FEMA's Hurricane Helene Response In Asheville; Was RFK Jr.'s Campaign A Scam? Plus: Lee Fang On Kamala, Trump, 2024 & More
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:15)
Hurricane Response in Asheville (3:48)
Fraudulent Campaign? (21:25)
Michael Tracey Interviews Lee Fang (46:10)
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Welcome to another brand spanking new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern here on Rumble, exclusively here on Rumble.
The free speech alternative to YouTube.
I'm your old friend, Michael Tracy, the less attractive but just as exciting fill-in host occasionally for dear old Glenn when he's away for whatever reason.
Tonight, I'm going to go through another exhilarating repertoire of issues for you to all absorb.
First, I happen to be right now in Asheville, North Carolina.
I've been talking to voters.
I've been surveying some of the damage, trying to get a sense of what impact the disaster Relief efforts or the disaster itself could have on voting, with North Carolina being a significant stage in the election.
So I will give you some preliminary observations on that score.
Secondly, I published a long, simmering article Over the weekend on the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
campaign and his newfound alliance with Donald Trump, I think I've uncovered a couple of details that haven't gotten enough attention about that interesting Alliance, I know many of you out there are going to have perhaps a harsh response to the article, but I'm going to try to keep it as factual as possible.
And if you have any objections, feel free to contact me and let me know what they are.
But I do think it's worth covering.
So we'll get into that.
And then finally, all the more exciting is Lee Fong.
You're one of your most beloved guests on this program.
Journalist extraordinaire will be joining us.
We're going to talk about issues related to what else but the 2024 election.
We're exactly now two weeks away from Election Day.
And no surprise here, but I think...
There are some critical aspects of the election that have not been sufficiently covered.
So hopefully, Lee Fang and I will have an opportunity to delve into those.
So that will be, I'm sure, exciting for all of you.
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For now, welcome to another new episode of System Update starting now.
Okay.
One of my routines in the weeks ahead of Election Day for the past couple of presidential election cycles now is to be out on the road in the lead up to Election Day.
I don't want to stay cooped up in my domicile in a non-swing state.
I would probably go a little Crazy.
So for my own mental health reasons and also for the edification of you and for Glenn, I've been going around to different states over the past week and a half or so.
So I've been in Nevada, I've been in Arizona briefly, Georgia, Florida, and now I'm in North Carolina.
And I came specifically to Asheville, North Carolina, because...
There's been a lot of confusion or uncertainty around the hurricane relief efforts and what impact the displacement of people and the after effects of the storm a few weeks ago.
Hurricane Helene could have on the election.
And I'm not going to act like I just parachuted in here and have all the answers.
I only got here basically yesterday.
But I did want to give a couple of preliminary observations because one thing that I've done in the short time that I've been here is go around to some of the early voting sites and just chat with voters.
I've surveyed some of the destruction.
I mean, some of it really is jarring.
I've only ever been to Asheville once before.
This was I don't know, seven or eight years ago and found it to be a lovely little enclave within the Blue Ridge Mountains, I believe it is.
And so obviously I was...
Disturbed and upset to see a lot of the devastation, particularly in the Arts District area around – that's just adjacent to the river in town.
Because there, you drive through or walk through and it looks like Sarajevo or something.
It's bad.
And I also toured around some of the more rural areas.
Areas in the vicinity of Asheville and the fact that this hurricane impacted an area that is unaccustomed to such major storm events, in contrast with, say, Florida, Which does have more of an infrastructure built up to deal with hurricanes and utilize their hurricane preparedness.
That was one of the reasons why this Hurricane Helene is having such a major impact.
And there's also been a lot of consternation and questions and debate around the efficacy, or lack thereof, of the federal government's response.
So I wanted to kind of remove myself, extricate myself from the social media chatter and go talk to some real people on the ground here.
And one observation that I did want to just relay is that even among the people who have firsthand experience with the disaster relief efforts, On the ground in Asheville who are directly impacted.
Just in the conversations I've had thus far, you can discern a real partisan I think?
When I put to them the question of, are these allegations that the federal government has been inept and even perhaps that there's been some malice behind resources allegedly being withheld from North Carolina and other states in the region that have been most severely affected by Hurricane Helene, is there any truth to that?
Does that comport with your experiences and the people who have been more democratic-leaning It's not hard to tell because we're at early voting sites and people are fairly forthcoming with their preferences.
They're the most eager to defend the federal government's response because they've kind of politically polarized around the issue.
If they did concede that there have been problems with the federal government's response or that the federal government has been inept, They would construe that as validating the critiques coming from Trump and from the Republicans.
Trump actually happened to be here in To attend his press availability event as media, but sadly I was denied.
I don't know what the issue is, but I get denied from every Trump campaign event when I seek to attend as media.
So if anybody out there is listening and can help me resolve this mysterious problem, I'd be certainly grateful.
I don't want to necessarily draw two grandiose conclusions from why this is, but I'm just reporting to you as a fact.
I can't manage to get accepted to attend any press as press, any Trump campaign events.
Why that is, I don't know.
But Trump was here yesterday, and like so I talked to one couple, older couple, who were clearly Democratic-leaning yesterday, and they were complaining about how Trump was Trump had caused traffic jams, and they were just objecting and they were complaining about how Trump was Trump had caused traffic jams, and they were just objecting to his
Complications on the region, and those complications are already quite severe because of the after effects of the storm.
And they were incredibly adamant that there's been no real problem with the hurricane response.
And I even put to them, Look, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's been incompetence in the federal government's response to this or in FEMA's response, because when has there not been?
I mean, I remember covering Hurricane Harvey in 2017, in the first year of the Trump administration, when an enormously devastating hurricane hit the Houston area, Texas.
And there were complaints about FEMA's responsiveness then, and they got even more extreme During Hurricane Maria, if people recall, that hit Puerto Rico where there was just – people were without power for – I forget exactly how long but weeks at minimum and there was tons of criticism.
So it doesn't really matter what administration is in power at least as far as I've been able to ascertain over the years.
FEMA is always going to have issues especially when you have consecutive hurricanes in a particularly active season.
So I would put to these more Democratic-leaning individuals, it wouldn't be surprising if there were problems with FEMA. But they would just reply that their instinct was one of, I think, a partisan reflex, where they were shooting down the criticisms.
Now, on the other hand, Bring up a lady who I spoke to as well, who I happened to snap a photo of with her consent.
This is Barbara.
She was at the same voting site.
There she is, Barbara Freeman.
I had a lovely conversation with her, and I asked her a similar set of questions.
She theorized to me that there was some political reason why The government at some undetermined level, could be federal, could be state, she suspected federal,
meaning the Biden administration, Biden-Harris administration, had been derelict in providing the Asheville area with the resources required, but especially in the immediate aftermath of the storm's impact.
Now, she didn't have a...
Firmly articulable evidentiary basis for this belief, nor would I expect her to.
I mean these are just ordinary citizens taking in information about the world around them and drawing tentative kind of inferential conclusions.
But she believed that there was some motivation, political malice really behind the federal government's response.
So I asked, what would that motivation be?
Why would the Biden-Harris administration knowingly and willfully withhold storm relief resources from a state that is a swing state?
So if you're going to get into that kind of base level calculations, politically speaking, North Carolina is a hugely important state.
It's actually a state where It's not inconceivable that Kamala Harris might slightly outperform based on recent polling in contrast with other states like Pennsylvania that has shifted more noticeably away from her, although it's all really within the margin of error, so it's hard to say with any certainty.
But what would the political rationale there be for the Biden administration to withhold the resources?
Again, I'm open to there being some genuine incompetence or malice.
But I guess my overall point here is that it's really hard to get a firm grasp on the efficacy or lack thereof of the federal government's response to the storm because people with an election coming up so soon are filtering all the data that they're inputting into their system through the lens of partisan polarization.
situation.
And I think you see a lot of that in terms of the social media chatter around the storm and probably also in the mainstream quote unquote media or corporate media who – I think it's perfectly possible if they had been here.
If there was a Republican administration in charge right now, the coverage of the storms after effects or the inadequacies of the governmental response might be much more turbocharged and condemn the Tory of the Republican administration.
I mean, that's all perfectly plausible to me.
I guess I claim humility here, and I don't claim to have all the answers, but There's one other thing I wanted to show because North Carolina is one of the states now that has very widespread early voting, as I indicated by my having gone to one of the early voting sites yesterday.
And I do want to show something that's of note.
So here is the North Carolina state data as of today.
For early voting and you can show these, you see these on the screen and I'm going to contrast it with the same data from the same date as of 2020.
So Democrats are still slightly leading in terms of the partisan affiliation of early voters.
So Democrats are at 34.98% This doesn't tell you who necessarily they voted for because a Democrat could theoretically vote for Trump or a Republican could theoretically vote for Harris.
But North Carolina is one of the states where the partisan affiliation is reported of the early voters.
So you also have unaffiliated and then minor parties.
So Democrats are slightly ahead, but look at the shift compared to 2020, if you would.
In 2020, on this same very date, But Democrats were way ahead.
So there's been a net shift of, oh, I should do the quick arithmetic in my head.
It's got to be like a net shift to Republicans of, what, something like five, eight points, somewhere in that range.
I was never particularly good at math in school, much less on-the-spot calculations.
But just look, there's been a net gain of Republicans by a lot in terms of early voting.
In 2020, you may recall early voting or mail-in voting especially was seen as much more of a democratic way of casting one's vote for whatever dumb reason that was contingent on the political circumstances of that time.
And now it's much more evenly distributed.
So with Republicans making gains.
So does that indicate that Republicans are making gains overall?
It's hard to know.
North Carolina was won by Trump in 2020 despite Democrats having that early lead in the early voting.
But I guess I just point this out to say that Republicans are making gains seemingly in a lot of states, particularly the early voting states that are considered to be swing states like Nevada and others.
And Are Republicans now voting in greater numbers in terms of early voting because they're more confident in the security of early voting compared to 2020 when it was seen as more of a statement to vote on Election Day if you're a Republican and Democrats also invested ideologically in the sanctity of mail-in voting?
Have those partisan dividing lines kind of Broken up a bit and now it's just more of a generic partisan.
Now there's like less of a Explicit kind of partisan connotation to how one chooses to vote.
I'm not sure.
But it is something to, I guess, just preliminarily bear in mind as you analyze some of these voting results.
Again, I'm not somebody who claims I have all the answers.
I'm just going around observing things like a floating eyeball that just travels around and reports back to you.
But on the issue of FEMA, depending on who you talk to, the response has been great.
If you talk to other people, the response has been terrible and there was some nefarious political intent behind the withholding of needed governmental resources.
I mean it is still it's pretty crazy to have seen some of the devastation I saw, especially in the more remote rural areas.
You could tell why there might have been a delay in getting people what they need in those particular areas.
The water services are still kind of busted.
I mean, people are told not to drink the water.
There's even a debate that I've heard about whether people should even shower in the water that's been restored to the water systems.
So it is a big issue, and I do think that people who complain about there being a lack of attention to it, there might be some legitimacy to that.
But hey, I'm only one guy.
So let's go to our first ad break, and then I promise we'll have an even more exciting segment coming up.
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Okay, so Robert F. Kennedy Jr., why am I discussing this issue now?
Well, I spent...
A month or more reporting a story about his campaign that I think about aspects of his now aborted campaign that I think deserve a bit broader attention.
And you can go to mtracy.net if you want to read the whole thing.
I'm not going to belabor you with every last detail.
It's quite long and intensive.
But Here's the point that I wanted to make and draw out and bring more people's attention to.
You'll recall that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., starting in October of 2023, withdrew from the Democratic primaries, presidential primaries that he initially claimed to be running in and decided to declare that he was running an independent campaign.
And lo and behold, perhaps based on the strength of his vaunted surname or for whatever other reason, because a lot of credulous podcasters brought him on and just showered him with awe and kindness because they were so enamored of his familial credentials,
But he did become, according to a good deal of polling, the most formidable third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992.
And Ross Perot in 1992 made a huge electoral impact.
There were points in the 1992 campaign in which Ross Perot was actually polling ahead of both Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.
So it looked like he could actually win the election outright.
And there hadn't been anything really close to formidable as a third-party candidate in all the years that passed since 1982 until this year when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared declared his independence and was going around soliciting contributions, donations to build a groundbreaking, earth-shattering third-party movement that, according to him, Would challenge and dislodge the two-party, quote-unquote, duopoly.
He used that term himself on many occasions.
So how did Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
seek to get himself on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia?
Because it's a very Byzantine process.
Almost arduous beyond belief to even get oneself in a position to get on the ballots in all 50 states plus D.C. But RFK Jr.
argued, perhaps with some legitimacy, that he was uniquely positioned to surmount those hurdles and get on all 50 state ballots plus D.C. It's 51 ballots actually.
So one of his strategies was to, in some states, form a new party called the We the People Party that was basically just organized around his outsized, adulated persona.
But in other states, he went around to existing minor parties and petitioned those minor parties for their presidential nomination.
If a minor party in a certain state already has ballot access because it has contested previous elections and gathered enough signatures and gone through the process to get themselves on the ballot, what he tried to do was get them to offer up their nomination for president so that he wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of the massive effort that it takes to get on certain state ballots as an independent candidate.
So when he dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump, I think rather melodramatically, I thought one thing that I was curious about and that I didn't see much coverage of was what has been the reaction to this turn of events by the minor parties whose nomination he sought and received.
So I did something fairly simple.
I went and interviewed a bunch of the heads of these minor parties.
And Here's an example of what one of them told me.
So this is Jim Rex.
He's the founder and one of the leaders of the South Carolina Alliance Party.
Again, these are minor parties, so you might not have ever even heard of them.
They're not electoral juggernauts, but they did have enough infrastructure in place that RFK strenuously sought their nomination for president.
So here's what he told me.
Jim Rex is the head of the Alliance Party in South Carolina.
Quote, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Because what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
was presenting, proposing to these minor parties was that he was going to have this groundbreaking independent campaign that disrupts the two-party duopoly that many of these parties were founded specifically to oppose and to dislodge in their primacy over the U.S. electoral system.
And Rex in South Carolina says that some of his members thought that they had been swindled.
Because what did RFK Jr.
do?
He ended up joining the very duopoly that he had previously been purporting to denounce because he was very aggressive in his denunciations of the Republican Party and Trump as his independent candidacy wore on.
Also, obviously leveling very harsh critiques of the Democratic Party.
But if you're talking about overturning a duopoly, that consists of two parts.
That's the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
But now RFK Jr.
is a surrogate for the Republican Party.
He's going around campaigning for Trump.
He has an event tomorrow in Georgia, and he has attempted now to funnel the resources that he accumulated over the course of his independent candidacy to burnish one prong of the two-party duopoly that he had been previously claiming he was dead set on overthrowing.
So Jim Rex, the founder of the South Carolina Minor Party, told me that his membership was of two minds.
Some of them were of the belief that they had been swindled by RFK Jr.
Others said that they just, according to his characterization, they just, quote, believe in him so much as a person, it's almost cultish.
Which is ironic because it looks like he's joining a cult.
So this is not my words.
This is the words of one of the parties, one of the heads of the parties, chairs of the parties, founders actually, whose nomination for president RFK Jr.
previously sought.
Now, he's saying that factions of his membership feel that they've been swindled or they have such a personal devotion to RFK Jr.
that they'll go along with anything he does, even if it means Discarding the anti-two party logic of his campaign and subsuming it into one of the two major parties.
Here's another party whose head I interviewed.
This is a gentleman by the name of Doug Dern.
He is the head of what's called the Natural Law Party in Michigan.
This is a swing state.
This is a critical state.
Doug Dern had put in the work, the really serious, intensive work, that is required to even retain viability for a minor party.
Now, again, I'm not arguing, nor would he, that the natural law party in Michigan is some kind of electoral behemoth.
It's not.
But it did have the infrastructure in place whereby they could offer a candidate its nomination, and then they would be entitled to appear on the Michigan ballot, which is crucial, and then eliminate a lot of the legwork that RFK Jr.
would have had to do if he was just on his own attempting to qualify for ballot access.
So as he told me, so he told me that RFK Dern, Doug Dern feels like RFK kind of used us.
I kind of feel like he used this, Dern said.
And if he was allowed to withdraw from the Michigan ballot, which he might now not be, or he's almost certainly not going to be able to do because he missed various deadlines and court rulings in Michigan have found that he is required to remain on the ballot even though he attempted to withdraw.
But if he were able to withdraw, according to Dern, he would have killed this party.
Our party would be dead, Dern told me.
Our party would be no more.
And I talked to other party leaders as well who echoed similar sentiments, but those are the two that I just want to focus on now.
And so here's my, I guess, quandary.
For something like 10 months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
was claiming that he was incredibly, uniquely, historically well-positioned to mount An unprecedented challenge to the two-party system.
At least as formidable a challenge as Ross Perot in 1992, if not more formidable.
Because he had gotten a lot of notoriety around his candidacy.
Particularly from the credulous podcasters who just buttered him up and loved to hear his fables about his dynastic legacy.
And then what does he do?
He turns on a dime and screws over these parties.
So not only was his initial claim to be running this magnificently historic independent candidacy false, not only did that pretense for his campaign prove to be false, He undermined the electoral and organizational prospects of these minor parties.
The South Carolina Alliance Party withdrew petition to withdraw RFK from the ballot because they determined that he had reneged on his commitments to them, which he did.
This gets to the heart of why I was always more skeptical than some might have expected about the RFK candidacy because I always found it to be fundamentally fallacious.
He was obsessively promoting his family legacy as one of his main reasons for running.
He was always invoking his father and uncle.
You know, why it is that having one's father and uncle shot in the 1960s is a big qualifier to become president, I never quite understood, but a lot of people were into it.
And then, you know, once he launches his independent candidacy, he starts going after Trump as well as Biden.
Biden was the nominee at the time.
I can pull up for you right now, in May, RFK Jr.
a complaint to the Federal Elections Commission alleging that Biden, meaning the Biden campaign, CNN, and the Trump campaign had all colluded with one another to illegally exclude him from that first and the Trump campaign had all colluded with one another to illegally exclude him from that first fateful
And that led to him being switched out unceremoniously with Kamala Harris.
Robert F. K. Jr. was trying to get on the debate stage, and he was claiming that he was being impeded from doing so through an illegal collusion scheme participated in, not just by the Biden campaign and the Democrats, and not just by the corporate media in the form of CNN, but also by the Trump campaign.
So one of the very simple questions that I would love to put to him, meaning RFK Jr., if I had the opportunity to do so, is, do you still allege that the Trump campaign colluded illegally against you, even notwithstanding you're now going around campaigning for him?
There's never been a really good answer to that.
He just turns on a dime.
And I'm sorry to say, I'm sorry to say, but he does have a segment of his worshipful followers who are just so enthralled by his pedigree and by who he is as a person that they don't even have the slightest thought to interrogate any of these contradictions but he does have a segment of his worshipful followers who are I've never seen such an inconsistency in a candidate.
RFK Jr., and I did get a chance to ask him about this when I had a brief encounter with him at the first presidential debate when he was there as a Trump surrogate on September 10th, and it was recorded for System Update.
But I asked him, you know, back in May, so not a lifetime ago, just a few months ago, he was denouncing Trump as having been partially culpable for causing the Ukraine war.
You can pull up the tweet.
Go to my article and look at it yourself.
He was saying that, look, Trump is intolerable because he continues to brag about arming Ukraine.
RFK Jr.
said, if you think that a Trump second term is going to be meaningfully different from a Trump first term, you're engaged in wishful thinking.
You're essentially delusional.
And then he just has a couple of private consultations with Trump, apparently.
Decides that all is forgotten, all is forgiven.
His denunciations of this first Trump term have no less merit in August or September than they did in May or June when he was making them.
And it all gets memory-holed.
But I did ask him, RFK Jr., about...
His endorsement of Trump in light of what he had denounced Trump for doing in the very recent past, meaning being partially culpable for causing the Ukraine war and bragging about arm in Ukraine.
And all RFK would say is that his views changed because they had some private discussions.
Okay, people can have their views change, but if you're not going to be forthcoming with any concrete details and you're just going to Throw in the garbage can, everything you have been saying while you're going around soliciting money for this campaign and trying to build up a national infrastructure to get on every 50-state ballot,
and then all of a sudden you decide to just funnel it into the Republican Party's campaign apparatus.
I think there's a bit more of an explanation that should be owed, but it has not been forthcoming.
So, look, I always thought that the mythological conception of RFK as somehow carrying on forth the mantle of his martyred father and uncle and putting this quasi kind of anti-establishment spin on the Kennedy family legacy.
To me, it was always frankly obnoxious because it was reminiscent, painfully so, of a standard kind of mainstream liberal apologia For the Kennedys that have been ubiquitous for decades,
where they venerate this sanctified notion of Camelot with the glamour and the lore and the principled commitment to advancing liberty and equality and freedom and all this stuff.
It was the mainstream liberals who usually trafficked in that kind of nonsense.
Now, bizarrely, RFK Jr.
is gobbling up disaffected, hazily ideological voters who maybe lean more Republican, and having them repeat these absurd I think, flakerly ahistorical depictions of the Kennedy dynasty and then using that to bolster the case for Donald Trump because RFK Jr.
is joining Avengers style with Trump to combat the deep state or something.
I mean, this is beyond facile.
John F. Kennedy drastically escalated the Ukraine, not the, sorry, the Vietnam War He was obsessed with running assassination programs and regime change in Cuba.
He massively strengthened and dumped massive additional funding into the CIA, far from splintering into a thousand pieces, which is the quote that RFK Jr.
likes to repeat and others repeated as well.
It's the chronically misused, decontextualized quote.
Where basically the origin of that quote is – and again, go and look in the article if you want further details.
Don't take my word for it.
Take Seymour Hersh's word for it because he's my source for the corrective to a lot of this hagiography that is still persistent and enduring with regard to the Kennedys but now has a different ideological valence because it's a lot of right-wing types who have become newfound converts to the cause of Camelot.
It's very bizarre.
But JFK Jr., sorry, JFK, John F. Kennedy, as well as his bad man, RFK Sr., who was attorney general.
I mean, imagine installing, imagine if any president today installed their brother as attorney general and it just got portrayed as some, you know, heartwarming example of like fraternal bonding.
It's absurd.
JFK was a Committed militarist.
He ran against Nixon in 1960 by saying that Nixon and Eisenhower had been soft on communism.
They weren't dedicated enough to imposing regime change in Cuba.
And according to Hirsch, JFK got fed to him updates from elements of the CIA that favored his candidacy over Nixon about the preliminary planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which came later in April 1961, and that JFK was hyper-involved in planning the most intricate details of.
So is this a historical digression?
Yes, it is, but it's unfortunately relevant now because RFK Jr.
is marshalling These fanciful and fatuous conceptions of the Kennedy legacy and then trying to use that to bolster Trump and putting out this claim that RFK Jr.
and Trump are going to, you know, join forces and dismantle the deep state.
I'm sorry.
As I say in the article, if you believe that, I have a bridge in Hyannisport to sell you.
Maybe a bridge in Chappaquiddick, frankly, to sell you.
Glenn on this show played a clip of my interviewing Howard Lutnick at the vice presidential debate earlier this month, where Lutnick, who is the co-chair of the Trump transition team, very proudly declared that That he is finding people with the deepest and most longstanding experience in the national security state to staff the next government.
And oh, by the way, his partner who's helping him very assiduously in doing this is Jared Kushner, which wasn't a shock to me.
I mean, Jared Kushner was involved in the first Trump administration as an employee, as a literal White House staff member.
Even if he doesn't have a formal job in the second administration, what, you think he's just going to be sitting somewhere twiddling his thumbs, maybe in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and not have any role in the second Trump administration?
That was never plausible.
So all I want to impart to people is that have a bit of critical scrutiny when you see a so-called independent candidate who runs for 10 months and receives donations on the grounds that he's going to mount this historic challenge to the two-party duopoly.
then joins one wing of the duopoly, throws all of his arguments into the trash can that he'd been making for the preceding number of months, And then becomes a partisan PR agent for one of the very two parties that he was purporting to denounce.
That I find to be a bit foolish, and I think people should be a bit more skeptical of that.
And so take a look at the article if you want a bit more details.
But now, thankfully, my soliloquy is over and we're going to get to Li Fung.
So there's an ad now that I have to read.
Let me see.
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I unfortunately don't know if I have an ad in front of me as to what to tell you about Rumble Premium, but I'm sure it's wonderful.
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More than worth the money.
And I'm sure that now my computer is giving me these thumbs up signals when I gesticulate with my hands.
I wish I could turn off that setting.
Let me see.
Okay, Rumble Premium.
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Okay, so hey, Lee, how's it going?
There's so much that I want to discuss with you.
I don't even know where to begin.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Good to see you, Michael.
And I just want to say, you've been killing it.
I love the interviews at the convention and other events you've been doing with Glenn.
So few people in independent media are actually critical of other independent media and other independent figures.
And, you know, most are kind of glorifying anyone who's supposedly anti-establishment.
And so few are doing original reporting and you're actually doing it.
So I appreciate what you're doing.
Well, flatteredly, I feel similarly toward you.
I mean, we could get into a whole rabbit hole here of the independent media and my observations of it.
I mean, maybe we should.
I mean, what the hell?
I do feel...
I mean, I listened to the second half of your, or I think like a third maybe, of your soliloquy, your monologue on RFK, and I think it's interesting.
I think you raise a lot of important points.
I'm not super I wouldn't predict that there's going to be a huge crackdown on the deep state.
There's certainly going to be a big exit of many people in the bureaucracy, and they're probably going to leave not because they're some type of CIA goons, but rather there are folks who don't feel comfortable with Donald Trump as president.
There are other folks that are being rooted out for being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump, and that's in the three-letter intelligence agencies.
It's also in the DOJ.
It's going to be a huge turnover if Trump is victorious in this election.
And in terms of RFK, one thing I'll say, just to kind of push back gently, is that we don't know.
Your article, I think everyone should read the piece, raises a lot of good points for all these kind of independent party lines that he kind of got onto and promised to fight the duopoly, fight the two parties.
I'm sure a lot of them feel hoodwinked.
They're certainly not accomplishing that with a partnership with RFK. But I will say that if you watch the last few big speeches from RFK, watch some of these recent ads, he's talking about making America healthy again, talking about the toxic chemicals in our pesticides, some of the overuse of pharmaceuticals, the chemicals and toxic substances we add to our foods and our highly processed foods.
Now, one could say that Trump as president was very bad on these issues.
It was horrible.
But one other perspective is that he's very ideologically flexible.
It's possible that You know, you kind of look down on folks who say, oh, he's raising the discourse by joining the Trump campaign.
And, you know, I share some of that cynicism.
But perhaps, at least around the edges, for a Republican administration, you know, Bush or Reagan were not good on these issues either.
For a Republican administration, perhaps if he incorporates some of these critiques of big ag or big pesticide, the chemical industry, into his administration and is not so horrible on it as he was The last four years he was in office.
That's perhaps a marked improvement.
I don't know about the rest of the deep space.
I don't know about what's going to happen in Ukraine.
But on food and chemicals, perhaps there's something to be optimistic about.
But Lee, if RFK Jr.'s candidacy was primarily based on his desire to remove toxins from the soil supply, I don't think anybody really would have objected to that overwhelmingly innocuous goal, right?
I mean, the argument of the RFK Jr.
campaign, so far as a coherent one can be discerned, is that he was taking on establishment, interest establishment, dogma, in particular in the national security sphere.
I mean, RFK Jr.
set himself that his top issues The Ukraine war and free speech, and that's what led him to forge this alliance with Trump.
On the Ukraine war, he was running around flamboyantly denouncing Trump for being partially responsible for causing the Ukraine war and being unrepentant about it because Trump still, to this day, has never stopped bragging about arming Ukraine, which he did, and went further than even the Obama administration had did.
RFK Jr.
was denouncing him for that.
On the issue of free speech, I don't know if, I mean, RFK Jr.
and Trump, they may have bonded over their shared pro-Israel fanaticism.
I'm not sure, because on the issue of speech, Trump is gallivanting around with Miriam Adelson.
Boasting about how he is going to use the coercive power of the state to crack down on so-called anti-Semitic speech.
So maybe RFK Jr.
loves that.
And that's part of his whole conception of free speech.
I'm not sure.
But the point is, if the focal point of his campaign was just this issue of removing toxins from the soil, I mean, I don't think you would have found many people to object to that, but it went too much further.
In terms of the three issues that he raised, the Make America Healthy Again agenda, whatever you want to call it, that's been up there just as much as free speech.
And I don't want to have any kind of Delusions about this, as you mentioned, delusions.
The Trump administration was very bad on this.
The Obama administration had moved into place to ban chlorpyrifos.
We spray millions of tons of this in California and other states that grow a lot of fruits.
It's a neurotoxin.
It's linked to autism.
It's linked to neurological problems in children and pregnant children.
Women, the federal government, the EPA, was moving towards banning trichloroethylene, which is a cleaning product that's actually fatal.
People have died from this.
It's used at dry cleaners.
The Trump administration rolled that back.
What did the Trump administration bring in to run this?
You know, these vital agencies, the FDA, the CDC, the EPA, I mean, it was just tons and tons of industry lobbyists.
The top lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, which represents the entire chemical industry, the top lobbyist, Nancy Beck, was brought into the Trump administration to regulate her previous clients.
So, you know, look, I want to be perfectly clear that As hopeful as I am that a lot of these vital issues that RFK is talking about in terms of healthy food, pesticides, processed foods, I think either candidate needs to be talking about it and the fact that he's elevating it as one of his top issues is vital.
But yeah, I mean, there's a big inconsistency there.
The question is whether Trump can incorporate some of this because it's now part of his base.
This is really, if you talk to RFK supporters, this is a top-line issue.
This is what really I think is a very vital part of his appeal.
Can he kind of change the mix of what a future Trump EPA or CDC might look like?
I don't know.
But I think that's one reason not to be completely cynical.
And look, politicians change over time.
If you look at certain Bernie surrogates back in 2020, certain left-wing publications that you and I both read, they were claiming that Biden, given his history of cutting Social Security, or at least supporting cuts to Social Security, the fact that he was advised by people like Bruce Reed, You know, this Clinton administration, Democratic establishment figure who's been behind many of the big plans to cut and winnow down entitlement programs, they were predicting that a Biden administration would mean big cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
Well, that didn't happen because the political dynamics changed, right?
There were claims that he would never pull out of Afghanistan given his kind of More military establishment friendly appointees.
Well, Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.
So, look, I just want to keep a little bit of an open mind without being naive about the political realities here.
Yeah, I guess I'm going to be stubbornly unhopeful because with such blatant deceit, it's hard for me to say, oh, I'm going to look for the silver linings of the egregious deceit.
Let's just give you one example of this.
We actually do have a graphic here.
Pull up this RFK Jr.
tweet from September 30th.
This is number 230.
I'm talking to the producers right now, just so maybe you can see it on the screen.
This is him, RFK Jr., saying, don't you think you deserve a president who's going to make peace in the world?
This is him talking about Trump, okay?
And then, let's go to Donald Trump, like, two or three days later, at an event in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
We have the clip.
Do we have the clip?
This is video two, Trump in Fayetteville, North Carolina, like two or three days after this tweet, that tweet from RFK Jr.
They asked him, what do you think about Iran?
Would you hit Iran?
He goes, as long as they don't hit the nuclear stuff.
That's the thing you want to hit, right?
I said, I think he's got that one wrong.
Isn't that the one you're supposed to hit?
I mean, it's the biggest risk we have.
Nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry.
You know, I rebuilt the entire military, jets, everything.
I built it, including nuclear, and I needed to build the nuclear.
But I got to know firsthand the power of that stuff.
And I'll tell you what, we have to be totally prepared.
We have to be absolutely prepared.
But when they asked that question, the answer should have been hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.
And that's what I said.
If they're going to do it, they're going to do it.
But we'll find out whatever their plans are.
But great question.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Austin.
Okay, so that's Trump repeatedly saying that Israel ought to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.
That same week, it was reported that he...
Trump made a phone call to Netanyahu.
This was reported only in Israeli media.
I haven't seen it really reported anywhere in American media.
But Israeli media reported that Trump made a personal phone call to Netanyahu, who he supposedly had a falling out with in the past.
Now, apparently, they've mended their ties and congratulated Netanyahu on invading Lebanon.
Before Israel invaded Lebanon, Jared Kushner put out A tweet or a message calling for Israel to invade Lebanon.
Kushner's still a proxy for Trump, essentially, as far as I could tell.
When I interviewed Trump's co-chair for his transition at the vice presidential debate, you may have seen this, Lee, Howard Lutnick, he told me directly that Jared Kushner is going to be helping staff a second Trump administration.
Why this should be surprising to anyone, I'm not sure.
I mean, did anybody think that Kushner was going to be Out of business?
That never seemed plausible to me, but there you have it from the horse's mouth.
So I guess this gets to why I'm kind of more resolutely cynical here.
On the one hand, you have RFK Jr.
and others, who maybe we don't have to name, going around declaring that Trump is going to bring peace to the world while he's literally calling for Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.
He's also said stuff to the effect of what the Biden administration should be doing right now is threatening to bomb the entire country of Iran into, quote, smithereens, rain down bombs just on all their major cities.
And you have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
saying, like, this is like the peaceful message that harkens back to the incredible legacy of his martyred uncle and father.
I mean, this is just idiocy.
Well, I mean, as you mentioned...
This is like absurd propaganda, is it not?
It is actually an accurate representation of the Kennedy legacy in the sense that JFK lied.
He lied about a missile gap.
Basically mobilized a new red scare around the 1960 election to say that we're at risk of being bombarded by all these advanced Soviet nuclear missiles and we really didn't have the technology to keep up.
The Eisenhower and the Nixon previous administration had not invested enough in the military and it was all basically a lie.
Subsequent reporting showed that the Soviets had no massive buildup of advanced missile ICBMs and nuclear weapons.
It was all kind of to whip the public into a panic so that he could be elected.
And a lot of his rhetoric during his administration about being the peace candidate and getting a peace for our time, you know, the speech at American University, was kind of window dressing for a very interventionist, militaristic agenda.
So, look, no disagreements there.
And if anything, just to kind of continue the 1960s parallel here, Trump sounds like 1968 Nixon, right?
Nixon spoke out of both sides of his mouth.
He kind of attacked the Johnson administration for not doing enough against the communists while kind of floating this vague, euphemistic, a secret peace deal that he could reach with the North Vietnamese.
In fact, his surrogates were doing everything they could to kill a peace deal with Hanoi.
He wanted to prolong the war.
And then, of course, when he got into office, rather than a secret peace deal that he had promised on the campaign trail, he started an illegal bombing campaign of Cambodia.
It escalated the secret dirty war in Laos, escalated American involvement in Vietnam directly, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians unnecessarily.
Really kind of grim political dynamic around deceiving American media and the American public around his plan for ending the Vietnam War.
He, in fact, only escalated it.
Trump's rhetoric around Iran, Israel, Lebanon has been terrifying, frankly, and really kind of breaks from his very refreshing views in the 2015-2016 Republican primary when he was a very lonely and populous voice against the Bush Neoconservative agenda and just pilloring every other candidate for their military and interventionist views.
It was very refreshing, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, Independent, to hear any kind of candidate talk that way.
We're used to the uniparty rhetoric on threat escalation from all of America's supposed adversaries, the need to spend more and intervene more.
Talking about the risk of terrorism, Trump was very frank and I think reflected the sentiment that most Americans feel about never-ending wars.
And here he is kind of just sounding sort of like a more bombastic Jeb Bush in terms of launching us into a new war with Iran, which, again, if we actually strike Iran, if we assist Iran, We're good to
go.
As somehow reflecting a heroic opposition to the so-called deep state or military industrial complex.
I mean, I'm a stickler for what politicians actually do when they obtain power.
Trump said all kinds of things in 2015, 2016.
In fact, famously, although in 2015 he was hectoring people like Marco Rubio for being puppets of Sheldon Adelson, Once he began to shore up the Republican presidential nomination, he ran right into the arms of Adelson and started accepting his largesse, went to the AIPAC conference and recited all the standard talking points.
And then, although he had promised in 2015, early in the primary season, that if he were president, he would Come up with a deal of all deals to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What did he do?
He became the most deferential possible president to Israel, and now he's running on a platform where he and the Republicans are denouncing Biden and Harris for somehow being In hock to Hamas or pandering to anti-Semites, despite the Biden-Harris administration providing more military support to Israel than literally any president ever in terms of sheer quantity of material.
I mean, this is what's good.
Go ahead.
Well, I just want to say what underpins, I think, this entire discussion Is our winner-take-all system.
I'm skeptical of anyone who just kind of blindly supports any third party candidate in our current There is a way that conforms with our Constitution to change the way we award the electoral college and those votes in a way that actually might boost a third-party candidacy that actually opens up the map so candidates have to compete all over the country.
You know, we could be, instead of doing this winner-take-all system where each state Does it based on whoever gets a plurality of votes?
We could have it by congressional district.
We could have it by proportional voting.
There's a way that opens the system up so that We'd have multiple candidates, multiple parties.
We don't have that, right?
We have a winner-take-all system that just mathematically benefits two candidates, and the two candidates we have are both competing to be militaristic in terms of Israel and Iran.
They're competing to kind of please the interests of whatever you want to call it, the deep state or the kind of military-industrial complex in terms of Arming these countries and escalating the war.
And for any third-party candidate operating in this system, in a winner-take-all system, they essentially benefit one of the two incumbent parties.
This never really made sense.
Third-party candidates, just as Ross Perot had an opportunity to really run as a singular figure, at the end of the day, his candidacy probably just boosted Bill Clinton because he drained votes from Bush.
That's how it kind of shakes out in all of these.
I think there's differing views.
There's differing interpretations, actually, of Ross Perot's electoral effect.
I mean, there are maybe certain regions of the country where he did disadvantage Bush, but others where he could have disadvantaged Clinton.
I mean, it's kind of a toss-up.
But I take the point about the overall...
Impact of third parties on the electoral system as it's currently constituted.
It's not like a parliamentary system where like a third party can like officially join or like a minor party can officially join in terms of parliamentary power with one of the major parties then you actually have official leverage rather than de facto leverage.
The coalition building is relatively transparent, right?
Like, if you want to form a coalition with the Greens, then you have to adopt one of their positions or you have to adopt one of their ministers as a key position in your government, and the tradeoff is very clear to the public.
Here, you know, it's left up to people like you and me to guess, really, to get leaks and to get kind of hints about is there actually a real tradeoff or we're all just being hoodwinked, right?
It's not clear.
And in our system, it...
There's less transparency.
It's all horse trading, but none of that horse trading really makes sense.
Yeah, so your point about there potentially being parallels to 1968 is really interesting.
I hadn't given that one much thought, but I should mull it over.
I was more thinking about 1960, especially since we're being told that JFK is somehow – I guess maybe because they've both been shot at.
That's the basis of the parallel that people want to cling to, which fair enough, I guess, that happens to be true, although Reagan was shot as well.
I mean, it doesn't matter.
But the 1968 point is interesting, and it segues into another thing that I wanted to raise with you, because I think we're forced to grapple with this now that we have an opportunity to chat, is the alternative media, okay?
So Trump...
And Kamala to some extent, but really largely Trump.
I think with great effect, his media strategy is dominated by hand-picking friendly podcast hosts, comedians like Theo Vaughn or Name your other podcast hosts.
Theo Vaughn, he's an entertaining guy.
I'm not even putting him down.
He's just not a journalist.
And not everybody has to be a journalist.
But Trump is getting so much airtime by going on these podcasts, Andrew Schultz recently, where they're clearly so enamored of his presence that they just kind of banter and joke around with him for an hour and a half.
And there are never any really serious questions put to him.
And now he can given the contemporary media environment, it probably makes more sense for him to just bypass any more traditional journalistic interview.
Occasionally he does do Fox.
I went to one of the town halls last week in Georgia, which was just a Republican pep rally.
I mean they host these town halls and they claim it's just like a generic selection of women who are going to have a chance to ask Trump questions.
And I went around and talked to a bunch of them.
And it was people who had been recruited through local Republican women's groups.
They were the ones who were given the Fox invitation to go and ask Trump questions, and they were literally chanting and cheering for Trump, which, okay, fine, then just don't market it as a generic town hall, because that's a misnomer.
But in these many easy interviews that Trump does...
Just to complete the question, my problem is that alternative media has not scrutinized Trump to the degree that I think is necessary.
Look, I think he's probably favored to win if I had to bet.
So he's probably favored to be reinstalled into power.
And how many millions of times have you heard him repeat over and over again his policy on both Ukraine and Israel, which is that it never would have happened had he been in power?
Okay, that's a historical counterfactual that can't be proven or disproven.
How about telling us what you would actually do in some semblance of concrete detail if you get back into power?
But he's just not challenged on it because he gets to go to these alternative media precincts, a lot of whom have this affinity with RFK, it seems.
And they just butter him up, kiss his ass, frankly.
And he's still not been asked a substantive question, really, on how he would – what policy he would implement vis-a-vis Ukraine in Israel.
It's just over and over again this recitation of it never would have happened.
The relationship between Trump and the so-called alternative media, I feel like a lot of alternative media is dominated by Republican agitprop at this point.
Not all, but more than I care for.
How does that comport with your observations?
I think in terms of the big podcasting world, there's a lot of Republican-adjacent conservative populist stars and hosts that do well.
But just across the independent sphere, the big TikTokers, the big YouTubers, big Twitch stars, there's folks on the left as well.
A lot of the kind of adversarial political views of those on the left are very performative.
When they actually do have access to candidates, they don't ask tough or interesting questions.
It's really just a crisis overall in American media.
We had the last 25 years or so of the switch to digital media that shred something like 20,000 or 30,000 newspaper jobs.
As newspapers shifted to online, they still could not compete with these new platforms on social media.
You know, I want to be clear that I benefit from this trend.
I'm a very digital journalist.
But overall, I hate it.
You know, the reason...
But despite my benefiting from it...
Yeah.
I was just going to say, just very quickly, I mean, I agree.
I'm the same.
But despite my benefiting from it...
The treatment of the two candidates in this cycle is making me yearn for, like, when the three networks dominated in the New York Times.
Not really.
I'm only just saying that to underscore the point that I think alternative media has really not performed very well in this particular election.
Could you imagine?
A lot of ass-kissing.
Could you imagine trying to understand the policy positions, the political environment, the policy landscape ahead of us by only listening to these pop podcasts that the candidates are going on?
You know, Kamala's going on some of these too.
It's like you have no idea what's going on in the world listening to them.
You get no pushback from the hosts on the candidates.
You know, I consume everything.
I'm reading kind of left and right-wing independent media outlets.
I'm reading the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Washington Post, New York Times every day, Financial Times.
Read a lot of sub-stacks.
But, you know, this is my business.
This is what I do professionally.
I'm trying to understand the world.
I'm trying to find interesting reported news, political analysis.
I'm not normal.
The average person doesn't have time to consume this much media.
You know, they don't have a big part of my, like, budget as a...
As an independent reporter, it's just paying for all these different subscriptions.
Normal people I know will not do that.
And I just got to think, if you're a regular person, you know, with a busy job and busy with their family, and the best kind of information you're getting is tuning in to one of these pop podcasts that's, you know, I listened to the Theo Phan one with Trump, and they're just talking, it's really kind of a humanizing interview.
I think that was the point of it.
He talked about his brother's addiction and I don't even know the true story of that.
I've read a lot of different things about how the Trump family might have bullied his brother.
I don't know the truth there.
But also, I don't care.
What matters here are the personnel choices of the next administration.
What are the big policy choices?
You can listen to these humanizing things about Kamala and her relationship with her mother and the church and music.
Again, I don't give a shit.
What matters are who she's going to put into office, who she's going to have run the DOJ, the FTC, what's her plan for Ukraine and Israel, which policies under the Biden administration will she continue to pursue, what will she change.
That's what really matters at the end of the day.
I mean, I know that might sound a little bit dry to some listeners who want more colorful, combative content, but look, that's what we face in our democracy, and the independent media sphere is not delivering.
At all.
And the dynamics that I'm sure you've already talked about and you're fully aware of, audience capture of just the kind of lack of basic ethical guidelines and kind of pushback from, you know, when you work at a magazine or a big media outlet, there's a push and pull with editors, with fact checkers.
I have that experience.
And, you know, when I have big, long, wonky investigative pieces, you know, I did a series this year with The Guardian and my friend Jack Paulson on a lot of kind of covert Israeli government influence operations in the U.S. shaping public policy and public opinion.
You know, that dealt with a lot of original source documentation, a lot of accusations.
So, of course, I worked with fact checkers and people who could speak Hebrew, who could double check some of these exclusive documents I got.
You know, it's a big process and it takes a lot of work.
But for these kind of quick buck There's no subscriber-based content producers.
There's no reporting.
There's no kind of research of the policy positions.
There's no knowledge of political history.
There's no attempt to hold the person accountable.
And it's very easy to do and it's very profitable, but it's not really journalism.
Yeah, so relatedly, I did want to bring up a tweet of yours that I replied to, and people got very outraged, but I think you were definitely on point.
This is from October 15th, so 272.
Pull that up, if you would, Magic Makers behind the scenes.
Because, look, maybe I'm just...
I don't know, complaining.
And I'm not trying to be too myopic about this, but look, I'm somebody who has used X, formerly Twitter, fairly regularly, as I know you have since 2009.
It's an important platform to me personally, quote-unquote professionally.
I still get a lot of great information from it.
It's, for better or worse, like hardwired into my brain.
I know Glenn could probably sympathize with that.
And look, I think it's pretty indisputable.
I was open-minded about Elon Musk purchasing X. I wasn't one of these people who was running around with my hair on fire claiming that it was going to destroy the company.
He clearly didn't.
I mean, he downsized the personnel, but it remained mostly functional with a few glitches here and there, but nothing as catastrophic as people who had a political problem with Musk were trying to claim at the time in 2022 when he was orchestrating his takeover.
But now, Elon Musk is openly endorsing Donald Trump, campaigning for him, holding campaign events across Pennsylvania in which he's holding lotteries where he's just giving random people who sign up for his PAC a million dollars. holding campaign events across Pennsylvania in which he's holding lotteries Whether that's legal or not, I don't know.
But regardless of the legalities, I do think it might be the most ostentatious intervention into the U.S. political system by a quote-unquote oligarch.
He's the richest man on earth since Mike Bloomberg in 2020.
Bloomberg just bought up Every staffer he could possibly find for like a late entrance to the Democratic primaries put ads everywhere, even in states that he wasn't even contesting.
It was actually disturbing.
I covered it at a time.
And Musk, I mean, if I open up my 4U tab on X, maybe this isn't universal, but look, I'm somebody who's used the platform for something like 15 years, so I can just attest to my own experience.
I pull it up now, and I see like Yesterday I got 12 – I think six Musk tweets in a row promoting himself and his latest pro-Trump campaign events and just a huge right-wing oriented selection of just kind of viral slop that is clearly pro-Republican.
Again, I'm not against consuming pro-Republican content.
I consume political content across the spectrum all the time anyway because I want to see what people are saying.
But I feel like there's a relationship here between the deficiencies of alternative media at large and these trends on X, which form the basis for how a lot of alternative media people gain their foothold.
I'm just wondering what you make of this and elaborate on your observations about the evolution of X. Well, you know, on the Mike Bloomberg point, I will agree, because I covered the hell out of that when he launched his candidacy and was running.
Really paid everyone's social...
Democratic activists, mayors, various politicians, PACs, consulting firms.
If you look at the actual lists of folks he had on retainer, it's just...
It's miles long, and...
Yeah, I think he would have actually he would have had a chance in the Democratic primary.
He might have actually been the nominee if he didn't face traditional media scrutiny that, you know, when he went on the cable networks, he was asked about this and then went on the Democratic primary stage.
Elizabeth Warren eviscerated him and kind of I've ridiculed him with the entire Democratic electorate watching.
Elon Musk doesn't face the same kind of scrutiny, not from the traditional media, and he doesn't have to debate anyone.
He's not a candidate.
So the dynamics are very different.
And so I think you know about this.
I know about this.
Other people are following this, but it's still not, I think, very wide known, just the kind of volume of spending that he's doing and the kind of unusual cash giveaway.
$75 million thus far, right?
So he's right up there with Allison.
Supposedly, he's giving to this dark money group as well that's running these kind of duplicitous ads, you know, geo-targeting Jewish voters and claiming that Kamala Harris is super pro-Palestinian and geo-targeting Arab and Muslim voters and claiming that Kamala is super pro-Israel and super Jewish.
You know, it's almost anti-Semitic.
It shows pictures of Doug Emhoff's Kippah, you know.
It's some weird stuff, but apparently he's funding that too, so I don't think we know the true number.
He's got the super PAC that's disclosed, and there's some dark money group that's undisclosed.
We don't know how much he's given to that, but yeah, the number's huge.
It's eye-popping.
And in terms of your other...
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, there's a reason that the CIA and the State Department became obsessed with Facebook and Twitter after the Arab Spring, looking at how these social media platforms could mobilize public opinion in a way that traditional media could never do.
You know, there's been a lot of influence operations in the history of the Cold War and throughout the 20th century, manipulating newspapers and radio stations to try to, you know, shape the enemy's public opinion to kind of shape morale, whatever.
There's nothing that comes close to the power of social media.
The intimacy, the immediacy, the kind of seeming authenticity of all the content.
Very good reason that so many democratic operatives and liberals really targeted the platforms to try to shape the algorithm and block and amplify certain types of content.
These are tools of the 21st century for shaping, controlling society, particularly open societies where public opinion matters so much.
And yeah, Elon Musk is doing his own thing.
He's very hypocritical in some sense.
You know, there's the Ken Klippenstein issue.
I don't, you know, this claim that the doxing material I think is BS because there's so many other links of other political documents that have been posted on X slash Twitter that have much worse personal information, unredacted social security numbers, lots of other personal information that never got removed or censored.
So I think that the claim is BS.
The New York Times has now subsequently reported that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Elon Musk to shadow ban and block links to Ken's article and to block his Twitter account.
So we know that he was really emulating the very thing that he denounced in terms of the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020.
And in general, yeah.
So if that same logic had been in place in 2016, all WikiLeaks links to Clinton emails, DNC emails or Podesta emails that had been technically hacked, that was the claim, claim, they might have been all banished from Twitter because you could claim that that cache of materials, the emails, contained private data in some cases that had been so quote unquote hacked.
A lot of those emails had credit card information.
There were personal identifying information, people's home addresses, the very same allegation against the Vance.
And most of the advanced memo was redacted.
It's really just like a part of the Social Security, not the full Social Security, and a home address, which has been shown a million times on local media, and you can just basically Google it.
It's a public record!
Classified document, yeah, or classified secret.
So no, the excuse is...
We're bullshit.
And if the same logic had been applied to the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 or the 2016 WikiLeaks documents, you can make the same argument.
But again, this is more just partisan justification.
Yeah.
All right.
So finally, I do want to get to Kamala Harris because we can't leave her out too much.
I know the Rumble audience will be chomping at the bit for it and I'm happy to deliver.
So, as you know, Kamala has been on a tour lately with Liz Cheney.
I mean, I want to know who the brain geniuses are in the Democratic consultant class who have advised Kamala Harris that her closing argument needs to be centered on Liz Cheney and maybe apparently Eminem, who is appearing with her tonight at a rally I want to know who the brain geniuses are in the Democratic consultant class who have But Liz Cheney is really the magic ingredient here.
So I want to play to you a clip of Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris yesterday in Wisconsin.
So that's video seven.
Let's hear that.
I tell people often, you know, I spend a lot of time working on national security issues, and when people that I know in the Republican Party tell me they might be considering voting and when people that I know in the Republican Party tell me they might be considering voting for Trump from a national security perspective, I ask Please go look at them.
Because what he's proposing in terms of withdrawing from NATO... Welcoming Vladimir Putin to attack our NATO allies.
Praising.
He praises Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, and President Xi of China, and Putin of Russia.
And if you listen to him, he doesn't just praise those people generally.
He praises them for their cruelty.
Yep.
For their tyranny.
That's not who we are as a nation.
It's not who we are.
And the world needs us to be better, and our own security and our own freedom requires that we have a president who understands America has to lead, and that our strength comes both from our greatness and also from our goodness.
And that's Vice President Harris.
Thank you.
So there are so many ironies here.
One of them is that Liz Cheney's entire critique of Trump, at least on a policy level, we know that she became obsessed with January 6th and that was the breaking point, but insofar as she levels a foreign policy critique of Trump, She exists in some alternate universe where Trump wants to demolish NATO,
withdraw from NATO. This was the same argument that was hysterically made in 2016 by the same sorts of anti-Trump Republicans, the David Frum types.
Bill Kristol, etc., that because Trump made a wisecrack here or there, that meant he was going to upend the entire NATO alliance and maybe even collapse the whole rules-based international order.
Now in 2016, everybody had to engage in some degree of speculation about what Trump would do.
He had no record.
But now, we all have the merciful advantage of four years worth of data to evaluate of what Trump did when he actually wielded power.
I can't believe that we still seem like we're mired in a 2016 time warp, as though nothing's transpired in the past eight years, like maybe shed some light on these issues.
But Liz Cheney repeats this fiction.
That Trump is pledging to withdraw from NATO when Trump actually cites the support that he's got from the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, the former Secretary General.
Trump expanded NATO twice.
He expanded NATO into Ukraine by elevating Ukraine to a subsidiary NATO status right below full membership.
He increased the funding instrument, the Pentagon funding instrument for US force deployments in Eastern Europe Beyond anything Obama ever did, he armed Ukraine, etc., etc.
But Liz Cheney exists in this bizarro world where she has to feed into these elite liberal preoccupations around Trump, I guess as a vengeance for January 6th, which she seems to believe is one of the most significant events in all of human history.
And Kamala Harris's Fully on board with this critique, the only thing that Kamala Harris was able to muster recently when asked what she would do differently from Biden is put a Republican in her administration.
Could that be Liz Cheney herself?
Seems perfectly plausible to me as Secretary of State or something.
So, yeah, I mean, whose bright idea was this and who does this appeal to?
I don't know what's going to happen in the election.
Trump is victorious.
I'm very interested to see the post-mortem tell-all stuff leaked to Politico.
It seems to happen every election after Clinton Lost in 2016, you had all those great leaks, again, to Politico showing that, I'm sure from one of her consultants or someone high up, because it had very detailed information, but in the waning days of the election,
the week before the election in 2016, that she diverted funding and support from the Midwest, from places like Wisconsin to From the blue wall states to Louisiana and California.
Why?
Because, you know, she had no hope of winning Louisiana.
She already, of course, would win California.
It's a gigantic democratic state.
But she was actually concerned of the opposite outcome.
She thought that she might win the electoral college, but then lose the popular vote.
So she wanted to generate additional Democratic votes in areas where, you know, there was no kind of competition from Trump, no serious competition.
She just wanted a higher raw vote total.
And indeed, she got that.
But she lost the electoral college by refusing to campaign in some of those blue wall states and, of course, diverting vital election resources.
And so I think we're going to get a similar postmortem in case Kamala loses this very pivotal last month of the election.
We seem to be seeing Dick and Liz Cheney every day on the campaign trail or in campaign ads for the Kamala campaign.
I mean, this seems like a transparent ploy to the kind of MSNBC-style suburban A voter who is concerned about Russia, sees Putin as America's worst adversary, really kind of got into the Russiagate stories from the Trump administration.
And this is kind of a quick emotional pull for them to see these kind of arguments, even though they don't really make sense.
And yeah, I don't even know how sincere they are from Liz Cheney.
I don't know if you saw this, but just the other day, she was asked about Roe v.
Wade.
Liz Cheney has been an anti-abortion politician her entire career.
Suddenly, she's singing a different tune and said that Donald Trump went too far in reversing that decision.
It's like, well, he's just a regular Democrat now, except with the Cheney foreign policy viewpoint and legacy.
Yeah, it's very similar to all the Never Trump people.
The Bulwark and The Dispatch, which I can't even differentiate between, frankly, but media organizations like that, they initially claim that they were just anti-Trump, but they were anti-Trump because they were so adamant about retaining their true conservatism.
But then they get embraced by like the MSNBC Atlantic kind of firmaments and then have a wholesale epiphany as to their entire political philosophy and become effectively just partisan – But, you know, another irony here that I did want to ask you about is, so what are the actual policy differences between Liz Cheney and Trump?
Because when Liz Cheney, on foreign policy in particular, because now Liz Cheney is claiming that they have these mammoth differences between them, and Trump has replied in kind.
But when Liz Cheney was actually in Congress, and she was chair of the Republican House Conference, She was almost unwaveringly supportive of virtually everything that Trump did in the foreign policy domain.
So bring up this screenshot that is memory hold of Liz Cheney reacting to the Soleimani assassination.
This is graphic 245.
I mean, this is lost in the ether, I guess.
It falls to people like me who have annoyingly long memories.
But this is her praising The drone strike assassination of Soleimani and saying that Trump was right to order it.
Other people, like, for example, Tulsi Gabbard, I happen to know, were extremely opposed to the Soleimani assassination, claiming that it was done on false pretenses.
Now she's apparently another Republican surrogate, so I don't even know how to begin to approach that one.
But what are the substantive differences between Liz Cheney and Donald Trump, other than Liz Cheney got unduly fixated on January 6th and thought that democracy was on the line, and now she has to recast everything As though she was always in this diehard opposition to Trump.
It doesn't really make much sense.
One more quick point.
The one difference that Liz Cheney and Trump did have...
On a substantive policy level was around Afghanistan.
Liz Traney tried to get an amendment, she did get an amendment added to the NDAA in 2020, Glenn covered this at the time, to impede Trump's ability to withdraw from Afghanistan.
It didn't fully impede it, but it just put up obstacles, right?
But now, Trump is saying that he was never going to withdraw from Afghanistan at all.
In fact, he was going to keep a permanent occupying force of at least 4,000 troops at Bagram Air Base, maintain it in perpetuity, supposedly to have a way to project force against China.
But he was going to actually We're good to go.
For withdrawing from Afghanistan because it was done incompetently.
He's condemning the very principle of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
So I guess like if you get so lost in the partisan kind of rhetoric here and the kind of the peculiar circumstances of where we find ourselves today, you kind of lose sight of the policy continuity between Liz Cheney and Trump that neither of them really want to acknowledge at the moment.
And Kamala apparently is all on board with this policy continuity.
Yeah, well, you look at terms that people use, you know, used to be the deep state, but now that's been so politicized, but the blob, that there is this kind of foreign policy uniparty in D.C., and the differences between left and right are mostly tonal,
and perhaps the neocons are more aggressive, and the Democrats are a little bit more subdued, but their general outlook in terms of American empire and intervention I mean,
the fact that Kamala has not outlined what her worldview is, that she even wants to end Israel's Military escalation in Lebanon or to hold them back from a strike from Iran or to make peace in Gaza, to have some kind of resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
She's only kind of vaguely supported a ceasefire, but without any kind of teeth or any deterrent for Israel to keep behaving in the way that it is.
And said really nothing about ending or winding down the conflict in Ukraine.
How is she even different from Trump in this regard?
It's really just tonal.
It's rhetorical.
And you look at where she's drawing her foreign policy advice.
It's places like CNAS, Center for New American Security, which is a think tank that, you know, it's not neocon.
It's not as aggressive.
But in terms of its policies, it's not terribly different from the Hudson Institute and those on the right.
And you look at her chief foreign policy advisor, Phil Gordon, who supported the Libya intervention, who has been very hawkish on China.
You look at his actual policy positions.
They're not perhaps not as extreme as the Chinese, but are they even that different?
Right.
In terms of maintaining this kind of global American empire of antagonizing America's adversaries.
You know, I know that the politics and the media coverage of this are completely poisoned because we don't have institutional memory, and the media has just lied to us for 20 years about the actual occupation of Afghanistan and how bad it truly was.
So people think that any kind of withdrawal is some kind of surrender.
That's the kind of one bright spot in the Biden administration the last four years in terms of foreign policy, in my view.
And she hasn't rushed to defend that either.
She kind of, under her breath, has defended it.
So, look, it's just very disappointing.
And so when people glom on Liz Cheney's views to her own, it's filling a void where people just have to guess.
And it's maybe a very...
Rightful guess because she hasn't articulated.
She does have that same kind of architecture of advisors who have advocated for more wars and more intervention.
So why assume that she's any different from her surrogates?
Yeah, so last point, I promise, but I did prepare this because I wanted to show it to you if you hadn't seen it.
But you did raise the point today of, given that Kamala is going around campaigning with Liz Cheney and saying how much they agree with one another and are of two minds on all these massively important issues, what inference can one make other than that they have a similar worldview or at least a compatible enough worldview that they can be like governing partners, right?
I put this very question to Senator Chris Murphy.
The Democrat of Connecticut at the first presidential debate last month, I asked her, do Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney, what do they disagree on?
I mean, all Kamala Harris does is tout how much they are in simpatico with one another.
So let's play that brief clip, video for myself and Chris Murphy.
Yeah, Senator, tonight Kamala Harris touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney.
We did.
Did you find that at all bizarre?
Would you welcome the endorsement of Dick Cheney?
Am I the only one who remembers that he was integral in launching the Iraq war on false pretenses?
Is that all the memory hold now?
Well, she's trying to win an election, right?
And in winning an election, you You're trying to build a coalition that's as big as possible.
So it is important that there are a whole bunch of Republicans, many of them who worked very closely with Donald Trump, who, having seen him up close, are convinced that he is deeply unqualified to do the job.
So I do think it's important that there are a host of people who disagree with Kamala Harris on policy, But are supporting her because they believe that the election of Donald Trump would mean the destruction of our democracy.
It just, I think, solidifies the stakes of the election.
But do Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris really disagree substantively?
They seem to have fairly compatible foreign policy worldviews from everything I heard from Kamala tonight.
Yeah, I think they disagree significantly.
On what?
On what?
Yeah, what do they disagree on?
I mean, did Kamala Harris support the Iraq war that Dick Cheney started?
She wasn't in public office at the time.
She may well have.
Does she support giving unfettered subsidy to the oil and gas industry?
So you asked me for some examples.
So, I mean, I thought that was a pretty...
That was very good, by the way.
But, you know, on that second point, the Biden administration in a deal with Joe Manchin added lots of fossil fuel subsidies to get their clean energy agenda passed.
So, you know, we have lots of money to, you know, this carbon capture sequestration technology, lots of money to other kind of fossil fuel-friendly priorities as part of the wider kind of Inflation Reduction Act package.
So, I don't know.
I feel like that was just kind of...
A silly point as he walked away.
I mean, there's plenty of fossil fuel subsidies from the Biden administration.
Yeah, and then again, to complete this point, let's play the clip of Kamala Harris at that very debate.
This is what prompted me to ask him this question because it wasn't just that Kamala Harris had cited the endorsement of Dick Cheney and touted it as the endorsement that she was most proud of and wanted to put before the American public, but that she was resurrecting Bush-Cheney-era rhetoric specifically with respect to Afghanistan.
So this is video three.
But let's understand how we got to where we are.
Donald Trump, when he was president, negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine.
He calls himself a deal maker.
Even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal.
And here's how it went down.
He bypassed the Afghan government.
He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban.
The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.
And get this, no, get this.
And the president at the time invited the Taliban to Camp David.
A place of storied significance for us as Americans.
A place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders.
And this former president, as president, invited them To Camp David because he does not again appreciate the role and responsibility of the President of the United States.
So, Lee, that's Kamala Harris denouncing the entire basis for the withdrawal from Afghanistan by castigating Trump for negotiating with terrorists, thereby resurrecting the classic Bush-Cheney refrain about how the United States will never negotiate with terrorists.
And denouncing Trump for, like, sullying the honor of Camp David by even contemplating bringing the Taliban there to broker some sort of arrangement to facilitate a withdrawal.
And she cites, without naming him, John Bolton, who...
And after he left the Trump administration, denounced the deal.
So again, my point to Chris Murphy wasn't just to point out that Kamala Harris had brought up Dick Cheney, but that there's every reason to think that they have, along with Liz, compatible worldviews until she indicates something to the contrary.
There's this Faustian bargain that's being made by the Democrats Really ever since Trump's election in 2016 that, oh God, you know, here's someone who's calling for NATO allies to increase their defense spending so we don't have to provide so much of the security resources for Europe.
Here's someone who wants to talk to our enemies, talk to North Korea, talk to other countries like Russia.
Here's someone who kind of defies the neoconservative blob.
So here's our political opportunity.
Let's seize the neocons and absorb them into the left.
And, you know, there's perhaps a short-term political victory that could be had with showing, you know, bipartisan credentials.
But I think it could spell something very ugly and dark for the future of the Democratic Party by moving so sharply down this path.
I mean, it's logically incoherent, especially when she's condemning essentially the Biden administration for negotiating with terrorists for its own pullout of Afghanistan.
It's this kind of War escalation and boogeyman-style rhetoric, this one-dimensional thinking that makes peace impossible.
Once you label your political and foreign adversaries as terrorists you can never speak to, then, functionally, any kind of peace negotiation is impossible.
And this type of rhetoric, once you kind of apply it so broadly, it takes on a life of its own where it has no meaning, right?
Itamar Ben-Gavir, the current security minister for Israel, not long ago was associated with a terrorist group.
He had Baruch Goldstein, the terrorist who shot 50 people in the mosque in Hebron, a poster of him in his own apartment in the West Bank.
He was a devoted follower of this kind of terrorist ideology in Israel.
Things changed and now...
Ben Gavir is part of the Netanyahu government.
Does that mean the U.S. government should never negotiate with Ben Gavir?
It doesn't really make sense.
It's really just rhetoric designed to snuff out any kind of dialogue to prevent The ability for foreign dignitaries to ever meet and discuss things.
And it kind of creates this kind of this Manichaean worldview of black and white thinking that you're either with us or against us that, again, is really reflective of the Bush administration.
I think you're completely right about that.
All right.
Well, Lee, on that happy note, thanks for reassuring me about the state of U.S. politics and media and giving me so much to be optimistic about.
Absolutely.
Remind everyone where they can look up your work if you'd like.
Primarily on Subsec, LeeFong, F-A-N-G dot com.
Find myself there.
Yep.
And I'm mtracy.net.
So now that we've hawked our URLs, Lee is always good to chat.
