New Poll: Dems Revere The Security State; DC Blob Begins To Accept Reality On Ukraine; New Focus Group Reveals Gap Between DC & Voters
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Democrats Love Security State (6:32)
Reality Check (43:24)
Insular Elites (1:06:09)
Outro (1:21:18)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, one of the most ignored stories of the Trump era has been the complete switch on so many issues between the two parties.
None of those changes is more pronounced than the way in which the Democratic Party has really become the party that now reveres and trusts The U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, even Homeland Security.
Well, skepticism about those security state agencies is now found overwhelmingly among conservatives.
The same is true for a wide range of issues, including the justifiability of state censorship online and the nobility of NATO wars and a variety of other related issues.
But nowhere is this more pronounced than one's views on these security state agencies.
And a new comprehensive Gallup poll released just today demonstrates just how vivid this shift has become.
We're going to analyze that poll and explain the implications.
And then one of the most mainstream figureheads of the U.S. foreign policy community is Richard Haas, who has spent the last 20 years as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He was in that position from 2001 until 2023, and he's been in and out of various foreign policy positions with both political parties.
He's really representative of the bipartisan ruling class foreign policy that has governed our country for decades.
Earlier this morning, that St. Richard Haas went on mourning Joe, which is now ground zero for mainstream D.C. ruling class thinking, and he said things about the war in Ukraine that up until about a month ago was utterly taboo to say, Something that if you said or expressed would immediately subject you to accusations of being a Russian agent or propagandist.
In particular, Haass announced That it is time for the United States and NATO to embrace what he called a more realistic goal for this war.
Given that, as he acknowledges, it is simply impossible to achieve what has been defined this entire time by NATO and the United States as quote victory, namely that Ukraine will somehow Expel all troops from its soil.
He has in fact said that given the reality of what is happening, namely that the US and NATO and Ukraine will never achieve that goal, Ukraine will have to cede part of the territory that Russia has taken as part of this last bloody war over the last three years in order to achieve peace.
Beyond his specific concession, one that has been slowly brewing in mainstream foreign policy circles in the West, designed obviously to prepare the public to have to accept this without realizing that they're now accepting something that they were told they would never have to.
We're seeing here this standard pattern for how U.S. elites sell wars to its population.
At the beginning of the war, they unite and they drown the population with tsunamis of maximalist proclamations of inevitable and total and noble victory.
We'll defeat the Viet Cong in a year.
We'll depose Saddam Hussein and unite the Shia and Sunni and Kurds and restore democracy to Iraq in a matter of months.
We'll expel every Russian troop from Ukrainian soil, even Crimea, for as long as it takes.
And every time at the start, anyone who points out that these claims are dubious or deceitful is basically accused of being a traitor.
accused of only saying those things because they're on the other side or they hate their own country.
And that happens all the way up until the point where those same elites who wanted that war sold start to get tired of their war, decide that they're bored with it, that they've already done enough with it and they want to move on to other toys, to new wars.
And then when they do, they begin admitting that those initial propagandistic claims are now false at the moment that they decide it's permissible to say that.
We'll take a look at both that amazing Richard Haass interview today and how this trend has been going on for quite some time.
And then finally, Few things are more glaring and overlooked than the ongoing massive gap between how elite opinion on the one hand understands the United States and the world, and how ordinary Americans on the other understand it.
It is impossible to understand politics over the last eight years without a fundamental overarching recognition of this massive gap that continues to grow.
And there are few things more entertaining or illustrative than when media elites go on some sort of field trip to visit the exotic species they call ordinary Americans, whose habitat is in the middle of the country at these little neighborhoods and communities that, when they're very brave, they like to go and visit.
One MSNBC personality named Alex Wagner made such an excursion to Michigan, and the results were predictably comical.
As it turns out, yet again, people who work for a living and have to worry about paying bills and supporting a family and rising prices for things like grocery and everyday needs have much different priorities Then media figures who work for major media outlets in New York and Washington or for celebrities who dominate our political discourse and set the agenda for what matters to them.
And this recent visit by Alex Wagner, this courageous visit to the middle of the country to talk to the ordinary folk, Really illustrates just how wide this gap has become.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
System Update.
System Update.
. you Probably the strangest experience I've ever had in the 20 years or so that I've been doing journalism and writing about politics was that starting around four, five, maybe six years ago, it basically became a consensus among a lot of left liberals that I somehow have changed my views, that I have gone from what they perceived as the left, or at least left liberalism, and have become some sort of far-right Trump supporter.
And the reason I say that it's so strange is not because I care how people label me, It's because I honestly haven't changed a single one of my defining views at all.
You can go back and read my early blog that I created out of nowhere in 2005 and 2006 and then my articles at Salon and then my articles in Reporting and The Guardian and then everything I did at The Intercept and interviews and speeches that I've given over the years and on the core issues, everything is essentially the same.
I'm not even boasting about that.
Maybe it's good to evolve and have different views on the key issues that you focus on much, but the reality is that I just haven't.
I began by focusing on the evils of the security state during the war on terror, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, Homeland Security.
I've always been a vehement advocate of free speech against any attempt to censor, especially censor the internet.
And all these principles have discontinued, including my basic view about journalism.
And yet somehow, You stand in the same place and then you get increasingly accused of having shifted, even though you haven't actually moved at all.
Because so often what changes is the political factions around you.
One of the defining staples of left politics in the West for decades, as I understood it when I first became acquainted with what that meant, as I studied more about the history of the 20th century and how both left and right liberal and conservative movements emerged,
was a very ingrained and justifiable skepticism about, even concern for and contempt for, the part of our government that operates in secret, that is a permanent power faction in Washington, and that can exercise immense powers completely in the dark.
The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, Homeland Security.
I mean, this has been a staple, an anchor of left-liberal politics, especially left-wing politics for as long as I can remember.
And I defy any of you now to go and try and find a member of the political faction in Washington who identifies as left-wing that ever talks about any of those issues or any of those agencies in anything remotely resembling a derogatory way.
It never happens.
If you go to Capitol Hill or you go to mainstream media outlets, the only people who ever speak negatively or critically or skeptically of the pronouncements and behavior of those agencies are now people who identify as being on the populist right.
You can certainly find some people on the left who don't want to be part of the Democratic Party who still are focused on these issues, but by and large, it is the Democratic Party that has become an increasingly pro-establishment party, including the left-liberal wing of that party that through the 1960s and 1970s defined themselves based on counterculture and anti-establishment politics.
They are now the most pro-establishment faction, and all of our politics, the ones who demand that you have to obey every pronouncement of the CDC, Put on masks the minute they tell you to, not question vaccines.
And be grateful when the CIA and FBI and Homeland Security do anything because they're really good people acting benevolently in our own interests.
I mean, it is a complete reversal of how politics has for decades in the United States been defined.
And you don't need to take my word for it.
There's so much polling data that has demonstrated this.
And there is a new poll out today from Gallup, which I think is the best polling agency to survey.
General attitudes, not necessarily the day-by-day presidential race, that's not really what they do, but they are very comprehensive and very reliable in surveying the kind of deep-seated opinions and ethos that Americans have, and they break them up by category, and their data is often extremely revealing.
And here is a report from Gallup that was issued just today where you see the headline, quote, Partisans Differ Most on the ratings of the CDC, FBI, and Homeland Security.
This is an article that, this is a survey that attempted to determine how Americans think about various federal agencies specifically by political ideology or party.
And the question was, how would you rate the job being done by each, excellent, good, or only poor, only fair or poor?
And here are the results.
And I mean, it really is remarkable.
So first of all, here's the CDC.
I don't even think that's a surprise.
I don't consider the CDC part of the security state, but given how much we know that the CDC aired and made inaccurate statements and false statements, 65% of Americans rate the CDC as good, less than 20%, fewer than 20% of Republicans do.
But here's the FBI, which obviously is a crucial part of the security state.
The FBI is the agency that was run by J. Edgar Hoover for decades throughout the 20th century.
It was the agency that hunted down leftists as communists and using, in the 1960s, all sorts of programs of illegal infiltration with COINTELPRO and all of those programs to infiltrate the anti-war movement or the civil rights movement, put spies in all sorts of programs of illegal infiltration with COINTELPRO and all of those programs to infiltrate the anti-war movement or the civil rights movement, put spies in there, put agent provocateurs in there, all of which was revealed in the 1970s during the And so we're going to talk about the CIA.
And here's the FBI, which was heavily involved in things like COINTELPRO.
That was a program that came from the FBI.
Some leftist radicals broke into an office, a branch office in Pennsylvania, of the FBI and took those files and it was revealed that the FBI was putting into every anti-war group about the Vietnam War, every civil rights group.
All sorts of spies infiltrating these groups, agent provocateurs that encourage these groups to engage in illegal or violent activity of the kind they wouldn't have engaged in absent the FBI's encouragement, things that we've seen through the War on Terror, then again in the Trump age, including at January 6.
So this is the FBI that's doing this, and here you see the FBI among left liberals is almost as popular as The CDC is, there you see, it's about 65% as well.
And yet, here again, in terms of any skepticism that you want for the FBI, you have to go to this red dot, which represents people who are Republicans, or identify as Republicans, or lean Republicans, and it's barely 20% of the people who rate the FBI favorably, versus 65% of Democrats who do so.
Imagine traveling back to the 1970s, 80s, certainly 1960s, even 1990s, And showing people this chart, nobody would believe it.
There's no way people would comprehend something like this.
Here's the Department of Homeland Security which is now sort of a accepted part of our democratic government framework, but in reality, unlike the CIA and the FBI, Which has been in existence for decades.
The FBI early in the 20th century, the CIA as part of the National Security Act of 1947 after World War II and the Cold War began when the National Security State was created.
Homeland Security was only created in 2002.
It was an initiative by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
To say that we need an overarching agency that manages all of the different security state agencies.
Another layer on top of all this massive, sprawling, secretive part of our government that we already had.
At the time, this was an extremely controversial measure.
Because people were saying, the last thing we need is another layer of massive bureaucracy that will have all of these massive powers.
This was right after the Patriot Act and people started saying, what is it that we're doing to our government?
That was what the Department of Homeland Security represented.
And there were a good number of Democrats who opposed to it and now you look at this and also with the Department of Homeland Security, you have 65% or maybe actually above 50% of Democrats who support the Department of Homeland Security and then about 13 or 12% of Republicans who do.
I mean, look at these gaps in the level of trust that both Republicans and Democrats place In these security state institutions, these secretive, unaccountable, undemocratic agencies.
Now some of you might be thinking, oh well this only is happening because this is under a Democratic administration.
It's typically the case that Democrats trust these agencies when it's a Democrat running it, but don't trust them when it's a Republican.
That's not true.
As I'm going to show you, this has been a trend long time coming though.
We also saw When Donald Trump was the president, was running the executive branch, and Democrats increasingly embraced the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon as the agencies that they most trusted.
Here is the CIA.
The CIA.
I try to imagine what it would be like to go back and just tell some leftist activist in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, that in just a couple decades, the only opposition to and skepticism of the CIA that you're going to hear is on the populist right wing of the Republican Party, whereas the Democrats are going to be overwhelmingly in favor of it.
Not just Democrats, but even the left wing of the Democratic Party will never speak ill of these agencies.
This is just unbelievable and remarkable.
Here is 55% or so of people who are Democrats who rate the CIA as doing a good job, whereas just over 20%, maybe 25% of Republicans do.
That's the CIA.
And then here you see the Defense Department, the Pentagon.
Where Republican support is a little higher, it's about 32%, and yet 65% of Democrats think the Pentagon is doing a good job.
The Pentagon that spends almost a trillion dollars a year that it can't keep track of, that it can't pass an audit for, that it pours into the endless pockets of Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamic that's filled with people who came from those companies who now run the Pentagon.
65% of Democrats favorably rate The Pentagon.
And you can go through pretty much the entire set of agencies where Democrats trust it more, including the Department of Justice, although the difference is a little bit less there, as well as the Secret Service.
But the big items are these agencies, the opposition to which basically used to define who was on the left and who was on the right.
Now, as I said, this has been a long time coming.
This is not some sort of new trend that only is happening because Donald Trump's no longer president.
Here from January 4th, 2017, this was in the interval between Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the time right before Donald Trump took office on January 20th of 2017.
And what was going on in this interval
Was that the CIA and the FBI had spent the whole campaign feeding to the Washington Post and the New York Times, fabricated stories all anonymously, claiming that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government to hack into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta's email, a conspiracy theory, classic conspiracy theory, that Robert Mueller, despite 18 months of unlimited investigation, concluded there was no evidence for.
And so Trump had basically identified that the enemies of his in Washington were the agencies that are supposed to be under his control as part of the executive branch and Democrats also realized that those agencies had now become their political allies.
Not just when a Democrat is president, but also when a Republican president was incoming during the campaign and then also once he was president.
So here from NBC News in January of 2017, you see the headline, "Democrats now give the CIA "higher marks than Republicans do." Quote, "That's a really big shift.
"Public perceptions of the intelligence community "have a whole lot to do with politics." Quote, President-elect Donald Trump has spent the week since the election openly questioning the CIA's assessments about Russian interference in the fall contest, prompting his foes to lob the apolitical and fundamentally patriotic mission of Americans' intelligence officers.
Let me just say that again because this is exactly what happened.
Once Trump started contesting the CIA's findings, which by the way were A lie.
Shocking that the CIA spread lies in order to achieve their political ends inside the United States.
What ended up happening was, was that his foes, Trump's foes, namely Democrats, started to cheer, to laud the apolitical and fundamentally patriotic mission of America's intelligence officers.
Democrats started cheering for and embracing this idea that the CIA was a benevolent, apolitical Actors defending democracy.
That's how liberals, especially the huge number of liberals, who only began paying attention to politics in 2016 as a result of Donald Trump, have no idea what the CIA did before, have no idea what the history was.
They were told the CIA were the good guys because they were trying to stop Trump.
And that's what even this NBC article goes on to say.
And then it continues, quote, but as with so many other U.S.
institutions, public perceptions of the intelligence community have a whole lot to do with politics.
While the CIA still remains relatively popular, much more so than Congress or either political party, the past two decades have shown significant fluctuations in how Republicans and Democrats view the agency, according to polling conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal.
Asked for the first time since the survey asked about the CIA back in 2002, Democrats now have a more positive view of the nation's foreign intelligence agency than Republicans do.
That was five years ago, six years ago now.
Actually, seven years ago.
So you see this trend going up for a long time and this is when it started happening and at the time NBC was shocked that just Democrats marginally trusted the CIA more than the Republicans did because it's a massive radical change in our politics.
And yet over the last seven years, through the Trump presidency into the Biden administration, that gap has grown larger and larger and larger to the point where the Democratic Party really is the party that believes in and trusts and wants to embrace and follow and obey and preserve the power of America's leading institutions.
They feel the same way about corporate media.
They're the only ones who trust it.
They feel the same way about big banks.
They're so happy when Goldman Sachs comes and endorses Kamala Harris.
They feel that way about every ruling class institution.
They basically are institutionalist establishment servants.
And a major part of the Republican Party is, too, the establishment wing led by people like Mitch McConnell.
That's what they represent.
That's why they're so close to the Democrats.
But Trump created a movement that feels great hostility towards these institutions and created all this space in the Republican Party and on the right wing of American politics where it never previously existed to understand that these agencies are pernicious and sinister and by no means some sort of benevolent Force in our politics.
Now here you see a chart that gives even more of a historical perspective.
It shows the net favorability of the CIA bi-party affiliation.
So here you see it starts in 2002, 2003.
So this is after 9-11.
George Bush and Dick Cheney are in office.
And the difference was not that big.
Republicans only had a 5%.
Net favorability view of the CIA, the negative 20% among Democrats was pretty standard.
But then as the war on terror went on and we started to have controversies like the CIA torture program and the CIA due process free prison program in Guantanamo and Bagram and CIA black sites, and then the use of the NSA to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law, most Republicans at the time were highly supportive of the war on terror and the agencies implementing it.
And so you see this Republican view grow to a big 45% favorability rating for the CIA, whereas the Democrats even Got more unfavorable where they had a 25% gap.
And then you see when Obama becomes president there's this massive increase, a steady increase.
Here's 2008, 2009 once Obama takes office you see this massive increase on the part of Democrats.
Who by 2011-2012 under Obama now have a 52% positive rating difference.
But still, Republicans are still very trustworthy of the CIA, even under Obama.
And then you only see this change, this decline, as we head into the 2016 election and then this complete reversal right after 2016.
This is the realignment that Donald Trump ushered in that so many people, especially in the left-wing sector of American politics, refuse to see, don't understand, cannot comprehend.
Because in their minds, those of who even think about this, the Democratic parties are always the good guys.
They're always the ones who are opposed to the U.S.
security state and its abuses.
And no matter how much you show them, shove in their face all of this data for years now, that the parties have completely switched when it comes to this question.
They just, they won't acknowledge it.
They won't comprehend it.
FiveThirtyEight, which is the data polling and analysis site that Nate Silver founded and now has left, noticed this trend back in February of 2018.
So again, during the Trump administration, just in case you think that it's just about who's in power.
And the title was, Why Democrats and Republicans Did a Sudden 180 on the FBI.
So we showed you the CIA.
It's also the FBI.
Quote, over the past 15 years, Democratic and Republican voters' views of the agency have veered in opposite directions.
In 2003, Gallup asked respondents to rate the job being done by the FBI and found that 63% of Republicans said the agency was doing, quote, an excellent or good job while only 44% of Democrats agreed.
Last year, however, and this is a 2018 article, so we're talking about 2017, Gallup asked the same question and found that the tables had turned over.
Only 49% of Republicans said the FBI was doing an excellent or good job, compared to 69% of Democrats.
of Democrats, seven out of 10 Democrats in 2017 loved the FBI.
I mean, that's why whenever I hear, "Oh, you change what happened to you," and I look at this, I mean, it's like you live in some kind of crazy world where you're looking at so obvious what happened.
I didn't move at all.
I have the same views of these agencies as I did 20 years ago.
What changed our, which sector of American political life shares that skepticism and distrust, and which one now reveres and trusts them fully?
538 goes on, quote, "The polling data suggests that these changes were driven by different factors for each party, at least initially.
Democrats' approval of the FBI was considerably higher in 2009 than 2003, suggesting that the election of Barack Obama as president may have increased liberals' confidence in the agency, but Republican support for the agency held steady through 2014." So they didn't start distressing the FBI, even though Obama was president, but that support among Republicans abruptly fell when the question was asked again in 2017.
Separate polling conducted by Pew, which tracks whether Americans have favorable or unfavorable opinions of an array of government institutions, found that Democrats' outlook on the FBI grew considerably rosier over the course of the Obama administration.
Pew's findings for Republicans show a more muted decline in support of the FBI.
The percentage of Republicans who said they had a favorable view of the FBI dropped from 71% in 1977 to 65% in 2017.
So it was pretty steady all the way up, and then suddenly, when they started seeing Republicans, what the CIA and what the FBI and what the NSA and what the US security state were actually capable of in terms of lying and spreading conspiracy theories and interfering in our politics.
And when Donald Trump saw that as well, that's when the space opened up for suddenly there'd be a lot of skepticism where previously there had been very little, which is on the right wing of our politics, whereas liberals and leftists started looking at what the CIA was doing to Trump and decided, wow, these people are great.
We love these people.
And the polling data shows that.
That's not just my characterization of it.
Now, here is Donald Trump on CBS News, just to give you a flavor for how this has gone.
This is just last month, just a few, about a month ago, he went on to CBS News and this is part of what he had to say.
The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign.
They spied on my campaign.
There's no real evidence of that.
Of course there isn't.
Okay, this date is wrong actually.
This is not 2024.
This is, I believe it's, We'll check on the state.
I believe it's when Trump was running for president.
It's 2019.
So Trump was already president and he sat down with Leslie Stahl and this is what happened.
The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign.
They spied on my campaign, Leslie.
There's no real evidence of that.
Of course there is.
It's all over the place.
Leslie, they spied on my campaign and they got caught.
Can I say something?
You know, this is 60 Minutes.
And we can't put on things we can't verify.
No, you won't put it on because it's bad for Biden.
We can't put on things we can't verify.
Leslie, they spied on my campaign.
Well, we can't verify that.
It's been totally verified.
No.
It's been, just go down and get the papers.
They spied on my campaign, they got caught.
No.
And then they went much further than that, and they got caught.
And you will see that, Leslie.
And you know that, but you just don't want to put it on the air.
No, as a matter of fact, I don't know.
Look, this is 60 minutes.
This isn't just some cable program.
This is 60 minutes with our decades of reputation for integrity in journalism.
We don't allow unvetted false claims to go to the air without being challenged.
I'm Leslie Stahl.
I know what you're saying is false.
Now, by this point, we had known so much to prove that was true, including the fact that a senior advisor in the Trump campaign, Carter Page, had been spied on as soon as he left.
And the FBI obtained a warrant only by lying to the point where the FBI lawyer who signed off on that warrant that allowed the FBI to spy on Carter Page in order to see what he was doing in terms of Russia and the Trump campaign had to plead guilty to crimes for lying.
And then here CNN in January 2017 says no, President-elect Trump, Russian hacking is not like the CIA's WMD fiasco because at the time Trump was basically mocking the CIA, saying, you got Russian collusion wrong, just like you got the CIA wrong.
Nobody should trust you.
Quote, in a statement about the CIA that he issued late last month, Trump said, quote, these are the same people who said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
So he was publicly mocking the CIA and arguing that they were untrustworthy.
On Sunday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump made this point again to reporters, saying, if you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster and they were wrong.
And of course, that's exactly what happened here, even though CNN said, no, this isn't the same.
It turned out to be exactly the same.
Let's remember that the conspiracy theory that the CIA and the FBI concocted and spread to media outlets who gave themselves Pulitzers for reporting it, the core conspiracy theory was the conspiracy between the Trump campaign on the one hand and the Russian government on the other to hack into those emails and alter the election.
And Mueller closed his investigation and did not indict a single American, not one, not anyone in the Trump campaign, the Trump family, the Trump White House, based on that original conspiracy that launched this whole thing, namely that Trump and the officials and the Russians and the Kremlin had colluded or conspired to interfere in our election.
Michael Horowitz was the Justice Department's IG, which is the Investigator General, and he is responsible for basically being this kind of outsider force.
Every cabinet department has an IG who's supposed to be independent, who investigates scandals, and he was there to do that for the Justice Department.
And oftentimes they whitewash what was done, and other times they don't.
And he issued a report detailing how extensively the FBI had acted corruptly with respect to the Trump campaign and also to Russiagate.
And he then went to testify before Congress.
And this is part of the exchange that happened.
I do want to talk a little bit about monitoring or surveilling the, you know, what is the euphemism?
Consensual monitoring?
In other words, you're wiring somebody to surreptitiously record someone associated with the Trump campaign versus the Trump campaign.
I think it's a difference without a distinction, but there's a distinction because there's a difference in terms of what authority, what approvals the FBI would have to get, correct?
Correct.
That's the reason for the distinction, but I agree with you.
There's varying degrees here of what occurred.
So they were trying to be pretty scrupulous about saying, oh, we're not, we're not surveilling the campaign.
We're just surveilling people associated with campaigns.
So what ended up happening here is, as you said, and we'll try and, what they did was they took individuals, informants that were signed up informants for the FBI.
wired them up so they could be recording conversations they had without the person they were speaking with knowing that they were being recorded.
That's, in essence, what a consensual monitoring is.
It sounds really close.
One party's constraint.
It really sounds really close.
I mean, the FBI takes people who are communicating with the Trump campaign and puts secret wires on them and sends them to go talk to the Trump campaign so they can listen to what people in the Trump campaign are saying.
Obviously, that is spying on the Trump campaign, as is fraudulently obtaining a FISA warrant by lying to the FISA court in order to get it to spine an associate of the Trump campaign as well.
And that's everything that the FBI did.
And so as all of this came out, as the FBI lied, as more and more evidence emerged that the FBI had been doing these things, the CIA had been too, it was natural that there would be a lot more skepticism of the U.S.
security state on the right.
But what amazingly happened was that the left basically renounced any skepticism And I know if there are leftists here, they would say, oh, no, we don't love the CIA.
Go find Bernie Sanders, AOC, whoever it is that you consider to be a leader of the American left in the United States, the mainstream left, not, again, the left outside the Democratic Party, and show me an instance where they ever talk about or denounce or want to scrutinize or investigate any of these agencies, the CIA, the FBI.
The NSA never happens because they perceive them as their political allies.
And we showed you many times when Matt Taibbi went to testify before the Congress about the revelations of the Twitter files and how the CIA and other members of the security state were pressuring the government to remove dissent.
Every Democrat on that committee defended the CIA.
To the point where Colin Allred, who's now running for senator against Ted Cruz in Texas, told Matt Taibbi that he was a conspiracy theorist for thinking that the CIA was up to no good and, in fact, he should consider that the people who work in these agencies are good upstanding patriots who are only censoring for our own good.
That is absolutely the ethos of the Democratic Party now.
Just to give you a little sense, because oftentimes what ends up happening is that people say, Okay, yeah, we admit that the CIA used to do bad things.
It's always in the past.
Every decade, we find out new things the CIA did, and then people say, oh yeah, okay, they did that, but they don't do that anymore.
Here from 2014, The New York Times.
This is what the CIA did under President Obama to the Democratic members of the Senate who are trying to investigate their use of torture.
Quote, political divide about CIA torture remains after Senate reports released.
Quote, Senator Dianne Feinstein was still speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday morning about the Intelligence Committee's report excoriating the CIA's interrogation program when a new website went live.
Its name was self-explanatory, CIAsaveslives.com.
It is a fight over history with profound consequences for America's image and personal implications for former CIA officials in particular.
The Senate report, approved by the Democratic majority of the Intelligence Committee, led by Ms.
Feinstein of California, portrays them as overseeing a dark, regrettable chapter in history.
The officials made it clear on Tuesday that they will not stay quiet when the report shapes their reputations for that of the agency.
Senator Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, and five other Republicans released a 100-page dissent.
Attempting to refute the 9,000, 6,000 page report which was written solely by Democratic committee staff members.
So when all of the CIA controversies, controversies of the CIA during the war on terror were emerged, mostly the only people critical of the CIA were the Democrats and it was the Republicans who were highly and vocally defending the CIA, just to give you a sense for how recent this change is.
Just wanted to highlight one thing about the Department of Homeland Security.
Because as I said, when I looked at that polling data, the thing that really amazed me is how much Democrats love the Department of Homeland Security.
Because as I said, when that was created in 2002, Democrats viewed it as some sort of sprawling, tyrannical, new system that was going to take the Bush-Cheney changes to our system of government and make it even more centralized and more radical.
And one of the Democratic senators who voted against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security basically on the grounds that, oh, it's too costly.
We don't need another bureaucratic institution in the US security state.
We already have these sprawling institutions.
Nobody knows how many people work in them or what they're doing.
That was his only objection.
And Max Cleland was somebody who was a triple amputee.
He had lost one arm and both legs serving in the war in Vietnam.
And he ran for re-election in 2002, so right at the height of the war on terror.
And one of the scumbags from the Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson, represented, or was working on the campaign of his opponent, Saxby Chambliss, the person I just identified, who became a Republican Senator from Georgia by defeating Max Cleland.
And the big attack on Max Cleland was that he was basically a traitor and a terrorist lover simply because he opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
They ran ads morphing his face into Osama Bin Laden's face.
People like Rick Wilson and Saxby Chambliss who never fought for their country.
When he died, the Associated Press in November 2021 recalled that incident.
Max Cleland died, a senator and veteran who lost limbs in Vietnam.
Cleland left Washington after Carter lost reelection.
In 1982, he was elected Georgia's Secretary of State, a post he had held for eight dozen years.
Then he won the Senate seat of the retiring Sam Nunn, but only held it for one term.
Polls showed he had been leading in the reelection campaign.
Before the devastating Max Chambliss ad, quote, accusing me of being soft on Homeland Defense and Osama Bin Laden is the most vicious exploitation of a national strategy and attempt at character assassination I have ever witnessed, Cleland said at the time.
Imagine going to war and losing three of your limbs and then having two warmongers who never get near a war zone accuse you of being a pro-terrorist traitor simply because you oppose the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
And then imagine further if he were here to see that 20 years later, Democrats worship the Department of Homeland Security and the only skepticism of it is from the populist right wing of the Republican Party.
Back in December of 2022, the ACLU also was leading the way, the kind of left liberal way in Warning about how dangerous these agencies have become.
Quote, ACLU criticizes federal commission, internal CIA recommendation, questions needed on domestic intelligence agency.
Quote, the ACLU today questioned the need for a quote, Homeland CIA, formally proposed that afternoon by a federal terrorism advisory committee.
Now let's just remember what the Homeland Security was.
This word homeland never used to be in the American lexicon, our homeland.
It's a very creepy word.
And the real concern when the Department of Homeland Security was created to protect the homeland was that essentially what it was going to be was taking the CIA, which was supposed to be focused on foreign countries, and make a new CIA but for the homeland, domestic, a domestic intelligence agency.
And that's exactly what it's become.
Remember when they wanted, the Biden administration did, to create a Ministry of Truth to dictate what is and is not disinformation?
They put it inside the Department of Homeland Security.
Because that's the intelligence agency that now focuses on the quote unquote homeland.
And to watch Democrats worship this department and respect it and think it's doing a great job whereas Republicans oppose it is remarkable given what was said back in 2002 by the ACLU.
Quote, as Americans we have always rejected an internal spy agency even when we feared possible nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.
Do you see how everything changed in terms of each side talking about these vital issues?
quote, the Hoover FBI ruined lives by going outside the law and engaging in covert investigations without suspicion of crime, Edgar said.
Why would the government ever want to institutionalize something so dangerous?
Do you see how everything changed in terms of each side talking about these vital issues?
What really led to the knowledge about how threatening and menacing the CIA was, was when mostly Senate Democrats, in the wake of the Watergate revelations and all sorts of revelations about the abuses of the CIA throughout the 1960s, persuaded the Republican colleagues to create an investigative commission inside the Senate that was called the Church Commission after the chairman of the Church Committee, Frank Church, who was pretty much of a left liberal,
Democratic senator from Idaho, but he was a war veteran.
He was by far from a radical.
And he led this commission and they uncovered all sorts of secrets about what the CIA had been up to, not just in terms of manipulating foreign politics, but also our own countries.
Let me just show you this 45, 50 second excerpt from when a member of the church committee was questioning a former member of the CIA about its relationship to the American media.
Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation American journal?
We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.
Do you have any people paid by the CIA Who are working for television networks.
This I think gets into the kind of getting into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I'd like to get into an executive session.
I mean.
He asked, are there people being paid by the CIA to contribute articles to major American newspapers?
And he said, yes, we do pay people to do that.
And then the question was, are there people employed by major American newspapers who are paid by the CIA to spread its propaganda?
And he said, that's a question I can only answer on executive session.
This is the agency that members of the Democratic Party, followers of American liberalism, by and large, on the whole, Trust and like and embrace and view as a benevolent agency.
And that is an increasing trend where more and more Democrats, more and more liberals every year are identifying with the U.S.
security state while the skepticism and opposition to it in the Republican Party and on the American right continues to grow as well.
And you can just see these lines completely parting ways on an issue that previously used to define who you were and where you were on the political spectrum in the exact opposite way as it does now.
We have raised a lot of questions, concerns, objections, doubts about the U.S., role in the war in Ukraine, basically from the very beginning.
I remember the week of January in 2022, when this debate really began, I remember going on this show and talking constantly, and on other shows too, about how it is that every time the United States involves itself in one of these proxy wars, only bad things happen.
How we're not in any way motivated by some desire to protect Ukraine, but to destroy Ukraine, because our real goal is to weaken Russia.
We don't care about the Ukrainians at all.
We're happy to sacrifice them and their country on the altar of our geostrategic goals.
And we know that because I've seen the United States do that so many times.
But the major skepticism that came not just from me or even principally from me, but from the experts that I was putting on my show, people like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wald and others, But principally, Professor Mearsheimer, who early on kept saying, when very few people were, there's no way Ukraine can win this war without NATO and the United States entering as direct belligerents, because Russia is a much bigger and more powerful country.
And maybe Russia will have some setbacks.
But ultimately, Russia is going to win this war, no matter how bloody it turns out being, in part because Russia is bigger, but also in part because Russia perceives Western and U.S.
encroachment and influence into Ukraine right on their border to be an existential threat to their country, rightly or wrongly.
And that means that they will do everything they have to do to win this war far more than what we're prepared to do.
And therefore, this whole narrative that's being sold to the United States, to Americans and to the West, that we're going to vanquish every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which they seized in 2014 in response to the U.S.
supported coup.
It was always impossible.
It was always a pipe dream.
And if you said that, if you said Ukraine can't win, this is a futile war, as many of us said, although not that many, then you were put on an official list if you had a platform, as I was many times, as Professor Mearsheim was, as a lot of other people were.
And even if you weren't, you were accused instantly of being a Kremlin propagandist.
Even though that all turned out to be exactly blatantly true to the point where American foreign policy elites are now starting to say that because they know they have to prepare the West to watch the United States and NATO lose the war and they're trying to create a way to frame their loss as something other than that.
Now, it doesn't mean that the war is coming to a halt or that US money is stopping.
In fact, just today, As Reuters reported, the U.S.
is preparing another $8 billion in arms and packages for Zelensky visit, sources say.
As you might recall, we reported on this on Monday night.
Zelensky came to the United States.
He was campaigning in swing states with Democrats like Josh Shapiro.
They went to a weapons factory.
Governor Shapiro, the Democrat, playfully signed.
The missiles and other weapons that will be used to kill people.
Very fun thing that American and Israeli politicians love to do now.
Nikki Haley went to Israel and did that for the Israelis, signed little happy faces on the missiles that killed children in Gaza.
But here's what the Biden administration did today.
Quote, President Joe Biden's administration has been engaged in urgent discussions with Congress to allow it to use another $5.6 billion in military aid for Ukraine before September 30th, the end of the federal fiscal year, when the authority was set to expire on Tuesday.
On Thursday, U.S.
officials said the White House intends to notify Congress it will move forward with the announcement of a $5.6 billion drawdown from U.S.
weapons stocks.
The contents of that package are still in flux.
The official said.
Now last night we told you about the president of the Czech Republic who because of the history of the Czech Republic which was once Czechoslovakia often repressed by the Soviet Union.
And the political party in the Czech Republic that is in power has been a unyielding, vocal, steadfast supporter of Ukraine, demanding more and more Western weapons, doing everything possible saying we have to prevent the Russians from winning, otherwise they will move into other countries.
And yet even the president of the Czech Republic said yesterday we have to start being more realistic because this is not a war that the Ukrainians can win.
And we have to really start thinking about being realistic and how to stop this war based on the reality that the Russians now occupy almost 25% of Ukrainian territory.
And how to negotiate to try and get the Russians to give up at least some of that.
So Ukraine doesn't end up in the words of Professor Mearsheimer of two and a half years is nothing more than a rump state, which is where it's headed.
Following that pronouncement, which really did surprise me.
The head of the Foreign Relations Council for the United States, Richard Haass, who is one of those people who just comes in and out of government, in the State Department, in national security offices, regardless of whether it's a Republican or Democratic president he served in, the Bush administration he served in, Democratic administrations as well.
He's just kind of the spokesman, sort of the dean of the U.S.
foreign policy community, the bipartisan foreign policy community in the In the United States.
He went on Morning Joe today, which speaks for the Biden administration.
Joe Biden watches the show every day.
It's kind of become ground zero for where mainstream figures go to talk about Washington.
And he went on Morning Joe and said something quite remarkable.
When you think about how long we've been subjected to the propaganda that the only outcome we can accept is full Absolute victory as NATO and the U.S.
has described it.
Listen to what he said, having looked now at what's actually going on in this war.
Well, he is tapping into something, Mika.
It's one of the long traditions in America.
It's the tradition of American isolationism.
That what happens over there doesn't matter.
It's not worth it.
It's simply cost.
It takes resources away from what should be spent here.
So that's essentially the tradition he's tapping into.
I mean, isn't that amazing?
By the way, that was about Donald Trump.
So Mika asked him, like, what?
Trump seems to be increasingly reluctant to send more money and Richard Haass said oh this is that evil American tradition called isolationism which believes that we should stop sending all our money overseas to fuel wars and instead we should spend our money here at home to improve the lives of the American people.
To these kind of people there's nothing worse than that.
Using our resources not for Filling the treasuries of Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing and fueling wars all over the place, but instead improving the lives of American communities, rebuilding infrastructure, creating more jobs.
They don't care about that at all, about any of those people at all.
They care about foreign wars and foreign policy.
That's all they've lived their entire life focused on.
But it was just amazing that in the course of attempting to depict what he calls Trump's isolationism as something sinister, the way he defined it was, oh, people like that believe we should stop spending all our money on foreign wars and instead spend it here at home.
So he had to kind of give lip service to the idea that Trump is misguided, that Trump is evil, but then this is what he goes on to say about Ukraine.
Before World War II, we've seen it periodically at other times, it's come back with surprising intensity there.
Two things, you know, one when he talks about Russia and he talks about Napoleon Hitler, the difference, rather fundamental difference, that's when Russia was invaded.
That's when Russia was on the defense.
Russia now is fighting an offensive war of aggression.
Rather minor detail, so it's much harder for Putin to do what Stalin did and appeal to, if you will, Mother Russia.
That said, I will say Trump, it's not in his defense, but I'll just say he makes one decent point.
Think how rare that is already, that someone like Richard Haass goes on to Morning Joe and says, okay, I spent You know, like 53 seconds clearing my throat about how bad Trump is, but I'm now ready to say that when it comes to what he's saying about Ukraine, he's actually having a decent point.
That alone is extraordinary, and this is what he said was Trump's decent point.
It's the question of what do we mean by winning in Ukraine.
It came up in the debate.
It came up yesterday.
It came up in President Biden's speech.
It came up with what President Zelensky said.
No one is putting on the table What is an achievable goal in Ukraine?
If victory continues to be defined, it is by many, Mika, that Ukraine has to totally rid its country of every Russian troop.
And I understand the argument for doing it.
The problem is it's not achievable.
No one is putting out there what is a realistic plan for victory.
If we're going to spend all this money, what is our return on investment?
And that's a conversation that this administration has been reluctant to have now for two and a half years.
And the danger of not having that conversation, not giving Americans an achievable policy or strategy in Ukraine, is it allows someone like Donald Trump to come into the conversation and say, this can't work, I'll just end it, and so forth.
So I think the administration and I think the Ukrainian government have to begin to fill the space and explain what is an achievable strategy in that country.
I mean, these people are such unbelievable scumbags, like completely rotted inside from the soul outward.
I mean, there has been endless conversations about how victory is defined.
He's trying to say, oh, for the last two and a half years, we've never really defined victory.
The Biden administration hasn't.
Victory was defined over and over and over and over and over again for the last two and a half years by the US government, by the EU, at NATO conferences, at conferences all over the world.
Victory was defined over and over as only one thing.
Expelling every single Russian troop from Ukrainian soil, including not just the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russians are now dominating in those Russian-speaking areas, but also Crimea.
And he even said that, he even referenced that, that that has been the definition of victory.
What is actually going on is that the West lost, NATO lost, the US lost in this war, because they defined victory in such a maximalist, unachievable way, That there's no way out for them because they cannot sustain the humiliation of losing to Russia.
The problem from the start, it was so obvious to see, was that they defined victory in such a maximalist way that they were bound to lose.
Russia would use nuclear weapons before it allowed Especially now, Russian forces to be expelled from Crimea or even parts of those provinces in Eastern Ukraine and allow just NATO forces to overwhelm that.
Russia would never allow that.
It was so obvious from the beginning.
And it's very similar to what the Czech president yesterday said, too.
So you can tell this is now a narrative that's emerging.
Like, look, we got to start preparing the public for the fact that we're not going to win.
And we can't let them know we didn't win.
So we have to start revising history and saying, we never really had a clear definition of what we wanted to achieve there.
And they're going to just invent some other definition like, oh, we won because we prevented Russia from taking all of Ukraine.
There's still this little chunk of Ukraine that the Russians said, we don't need that.
And so we won.
We prevented poof.
So whatever they're going to need to do, it's going to involve whitewashing all of history.
But what amazes me about this, and it happens every time in every war, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Afghanistan, They make these sweeping proclamations to propagandize the population to accept the war, and then sometime into the war, all of those things prove to be lies.
And then once they are tired of the war and know they have to end it, they start admitting the things that they had made taboo for the prior two and a half years, such as, of course Ukraine can't expel every Russian troop from Ukrainian soil.
Something that if you said in 2022 or 2023, or basically until about seven seconds ago, You would have been accused of being a traitor to your country.
Vladimir Zelensky, and we've heard this from Ukrainian officials for a year now, is pretty much the only person on the planet who actually believes that Ukraine can still win.
They basically have been saying things that are warning the Western press that he's like mentally unbalanced.
But he's so detached from reality that he still thinks that Ukraine is going to win, because the West encouraged that.
Remember, the Russians and the Ukrainians were close to a deal to avert this horrific war, and the West slooped in and said, no, you're not going to do a deal.
We're going to just give you everything you need to make sure you win.
And he started believing it.
And remember democracy elections are suspended in Ukraine indefinitely for as long as this conflict goes on and who knows how much longer after that.
So this democracy we're trying to save is not even a democracy any longer as Zelensky is this madman.
And here's part of what he said at the UN yesterday.
today.
Russia can only be forced into peace.
And that is exactly what's needed.
Forcing Russia into peace as the sole aggressor in this war.
The sole violator of the UN Charter.
He's basically there saying, you need to give us more weapons.
You need to liberate us to use missiles deep into Russia.
Like, let us and you together risk a major escalation because we can and nobody in the West really believes this any longer.
And I'll just show you quickly how, for quite a while now, this has been emerging.
Here yesterday was the headline we showed you, Ukraine needs to be realistic about its goals, Czech president says.
It was President Peter Pavel, a former NATO general, who has been vocal in his support for Ukraine, said Kiev needed to accept that some territory could remain under Russian control, at least, quote, temporarily.
The Economist in the beginning part of this month, September 8th, had a headline, quote, Danger in Donbass as Ukraine's front lines falter, Russian fighters are trying to encircle the defenders.
In Politico, all the way back in November of last year, Ukraine's top general, war with Russia has reached a stalemate, quote, there will be most likely no deep and beautiful breakthrough, he said.
The New York Times, even at the beginning of the war, April 22nd, can Ukraine keep winning as a new phase of the war begins?
We look at Russia's advantages and Ukraine's.
And it said, quote, Ukraine has defeated Russia in the first phase of the war and a second phase has begun.
The bottom line, a quick victory by either side seems unlikely.
Then again, war is often very difficult to predict.
Now, as I mentioned, one of the very few people who has been warning of this over and over has been John Mearsheimer, who's been on our show many times.
He's been on several shows.
He was on a show called Uncensored.
I believe this was earlier today.
Oh, this is with Piers Morgan, actually.
And I believe they're discussing Ukraine.
So let's listen to what John Mearsheimer has every right to take victory laps and his Prussians had to say.
Because there's nothing that we can do to turn the tide on the battlefield in Ukraine.
There is!
There is though!
We can give them the missiles they want.
The missiles are not going to make any difference.
The idea that giving them a tacums or storm shadows is going to turn the tide on the battlefield is not a serious argument.
The Ukrainians are doomed.
What really matters here are the number of troops, the number of artillery pieces on the front lines, and the amount of air power each side has over the battlefield.
And there, the Russians have a decisive advantage, and that advantage is increasing by the day.
And there's nothing we can do to reverse that.
The Ukrainians are doomed.
And given that the Ukrainians are doomed, the best thing to do at this point in time is put an end to the war.
That's the morally correct position, at least from my point of view.
And Piers Morgan trying to argue war and military strategy with John Mearsheimer is like watching a four-year-old trying to debate any kind of issue with an adult.
I mean, it's just not even a worthwhile conversation to have.
Like, yeah, we can give them missiles.
What is that going to do about the crumbling front line in eastern Ukraine or about the massive difference in the number of troops each has?
And Mert Scharmer has been saying this from the start and he has proven to be true.
That's why he's banned basically from mainstream media.
He goes on Piers Morgan.
He used to be on a lot of other stations.
He's never on them now.
He basically speaks on independent media because that's the only place where he can get on because of his heresy on Ukraine.
But he's been right all along.
In contrast to people like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who as recently as March of this year was telling the BBC, quote, the Ukraine war, Ukraine can absolutely win against Russia, says Blinken, quote, asked if he was convinced Ukraine could win.
He said, over time, absolutely.
I can't tell you how long this will go on.
I can't tell you how long it will take.
But the idea that Russia can subjugate to its will 45 million people who are ardently fighting for their future and their freedom, that does not involve Russia having its thumb on Ukraine.
That tells you a lot.
And then here is Nancy Pelosi, who is also assuring Americans that we have to win and will win.
What happened to this war?
This counteroffensive is making inroads, but it's slower than I think a lot of people expected.
I mean, how have you been seeing this counteroffensive play out on the ground?
The counteroffensive, by admission of the Ukrainians, has not- By the way, that reminds me about the counteroffensive.
In 2023, the war was looking terrible.
For the Ukrainians.
And what we were told was, oh no, don't worry, there's this gigantic counter-offensive coming from the Ukrainians that's going to push the Russians way back.
And all those same people who were telling us in the middle of the Iraq war, don't worry, we have a surge coming, we're going to win.
People like David Petraeus and Max Boot and the Washington Post, all these people were saying, oh no, this counter-offensive is going to come and it's going to crush the Russians, push them all the way back.
And the counteroffensive was a bloody failure.
The Ukrainians lost so many people.
And it barely changed anything.
To the point where even people like Nancy Pelosi are forced to admit, oh yeah, the counteroffensive really wasn't as good as we were hoping.
The counteroffensive, by admission of the Ukrainians, has not gone as Quickly or strongly, as they had hoped, but that doesn't mean it won't.
We have to make sure that the counter-offensive works.
We must win this war.
It must be won.
And we cannot not win because we have withheld something.
So the NATO countries, including the United States, have to, one way or another, make sure that the Ukrainians have what they need to win the war.
I mean, this is the thing they've been saying for so long.
It has been completely detached from all of reality.
And they knew they couldn't win the war.
They wanted the war to continue.
They wanted to transfer billions of dollars to the war machine, to the big arms manufacturers that control Washington with their lobbyists and their revolving door, to make sure that the United States and NATO continue to project force, and most of all they felt they were going to weaken the Russians, when in fact the Russian economy and the Russian military are now strengthened, as is the Russian alliance with both Iran and China.
Brilliant, brilliant as always.
Here's Joe Biden.
Back in December of last year, talking about this war as well.
Look, I know we have our divisions at home.
Let's get past them.
This is critical.
Petty, partisan, angry politics can't get in the way of our responsibility as a leading nation in the world.
The entire world is watching.
The entire world is watching.
What will the United States do?
Think if we don't support Ukraine, what's the rest of the world going to do?
What's Japan going to do, which is supporting Ukraine now?
What's going to happen in terms of the G7?
What's going to happen in terms of our NATO allies?
What are they going to do?
If we walk away now, we'll only embolden other would-be aggressors.
But I'm calling on Congress to do something and do the right thing.
To stand with the people of Ukraine.
Stand against the tyranny of Putin.
Stand for freedom.
Literally stand for freedom.
Let's get this done.
All right, so it didn't get done.
And actually, the war in Ukraine, sponsored by the US and NATO, had been viewed in much of the world as yet another attempt by the United States to rule the war by force.
It has driven much of the world further into the arms of China and into the BRICS alliance, and has alienated the world even further, just as, even more so, the US support for the war in Israel.
So this is everything that happened.
This is what has been said.
and now you're seeing this pivot where they're never going to admit that they lost or that everything that they said had been wrong.
You're going to hear things like what we heard from Richard Haas, like, yeah, we just never clearly define victory, unfortunately, and that is exactly what we need to do.
And if it were only this war, it'd be one thing, but this is the pattern of every war, and that's why it's so critical.
And I remember talking about this a lot, too, that war propaganda is the most emotionally manipulative thing that can be dispensed because you hear about the evil Russians invading the Ukrainians, about civilians in Ukraine being killed, which, you know, is basically about civilians in Ukraine being killed, which, you know, is basically true in terms of the Russians going over the border and killing Ukrainian Certainly nowhere near the number of civilians being killed in Gaza, but nonetheless.
And then you are worked up into this kind of anger, like, we can't stand for this.
We have to go do something.
We're the United States.
We have to go fight for freedom.
And especially in those moments when you get worked up, when you're emotionally manipulated into supporting the government and wanting to feel part of this kind of tribalistic, nationalistic unity and fervor, that's when skepticism is the most urgent.
You have to fight in order to do that because every time we don't, this is the history of what ends up happening.
It really never ceases to amaze me how unwilling media outlets and They're employees of major corporations who work in New York and Washington and whose lives are very incestuous.
They just all constantly speak to each other and for each other.
All these media and political people in D.C.
and New York who are all part of the same ecosystem, all part of the same homogenized view.
They just talk to each other and for one another and to one another.
We've seen it over and over.
about January 6th forever.
They talked about Russiagate forever.
And meanwhile, none of the country cares because the rest of the country lives completely different lives than the people and media who purport to speak on their behalf.
We've seen it over and over.
And if 2016 didn't show them that, when they were so sure that Hillary Clinton was by far in a different universe of superiority than Donald Trump, only for so many people in the country to go and vote for Donald Trump and make him the president, despite all the Russiagate stuff and all the other stuff that was said during the campaign.
In fact, I remember in 2015, Trump started really leading in the polls against people like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and people were kind of shocked.
and But there was this assumption, oh, he's just a new thing.
We've seen this before in the Republican Party.
People like Michelle Bachman, or Alan Keyes, or Ben Carson, or a bunch of different people have shot to the top of the polls for a little while.
Republicans are still kind of interested in these new things, and then they fall back.
And then Mitt Romney or John McCain win.
And the Washington press corps were sure that was going to happen with Donald Trump.
And I remember in 2015, That was when Trump made that comment about John McCain because John McCain had been critical of Trump.
When Donald Trump said, look, I don't really respect John McCain that much because he was a member of the military who got caught.
His plane crash got caught.
I respect members of the military who don't get caught.
Captured.
And I remember The dean of the Washington Press Corps, this like old, you know, wise man who's been around Washington forever, been analyzing politics for the Washington Post forever, his name is Dan Baltz.
He's like this old, thin, white guy with like a gray beard, exactly what you would expect if you don't know what he looks like.
He went and wrote an article in which he said, this is the end of Trump.
It was one thing when he was kind of entertaining, but Americans are going to be so outraged that he would attack a national hero like John McCain in this way that he's going to now collapse.
And they quoted all these Republican operatives saying, this is it, this is over.
Because the press corps was in love with John McCain and they were so deeply offended but no one in the country cared.
Why would anyone in the country struggling to earn a living or to send their kids to school or to get healthcare care about these internecine conflicts between People who have been around in Washington forever, that's what Washington reporters care about.
That's not what Americans care about at all.
It didn't affect Trump in the slightest.
It continued to just skyrocket and then obviously won the nomination and the election despite all kinds of things far more severe than that.
And how they didn't look at everything that they said and did and realize, wow, wait a minute.
What we think matters, what we think should matter is totally different than what pretty much the rest of the country thinks because maybe our lives are so different.
Now, you see this every time these journalists go and, you know, usually they're just speaking to, like, pundits and operatives.
They invite them on their show, put them in their green room.
But every time they go and speak to, like, the ordinary folk to try and, like, oh, I'm curious.
You tell me what you think.
I want to learn from you.
Complete comedy ensues because they discover that none of the things that they spend every day waking up to talk about and focused on and being excited about has any importance whatsoever to the vast majority of the country.
Alex Wagner went to Michigan, she's the person who replaced Rachel Maddow, she's the 9 o'clock host on MSNBC, and she went to talk to union voters and here's part of what happened.
Avin, talk to me about your level of interest in the criminal charges and so forth.
Uh, February 6th?
January 6th.
Um, so I remember that day.
So just that alone, just imagine that.
You have spent years saying that January 6th is like the most important day in American history.
It's like on par with 9-11 and Pearl Harbor.
And she asked him about that.
He's like, you mean February 6th?
And she's like, January 6th.
Like he doesn't care.
Why would he care about January 6th?
It was almost five years ago now.
It was like a three-day, a three-hour protest that turned into a riot at the Capitol that was immediately put down.
Why would this person be thinking about January 6th just because it's on her mind all the time?
And she was also asking about these charges that had been filed against Trump and asking how much he cares about these, and this is what happened.
February 6th.
January 6th.
So I remember that day.
I know he was the standing president.
I'm not familiar with the charges that are being brought against him for that.
I'm not following that charge.
There's multiple court cases going on, I'm just not familiar with it.
I mean, that doesn't sound like it's going to be a factor in deciding who to vote for.
No.
Okay, so when I say January 6th, what do you think?
Oh, I just remember seeing it on the news, like all the riots and stuff.
Don't really know what it was about or what happened though.
How did it make you feel when you saw it?
I don't know.
I don't really feel any way about it.
I don't... I mean, people showed their emotion, I guess.
Probably in the wrong way, but it happened.
Who here is... I just want you to think about that for a second.
So, in her world, she works at MSNBC.
In her world, the two most important things are January 6th and the charges against Trump.
Like, this is the most... I remember Chris Hayes The 8 o'clock host, I'm not exaggerating, we've shown this clip before, the first time that Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump, Chris Hayes cried on air.
He cried, like actual tears, like crying.
His eyes were red.
And he said the reason is because he feels so relieved, so relieved that the thing that he's been seeing, this criminality, is finally being validated.
Imagine just how completely detached from any material struggle you have to be to cry because Donald Trump got indicted over the 2020 election.
I mean, just imagine how much everything else must be completely taken care of, just an abstract world you live in, in order for you to make that your number one priority.
And she spends every day of her life talking about January 6th and Trump's charges, and before that, about Russiagate.
And then you go and you're like, what do you think of January 6th?
What about those charges?
And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about.
Like, I kind of heard it out on the news, but I don't know.
Why are you asking me about irrelevant stuff like that?
And you could see she was just like shocked and kind of smirking at the same time.
Here's another clip from her little field trip.
They were also particularly motivated by concerns about the economy, including inflation and the rising cost of housing.
Do you think housing is an issue?
Yes, I actually just recently purchased a home.
So, yes, I do think that it is too high.
It's just the cost of a livable, move-in, ready home nowadays is just absurd, I think, in my opinion, to where before I feel like you could buy a house for a reasonable price and not have to have a ton of work put into it.
I just recently purchased a house as well, and this house has gone up $50,000 in the past five years.
So, I mean, just looking at the prices in the past five years, you know, why has it gone up so much?
What can we do to bring it back down to what it was?
We're fortunate enough, our wages have been able to keep up with inflation, but a lot of people, they haven't been so fortunate, and they have to choose between paying bills, buying food, putting food on the table, you know, so I think that's going to play a big factor in this.
So if you're an MSNBC host and you're making, I don't know, $700,000 a year or whatever she's making, $500,000 a year, something like that, obviously that's not the kind of thing you're thinking about.
Oh, the house went up $50,000.
Oh my God.
And in fact, the more polling data kept showing that people, everyone in the middle class and the working class basically was saying, yeah, we can't afford things anymore.
Prices keep going up.
These kind of people kept going on the air and in their columns and saying, no, these people are wrong.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
Actually, inflation is under control.
The economy is doing really well.
Just like denying their lived experience, to use a really horrible term.
But in this case, it actually applies.
It's like these people are living their daily lives and perceiving these things.
And then these people over here, these journalists, are living completely different lives.
And they have no humility about that at all.
They really believe that they're speaking for these people.
Every poll shows this, too.
Here from CBS in June of 2024, this is before Biden dropped out.
Trump and Biden are neck and neck, and nationally and in battleground states, quote, almost all of the factors on voters' minds this election, among all the factors on voters' minds this election, former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict pales in comparison to issues like the economy, inflation, and the border, all items on which Trump maintains advantages.
As such, the verdict has not dramatically reshaped the race.
I can't tell you how many times I heard a journalist and pundit saying, Once Donald Trump is found guilty of felonies, I mean, there's no way Americans are going to vote.
No one has any recollection of that.
It was like a one-day story.
It was a ridiculous case brought in by a Manhattan prosecutor, very liberal, with a very liberal Manhattan jury that convicted Trump basically on bookkeeping-era charges, and they converted it into a felony.
And no one cared except these journalists.
Because again, when you're completely comfortable and taken care of, these are the sorts of things that you can Think about, here was a chart, major factors in vote, the top answer compared to a Trump conviction, what do you care about most, the economy 81%, inflation 75%, the state of democracy 74%, it's very unclear what that means, I think it just means, if you ask people that, they don't mean like,
2020 election denial because it's 74 percent, then crime, the U.S.-Mexico border gun policy, and then all the way at the bottom, a measly 28 percent, all Democrats, I'm sure, who say they care about Trump's conviction.
And if you look at the attention that these issues get inside the media, it's basically almost completely reversed.
Here was a poll that asked about Trump's guilty verdict.
This is among Trump supporters, but here was the Pew Research poll from September where they asked, "The economy is the top issue for voters in the 2024 election.
And then you can see here, it just goes down by both parties.
What is the most important issue to you?
The economy, health care, Supreme Court appointments, foreign policy, violent crime, immigration, gun policy, abortion, racial and ethnic identity, and climate change.
And if you just compare the The issues that voters care about to what kind of coverage they get in the media, it's almost inverse.
The thing the media covers most are the things voters care about least.
One of the things that made Democrats and Liberals happier than almost anything I've seen make them happy in the last year was when Oprah Winfrey, the multi-billionaire who's lived a very lavish life for many decades,
She earned it, she is self-made, etc., but nonetheless, hosted Kamala Harris and there were all these, you know, major celebrities who videoed in to endorse Kamala Harris and the whole thing was bereft of any kind of substantive conversation because if you're Oprah Winfrey or George Clooney or whoever was there, why would you care about any of those things we just saw those people in those videos talking about?
It's so removed from your life.
You're living in a completely different world in a completely different universe.
So while Oprah Winfrey is well liked or Taylor Swift or whatever, these people have no connection to the people who take seriously who they're voting for based on what's best for their family.
And they just don't realize that.
And so here's the kind of discourse that happened because this is the sort of thing that you think about if you're Oprah Winfrey.
What is on your heart to say to the American people as we have 47 days until November 5th?
What's on your heart?
Particularly those people who are still undecided or maybe indifferent or on the fence still.
We love our country.
I love our country.
I know we all do.
That's why everybody's here right now.
We love our country.
We take pride in the privilege of being American.
And this is a moment where we can and must come together as Americans, understanding we have so much more in common than what separates us.
Let's come together with the character that we are so proud of about who we are, which is we are an optimistic people.
We are an optimistic people.
Americans, by character, are people who have dreams and ambitions and aspirations.
We believe in what is possible.
We believe in what can be.
And we believe in fighting for that.
That's how we came into being.
So, just compare Those specimens that MSNBC went to examine and pick at, try and like study under a microscope and understand, compare what they said they were concerned about, what their interests were, what their lives were like, to what you just heard.
The disconnect could not be greater.
And if you were to take an analysis of media outlets, major media outlets, corporate outlets, and look at the time they've devoted to various issues, And then compare it to a chart showing what Americans say are their most important issues, you would actually see a complete inversion.
Because the lives of liberal elites are so radically different than the lives of most Americans.
And it's not even necessarily anyone's fault in that sense.
But you would just, what I don't understand is how they never process that, how they never come to see that, how they never have any humility about it, how they never realize that the people who they constantly purport to speak on behalf of are people who almost have nothing in common with them and the way they live their life whatsoever.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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