TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:15) Same Old Smears (6:50) Interview with Nathan J. Robinson (49:05) Outro (1:30:36) - - - 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
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good evening. | |
| It's Monday, October 28th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight... | |
| As we have covered many times before, Kamala Harris does not have much of an affirmative policy agenda or even a discernible political identity. | |
| As a result, Democrats and their media allies have quite obviously decided to spend the last two weeks of the 2024 election depicting Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler and his supporters as the equivalent of Nazis. | |
| Trump's sold-out rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday was instantly depicted as some sort of Nazi rally of the kind that are often led in Germany and that American isolationists of a new Nazi stripe held in Madison Square Garden in opposition to U.S. entrance into World War II. Like the Trump campaign itself, Sunday's rally was a very peculiar gathering of Nazis. | |
| Like the support for Trump himself as a candidate, the rally was composed of a very multiracial audience. | |
| Many of its most prominent speakers were Jewish, Black, Indian, and a whole range of other non-white identities who were wildly cheered by the crowd. | |
| Orthodox Jews celebrated Trump alongside American Black and Latino people from various boroughs throughout New York City. | |
| As I recall, none of that was particularly common at actual Nazi rallies led by Adolf Hitler. | |
| But given that Kamala's hope for victory apparently rests on this Trump is Hitler narrative, the theme of the last 24 hours among liberal media elites and Democratic Party operatives was that this was a pure Nazi rally because it's Hitler. | |
| Its leader, Donald Trump, is Hitler. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm not a political consultant, but it seems difficult to convince Americans, other than MSNBC viewers who already believe this, that Trump, whom they've known for decades as a celebrity and four years as their actual president, is now suddenly Adolf Hitler planning concentration camps and various holocausts. | |
| But that does seem to be the overriding strategy of the Democratic Party, who seemingly has abandoned any attempt to convince Americans that they will do anything for their lives and instead are relying on this caricature. | |
| Then, Trump's vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance appeared on CNN this morning with CNN personality Jake Tapper. | |
| That was actually over the weekend. | |
| When Tapper was hurling the standard accusations that corporate media figures hurl at Trump supporters, including J.D. Vance, Vance reminded Tapper of all the lies and disinformation that came not from Trump supporters, but that Tapper and his own network have spent years spewing. | |
| Chief among them, said Vance, were multiple lies throughout many years about Trump, Russia, and all sorts of debunked conspiracy theories. | |
| In response to that accusation, Tapper did what almost every corporate media employee does when confronted with the truth that they spent years drowning this country in debunked conspiracy theories. | |
| Tapper simply denied that he or CNN ever promoted these Russiagate conspiracy theories. | |
| Even though CNN and other outlets and Tapper himself, in fact, drowned the country in those false conspiracy theories for years. | |
| It's not just that they're unable to retract false stories when they ratify or spread them. | |
| It is that they will look you right in the face and baldly deny that they ever spread them to begin with, no matter how much evidence exists, that they did exactly that over and over and over again. | |
| As always, nobody spreads more disinformation or lies more frequently and casually than these corporate media outlets. | |
| And for that reason, no institution deserves the widespread contempt and distrust more than the corporate media does. | |
| Finally, Nathan Robinson is the founder and publisher of the political affairs journal Current Affairs. | |
| He is also one of the authors, along with Noam Chomsky, of a newly released book entitled The Myth of American Idealism, How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World. | |
| Now, there are many views of Noam Chomsky's that people can and do reasonably object to. | |
| I often hear most frequently his comments during the COVID pandemic when he was 92 or 93 years old. | |
| But there's no denying that Chomsky has been among the most influential voices over the past six decades, not just in the United States, but throughout the West when it comes to dissent over basic precepts of the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. | |
| We will talk to Nathan about this book, which primarily focuses on Chomsky's views on foreign policy and how it relates to both ongoing U.S. wars and conflicts as well as the imminent 2024 election. | |
| Before we get to all that, a few programming notes. | |
| First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app. | |
| If you do so, it works on your telephone, on your smart TV, and even on your Xbox. | |
| We confirmed that over the weekend. | |
| And if you download it, you can follow the programs you most like to watch on this platform. | |
| And once you do, you can activate notifications, which we hope you will, which means that the minute any of those programs that you follow begin broadcasting live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by a link that you can just click on and begin immediately watching the show as soon as it starts broadcasting live. | |
| That really helps the live viewing audience numbers of every program here and therefore the cause of free speech of Rumble itself. | |
| As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. | |
| You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate and review and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show. | |
| Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show. | |
| That after show is designed to take your questions, respond to your critiques, hear your suggestions for future shows and guests. | |
| The after show is available solely for members of our Locals community. | |
| So if you'd like to join, which gives you access not just to those after shows but to multiple interactive features. | |
| We have a lot of exclusive original content that we post on that platform that we don't get to here on the show. | |
| We publish written professionalized transcripts of every program we broadcast here. | |
| We publish the transcripts the next day there. | |
| And most of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night. | |
| Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community. | |
| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| It certainly is not new that the corporate media and their Democratic allies have been comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and his movement, which constitutes roughly 50% of the country, and his supporters to members of the Nazi Party Party. | |
| That has been a very common theme ever since Trump descended on that elevator in 2015 and then began to be a viable candidate in the polls. | |
| What has changed, however, is that This theme has now become the central attack on Donald Trump, the central campaign narrative of the Kamala Harris campaign starting about a week ago when they rejuvenated what was not a new story but rather an old story, | |
| namely that an anti-Trump general who was Trump's chief of staff and then got fired, John Kelly, said to Bob Woodward that Trump had He suggested that he wanted generals similar to the ones that Hitler had, that he had expressed certain kinds of admiration for Adolf Hitler. | |
| Now, you would think if that really had happened, John Kelly would have denounced that right at that moment. | |
| He would have gone to the media and said, I have something extremely alarming to tell you. | |
| The President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, the person in charge of the nuclear codes, has been expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler. | |
| And saying that there are certain things that Hitler and the Nazis did that he admires and would like to replicate. | |
| You wouldn't think that somebody would hold on to that secret for years only to have it then rejuvenated just a few days before the election. | |
| But ever since that happened, it became apparent that that was going to be the closing argument, basically, of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party and their loyal allies in the media. | |
| Not here's what we plan to do for you to make your lives better if Kamala wins. | |
| Not here are the policies of Donald Trump that he instituted during his first term that we oppose and think were detrimental to your lives. | |
| They're looking at the polling data that shows Americans overwhelmingly believe that America is on the wrong track, that they were doing better under the Trump presidency. | |
| There's obviously a lot of panic within the Democratic Party and the Kamala Harris campaign that thought they were going to ride to a fairly easy victory over Donald Trump this year. | |
| They still very well may win. | |
| The polls are close, but certainly there's a lot of panic within the Democratic Party. | |
| And as a result, they have clearly decided to make front and center this narrative that Donald Trump is essentially the new Adolf Hitler, that he's planning to build camps and send dissidents and critics in the media to those camps. | |
| People like AOC and all sorts of liberal pundits and Joy Behar have openly talked about the camps that they expect to be put into. | |
| And in advance of this rally that Donald Trump was planning to have at Madison Square Garden, they were talking as if Madison Square Garden was some sort of abandoned, useless, closed for decades forum that had only last been used in the late 1930s closed for decades forum that had only last been used in the late 1930s for Nazi sympathizers of the United States to come and hold a anti-Semitic rally that in part was designed to protest the American | |
| Two, instead of an extremely common venue that people in New York go to all the time that all sorts of presidential candidates have used regularly over many decades in order to hold rallies there, the minute Trump announced that he was having a rally there, they immediately began equating it with the neo-Nazi rally in they immediately began equating it with the neo-Nazi rally in the late 1930s in the United States at Madison Square Garden. | |
| And once the rally took place, before it was even over, the media essentially started accusing Trump of having held a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| Some of the media narrative is so deranged, it's so unhinged that it's almost impossible to believe. | |
| Here from the Washington Post today... | |
| Quote, another night at the garden how Trump's rally echoed one in 1939. | |
| The Trump's campaign's rally in New York mirrored one in the 1930s that was openly supportive of Adolf Hitler. | |
| Now you may think, as I think we did when we first saw this, that this was on the opinion page. | |
| This was an op-ed column by one of their columnists who's super angry that The paper chose not to endorse Kamala Harris as though that's the real function of the Washington Post, but no it's not. | |
| It's an actual news article. | |
| It's in the news section. | |
| It's by people whom the Washington Post call reporters. | |
| And this is part of what they wrote, quote, Madison Square Garden, as speakers at Donald Trump's Sunday night rally in the arena were eager to remind the audience, is one of the most famous venues in the world. | |
| It's where two professional sports teams play and is a mandatory stop for tours of best-selling performers, in part because it's trivially easy to tap into the millions of people that live in the New York City area. | |
| They're saying it's trivially easy to fill up Madison Square Garden. | |
| That's in order to justify the fact that Trump not only filled it up in a city and in a country and a state that's supposed to be vehemently opposed to him, but he filled it up and then had thousands, if not tens of thousands of people waiting outside to get in. | |
| The article goes on, quote, it literally sits on top of a train station that has lines running through the city out to Long Island and over to New Jersey. | |
| In one sense, it's good that the Trump rally fell into the familiar patterns of commercialism and tourism that the garden reinforces It meant that while there were protesters outside and intermingled with the hundreds of Trump supporters who were leaving or had not gotten inside, the temperature was low. | |
| But it also suggested that what was underway in the arena wasn't exceptional, that it was just another evening with another niche event. | |
| But except for one similar event on a prior evening, Meaning the Nazi event in 1939, the Trump event was quite exceptional indeed, except for that one similar event. | |
| The Post news article goes on, quote, On February 20th, 1939, an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden hosted a political rally that bore some striking similarities to Trump's. | |
| Organized by a group called the German-American Bund, the event was ostensibly a celebration of George Washington's 207th birthday. | |
| In reality, it was a celebration of the ascent of Germany's Third Reich and an excoriation of the purported nefarious influence of Jewish people in the United States. | |
| I want you to note that this is what the Washington Post is saying was the rally that had enormous amounts in common with the rally that Donald Trump held Namely that it was designed to be anti-Semitic, to lament the excessive influence of Jewish Americans in American society, to spread the Nazi ideology of white supremacy. | |
| The Post News article goes on, quote, Alright, if that's all that's required, | |
| To qualify as a neo-Nazi rally, namely lamenting government spending, railing against Marxism, and complaining about how information negative to their allies was played up and twisted to flame the fans of hate in the hearts of Americans by the news media, that's essentially every Republican rally over the last many decades. | |
| That's pretty much every Ronald Reagan rally that ever existed, rallying against government spending, Denouncing communism and Marxism and complaining that the media purposely sides with their allies. | |
| I mean, that's really just basic populist politics, not exactly the hallmarks of a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| But the Post went on, quote, similar arguments were raised at Trump's rally as well. | |
| Quote, free America, the crowd chanted in 1939, while Trump's speakers pledged that he would, quote, save America, with the 2024 crowd chanting USA. Oh my God, this crowd chanted, quote, save America and chanted USA. These are basically Nazis. | |
| I mean, they were saying the United States is not going well. | |
| We need a change of party role in order to, quote, save America. | |
| And then they chanted USA. And the Washington Post is using this as primary evidence of the neo-Nazi tenor of the rally in Madison Square Garden yesterday and its similarities to the 1939 rally. | |
| It goes on, quote, the Bund managed tens of thousands of members. | |
| Trump has tens of millions of Boon leader Fritz Kuhn, who called Washington the, quote, first fascist, meaning it as praise, delivered with a brief interruption the final speech of the evening at the 1939 rally. | |
| From the outside, sure, the rally looked like another rock concert. | |
| From the inside, Fritz Kuhn would certainly have recognized what he saw. | |
| I want you to just stop and think about that for a minute. | |
| This is a news article in the Washington Post overtly claiming that Madison Square Garden has never seen a rally like the one Trump held yesterday, except for one other time in American history, which is 1939 when neo-Nazis gathered. | |
| And in order to draw the comparison between the Trump rally yesterday... | |
| And the neo-Nazis in 1939, notice how they have to basically exclude all of the defining features of what made Nazis Nazis. | |
| A celebration of white supremacy, extreme hatred against Jews and other non-white people, an attempt to turn the United States into a haven of nothing but white people. | |
| Instead, they have to focus on very banal aspects of the rally. | |
| Like, hey, that also had a lot of people there. | |
| It was also held at Madison Square Garden. | |
| They also chanted. | |
| They railed against government spending too. | |
| They said Marxism was bad. | |
| These are the most banal, pervasive attributes at Democratic and Republican rallies alike over many decades. | |
| If you actually look at the rally, of course, it bore no resemblance. | |
| To anything that was actually a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| In fact, the actual Nazis in 1939 would have looked at the Trump rally with hatred and contempt and disgust because of who composed the audience and who was actually speaking and what they were saying. | |
| But this is the How far the media is willing to go before elections? | |
| We've seen it so many times. | |
| They're willing to lie like they did in 2020. | |
| They're willing to create false scandals like they did in 2016 with Trump-Russia conspiracies to help the Democrats beat Trump. | |
| And now they're just simply publishing everyday claims that Donald Trump, whom they've known for years, for decades, whom they've written about with admiration for decades, suddenly is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. | |
| One of the ways that they tried to do that is that the Trump rally yesterday featured an insult comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe who it seems like none of the people in political media know who he is and no one in American political life really seems to know who he is even though he's quite a well-known comedian. | |
| He has one of the most popular podcasts in all of the United States. | |
| States. | |
| He's frequently a guest on Joe Rogan. | |
| He was one of the featured stars of the well-watched Tom Brady roast on Netflix. | |
| He's been on Comedy Central and roast for many years. | |
| I don't know if it's that they don't know him or they want to pretend that they don't know that he's a comedian because what they want to do instead is use jokes that he made, at least some jokes. | |
| They're taking some of the jokes that are useful to them that he made about Puerto Rico in particular and pretending that he's some sort of Trump political ally and just omitting the fact that he's a comedian. | |
| Listen to how the New York Times yesterday tried to explain. | |
| I don't know Comic set in order to suggest that this was representative of the politics expressed at the Trump rally. | |
| The New York Times. | |
| A Trump rally speaker trashed Puerto Ricans. | |
| Harris reached out to them. | |
| And yes, this is also a news article, not an op-ed. | |
| Quote, before Mr. | |
| Trump had even taken the stage, warm-up speakers had called Puerto Rico, quote, an island of garbage. | |
| That's talking about the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. | |
| Referred to Ms. | |
| Harris as, quote, the devil and the antichrist. | |
| Oh, such rough and evil rhetoric. | |
| The only type of rhetoric that's acceptable is to continuously call Donald Trump Adolf Hitler and a fascist. | |
| But calling Kamala Harris the devil and the antichrist, that's essentially a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| And made racist or derogatory remarks about Latinos generally, African Americans, Palestinians, and Jews. | |
| The remarks at the rally came as Ms. | |
| Harris wrapped up a day in Philadelphia where she spent time courting Pennsylvania's significant Puerto Rican population by visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant. | |
| While there, she talked about a new plan she announced on Sunday to bring economic opportunities to Puerto Rico. | |
| One of my favorite things about the Kamala Harris campaign is that every week or so they look at polls and see particular groups that they believe that they own being very Cold and chilly, even antagonistic to the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| And then suddenly they're like, oh, let's create an agenda of all the things we're going to do for them, even though we've never expressed any interest in this in the past. | |
| Two weeks before an election, it's like, hey, Puerto Ricans, here's what we're going to do for you. | |
| Hey, black men, here's what we're going to do for you. | |
| But the New York Times is talking about this like this is very genuine. | |
| On Sunday, Kamala Harris was there to, quote, talk about bringing economic opportunities to Puerto Rico, discuss her visit there after Hurricane Maria, and said that even as a senator, she had, quote, felt a need and obligation to, quote, make sure Puerto Rico's needs were met. | |
| This is not a new area of focus for me, Kamala said. | |
| She received a warm reception from the crowd with chants of C, C, Puji, Puji, which is yes, yes we can. | |
| I'm always turning it into Portuguese, which is yes, yes we can in Spanish. | |
| The Trump campaign appeared wary of the political fallout from the, quote, island of garbage remarks and other comments. | |
| A senior advisor, Daniel Alvarez, said in a statement, quote, this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign. | |
| An entire article attempting to make Trump's rally look like some sort of bigoted hate fest that featured a joke by a comedian, That was one of many jokes about many other different groups. | |
| It's what comedians often do. | |
| Without mentioning that he's actually a comedian with trying to make him seem like he's just a one in the line of Trump's political speakers there to deliver the Trump campaign message. | |
| The Atlantic, of course, today did the same thing. | |
| The title was, "This is Trump's message at his Madison Square Garden rally. | |
| Trump's argument was hate and fear." Quote, "We might as well start with the low light of last night's Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden." That would be Tony Hinchcliffe. | |
| A podcaster who's part of Joe Rogan's circle and who was the evening's first speaker. | |
| What Tony Hinchcliffe is is a comedian. | |
| He has a comedy podcast. | |
| He goes around doing stand-up comedy routines all over the country. | |
| He's been on Comedy Central for many years. | |
| That's all he is, is a comedian. | |
| He was there as a comedian. | |
| Now, you can question the judgment of having somebody like that at such a prominent political rally, but he was a comedian. | |
| He is a comedian, and yet they'll use every Adjective to describe who he is to identify him for the readership who obviously doesn't know except comedian. | |
| Because they want to make it seem as though this was the design message of the Trump rally. | |
| That Puerto Ricans are filthy. | |
| That Puerto Rico is garbage. | |
| And here's how they quote him. | |
| Quote, these Latinos, they love making babies too. | |
| Just know that. | |
| They do. | |
| They do. | |
| There's no pulling out. | |
| They don't do that. | |
| They come inside, he joked. | |
| Just like they did to our country. | |
| A minute later, quote, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. | |
| Yeah, I think it's called Puerto Rico. | |
| Other speakers were only somewhat better. | |
| A childhood pal of Donald Trump's called Vice President Kamala Harris, quote, the Antichrist and the devil. | |
| The radio host, Sid Rosenberg, who's clearly a Jew, said, One of the many who spoke at this neo-Nazi rally called her husband, Doug Emhoff, quote, a crappy Jew. | |
| So they leave out that Sid Rosenberg himself is a Jew. | |
| He's a very pro-Israel Jew. | |
| And he's criticizing Doug Emhoff not for being just a Jew, but for being a crappy Jew because he's insufficiently supportive of Israel. | |
| But they tried to make it seem like this is also an anti-Semitic rally, courtesy of the speaker, Sid Rosenberg. | |
| It went on. | |
| Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be, quote, the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, which was simply satirizing this narrative that is always used in identity politics that Kamala Harris is going to be the first this, the first that. | |
| Stephen Miller went full blood and soil, declaring, quote, America is for Americans and Americans only. | |
| In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised, quote, to restore America to the true Americans. | |
| Here's MSNBC over the weekend, just to get a sense for how pervasive but also how desperate and deranged this is. | |
| Here's how they, quote, reported on the Trump rally. | |
| But that Jamboree happening right now, you see it there on your screen, in that place, is particularly chilling. | |
| Because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the garden for a so-called pro-America rally. | |
| A rally where speakers voiced anti-Semitic rhetoric from a stage draped with Nazi banners. | |
| When a Jewish protester rushed the stage, the Associated Press reported, quote, instantly a dozen or more stormtroopers set upon him, knocking him down and beating him as he held his head in his arms. | |
| Most of his clothing was torn from his body. | |
| Later, he was booked for disorderly conduct. | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| That's what would happen at the neo-Nazi rally. | |
| Neo-Nazis are anti-Semitic. | |
| So if a Jew enters the neo-Nazi rally as a protester, he's likely to be treated very poorly. | |
| He's likely to be attacked at an actual neo-Nazi rally. | |
| There were also Jews at yesterday's rally in Madison Square Garden. | |
| It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn. | |
| Many of them were Orthodox Jews, so they weren't hiding. | |
| They were wearing full religious Jewish garb. | |
| Many of them were self-identified Jews there to speak on behalf of President Trump. | |
| There were people waving the Israeli flag. | |
| And none of the people in that audience were attacked or violently kicked or beaten. | |
| Just like none of the black speakers were, nor the Latino speakers, nor the Hindu speakers, nor the Indian speakers, because this wasn't a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| That is exactly what happens at a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| What he said, if there's a Jew and they know there's a Jew in a neo-Nazi rally, they're probably going to attack him. | |
| Trump's rally, by contrast, was filled with Jews, many of whom spoke as Jews. | |
| And they weren't attacked, they were Very passionately applauded. | |
| Here is how the MSNBC segment went on. | |
| Now, against that backdrop of history, Donald Trump, the man who has threatened to use the military against opponents he calls enemies from within, who has threatened to use the troops to quell what he says are lawless cities, and to use those troops to carry out mass deportations of immigrants, is once again turning Madison Square Garden into a staging ground for extremism. | |
| And by the way, the title on the screen for that MSNBC report, that very sober, serious MSNBC report, was Trump's Madison Square Garden rally comes 85 years after a pro-Nazi rally at the famed arena. | |
| Susan Rice, who was the National Security Advisor of President Obama and is now a domestic policy advisor to the Biden White House, and she's been acting as a media surrogate for Kamala Harris. | |
| Here's how she went on to MSNBC and talked about this rally. | |
| They're terrified of, you know, effective, smart, strong women and leaders in the United States. | |
| Secondly, they embrace and laud and praise dictators like Xi and Putin with whom they want to become closer when they are our most formidable adversaries. | |
| These people are dangerous. | |
| Donald Trump hugs dictators. | |
| He's about to have a rally reminiscent of 1939, cheering on Nazi Germany. | |
| The people who've spoken in that rally already have been a litany of attacks on black voters, on Latino voters, on Arab-American voters. | |
| I mean, that's the divisive, dark, evil The threat that Donald Trump poses all encapsulated right there at Madison Square Garden. | |
| She said that they were about to have a rally that was going to cheer on Nazi Germany. | |
| Now, probably very few of you were able to watch the entire rally because it was six hours long from start to finish. | |
| But I'm pretty sure there was no one there who was cheering on Nazi Germany. | |
| If there were, that video would probably be everywhere. | |
| They probably wouldn't be obsessively focusing in every first paragraph of every story on a joke told by a comedian about Puerto Rico. | |
| Obviously that did not happen. | |
| Let us show you instead, compare what is being said by all of these liberal outlets, including the news articles of the Washington Post and the New York Times with the Actual footage. | |
| First of all, here's the footage of the actual night at the Garden back in 1939 where there were a lot of anti-Semites and Nazis and admirers of Adolf Hitler, an actual Nazi rally here in 1939. | |
| And we'll show you what happened yesterday in Madison Square Garden so you can see if they actually do seem similar. | |
| You see a lot of people giving the Heil Hitler sign. | |
| A lot of people dressed up, but all with their right arm extended in the classical Nazi salute. | |
| Looks like everybody there is white. | |
| Seeing a lot of footage that I haven't seen a single non-white person there, which is what you would expect. | |
| There's a huge picture of George Washington about whom the event was, and there you see a Nazi admirer carrying a swastika. | |
| So, an all-white audience overtly celebrating Adolf Hitler and Nazism, giving the Nazi salute with Nazi swastikas. | |
| That's essentially what happened at that rally that they're saying was very, very similar, in fact, identical to, practically, the Madison Square Garden rally yesterday. | |
| Right before the rally even happened, as soon as it was announced, the very fact that Trump was going to Madison Square Garden was depicted as some sort of bizarre apparition, unprecedented in American history. | |
| In fact, it's been very common for presidents and all sorts of candidates to speak at Madison Square Garden because in the middle of New York City, it's one of the most renowned and iconic venues in American life. | |
| Here from the New York Times, October of 2012. | |
| They would obviously never say this now because the idea is to pretend that only Donald Trump would go in Madison Square Garden to try and replicate that Nazi rally. | |
| Presidents who played the garden. | |
| There you see... | |
| Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. | |
| There he is at the Madison Square Garden. | |
| Here is a JFK rally at Madison Square Garden. | |
| Here is LBJ in 1964. | |
| Speaking at Madison Square Garden, here is Jimmy Carter, the famous neo-Nazi Jimmy Carter. | |
| Speaking at the Madison Square Garden rally, here is Bill Clinton with Al Gore. | |
| There they are at the Madison Square Garden rally. | |
| And then here is George H.W. Bush, who is also holding a rally at the Madison Square Garden. | |
| Now, there were actual reporters, people who wanted to describe what in fact took place at yesterday's rally, who went and told a much different story than the image depicted by these news outlets. | |
| These news outlets. | |
| Here is Byron York in the Washington Examiner. | |
| With the headline, at Madison Square Garden, the wide world of Trump. | |
| Quote, That 40%, | |
| should Trump actually achieve it, would equal the best Republican performance among Latino voters ever by President George W. Bush in 2004. | |
| Among the first people I met inside the garden as everyone waited for the program to begin were Mark Vasquez and Angle Paulino, two friends from Brick Township, New Jersey. | |
| Vasquez's family came to the New York area from Puerto Rico, while Paulino's came from the Dominican Republic. | |
| Both are active in their local Republican Party. | |
| Vasquez, who is 30 years old and works in marketing, explained that when he was younger, I always believed I was a Democrat because that's what my family identified as. | |
| Republicans, he believed, were rich, out of touch, and didn't care about people like him. | |
| Then, in 2014, around the time he turned 20, he started a business that dealt with repairing phones and tablets and found himself dealing with quite a few conservatives. | |
| Trump joined the presidential race the next year. | |
| Vasquez found that he agreed with Trump on immigration, quote, It wasn't about hate. | |
| It was about putting America first, making sure our laws were respected, and ensuring our communities were safe, he said. | |
| Vasquez also found himself supporting Trump's tax cuts, energy policies, deregulation, and more. | |
| He thought Trump, quote, was focused on creating real opportunities, particularly for communities like mine, which had been overlooked by politicians for years. | |
| Engel Paulina wore a MAGA hat, too, a baseball cap turned backwards, plus a never-surrendered T-shirt featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. | |
| He did not pay much attention to politics until Trump won the presidency in 2016. | |
| Like Vasquez, he was fascinated by the strong media antipathy to Trump. | |
| Quote, I always wondered why did they hate him so much, he said. | |
| He started paying more attention to politics and found that he agreed with what Trump was doing. | |
| Now, in contrast to that actual Nazi rally we showed you from Madison Square Garden that virtually every media outlet is saying was the inspiration for or was identical to the one held yesterday at Madison Square Garden by Trump, there was not an all-white audience at This Nazi rally led by Trump. | |
| Quite the contrary. | |
| It was extremely multiracial, just like the Trump coalition has become. | |
| And not just among the people in the crowd, but among many of the people who spoke. | |
| One of them was Congressman Byron Donalds, a black congressman, Republican congressman from Florida who was widely reported to be on Trump's shortlist for vice president. | |
| An odd thing for a neo-Nazi leader like Trump to have considered. | |
| And when he was announced to speak, Byron Donalds, this is how the Nazi crowd treated this black congressman. | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Congressman Byron Donalds. | |
| Thank you. | |
| You can't see me, but I'm the king. | |
| I've got no fellow. | |
| I'm still, I'm not your fellow. | |
| I'm not your fellow. | |
| In the background, you hear the famous Nazi jingle that Adolf Hitler personally helped to compose as this black congressman comes onto the stage in the middle of this Nazi rally, which for some reason, bizarrely, is clapping for him and which for some reason, bizarrely, is clapping for him and cheering for him and waving signs at him for a full 90 seconds. | |
| Here's a little bit more. | |
| Man, is it good to be home in New York City. | |
| Thank you. | |
| You know, usually I got a lot to say, but this one's special to me. | |
| I was born in Brooklyn, New York. | |
| The Nazism at this rally is visceral. | |
| It's disgusting. | |
| It's a celebration of white supremacy. | |
| It's an attempt to re-establish the United States as an all-white country, a country of white supremacy based on white supremacy, of taking minorities and putting them into concentration camps, of shipping them on trains, perhaps mass-murdering them in holocaust. | |
| That's all the things that we've been hearing from the media. | |
| And yet the rally itself contained a lot of peculiar and bizarre things that you would not expect to find at a Nazi rally, including all the people who were there in attendance, all the people who spoke, and pretty much everything they said. | |
| Here, for example, is former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a longtime Trump supporter, whose speech, like many of the people who spoke, was devoted to praising and heralding The Jewish state and insisting that it's the overarching duty of the United States to remain on the side of Israel. | |
| You would hear this at every Democratic rally. | |
| It would be stranger, though, to hear this at a Nazi rally, a neo-Nazi rally, and yet this is often what the theme was among the speakers. | |
| We have to be there for Israel always because they are always there for us! | |
| Hamas is not there for us. | |
| Iran is not there for us. | |
| They want to kill us. | |
| And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. | |
| They won't let a Palestinian in Jordan. | |
| They won't let a Palestinian in Egypt. | |
| And Harris wants to bring them to you. | |
| They may have good people. | |
| I'm sorry I don't take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two! | |
| I'm on the side of Israel! | |
| You're on the side of Israel! | |
| Donald Trump's on the side of Israel! | |
| And they're on the side of the terrorists! | |
| By the way, Rudy Giuliani was just ordered by a court to give up pretty much all of his belongings, including his apartment and even his jewelry, to two election workers in Georgia who he had falsely accused of engaging in fraud and they were inundated with death threats. | |
| Rudy Giuliani has always been this deranged. | |
| It's just that after 9-11 this kind of rhetoric was deemed inspirational. | |
| And a lot of the stuff that he says about Palestinians is actually, you could say, certainly bigoted. | |
| The idea that Palestinians are taught to hate and kill Americans at the age of two and we can't be around them. | |
| There may be some good Palestinians, possibly. | |
| But the whole point was... | |
| But we are on the side of Jews. | |
| We are on the side of the Jewish state, on Israel, while the entire crowd cheered. | |
| Also a very odd thing to happen for a neo-Nazi rally. | |
| Now, here is in the Israeli national news, the article by Eretz Sheva, It's about this Orthodox Jewish sect that is very pro-Trump and appeared there. | |
| Leaders of this Hasidic sect announced decision to vote for Donald Trump due to concerns Kamala Harris poses a risk to Jews. | |
| Now you would think if this were a new Hitler figure, Jews would probably be a little bit reluctant to lend their support to him, and yet polls show that at least 30-35% of Jews, maybe more, maybe more American Jews than in a long time intend to cast their vote for Donald Trump. | |
| One of the also bizarre and peculiar speakers to have appeared and to have been cheered is Vivek Ramaswamy. | |
| You would not expect to see him and his Indian descent and his Hindu religion at a neo-Nazi rally in the middle of New York City and yet he was treated just the same as Byron Donalds. | |
| Here is Vivek Ramaswamy being cheered by the neo-Nazi crowd as he urges a vote for Adolf Hitler. | |
| If you want to seal the border, vote Trump. | |
| If you want to restore law and order in this country, vote Trump. | |
| If you want to grow the economy in this country, vote Trump. | |
| If you want to revive national pride in this country, vote Trump. | |
| If you want to stay out of World War III in this country, vote Trump. | |
| If you want to make America great again, vote Trump. | |
| I'm going to give you one more reason to vote Trump, and it's this. | |
| It's the one the media in the back, they won't talk about this. | |
| But they know it to be true. | |
| Donald Trump is actually the president who will unite this country, actually. | |
| And we don't talk about that enough. | |
| America first includes all Americans, regardless of their race, their gender, or their sexual orientation. | |
| Very strange Nazi messaging. | |
| By the way, Donald Trump himself was speaking earlier this week about his Jewish grandchildren as a result of his daughter, widely reputed to be his favorite child, Ivanka, having converted to Judaism in order to marry Jared Ivanka, having converted to Judaism in order to marry Jared Kushner. | |
| And he was speaking with love and affection about his Jewish grandchildren. | |
| He was also speaking about the imminent grandchild he's going to have who will be half Arab as a result of his daughter's Tiffany's marriage to a man of Arab descent, meaning that his grandchild will be half Arab as well. | |
| And he was speaking about the pride he has knowing that there will be a half Arab grandchild in his family. | |
| Now, obviously, you can look at Donald Trump's policies. | |
| You can claim they are whatever you want them to be. | |
| You can call them extreme, you can call them dangerous, you can call them fascist even if you want. | |
| But the inarguable fact of the matter, and this has been true for quite a long time, is that Donald Trump's movement is a very multiracial movement, both in its leadership and in its followers. | |
| And polls suggest that it's becoming more multiracial, more working class and more multiracial by the minute. | |
| And so whatever you want to say about that rally yesterday... | |
| The one thing I think it's preposterous to say is exactly what the media is saying, because it is Kamala Harris's closing theme as we head into the election. | |
| Not what she will do for people with our policies, not what she will do to improve their material life, not what Donald Trump's policies will do that will be detrimental to people's lives, but instead that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler and that his movement is a neo-Nazi one. | |
| And if you look at this rally, the actual rally, not the one depicted in the American media, but the actual rally itself... | |
| One of the things it was, both in terms of the audience, in terms of the speakers, but especially in terms of the content, was extremely multiracial. | |
| And that seems unlike the Nazism that we all learned about in school and the Nazism that actually expressed itself in the late 1930s and 40s, not just in Germany, but in Italy and in sectors in the United States. | |
| A lot of people talk about the importance and virtues of independent media. | |
| They also talk a lot about the virtues and importance of preserving free speech on the Internet. | |
| But one of the things that both independent media needs and free speech on the Internet needs is some form of support in order to make it sustainable. | |
| In general, if you offer a free speech platform, most mainstream corporations will be driven away as advertisers because the media will immediately start accusing these companies of being associated with extremist content. | |
| And so the independent media platforms like Rumble have to find other ways to make themselves sustainable and to be able to compete with corporate media as an alternative. | |
| One of the things that Rumble has been doing is marketing and launching its own products that you can consume as a way of supporting its free speech mission. | |
| And one of those is Rumble's 1775 coffee, which is coffee that not only... | |
| It goes toward defending the cause of free speech, but it's actually extremely good tasting coffee to start here. | |
| Morning is ethically sourced from a family farm in the high altitude mountains of Bolivia. | |
| There are several rows to choose from. | |
| I always talked in the beginning about how the dark roast was my favorite. | |
| I've ended up kind of changing my mind about that. | |
| I have several different flavors that I would call my favorite, but I encourage you to try them all and see which one you like. | |
| It really does help with Rumble's mission of preserving free speech on the Internet, resisting censorship from states and corporations alike. | |
| You can go to 1775coffee.com right now and pick up your first bag. | |
| You can use the promo code GLEN to save 15% off of your first order. | |
| You can know that your hard-earned dollars are going towards supporting Rumble and its mission of free speech and not some giant coffee corporation that has no values or one that's antagonistic to yours. | |
| You can wake up every day and choose a great coffee and a great cause by ordering at 1775coffee.com slash GLEN. | |
| And if you use the promo code Glenn, you will get 15% off of your first order. | |
| Nathan Robinson is the founder and publisher of the political affairs journal Current Affairs. | |
| He is also the author of several different books, one of which is a newly published book that he has published, along with Noam Chomsky, that is largely a critique of US foreign policy by Noam Chomsky throughout the years. | |
| It's entitled The Myth of American Idealism, How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World. | |
| Nathan has written for a lot of other places, including having been a columnist for The Guardian. | |
| He's written in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Salon, and elsewhere. | |
| I've known Nathan for a long time. | |
| I've always admired what he's done with current affairs, and I am happy to speak with him tonight about this new book and related matters. | |
| Nathan, it is great to see you. | |
| How are you? | |
| Hey, Glenn. | |
| Nice to see you. | |
| How are you doing? | |
| I'm doing well. | |
| So let's talk about not necessarily the content of the book yet, but the kind of process by which you've written it. | |
| Because when you look at the cover, and we shouldn't judge books by its cover, but nonetheless, there is a cover. | |
| And the cover has both you and Noam Chomsky listed as the authors of the book, essentially Noam Chomsky first and you second. | |
| You wrote the preface to the book, but I'm just wondering what Chomsky's involvement was in the compilation of the book itself. | |
| We all know that he's been of ill health for a while. | |
| A lot of these are sort of excerpts of things he said and written, but it seems like Very much like you did a lot of work to make it fresh and new and applicable to current debates. | |
| Can you talk about the process of how the book was put together? | |
| Sure. | |
| So you mentioned the publication that I run, Current Affairs. | |
| Noam Chomsky became an early subscriber to that, and I interviewed him a couple of times for Current Affairs. | |
| And as many people have, I struck up a correspondence with him. | |
| And he hadn't published a book of original writing in a long time. | |
| And it struck me that a lot of his, around 2021-2022, that a lot of his commentary on escalating tensions with China, on the war in Ukraine, were still very, I mean, he was 93, 94 at the time, but was still very vital and necessary. | |
| And so there was my belief that there should be a new... | |
| Noam Chomsky book that elaborated these critiques for our time. | |
| So I approached him in 2021, 22, and said, you know, would you be willing to work with me on producing something new? | |
| And I said, what I want to do is I want to Talk it through with you what you think your most kind of valuable points are, and I'll help kind of compile them. | |
| We can rework them, we can update them, we can add new sources, and we can put out something that really powerfully articulates this message and this warning Because increasingly, over the years, Professor Chomsky's message has been a warning that the world is in great peril from US power. | |
| And he agreed to the project. | |
| And so for a year, we went back and forth. | |
| And first, I sort of compiled everything he'd said on a topic. | |
| And then I went through with him. | |
| And said, you know, what do you think is important? | |
| What needs expressing? | |
| And we finessed these chapters. | |
| As you mentioned, he unfortunately, in the middle of last year, had a stroke, which has left him unable to complete the book. | |
| We were very close to finish, so we had this manuscript. | |
| So I have to kind of finish from the notes that we had. | |
| And readers will notice that in the Israel-Palestine chapter... | |
| His stroke occurred before October 7th, so he was unable to produce new commentary. | |
| So for that chapter, I've written in my own voice, not in his voice, a, you know, a postscript going through what's happened in Gaza in the year since. | |
| But up until that, this is like, you know, some of it's drawn from things he's written previously and said previously, interviews over the past few years, but sort of... | |
| But edited into a kind of coherent new book. | |
| So that's what we did. | |
| And I was very fortunate to be able to do that in the year leading up to his unfortunate decline in health. | |
| Yeah, I don't think it would take a great deal of... | |
| about the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, especially for someone such as yourself who's been reading and studying and has been so influenced by Chomsky's thoughts over the years. | |
| And that's actually something I wanted to ask you in your preface. | |
| You described the process by which you first became aware of Chomsky's writings, especially on foreign policy, and talked about how it was sort of this transformative, life-changing event for you. | |
| Something certainly I would say the same for myself. | |
| I think actually everybody who has anything meaningful to say as a critique of U.S. foreign policy, whether they know it or not, is influenced directly or indirectly by Chomsky in some way. | |
| But what was it about... | |
| The things that you first got exposed to as a result of reading his writings on foreign policy that were so eye-opening or so kind of altering for you of your perspective. | |
| I mean, what was the stuff that he was saying that you weren't really getting exposed to previously? | |
| Well, you know, I was in high school at the time of the Iraq War. | |
| I graduated high school in 2007. | |
| And you were actively writing during... | |
| I graduated high school in 2006. | |
| So, yeah, we were basically the same age. | |
| Well, you know, so you remember the poisonous, discursive environment of the time in which kind of we were saturated with jingoistic messages post 9-11, very similar to I just heard Rudy Giuliani talking there. | |
| And you mentioned that Rudy Giuliani is still seeing the same song that he sang after 9-11. | |
| But then he was pretty uncritically celebrated by everyone in the country. | |
| He was America's mayor. | |
| He was considered the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008 at one point, I believe. | |
| And that kind of rhetoric about the terrorists want to kill us all. | |
| They're raised from birth to try and destroy America. | |
| All they want to do is kill Americans. | |
| I mean, that was everywhere. | |
| And, you know, one of the things that Chomsky does so skillfully is to unravel propaganda and to show you that what you're seeing is propaganda and to excavate all of the real facts. | |
| I mean, he has had an immense command of source material. | |
| So, you know, this book has 80 pages of endnotes, which is very typical for a Chomsky book. | |
| And he goes through mainstream media sources, sources in the foreign press, and shows that everything you're told, oftentimes, and not just about the Iraq War, which I think a lot of Americans came to understand was deeply immoral and understood that they'd been lied into, but even the Afghanistan War, Chomsky was showing that we were being lied to about. | |
| And there was information like the fact that the Taliban had showed a willingness to turn over Osama bin Laden. | |
| This was something that Americans were never told. | |
| They were never told of possible alternate paths that could have averted the catastrophic war. | |
| They were never told that Afghan opponents of the Taliban hated what the United States was doing in Afghanistan. | |
| And so there was all sorts of information that was concealed that basically you could only read in the works of Noam Chomsky and, you know, a few other people on the left. | |
| But I mean, he was finding this stuff. | |
| And when you read it, it really transforms your understanding. | |
| I mean, we have, I went through a lot of his Vietnam War writings for this book. | |
| You know, he flips your understanding of the Vietnam War on its head. | |
| You still hear people like Democratic Senator John Fetterman saying that the Vietnam War was a war for democracy. | |
| And, you know, Chomsky just explodes all of this with all of this documentation. | |
| Yeah, you know, I found it so interesting, this incident earlier this year, when a bunch of young people who either weren't born or were way too young to remember the time after 9-11, and they all remember from having absorbed it in the culture that 9-11 happened because these and they all remember from having absorbed it in the culture that 9-11 happened because these terrorists And they discovered the Ben Laden letter went super viral on TikTok. | |
| And they were all saying, oh, my God, there's like this other way to look at why 9-11 happened. | |
| It wasn't necessarily because they hated us for our freedom. | |
| It's because of all the things we've been doing in their region. | |
| And this was so dangerous that they actually had to ban the discussion of it on TikTok, remove the Bin Laden letter from the Guardian's website so no one could longer read it any longer. | |
| Yes, our former employer. | |
| Yeah, and it really shows how despite... | |
| Yes, your former employer who became your former employer because of your own views on Israel that they thought were outside of the scope. | |
| And you kind of realize how... | |
| Even though Chomsky began talking about how constrained and constricted our political discourse was back in the 70s and 80s when, you know, all you had was, you know, three networks, a few national newspapers, pretty much all of the same ideology. | |
| There was the sense first that cable news and now the Internet would wildly expand the scope of it because of how easily we could expose ourselves to other alternatives and other ways of looking at things like Chomsky did for you and so many people. | |
| And I'm wondering what you make of how... | |
| Much that's become true, whether there's this sort of attempt to ensure that the proliferation of platforms and views on the internet does not actually have that effect of being able to expand the scope of ideas to which people can be exposed. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's a hard question, because I think there are multiple tendencies here. | |
| On the one hand, it is true, and you and I kind of prove that it's true through our work, right? | |
| The fact that we both now have platforms where we can express these critiques to an independent audience, and when you look back... | |
| at what Chomsky was doing in the '70s and '80s. | |
| Basically, he was completely shut out of the mainstream media. | |
| The New York Times just wouldn't review his books. | |
| And if the New York Times didn't review your book, nobody would pay attention to you, and you would be consigned to little tiny, tiny, tiny circulation lefty journals that would reach a few thousand people. | |
| And it was really, really hard to get these critiques in front of eyeballs. | |
| And now it's better. | |
| But it's not that much better. | |
| And, you know, your example of the Bin Laden letter, right, is a great example. | |
| Because on the one hand, because TikTok exists, people could find this and they could say, wow, this perspective, right, we don't agree with Bin Laden necessarily, but the fact is that letter begins, why did we attack you, right? | |
| We attacked you because you attacked us. | |
| And he cites the U.S. support for Israel. | |
| He cites a massacre in Lebanon that Israel committed in the 1990s. | |
| He cites U.S. support for Arab dictatorships. | |
| And the sanctions regime in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| That's right. | |
| And so on the one hand, people are able to find that people are able to spread that. | |
| But on the other, as you point out, there are there are mechanisms that quickly come into place. | |
| And you saw U.S. officials quick, quickly saying quite openly that one of the reasons they had to get tech talk out of Chinese hands was Was so that we would have more control over the content. | |
| And it was pretty clear that there was a direct link between, you know, kids discovering the truth about Gaza or discovering that there is another side to U.S. wars, that there are people with different opinions around the world and different motivations, and you can hear from them, and actually they have arguments. | |
| And it was pretty clear that that was so frightening that we had to... | |
| Now, we haven't succeeded so far in taking TikTok out of Chinese ownership. | |
| And it's true that you and I do have the platforms that we have. | |
| But I think you're right that there are... | |
| The institutions that Chomsky identified as the manufacturers of consent, they're still there and they're still very powerful. | |
| And what gets printed in the New York Times still in many ways determines what anyone with any influence is going to think of as the basic facts of the world. | |
| Yeah, I mean, for me, the internet, you know, because it sort of emerged in the early part or middle part of my life, became this kind of instrument that I thought could, in a very unprecedented way, expand the scope of ideas to which people would be exposed, and therefore automatically expand the range of ideas that were not just permitted, but that you could actually reach people on a large-scale basis. | |
| And it's one of the reasons why I regard this attempt by states or corporations to To kind of commandeer control of the internet and reduce the range of ideas that can be heard or at least can be reached by a meaningful audience to be so menacing. | |
| Let me ask you, earlier today I had, by coincidence, root canal. | |
| So I knew that any... | |
| The interview that I did with you was going to be very pleasurable, at least in comparison to what I was suffering five hours ago. | |
| And whenever I go to the dentist, what I try and do to distract myself is I just listen to long lectures that are like an hour, an hour and a half. | |
| A lot of times Chomsky ones, but other ones as well. | |
| And I listen to, and I think in anticipation of your coming on, An interview that was actually the interview that he gave, the full interview that was used for Manufacturing Consent, the book that he wrote and then the great film that was made. | |
| Based on the book from 1989, it was the kind of raw interview that he did. | |
| And there were a couple of sections that I found very interesting that I wanted to play for you to get your reaction to. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Let's do it. | |
| How it is that the media, and again, this is 19, it's actually 1990 or 1989, talking a lot about the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Grenada. | |
| And he was specifically talking about why it is that he spends most of his time attacking not conservative voices in the media, but left liberal voices in the media. | |
| And here's what he has to say. | |
| It's about two and a half minutes, but I really think it's worth listening to so we can talk about it. | |
| All right, let's play these. | |
| And what that means is that the role of liberalism is to set bounds on discussion. | |
| There's supposed to be a spectrum of discussion. | |
| That's very crucial if you want to establish illusions. | |
| You've got to make it look as if there's a debate going on. | |
| But you have to ensure that that debate is within very specific bounds. | |
| And the bounds of the debate, the assumptions of the debate, that's the propaganda system. | |
| Now, unless you accept those assumptions, you're not even part of the discussion. | |
| The assumptions are the United States has the right to do anything it feels like. | |
| We stand for right and good is defined as what we do, except we're allowed to make mistakes sometimes because nobody's perfect. | |
| We are free and democratic. | |
| Whatever we have is basically perfect, aside from some mistakes which we can fix up. | |
| That's the balance of the debate. | |
| If you accept that, you're part of the debate. | |
| And then you can be either a conservative who says, you know, let's be more brutal and harsh, or a liberal who says, well, you know, maybe it'll cost us too much unless we're a little softer. | |
| But you have to accept... | |
| Alright, so that's the first question. | |
| I just want to play the other two quickly that are very much part of this answer. | |
| We just sort of added it for concision because he doesn't always answer questions in very short periods of time. | |
| Let's start that from the beginning. | |
| The fact of the matter is that by and large the media do represent I'm sort of liberalism, like I suppose most journalists vote democratic. | |
| So that I agree with. | |
| But I think that that completely misunderstands the function of liberalism in a system of necessary illusions. | |
| In fact, if you look at my work, I mostly criticize the liberals, even the left liberals. | |
| I don't waste much time discussing George Will. | |
| That's a joke. | |
| But what's interesting to me is people like Anthony Lewis and Tom Wicker and, you know, the whole liberal establishment, the liberal journal, like, you know, what's called the liberal establishment, the Times, the Post, you know, and so on. | |
| And I agree that they do generally represent liberalism. | |
| Their liberalism is, well, let's take the Vietnam War again. | |
| There were hawks who said, if we try harder, we'll win. | |
| And then there were doves, the liberals, who said, well, it's costing us too much and probably it's not going to work, so let's not win. | |
| Now, personally, I much prefer the hawks. | |
| At least they're honest. | |
| The doves are just totally dishonest. | |
| They basically agree with the hawks. | |
| They just say we're not going to get away with it. | |
| In fact, some of them said it explicitly. | |
| Like, say, Arthur Schlesinger, a leading liberal historian and spokesman, his view was, well, you know, I hope the Hawks are right, but I don't think they are. | |
| And if they are right, and we can win, even though we'll leave ruin and destruction, he said, we'll all be praising the wisdom of the American government. | |
| It's just that it doesn't look like it's going to work. | |
| All right, Nathan, so there's a lot in there with which I empathize a great deal. | |
| I'm wondering, I have a lot of specific questions, but I'm just wondering in general what your reaction is to his view about why it's more important to critique and to dismantle the kind of propagandistic framework of left liberalism and the left liberal wing of the media than it is the right-wing or conservative faction. | |
| Yeah, so he articulated in pretty much every U.S. war from the Vietnam War to the present day, he articulated some version of this. | |
| And it's really powerful and important because once you see it, it's very illuminating, right? | |
| He says, look for the spectrum of debate. | |
| And in the Vietnam War, as he said there, it was between those who said we can't win versus those who said we can. | |
| And he goes on to say that what about the position that we shouldn't win because the war is fundamentally immoral, that we have no right to impose upon Vietnam a government of our own choosing, that we believe that the will of the people of Vietnam should determine the government of Vietnam. | |
| And the same is true, he pointed out, in the Iraq debate, in the Afghanistan debate. | |
| And I think today, and this goes to why it's so important to analyze liberal premises, as you look at the war in Gaza, you have people on the right like Rudy Giuliani, who, as he said, are quite honest. | |
| They say, well, you know, we have to support Israel no matter what, even if they want to wipe the Palestinians off the face of the earth. | |
| The Palestinians are terrorists and, you know, that's basically justice. | |
| But I think you would find, I mean, we don't know, I don't want to say what Chomsky would say if he could say, if he could be analyzing the present war, but consistent with his prior analysis is, but if you look at the Biden administration and Biden and Harris, the way they talk, he was talking there about how the liberals are more dishonest. | |
| And the Biden-Harris administration has been insisting that it is pushing for a ceasefire, that it laments But this is, of course, completely dishonest. | |
| We know this from the State Department officials who have quit. | |
| We know that the Biden-Harris administration could at any point have stopped the war and has chosen not to. | |
| So there is that deeper dishonesty. | |
| And that's what requires exposing, right? | |
| That's what requires some work. | |
| Rudy Giuliani is not lying. | |
| There's nothing to expose there. | |
| And once you see the falsity of the liberal narrative, then you see what the shared premise is, and you see the spectrum. | |
| And the spectrum runs from being dishonest about supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza versus being honest about supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza. | |
| But it's really, really important to expose the dishonesty because then you see that there is a shared premise across the political class of support for a monstrous atrocity. | |
| Yeah, what he says in this other clip we have, which I'm not going to play, I'll just summarize what he said because I find it so enlightening, is that actually by calling the media the left, or calling them the liberal media or whatever, or calling Joe Biden or Kamala Harris the left, which no leftist does, but a lot of even mainstream media discourse refers to the Democratic Party as the left. | |
| The crazy leftists like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden occasionally pretend to push back a little bit on the worst of the humanitarian crimes committed in Gaza. | |
| I heard Matthew Miller today saying, we're very much against this bill to ban funding for the UN agency that is the only one that can distribute food. | |
| We want more food to enter northern Gaza. | |
| So that if that's the most liberal position, then someone like yourself or like me, who just say the entire Israeli war is fundamentally unjust, we shouldn't be paying for it, we should be doing everything to stop it, seem almost out of the frame, like not even something that people can begin to comprehend. | |
| Is that something in your own work? | |
| That you think that you do or try to do, in other words, like one of the things that drives me crazy is this Republican attack, this Trump-Republican attack that somehow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have abandoned Israel, when in reality Joe Biden is easily one of the most pro-Israel politicians in Washington and has been for decades, and they are funding and arming the entire war. | |
| So part of what I want to do, as you said, everyone knows that You know, Trump is out there funded by Miriam Adelson saying, we're going to make Israel great again and we're going to do everything for Israel and let them go. | |
| And everyone understands that, but what they don't understand is that Biden and Harris and their supporters are maybe not rhetorically identical, but in fact all but identical. | |
| So is that something that you prioritize as well, this idea of kind of trying to shed light on what left liberalism, mainstream left liberalism in the United States is really about? | |
| Yeah, because it's a problem when there's a consensus between both the Republicans and the Democrats on something that's false, right? | |
| So Trump and the right think that Democrats are pro-Palestinian, pro-negotiations. | |
| The Biden administration will say, well, yes, we believe in Palestinian human rights and we're pro-negotiations, and we have a debate on the basis of that premise. | |
| But in fact, the Biden State Department has admitted that they said, well, actually, we're not in favor. | |
| We've never been in favor. | |
| There's that quote, we've never been in favor of negotiations with Hamas. | |
| We believe in the ultimate destruction of Hamas. | |
| So the actual fact, right, is that Both parties have a mutual interest in misrepresenting where the parties stand. | |
| And so it's the job of us in independent media to say, no, actually, Biden doesn't support negotiations either. | |
| He doesn't support a negotiated settlement. | |
| They support this kabuki diplomacy, this fake diplomacy, where they pretend to be pushing for a ceasefire while actually making sure that a ceasefire will never happen, that a two-state settlement will never happen, And so these facts that are mutually convenient to ignore, | |
| so like Trump isn't going to mention that the Biden-Harris administration has opposed a two-state settlement at the UN and refuses to recognize a Palestinian state, and the Biden administration isn't going to highlight that fact either. | |
| It's just like how neither Trump nor Biden wants to draw attention to how friendly to the fossil fuel industry Biden has been. | |
| There's a mutual interest in pretending these things are otherwise. | |
| So we, outside of this, have to say, no, actually, they're both pretending that the world is other than it actually is. | |
| So let me ask you about Ukraine. | |
| One of the things I'm very happy about is that Chomsky was able to weigh in on the beginning parts of the war in Ukraine actually for the first year or so because I think it was kind of a reminder of how disparate sort of classic American left critique of foreign policy is as represented by Chomsky and a lot of the modern day even you could call it the left wing of the Democratic Party for instance Chomsky was very adamant about the fact that | |
| the Russian invasion was unjust but that much of it was provoked by the United States and by NATO and that a lot of our own behavior contributed to that in a lot of ways and yet that view was completely unrepresented Throughout the entire Democratic Party, | |
| from AOC and Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar to Joe Manchin and whoever, and you have a section of the book on Ukraine, and I'm just wondering, do you feel like... | |
| Even left-wing politics, the mainstream left-wing politics, the part of it that's within the Democratic Party on the left flank, has moved further away from the standard Chomskyite critique of foreign policy, of the U.S. security state, of the CIA, of how propaganda works, of the U.S. role in the world? | |
| Or do you think that it's always been that kind of gap? | |
| To me, Ukraine represents so much how this gap, how wide this gap now is. | |
| It's hard to say whether it represents a change, because as you pointed out, and as Chomsky has pointed out, the leftmost wing of the mainstream Democratic Party has always been critical of US wars only in a very limited way. | |
| And that's been true for a very long time. | |
| So, you know, many of the critiques that he would make of Democrats on Ukraine, he was making in the 60s of the supposed doves on Vietnam. | |
| So I don't actually know whether I would say it's a change, but it's certainly a real tendency. | |
| And that is, you know, you could see in the fact that I think When the Congressional Progressive Caucus put out that letter that just suggested that there should be the beginnings of diplomacy with Russia, they were quickly denounced by everyone in the higher-ups of the party, and they had to withdraw and go, Oh, no, no, we don't actually believe in diplomacy. | |
| We believe in endless weapons. | |
| And that just became, you know, the very idea of diplomacy. | |
| That's one of the things that's emphasized in this chapter. | |
| And in fact, the Ukraine analysis is one of the reasons why I really, really wanted to make sure there was a new Chomsky book out, because as you said, he had been talking a lot about that war. | |
| Because it's exactly the sort of issue where his analysis is so crucial. | |
| As you mentioned, it doesn't forgive Vladimir Putin at all. | |
| He says it was just as illegal as the war in Iraq, and anyone who knows Chomsky's opinion on the war in Iraq knows that that is no defense of it. | |
| So, you know, he there is a very valuable voice going against, as you say, even those who are considered as far left as you can get within the Democratic Party. | |
| And still, these basic facts... | |
| You know, the fact that incredible Russia analysts in the United States diplomatic establishment have been warning for decades that the expansion of NATO was a provocative action that was going to cause a Russian backlash and lead to conflict. | |
| These basic facts, or the fact that we avoided every possible opportunity for diplomacy because a war actually was kind of in the United States' self-interest. | |
| These basic facts that Chomsky pointed out over and over and over, We're just unable to be stated within the mainstream. | |
| Yeah, let me just push a little bit more on this because it's something that really interests me. | |
| So during the Vietnam War, which obviously was begun under and then prosecuted by two consecutive Democratic presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but then also by Richard Nixon, There was, you know, a lot of mainstream left liberalism that agreed with Chomsky. | |
| Maybe it didn't go as far as he did in terms of how he framed it as it being an attack on or invasion of South Korea. | |
| But nonetheless, it was obviously a massive anti-war movement that was not just based on what liberal columnists in The New York Times and The Washington Post were saying, which is that we should stop because we can't win, but what was based on the immorality of the war itself or how many people we were killing or how many people were dying. | |
| And then you look at the 1980s, and one of the things that surprised me when I went back and looked at some of these Senate debates was that the main foreign policy debate under the Reagan administration was a lot of these dirty wars in Central America and Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador. | |
| And if you listen to Democratic senators at the time, they were trying to do everything they could to stop Reagan's funding of a lot of these terrorist groups or coup governments that they had installed. | |
| And they would even, you know, do it by, say, implementing legislation that banned the funding of terrorist groups. | |
| So they were calling U.S. allies in the region terror groups. | |
| And it was a pretty radical critique of Reagan's foreign policy, I think, throughout the 70s and 80s because of things like the Church Commission and a lot of the understanding of what the CIA was doing. | |
| Very much embedded in at least left-wing politics, mainstream left-wing politics, with a critique of the U.S. security state. | |
| I know when I did the Snowden reporting, there was a lot of left-wing support for the critique of the NSA and concerns of what they were doing. | |
| To me, it seems like a lot of that has dissipated, if not gone away completely. | |
| I think you rarely hear that sort of critique anymore in left-wing. | |
| I think it's true for a lot of reasons, including some reactionary stuff involving Trump. | |
| But I'm wondering if you see it the same way, if you see that having always been the same or some kind of change in that way. | |
| Well, it's true that one of the things that is so admirable about Chomsky, in my opinion, is that he's always been a principled civil libertarian. | |
| He's always been someone who has championed free speech. | |
| He's even been someone who has gotten into an awful lot of trouble over it, as when he's been, you know, defended Holocaust deniers, right to free speech. | |
| And I do think that the basic understanding The basic civil libertarian argument, the freedom for the speech that we despise and the warning that even if government power you can use towards your ends now, | |
| there's still a major danger in expanding the use of government power and you still need to take into account the fact that empowering a censor Is a great risk, even if the censor is on your side in the short term. | |
| These are arguments that I do think Chomsky is probably more alone in making in the latter ten years of his life. | |
| I do think that civil libertarian leftism is incredibly important. | |
| Chomsky always identified with the anarchist or libertarian socialist tradition. | |
| You do hear a lot of casual demands, the government police hate speech, and without recognition of the concern, of the risk of that. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, I think there is a civil libertarian tradition on the left that he represents that... | |
| I don't know how strong it ever was, but you're right to identify that in the 1980s, the pushback on the Reagan administration in Congress was a lot stronger than you're seeing, you know, like with the Gaza situation, right? | |
| just lining up to condemn anything perceived as anti-Semitism to, you know, massive weapons, almost complete consensus for increased weapons aids to Israel, almost no dissent on Ukraine. | |
| So, yeah, that is a change. | |
| And it is something that I think that obviously Chomsky would be incredibly critical of. | |
| And I do suggest that people go back and listen to the parts of his critique that are discomforting, because they're the parts where he defends the rights of those you don't like. | |
| Yeah, I mean, he certainly thought, and I, you know, for as long as he could speak for But I remember him telling me, and I don't know if this is consistent with what you've talked to me about as well, that a lot of times the Democrats seem to be... | |
| To be angriest or find most objectionable, the parts of Trump that actually you could look at as almost being a positive, such as his desire to foster better relations with Russia and not to be as antagonistic. | |
| What he thought Trump was so dangerous on was things like climate change and I think that principally was the argument. | |
| But I do want to ask you, this is the final question. | |
| It is true that despite how critical Chomsky has been of left liberal politics and the Democratic Party and the like, and even left liberal political thinking, every four years he would sort of pop up and just sort of say like, hey, by the way, there's an election coming up. | |
| I think you should go and vote for the Democratic Party candidate because on balance, they're the lesser of two evils and these differences, so they seem small, actually can be pretty meaningful in people's lives. | |
| And he's done that through every election, at least for as long as I can remember. | |
| You earlier used the phrase genocide for what you believe the Biden and Harris administration are supporting in Israel. | |
| And Chomsky is not here to speak for himself, so we can't sort of conclude one way or the other. | |
| But I'm wondering, in your view, because I believe you've been a supporter of this chumpskate idea that you should vote Democrat and then go right back to criticizing them, whether there's any kind of red line that a party should not cross in order for people still to be willing whether there's any kind of red line that a party should not cross So it's one thing to say Democrats have done a lot of things I find immoral. | |
| They've supported a lot of wars I dislike. | |
| But on balance, I still find them better, so I'm going to vote for them. | |
| But you have used the word genocide, meaning that the Democrats have actually crossed the line of supporting a genocide. | |
| If you want to talk about how Chomsky would you think Chomsky would see that spy now? | |
| I'm interested in how you see that as well. | |
| I mean, is there any line at all that a party can cross where they become ineligible for a defense on lesser of two evil grounds? | |
| Well, I think you have to distinguish between what you use the phrase support. | |
| Chomsky, when he talked about voting, basically boiled voting down to the fact that one of two outcomes are going to occur in the world. | |
| Unless there is something incredibly unexpected that's going to happen, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is going to win the 2024 election. | |
| And so the way Chomsky looked at voting had nothing to do with red lines. | |
| There are all kinds of red lines you would have if you were... | |
| I mean, you would never be able to vote for one of the two candidates. | |
| He saw a bundle of consequences here and a bundle of consequences there. | |
| And he said, which of these sets of consequences is marginally worse than the other? | |
| And that was basically the end of the analysis. | |
| And because he believed that Trump was worse than Joe Biden on definitely on climate change, which he increasingly has talked about as the central issue facing humankind in the 20 in the 21st century. | |
| And also on war, actually, because, you know, he believed and I believe that Trump's anti-war posture is largely a posture and that the foreign policy ends up being pretty similarly bellicose. | |
| And the fact that I think you would see, if anything, a worse policy on Gaza in the Trump administration that basically ends the analysis. | |
| Like which of these sets of consequences for him or for you than the other for him or for you? | |
| I think. | |
| I think for me also, I think that I would definitely prefer that Donald Trump not win because I think it's going to be worse on pretty much everything that I care about. | |
| I also think that climate and nuclear proliferation and the war in Gaza are probably the most morally serious issues. | |
| That's true. | |
| Although you were just saying just a little bit earlier that Joe Biden is as friendly to... | |
| Fossil fuels as the Republican Party. | |
| I mean, so is there really any meaningful difference in terms of the impact on climate change? | |
| No, I don't know. | |
| Well, I, we know that, I don't know if it's actually the case that, I mean, I think Donald Trump's climate policy would be worse than Joe Biden's. | |
| Because that's what he says. | |
| Basically, he says we're going to tear up every single climate, what he calls the Green New Scam. | |
| He talks as if the Green New Deal actually happened. | |
| He says we're going to tear up every single effort and we're going to ramp up fossil fuel production as much as possible. | |
| So I do think Trump's climate policy would be probably worse than Biden's, and that the chances for meaningful climate action are basically zero under a Trump administration, whereas I do think that a Democratic administration could perhaps be pressured. | |
| It's not a good alternative, but you're just looking at marginal differences. | |
| Yeah, no, I get it. | |
| I mean, I think there's a good argument to make that especially when it comes to war, there is kind of this more instinctive anti-war aversion, not for moral reasons, but just for a whole variety of other reasons about Trump's view of America and the world versus Democrats. | |
| That makes war less likely. | |
| And I think you saw that in the first term. | |
| But that's a whole other separate debate. | |
| I really I know on balance you believe the Democrats are better. | |
| I understand why someone might think that I was just really more interested in this idea of is there any red line like genocide. | |
| But I get your point, too, that if you certainly listen to Chomsky over the last 50 years, it's not like this is some brand new immorality on the part of the U.S. government of either party. | |
| There's always been red lines crossed by everyone. | |
| And yet he still maintains. | |
| Yeah, I mean, Vietnam was even deadlier than Gaza. | |
| But I think I'm fairly sure he would have supported Humphrey over Nixon, even though obviously he was repulsed by both. | |
| Yeah, yeah, or McGovern over Nixon as well. | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| Well, one of the things I just want to say as we let you go is that I do think there was a while where Chomsky was becoming kind of Where people who had previously been very closed off to him were becoming more open to him as there was a lot more questioning in different political sectors about the U.S. security state and U.S. foreign policy. | |
| I think some of COVID kind of changed that, but at least in foreign policy, I really do think that anybody who's looking at the United States from a critical point of view can only benefit from reading Chomsky, especially because the further you go back, and I think your book shows this so well, | |
| this critique has been so applicable I hope it does well. | |
| I hope a lot of people read it, and I appreciate you coming on tonight. | |
| Thanks very much, Glenn. | |
| All right. | |
| So that concludes our show for this evening. | |
| We had a segment that we had planned to do that we'll likely do tomorrow night about the very contentious interview that J.D. Vance had with Jake Tapper in which, amazingly, Jake Tapper just outright denied that he and his network had spread the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theories both in 2016 and 2020 Jake Tapper just outright denied that he and his network had spread the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theories both in 2016 and 2020 when there's ample evidence and video and other places that we were about to show | |
| It's just kind of a window into how corporate media just refuses to accept any accountability. | |
| I think a major reason why so many Americans have come to hate and distrust them, justifiably so. | |
| But assuming there's no unanticipated event between now and tomorrow night, we'll likely include that segment in tomorrow night's show. | |
| As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. | |
| You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms. | |
| If you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of the show. | |
| As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, where we have our live interactive after show. | |
| That after show is available only for members of our Locals community. | |
| So if you'd like to join, which gives you access not just to those after shows, but to multiple interactive features. | |
| We have a lot of original, exclusive content, interviews, and segments that we don't have time to put here that we post on the local show. | |
| It is the place we publish written, professionalized transcripts of every program we broadcast here. | |
| We publish transcripts there the next day. | |
| But most of all, it is the community on which we rely to enable this program to continue to support the independent journalism that we do here every night. | |
| All you have to do is click join right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community. | |
| For those who have been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble. | |
| Have a great evening, everybody. |