So congratulations on writing it.
And thanks so much for coming on to talk about it.
I appreciate it.
Hey, thank you for having me.
All right.
Have a good evening.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As I mentioned, we probably weren't going to be able to get to this other segment about Hillary's comments last night on Rachel Maddow's show, calling for the imprisonment of people who spread propaganda or disinformation.
So we're going to cover that on our after show, which, as you likely know, is available
