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Sept. 27, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:26:57
X Bans Reporter After JD Vance "Dossier" Published; Major DNC Fundraiser On Why She Is Leaving The Dem Party

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Dossier Leaked (7:53) Interview with Evan Barker (1:02:26) Outro (1:25:44) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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7 p.m Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, one of the very worst escalations of the online censorship regime now sweeping the West took place just three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, when the pre-Elon Musk Twitter and Facebook announced that they were banning and or suppressing any discussion or any links to the New York Post reporting about the Biden family businesses and their interests in places like Ukraine and China.
Among all of the corrupted aspects of those censorship actions, the rationale which those big tech platforms used to justify their censorship was simply false.
They claimed that any links to such stories violated their policy that banned any linking to hacked documents.
But the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop on which that reporting was based was not hacked.
Remember, that came from a CIA lie that this was Russian disinformation.
That banning of that story by Twitter and by Facebook weeks before the 2020 election was as brute of a political censorship as you will ever get.
Many people are comparing that 2020 incident to the decision by X today to temporarily suspend a journalist on the grounds that he did something similar.
Now, earlier today, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, my former colleague at The Intercept, along with his colleague, the national security journalist Bill Arkin, obtained and then published on Klippenstein's substack A dossier about J.D.
Vance that was compiled by the Trump campaign.
Now, when you call it the dossier, it makes it sound very sinister, but it's really just a very typical, common vetting document that presidential campaigns always compile about all of the possible running mates that they might choose to understand the benefits and the downsides of each candidate.
Now, it has long been reported over the last several months, and in fact, we covered this fact, that major media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times and others had Received copies of this Vance dossier but decided not to publish it.
In part because they said the CIA claimed with no evidence that the documents were obtained by Iran's hacking of the Trump campaign, and they cited their policies against publishing hacked documents from a foreign government right before an election.
And also, these media outlets said, the dossier contains nothing particularly interesting, no real new revelation, merely just information largely already publicly available about J.D.
Vance's prior statements, prior work.
Mostly things that were already publicly known.
Now, once this so-called Vance dossier was published on Ken Klippenstein's site, the same one that these media outlets had refused to publish, there is, and you can see it, almost nothing in that report about Vance that wasn't already previously known and why they reported the media outlets were truthful in explaining why they didn't publish it.
Now, despite all of that, X quickly announced what it called a quote temporary suspension of Ken Klippenstein's account right after he posted a link to his substack with that Vance report published on it.
And they also barred the posting of any links by anybody else to that report on Klippenstein's site.
Now, at first glance, this action seemed in a lot of people's eyes to be similar in kind to Twitter's banning of the Biden reporting four years ago.
Namely, both were barring any discussion of documents hacked by a foreign power.
Now, as it turns out, there are several important distinctions between what happened then and what happened now.
In this case, X quickly made clear today that it had no objection to publication of the Vance Report itself.
That had Kuppenstein just merely uploaded the Vance Report in what they considered a responsible way, that would have been fine.
It wouldn't have violated any rules.
What they objected to, they said, was the failure to redact certain personal information in the dossier about J.D. Vance, including his home address in Ohio, which appears on the very first page of the report, along with five of the nine digits of a social security number.
And that said that violates our policy based on that bans links to doxxing, links to people's home address.
Now, there's a lot more going on here in this story beyond this specific question of whether this temporary suspension of Ken Klippenstein is justified, whether it can be compared to the Twitter and Facebook banning of the New York Post reporting in 2020.
This entire incident says a great deal about the role that media outlets, the posture that they have assumed and the way in which they have painted themselves into a corner In order to justify this new policy they announced in 2020 under great deal of liberal pressure that they would no longer publish but instead would withhold documents in the public interest if they come from hacking by a foreign power.
It also says a great deal about the role of big tech is and should be and should not be in the policing of content by journalists and others.
It says a lot about whether there is any real evidence that Iran did this, as is being widely claimed.
It has a lot about what, quote, doxing really means and does not mean, and much more questions like that, which is why we want to delve into it, all of which will likely be increasingly relevant as the 2024 election approaches.
Evan Barker has spent many years as a major fundraiser for the DNC and has been a Democratic Party operative going all the way back to the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign that she ran against Barack Obama when Barker worked for her campaign as an intern.
And then she progressively worked her way up the Democratic Party ladder through the Obama and Biden years, finally becoming one of her party's major fundraisers and operatives.
But earlier this month, After she attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Barker published a very thoughtful and compelling article in Newsweek entitled, quote, I raised millions for Democrats, but at the DNC, I realized they're the party of the rich.
She also went on to argue that she realized that this party has become In terms of foreign policy, the party of neocons and Bush Cheney foreign policy.
We will have her on to talk about her departure from the Democratic Party, what she meant by a lot of what she wrote in that Newsweek article, how she now sees the two parties, and the 2024 election as well.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
I was joking with some members of this program and the staff of this program just before we went on about how I hope not to spend way too much time delving into something that I have talked often about because I still consider it to be such an extreme and yet overlooked outrage, which is the way in which big tech companies, for the first time in an unprecedented way, directly interfered in our presidential election in 2020 by deciding to censor
The New York Post reporting about the Biden family's activities, business activities, in pursuit of profits both in China and Ukraine by claiming falsely that the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop on which that reporting was based were documents that were hacked by a foreign power and therefore violated the platform's in pursuit of profits both in China and Ukraine by claiming falsely that the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop on which that reporting Of course, we now know that that was all a lie.
The documents were not hacked, let alone by Russia.
They were made available when Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair store in Rhode Island that then turned it over and it made its way to the hands of Rudy Giuliani as well as the FBI.
And that's what enabled that reporting.
But what ended up happening was the New York Post had their account locked all the way up until the election, practically, so that they could no longer promote that reporting.
They were told they could get their account back only on the condition that they took down those tweets promoting the reporting that was banned and they refused to do so on principle.
And also, for days on Twitter, it was impossible to even post a link.
You would try and post a link and post it, and it would say, this link is too dangerous to post.
And Facebook, through a DNC operative, a lifelong DNC operative, announced that they were, quote, algorithmically suppressing any discussion of that reporting, and did so all the way through to the 2020 election.
So, for obvious reasons, when earlier today, X decided to suspend the account of the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who, as I said, was my colleague for several years at The Intercept, and then left The Intercept, where he now publishes on Substack.
He's an outstanding reporter and investigative journalist, and he got a hold of This document that has been called the Vance dossier in order to make it seem like it contains all sorts of deep secrets, kind of like the Steele dossier did, when in reality it's basically just a vetting document that was compiled by the Trump campaign about all of the people they were considering as potential vice presidential running mates for Donald Trump, including J.D.
Vance, and all it does is it sort of just lists all the pros and cons, the pluses and minuses, the areas where he'd probably be attacked if he's the one who they decided to choose as his vice president.
I mean, almost entirely based on statements he's made in public going back many years, statements he's made about Trump, about Democrats, about policy, along with a couple of sections of information, not very probing or incriminating information about his businesses, his finances, mostly based, not very probing or incriminating information about his businesses, his finances, mostly based, again, on public documents or on documents easily obtained through various databases that you And it's long been known that this report has been in the hands of media outlets.
And these media outlets claimed, and so did the U.S.
government, that the way these media outlets got this report about J.D.
Vance was because Iran hacked into the Trump campaign and was able to extract this document and gave it to media outlets, just like they claimed in 2020, or rather in 2016, that the Russians hacked into the DNC and possessed emails, and that was how they got, how WikiLeaks got those materials that then journalists, as they should have, began reporting on.
And these media outlets, people obviously knew that they had them, a lot of journalists don't keep secrets and talk, and so they were asked, why aren't you publishing This dossier on JD Vance that you've gotten, why are you withholding it?
And they would say, well, in part, it's because we changed our rules in 2020 in response to liberal demands and liberal grievances that we should no longer publish information right before an election if it's obtained through a foreign hacker.
And obviously, the liberals wanted that news, that principle of journalism changed.
From what it had been for decades, which is we don't care where documents come from, we don't care what the source's motives are, as long as the documents are authentic and in the public interest, we publish.
This has been foundational to journalism for decades.
But because they wanted to protect the Democratic Party from any further possible hacks of documents by the Russians, they changed the rules by which journalism has operated for so long to say from now on, right before an election, we're not going to publish documents that we get by virtue of a foreign government hacking and trying to interfere in the outcome of our elections.
And so they kind of screwed themselves in the sense that they announced this rule that was obviously designed to protect Democrats, but then once they announced it, They obviously couldn't then go publish documents that the government says came from Iranian hackers.
Not even our media could be that blatant in violating their own announced policy four years earlier.
The real reason they didn't publish it though, the other reason that they gave, is the real reason they didn't publish it, which is basically that it doesn't contain anything incriminating about JD Vance at all.
I can essentially guarantee you, even though it's a counterfactual, That had these media outlets gotten documents about the Trump campaign or from the Trump campaign that came from Iranian hackers or Venezuelan hackers or Palestinian hackers or whoever doesn't like Donald Trump and it actually contained incriminating evidence about Donald Trump or JD Vance, you can guarantee, I can guarantee that they would have published those documents so fast it would have made your head spin.
But here, this Vance dossier is extremely benign.
Actually, parts of it are flattering to J.D.
Vance.
And so these journalists got to pretend, oh, we changed our policy in 2020.
We're going to stick by it, whether it's Trump or Biden that it helps, or Trump and Harris or the Democrats that it helps.
But in reality, they got to get up on their high horse because publishing this document wouldn't have hurt J.D.
Vance at all, as we now know, because this document made its way to Ken Klippenstein and his colleague, the national security journalist Bill Arkin, and they have published it earlier today on their substack.
And we can now read through it, and we're going to show you parts of it, including the parts that are flattering to JD Vance, the parts that are clearly just a compilation of publicly available documents.
No one so far, having read this dossier, claims that there's anything in here that harms JD Vance or reflects poorly on him that wasn't already known.
And yet, despite that, Soon as Ken Klippenstein published a link saying, hello Twitter, I got my hands on this Vance dossier and we have now published it.
X immediately jumped in and blocked any of those links, and then also suspended Ken Klippenstein, the journalist who promoted it and published it.
There you see from The Verge earlier today, just summarizing in their headline what happened from September 26th.
X blocks any links to hack JD Van's dossier and suspends the journalist who published it.
Now, when this happened, a lot of people, including myself, presumed at first glance that it seemed very similar to what happened in 2020.
When material that was published by the New York Post that reflected poorly on the Biden family and the Joe Biden campaign was blocked in the same way by Twitter, the pre-Elon Musk Twitter.
They banned any attempt to post those links.
They locked the account of the New York Post, the journalist that published it, and it seemed like Oh wow, Elon Musk and X is now censoring a journalist in the same way that pre-Elon Musk Twitter did back in 2020, although this time to help Donald Trump.
That was the widespread perception that a lot of people had, that this was an act of political censorship by X to protect J.D.
Vance.
Try to find Ken Klippenstein's original tweet, linking to his substack where you can find the JD Vance article.
Even if you search for the exact link where that report is found, it'll come up as no results at all on X for that link.
That link is banned.
Now, as people started objecting and saying, what's happening An-Mas, I thought you believe in free speech, yet here you are punishing a journalist, silencing a journalist, for having published secret material about J.D.
Vance, the candidate, vice presidential candidate, running with the presidential candidate, Donald Trump, whom you support and are trying to help win.
It turned out there was another side of this story, and it was expressed by the safety division of X itself.
And they very transparently explained why, in their view, they censored or suspended Ken Klippenstein's account.
They said the following, quote, Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Senator Vance's physical address and the majority of his social security number.
And in other postings, they made clear that had he merely posted the dossier, the Vance dossier, And simply redacted the home address of where the Vance family's family home in Ohio is located, along with redacting the majority of his social security number.
Had they just done that, there would have been no problem at all, says Axwith, promoting publication of that document, of linking to it.
It was not because it was based on hacked materials or it was Damaging to J.D.
Vance.
It was solely because, in the view of X, and we'll get to this argument in just a second, Ken Klippenstein was guilty of putting J.D.
Vance in danger and his family in danger by publishing both his home address and his social security number.
Now, Ken Klippenstein, if you look at his Substack site, and obviously X can't censor that, but you can go there and you can read the Vance dossier.
Here was the article that they published where just the headline is, read the JD Vance dossier.
Quote, we're publishing the supposed Iran hack document.
Here's why.
And then the text says, Behold the dossier.
It reportedly came from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign.
And since June, the news media has been sitting on it and other documents declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government's campaign against, quote, foreign malign influence.
Now, let me just stop there and say that it is true that the government has claimed And media outlets have repeated that these documents are part of a foreign influence, foreign malign influence campaign, and that it was basically the result of documents that were hacked by the Iranian government.
And I have the same reaction to this claim as I had from a similar claim in 2016 that this was done through the collaboration of Donald Trump and the Russian government, which is, show me the evidence of that.
I don't want to hear just the CIA claiming that, or media outlets saying they suspect that.
There's a big difference as well between, say, a hacker who is Iranian, whether inside Iran or outside of Iran.
And the Iranian government doing this, just like there's a difference between Russian hackers and Vladimir Putin personally ordering it.
I mean, if there were an American hacker that hacked into Vladimir Putin's personal files, nobody would say, oh, Joe Biden did that, unless there was proof that the American hacker had a connection to the US government.
So there's no real proof that this is the Iranians or the Iranian government that has hacked.
Obviously, it's possible.
I'm just saying, before we go around asserting it, we should need evidence.
But anyway, as Klippenstein said, That was part of the reason why media outlets said they're not publishing it, because they changed their policy in 2020 to say we're not publishing any documents that come from a foreign government, even if the documents are true and authentic, even if they shed light on a major political candidate like J.D.
Vance.
The real reason, though, is that this dossier has nothing in it of news, of real news.
But about the claim that you shouldn't publish it because it's part of a foreign malign influence campaign, Klippenstein, justifying his decision to publish it, said, quote, I disagree.
The dossier has been offered to me, and I've decided to publish it because it's of keen public interest in an election season.
It's a 271-page research paper that the Trump campaign prepared to vet now-vice presidential candidate J.D.
Vance.
As far as I can tell, it hasn't been altered.
But even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable.
I'll let it speak for itself.
Once you say that, once you say that, it hasn't been altered, but even if it was, which it should be were, but that's fine.
I'm just curmudgeoning about the subjunctive case.
But anyway, he's saying its contents are publicly verifiable, and that's exactly right.
There's really nothing of substance in this report that isn't already in the public domain, which is precisely why it's not that interesting of a document at all.
Not very newsworthy or anything else.
Precisely because, as he says, the claims are publicly verifiable.
He got a quote from the Trump campaign before he published it, which said, quote, this, quote, the terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump.
Stephen Chung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.
Kudmasi went on, if a document had been hacked, By some quote, anonymous-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it.
I'm just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government doing its work combating foreign influence, nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.
Now, about that I completely agree with Ken Klippenstein, which is why I was so vocally and vehemently critical of the decision by Twitter and Facebook at the pressure and behest of the U.S. security state to censor reporting that was done by the New York Post, as well as a decision by many other media outlets to refuse to report on the contents of that reporting based on their lie that came from the CIA, that this was sort of some foreign influence as well as a decision by many other media outlets to refuse to report on the contents of
Based on their lie that came from the CIA that this was sort of some foreign influence campaign of disinformation that came from the Russian government.
The Russian government had absolutely nothing to do with those documents.
They never had anything to do with them.
It was not disinformation.
It was authentic.
They were authentic documents.
And that was the thing I was saying back in 2020 is this is not the media's role to withhold Relevant documents in the public interest about a major political figure like Joe Biden, who's running for president, simply because they think that it's part of some foreign influence campaign.
So Ken Klippenstein has taken that rationale that was used by some of us in 2020 to object to the censorship of this reporting.
And as you probably know, because I've talked about it many times, I let the intercept, because that was their argument, was you can't report on the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop documents.
The CIA says it's not authentic, that it's Russian disinformation.
And I was so angry about it that I left the intercept over it.
And most liberals were either silent about that, indifferent about it, or fine with it, supportive of it, that Twitter and Facebook were censoring these materials.
But here's Ken Klippenstein saying, I reject this rationale that the media should be involved in some gatekeeping role where we don't publish things if we think they come from a foreign government.
I think he's exactly right about that.
The only two concerns that a journalist should have are, number one, are the documents authentic?
Number two, is it in the public interest?
The answer to both of those questions is yes, you publish it, regardless of where it came from, how it got obtained, whether they were stolen or hacked, whether the source had good or bad motives.
This is journalism 101, but that's the job of a journalist.
The only reason this is even an issue is because the media changed its rules in 2020.
But if you think this Vance dossier should be published, even if it came from the Iranian government, then how can you possibly object to the New York Post reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop or the reporting that the media did on the hacked DNC and Podesta emails, which are equally at least of public interest?
Here is the dossier itself, and there you see the title, Research Dossier J.D.
Vance, last updated February 23rd, 2024.
23rd, 2024.
And here is how the document begins.
Quote, in preparing this background report, we undertook an examination of all readily available and relevant electronic and online records, several hundred Nexus and news articles, dozens of active and archived web pages, and several dozen public records from Nexus and the resources of various federal, and several dozen public records from Nexus and the resources of various federal, state, and The results of our analysis are contained below.
So even they're saying all these documents, if you tried hard enough to get them, they're all either in the public domain or Or easily obtainable through services like Nexus that you pay for or by going to government offices and asking for these documents that the public has a right to see.
They didn't hire spies or use the NSA to spy on JD Vance's phone calls and found something menacing or improper.
It's all just based on publicly available information, most of which is about JD Vance's trajectory, political trajectory and things he used to say about Trump and Republican policy and things he now says.
The Compilers of this dossier about J.D.
Vance summarized it this way, quote, Revealing a range of positions that traverse traditional party lines.
While acknowledging the benefits of certain democratic policies for working class Americans, Vance has been notably critical of aspects of the Trump administration's agenda.
His skepticism extends to Trump's core domestic policies, expressing doubts about their effectiveness and seriousness in moving the country forward.
Vance diverged from Republican orthodoxy by criticizing the 2017 tax cut bill.
and supporting higher taxes on capital gains, U.S. businesses, and individuals without children.
Now, all of this was known.
J.D. Vance was extremely critical of Trump in 2016, was considered an ever-Trumper.
But also, based on his populist economic principles, he didn't want tax cuts for big corporations and rich people.
It goes on, quote, In a departure from conservative economic principles, Vance has questioned the emphasis on America's businesses, criticizing corporate interests, criticizing corporate interests, and economic incentives for company relocations.
He has signaled support for strengthening labor unions, opposing right to work laws and advocating for reforms like sectoral bargaining and labor representation on corporate boards.
This stands in contrast to traditional free market priorities, with Vance opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies and emphasizing the nuclear family over free market principles.
Vance's stance on healthcare revealed further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump administration's effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts.
On environmental issues, he acknowledges climate concerns and dismisses the return of coal jobs.
Vance is also known to have been critical of Trump's border wall proposal and his Muslim travel ban.
He attributes the border crisis to business interests seeking cheap labor, aligning with Trump's rhetoric but diverging on some points.
And then he said this, in 2017, Vance claimed that Trump was part of a political realignment.
Predicting that quote in 20 years, Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders would be on the same, in the same party.
Kind of the way that Senator Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney are now.
J.D.
Vance said, there's a realignment.
It's about populism and anti-establishment politics versus established politics.
And as a result, he envisions that 20 years from now, Trump and the kind of Sanders movement would be in the same party, while Paul Ryan and Hillary Clinton would be in their own separate party.
Now, I personally don't think that Reflects poorly on J.D.
Vance at all, quite the contrary.
Remember, Donald Trump ran in 2016 based on this populist framework, not just rejecting Bush-Cheney foreign policy, but also longtime Reaganomics about, oh, rising tide lifts all boats.
If we make the richest in our society richer, then it helps everybody.
Because these corporations have no allegiance to the United States anymore.
You make these mega corporations even richer, They run roughshod over people who are middle class or working class.
They exploit their monopoly power.
They destroy consumer rights.
They ship jobs overseas.
It's what's wrecking the country, is just giving this unfettered power to gigantic corporations.
That was Donald Trump's and Steve Bannon's view in 2016 of populist economics, and JD Vance is a true believer in that, hence all of these deviations.
Now, here is part of the dossier, just to give you a sense for how benign and even helpful it is to J.D.
Vance.
So one of the sections is entitled, J.D.
Vance has indicated he supports unions and their priorities over that of American businesses, meaning he thinks the working class and workers should have more rights and large corporations should not be able to exploit them.
Any further through their concentrated power.
Remember after COVID and the 2008 financial crisis, all these gigantic mega corporations got far more powerful than ever before.
And consumers and ordinary people and ordinary workers basically have no protection or power at all.
They're just run roughshod over.
And J.D.
Vance has always said, I'm not somebody who is a corporatist who believes that corporations are the highest religious value.
Regardless of what they do to ordinary people.
That's what economic populism is.
That's what the Democrats used to say until they became the party of corporatism.
And then here is another section we highlighted that it reads, JD Vance has been critical of free market economic priorities.
He doesn't just want a Unfettered free market.
Tucker Carlson has been highly critical of that with hedge funds and BlackRock owning everything, all at the expense of American workers.
And that's what this dossier largely reveals.
But as you can say, it's entirely based on just publicly available records about what JD Vance has long thought.
Now, this is the very first page of the report And right here, it has J.D.
Vance's security number, and we redacted that security number, but in the document that Ken Klippenstein uploaded, it had the first five digits visible of J.D.
Vance's social security number, and the last four digits were X'd out.
But they weren't X'd out by Ken Klippenstein, they were X'd out in the original...
It was X'd out in the original report, so it gave five of the first numbers of J.D.
Vance's nine-digit social security number, so a majority of numbers.
And that was part of what X cited as why this document shouldn't be linked to and why it was doxxing of J.D.
Vance.
But the much more, I think, substantive argument and commonly cited argument was, here you see his home address.
And the address that's listed here, and again, these green redactions are ours.
There were no redactions in the report that Ken Klippenstein uploaded.
This report contains, this section right here, has the actual home address of where J.D.
Vance and his family live, their principal residence in Ohio.
Obviously, J.D.
Vance, being a senator, spends a lot of time in Washington.
But his wife lives and works in Ohio, their children live in Ohio, they go to school in Ohio, and this report...
Disclose the exact address where that home was.
And then there's an additional property.
I believe this is the one that J.D.
Vance has where he lives when he's in Washington, in Arlington, Virginia.
We also blocked that out, but there wasn't blocked out in the reporting.
Now, the argument from X was, we don't care that the J.D.
Vance dossier was disclosed.
We only care that his security was endangered by virtue of publication of this very personal information that was not ever redacted and could make people know where he lives and be put in harm's way.
Now, if I were publishing a document like this and had I gotten this dossier on J.D. Vassar, Vance, my guess is I would have published it.
I mean it was a document compiled by the Trump campaign.
It is about J.D.
Vance.
It has factual information in it.
It was part of what went into the decision-making process of the Trump campaign.
So even though there's nothing particularly newsworthy in here, I think it's a document that the public should see, that media outlets shouldn't hide.
But I most definitely would have redacted any of this kind of personal information, if for no other reason than it has no journalistic value.
There's no journalistic value to knowing the street address of J.D. Vance.
There's obviously potential harm that could come, although I think far less than a lot of people have been making that out to be, for reasons I'll explain in a second.
But I think the act of publishing it was perfectly fine.
In fact, a good thing.
And according to X, they agreed.
Their only issue, unlike when they censored the reporting based on the Hunter Biden documents back in 2020, was that the very first page could put J.D.
lady vans at risk because it contained this information that for whatever reasons was not redacted before it went up.
I don't know what this is, why there's an ad for filet mignon, but apparently that was Now, I want to get to the question of what doxing really is because I've been accused of doxing people before in ways that were preposterous.
And the reality is, is that J.D.
Vance's address, both in Ohio and in Virginia, have been widely spread all over the internet before.
It's not like it was some big, huge secret.
If somebody actually wanted to find out where the Vances lived in Ohio or where J.D.
Vance lives in Arlington, Virginia, it's extremely easy to find online.
You don't even need to dig.
You just go to Google and enter J.D.
Vance's house and it will all come up.
I personally would not have published it simply because there's no value to it and the more number of people who see it, the more risk there might be.
But it wasn't like this was some closely held state secret and now everybody knows where J.D.
Vance lives.
J.D.
Vance's house is well known if you want to find it.
Trump lives in Mar-a-Lago.
I hope I'm not doxing him.
We know where the Obama house is on Martha's Vineyard.
And on top of that, J.D.
Vance now has Secret Service as significant and large as the sitting president of the United States himself.
So there's a lot of drama queen hysteria over what this doxing was to justify the banning of Ken Klippenstein from Axe.
But like I said, I do think there's an argument, a good argument, a very strong argument that that material should have been redacted.
Back in, on Friday actually, there was a report in Vanity Fair about why news outlets are refusing to publish but instead are sitting on these hacked Trump documents.
This was, sorry, this was two days ago.
I was thinking today's Monday.
I don't know why I thought that.
It was actually on Tuesday, Vanity Fair published this article entitled, Why News Outlets Are Sitting on Hacked Trump Documents.
Obviously, this is an open secret in Washington.
All these journalists inside these media outlets know that they have this and a lot of them are angry that it's not being published.
And so they're going around trying to get it published, telling everybody they could find.
And so these media outlets were forced to defend themselves.
And here's what, according to Vanity Fair, they were saying.
Quote, the Pilferd vice presidential vetting materials failed the, quote, newsworthy test, says New York Times editor Joseph Kahn.
Politico and the Washington Post also passed on publishing documents from the breach, which, as popular information revealed Tuesday, appears more extensive than originally known.
Quote, in mid-July, a source identifying himself only as Robert began contacting news organizations with what sounded like a tantalizing offer, internal documents from Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
In email exchanges, Robert was cagey about how he had gotten the goods.
Quote, "I suggest you don't be curious about where I got them from," Robert advised when a political reporter pressed for more information.
Any answer to this question will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.
There are no legal restrictions on what media outlets can publish in the public interest.
Even if it were hacked, even if it came from Iran, you have every right to publish these materials.
Robert's spy movie statements aside, the material he was peddling was the result of a hack If we could put that document back on the screen.
I'm not sure if we can, but there it is.
Robert's spy movie statements aside, the material he was peddling was the result of a hack.
One that Microsoft and federal authorities said began in June and emanated from Iran.
The penetration of the Trump campaign's file was reminiscent of Russian hackers' breach of the DNC computers in 2016, which led to WikiLeaks' slow-drop release of emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton's campaign and helped Trump in the final months before this election.
This time would be different, however.
None of the information stolen from the Trump campaign has been published to date.
Political decline Roberts offer, as did the Washington Post and the New York Times, which Robert also approached.
The decision by editors to sit on the hacked material invited accusations of a double standard.
With Jed Lugum, a longtime DNC operative, calling out news organizations earlier this month for apparently changing their standards without any detailed explanation.
Now that actually isn't true.
They did change their policy back in 2020 in response to liberal grievances, as I said.
That in the weeks or months before the election, we're not going to publish material, even if it's accurate and in the public interest, if it comes from a foreign source.
So liberals painted these media outlets into this corner that prevented them from publishing it.
But the real reason they didn't publish it, as I said, was because there was nothing really incriminating about Trump or Vance.
If there had been something in there like that, we would have been reading about this months ago.
Or maybe they would have waited until close to the election to reveal it.
Here's the Washington Post explanation, quote, why newspapers haven't published leaked Trump campaign documents.
And this is what they say, quote, the Trump campaign said the documents from a mysterious source came from an Iranian hack.
The FBI is now investigating.
Quote, in response to reporters' questions, the Trump campaign put out a statement Saturday revealing for the first time publicly that it believed it was the victim of a foreign hack.
Without offering evidence but pointing to Microsoft's report, the decision for newsrooms to not publish the Vance materials A compilation of publicly available records and statements, including Trump's past criticism, France's past criticism of Trump, appeared to be more straightforward because they also didn't reach a high level of public interest.
Despite the reluctance of news outlets to publish material, if the hackers want the documents to be available online, they will be.
And then this is what the Washington Post editor said, quote, even if we don't publish, we, the Washington Post and the New York Times, quote, they will eventually move down the food chain and find someone who will publish them.
And even if they fail at that, the internet being what it is, they could just publish it themselves.
So that was the real reason why these media outlets didn't publish it.
It wasn't because they were being principled.
It was because there was nothing in them that really makes any difference at all.
Now after X, Suspended Ken Klippenstein for having posted the full unredacted version of this Report and said the reason was was because of the revelation of the home address he went on to his sub stack and under the headline Twitter banned me and And he posted this communication he got from X. He essentially justified why he published the document in unredacted form.
He said, quote, self-styled free speech warrior Elon Musk X banned me after I published a copy of the Donald Trump campaign's J.D.
Vance research dossier.
X says that I've been suspended for, quote, violating our rules against posting private information, citing a tweet linking to my story about the J.D.
Vance dossier.
And then Klippenstein says this, first quote, "I never published any private information on X.
I linked to an article I wrote here linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn't want to alter for that reason." He then went on and said, quote, "The principle involved here is complex.
I do not believe it is the job of news media to alter documents as if it's a de facto government deciding what the public should and shouldn't know.
Yes, I know that in general, it's general practice to delete, quote, private information from leaks and classified documents.
But in this case, not only is Vanson elected official and vice presidential candidate, but the information is readily available for anyone to buy.
We should be honest about so-called private information contained in the dossier and quote private information in general that is readily available to anyone who can buy it.
The campaign purchases information from commercial information brokers.
These dealers make huge profits from selling this data and the media knows it because they buy the data for reporting purposes just like the campaign.
They don't like to mention that though.
Did I make a mistake in not redacting the quote private information of J.D.
Vance?
If I wanted a Twitter account, I would say apparently so.
But on principle, I stand by it.
Absolutely.
Now, even though I defend most of what Ken Klippenstein did, as I said, I don't think there's any such thing as a journalistic principle that says you never redact any information from a document.
Not even Julian Assange believes that.
Other than the 2016 dump of emails from the DNC, every time WikiLeaks has published material, they've redacted or withheld material that they thought would be harmful to the public.
I think most journalists, including people like myself, who are very much on the far end of the side of information being free, believe that you have some ethical duties to withhold certain information that could endanger people's safety or the safety of their families, Especially when there's no journalistic value to it.
If there were real journalistic value to publishing the address, like, oh, J.D.
Vance claims he lives in this state, but in actuality here's his real house, that would be a harder decision.
But here there's just no value, journalistically, in publishing the address.
So why do it?
Even given the small chance that someone who might not have gotten it previously will now have it and can act.
But again, I think there's been a lot of exaggeration.
Now, just to underscore why I think there's been a lot of hysteria over this idea that somehow Ken Klippenstein put J.D.
Vance's life at risk, or his family's life at risk, there is all kinds of places, as I said, online, where you can find J.D.
Vance's house, reporting by major magazines, media outlets, local Fox News affiliates about where J.D.
Vance lives.
They have pictures of his house.
They have all sorts of videos.
I think we have a video here.
All right, here's one of the videos that was played by a local Fox affiliate about where JD Vance lives.
Oh, this is actually, this is found on YouTube by a real estate channel that's very popular.
You can find it easily on YouTube.
And it talks about where JD Vance decided to live in Virginia.
Seems to love the neighborhoods he lives in anyways.
From the elegant farmhouse in Delray with its custom features to his home in Cincinnati, we can see JD likes a blend of charming history and modern amenities.
So, that was the wrong clip from the video.
The video actually goes and explains.
Here's J.D.
Vance's house in Ohio.
This is the town in which it's on.
This is the street in which it's on.
They show the house from the exterior.
And then there's another video showing J.D.
Vance's house in the neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lives.
And obviously, J.D.
Vance is surrounded by gigantic amounts of Secret Service, everyone in the neighborhood, everyone in the town, everyone in the media knows where he lives.
And if you just go to Google, you will find it instantly, pictures of his house, both of his houses.
So this idea that this is some kind of dangerous doxing, I think is something that has been overstated and I think people should be careful about that.
Now, we have talked before about this kind of change that the media adopted in when they publish documents and when they don't.
This was right around the time when there started to be this controversy.
Wait, media outlets have these documents, they say that they're hacked by Iran and yet they're not publishing them.
This was a issue that we covered on August 14th, just last month.
I just want to play a little bit of clip about what really happened here, about why these media outlets won't publish or kind of painted themselves into a corner about not publishing things like this quote-unquote Vance dossier, which they claim is from an Iranian hacker.
I don't think that should matter at all, but they have to pretend that it does and this is why.
2020, one of the things that I was actually kind of amazed by, and again, I have, as you know, an extremely low level of expectations for the corporate media.
It is extremely hard for them to do anything that surprises me.
The Hunter Biden lies before the 2020 election, to this day, enrage me, but they didn't surprise me.
I watched the media lie many times, shamelessly, deliberately.
And even though it was so flagrant and I knew they were doing it, of course I left the intercept, because they were doing it as well and they wouldn't let me publish stories about that archive based on the false claim it was Russian disinformation that came from the CIA.
That didn't really surprise me.
That wasn't really out of the ordinary.
But one of the things they did in the lead up to the 2020 election did actually amaze me.
Because it's such a radical violation of the most foundational principles of journalism.
What they said was, we're not going to repeat the mistakes of 2016.
And when they said the mistakes of 2016, what they meant was, that time they did journalism.
When WikiLeaks began publishing all of his emails from the John Podesta email inbox and the DNC email inbox and began analyzing what it showed about Hillary Clinton and what they were saying in private, it showed things like how the DNC cheated overtly to ensure Hillary won over Bernie.
It forced the resignation of the top five officials of the DNC, including the DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, right before their convention.
It was obviously In the public interest to know about what Hillary Clinton, a person who very well might have become president in just a few months, was doing.
That's basic journalism.
Of course if you get a big archive in your hands of emails and other documents that you can authenticate that are about Hillary Clinton or any presidential candidate, of course you report on them.
And that's what WikiLeaks did.
They published them and then media outlets, including The Intercept, including myself and lots of others, reported on them.
And I think a lot of them doing that did so only because they never expected Hillary to lose.
They assumed Hillary would win and that was why they felt comfortable doing it.
And then when Hillary lost and Trump won, all these liberals inside these media outlets were horrified at the idea that they may have played some role in helping Hillary lose by doing what?
by doing their job as journalists, by reporting.
The profession that they decided they wanted to enter, journalism requires them to report relevant information about any candidate, even if they want them to win.
And that's what they did, and then afterwards they regretted it.
I've talked before about that night when Trump won in 2016, and not only was there crying inside the Intercept Slack channel, which, as probably you know, is a platform that a lot of companies, media outlets, is a platform that a lot of companies, media outlets, but a lot of others as well, use because people these days are spread all over the place physically.
It's a place where you virtually meet.
People were crying.
Journalists inside The Intercept that night.
And also what they were saying was, we need to apologize.
And some of us were like, for what?
Why would we apologize?
What did we do wrong?
And they said, we reported way too much on these emails.
This was misogynistic.
Anyway.
So that was the climate going on in 2016.
Oh, we made a mistake by doing journalism.
We played a big role in helping Trump win.
And then in 2020, as the 2020 process said, we're not going to make that mistake again, that mistake of doing journalism.
And that was when they all announced, many of them did at least, that From now on, they're going to abandon the longstanding rule that we publish information as long as it's authentic and reveals something about a powerful figure.
And we're going to take into account whether it came from a foreign government with the intent to manipulate the election.
And if it does, there's a good presumption against publishing it.
And they, again, did that because they wanted to protect Democrats from some hack that came from Russia, or that they were going to say came from Russia, like the Hunter Biden reporting.
And now they've created a rule that basically is preventing them from publishing information about Trump on the grounds that it came from the Iranian government.
Though, like I said, they would jettison that rule in a second if this were actually significant.
Now, one of the reasons why I am a little bit sensitive about these kind of hysterical claims, oh, someone was doxed, is because I've seen how this works before.
And I just want to show you an example where I was accused of doxing widely.
over the most preposterous, on the most preposterous ground.
So as some of you might know, this woman, Molly Youngfast, is a frequent pundit on MSNBC and CNN.
And her name is Molly Young because her mother was Erica Young, or is Erica Young, who is a very famous novelist.
Wrote The Fear of Flying in the early 1970s and other books like that.
Was a very wealthy and famous woman.
And her husband, her Molly Young fast father was also very wealthy.
She grew up extremely wealthy in Manhattan.
And she went on MSNBC and started ranting and raving about Elon Musk and others, and in the course of doing shows she started ranting about rich white men.
She's like, rich white men are the problem, rich white men are this, rich white men are that, and I couldn't believe when I heard that because she's an extremely rich white woman who grew up in the lack of white luxury in Manhattan.
And so in response to that video, I posted the following on Twitter, quote, rich white woman, Molly Young Fast, who won the birth lottery by being born to rich, famous white parents who raised her in Manhattan, sent her to private schools, and thus herself bought an Upper East Side co-op for $5 million in 2007 at the age of 29, rants about, quote, rich white men.
And then I posted the video.
And as part of that, I had posted an article from a real estate newspaper that's online that anyone can find.
It's completely public.
And I posted a segment, an excerpt of that article.
Here you see it.
It's from, it was from, it was a 2007 article I posted on May 2nd and it was from the New York Observer, which is a well-known paper in New York City.
And the headline was "Sold!
Shlumpy Molly Young Fast Drops $5 Million for a Ritzy Eastside Co-op, Calls Her New Neighbors, Quote, Plankton.
So this is a publicly available document that reported on Molly Young Fast's purchase of a $5 million co-op back in 2007 at the age of 29 using her family wealth And the part of the article that I posted simply said, quote, the 29-year-old novelist Molly Young Fast completely, entirely, totally adores the Upper East Side.
Ms.
Young Fast, the only child of Erica Young, who wrote this sexed-up 1973 feminist gem Fear of Flying, paid $4.9 million last month, cited record show for a four-bedroom co-op overlooking Madison Avenue.
I posted that because of the absurdity of this woman, of all people, going on MSNBC and ranting and raving about the evils of rich white men.
And one of the people who replied to this tweet was Elon Musk.
Now, it turns out that this article, from which I took this excerpt, very long, that lowdown in the article contains the address of the co-op, the building of the co-op that she purchased.
I didn't even publish that part of the article, and even if I had, it's a publicly available article.
And all these Liberals, particularly liberal feminists, these kind of types, Molly Young Fast, started claiming that I had misogynistically doxxed her and that Elon Musk helped promote this doxxing by promoting my tweet by responding to it with a meme.
And I got accused of doxxing because I posted an article from 16 years earlier about Molly Young Fast's purchase of a co-op in Manhattan that I got from an article that was written about it that's still online.
And it was such a big kind of scandal that it made all sorts of media outlets.
Here you see from Newsweek in May of 2022.
It was that same day.
Elon Musk is under fire for retaliatory, quote, doxing of a journalist.
Quote, Musk was accused of supporting the practice of doxing Monday after weighing in on a Glenn Greenwald Twitter thread, criticizing The Atlantic writer Molly Young-Fast for calling the billionaire's complaints about woke censorship, an example of, quote, old rich white men being upset with, quote, young people during an MSNBC interview.
After Greenwald shared an article about Young-Fast purchasing a $5 million condo in New York City's wealthy Upper East Side, Musk shared a SpongeBob SquarePants, quote, Mrs. Krabsmean.
While the neighborhood has over 200,000 residents and the article shared by Greenwald did not include an explicit address as of Monday evening, although some Twitter users suggested the address was removed after Greenwald shared the article, that's a total lie, the soon-to-be Twitter owner was slammed for the alleged the soon-to-be Twitter owner was slammed for the alleged doxing of Molly Young-Fast.
And again, the article itself had the address in it, but not her apartment, it was just the address of where this building was from 15 years earlier, And so the idea that this was doxing was preposterous given that I had just simply cited a publicly available article that was online published in a major newspaper.
And as I said, you can with almost as much ease find where JD Vance is.
I don't know if we have the So let me just show you two videos that pretty much, and these are on major, one is from a major Fox affiliate in Northern Virginia, the other is from a very large real estate channel on YouTube that talk about J.D.
Vance's various real estate holdings.
Here first is the Fox News affiliate reporting on J.D.
Vance's residence in this one particular part of Arlington, Virginia.
Let's play that.
Those opinions and stuff, sure.
That's what America's about.
It's just having opinions and being able to have your differences and not shoot people or get in fights.
Vance is reported to have purchased this home through an LLC for more than 1.5 million dollars after he was elected to the U.S.
Senate.
Today, there's an Alexandria police officer stationed across the street from the Vance home.
I'm not excited, but I'm not upset either.
So they went to the exact neighborhood where it was.
They said the exact neighborhood it is.
They showed the front of JD Vance's house in Arlington, Virginia.
They showed the houses that are across the street from it, and it would be very easy to obviously find that house if you really want to look for it.
Here is a very large and established YouTube channel about real estate holdings that was about J.D.
Vance's home in Ohio.
And again, I'm just showing you this to show you how widespread and widely available and easily obtainable this is.
Let's look at this.
In 2018, Vance and his wife Usha, a lawyer from San Diego who resigned from her position at Munger Tolls in Olson following her husband's VP nomination, purchased a pre-Civil War home in Cincinnati for nearly $1.4 million.
$1.4 million.
Built in 1858, the 6,405 square foot home features five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms.
Situated on about 2.3 acres in East Walnut, Now, it says the street on which this house is located.
It shows pictures of it.
And by no means are these the only ones.
You can find these all over the place.
Okay, and it goes on and on about all the features in this house.
Now, it says the street on which this house is located.
It shows pictures of it.
And by no means are these the only ones you can find these all over the place because in general, real estate transactions are public.
When people buy and sell big homes, it's often subject to newspaper articles.
So I want to be very clear.
I would not personally have published anyone's home address.
I think it's journalistically irresponsible or at least careless.
And I made that view very clear.
I think that should have been redacted.
I would have redacted it before publishing it, but it's also not what is being made out to be some sort of attempt to put J.D.
Vance and his family in danger, because anyone who wants to know where he lives, everyone knows where Donald Trump lives, could very easily find it.
So I think in some way this is a little bit much to do about nothing, this specific incident, in the sense that What really just happened here was that X was basically saying, we don't want you to use our platform to link to a document that contains someone's home address.
And basically emphasized that he had been temporarily suspended, although I think one of the notes Ken Klippenstein got suggested he was, at least for now, permanently suspended.
But it seems clear that if he were to upload the document and redact that information, X would allow him back on.
The reason why I wanted to deconstruct that, in part, is because there's so much misinformation about it.
A bunch of liberals who love Twitter and Facebook censoring of the New York Post article, all up in arms about this political censorship as though J.D.
Vance punished and silenced a journalist for publishing damaging information about a Republican vice presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, a bunch of conservatives accusing Ken Klippenstein of having deliberately put J.D.
Vance's life in danger.
All of this is way histrionic.
But I do think there's a lot of extremely important issues buried in this and are surrounding it about what role the media has now assigned itself when it comes to documents about the ability of big tech to continue to police our discourse and what their responsibilities might be.
And just in general, how information can either be allowed to flow or be impeded on the internet.
I do think Ken Klippenstein should be allowed back on X, especially if he re-uploads that document.
I don't believe he was trying to put JD Vance's life in danger.
My guess is it was just a careless oversight.
Even if it were something more than that, as we've just shown you, it doesn't actually provide information that isn't otherwise readily available.
But I do think it raises a lot of questions about why this document wasn't previously published, what led up to that.
And a lot of that, as usual, reflects poorly on our media.
Speaking of the free flow of information on the internet, Rumble is one of the very few companies genuinely devoted to fighting for that, even if it means losing access to very large even if it means losing access to very large countries, and even if it means harm to their self-interest.
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Evan Barker has been for quite some time now working her way up the ladder of the Democratic Party.
She began back in 2008 as an intern in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the one that she ended up losing to Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.
She worked as well for the Democratic Party during the Obama years, through the Trump years, and then also into this year.
But last month, she attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where she started having some epiphanies, things that I believe, and we're going to ask her in just a second, were things that were kind of bubbling up, but that really came to the surface when she saw what the DNC was and how the party was presenting itself. but that really came to the surface when she saw
And that led her to publish this very thought-provoking and compelling article in Newsweek that for this headline, quote, I raised millions of dollars for Democrats, but at the DNC, I realize they're the party of the rich.
And it goes on to offer multiple other critiques of the Democratic Party, including their donor base, as well as their foreign policy.
And when I read the article, I immediately thought to myself, I want to have the author on my show because I thought so many of her critiques are worth hearing.
Evan, thank you so much for taking the time to come on our show and talk to us.
It's great to see you.
Hi, Glenn.
It's so nice to meet you.
I can't believe I'm here.
Yes, you are here, and we're very happy to have you.
So let me just begin by asking you a couple of questions about your sort of personal trajectory, which I think is a crucial part for understanding the context of what you wrote and kind of what you're thinking is.
I think a lot of people empathize with your trajectory when it comes to the Democratic Party, but Talk about, I sort of gave the skeletal version, but talk about your entrance into the Democratic Party, kind of what drove it, and how over the years you've come to take on more and more important roles.
Right, so I'm originally from the Midwest.
I'm from the Kansas City area, and I come from a family of union workers that have long supported Democratic candidates and have been Democrats.
And I was also born with a rare genetic lung disease similar to cystic fibrosis.
I wasn't actually diagnosed with the disease until I was 15 years old.
So I was in high school actually at the time, which is why I think I was sort of ignited and working for Democrats because I realized and I had experiences as a child of being denied health insurance because of my pre-existing condition.
So even before they actually knew what it was, they were still denying me healthcare.
I had to go on high-risk pools.
It put a lot of stress on my family.
My parents divorced when I was 10 months old, and my mom's family has always been very blue-collar.
My dad was a very small business owner.
It was just him.
Working for himself and, you know, no employees, just him.
And so I saw the struggle that it placed on my family and this sort of animated me in high school to get involved in politics.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talked about universal health care and also outlawing the pre-existing conditions clause where insurance companies were allowed to deny you based on that condition.
And so that's what originally got me involved in politics.
I will say I started noticing, even at a very young age, the hypocrisy in democratic politics.
And as I reflect on it now as an adult, I can see my younger self sort of pushing some of these ideas down inside.
I remember when I was interning on Barack Obama's campaign in high school, I remember that a lot of the other interns that were there working did not have backgrounds similar to mine.
They didn't grow up in the socioeconomic conditions that I did.
They didn't face being denied healthcare as a child.
Actually, a lot of them were the children of donors who were throwing fundraisers for Obama with Ted Kennedy and, you know, others.
So I felt like they got preferential treatment on that campaign.
And, you know, that's something that I sort of pushed down inside.
And then I continued to see this.
I mean, it wasn't just isolated to that experience.
It continued to play out, you know, throughout my career.
And, you know, for the last four years, I have become very disenchanted with the Democratic Party Just through seeing them promote endless proxy wars.
I was somebody when I was a child that spoke out even, you know, in middle school against the Iraq war.
And so it's been very confusing for me to see them champion sending $175 billion to Ukraine.
And when having conversations about this with other people that I work with in democratic politics, they don't seem bothered by it at all.
Or if they are, they're just being quiet for the sake of You know, not wanting to upset anyone and lose their job or whatever.
So I don't know if I had gone to the DNC, if I actually would have written this op-ed or not.
I might have just carried on with my quiet little existence and just slowly faded away from working in politics, as I kind of have been, you know, over the last couple of years.
I went and I felt absolutely disgusted by what I experienced.
I felt like I was in a building with the most elite and out of touch people in the world.
People that probably have never been to Missouri or have even met people.
My family couldn't even begin to understand what they've gone through the last couple of years with inflation and how the economy has been.
So I just felt very, very angry.
And when I went home, I initially posted a video to TikTok to 60 people.
And the next day, that video had millions and millions of views.
And that's what spurred me to write the op-ed.
I wanted to take the opportunity to, like, really crystallize my thoughts and put them down on paper.
And I'm glad you did.
So I just have to say, like, I find this background of kind of how you were inculcated with this mythology of the Democratic Party so wild in contrast to the reality of it so interesting because I think so many of us are the byproduct of this.
I remember when I was young, my first political memories were of my grandparents who were came of age in the Great Depression and then viewed FDR as the savior of the country because of all these social programs and always identified the Democratic Party as the working class party, the party of the workers and the poor and the Republican Party as the party of the big corporations and the rich, which was not entirely untrue the party of the workers and the poor and the Republican Party as the party of the big corporations and
And you just see now by polling, there's a giant migration of working class people from the Democratic Party to the Trump movement.
And in turn, a lot of affluent suburbanites and very wealthy people, people like Dick Cheney, in fact, and the head of Goldman Sachs, who are supporting the Kamala Harris campaign.
Now, in my time working as a journalist, I'm a little tiny bit older than you.
I think I was in high school during the Obama presidency, not in middle school as you were.
I've seen a lot.
I was just kidding.
I'm a little bit older than you, though.
I know I don't look it, and you can feel free to say that at any time, but in the 20 years where I've been doing journalism, there have been a lot of articles written that have a very surface similarity to the one you wrote.
Like, oh, I've been a Democrat for so long.
But now I'm leaving the Democratic Party and usually these are coming from people... Are you able to hear me okay?
No, it's okay.
So oftentimes these are people who say, oh, I always believed in the Democratic Party, but now the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left on this issue and that issue that I don't recognize it anymore and they become Republicans.
There's so many people like that over the past 20 years, pundits and politicians.
It's a very lucrative thing to do if you're in punditry to say that.
You are coming at this from a much different perspective, at least as I understand your Newsweek article, which is not at all Oh, the Democratic Party has moved far to the left.
You really seem to be looking at it through this prism that I think is far more relevant these days than left versus right, which is anti-establishment versus pro-establishment, because you also talk about the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and what it's kind of become.
So in terms of these specific policy issues, can you talk a little bit more about those?
And what was it specifically about the Democratic National Convention?
I mean, I think you mentioned Oprah Winfrey's speech.
Just a couple of the kind of turning points for you that really just made that unsustainable.
Yeah.
And I just want to say, like, for the people that have said that the Democratic Party has become too progressive or too left, I would counter that with, if you look at a state like Missouri, The people there generally love Donald Trump, right?
Missouri has been a state that's gone red over the last decade or so.
But they actually vote for very progressive economic things.
So they, for example, they voted to fight back right to work.
They voted to raise the minimum wage to $15.
They voted to make marijuana recreationally illegal.
So I think what the Democrats... And also if I could just interject there quickly just to add to that point.
I mean, the Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who's widely viewed as this harshly conservative, far-right politician, was the person who stood by Bernie Sanders to filibuster the COVID Relief Act because it had no direct payments to the American people, and he actually
Succeeded in getting direct payments to the American people once and Trump even vetoed the bill and said no It has to be even higher and then also as we just heard from the Teamster Union President Josh Hawley and JD Vance have been among the most pro-union people They're very supportive of Lena Khan who works in the FTC kind of combating so you see this is what I mean by this left-right Framework is not so telling anymore Right, exactly.
And there's, you know, the horseshoe theory of like, but the Democratic Party doesn't seem to understand that like working class people are very receptive to some of these like economic, progressive populist messages, but what they're not receptive to is being lectured to or told that they're racist.
And that's what I think I have just witnessed a lot over the last couple of years, especially since 2020.
Going back to the convention, yeah, I think just seeing people like Oprah Winfrey there giving speeches, hearing speeches about hope and joy, and nothing really substantial policy-wise.
At the time that I went to the convention, I think Kamala Harris still hadn't even put up an economic or any policy positions, actually, on her website.
And I felt like it was just really creepy being there and listening to other people talk and just how everyone just seemed to be going along with it.
It's like everyone was high.
Like everybody had drank some sort of elixir that just put them under the spell of being like, this is fine, this is cool, this is what we're doing.
You know, and I did sort of try to push back on people a little bit, I would say, like, you know, does this is this feel kind of weird to you that, you know, the Democrats have been talking about the fact that democracy is on the ballot for the past couple of years.
And, you know, what we're doing right now, does it feel very democratic?
And people would say things to me like, well, Evan, you know, we voted for Kamala Harris when we voted for Joe Biden.
Well, at the If that were the case, then Dick Cheney would have become the nominee.
You know, that's not really how it's supposed to work.
And so, yeah, it was just the display of groupthink, the lack of dissent.
You know, I must say, having been somebody that for a very long time has been very openly critical of the Republican Party, that was so much easier to do, even when I was Critical of the Republican Party to Republicans.
They were generally nicer to me about it.
You know, I'm from Missouri.
I know a lot of Republicans back home, right?
When you're critical of the Democratic Party, if you say anything that goes against the line, you were automatically labeled, you know, whatever phobic or, you know, like evil or hateful or, you know, there's just no room for critical thinking.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think We did this segment last night that I thought was so eye-opening and it was also so relevant to what you said where an MSNBC host, Alex Wagner, went to Michigan and she kind of sat down with these union workers in Michigan And, you know, whenever it has always this feel that like these, you know, people are going from New York and Washington to this field trip to these exotic places to look at these like unknown species.
And, you know, she asked them about January 6th and they were like, they barely remembered what January 6th was.
They didn't care about it at all because why would they?
It was four years ago.
It was a three hour riot in the Capitol.
It's not what they're thinking about every day.
And then she also asked about Donald Trump's lawsuits.
And they were just like, these are not the things that I'm worried about because but it's the kind of thing, you know, and if you look at the event that Oprah Winfrey hosted for Kamala Harris, obviously it was devoid of any concerns about material needs of people of like health care and education and transportation.
Because Oprah Winfrey and all those other like George Clooney and billionaires who are and Kamala Harris have lived these lives completely.
Yeah, and one of the things you wrote in the article was Democrats love to decry money in politics when it comes to the Koch brothers or Elon Musk.
But the billionaires who support Democrats are given a total pass and have a huge influence over policy.
Now, one of the things that amazes me is, if you look at, say, Lena Kahn, who's been You know, going after drug companies over the fact that, you know, medications in the United States cost 15 times more than they cost in Western Europe or even in Canada.
Or breaking up, you know, big gigantic corporations because of terrible public service where you can't, you know, you wait three hours on the phone.
These are incredibly popular policies, but Kamala Harris can't talk about them because her donors and the donors of the Democratic Party hate Lena Kahn and want her gone.
Having been kind of in the party working your way up, what is that interaction between donors and the policies in the party?
It's wild.
I mean, it was like cognitive dissonance for me.
So there's this process, I don't know if you're familiar, but what candidates do actually to get elected is they spend 8, 9, 10 hours a day making calls to rich people.
It's called call time.
And so part of my job was to prepare the notes for that grueling call session, research and find donors for them to call and basically pitch themselves to, strike up a conversation, try to connect with them, and hear them out and hear what they found to be important.
And obviously, this creates a huge problem because the politician is just spending all of their time talking to rich people in California and New York all day long.
Sure, they do talk to voters a little bit, but the majority of their time is just spent talking to very rich people on the phone.
So I would actually hear, especially progressive candidates, say things like, oh, the Koch brothers this or Elon Musk this, you know, they're trying to end democracy.
They're trying, you know, they'd have all these different talking points, but then they turn around and I'd hand them the call sheet and the next person would be like Alexander Soros, you know, or Reid Hoffman would be somebody that would come up.
And with those people, it's like they could never publicly criticize them in their speeches, you know, because they were rich, but they were the ones that were giving them money.
And so that was part, like just seeing this process play out over and over and over again, is part of the reason that I'm sitting here talking to you is because when I first got into politics, I really, really thought that if we just got the right people elected, that things could change.
And now I figured out through watching the system, and I know it's the same on the Republican side too.
It is.
It has to be, okay?
That the system is truly, it's not just broken, like I said in my article.
It's designed to be this way.
It's designed to keep true representation in this country from ever happening.
And on top of spending all of this time just calling rich people, a lot of times the politicians themselves will, like 99% of the time I think, have to either know other rich people or they have to be rich themselves.
Okay?
So that automatically disincludes any real representation for working class people.
The first thing that they do when you say that you're going to run for office, you know, these, these democratic groups, I'm not going to name specific names, but the first thing they do is they'll get their, their people on the phone and they'll say to the candidate, they don't ask them about their policy.
They'll first ask them what their networks are like, how they plan to fund their campaign.
That's literally the only thing that they care about.
And so seeing this process play out over and over and over and over and over just made me cynical.
And I think for the first time in a really long time, the last few weeks, being able to speak out on these things has finally made me a little hopeful again.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Because at least I can use this to talk to people.
I mean, one of the things I thought was interesting about the Trump 2016 campaign was that he was one of the very few people ever to just basically explain all that.
You know, I remember him saying in one of these debates, oh yeah, I just send money to politicians and then I immediately get them on the phone and get them to do whatever I want because I'm giving them money.
And that's exactly how it works.
And it's just never spoken of that way.
All right, let me ask you one last thing in the little time that we have left.
And I think it's funny because I read your Newsweek article.
I'm sure like 10 million more people actually saw your video on TikTok than read your Newsweek article.
So people should check out each of those.
But, you know, sort of as you were describing your the incipient stage of your political consciousness, like becoming kind of aware of politics, paying attention to it in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
So that was in the Bush-Cheney years.
That was right around the same time that I was getting involved in journalism, like really devoting myself less to law and more and more to politics.
And I remember so well, I mean, Dick Cheney and the neocons were talked about in ways that Democrats now talk about Trump.
that they stole the 2000 election, that they were bloodthirsty and warmongers who wanted to go to war for corporate profit and because they had a sociopathic indifference to the lives of foreigners, all of which I agreed with and still agree with.
And yet now you see this, you know, widespread endorsement of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party from those very same people, including Dick Cheney, And one of the things you said in your article, though, it focuses most on domestic policy and this issue of financing, was, quote, perhaps the most shocking of all is how the Democrats have embraced Bush-era foreign policy to become the party of war instead of rebuilding the working-class communities that have been hardest hit.
By their neoliberal trade policies, they've spent $175 billion funding the war in Ukraine.
I think so little attention is paid to how much communities like the one that you come from are struggling at the time that we send tens of hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel to fuel their wars.
Can you just talk about this relationship that you've come to see between how much money we spend on foreign wars and putting, you know, filling the coffers of Boeing and General Dynamics on the one hand, and how people are living, not on Oprah Winfrey's estate, but in the middle of the country on the other.
There's a lot of people in Missouri that don't even have access to broadband internet.
During the pandemic, when they shut down the schools and a lot of the kids weren't able to go to school, there's articles that you can read about, but a lot of these kids actually had to go sit in McDonald's parking lots just to get Wi-Fi so that they could attend school.
You know, the communities there, a lot of them are just really economically depressed.
They're really struggling.
They need good jobs.
They need one party or both parties to start paying attention to them again.
You know, I don't know if they realize that the Democrats realize that the people there do make the connection between their lives and the way that they're struggling and where their tax dollars are going.
I hear this all the time from people back home.
So it's extremely frustrating to see us just continually perpetuate these foreign proxy wars that are endless, you know, because that's what they are, like we are at war, and send money to defense contractors, and then not build up the communities back home that have had their jobs shipped overseas, By Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan and has been continued to be perpetuated in the last couple of decades.
And it's just exhausting and it makes me it honestly makes me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, no, I'm really appreciative of what you did.
I can see now why your TikTok on this viralized.
It's because you speak very stripped away from any kind of like ideological dogma or partisan fervor.
It's just like a very plain spoken and clear, but also very informed kind of from the inside as well.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
It was great to meet you.
Yeah, you too.
how both parties function.
And I think it just resonates when you just describe the political system in very clear ways.
So instead of fading away, I hope you're going to continue to use these platforms to speak out because I think more voices like yours are needed.
And I really appreciate your time, taking the time to come on in and talk to us tonight.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
It was great to meet you.
Yeah, you too.
Have a great evening.
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