Comedian Dave Smith On Trump's Picks, Israel, Ukraine, and More
Comedian and political commentator Dave Smith discusses Trump's cabinet picks, Netanyahu's ICC arrest warrant, the escalating war in Ukraine, and more.
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Good evening, it's Thursday, November 21st.
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...
The entire day is full of significant news events.
The International Criminal Court earlier today issued arrest warrants for two Israeli government officials on the grounds that they have committed war crimes in Gaza under the Geneva Conventions.
Those two are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Secretary Yov Golan, who promised at the start of the war that Israel would cut off all food, fuel, and medicine and water to Gaza in a full-scale siege.
Several Hamas leaders were also charged.
Numerous U.S. allies immediately announced that they would enforce the ICC wards if either Israeli official attempts to enter their country.
That includes France, Holland, Canada, and many more.
But the Biden administration, of course, immediately said that they regard the war and says unjust and invalid and would not enforce them even if Netanyahu or Golan were found on American soil.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has predictably escalated, exactly as Joe Biden or those acting in his name designed it as and seemed to crave when Russia earlier today used a nuclear-capable ballistic missile to attack Kiev.
It didn't have a nuclear weapon, but the message was very clear.
Trump's nominee to lead the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, Withdrew his nomination today among a swirl of accusations surrounding the case that the Justice Department had investigated and closed.
And Trump just announced, just a few minutes before we went on the air, that the new Attorney General nominee to replace Gates is former Florida Attorney General, longtime Trump ally, Pam Bondi.
And the attacks on Trump's choice to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hesgath, as well as those on Tulsi Gabbard, continue to escalate, all while Democrats and their media allies are perfectly content with, even supportive of, Many other Trump nominees, such as Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador to the UN, and Kristi Noem to lead Homeland Security.
Nobody seems bothered by those choices at all, except some Trump supporters.
We are lucky to have on tonight one of the most independent-minded and incisive analysts that we know to break down all of this news.
He is Dave Smith.
He wears many hats.
He's a news analyst, a podcast host, he's a comedian, and I think he has quickly emerged over the last couple of years as one of the most sought-after guests for political shows and with good reason.
He's very...
Welcome to my show!
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There's a lot of very significant news events going on today and I'm actually happy that we have a guest on because if we attempted to really break them down and cover them in the normal way that we would, the show would probably be three hours long.
That's how many significant developments took place today.
in something that is really quite historic.
The International Criminal Court, which was created to enforce the Geneva Conventions, it had its precedent as a post-Nazi, post-World War II tribunal for Europe to try Nazi officials, but then also in the Far East to try Japanese ones. post-World War II tribunal for Europe to try Nazi officials, And then the idea was we had to merge them because we now have a new system, a new set of rules of law for war.
And those only make sense to have if we have a body to enforce them.
And that became the International Criminal Court.
The United States signed on to that in 2000, rather.
And then right before the war on terror began, the Bush administration withdrew that signature and actually passed a law saying that we could use military force if any American official or official or service member of an allied country such as Israel is arrested and taken to The Hague.
The United States is authorized to use military force to go and quote-unquote rescue them.
And that was because we were just beginning the War on Terror.
The Bush administration knew we were going to do a lot of war crimes, which the United States did, and wanted to make sure that there was no infrastructure in place.
We weren't part of any legal framework that would be designed to punish the United States.
So although a lot of signatories, France and Canada and Holland and many other U.S. allies who are signatories to this convention announced, because they have to...
That they would enforce the arrest warrants if Netanyahu or Yeltsin tried to travel to their countries.
The United States immediately announced that they would not.
And of course the question as well is why should the United States not be legally liable as well given they're the ones that funded and armed the Israeli government all that time.
In Ukraine, just quickly, we have been talking about, reporting on all the steps that the quote-unquote Biden administration, the Biden White House, has taken over the last just few weeks since they've lost the election to deliberately provoke the Russians to clearly try to escalate this war as quickly as possible in anticipation of Trump's has taken over the last just few weeks since they've lost the election to deliberately provoke the Russians to clearly try And he's a person who just won an election based on the promise to resolve that war diplomatically and peacefully.
And obviously, the United States government, as it currently is composed, wants to make sure that can't happen.
The United States began participating in the launching of guided missiles, ATACOMs, inside Russia, as did other NATO countries like the UK.
So the United States and NATO countries are now direct belligerents in this war.
And on top of that, Biden yesterday, or whoever's acting in his name, authorized the sending of landmines to Ukraine, which we covered extensively last night in terms of why these are such heinous and destructive weapons.
And obviously, Vladimir Putin cannot, anywhere than any other leader, simply stand by and watch NATO and the United States bomb inside his country.
And not respond.
Even if he didn't want to respond, even if he wanted to wait for Trump or be more restrained, he has a lot of political pressures to his nationalistic right that would demand a meaningful response.
Today, the Russians shot a ballistic missile into Ukraine, which is nuclear capable.
And they're now openly talking about which targets they're going to destroy.
The American embassy in Kiev has been closed.
The American embassy in Poland is being talked about as a target for destruction.
Clearly, this war is in an escalatory framework.
The question is how far it will go.
Trump's choice to run the Justice Department to be his Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination earlier today.
It became apparent that there was no way he would get 50 Republican senators to vote for that nomination.
There was no other mechanism to get him confirmed as more and more leaks happened about this case that the Justice Department actually investigated and closed the investigation on the grounds that there was no evidence to convict him of any crime.
And just a few moments ago...
The Trump transition team announced that his new attorney general nomination, he didn't wait very long, just not even half a day, is former attorney general, longtime Trump ally, Pam Bondi, who even Democrats on MSNBC and other places are admitting...
Is an extremely capable lawyer and will be an extremely capable leader of the Justice Department, more so that they think they're not Gates.
And she's every bit as much of a loyalist to Donald Trump, a defender of the idea that the Justice Department has been criminalized but needs to be depoliticized because it's been used as a weapon against political enemies.
She's somebody who has a very hard line in immigration, including when she was a prosecutor and attorney general.
So it may end up being a pick that actually serves Trump's agenda More than Matt Gaetz could have as well.
So in order to break all of this down and more, we are thrilled that we have a good friend of the show, someone who we think has become, as I said, We're good to see you.
What's up, Glenn?
Thanks so much for having me back on.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
And thank you for those kind words.
That's very, very kind of you.
Yeah, I really mean it.
And for those who don't know Dave, it's probably very few people, but you should definitely follow his work.
I do, and it's always enlightening.
All right, so...
There's a lot going on, so I don't think we chose you for that reason, but it's good that the schedule is aligned, that we have a lot to talk about, including things that I know you're very interested in.
So let's begin with these warrants that were issued, these arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court.
That essentially require all signatory countries that include almost all of Western Europe, for example, all of Latin America, South America, other countries spread throughout the world, to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in the event that they try and enter those countries, charging them with war crimes under the Geneva Conventions for what they've been doing in Gaza recently.
The world was shocked to hear the response of the Israeli government, Netanyahu specifically, which was to call everyone involved in these prosecutions bigoted and antisemitic.
No one imagined that that would be the response.
So I guess I want to begin there.
Is this prosecution arguably antisemitic?
You know, it's funny because you say, like, I'm a comedian and I'm here to be a political analyst, but it only makes sense in this world because Netanyahu's response video was like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch or something.
I mean, in the darkest way, but it's almost hilarious.
It'd almost be like if there was like a, you know, like you'd see something, a comedy sketch where like a black guy's just beating someone up and they go, hey, Stop beating him up.
And he goes, oh, it's because I'm black or something like that.
And you just be like, oh, it's so ridiculous to jump to that conclusion.
And, you know, it's you know, I'm not the expert in international law, but it's just so absurd.
To even consider that what he's doing wouldn't be against international law.
Like, what would the point of having international law be if you could have a people who you – like, to just bomb a captive people for over a year and kill all of these kids and not that – you know, it really does, at least to me – Totally just change the equation that Israel has been occupying slash controlling Gaza for longer than the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe.
You must have some higher obligation on how you police people who you have occupied.
And so anyway, the whole thing is for him to say that The idea that the only issue you could have with that is that you just hate Jewish people deep down is so absurd.
It's hard to imagine it's happening in real life.
You know what really enrages me about this and it actually enrages is the correct word is that For the last decade at least, probably even longer, pretty much every conservative in America by definition mocked this tactic that the minute some group is dissatisfied with some idea, people are opposed to affirmative action, you immediately get accused of being a racist, people are accused of immigration, you get accused of being a white nationalist.
You don't want to put biological men, even if they're trans, in women's bathrooms to get accused of being a transphobe.
They have mocked this attempt to weaponize bigotry accusations mercilessly from every single group.
And yet the minute it comes to this one particular identical tactic, which is to accuse everybody critical of Israel or opposed to Israel being anti-Semitic, There is much on board with identity politics and censorship, by the way, as well.
But this identity politics, as any sophomore with purple hair at Oberlin, how do they justify in their own mind this obvious conflict in their worldview?
Oh, I mean, well, first off, you just, you totally nail it, and it is infuriating, but it's even one step further than that.
It's, then they call us the woke right.
They turn around, it's, and just to further mimic the woke progressives, they turn around and accuse you of exactly what they're doing, and I get this all the time, like, on social media, and not just from random people, but from, like, you know, right-wing influencers who support Israel in this war, and they'll point out that I, they'll go, You know, see, you're just like those campus leftists because they're all against this and you're against it too.
And it's like, so you're pointing out that I just happen to agree with another group of people, but you're borrowing all of the worst tactics that are the reason we don't like that group of people?
And it's just all so...
It's bizarre.
And like you can't even believe that they have the gall to make this argument as they're making it.
And just one more point is that – and I know I said something similar to this I think the last time we talked.
But it's not just that it's the same argument as the woke leftists.
It's the same logic in a much, much weaker position, in a much weaker situation to use that.
It's like they're much worse because it's not as if if you were to point out – like if you're saying that maybe a conservative or a right-winger will make some point about some policy and then they'll accuse you of being racist.
OK, that's wrong and dumb and that is done a lot.
But you're in this case talking about like whether you consider it a genocide or not, the mass slaughter of innocent people and you're criticizing that.
It's not just some random policy and then to use the anti-Semitic card unlike say like groups who might use that on the woke left, Jews aren't even a marginalized group.
They're not a marginalized group in the United States of America.
They're a thriving – Quite the contrary.
A market-dominant – yes, a market-dominant minority as Amy Chua would call them and in – the Middle East, in the region, they're by far the most powerful force with the backing of the biggest, most powerful governments in the history of the world.
So, like, it's substantially worse than what the woke left does.
Yeah, not only has this woke left, as they call it, been defined by weaponization of bigotry and racism narratives.
Anyone who disagrees with them is a racist or a misogynist or whatever.
We saw that in the campaign, for example, that just concluded everybody who didn't want to vote for Kamala Harris was a racist or, as Obama said, a misogynist when he was speaking to black men in Philadelphia with whom he has so much in common and for whom he speaks.
He was saying, "Oh, you don't want to vote for Kamala Harris?
It's because you hate women." Not only is it that narrative, that bigotry narrative, but also it's this victimhood narrative that has been mocked so much.
Anytime any group says, we're endangered, we're marginalized, we need protection, you get nothing but Endless, limitless mockery coming from conservatives, and a lot of that I've shared many times because I think it is worthy of mockery.
But at least when it's being offered on behalf of many of these groups, you can make the case with data and other sorts of historical events and even current dynamics that they are marginalized, they are vulnerable, they do have less power in the society.
Anybody who can look at someone with a straight face and look at all of our institutions and how power is exercised and say that American Jews or European Jews or global Jews are somehow marginalized, that they're the only real victim group, that they are in danger, that they need special protection by the government, especially for conservatives who have been mocking that forever, that too is sort of on top of that whole other layer.
Yeah, and of course the – and I'm with you too.
I also mock woke stuff when it's on the left like that.
But the response to that is almost always something along the lines of like, well, you're saying the problem is because you're black or because you're gay or because you're trans.
But maybe the issue is your behavior or maybe the issue is this.
Why don't you take a look?
And I don't understand why that's so crazy.
Like even if I could put myself in the space where I was like pro-Israel.
I was on that side.
If I was being honest at all, I'd still admit, oh yeah, I can understand why people would be appalled by what we're doing.
Like somehow I feel it's necessary, but clearly just looking at it on the face of it, you'd be pretty appalled by what we're doing.
And your first assumption, if somebody was a critic of the policy, would not be to assume that it must be some blind hatred of Jews that could only be motivating this.
It's pretty obvious on the face of it, man.
What they're doing is just horrible.
And everybody can see that at this point.
Yeah, I mean, what else is bizarre about it as well is that these are often American citizens who claim that they're America First adherents, that they're American patriots, and yet they have no problem Viciously attacking their own political leaders and the American government and still claiming I'm an American patriot.
It would be like saying anybody who criticizes the United States or its government or its actions is anti-American.
They would say, no, we love our country, but we have the right to criticize it.
And yet, when it comes to this foreign government, this foreign country, they don't even tolerate any criticisms at all, don't recognize the validity.
All right, let's talk specifically about the war crimes charges.
As you said earlier, you're not an expert, but you've been following this war and the humanitarian crisis that has spawned very, very carefully.
You talked a lot about it.
So what is so poignant to me about this arrest warrant, the reason why I say it's so historic, is because this body of law, the laws of war, were created in response directly to the specific, singular, unique atrocities of the Nazis during World War II with unique atrocities of the Nazis during World War II with European Jewry.
Things like collectively punishing an entire population.
You know, the Nazis would notoriously threaten to murder civilians in France if the resistance of the French resistance ever succeeded in anything.
And they often would do that.
They would collectively punish cities.
That was the idea.
We're after these individual people, but to punish them, we're going to collectively punish them.
They were deliberately starved.
They were deliberately blockaded for medicine.
They had every kind of humanity deprived of them.
And so the great taboo has always been comparing Israeli actions to what the Nazis did, even though sometimes that comparison is just.
That new law, that anti-Semitism law that expands the definition of anti-Semitism includes, if you compare in any way what Israel did, the Nazis did, you're automatically saying things that are anti-Semitic and therefore barred.
But in this case, Dave, it just seems so clearly applicable.
Like, there's no way this law could have credibility, this body of law, if it weren't applied in this case to Israel because collective punishment, As you said, bombing a captive population, boasting about the fact that they were cutting off food and water to use mass starvation as a weapon of war, has been all the things that have characterized the Israeli actions.
What possible grounds is there for contesting that there are war crimes here as the most basic, classic definition of that is now defined?
Yeah.
And, you know, just to your point about the comparisons between Nazi Germany, it's the funny thing, too, is that everyone is compared to the Nazis.
Like just in the culture, certainly within the political culture of the United States of America, that's everybody's called a Nazi.
Whether it's, you know, the neocons would always call every single enemy that there were trying to get the next war against the next Adolf Hitler.
That was always like the language that was used.
As I know you know very well, as somebody who was one of the most vocal critics of the war in Ukraine and America's backing of Ukraine in this conflict over the last couple years, you're Neville Chamberlain, you know, and you...
You know, because Putin's the new Adolf Hitler, and everybody from George W. Bush is Hitler, or Obama was Hitler, or obviously Donald Trump got called Hitler every single day, and yet there's this one area where you can make these direct parallels, but comparing that at all to the Nazis is somehow, even though it makes far more sense than any of the, well, maybe not Bush, but it You know, it's one of the best, for sure, out of all of those.
And I just think the thing that stuns me, and I'm not that old, but, like, I got some gray in my beard.
I'm not that young either.
And the idea that in the public consciousness of so much of the world, the Jewish state of Israel is now equated with the Nazis and as the ones perpetrating a genocide, as the ones, you know, violating all these rules that were only put in place after, you know, World War II— It's just, this is such a profound change that I never could have imagined in my entire life.
I mean, like, the Jews always had the image in the Western world as being, like, the put-upon group who was the biggest victims of just this generation before us.
And to just watch the change in this, and it's...
It's shocking that the Israeli government is not more concerned about this.
It's not just that what they're doing is so wrong and that our country is so compromised that we're not allowed to criticize some foreign government.
It's like the fact that they don't even, for their own self-interest, see how dangerous this game they're playing is, is one of the things that's most scary about the situation.
Yeah, I mean, I think for people who live in the United States...
And who largely are connected to the prevailing narratives in the United States.
It's difficult to understand how basically the entire rest of the world Has completely turned against what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, even countries that had previously supported it at the beginning.
Nobody can withstand watching these moral atrocities any longer.
Even Mohammed bin Salman, who, as the Saudi leader, wants to normalize relations with Israel, wants to be an ally of the United States, called it a genocide two weeks ago, notwithstanding how much that could jeopardize his primary foreign policy goals.
All right, let me ask you about The role of the United States in all of this because, of course, the United States government had to come out and say these war crimes accusations, these arrest warrants are invalid because there's no way to distinguish Israeli actions from American actions.
It was the Israelis dropping the bombs, but it was the Americans providing it, the Biden administration providing it.
The Biden administration paying for it.
The Biden administration allowing all of this to happen in front of everybody.
They kept sending weapons, even though they would sometimes threaten that they wouldn't.
They would protect everything Israel was doing diplomatically.
Why should Kamala Harris get to, or Joe Biden, get to go to Paris and Amsterdam and Toronto and Montreal if Benjamin Netanyahu and Yulav Gallant can't?
Yeah, and just by the standard that they use, right?
I mean, when you had Lindsey Graham, I think the day after, I think on October 8th, he was calling to bomb Iran because he said they were in on it.
And Nikki Haley, too.
Right.
Because they have in the past done business with the group that committed an attack, therefore they're guilty.
Yet, if these are war crimes and they're doing them with our money and our weapons and our logistical intelligence, How would we not be implicated in all of that?
And it's, you know, it's the whole dynamic here that's really dangerous for this conflict is that, as I know you know very well, but there's been, you know, I remember when you were on my show very shortly after October 7th, I think it was a couple weeks later, and you had made the point that it seems like half of the kind of MAGA world has just been,
like teleported back to 2003 or something like that and they're like just you know right back to the Cheney Republican Party and that certainly was true for a lot of people and one of the the characteristics I think of that that almost replayed is it reminds me of if you as I know you remember well Glenn in the Obama years the the kind of Republican establishment criticism of Obama would be that he's too soft on foreign policy like that he
This is kind of lost now because now the right-wingers like to say Trump kept us out of war.
Trump didn't start any new wars.
But at the time, like on Fox News, the criticism of Barack Obama was that he was soft and that he pulled out of Iraq.
And that's why ISIS was able to take Iraq back over.
Not that he was arming them in Syria and not that he overthrew the government in Libya, but that he didn't protect some of the people there.
While Obama's expanding the wars all over the world and being even more hawkish than George W. Bush, the criticism he's getting is that he's soft on foreign policy and he won't even say radical Islamic jihad and all those really, really stupid arguments that right-wingers used to make at that time.
And then the same thing kind of happened with Biden, where Biden is just all in on backing Netanyahu's mass slaughter of the people of Gaza.
And then all these guys, the real woke right-wing people, They're all criticizing him for being too soft.
And now in comes Donald Trump, who is just kind of George W. Bush in this situation, just a naked hawk where there's no even pretense that he cares about getting some more food into Gaza or anything like that.
And his foreign policy picks, I mean, have just been...
Well, I want to go through that with you because I'm interested in hearing how you read these and what you think will be the outcomes.
And I want to take a little bit of time to delve into that.
But before we get to that, before we leave this issue of Israel, Basically, every member of Congress, when these arrest warrants were announced, dropped what they were doing and ran as fast as possible.
Like even the old and obese ones, they like made a beeline for the computer because they wanted to just immediately show everybody how ugly.
How angry they were on behalf of Israel and how they were all competing with each other to threaten the ICC in the most explicit and gruesome ways, you know, basically saying, like, you're going to pay a severe price for this and if you touch a hair on Israel's head, the U.S. military is going to come after you and you'll regret it.
Both parties, of course.
Both parties.
As you say, the Republican Party's critique of Joe Biden, both in Israel and Ukraine, in Ukraine as well, has been that he didn't do enough to support the Ukrainians.
He didn't do enough quickly enough.
He didn't do enough intensely enough.
And that, of course, is the critique in Israel.
Though in Israel, I don't understand what more we could possibly do for Netanyahu than what Biden did.
But I know we've talked about the Israel lobby before.
Everyone understands the influence of the Israel lobby.
And I've had Stephen Wald and John Merchant on my show and I've asked them, you know, this book was written in 2006. Do you think it still applies?
Both of them say, I think it's gotten worse, the extreme influence of the Israel lobby.
I think that, too.
Do you think that?
And if so, why has that happened?
Yeah, well, it certainly seems to be the case.
And if Mearsheimer says that's true, I believe him on it.
It's a fantastic book that I highly recommend people read.
And it certainly seems like the way that – I mean in terms of like money spent in congressional races and things like that, it certainly seems like they're more active.
It seems like they have – I mean they've always had a real ability to take out people who are critics of pro-Israeli policies.
I do think while it is probably true that the lobby is stronger than ever, and certainly their grip on the political class is stronger than ever, they've certainly, as with the rest of the establishment, lost their propaganda apparatus, and now there are more voices who are critical of Israel that are able to get in front of large audiences, so that's kind of a separate issue.
But I don't know what to say, man.
I mean, there are times where I just can't even, you know, again, even if you were Like if you were a Mossad agent, if you could just put yourself there for a second, I feel like at a certain point you'd be like, hey guys, don't like overdo it.
You know, like you're making it a little bit too obvious that there's something fishy going on here.
But the idea of just everybody tripping over themselves to defend a foreign government, as you pointed out many times, so much quicker than they would even defend their own government.
They're their own party's leader in this country.
Those Republicans will support Netanyahu quicker than they would support Donald Trump.
Those Democrats will support Netanyahu quicker than they would support Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
It's unbelievable to watch.
And yeah, I think the lobby is a huge part of it.
I wonder what other pieces there are to it.
Hey, we're on Rumble, right?
So I could say there were a lot of...
There were a lot of people who were close to Mossad around Jeffrey Epstein.
Who knows what other type of blackmail operations and things like that they have going?
But there is no question that you can just look at things like that and be like, it's not organic.
This is not organic.
You don't just all care so much about this country the size of New Jersey and the Middle East.
That's not what this is.
There are incentives.
There are pressures.
There are other factors involved.
And Yeah, in fact, if you look at the election and the reason why a lot of people voted for Trump— They will often say, it's very common that you hear this in these interviews that journalists are doing and these exit groups and these focus groups that are being assembled.
They'll say, I don't understand why when we can't pay for groceries or healthcare for our children, We're sending hundreds of billions of dollars to other countries like Ukraine and Israel.
It's not one or the other.
They don't distinguish it.
You can try and manipulate public opinion to say, oh, Americans somehow love Israel, that all these working-class, multiracial coalition voters that just elected Donald Trump somehow love Israel and want all of our money to be going to Israel.
But I think it's such a complete detachment from the actual mood in the country.
It's just there's no space at all to try and contest it.
I wonder, I think the thing that has changed most since 2006, I'm wondering what you think about this, is there was always an evangelical component.
There's obviously an American Jewish component to it.
There's a significant financial incentive, as you said.
They just take people out of Congress whenever they want.
They do it in a very sophisticated way.
They get some black...
Centrist to run against, you know, Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush so they can't be accused of racism and they give them so much money that they program them and then suddenly they're pro-Israel and pro-APAC and they make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
You know, the book, Walden Mersheimer, talk about the evangelical faction, but it's grown so much in terms of the power that American evangelicals have, political power, in this country.
They got much more active than...
They never really used to be a big political force in the United States.
It was really as a response to Roe, and then it kept growing and growing.
And now you have an American ambassador to Israel that's not even Jewish, the first time in a long time, if not ever.
But it's Mike Huckabee who has a ardently theological religious devotion to Israel because he believes that Israel should occupy the entire territory from the river to the sea in order for the Messiah to come back and then consign all the Jews to hell.
But Israel is fine to take that theory since they don't believe that will happen.
Do you think that that has been, that seems to me to be a big part of, even as part of this America First movement, why this contradiction that's so obvious, like America First, America First, let's give all our money to Israel.
The reason that conflict, that very glaring conflict is not recognized is because of this evangelical fervor within the Republican Party that keeps this obsession with Israel stronger than ever.
Yeah, I mean that certainly is a huge part of it.
And of course to the stuff you were saying before, I think it's also – like it's important to recognize that like even if you have the Israel lobby and you have like say like financial interests or who are pushing in the direction of always unconditionally supporting Israel – It's also the fact that,
and this is one of the things that are, it's kind of, it's the nature of government, and I think it's something that people, especially people in this type of space, when we're talking about, you know, people who listen to shows like this, they listen because they care about policy and they've thought about these things and they enjoy, like, hearing these perspectives, but...
sometimes we can have the illusion that that's how like the state apparatus is run and that you know people are making arguments and whoever has the better argument gets that policy but of course like we all know that's not how it actually works and the truth is that what's good for power in washington dc or what's good for business for business and influence who have influence on washington dc that ends up being the decisions that get made and so not only do you have say like the neoconservative ideologues
and then you have the israeli lobby and then you have these but also their proposed policy is just really good for weapons companies and you know what i mean and it's really good for people in the cia or in the you know whatever branch of of the national security apparatus they may not be ideologically zionists but if there's a neoconservative movement that's pushing that they get a lot more power they also might kind of fall in line with that so So that's a pretty big factor.
But there's no question.
I mean, there's tens of millions of evangelical Christians.
And, you know, to hear Mike Huckabee in his own words, because if people haven't heard it, maybe it could sound like you're being slightly hyperbolic in the way you describe it.
But I assure you, anyone who hasn't heard it, Glenn is not.
And it is the way he speaks.
It's the creepiest freaking thing I've ever heard in my life.
There is just simply no other area, no other policy where anyone ever speaks like that who's actually in a position of power.
Like, it's...
I mean, you may see, like, you know, that Jerry Falwell or someone like that has a show, but in terms of, like, actually...
Like, there's no argument where someone could just...
Mike Huckabee just says, there's no such thing as a Palestinian, and there's no such thing as a settlement, and there's no such thing as an occupation because God gave all of this to the Jews.
And, like...
Even the pro-lifers have to try to make an argument.
They don't just get to say it's in my book and God says so.
They'll say life begins at conception or something like that.
It's just wild.
They'll use scientific data that the fetus has a heartbeat, has a self-consciousness.
You know, there's moral arguments that are mounted.
It's not sufficient to say, oh, the Bible says no.
And I want to make very quick, because every time I talk about this, I get a lot of emails from people watching and others, that being evangelical does not signify that you embrace this kind of almost caricature of the rapture theology.
But a lot of the people who are in Congress and in power, certainly like Mike Huckabee, absolutely do.
And as you say...
You go back and compare Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush I and even the Clinton administration, which was very pro-Israel, the second George Bush administration, and you compare what they said on Israel, which is that under no circumstances can Israel occupy the West Bank.
Reagan himself imposed more limitations on Israel than almost any other president since the recognition of Israel, arguably.
But you compare that to what people like Mike Huckabee are now saying, and it's just in a completely different universe of a framework, way more pro-Israel because they're speaking religiously.
Theologically and dogmatically and not from the perspective of geopolitics.
And that's what I think has changed so much.
I want to move to Ukraine because there's a lot going on there and I want to hear your perspectives on this.
So, I think you heard my saying at the beginning, these escalatory moves that Joe Biden, quote-unquote, or whoever, acting in his name, have taken.
And the most escalatory one, the riskiest one, is the use of attack-ems, because the Russians have said, and they're absolutely correct, that the Ukrainians can't launch these on their own.
You have to have the direct involvement of the Americans or the NATO military, which means we're now actively involved in bombing Russia, basically.
NATO is bombing Russia.
The U.S. is bombing Russia.
What do you think, what do you make of the dangers of this over the next couple months?
And why do you think, quote unquote, Joe Biden and the Biden White House are so recklessly escalating this now on their way out?
I mean, you know, I'm not sure to answer that last part.
I don't know.
You know, Scott Horton, who just wrote his book, Provoked, just came out, which is phenomenal.
Yeah, he's going to be on our show tomorrow.
He's going to be on our show tomorrow.
Yeah, awesome.
That's great.
I mean, the book is so good and he's just so, I mean, he just lays out the most devastating case for how the West provoked this conflict at every single turn since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And what he said, I heard him, he said earlier today that like maybe it's just kind of like they feel like now that Putin knows Trump's coming in, he's not going to do anything crazy now because he knows a negotiation, so we can give him another black eye or be in a slightly better negotiating place after that.
I hope that's The answer to it.
But, you know, I mean, I'm still it's just I know it's been years at this point, but I am still and I am somebody who live for a living.
I live in the world of, oh, this government is so corrupt and here's everything that's corrupt about it.
And I still like have my jaw on the ground that they are this reckless.
I mean, and I think people like if you have some perspective of of the history of the Cold War, the first Cold War, I mean we embarked on crazy policies and fought these brutal wars.
I mean just like absolute catastrophes like Vietnam where it just made absolutely no sense.
The theory was all wrong.
All this domino theory nonsense.
It was just all completely wrong and just so many people got slaughtered and such a waste of money and resources.
But even in that time, at least the leaders – Treated the profound risk of nuclear war with some degree of seriousness.
I mean, we never did anything like this when it was when it was the Soviet Union, you know, who had control of half of Europe and at least kind of in theory their ideology was that the entire world would fall under this communist umbrella and were somewhat not somewhat were expansionist in nature and like even then You know, Vietnam, fighting a proxy war with Russia and Vietnam is like, you know, there's China in between them.
It wasn't right on their border.
It certainly wasn't approving strikes within Russia.
And, you know, to just see them – so there's that thing which is like totally unprecedented.
You can't imagine – and the degree to which people just don't even seem to have any serious consideration for this risk.
And then on top of that, I've just never really seen an example before.
Maybe you – I don't know this stuff better than me, but an example where after an election, in a lame duck session, where essentially the candidate who won pretty decisively won on ending the war, and then you're going to take these provocative steps when he's two months away from coming into the White House?
This would be like George W. Bush surging in Iraq immediately.
After Obama beat John McCain in November of 2008. I can't think of another example like this.
It's just all so wild and so reckless and so clearly motivated by some certain self-interest or special interest and not what's good for the country or the world.
Yeah, I think the U.S. security state fears that Trump is going to come in and end the war, and Russia is going to end up with a huge chunk of Ukraine, which they're going to end up with no matter what.
They would have ended up—everyone in Europe is done with this war.
They understand there's no way to expel the Russians from Ukraine.
The Russians have paid a huge price to basically get 25 percent of Ukraine, and they're not going to give that up easily.
They're not going to give it up at all.
They're going to drive a very hard bargain, given the price that they paid that they had to fight a war for three years against NATO. I think that what the Biden administration is doing is trying to make it as difficult as possible for Trump to resolve the war, even though he ran his campaign on a promise to do that, And that's what Americans wanted by preventing it from being what it has been over the last six months, which is a more or less stable conflict where the Russians are advancing, but not very rapidly.
And people are starting to accept that the Russians are the only deal to make is, okay, the Russians are going to get to use Eastern Ukraine as a buffer.
They're going to obviously keep Crimea.
And there's going to have to be a pledge that Ukraine will never join NATO.
We'll not join NATO for the next 40 years or whatever.
And everyone knows that's the deal.
And I think it becomes a lot more difficult to make a deal like that if you're spiraling up the escalation ladder.
But as you say, you know, the thing that I think is so different, you recounted that important history of the Cold War.
Both sides were petrified of a nuclear war.
It was central to everybody's level of fear.
You talk to anybody who grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, nuclear war was the thing that they were talking about the most in school.
They were training to how to go into bunkers.
And even then, when you had the Soviet Union, a much bigger threat than what Russia is, that the United States viewed as an existential threat to the world, To freedom, all of that, fighting wars.
American and Soviet leaders spoke all the time.
They spoke at every level of the government to make sure there was no misconception, misperception, misunderstanding.
And ever since Russiagate, it has been basically taboo to have an American official meet.
I mean, Nixon and JFK and Reagan constantly met with Russian leaders.
Imagine if Trump tried to meet with the Russian leader to resolve this war.
You can understand what would happen instantly.
Biden and his administration don't talk to the Russians.
For me, the insanity of this all comes from Russiagate.
It comes from the attempt to convince Americans that Russia is the gravest threat to our country.
What do you think Russiagate is sort of the original sin here?
Well, I think so.
My theory on it is I think the original sin of Vladimir Putin was Syria.
And that's really what made him an enemy of the American regime, at least on a different level.
I mean, if you look at, say, like pre—what year did he go into Syria?
It was 2014, 2015. If you look before that— You're not going to find examples of the American elites talking about Vladimir Putin in the way that they have since then.
George W. Bush famously said he looked him in the eyes and he could tell he was a good man.
Hillary Clinton did that whole reset button thing.
Barack Obama, of course, as you remember well, in 2012 mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was our big enemy.
The message of the kind of war party was not what it is now.
No one was pretending that this guy was some type of imperialist or hell-bent on reclaiming the Soviet Union.
And what happened was...
His true crime was he denied the U.S. regime a regime change in Syria.
And that's a big no-no.
And, you know, there were a lot of very powerful forces who had a plan there.
And that plan involved Bashar al-Assad being overthrown.
You know, you could listen to General Wesley Clark, who's four-star general, claims that he saw the plans back in 2001. This is something they were working toward for a long time.
And particularly...
After the war in Iraq gave so much more influence to Iran in the region and then the Saudis were furious and Israel wasn't too happy about Iran's influence in the region.
And so this was the plan to overthrow him and Vladimir Putin denied the U.S. that successfully.
And then of course you have just as this conflict in Syria is still going on, you have Donald Trump running for president and he was running on detente with Russia.
And why can't we be friends very openly in the 2016 campaign?
And this was part of his platform.
And he was like, hey, why don't we be friends?
Hey, Vladimir Putin wants to kill ISIS. That sounds a lot like what I want to do.
So I don't care about Bashar al-Assad.
And I think we should kill ISIS together and be friends and get along.
And then he was framed for being a Russian spy.
And so to me, it was like really the starting point of being on this huge escalation.
And You're having Scott on tomorrow.
He's the guy to talk to about it.
It's true that we've been escalating the conflict since the end of the Cold War and basically started up a new Cold War right away.
But to me, I think it took a whole different level after we failed in Syria, in large part due to Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, absolutely.
The United States doesn't react well when their foreign policy goals are impeded, their CIA dirty wars are undermined.
I want to spend some time on the Trump nominations, but I just, as the last topic, just before we get there, I just want to make this observation and ask you what you think about it, which is there's this amazing data trend where you go back to almost every war over the last six decades, starting with Vietnam,
going through the 1980s dirty wars in Central America, Heading into the war on terror with the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Libya, the war in Syria, the war in Afghanistan, where the same dynamic is observable, which is at the beginning of the war, huge numbers, huge majorities of Americans support it.
They're very good at getting Americans riled up to support this war.
But eventually, over two years, five years, ten years, you see with Ukraine now, Americans come to say that war wasn't worth it.
It was a huge mistake.
The percentage of people willing to admit they supported the war.
So, you know, at the time it'll be like 68 or 75% of Americans support the war.
And then you ask them five years later, did you support this war?
And only 35% will admit it.
Most will say it was a mistake.
And yet every single time there's a new war to sell, as happened in Russia and Ukraine, it's like none of that ever happened.
People don't remember.
No, this war is the just war.
This war is the good war that we're actually going to be able to win and do good with.
What do you think accounts for this potency of war propaganda, even on people who have lived through it so many times and have come to realize that they were misled?
I mean, you know, I could easily, I could more easily give you an answer for what accounts for them waking up to it, which is that all of the lies are, all of the wars are sold on lies, every single one of them.
I mean, literally every single one that you just named from Vietnam all the way up to, it's all sold on lies and blatant lies that are demonstrably false, that That later are even admitted by the people who pushed the lies.
And so, you know, it's easy to wake up after a while to that.
And then, of course, this war in Ukraine was no different.
I mean, it was just lies, lies, lies, lies the whole way through.
I mean, it was, you know, first off, the starting point of it being unprovoked was a complete boldface lie.
The ghost of Kiev was a lie.
We can win the war with sanctions was a lie.
You know, it just goes on and on.
Yes, Putin blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
I mean, it's just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie the whole way through.
And so, yeah, it is...
I mean, they're good at the propaganda, I guess, to some degree.
And it is remarkable that they were still able to fool so many people.
I do think – so this is the area where I'm most hopeful.
And this to me I actually think is the best part about Donald Trump winning.
Why even with all of these bad things we're talking about, I still think it's much better for the country that Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost.
Because I do think that the corporate media apparatus has been just like dismantled in a way that even – it hadn't been in 2016 or 2020 or any of the years in between.
It's just different.
Like they've all almost admitted that the real action is with Joe Rogan and with all these podcasts and all these shows on the internet.
And I think that even...
I think COVID was a really huge part of this.
And Ukraine came right on the heels of COVID. And people, I think, in a way, were kind of relieved to switch the propaganda over to Ukraine.
All the same people who had their masks on got their Ukraine flags up on Twitter.
And I just think even a lot of those people have woken up to how the whole COVID stuff was all lies now, too.
And at the time, maybe they hadn't.
And so I think it is getting harder and harder for them to sell the next thing.
But I don't have a good answer for you.
I'm kind of amazed that they're able to sell any of these conflicts.
You would think after just all the disasters that you listed, every one of those wars, a disaster, that by now the American people would be at the point where they were like, we don't believe you when you're trying to sell the next war.
Yeah, but they did.
I mean, you could see it happening right after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Every media outlet, every major faction was all on the exact same page about what this was.
All right, let's get into these Trump picks as the last topic, and then I can let you go.
You said earlier that Trump is selecting all these basically terrible neocons, that Trump doesn't even pretend to want to kind of do things like get humanitarian aid into Gaza.
And that's all true.
At the same time, there clearly is two different types of Trump nominees.
One is the type that the establishment, Democrats, the media, not just are comfortable with the love.
Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., basically a clone of Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney, Kristi Noem at Homeland Security.
No one cares about that.
No one's talking about that.
Everyone's fine with that.
So you have this group of people who are like the kinds of people who typically get chosen for these positions who you would expect to see in a normal Republican administration that just, you know, Ron DeSantis or Mitt Romney or whomever.
But then you have these very out of the beaten path kinds of choices, and these are the ones that are causing the most upset among establishment factions, like Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, Pete Hegseth as Pentagon Secretary, obviously Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr. Now, the one thing they all have in common, every last one of them, it's like the entry price for admission, which I would agree with you on, is they're all fanatically pro-Israel.
All of them.
Every last one of them.
No dissent of any kind.
It does seem like, and this is, I guess, my argument that I would make against this certainty that Trump will just be this kind of hawk and warmonger and neocon, is that, although I think it's very possible for a lot of different reasons, Trump just has an inherent unpredictability that creates potential, at least, for things to break.
Seymour Hersh wrote, and Jeremy Scahill cited this, that Trump is like a circuit breaker, that he just kind of gets in there and all the circuits just go haywire.
And kind of everything, the train goes off the tracks.
Whereas with Kamala, there'd be zero unpredictability.
You would know exactly who would occupy these positions.
They would continue everything as is.
It would be the ultimate perpetuation of the status quo.
Does that give you any hope at all?
I'm not saying it's guaranteed.
I could absolutely see Trump getting the U.S. into words, given the people who he's going to be listening to and who are surrounding him.
But the thing that I hold out hope for is that aspect, that attribute of Trump, and on top of which I think he prides himself in getting deals done, like resolving disputes by getting deals done that he would get the credit for.
What do you think about all that?
Where the foreign policy is likely to go?
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
At least with Trump, there is some air of autonomy to him.
There's something like – and Donald Trump, don't get me wrong.
I'm not trying to paint a rosier picture than there is.
Donald Trump has never struck me as a deep thinker.
I'm not saying he's read a lot of books and really has a deep understanding of any particular policy.
But He is kind of just a boss.
That's who he's been his whole life.
He kind of has the attitude, unlike Kamala Harris, where she kind of just knows she has to play this game so she gets her next position.
And, you know, he has some actual ideas.
And so you never know.
And he's also just, like you said, unpredictable.
So you never know exactly what he might do.
You never know who of the people around him are going to be gone in three months.
And then he's going to be telling you how stupid and little they were and then bring someone completely different in.
There's just a lot of question marks there.
And, of course, you know, you're absolutely right that they are all there is no, you know, air on Israel.
Every single one of them is bad on that topic.
But there are really important areas where like someone like Tulsi Gabbard is a lot different than the standard Washington politician.
And I mean she really was heroic on Syria.
She's been great on Ukraine.
She's been great on the nature of the war in Iraq and our endless support of Saudi Arabia.
There's a lot of areas.
And particularly one thing I really – I was listening to Ewan Tucker's podcast and it was great.
But the one part where you guys were talking about the threat of nuclear wars, we talked about today, too.
I mean, Tulsi really should get a lot of credit.
I remember in 2020, when she was on the debate stage, whenever she'd be asked what her most important issue is, she'd always say nuclear war.
And this was before Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine, but it was after we had framed him for overthrowing our democracy and all that.
And I was like rooting for her because she's the anti-war candidate and I wanted her to do well.
But I remember thinking like, oh, you're going to come off a little goofy if you say it like that.
Like that kind of sounds like, come on, nuclear war is not going to happen.
But, you know, just like to your point where this used to be a real fear of Americans and now it's kind of not.
And she was up there saying, no, this is something we really need to be concerned about.
And not that we've gone to nuclear war since then, but that concern certainly aged very well.
And just someone with that mentality in there.
You know, it's like, oh, it might be interesting.
I kind of trust that, like, if Tulsi's the head of the intelligence community and she finds out that the government's doing some wildly corrupt thing, she might have a problem with that.
And you just weren't going to get anyone like that under Kamala Harris and even Pete Hegseth.
And, you know, I know he's not good on Israel, but he's said some great things about Ukraine.
And given the threat of nuclear war, it's pretty important to be good on that.
I don't mean to like sell out the Palestinian people, but all of these things are important.
And, you know, obviously, Bobby Kennedy, while a lot of people may have, you know, be triggered by him, he's a real outsider to the corruption of the big pharmaceutical companies and kind of the health care system in this country in general.
And I think Matt Gaetz is out now, too.
But he's at least putting some outsiders in there.
And again...
That's just unfortunately maybe the state of modern American politics, but that's better than we were going to get with anyone else I think, including any other Republican if they had one or any other Democrat besides Kamala Harris.
The only person who plausibly could have won and would maybe give us some picks like that is Donald Trump right now.
Yeah, that's the thing that gives me hope, too.
And even with Israel, I'm not saying, you know, he's very indebted to Miriam Adelson, who gave him $100 million.
I think they really was a big effort.
They wanted to get Ron DeSantis as the GOP nominee.
That was their favorite one.
But once he was clear Trump was going to win, they did everything possible to make sure that he was going to be put in this corner where he would be a fanatical leader.
Devotee of Israel, he even said things like, I'm going to make Israel great again if I win.
We're going to make Israel great again.
We're going to make the United States great again.
But still, he's expressed some kind of personal frustration with Netanyahu before.
He wants this war over.
And I think, to your point about, I have to say, when...
One of the things that surprised me when I started doing the stoner reporting is a lot of the people who were emailing me to say how supportive they were of this reporting were people in the military, people in the intelligence agencies, people who had been to war because they know better than anybody the realities of these kinds of conflicts, how corrupting our foreign policy is, how, you know, just poorly arranged it is, how many lies are being told.
And I think the fact that Tulsi Gabbard actually went and fought in these wars makes her more sensitive to these risks.
And I've noticed as well that Trump went Whenever he talks about nuclear weapons, you can see this kind of fear that he had obviously instilled in him from whatever briefings he got where he talks about people don't understand how dangerous these weapons are.
It makes Nagasaki and Hiroshima seem like child's play.
He talks in that way like he's very petrified of it.
And so that's the thing that gives me a little hope.
All right, before I let you go, just one last thing.
I don't know if you had time yet to see anything about Pam Bondi.
She just got announced as Matt Gaetz replaced me, so if you don't have any views on her.
Okay, well, I don't have money either, none that I want to share, so I wonder if you did, so we'll save that for another time.
Yeah, it just happened like 10 seconds ago, so I want to show that I had the same ignorance as you did.
All right.
Dave, it was really great to see you.
I totally enjoyed this conversation as much as I thought it would.
I'm sure our audience did as well.
We'd love to have you back on.
I'm going to invite myself back on your show shortly as well.
So thanks so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Great to see you.
Glenn, you are a legend.
You are welcome anytime on my show.
Thank you so much for having me again.
All right, Dave.
Have a great evening.
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