DC Attacks Trump's Most Disruptive Picks; Biden Authorizes Massive Escalation With Russia; Joe & Mika Meet With "Hitler"
Washington most vehemently attacks and scrutinizes Trump's appointees who pledge to disrupt the establishment status quo. Biden authorizes a major escalation with Russia as a lame-duck president. PLUS: The "Morning Joe" co-hosts make a pilgrimage to meet with Trump ("Hitler").
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This is Glenn Greenwald with a brand new episode of System Update, an on-the-road episode.
We're trying this again.
We had a little bit of an audio problem.
That was actually my fault.
I think it's...
People in the chat will tell me system updates.
As you know, it's 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.
And yes, I did see people in the chat observing quite cattily that this is the same thing I wore when I appeared earlier today on the Megyn Kelly show.
It's actually not true.
I did change my tie.
I think the shirt is actually different as well, but I understand that the color coordination is It's the same.
I'm actually traveling because I'm doing a different show tomorrow and have to wear something tomorrow.
I only am traveling for a few days, so you'll just have to...
We have a lot to get to tonight, including the fact that, first of all, there is a major war underway against several of Donald Trump's Nominees for his cabinet, for other positions in his administration, and quite notably, the war is being waged only on the group of nominees who are there to disrupt and fundamentally overhaul the agencies that they're appointed to lead.
Disagreement or dispute about the most pro-establishment sorts of status quo perpetuating appointees, people like Marco Rubio for Secretary of State or Elise Stefanik for Ambassador to the UN or John Ratcliffe to head the CIA. Washington, including Democrats in the media, are thrilled with those appointments.
Those are the kinds of appointments that Kamala Harris would have made, that Liz Cheney could have made.
They will likely play a different role in the administration, but the ones they're really intent on ensuring don't end up with approval are the people like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth and RFK and Matt Gaetz, because they're there to fulfill Donald but the ones they're really intent on ensuring don't end up with approval are the people like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth and RFK and
Obviously, the permanent power faction is most afraid of that, and they're therefore going to devote all their energy to stopping those appointees in a way which I think is very revealing.
Then Joe Biden, or whoever acts in the name of Joe Biden, has announced an extremely dangerous and serious escalation of the war in Ukraine and with Russia.
And he's doing it with about a month ago in his presidency, in his presidency, essentially doing something that the administration itself has long refused to do on the grounds that it's so dangerous and escalatory, and making it, A, very difficult for Donald Trump to come in and negotiate a peace deal, but also making it very difficult to avoid the kind of escalation that but also making it very difficult to avoid the kind of escalation that through sheer luck we've
Namely, Biden has authorized Ukraine to use a TACM's missile, which the United States has provided them, in order to strike deep interruption territory
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has long said that the red line for him, what he will consider the entrance of NATO and the United States as a belligerent in this war to be, is if they authorize the use of those kinds of missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory, in large part because the Ukrainians don't have the capabilities of To do it on their own,
it would actually take the direct involvement of the United States or other NATO countries to help guide those missiles to launch them, and that would mean the United States and or NATO would in fact be a direct belligerent against Russia in this war.
An extremely dangerous and risky thing to do, especially while Biden's on his way out, when he obviously has no idea what's going on.
People are doing this in his name.
And to take these risks now when the war is, in everybody's eyes, finally something that is futile is remarkably reckless, to put that mildly.
It's almost sad to watch Democrats come to the realization that none of their leaders were serious when they were claiming that they viewed Donald Trump as the new Hitler, that they viewed him as some sort of white supremacist dictator who was going to end American democracy.
They got that realization first when Joe Biden, with a huge grin, warmly welcomed the new Hitler to the White House and promised his complete and full assistance in anything that Hitler needed in order to return back to power.
Many of them, including people like Charlemagne Tha God and a lot of liberal pundits, said, wait a minute, I thought you thought he was Hitler.
Why would you welcome him to the White House and offer assistance?
And two of the people in media who led the way in insisting that Trump was a Hitler figure, that he was going to be a dictator, that he was going to kill women, that he's a white supremacist, were Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who first in 2015 rode on Trump's coattails.
put him on the show all the time, including by phone, We're overtly supporters of Donald Trump.
And then only once Trump got the nomination and Joe Scarborough didn't get chosen as his vice president, which he was lobbying to do, did they turn against him.
They spent the last six years, seven years calling him Hitler, calling him a fascist.
And now that he's elected, And they're desperate to stay proximate to power.
They're desperate to find a new way to get people to watch their show.
They made a humiliating, degrading pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago where they humiliated themselves in front of Trump.
Anthony pled with him to talk to them again, to come on their show again.
And obviously a lot of people who used to believe them for some incredibly stupid reason are now realizing that they're just opportunist, craven grifters who never meant a word of what they said and still don't mean it.
And it's really reflective of this broader realization that with Trump back in power, virtually none of our power centers meant anything that they were saying in order to try unsuccessfully to convince the American public not to vote for Trump again because of how endangered they would be.
Alright, now, that's a lot to get to, and before we get to all that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of Cine Update, starting right now.
What's going on in Washington, but the, I think, most significant and also most revealing event center around most significant and also most revealing event center around a lot of the nominations that Donald Trump has chosen, and
And it's really interesting because he's chosen two different, almost antithetical classes of appointees.
One type is the very pro-establishment kind of expected, ordinary, normalized appointees that people expect to fill these cabinet positions, people who come from the Senate and are respected there, people who believe in bipartisan orthodoxy and have never in their careers threatened people who believe in bipartisan orthodoxy and have never in their
That would be people like Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Elise Stefanik as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, replacing the position that Nikki Haley held in the first Trump presidency, as well as others like John Ratcliffe, who will head the CIA.
And you'll notice you hear almost no negative commentary about any of them, even from Democrats.
In fact, Democrats hold those appointees up, like Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio, to say, no, these are the kinds of people we need.
These kind of people who, yeah, we disagree with, but they're fundamentally part of our system.
They won't threaten radically any sort of dogma or any institutional authority.
And these are the kinds of people we want.
And had Trump only confined himself to those sorts of people, I think there'd be a lot of concern, a lot of valid grievance that Trump's promise, his central promise for the last eight years of draining the swamp, of radically uprooting the corruption, the bipartisan corruption that drives the permanent power faction in Washington, a lot of people should be able to rightly say, well, how is it possible that you're going to achieve that, that you were serious about that, if these are the kinds of people you were appointing?
It would be sort of like...
Democrats saying for four years that Trump is Hitler, and then the minute that he wins the election, doing everything normalized, proving that they never meant it.
That would have been the reaction, I think, of a lot of Trump supporters is, wait a minute, you're promising to uproot the swamp, drain the swamp, and yet you're choosing representatives of the swamp, of the way it does business, of its ideology, to the point that Democrats are very happy with their choices?
But he isn't doing that.
He started by doing that.
Those were his first initial appointees that he unveiled, the first two being Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik, and everybody was fine with those, but now they have a series of appointees who are the exact opposite of what I just described, the kinds of people who are not expected to occupy these positions,
who have radically critiqued the way institutional authority and power in Washington have been corrupted, people who are there Not to continue or preserve the governing dogma of these agencies, but to radically transform them in the way that Donald Trump vowed would happen.
And those people include Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence, overseeing all the intel agencies.
It includes people like Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, Pete Hegseth to be the director.
Defense Secretary and, of course, RFK Jr.
to oversee the health agencies as the Director of Health and Human Services.
Now, it's really odd and interesting how these people are being attacked because it reeks of a kind of desperation.
You know the establishment is shocked and horrified that these kinds of individuals, ones who have been radical critics of Establishment DC, are now going to be ascending to some of the most influential and cherished positions in Washington.
But they don't really have much of a basis to attack them, but in their desperation to attack lies a great deal of important truth about how Washington functions on a bipartisan basis.
I thought for a long time that the thing that made them most upset was Matt Gaetz, and I still think that's probably true, but I'm starting to think that a close second Is the choice of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence precisely because Tulsi has been one of those people who back in 2014 and 2016 when she was on the left wing of the Democratic Party supporting Bernie Sanders from an anti-establishment perspective and then slowly transforming, realizing that the Republican Party provides a much better vehicle for challenging establishment dogma.
She's always been somebody that they viewed as very threatening, as someone they could not control.
And what gives her so much credibility in attacking the intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex is precisely the fact that as a young woman, she was deceived and misled into going to Iraq to fight for what she thought was her country's national security, only to learn that she had been lied to.
And that the war was just a regime change war to try and rebuild Iraqi society by changing the country and imposing leaders, new governments that we wanted.
And she realized how futile and wasteful that is of human life, of resources.
And as a result, like you can imagine, having gone to war as she did, Based on false pretenses, of course she is and should be a radical critic of the agencies that did that, then did so much after that, like trying to remove Bashar al-Assad and destroying Syria as we fought alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda, or trying to change the government of Libya.
These are not wars in the national interest or in the national security of the United States.
They're wars to feed the military industrial complex.
And so she is a particularly hated figure because of the importance of this position.
And they don't really have much they can attack her on other than screaming Russian agent.
We've gone over the many people who have done that.
But it's really intensified in, I think, a way that is worth looking at.
So earlier today, the New York Times has an article, the headline of which is how Tulsi Gabbard became a favorite of Russia's state media.
President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the director of national intelligence has raised alarm among national security officials.
Now, let me just say, when you see career professionals at the Justice Department crying, literally crying at the prospect that Matt Gaetz might be the attorney general, when you see the people who have run and built our massive health industry inside the government express when you see the people who have run and built our massive health industry inside the government express indignation and horror at RFK Jr.'s probable assent to lead that agency, when you see long-time defense contractors and agency.
When you see long-time defense contractors and defense officials who have worked their way through the Pentagon bureaucracy be horrified that someone like Pete Hedsgeth could be appointed to run that sprawling, almost trillion-dollar-a-year part of the government, and when you see people horrified, national security officials, and when you see people horrified, national security officials, quote-unquote, horrified that Tulsi Gabbard could lead those agencies, that is the greatest endorsement any of these appointees could possibly have That's the reason that they're there.
They're not there to continue the way things have been done.
All of those agencies have been deeply corrupted.
People realize how rotted the healthcare professionals were, health policy officials were during COVID when Dr.
Dr. Fauci and his horde of collaborators insisted and decreed that so many things were not just true, but provably true, such that questioning them made you a disinformation agent who should be banned and silenced off the Internet.
Many people were only for people to realize that so much of what they said was either false or aggressively harmful, forcing young kids to get a vaccine that was experimental, that likely could have caused some injuries that never lived up to the promise that likely could have caused some injuries that never lived up to the promise that it would stop the vaccine, that Obviously, tons of people who are vaccinated continue to contract COVID and pass it along.
None of that was true.
Obviously, the origins of it.
that's true of the justice department which has been extremely politicized to the point where it is intensively and non-incessantly tried to imprison not just donald trump but so many of his closest associates based on a scandal that came from the intelligence agencies that was completely fabricated namely that donald trump was collaborating with vladimir putin and was also a russian asset russian agent and this is now the claim they're making about tulsi gabbard
even though there has never been an iota of evidence that tulsi gabbard is in league with or takes orders from the russians or the kremlin let alone that she's paid by them and you have so many people in fact if you go on to any show in corporate media or you go on to a op-ed page of any national newspaper and you write down what they're all saying in writing which is that tulsi gabbard is a russian asset
as new york times says how tulsi gabbard became a favorite of russia's state media national security officials express alarm then you will never be questioned about what your basis is what the evidence there is for that The only reason they're able to say that about Tulsi Gabbard is because when the war in Ukraine broke out, she correctly said that this war would be completely disastrous.
The Russians were always going to win.
Ukraine could never win.
The choice was not between expelling Russia from Ukraine.
That was never going to happen.
The choice is between years of bloody, fatal The conflict that would ultimately end up with Russia getting what it wanted anyway at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of Ukraine, that was one option.
The other option was diplomatic resolution based on the understanding that Putin had legitimate concerns about what was taking place on the other side of his border with regard to U.S. and NATO interference in it.
John Mearsheimer said the same thing many times on our show.
So did many others, including me and everyone who said it got put on official lists issued by Ukrainian intelligence as being Russian agents.
So for disagreeing with Joe Biden's war policy and the war policy of bipartisan D.C. in a way that proved to be completely correct, she's being accused of being a Russian asset.
It's exactly like the 2002-2003 tactic of accusing anybody who was against the war in Iraq of being a sympathizer of Saddam Hussein or being in league with Saddam Hussein.
It's that idiotic.
And then there was the meeting that she had with Bashar al-Assad, something Nancy Pelosi did as well, something a lot of people have done because you're supposed to talk to Foreign leaders and adversaries when your government wants to go to war with them.
That's part of the congressional responsibilities to go there and understand what's happening, trying to avert a war.
And simply because she went and met with Assad, went to Syria to find out what was happening for herself, a country very close to where she fought in as a member of the military, which she still is, those two policy positions that A proved completely correct, the government did not succeed in taking the government did not succeed in taking Assad out of power.
We destroyed that country.
We did fight along ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Many of the weapons we sent there ended up in the hands of the groups that we were told for 20 years we have to fight against.
We were on their side in that war.
And certainly what she said about Ukraine, the fact that she was in dissent and correct is what causes all of this brouhaha that she's some sort of foreign agent.
Earlier today on CNN, there was a panel discussion about why Tulsi Gabbard is this great evil.
And the opposition to her was led by Coleman Hughes, who I don't really understand when he became an expert on foreign policy.
He became known speaking, I think, quite insightfully about things like race and class and the intersection of them.
I've been on his show before.
He's been online.
Suddenly, though, he's now a great expert on the Middle East.
He's a vehement supporter of Israel, as much as Barry Weiss or Sam Harris or people like that are.
And here he is on CNN maligning Tulsi Gabbard who knows 10 million times more about foreign policy in her toenail than Coleman Hughes has in his entire arsenal of knowledge.
But here he is expressing why she's such a terrible choice to lead DNI. I don't understand...
Well, let me take that back.
I do understand if your number one concern is having someone who doubles down on what you already believe is wrong with the intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard might be a perfect choice.
But if you have been president, as Trump has, and you understand the seriousness of what comes through on that presidential daily brief, this is a confounding decision.
It's a very confounding...
I mean, look, call me crazy, but I think the director of national intelligence should be a person who, A, trusts U.S. intelligence, and B, likes U.S. intelligence.
What do we know about Tulsi Gabbard?
We know that when Assad gasped civilians in 2017, and our intelligence agencies determined that, and Trump decided to strike those facilities...
Gabbard doubted that.
She doubted the findings of our own intelligence facilities.
She also went to go visit Assad.
Yeah, and she went to go visit Assad.
And we know that she defends Julian Assange, who released classified information that imperiled the people we were working with in Afghanistan, and the Taliban went out there and were able to kill them one by one.
I just want to repeat that because of how unbelievable we would choose and ignorant that is.
He's saying that the only kinds of people you want to lead the intelligence agencies are people who, A, trust what they tell you, and B, like how they operate.
How can any sentient human being who knows anything about the last 25 years of American history, and even if you want, you go back much further, and it's the same thing, but just going back to the last 25 years since the war in Iraq and the run-up to it, going all the way through Things like Syria and Libya and Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop and all the different ways that these intelligence agencies have interfered in our politics improperly and based on lies.
It's not disqualifying to just trust the intelligence agencies or to dislike how they operate and want to change it.
What's disqualifying is to trust the intelligence agencies.
How mindless must somebody be to say, yeah, I really trust the CIA. I think their pronouncements are all correct.
Oh, the audacity of her to question anything that the CIA was saying about the war in Syria, which the CIA was leading.
One of those dirty wars that they love to fight at a billion dollars a year that Obama unleashed them to fight in order to remove Bashar al-Assad from power and replace Oh, no questioning the intelligence agencies.
Tulsi Gabbard questioned what they said, doubted some of their pronouncements, and now she's somehow ineligible to lead them because she doesn't have blind, mindless faith in them.
This is conventional wisdom in Washington.
Coleman Hughes doesn't know anything about the topics on which he's opining, including what he said about WikiLeaks.
And the idea that WikiLeaks is supposed to be considered some sort of nefarious group that nobody can defend when they've done more than anybody to bring transparency to our government, including the lies they told about the wars in which Tulsi Gabbard fought, and the corruption of our allies and all the lies that we've been told as a public about what our government was doing.
The idea that defending Julian Assange for bringing transparency is somehow disqualifying, I'm sure he would say the same thing about Edward Snowden, who Dolce Gabbard also supports, is just mind-blowingly dumb.
But this is, we showed you this because it's so reflective of how Washington thinks.
I mean, Coleman Hughes, what he does when he doesn't know what he's talking about is he just picks up on conventional wisdom and the world in which he resides with Barry Weiss and those kind of people.
He just repeats what that world thinks without even an inch of knowledge.
But it's nonetheless worth seeing because that is the opposition to Tulsi Gabbard.
oh, she's not a fan of the CIA.
She's not a fan of the NSA.
She doesn't think the intelligence agencies like Homeland Security have been doing a good job, have been honest with the American people.
This is what Donald Trump ran on.
He didn't run on appointing the kind of people that Coleman Hughes thinks should be appointed, people who think the intelligence communities are so trustworthy and who love what they're doing.
He ran on a campaign promise to uproot them, to fundamentally drain their swamp and to rebuild them into more ethical and trustworthy institutions.
Tulsa Gabbard represents that.
The only people scared of her are the people who should be scared, the people who want to keep those institutions in place despite all the lies they've told and the corruption they've imposed precisely because they're the ones who They don't want anyone questioning, let alone changing how Washington works.
Here is arguably the most loyal spokesman of the CIA over many, many years.
David Ignatius, who's a columnist for The Washington Post, and basically is known for his extreme proximity to the CIA. And he went on mourning Joe this morning, and we're going to get to Joe Scarborough in a minute, but you'll notice here already that Joe Scarborough is arguing against Tulsi Gabbard by pretending that he has Trump's best interest in mind.
This is bad for Trump, he's saying.
That's the posture that he's now in.
Oh, I love Donald Trump.
I want the best for him.
I hope you're listening, Donald.
I'm not attacking Tulsi because she's doing what you want.
No, I'm attacking her because she's going to make life more difficult for you and you shouldn't want that.
And then here's David Ignatius obviously speaking for the CIA against Tulsi Gabbard's nomination.
She has just echoed the words of Vladimir Putin and Russia.
So there are a lot of people that are concerned that Donald Trump and his administration will not get the intel they need because, you can speak to this very well, there are just going to be other countries that are not going to share information and sensitive intel with Tulsi Gabbard.
And so, as I said last week repeatedly, A pick like Tulsi Gabbard or a pick like Matt Gaetz for A.G., That's not just bad for the Republican Party.
That's not just bad for America.
It's bad for Donald Trump because it makes him less effective.
I understand.
He wants to find loyalists that will go in and overturn the rocks, you know, and see what's underneath in all of these different bureaucracies.
And I think most Americans would say, okay, that's good.
But not political retribution and not these selections that will end up hurting him and make him less effective and make the United States less effective.
So, Joe, as you know well, the military, the intelligence agencies are full of thousands of people who want to serve their country.
That's why they're doing it.
And they want to be professional in how they do their jobs.
They want to be respected.
And I get nervous when I see a nominee who's been...
Making headlines for years, as Pete Hegseth has, by attacking military leadership.
I just worry that that's going to produce chaos and the opposite of what the country wants.
There are going to be so many issues coming up where Donald Trump's going to make decisions that really matter for America and the world.
What he does on Ukraine, whether he rewards the letter of Putin's aggression, whether he leaves the Ukrainians...
In terrible danger is a crucial issue.
We need to cover that.
We need to know a lot about the decisions he's making.
Same thing with finding peace finally in these Middle East wars.
Same thing with Iran and where our policy toward Iran is going.
On all these areas, it's important that we do our work as journalists.
When we see mistakes being made, poor choices being made, when we hear from allies around the world, these policies are hurting us.
We need to get that information to the American public and to the White House, for that matter, as readers.
Okay.
The only tiny people, first of all, who are going to be impeded in their quote-unquote journalistic endeavors if Tulsi Gabbard runs the intelligence community are people like David Ignatius.
Whose whole career is based on befriending and cuddling up to the leaders of those agencies and serving their agenda.
He's a believer in these institutions because his whole career is based on them.
And what he's really saying is, why would Tulsi Gabbard running the intelligence agency prevent journalists from bringing transparency?
She wants to bring transparency.
As Joe Scarborough said, she wants to overturn the rocks and see what's underneath them.
He's not saying that most journalists would be impeded in any way in doing our jobs.
He's saying he would be because his friends are finally going to be removed from leading these agencies.
He's not going to get the scoops and the leaks that he's been getting his whole career where they say, we want the American people to believe this, so go write this, and then he dutifully does it.
But the broader issue here is these people are so disingenuous to the point that it's nauseating.
Maybe disingenuous isn't even a strong enough word.
Remember, these are people who have been saying for years, for at least eight years, that Donald Trump is a Russian agent.
They've been saying that our allies won't provide intelligence to the United States government, not because of Tulsi Gabbard, because of Donald Trump.
They don't trust Donald Trump.
He's going to pass it all to the Russians.
He's going to sell it to the Saudis.
Donald Trump, as the president-elect, about to be president, has access to all classified information, whatever he wants.
He runs the executive branch.
You can't keep secrets from Donald Trump.
There was actual reporting in his first term that generals and intel agencies did keep things from him, and they were celebrated for it.
But in theory, they're not supposed to.
But if you already believe Donald Trump is a Russian agent, as all these people do, they're not saying it now because they're trying to appease Trump.
And they want him to listen to them, so they're pretending they're doing it for his own good.
If you believe that Trump is a Russian agent, that all these people close to Trump are Russian agents, then why would Tulsi Gabbard change anything?
Trump could pass it all to the Kremlin if he wanted.
He has access to everything.
This is desperation speaking, the stench of desperation.
He said a lot of people inside the intelligence agencies are very alarmed by Tulsi Gabbard.
If the Director of National Intelligence, chosen by Donald Trump, was not alarmed, did not make those people alarmed, David Ignatius, the people he serves, you would know it would be a terrible choice.
Similar to the way there's very few people alarmed by the selection of Marco Rubio.
This is, I think, the key point.
If Kamala Harris had won, if she had won, she would have chosen, like Barack Obama did, like Joe Biden did, people who are just very standard welcome Friendly to accommodating of Washington institutional power and D.C. dogma.
That's why the people who love D.C. dogma, like Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol and the rest of the neocons, were behind Kamala Harris because they knew what was so obvious, which is that all the people she would appoint would just come from these agencies and institutions and be there to perpetuate them and continue their dogma.
If the American people wanted that, they could have chosen Kamala Harris and that's what people would have been entitled to.
She lost the election.
She didn't win the election.
Americans instead voted for somebody who made very clear over and over for years that he believes these institutions are politicized, dangerous, corrupted, and destructive, and he has the absolute right to fulfill his promise, in fact, the duty to fulfill his promise, to appoint people who are radical critics of these agencies and who scare the daylights out of the people inside these institutions and their slaves and servants and defenders like Joe Scarborough and Tulsi Gabbard.
So there's Tulsi.
We also have then Pete Hegseth, who is Trump's nomination to be the defense secretary, which arguably is the most important appointment a president can make because they have close to a trillion dollar budget.
So I just want you to realize how many financial interests and stakes there are in the Defense Department.
That that wheel just stays greased with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars going out the door into the pockets of Raytheon and General Dynamic and Boeing.
Lloyd Austin, the current defense secretary, was not just approved overwhelmingly, but they actually rewrote the law for him.
They gave him a waiver You're not supposed to have a recent member of active duty military run the Pentagon.
It's supposed to be a civilian run Pentagon.
And there's a rule that says if you've been an active duty military member for the last five years, you can't get appointed to run the Defense Department unless you get a waiver.
Trump selected General Mattis to run the Pentagon, and he needed a waiver because he had just been in active duty.
And when Congress gave Trump the waiver, they wanted General Mattis there because they felt like he would impede Trump, he would defend the military and the bipartisan military.
The military and war policy, he would keep all the deep pockets that fund them, the lobbyists who fund them, very happy, which is exactly what he did.
They did a waiver and they said, we're never doing a waiver again.
It's very important that we keep civilian control of the Pentagon.
But then soon as Biden chose Lloyd Austin, the Congress did exactly what they promised they would never do again, which is they gave him a waiver.
Why?
Because he was coming from the board of Raytheon.
He was part of the military-industrial complex.
Of course, Lloyd Austin was going to continue all the sporging and spending and dogma that runs the Pentagon, and so everybody was very happy with Lloyd Austin.
Now you have Pete Hegseth, who I have to say, I have a lot of serious disagreements with him, a lot of serious disagreements with him, based on policy.
Probably the thing I find most disturbing about Pete Hegseth Is that there were members of the military who recklessly and deliberately murdered Iraqi civilians or Iraqi detainees, just shot old women in the head, shot children in the head, really just out of some sort of psychosis.
And there were others who just stabbed detainees to death for no reason.
And they got court-martialed.
They were found guilty by the military, which is a very hard thing to do in war for a soldier to be found guilty.
And Pete Hegseth was a longtime defender of these people.
He campaigned for their pardon.
He convinced Trump to pardon these were criminals.
And he was a big defender of almost every war and terror policy that turned out to be a disaster.
But he's morphed and changed over time, like a lot of these picks have.
And so I'm not saying that I'm comfortable with his ideology, but...
No one minds that ideology.
If anything, that's what makes it more likely that he's going to get confirmed.
But what they really hate about Pete Hegsap is that he has been a harsh critic of the dogma that runs the Pentagon, of a lot of the woke policies that have shaped the Pentagon.
He believes that women shouldn't be in combat.
But he also believes that the Pentagon has been extremely corrupt in how it spent its trillion dollars.
They can't pass an audit.
They just failed their sixth audit in a row.
So much money goes out the door, $800 for hammers, all those things that aren't apocryphal but are real.
And there's probably nothing people in the Senate and the House care more about than making sure that money keeps flowing to these gigantic arms dealers who fund their campaigns, whose lobbyists run their offices.
And Pete Hegseth is a threat to that because he's not emerging from the Pentagon bureaucracy.
And just like with Tulsi Gabbard, the objection to Pete Hegseth has nothing to do with his actual views.
But instead, out of nowhere, appeared this allegation, very similar to when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, that he actually raped a woman in 2017.
Here you see, it's all over the media now, here in New York Magazine, from today, what we know about the sexual assault allegations against Pete Hegseth.
And here's what they say, quote, No
charges were filed.
And the woman's statement has not been made public.
Now, I was on Megyn Kelly's show earlier today for about an hour and a half where we discussed this case at length.
Megyn, of course, is a outspoken defender of women who are victimized by sexual harassment and sexual assault.
She was very famously when she was on Fox News, as were other female journalists.
So she's not somebody who just rushes to defend men and dismiss the allegations of women, and yet she went through, both as a lawyer and a journalist and as an expert in this field, a lot of the reasons to have serious doubts about what we know so far about these allegations.
My view, my bottom line view, is the same one that applies to Matt Gaetz's situation, which is that if a government body or if a police officer investigates an allegation of criminal conduct and they decide there's no evidence to even charge the person, let alone obtain a conviction, which is that if a government body or if a police officer investigates an allegation of criminal conduct and they decide there's no evidence to even charge the person, let alone obtain a conviction, which is what happened in Pete Heggs' case, the woman who disappeared
She woke up, she claimed she didn't remember anything, claimed she was raped the next morning to her husband as a reason she disappeared.
They went to the hospital.
They did a rape test, a rape kit.
But the police found nothing to justify even further investigating what happened.
And so they closed the case and no charges were brought.
She then sued for money and he did pay her money.
But if you're a public figure, especially at the height of the Me Too movement, which is when this case was brought, a lot of people pay off accusers even if they've done nothing wrong because they know that the mere allegation, even if false, will permanently destroy their reputation and their careers.
He would have almost certainly been fired by Fox, never have any opportunity again.
So the fact that he paid her...
As a way of ensuring that that allegation did not come public, doesn't in any way to me signify guilt.
And it's just, again, every time at the most opportune moment these allegations emerge and appear, and this is a serious crime that he's being accused of, which is rape, and the fact that the police investigated in real time and found no evidence to justify the...
Criminal charging.
As the same thing happened with Matt Gaetz, the Biden Justice Department spent a year and a half or two years leaking about Matt Gaetz, over and over destroying his reputation and then ultimately finding that they don't have evidence sufficient to charge him and indict him, let alone convict him.
I'm not saying you can't make judgments about people if they're not charged criminally, but it's pretty significant.
That they weren't, and clearly the reason why these kinds of accusations are being launched against these people's character and past is not because people care about these allegations.
They're being exploited against the very people who are most frightening to the D.C. establishment.
Now, if you think I'm overstating that, last week we showed you an interview, a video interview, of Elizabeth Warren Saying that Tulsi Gabbard was the most dangerous nominee in contrast to Marco Rubio, who she said, I don't agree with him on anything, but he's a very serious person.
He's qualified.
He has the credentials.
They just want the kinds of people who they feel is unthreatening.
Here is Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia talking today, for example, about Marco Rubio's nomination on MSNBC. Joining us now, Virginia Senator Mark Morner, Chair of the Intelligence Committee.
You've worked so closely with Marco Rubio.
He's been the Vice Chair, but really much a partner of yours.
How do you assess him as the choice for Secretary of State?
Well, Andrea, first of all, I don't get to make Trump administration personnel decisions, and, you know, the president-elect has still not put forward anybody's name.
But if Marco is put forward as Secretary of State, I think it would be a strong choice.
He and I don't agree on a lot of things, but we've found, always found a way to work together.
And I think most importantly, he knows and understands the...
not just Republicans, but the Democratic establishment, the media establishment, for the obvious reason that they believe that Marco Rubio is one of them.
Here is Ana Navarro on The View, and she particularly likes Senator Rubio because he has long advocated U.S. intervention and interference in Central American and South American countries to change governments.
And she hails from there, from Central America, and she has long advocated, when she was working with the Bushes, intervention to change the governments of Latin America.
Her father was a...
High-level El Salvadorian, a Nicaraguan leader who the Americans worked very closely with.
And this is what her ideology is.
It's not really right or left.
It's just interventionism.
When it's not about American defense, but about changing foreign governments, the kind of war Tulsi Gabbard hates and is opposed to.
And Trump is too.
Here's Ana Navarro, who hates every iota of Trump, praising his choice for Secretary of State on The View.
What do you think of all this?
You know, I've known Marco Rubio for a very long time.
He and I grew up in Republican politics in Miami together.
Haven't spoken to him in several years.
He's changed a lot.
He probably thinks I have too.
But I will say this.
Marco is qualified.
He's been on foreign relations in the Senate for many years.
I'm happy because he knows Latin America, which for me is a region that's often forgotten.
He speaks Spanish.
He knows who these leaders are.
He knows what the issues are.
I think he's going to come in hot on places like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, which I care about enormously.
I'm surprised by the appointment because...
I agree on foreign policy, and I think he's considered a foreign policy hawk and kind of like a neocon, which is looked down upon by the MAGA folks.
I'm also surprised because of all of this stuff that's happened between them before, and Trump is putting such an emphasis on loyalty.
I'm surprised because this will give Governor DeSantis the chance to make a Senate appointment.
And Governor DeSantis is not one of Donald Trump's favorite people.
And I'm surprised by Marco because Donald Trump had such turnover in his cabinet in 2016 that I think giving up your Senate seat where you're your boss to go work for Donald Trump.
Marco Rubio's record in Washington has been a war hawk.
An interventionist, as she says, very aligned with neoconservative ideology.
And you'll notice there, she says neocons are disliked in Trump world, in MAGA world, but they're not disliked in the Democratic Party, which is why Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol support the Democratic Party.
And if Trump's appointees were only people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, who, by the way, doesn't have a single difference, there's no difference at all in foreign policy views, Between Elise Stefanik on the one hand and the person she would be replacing at the UN, Nikki Haley, there's not any difference in foreign policy between Elise Stefanik and Liz Cheney.
As Ana Navarro correctly pointed out, these are basically neocons whose whole career has been that.
If all of Trump's appointees were that, I'd be very alarmed about Trump's intention to fulfill the things he's been promising to do.
The reason I'm in wait and see mode is because so many of the people who he chose as well are people who have a completely contrary worldview.
And ultimately, that resolution will be determined by Donald Trump.
We saw that in 2016, as she said.
He fired a lot of his advisors.
He made them walk away bitter because he wouldn't do what they say.
We'll see what kind of ideology and worldview emerges.
Now, obviously, RFK Jr.
is deeply threatening, and the reason why is so interesting.
I think this is such an important thing to realize about RFK Jr.
RFK Jr.'s principal focus is not on banning vaccines.
In fact, as he will tell you, what most offends him is vaccine mandates, forcing people against their will, To inject into their body even vaccines that are experimental where there's been very little research, which is true for the COVID vaccine.
I talked about earlier today on Megan's show how as a parent of young boys, prepubescent or just post-pubescent, I wanted to weigh the risks and benefits for them of getting the vaccine because I knew that as healthy children, the risk of COVID was extremely low for them.
And so the idea of injecting into their body some sort of vaccine that wasn't very well tested, that drug companies who controlled these regulatory agencies were making billions and billions and billions of dollars on, was something I wasn't sure I wanted to do.
And what was so infuriating was that that choice was taken away from me as a parent.
My kids had to get the vaccine because there was vaccine mandates.
They couldn't go to school.
They couldn't go into buildings.
They couldn't go on airplanes.
They couldn't do anything unless they had the vaccine card because vaccines became mandatory, even though these kids have almost no risk of COVID.
And as we know, the vaccine didn't prevent them from contracting it and passing it along either.
So that was a lie.
What RFK really is focused on is the fact that all of these institutions, the FDA, the NIH, the huge apparatus, the bureaucracy that runs health care policy have been captured by the major industries they're supposed the bureaucracy that runs health care policy have been captured by the major industries they're supposed to be regulating by big agriculture, by big pharma, and by the insurance companies.
And the irony of this is that this has long been a left-wing view of That these gigantic industries who only care about profit are willing to make Americans sick if it means increasing their profits have captured the government and you need somebody who's opposed to these industries who believes these industries need to be stopped and changed and radically transformed so they can't keep putting into our food supply extremely damaging substances in
our food supply and then when we get sick from them Allowing big pharma to step in and sell us the medication directly through ads that they tell us we have to take to cure our sickness.
Also, very little oversight of that because they too have captured these regulatory agencies.
And then, when it's time to get sick, we have to turn to these insurance companies that are worst of all.
And there's no control of any of this.
They control the government, not the other way around.
That is RFK's principal worldview.
It has long been a left-wing worldview.
And to watch Democrats now, that's why RFK Jr.
was a beloved liberal for so long.
He was an environmental lawyer fighting to prevent corporate pollution and dumping in our water supply and in our rivers.
That's why Obama actively considered appointing him as the head of the EPA during the Obama administration.
But like so many people, he hasn't changed.
The politics around him have changed.
And Democrats and even liberals no longer believe in opposing power centers in Washington, including corporate power centers.
And that's why he's such a threat.
Here today is Obama's Health and Human Services Secretary, the former governor of Kansas, Democratic governor of Kansas, Catherine Sebelius, who, needless to say, finds RFK Jr.'s nomination very alarming.
She went on the MSNBC to explain why.
Well, I just listened to Congressman Ivey and I think that we're talking about magnitudes of danger beyond Erroneously making legal decisions.
This is life or death.
The HHS affects people from birth to their grave and is intimately connected with every state in the country.
So this could be very dangerous.
I think it's totally disqualifying for anyone who seeks to lead the major health agency in this country and one of the leaders in the world to just unequivocally say there is no safe and effective vaccine.
That, in and of itself, From the bully pulpit of HHS could end up killing people, could end up harming children.
My grandson is too young to get a lot of vaccinations yet, and having him exposed to unvaccinated people with polio and measles is a terrifying thought, having eradicated those diseases as a major health initiative.
Joseph Barber did a similar segment claiming that RFK Jr.
is—I'm sorry, Lawrence O'Donnell.
Lawrence O'Donnell did a similar segment And accusing RFK Jr.
of having directly killed people by encouraging them not to take the COVID vaccine, and as a result, they died of it.
Do you know how harmful and destructive and fatal so many of these COVID policies ended up being?
Things like closing schools for more than a year, locking people into their homes, lockdowns and curfews, And shutdowns of everything, isolating people even further from society more than they already were, causing massive mental health problems that led to suicides and increasing alcoholism and drug addiction.
Stunting the emotional and intellectual development of school-age children by not allowing them to go to school for more than a year, even though they were never at risk.
Stunting and impeding the brain development of very young children because people had masks on and their brains didn't learn how to read and adapt to other people's faces, a crucial part of early childhood development.
To say nothing of the fact that there is an increase in myocarditis and other health problems, not a huge risk, but an increased risk that nobody was allowed to talk about from the vaccine.
These are the people who have been killing people, allowing all kinds of poisons into our food supply, turning the population obese and highly overweight at a much radically escalating level, and it's getting worse and worse, especially among children.
The health care in the United States, the health status of people's health in the United States is disastrous.
Mental health and physical health.
Because people like Catherine Sebelius have overseen and just been part of and then profits off of a system they did everything to protect, one in which these corporate industries, the ones, the sectors that I just listed, are free to do whatever they want, including getting experimental drugs approved at breakneck speed because nobody cares to stop them.
RFK Jr.
is not going to make polio vaccines optional, right?
He's going to be constrained in what he can do.
And when he said there's no such thing as a safe and effective vaccine, he's explained a hundred times that what he meant by that is that we don't have enough research into these vaccines.
And people like Joe Scarborough, 10 years ago, would have RFK on their show, and Joe Scarborough claimed that his oldest son has a mild form of autism, Asperger's, and he believes that it's possible that it was caused by Vaccines.
And of course, people say there's no evidence that vaccines cause autism, and maybe there isn't.
And RFK's counterpoint is that's because no research is being done into that question because it's been prohibited and rendered taboo.
You're not even allowed to raise the question.
So just like Matt Gapes and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstaff, they're petrified of RFK Jr.
The right people are petrified of him because they believe he's going to go in and put an end to the game they've been playing at people's expenses and their benefit for decades now.
And that's all the more reason these appointees should be approved.
And you can almost see the best appointees by the ones who scare Washington power mavens in media and politics and finance the most.
And you can kind of see the worst appointees by the people who...
Get called qualified and serious by the bipartisan political class.
And so you see a lot about how Washington works in their reaction to all these different appointees.
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From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine with Russia back in February of 2022, almost three full years now, we've been saying essentially the almost three full years now, we've been saying essentially the same thing and have had very informed guests on to bolster it as well, which is that this war is going to lead to nothing positive.
Even if you believe it was a moral duty to support Ukraine or help Ukrainians fight off Putin, it was never possible.
There is no way a country of the size of Russia could lose to, in a ground war, to a country the size of Ukraine.
It was just never going to happen.
The Russians have a superior military as well, superior military technology, more know-how and how to fight wars through the decades and even centuries that the Russians have fought all kinds of wars.
It's been a rich part of their history.
And the solution or the choice never was, oh, the Ukrainians are going to expel the Russian troops out of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which the Russians, after a referendum, where nobody doubts the vast majority of Crimeans identify as Russian where nobody doubts the vast majority of Crimeans identify as Russian and prefer to be under the governance of Moscow than Kiev, voted to be part of
Either way, the Russians took Crimea because they viewed it as an existential to their national defense in wake of the U.S.-supported coup in Ukraine that removed the democratically active leader a year before his constitutional term expired and replaced him, as we know, with Victoria Nuland's leak.
with a government that the U.S. handpicked to serve their interest right on the other side of the Russian border.
And so there was no possibility the Russians were going to give up Crimea to NATO and let them have access to the Black Sea and be right in that crucial, geostrategically crucial part near Russia with a peninsula filled with people who identify as Russians, nor were they going to allow NATO to fill up all of Ukraine, to come right up to their To the east of Ukraine right on the western border of Russia.
They were just not going to allow that to happen.
They were going to do everything to fight it.
So the choices never were either the Ukrainians save their noble democracy and drive the Russian invaders out or let Ukraine just be annexed by Putin.
Those were never the choices because Ukraine was never going to win.
The choices were between having a diplomatic resolution and That the Russians and the Ukrainians came very close to achieving in February of 2022, or having a years-long war that killed hundreds of thousands of people needlessly only for the Russians to occupy a chunk of Ukraine at the end and leave Ukraine as a rump state with a generation of men murdered or killed, and the whole country in shambles, which is exactly what has happened.
And the reason that diplomatic solution did not happen was It was because people like Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and neocons like Victoria Nuland in the US, told the Ukrainians, and obviously the Ukrainians have to listen because they depend on the largesse of the West, you cannot sign this peace deal.
We want you to go to war with Russia.
We'll give you everything you need to make sure that you can win.
And that's when Zelensky got convinced that he didn't have to do a deal with Russia.
And here we are almost three years later.
And what made this war not just destructive but so dangerous is that Russia is the country with the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet and we're playing this game right in their neighborhood on the other side of the border, the most sensitive part of their border, which was used twice in the 20th century to invade Russia in two world wars and kill tens of millions of its citizens.
We had Sarah Wagenknecht, the great and rising German politician, who used to be part of the left and started her own party in large part out of opposition to their culture war agenda and immigration, but also in large part out of the militarism of the left wing of the German political wing and the Green Party in particular.
And she talked about something I had not really thought of, but as a German you would think about it, which is how alarming and traumatic it is for the Russians to once again see German tanks Riding eastward into Ukraine toward the Russian border.
Obviously, for obvious reasons, that is extremely alarming and traumatic for anybody steeped in the most basic parts of Russian history.
And if that's exactly what we've been doing, this war has risked escalation of a very dangerous kind for a long time.
Putin has been constrained, thankfully.
And now Joe Biden...
After his party loses the election, in part because Trump said we have to finish this war in Ukraine and get it resolved, in part because people are sick of endless wars, as a lame duck, as somebody whose party was just vehemently rejected by the American public, makes a decision,
or again, when I say Joe Biden, I mean who's ever acting in his name, makes a decision to radically escalate this war on his way out, In a way that even the United States previously admitted would be too dangerous to do because it would mean direct U.S.-NATO involvement in the war.
It would become direct belligerents against Russia, which is by not just giving the Ukrainian long-range missiles, attackums, but authorizing their use deep into Russian territory.
And it isn't just authorizing the Ukrainians to do it.
The Ukrainians cannot operate these missiles on their own.
They need the satellite and guidance systems of the U.S. or other native countries, and that means every missile that's launched, the United States or the Western European militaries, will be directly involved in the launching of these missiles to Russia.
And Putin has said, as a result, we will absolutely regard the first missile that lands in our territory to be a direct war with the United States and NATO, and we will treat it as such.
And here's the game that Biden is playing.
From today in the New York Times, quote, Biden allows Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range U.S. missiles.
With two months left in office, the president, for the first time, authorized the Ukrainian military to use the system known as attack arms to help defend its forces in the Kursk region of Russia.
The weapons are likely to initially be employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of Western Russia, the official said.
Mr.
Biden's decision is a major change of U.S. policy.
The choice has divided his advisors, and the shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support of Ukraine.
The officials said that while the Ukrainians were likely to use the missiles first against Russian and North Korean troops to threaten Ukrainian forces and curse, Mr.
Biden could authorize them to use the weapons elsewhere, meaning deeper inside Russia.
Some U.S. officials said they feared that Ukraine's use of the missiles across the border could prompt Putin to retaliate with force against the United States and its coalition partners, but other U.S. officials said they thought those threats were overblown.
Now, we don't know what Putin's going to do.
Putin isn't suicidal.
He's not stupid, as he's proven repeatedly.
He's not going to pursue a direct military attack on the United States and NATO unless he considers it absolutely necessary.
He understands the risk of that very well, especially with a new president, Donald Trump, coming into power in just two months who has promised repeatedly and won on a campaign pledge of ending the war, not escalating it.
Still, this decision by Biden is so reckless.
It's so politically unethical.
On your way out, as an 81-year-old man who doesn't really care that much about the future, you just say, ah, screw it.
Let the Ukrainians bomb deep inside Russia in a way that we or our European allies have to help them do it, knowing that Putin has said that this is a direct attack on Russia.
And remember, this is all being done to help the Ukrainian forces that have invaded Russia and occupy an increasingly smaller part of their land.
And what really is going on here is that it is now inevitable that NATO and the US will be humiliated.
From the start, they defined victory in a way that could never be accomplished.
Namely, driving out all Russian troops out of every inch of Ukrainian soil.
There is zero chance that that will happen.
Nobody believes that will happen.
Everyone knows that won't happen.
NATO and Biden said, we will fight until the end to ensure victory against Russia.
We will not let Russia win.
Russia has won the war.
This is all about trying to save face and get a better deal from the Russians, who inevitably are going to occupy part of Ukraine.
But it's also, it's really about this.
I really believe it's about this, which is, Trump has vowed and promised to do what should be done, something Tulsi Gabbard favors, a lot of Republicans favor, which is not escalating that war further, not funding it further, not arming it further, but instead negotiating a deal with Russia, which of course will involve Russian control over Ukrainian land.
They paid a huge price to get that.
They're not giving that up.
And when that happens, there's going to be an effort on the part of the media and the Democratic Party to say, look, Trump gave away Ukraine, parts of Ukraine, to his friend Vladimir Putin.
When in reality, we're on that road anyway.
European capitals, American officials, even Ukrainian officials understand that this war has to end.
It's far too destructive and there's no chance of achieving victory.
But they're going to get to fabricate this narrative that it was Trump who gave away parts of Ukraine, when in reality it was the Biden administration and NATO officials who wanted this war, who could have averted it early on with a buffer zone and a promise of neutrality, no joining of NATO, and instead purposely averted a diplomatic solution, caused this war to kill hundreds of thousands of young men, both in Russia and Ukraine.
And Now ensure that the Russians are never going to give up territory that they paid such a steep price in order to get.
It's not going to be Trump's fault.
It's going to be the fault of Biden.
Now, here's The Economist offering a very important piece of analysis earlier today about this decision by Biden.
And what they're essentially saying is this was something that Biden and his advisers were adamant against doing from the beginning of the war.
There was pressure from the Europeans.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Great Britain, flew to Washington to try and badger Biden into allowing and authorizing the involvement of NATO this way.
And Biden was steadfast that that wouldn't happen.
And the reason why the U.S. wouldn't do it is because of how serious the risk of escalation are from doing this.
Here's what the economists recalled.
The headline is Ukraine cannot last use its American missiles inside Russia.
They're talking about the reasons why...
The U.S. has refused to allow these attack of missiles to be used until now.
Quote, Direct American involvement.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, has as a result said that use of Western missiles in Russia would constitute, quote, direct involvement in the war, which of course it would.
Here was Putin back in September of 2024, as reported by Bloomberg, talking about how Russia would viewed any decision of this kind.
To do the attacks with modern high-stress systems of large density, the Ukrainian army is not able to do this.
If this decision will be made, it will mean nothing else, as a direct participation of NATO, USA, European countries in Ukraine.
This is a direct participation.
This will mean the nature of the conflict.
This will mean that NATO, USA, European countries are fighting with Russia.
And if it is so, to make the difference in the whole of the conflict, we will accept the right.
The fact that if the United States sends its military officials, its soldiers, its intelligence officials to work directly with Ukraine on launching American-made, American-sent, American-sold missiles into Russia because Ukraine can't do it on its own, that of course American-sold missiles into Russia because Ukraine can't do it on its own, that of course the United States would now be a direct participant, a Why risk that?
Why risk that kind of retaliation, that risk of nuclear war from an 81-year-old man who doesn't know where he is, whose party has just been soundly rejected and who's on his way out of the presidency and the lame duck to make a decision of that consequence, of that danger?
It's insane.
Back in September, the New York Times published an op-ed with the title, Ukraine is running out of optimists.
And it essentially talked about how even the hardest core boosters of the war are now admitting that this war has destroyed them, that they have no chance of winning.
They're wanting this war to end.
All it's doing is killing them and destroying their country, and they know they've accepted the That they cannot beat Russia, that eventually the Russians will control, as they do now, a good chunk of Ukraine.
They're controlling about 24% of the country.
And every day Russia expands further, a mile, a half mile, two miles, further westward into Ukraine, headed toward Kiev.
And, obviously, the Ukrainians want to stop that.
They want to stop the Russians where they are, not allow them to get more territory, get the security guarantees that they need, and stop the killing and dying of their citizens.
Even in Ukraine, they realize this.
And Joe Biden instead is saying, oh, let's just keep pouring fuel on the fire.
This is a big reason the Democratic Party lost.
Because of the perception that the United States wants to spend its money on everything other than the welfare of American citizens.
You go and look at all of these exit discussions and exit polls about the anger.
People have anger about their perception we're spending a lot of money to give benefits to people who enter the country illegally that citizens don't have.
But they're also very angry about the hundreds of billions of dollars going out the door to help Ukraine, to help Israel.
And when people can't afford groceries or basic health care for their kids, of course, that's going to make them angry.
And it also is just a series of endless wars.
And obviously Americans don't wake up and care about who's going to rule various provinces in eastern Ukraine.
Why is the United States involved in that war?
Again, Tulsi Gabbard questioned that, questioned the same thing about Syria, and for that reason and that reason only, she's being maligned as a Russian agent.
We need more people to question this kind of war consensus.
It's destructive.
It burns our resources.
And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do.
And one of the worst things I've seen is watch now.
Someone in Joe Biden's name authorized this extreme escalation that even the Biden administration for years was unwilling to take precisely because they knew how dangerous it was.
All right.
So just as a quick last segment, it's not really worth spending a lot of time on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, but it is worth talking about how they're behaving as a window into understanding what the media now is.
So, as you undoubtedly know, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were Trump's biggest boosters in 2015.
They loved Trump.
They went down to Mar-a-Lago constantly.
They talked about him as their friendship with him.
They did everything to boost him.
And then right when Trump was ready to run in the general election, and there were a lot of reports that Joe Scarborough wanted to be his vice president, and Trump obviously didn't pick him and picked Mike Pence instead, they turned on a dime.
Now, part of that was because MSNBC had become such a vehemently anti-Trump network that the only people watching were people who hated Trump and believed he was Hitler and a Russian agent, and no show could survive on that network unless they were as vehemently opposed to Trump as the rest of the network.
But it was also because there was a personal interest there that they felt pushed away.
And the thing that Joe Scarborough needs more than anything is to feel like he's important, that he's listened to by people in power.
That's why he worshipped Trump and served him in 2015 and 2016.
And then when Joe Biden won, he became the biggest cheerleader of Joe Biden, insisting that anyone who questioned Biden's cognitive abilities was lying, that he personally was with Biden many times, and that he could run laps around any of the Republicans questioning his cognitive abilities, including Kevin McCarthy and and that he could run laps around any of the Republicans questioning his cognitive abilities, including Kevin McCarthy and
And he was constantly calling Trump a threat to democracy and just defending the White House line to the point where Joe Biden, it was well known, His favorite show on TV was Morning Joe because he would tune in every day and see Joe Scarborough defending him and heralding him in every one of his positions.
And that's what Scarborough likes.
Oh, Joe Biden listens to our show.
And now that Biden is on the way out, the Democrats are rejected and the new power is Donald Trump.
Listen to what Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have spent the last seven years calling Trump Hitler, a white supremacist, a Nazi, someone who wants to kill women.
Listen to what they degraded themselves, humiliated themselves by doing in their own words.
Over the past week, Joe and I have heard from so many people, from political leaders to regular citizens, deeply dismayed by several of President-elect Trump's cabinet selections And they are scared.
Last Thursday, we expressed our own concerns on this broadcast and even said we would appreciate the opportunity to speak with the president-elect himself.
On Friday, we were given the opportunity to do just that.
Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with president-elect Trump.
It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.
Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents, and media outlets.
We talked about that a good bit.
And it's going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.
What we did agree on was to restart communications.
My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed.
That's a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.
We had not spoken to President Trump since March of 2020, other than a personal call Joe made to Trump on the morning after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In this meeting, President Trump was tearful, he was upbeat, he seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.
And for those asking why we would go speak to the President-Elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back Why wouldn't we?
Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country.
We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump's actions and words in the coarsening of public debate.
But for nearly 80 million Americans, Election denialism, public trials, and January 6th were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote.
Joe and I realize it's time to do something different.
And that starts with not only talking about...
From Joe and Mika allowing Donald Trump to call into their show again.
Something that no news show ever does for a politician.
But that those two did all the time in 2015 because of how much Trump saved their jobs and brought them ratings.
Let me just note a couple of things.
First of all, I mean, there's so much to say about that, but I'm just going to try and restrain myself.
First of all, note how Mika says Trump was upbeat and cheerful.
I'm sure he was.
He loves nothing more than when he forces people to make pilgrimage to him and bend the knee because they need him for something, especially the people who have bashed him the most.
And now they have to plead for an audience with him and he grants it.
But they have to fly to him and they're not even there for an interview.
They don't get an interview out of it.
They're just allowed an audience with him to meet with him.
Because they're so desperate to recreate a relationship with Trump in order again to feel like they're proximate to power.
The worst desire for someone who purports to be a journalist in any way, wanting, craving to be close to power instead of adversarial to it.
But also because Donald Trump is the only thing that can bring them an audience.
There's no more MSNBC audiences we're about to show you.
They need Trump.
He obviously doesn't need them at all.
Now, I was on...
The other thing I just want to say, too, is...
As you might know, Mika Brzezinski's father was Zipnick Brzezinski, who was an actual diplomat, a national security advisor, And a national security expert, much sought out through the 70s and the Carter administration into the 80s and the 90s, she compared that dumb duo, that pundit duo, to her father as though they're just doing what her father did, like growing around the world, trying to facilitate peace.
But they're like, my father often said, you have to talk to people who you don't like.
We're there to solve the divisiveness in the nation.
Oh, that's why they went to Mar-a-Lago, because they're there as peacemakers on behalf of the country, like her father flew around the world meeting with adversary countries to negotiate peace deals.
As though, I just think about the self-importance to be able to try and pretend that that's the reason that you went there, as opposed to crawling on your hands and knees because you're desperate for Trump to talk about your show, to watch your show, to come on your show, because they have nobody else on.
Now, earlier today, as I said, it was on Megyn Kelly's show.
We also spent a good amount of time on this.
We had a hard time controlling ourselves.
We tried to move on to other topics, but it was just so much material to mock, but also to derive meaning from.
And we were going to show you, before I went on, we were talking about putting together a montage of all the things that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were saying about Trump before he won.
She was saying, for those of you who asked why would I go there, I would ask you, why wouldn't we?
The reason you wouldn't is because you claimed he was Adolf Hitler.
That he was deliberately going to kill women.
He was going to put his critics like you into concentration camps.
Maybe they really believe that and they're trying to avoid the concentration camp by currying favor with him, which would be even more pathetic.
Here's just a little bit, a little taste of what those two have been saying about Trump for the last several years.
And this was put together by Megyn Kelly Show.
Okay, this is so juicy.
I'm so thrilled you're here for this.
You deserve this, Glenn.
You deserve this after your chest infection and the whole thing.
Glenn, out.
Glenn is back in.
It's the best president.
Here, we'll start with, let's just start with, we'll do it in reverse order, SOT2, what they were saying ahead of the election.
When is the time to sound the alarm?
When is the time to start saying, well, does this look like Germany in 1932?
His obsession with Hitler that has now come out.
This is not a reach.
I could go back and talk about Nazi Germany and I'd do it without any concerns whatsoever.
Who they are running against.
A dark, dismal, fascist and increasingly obviously fascist person.
He's getting through the moment as an aging bullshit artist.
It's a tinge of racism in everything he says.
If you can't believe it and this is your choice, you're lying to yourself and you're going to ruin this country.
Hateful, racist, bigoted, tired, aging, branding, I wouldn't say genius, branding, obsessed, Narcissist.
He will imprison.
He will execute whoever he's allowed to imprison, execute.
They're knowingly voting for a fascist.
They're voting for a racist.
Did a graphic scene like he was having...
How fapid and vacant and sociopathic And bereft of any genuine belief somebody has to be.
To perform like that for a liberal audience, calling Donald Trump repeatedly Adolf Hitler, Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, looking to murder and imprison his critics.
Over and over and over again.
Because you know that's what brings a liberal audience.
And then the minute that person wins the election, you realize nobody has listened to you.
Nobody takes seriously a thing you say.
You were telling them, you can't vote for him, you're going to destroy the country, and they just tuned you out and did it anyway.
And you realize your own relevance, and now you're desperate to A, find a way back to what you think is relevance, and B, to find a way to get your audience back.
And so you go down, you fly down to the kingdom of Adolf Hitler, and you meet with him privately, and you tell him how important it is to you to reestablish a relationship.
These people don't believe anything they've been saying, anything they've been saying.
Kamala Harris's closing argument was Trump is a fascist, and then Joe Biden, when he wins, warmly, Welcomes Hitler to the Oval Office and says, we're here to do anything that you need to facilitate a smooth transition back to power, Mr.
Hitler.
And Democrats, the liberal audience, the herd, who did believe this, have to watch this, and they realize now, none of them ever believed it, who were leading them to believe that Charlemagne the God was indignant.
When Biden invited Trump to the White House because he rightly said, wait, we thought Trump was Hitler.
Why are you inviting him to the White House?
But these two are willing to humiliate themselves more than any media personalities I've ever seen, I've ever seen.
Here's a clip from Megyn Kelly in 2017 when she still worked at Fox.
She obviously understood cable news as well as anybody, still does, but especially she was very attuned to it then because she was still at Fox.
Here she was talking with amazement, not just about how Trump saved the jobs of so many people in cable who were on the verge of being fired in 2015 because nobody was watching their show, but also these two in particular, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, all that they did to curry favor with Trump.
Let's watch that.
So we—my executive producer and I had long talks about what's fair as opposed to just what rates.
And we, on our show, The Kelly File, were very careful about not just sort of pumping the Trump machine, which would pay dividends, and still does.
I mean, Trump's been a huge boon to cable news.
Huge boon.
All news.
But especially CNN in lots of ways, which shows the empty podium during the day.
They're waiting for Trump to come out, right?
Of course.
And not just CNN. MSNBC, I mean, the morning show over there now hates Trump's guts.
And every day they're out there attacking him.
They were part of the reason he became the Republican nominee.
You know, Joe Scarborough and Mika, they loved Trump.
They promoted Trump every day.
I remember watching it thinking, wow, what is it about Trump that got them on board so early?
What was it about him?
I mean, he liked them and he went on their show, so I really don't know.
They were down in Mar-a-Lago and so on.
Trump was very good at cultivating relationships.
And trust me, he tried to cultivate a relationship with me too, but I was a journalist and I understood I needed to keep him at arm's length.
Like you do all the candidates.
You can be cordial, you can be nice, you can be friendly, but it is at its heart an adversarial relationship, you know, that of a politician and a reporter.
But yeah, of course, he boosted their ratings.
He boosted CNN's ratings.
I mean, the Today Show used to take phoners from Trump once a week.
It wasn't just Fox and Friends putting him on back when he was on The Apprentice.
The Today Show was allowing a presidential candidate to do a phoner once a week.
Why?
Because he rates.
That's why.
It's mercenary.
And look, you could make the argument, oh, well, it's a journalistic principle.
He's the Republican frontrunner, or he eventually was the Republican nominee.
It's completely unfair.
He could be sitting there with notes, and now we know from reporting that's come out, he was.
He was sitting there with notes.
That's not okay.
You know, it's not the worst fraud I've ever heard of in my life.
The foreign policy views of Megyn Kelly that you dislike.
I dislike them as well.
But to her credit, I go on her show all the time.
And we actually had a debate one of the last times I was on about our differences about foreign policy, about 9-11.
It was when TikTok banned the 9-11 letter.
And whether...
Whether Muslims hated the United States because they hate our freedom and our religion or whether it's because they hate our foreign policy.
So you can go watch that.
We have our differences.
That's fine.
But one thing I will say about Megyn Kelly, she will interview any politician, including one she loves.
She loves Ron DeSantis, loves him.
Go and watch the interview that Megyn Kelly did with Ron DeSantis when Ron DeSantis was running for president, even though Megyn obviously not just liked him.
I would say that that was her favorite candidate.
She asked DeSantis probably the hardest questions that he had been asked throughout the presidential cycle.
Because, as she says, at the heart of this relationship is an adversarial one.
Especially when you're a working journalist.
And Joe and Mika were worshipful of Trump when it served their interests and they became haters of his, of the most virulent kind, and now they're back to...
Crawling around in his office, begging for some attention.
One of the reasons this is happening is because it is hard to overstate the extent of which liberals have tuned out of politics, especially the networks that they were watching telling them that Trump was going to prison any moment, that Trump was on the verge of being prosecuted, that Trump was a traitor, that everybody knew that, that Kamala was going to win, that women were going to rise up.
And then after the election, they're like, none of what we believed was true.
And not only that, but it seems like these people that we are paying attention to have zero influence because nothing that they were saying resonated with the broader country.
We're in this tiny little bubble.
They realize that they feel helpless, they feel misled, and they are in droves abandoning politics in general, but especially these people who they feel misled by in particular MSNBC's audience.
It has all but disappeared.
And I just want to show you the numbers just to emphasize how true that is.
Let's look at this.
Here you see, these are the primetime numbers for Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. And this is showing the number of people who watch these primetime programs on these major networks.
Who are in the key demographic, which is 18 to 54.
Advertisers don't care about people above 54, 55 and older because they feel they're set in their ways.
They aren't really reachable.
As consumers, the only people they consider influenceable are people who are 18 to 54.
That's the only monetizable audience.
You could have 10 trillion senior citizens watching your show.
Advertisers don't care about them.
They don't want them.
They won't pay for them.
They only pay for this key demographic of people under 55.
Let me show you the numbers of people watching MSNBC shows in prime time.
So here in yellow, you see it.
You have Ari Melber at 6 o'clock.
He has an audience of 66,000 people.
66,000.
Jory Reed, 76,000.
Chris Hayes, 77,000.
Alex Wagner, 53,000.
The Last Word, 53,000.
And Stephanie Rule, 62,000.
CNN is a little bit better, but barely.
And then as usual, Fox News has five times that amount.
Just for that, do you know how few people...
When you are on cable, you're in every home, you're in every airport, you're in every doctor's office, you just flip through the channel and everybody can see you.
You have a major corporate conglomerate promoting you aggressively and continuously.
Do you know how pathetic it is, what a disaster it is to reach 53,000 people who are under the age of 55?
Not even 100,000 people.
They can't even get to 80 in prime time.
Here's their weekend numbers, which are even more shocking.
They have a 4 p.m.
show, MSNBC reports.
Listen to how many people they got.
13,000 people watched that show.
Dan Bongino has hundreds of thousands of people watching him live on Rumble.
Without any of that corporate backing, without having to pay zillions of dollars for our on-air talent and staff.
Al Sharpton Show, 33,000 people.
Jonathan Capehart, 27,000 people.
Ari Melber, 26,000.
Stephanie Ruhle, 23,000.
I mean, their audience really has disappeared.
CNN has, on primetime nights, their lowest audience since...
They began practically back to 2000 you have to go to find that few people watching CNN. And Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski make a lot of money.
And that money and their importance depends on keeping an audience.
And they know the liberal audience has tuned out, has checked out.
It feels misled, feels dispirited, feels impotent.
And their only chance to gain back relevance and gain back an audience is to have Trump come back on their show.
Now, I don't think it's going to work.
No liberals, no MSNBC liberals want to see Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski being friends with Donald Trump.
And no conservatives are ever going to trust Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski no matter how many times they bring Trump on.
So I think they've painted themselves into a corner, but just have some dignity, just a minimal amount of dignity.
And they just don't have it.
At least people like Rachel Maddow...
And like Lawrence O'Donnell and like Caitlin Collins and all these people, they believe the deranged stuff they're spewing.
They really believe Trump is a Russian agent.
Rachel Maddow really believes she's going to go to a concentration camp or a prison.
AOC really believes that.
It's deranged.
It's hysterical.
It's unhinged beyond belief, but at least there's some authenticity to it, which I respect more.
Then these two who are just such craven, vacant opportunists who will say and do anything just to advance themselves a little further, to enhance their relevance just a little bit more.
Calling someone Hitler for four straight years, six straight years, a racist, a white supremacist, a dictator, someone who's going to kill women, and then admit that you crawled on the floor and begged for an audience with him, got one in, tried to encourage him to talk to you again.
And now you already see Joe Scarborough, as we showed you, framing the things he's saying, including opposing Tulsi Gabbard, as though he cares about Trump.
He wants what's best for Trump.
He believes Trump's now watching his show, trusting what Joe Scarborough is saying.
So he's like, I'm not criticizing Donald Trump for this appointment.
He has the right to appoint who he wants.
It's just bad for Trump to have Tulsi Gabbard at the head of these intelligence agencies.
That's what his plan is.
And so transparent and And it's just a form of self-degradation unlike any I've seen before, but the reality is that these people finally, not just these two, but that whole wing of the corporate media, is having to grapple with the fact that nothing they say resonated this whole time they've been talking to a tiny little liberal bubble of like-minded people who live in these tiny enclaves with like-minded people.
So many of them are on an exodus from Twitter because they want to go to some other social media site where only they exist.
They're actually retreating even more into this bubble because they finally are grappling with the fact that no one believes them.
No one trusts them.
Polls have showed it for so long they didn't want to believe it.
Now they have to.
And they're in kind of a panic.
At least some of them are just saying we're going to go further into this bubble.
These two are trying to get back into Trump's good graces in a way that Trump must be laughing his ass off.
I'm sure he's going to make them do all sorts of even more humiliating things before he gives them what they so desperately need, which is him going back on to the show.
And it's just very indicative and illustrative of the broader media, of the broader liberal discourse.
They just can't justify to themselves anymore that anything that they're doing is true or relevant or has any impact whatsoever.
And it's kind of cathartic and delightful to see.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As you can see, I'm not in the studio.
That's because I'm traveling.
I'm doing a program tomorrow.
That's why I came to the United States to do it.
I will be flying back on Tuesday night, tomorrow night, and I'll be back in our studio on Wednesday.
So for tomorrow night, we're probably going to have a show that is a montage of other segments we've done that are relevant to the current news cycle, but I'll be back in the studio.
On Wednesday, 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 our show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night once we're done with our live show here on Rumble.
Rumble, we move to Locals where we have our live interactive after show.
We won't have that tomorrow night because I'll be traveling back home, but Tuesday and Thursday night in general, we have that.
That's where we take your questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, hear suggestions for future shows.
If you want to see what that show is like, we actually...
Posted to the Rumble channel, the live after show we did on Thursday where we took a lot of questions from our audience about Trump and the presidency, his appointments, just politics in general.
It's a more informal atmosphere, more kind of interactive and communicative atmosphere.
We're about to install a new feature where people can actually call in and leave a voice message or be on camera if they choose.
I know a lot of people don't want that, so we're also going to take questions by text still, but we're going to have this new feature that's even more interactive where people can...
Respond to things I say.
So those aftershows are great.
I really love doing them.
We have a lot of great participation.
They're available only from members of our localist community.
So if you want to join, which gives you access to those aftershows, a lot of interactive features, a lot of original written exclusive content we put on there that we don't have time to put on here.
We have Written transcripts of every program we broadcast live here.
We publish written professionalized transcripts the next day.
And most of all, it's the community on which we most 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 those who've been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back on Tuesday night, tomorrow night, and every night at 7 p.m.
