Liberals Encourage Family & Friends To Separate Over Political Disputes; Segment Debut Of System Pupdate: Profiles Of Rescued Dogs
Friends and family members are cutting loved ones out of their lives over political differences ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. PLUS: Glenn debuts System Pupdate, a segment sharing the stories of his rescue dogs.
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Matt Stoller's Reporting: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Wednesday, November 27th, which, as you may know, is the day before Thanksgiving.
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.
Given that tonight is typically a day when a lot of people are traveling or waiting for their family to travel to them, we thought we would cover a couple of topics that are just a slight bit lighter in nature than usual, or at least we're trying to make a particular effort not to be ponderous.
I don't think we're actually ever ponderous, but we're making a special effort tonight not to be.
So to begin, there has been this extremely disturbing trend.
We were going to talk about this last night, but until we ran out of time, among liberal commentators who are still enraged by Trump's victory, To encourage their fellow liberals and Democrats to cut off friendships and even family ties with people who voted for Donald Trump on the ground that anyone who voted for him must be some combination of evil, sociopathic, or at best indifferent to the suffering of others or at best indifferent to the suffering of others and therefore unworthy of any kind of attention.
Encouraging people to cut off ties with their family members and their friends is a core tactic of a cult and yet has become not just recently but a long time liberal orthodoxy in our media discourse.
A few days ago, the longtime progressive commentator, Anna Kasparian, was featured in a viral video where she discussed an experience that she had recently that led her to realize how pernicious it is to assume that the worst caricatures of people who have different politics.
And I want to share my own similar story about how I came to realize that as well, not recently, but many years ago, but constantly tried to divide people into these tiny little enclaves of identity or political preference and then encourage them to hate anyone outside of those little groups is as psychologically twisted but constantly tried to divide people into these tiny little enclaves of identity or
So we want to spend a little time on this, including sharing my own story from my early 20s that forever transformed how I think about and understand these kinds of questions about how to relate to those with radically different views that I have on social, religious, moral, and political questions.
And given that we're on the eve of Thanksgiving, a typically family holiday, we thought it was particularly appropriate to cover it this evening.
Then we have been talking for a long time now, including on our after show with our local members about introducing a new series on our Rumble program cleverly entitled System Pupdate.
As some of you may know, dogs and the act of rescuing dogs from the street is and long has been a central part of my life and my family's life.
We have 26 rescue dogs at home.
I know that sounds crazy, but before you imagine some kind of repulsive hoarder's apartment, we do live in a house that has a lot of outdoor space and that enables us to make sure the dogs have the space to run outside, but also as necessary to be segregated from one another if they don't get along.
But we also have about 11 dogs who live with us back in the house itself.
In 2016, I guess about eight years ago now, when we realized we need to stop rescuing dogs and bringing them home but had no discipline to stop doing so, we created a non-profit shelter here in Brazil called the Hope Shelter where we have about right now another 175 dogs who are rescued from the street and who are available for adoption.
We also place them with their new families.
This unique feature about our NGO is that we often employ homeless people Who have a demonstrated love of animals as evidenced by their living with their dogs or their cats on the street with them.
And once we hired them, we helped them open bank accounts, get identification, manage their income and hopefully exit the streets permanently.
Now, as any of you who have ever rescued Any dogs know, not just from the street, but from a shelter or anywhere else, every rescue story is very unique, very different.
Each dog is different.
The interaction between you and the dog you rescue, what they do for you, what you do for them, is very different as well.
And so in order to end each week of our show on a little bit of a lighter and less heavy note, political note, we decided to create the System Pup Date series.
Where every Friday at the end of the show, we will show you about a five to seven minute video introducing one specific dog and narrating their stories.
Even though it's not the end of the week, it is for us because we will be off for Thanksgiving and then for Friday.
So we're going to do that tonight.
Some of these dogs that we're going to feature that we have in our house are known to our locals members because they often serve as the canine co-host for our after shows.
And that is true of the first dog who will start in his own segment tonight.
His name is Sylvester.
We taped this segment.
Roughly three months ago, and as I said in there, although Sylvester is old, he actually was very healthy.
But sadly, about two months ago, he unexpectedly and very quickly died of a brain aneurysm.
Though it happened at a very advanced age for a dog of his size, and the most important thing to remember when you experience such situations is that he lived the fullest and most fulfilled life possible for a dog.
So we'll show you the story of Sylvester in our first installment of our now weekly series, System Puppy.
It'll be just about five to seven minutes.
I'm going to explain to you a little bit why I think it's more than just some cute, uplifting internet series, why it has a little bit of a deeper meaning for anybody, whether you relate to dogs or not.
Before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on, I think you know the list by now, but the list is always expanding, so maybe you don't remember, your smart TV, your telephone, your Xbox, and a lot of other things, especially probably with Christmas, lots of devices coming out where somehow the app will work on those as well.
Once you have it downloaded, you can follow the programs you most like to watch on this platform.
And then once you do that, if you activate notifications, it means any of the time those shows that you like begin broadcasting live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by link, so you can just click on it.
You don't have to wait around for shows to begin.
You don't have to try and remember when they start.
You don't have to anticipate when shows might go live unexpectedly for a news event.
That really helps the live viewing numbers of each show and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble itself.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every program 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms, where if you rate, review, and follow our show, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community, where we have our live interactive after show that, That after show, which is interactive in nature, is available only for members of our Locals community.
So if you'd like to join, it gives you access not just to those after shows, but to a whole variety of interactive features.
We put a lot of original, exclusive interviews and video segments.
We don't have time to show here.
We put them only on the locals' platform.
We publish transcripts of every show we do here at night.
We publish transcripts the following day.
But most of all, it is the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
You can simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It shouldn't be surprising that a lot of the liberal sector of media and Washington politics are truly emotionally in a tailspin as a result of Donald Trump's victory.
Not a narrow victory, but a solid victory.
And I think what has been most traumatizing for them is that although they believe at the core of their being that they are the representatives of and the spokespeople for and the sole protectors of the people in the United States who are the marginalized groups that they believe that they own and can exclusively protect, huge numbers of non-white voters migrated away from the Democratic Party from what would have been the first black woman president in American history and instead voted for the candidate that these media figures have spent eight years loudly insisting as much as they could that In fact,
huge numbers of non-white voters migrated away from the Democratic Party from what would have been the first black woman president in American history and instead voted for the candidate that these media figures have spent eight years loudly insisting as much as they could that Donald huge numbers of non-white voters migrated away from the Democratic Party from what would have been the first black woman president in American history and instead voted for the candidate that these media figures have And so they realized their own impotence.
They realized they don't have influence on anything.
They realized, really, as polls show, nobody trusts them.
Nobody listens to them any longer.
And a lot of them are really spinning out of control in a way that we haven't quite seen before.
They're often spinning out of control, but this is sort of a separate level of derangement.
Now, there has been a longtime theme among a lot of liberal media television personalities and writers that Donald Trump is such a singularly, uniquely evil political figure.
That even if you have family members and friends who in the past have voted for Republican candidates, good noble patriots like George Bush and Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney or John McCain, this is an entirely new level of evil, people who vote for Donald Trump, so this theory goes.
And as a result, they argue with increasing levels of stridency and explicitness that if you are somebody who has family members Who have voted for Donald Trump, you ought to strongly considering severing ties with your own family as a result of those political differences.
If you have friends, new friends, work friends, longtime friends from your adolescence or even your childhood who you discovered voted for Donald Trump as well, you ought to, according to them, seriously consider severing those relationships as well because the act of rejecting the Democratic Party candidate This secular Saint Kamala Harris in favor of a new Hitler reveals such an irrevocably rotted aspect
of their character that it's basically self-destructive and toxic to your mental health if you continue to have any relationships with them at all, even if they're your parents or they're your siblings or they're your children or your grandparents or your neighbors or your best friends for all of your life.
We showed you a couple of weeks ago the MSNBC host Joy Reid who actually had on her show a clinical research psychologist from Columbia who she invited on explicitly to lay out this theory about why not only your parents You're justified, but you're probably advised to sever ties with people, especially for the holidays, who you have discovered voted for Donald Trump in this election.
Earlier this week, the very same Joy Reid, not, I guess, satisfied with what she did on her own show.
And I don't want to single her out.
She's by no means alone in this view, as we're about to show you.
But she went on to, I think it was TikTok, and she didn't have the setting of her show.
She didn't have a teleprompter.
She had no script.
She had none of the good camera angles that at least give you a little distance from having to look right at her.
She put her face in front of the camera.
And when discussing whether or not you ought to this Thanksgiving cut off relations with your family or talking to people who have said they intend to do that with their family or their friends, Here's what she said about why that is so understandable.
People are rightfully alarmed.
They have a reason to be alarmed.
And if you would vote for that, people may not feel so confident that they're safe with you.
This is not crazy.
This is legitimate feelings of fear of you and a feeling that you might not be someone they could trust if this thing goes way south.
Autocracies go south.
Real fast and things get ugly and people get asked to do things and turn people in and point people out and turn on them.
And if you're voting affirmatively, gleefully For this, people might, I don't know, may not feel so confident in you anymore.
That's real, and you kind of have to live with it.
So if you think that you can vote for what people see as their destruction and then demand that they still are cool with you and kiki with you and have Thanksgiving with you, like, I think you're kind of missing the point.
Of what people are upset about.
They're afraid.
And autocracy and fascism are things that are legitimate to be afraid of.
So you may want to step back.
You know, one of the things that genuinely amazes me, and I'm not just saying that for rhetorical effect, it does genuinely amaze me, about people like this who live their lives in cable news studios, who work for a gigantic corporation where, if she's not making a little bit more than seven figures, she's making very close to it, certainly is in the very top 1% of income earners.
In the United States, she spends her time dealing with, obviously not the working class or anything like that, but with fellow elites at MSNBC, the people she has on her show, the members of Congress with whom she often congregates, the advocacy groups that are very well-funded that purport, like she does, to speak for people who decided they weren't going to vote the way she told them to.
There's just no sense of humility, and I just cannot understand why How someone like this could look at somebody who votes for Donald Trump, even knowing all the hatred she has for Donald Trump, all the beliefs she holds about why he's so menacing or toxic or bigoted or whatever,
and not even consider for one second that perhaps a lot of the people who voted for him, voted for him either because they don't believe that about him or because they might believe it about him, but nonetheless voted for him despite that.
Because they think it's true of the Democratic Party as well, but they principally voted for it because unlike Joy Reid and the people she knows, they're actually confronting a lot of economic difficulty.
And the last thing they want to do, as has been true in American politics for decades, is vote for the candidate and for the party that is already the one in power that has made their lives, their material lives and their view so deprived.
There's just no space in a brain this dogmatic and simple-minded to have empathy for anybody who even has a slightly different view than she does.
Because she goes on every night, And says Trump is a Nazi, he's a fascist, he's a Russian spy, he wants to put me and other people who are dissidents and minorities into a concentration camp.
She believes that everybody else believes that, notwithstanding how tiny of a percentage of people know who she is or watch her show.
Because the world in which she occupies is one in which everybody else believes that.
So for her, anybody who voted for Donald Trump didn't do so out of economic struggle or deprivation or agreement with him on certain social issues or a desire to end.
No, it's because, as she said, they voted for autocracy and tyranny and the destruction of people like Joy Reid.
The government's coming after Joy Reid.
She's a very vulnerable person.
And therefore, how could you have any kind of social communion with such people, given that they've proven by virtue of their vote, not for Kamala Harris, but for Donald Trump, that these are evil people?
And there's a constant, implicit encouragement to You're born into this world.
You have basically one family.
You may form other very close relationships that you consider your family, but one biological family or one adoptive family, one immediate family, your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, your children.
This is what forms the foundation of human civilization, of our instinctive devotion and loyalty.
And to encourage people to terminate those to no longer talk to people in your own family not because they've done anything directly to you that's abusive or that betrays your trust but because they cast a vote for a candidate that you don't support or to do so with your very close friends which studies show most Americans don't have a lot of It's really mentally deranged.
It's actually, I think, quite evil.
If someone joins a cult, one of the very first things that they're told is that it's unhealthy for them to maintain relationships with anybody who doesn't understand the cult, with people who don't support the cult, who aren't part of the cult's core belief system.
That's how they isolate people, cut off their key relationships with outsiders and make sure that the person becomes increasingly dependent on the teachings and the decrees and ideology of the cult and loyalty to the cult leaders.
That's what these people are trying to foster.
Now, as I said, this has been a theme that has developed over time.
Here's the New York Times in November 15, 2016, right after Trump won the first time.
The headline was, Political Divide Splits Relationships.
And Thanksgiving, too.
And they were narrating how a lot of people have a great deal of difficulty seeing their family members if they know they voted for Donald Trump, that even in their own personal relationships or even spousal relationships, it is starting to fracture the trust that people have in one another.
This is really, really strange stuff.
Here was the Washington Post right around the same time, November 18, 2016, entitled, Surviving Thanksgiving, Your Family Voted Wrong.
No, sorry.
It's fight, flight, or drink.
Surviving Thanksgiving when you hate how your family voted.
Where does this come from?
I mean, people inside families have been voting for different candidates for generations.
That's kind of the nature of American politics.
Young people often see the world one way, their parents see the world another, their grandparents see it an entirely different way.
People see the world differently based on their economic status, their social status, their social values, their religious convictions, where they live, what their community believes.
And other than the Civil War, where there's actual violent war, a deadly war that often involved family members on different sides, the United States has never been a country where people were encouraged to fracture their family ties or their marital relationships or their longtime friends based upon political differences.
This is something that the media began encouraging in the wake of Donald Trump.
Here was Harper's, the magazine Harper's, in November of 2017, entitled, quote, Let me say that again.
I know it's kind of shocking to believe.
The headline is, If you are married to a Trump supporter, divorce them.
The unfortunate truth about being in a relationship with someone who supports Donald Trump.
And you may recall as well that, and we went over this several times, that a couple of the themes of the Kamala Harris campaign, including advertisements that they broadcast in all the swing states, was based on this theme that a lot of marital strife, a lot of inter-family conflict is due to the fact that a lot of women don't want to vote for Trump the way their husbands do, but want to secretly vote for Kamala Harris.
But the Democrats' view of marriage is that women are mindless, obedient vessels who do what their husbands tell them to do, and they're afraid to have open communications with their husbands.
And so these ads were encouraging these women to lie to their husbands about who they intended to vote for, go into the voting booth, vote for Kamala Harris instead of voting for Donald Trump, and then come out and mislead their husbands into believing that they actually voted for Donald Trump.
It's such a dehumanizing and decadent view of marriage and families.
Here is GQ, November 2017, just like the prior article, right on the verge of Thanksgiving in 2017. Quote, it's your civic duty to ruin Thanksgiving by bringing up Trump.
This jerky day, consider making life hell for a few of your relatives.
Also essentially encouraging people that you should go to Thanksgiving, you shouldn't ask about how your grandparents are doing, catching up with your siblings, meeting their new partners, getting to know their kids as they're growing.
No, you should go there with the specific intention of upsetting people By deliberately bringing Donald Trump up to people that you know support them and trying to attack them for having done so.
Politico, right around the same time, November 2017. This is the first Thanksgiving after Trump won.
Trump ruined Thanksgiving.
How Donald Trump ruined Thanksgiving.
A new study finds that after last year's scorched earth presidential campaign, Americans could barely stand to look at each other in the eye.
Americans can barely stand to look each other in the eye as a result of the election outcome, according to Politico.
Mother Jones, also in November 2017. You see this is all around Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving fact-checking.
Some Thanksgiving Trump defense fact-checking.
It was purporting to provide its readers with things that they could and should say When they went home for Thanksgiving and learned that some of their relatives had voted for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton and they were supposed to raise political arguments and mount the defense and Mother Jones was reporting to arm them with the fact checking so that you can tell your uncle or your grandparents Or your mother who voted for Donald Trump that they were
deceived and misinformed and ignorant and stupid.
And according to Mother Jones, here are all the reasons why you were supposed to tell them that.
I'm not saying I haven't seen political discussions during Thanksgiving holidays that I've had with my family over my entire life.
I presume lots of people have political discussions or even disagreements in passing.
But the idea of family is the reason you're spending Thanksgiving with them.
It's a holiday set aside for you to go do that.
It's precisely because it's a time that you're supposed to nurture those family bonds.
We have a very modern society.
It's not the case anymore in the United States.
And it's interesting, in Brazil, there's still a culture like this.
There still is in a lot of other countries, but not the United States, where families stay together.
Oftentimes, kids leave the house at 18 to go far away to college, and they don't really come back except for holidays.
So the family and the parents and the kids split up at a very early age.
And then you have your grandparents who live alone.
They don't live with you either.
And then once they get to the point where they need some help, they go into assisted living or nursing homes.
And so American society encourages, is structured financially in every other way to have families separate, to segregate more than almost every other society in prior history.
And so Thanksgiving is the time of the year where you're supposed to connect to your family.
You're supposed to find that special bond that you could only have with your family.
And you have this political media not just observing, but encouraging people to corrupt it, to contaminate it by seeking out not just disagreement and good faith, but lingering conflict that can fracture families where you purposely raise the kinds of political disputes that you know are likely to produce the greatest source of anger.
Think about how Politics, the role politics is playing in our society if that's what is supposed to shape and determine whether you even maintain relationships with your lifelong friends and your family.
Here is Salon.com, a place that I used to work a long, long time ago when it was something not great but much different than it is now.
The headline was Democracy's Last Thanksgiving.
Experts imagine America in a year if Trump wins the 2024 election.
Quote, if Trump wins in 2024, it will be a dark Thanksgiving indeed, read the headline.
So we're almost supposed to assume that if Trump wins, American families can no longer gather in the way they have for centuries in this country on Thanksgiving because once Trump wins, if he does, it means that In 2024, once Trump wins, this was written in 2023, family members who have different political views than you, the gap will be so great.
The feelings will be so intensely contemptuous that it'll probably just ruin Thanksgiving forever.
This was said in part in prediction and in part in great hope that people will no longer be able to maintain positive relations with their family members if they have any of them who voted for Donald Trump.
I'm showing you these just to show you that what Joy Reid said.
Though particularly alienating and a little bit repulsive because of how close she was to the camera, because she's a particularly hateful person, because the way she expressed it was just so creepy, and taking pride in this.
This didn't come out of thin air.
Here's the Huffington Post, November 12, 2024, right after Trump won.
Headline, Canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The title, my husband and his family voted for Trump, so I'm canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Quote, I will not unwrap gifts given to me by people who voted for a party that has talked about building internment camps and mass deportation.
This is a woman saying that she wasn't going to just cut off her husband's family, she was going to cut off her husband himself for having voted for Donald Trump.
Same week, right after the election, a couple weeks after the election, a few days ago, Newsweek promoted a movement, I guess, they call Women Boycotting Thanksgiving.
Quote, women are boycotting Thanksgiving with their Trump-supporting family.
But no signs that this is socially destructive and unhealthy in the extreme.
Here's another article from November 24th from BuzzFeed, the headline of which reports there are tons of post-election divorce stories.
Tons of post-election divorce stories currently circulating online.
Here's what lawyers say is going on.
Apparently people who met and fell in love and decided to take the leap to take their marital vows to one another, to love each other unconditionally and better for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, permanently, are deciding that their marriages should now terminate because one of them, presumably the husband, voted for Donald Trump.
Here's the USA. I just can't believe how many of these are.
Here's the USA Today.
From a couple days ago, November 26, 2024, titled, We Can't Share Thanksgiving.
You voted to deport people who look like me.
Opinion, why in the world should people be expected to carve some turkey with family or friends who voted against their existence?
These people are such drama queens.
One of the whole benefits of Thanksgiving is that typically you do have people in your family who have radically different experiences than you.
You have radically different views than you.
They have different social mores and religious values.
And therefore, of course, political opinion.
And part of it is you get to go and be in the middle of these people you've known your entire life, who you love and trust, who you know love and trust you.
And you get to speak freely and openly without regard to fear of being judged or condemned because this is your family, the whole point of which is they provide unconditional love.
And so part of it is that you're supposed to learn from them.
But the other part, which I would even say is more important in terms of these kinds of holidays, this kind of connection that we have to our families, to our lifelong friends, Is that these kinds of relationships are absolutely central to our ability to be happy in the world, to be fulfilled in the world.
We are political and social animals.
We evolved to be part of tribes and villages and especially families.
I don't know, I've known people in my life who have no relationship with their family, who cut off their mother, who cut off their father, who just, they cut off everybody, and I can't think of a single one of them who's well-adjusted or happy.
It could be they had a good cause.
I'm just saying, the loss of those kinds of connections, those very specific, irreplaceable connections of family...
It's something which is genuinely destructive to your mental health, and I think that's one of the reasons why in modern society, where people split up so quickly, live so separately, are all atomized.
We talked about this before.
There's a lot of social studies and social science on this.
One of the reasons is because we lose those connections.
We have a very attenuated Connection to those.
And Thanksgiving is supposed to be one of those times where you actually get to experience that and reinforce it.
And just on a very quick note, there's a documentary that I would really recommend that's on Netflix, I believe, called Happiness, which asks a question that we ought to be asking a lot more, but don't ask much of, which is, what is human happiness?
What does that mean?
What does it mean to be happy?
And what are the ingredients of human happiness?
I mean, that's as fundamental a life question as it gets.
And one of the unique perspectives of this documentary using certain indices is that happiness is highest in a lot of the places in the world that are poorest, poorest materially.
And a lot of The places that are most materially thriving are places where happiness is at a far lower point, where there's a lot of mental illness, a lot of mental health problems.
And the point, I guess, the reason is, in part, is because people in modern wealthy societies pursue things, they're told to pursue things, that don't in fact produce happiness.
Career success, material wealth, fame, Just achievement.
These are things you're taught to want that you believe will make you happy but they genuinely if you acquire them especially at the expense of other more meaningful things don't.
And without romanticizing poverty a lot of times people who live in countries where that kind of a social set of priorities is not prevailing and people focus on their family life live at home even if it's not a very A large home or a nice home,
but they spend most of their time with their parents, taking care of their parents into their elderly years, who spend time with their children, raising them with their wife or husband, knowing that when they get old, their children will take care of them.
That's where happiness is often highest.
There's a lot of religious community or social community.
That more modernized societies don't provide.
It's counterintuitive to a lot of people, including to me.
That's why I found that film so memorable and eye-opening because it really does make you think about what generates human happiness.
And one thing for sure that generates it is a healthy connection to this special group of people called your family that have been your family your whole life.
And the ability to spend quality time with them and encouraging people to cut that off, to isolate themselves even further by refusing to have any interaction with them over political differences is, that's why I say, not just mentally deranged, but evil.
Anna Kasparian, who's a longtime progressive activist, I think you would call her, journalist, analyst.
She's the co-host of The Young Turks, which has become one of the largest progressive independent news outlets.
She's been the longtime co-host of Cenk Uygur, has often talked about how She was somebody who for a long time believed that anyone who voted differently than she did, especially people who voted for conservatives or Republicans or people who she was conditioned to automatically view as being evil.
Not as people who were voting wrong or had misguided views or maybe just different experiences as she, but people who were actually evil with whom you should have no interaction.
And she appeared on a podcast called Modern Wisdom just a couple of weeks ago.
And, you know, I think she's approaching middle age.
For me, it's a little bit of a late time to have this realization, but a lot of people never have it.
So better late than never.
Credit to her.
And here is what she said in describing how she finally abandoned This perspective, this mindset that our media and our political system is so often encouraging us to adopt about one another.
And so I'm like, crap, he's trying to get his bicycle up the stairs.
And all of a sudden, this man stops me.
His name's Jeff.
And he's like, hey, let me help you out with that.
And he starts helping me out.
He stopped everything he was doing to help me out.
And then Jeff and I became very close.
You know, one of my neighbors who I really like, he was my favorite person in the entire building.
And years go by, one day we're in an HOA meeting, Homeowners Association, and...
One of our, like one of the people living in the building said something about Trump that was negative.
I don't remember what it is.
And Jeff whispers in my ear, oh, she's going to start trashing Trump.
I'm out of here.
And it hit me that he's a Trump supporter.
We had never talked about politics before.
So I got to know Jeff before I knew what his politics were.
Incredibly kind guy.
He helps everyone in this building with anything they might need.
And so that woke me up to...
Wait a minute...
Not all Trump supporters are dangerous, evil individuals.
And yes, it was stupid that I thought that to begin with.
I'm embarrassed admitting that, but it's just how I believed.
And that kind of was one of the moments where a light bulb went off and something was telling me, you need to scratch beneath the surface a little more because you don't have a realistic view of what's going on here.
So just to correct something I said, I mean, I said she said this recently on a podcast, which she did, but I also said it seems kind of late in life to have that realization.
Turns out from the story, it's at least been years ago, so I don't know when she had this experience, but I think for people who are deeply enmeshed in partisan or ideologically rigid media like her to explain a story like that as kind of simple as it may seem and maybe the simplicity of it makes it a little more attractive, I think those things are important.
I think that's an important way of countering all of this other poisonous messaging that we've been hearing.
So I just want to share my own experience in this regard.
I've actually thought about this a lot, especially as I've been reading this sort of amazing...
Amazingly toxic instructions to people about how to deal with others who have different views than you.
I think I talked about this once before on our After Show with Locals, but I just want to share my own story about this before we get to the next segment.
I grew up in pretty classically liberal enclaves.
I grew up in South Florida when...
I was growing up and my grandparents were my biggest political influence and they were Jews from the Depression and they worshipped FDR and they were always very liberal Democrats.
I remember the first election just very vaguely when Richard Nixon ran against George McGovern and they were super committed to electing George McGovern and that was the kind of environment in which I was raised.
It's Broward County, which is just north of Miami-Dade, which has always been a heavily Democratic county.
It's the place that elects people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
And I grew up my whole childhood just assuming the Democratic Party was better.
And also in the 1980s is really when I came up political age.
I turned 13 in 1980.
That was the era of Ronald Reagan.
And that Reagan movement was driven in large part by a very hardcore, socially conservative, religiously evangelical movement.
People like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and as somebody who, as a teenager, started realizing that I was gay and identifying that and trying to grapple with what that was like.
The only messaging I was getting from the media About that was it was immediately associated not just with a spiritual or symbolic disease but with an actually horrific disease.
It was AIDS and then HIV where the only images you would see of people who were gay were people who were wasting away from this absolutely terrifying disease.
Nurses and doctors didn't even want to go in the room.
They didn't know what it was.
And there was a lot of really ugly rhetoric about what this disease was.
It was God's retribution.
So for me, I always took on religious conservatism in particular, but conservatism in general is this sort of cruel ideology that was mostly for rich people and didn't care about poor people or the working class.
And then the social aspect of it was just kind of this very judgmental, exclusionary, almost violently aggressive posture toward people that they judged as immoral, which included me.
And so I had a lot of hostility toward it.
It's kind of unthinking hostility that anybody who subscribed to that ideology was essentially a bad person.
I mean, this is my teens and my late teens where you don't have a lot of instruments to critically evaluate what you think.
I then went to college in Washington, D.C., where there was a lot of that similar My view, obviously, D.C. is a very liberal enclave.
And then when I went to law school in New York City, and I went to NYU, which is a very kind of liberal left law school as well, in my second year of law school, you originally live in a dorm, but then in your second year, you move off campus to an apartment, and my roommate was this woman.
It was a good friend of mine.
And it turned out that she started dating this guy that she really liked and got serious enough that he invited her home to his house, his parents' house in Massachusetts.
And she went there and visited.
And then she came back after the weekend and said, Oh my God, you're not going to believe it.
His parents are incredibly right-wing.
They're fanatical Rush Limbaugh supporters.
And his mother in particular is an extremist.
And this is right at the beginning of the internet where the internet was kind of segregated by AOL and CompuServe.
And they all had these little forums isolated within these closed communities.
And she said there's this forum that Rush Limbaugh listeners use.
It is run by the National Review and the Heritage Foundation.
It's full of not just conservatives, but like hardcore evangelicals, housewives who are super socially conservative.
They're very anti-gay, anti-abortion, everything.
You should go in there and kind of just troll them, like go in there and just make them all miserable, disrupt.
And everything was anonymous on the Internet then.
And so I was like, oh, that sounds so much fun.
And I started to do that.
And I went in with the intention to just sort of provoke anger and to kind of provoke debates where I could attack them, be very aggressive, and that's what I started doing.
And then over time, the debates got a little bit more sincere.
Instead of just trying to be provocative, I was actually engaging with people and trying to kind of almost convince them as they were trying to convince me of...
The very different views that we had.
And then after a little bit of more time, a few weeks, a couple months, I started to get to know people a little bit who were in these forums.
We would DM each other.
I kind of became a regular on this platform.
And they were as foreign to me, being these people in the middle of the country who were evangelical, who loved Ronald Reagan, who were against everything having to do with gay rights, who were Super right wing, love the moral majority, as I was to them.
I was just gay, Jewish lawyer in the middle of Manhattan because by that point I was already working at a law firm.
And yet, eventually those differences kind of started eroding because we were having this increasingly intimate sort of interaction of the kind that you ultimately have with people when you deal with them a lot online.
Now, remember after about eight or nine months, They told me that this forum every year has a get-together where everybody in the forum goes to one place in the United States and just spends the weekend together so they can actually meet in person.
And the event, they said, was going to be held in some faraway suburb of Indianapolis, some place in like a hotel in the middle of Indiana.
And I remember thinking, like, I think I want to go to this.
I kind of want to see who these people are.
I've been talking to them now for eight months.
And I remember telling my friends in law school, oh, I think I'm going to go here.
And they had this character of what social conservatives and religious conservatives and people who are hardcore right-wingers were.
And they were saying, are you crazy?
You can't go to the middle of Indiana and meet with these people.
They're going to kill you.
They're going to murder you.
This is like a trap.
And I kind of knew them.
I didn't really believe that.
But, you know, I had a little bit of trepidation.
Anyway, long story short, I went there.
I got to hang out with them the entire weekend.
We had various lunches and dinners and events.
And all these people who my whole life I had been trained to view as hateful, as filled with malice, who were very judgmental.
Could not have been warmer or more compassionate or just more welcoming to me entering their world.
And obviously that made me feel the same way to them.
And it was one of the most interesting weekends I've ever had, you know, spending three days with people who up until that point I had no connection with or involvement with.
And it obviously left me, once I left, realizing that I had had these caricatures of people who had been placed, these caricatures that were placed into my brain By ideological enclaves and political sectors and just societal divisions that had no bearing on who these people were.
They were completely the opposite of what I had always thought they were like.
And I have a strong sense, and in fact I've talked to some of them afterwards, that they had views of the kind of person I was that also got disabused simply through interaction, communion, conversation.
And for me, I think I was 22, 23 at the time, it really transformed how I think about other people.
I try to be very conscious of the assumptions that you make.
And this is one of the reasons I think I'm so offended by this narrative about cutting off ties with your family members because you assume everybody who votes for Trump is hateful and racist and wants to see you in a concentration camp.
Anybody who has had any conscious experience where you've critically evaluated the things that you grew up being taught to believe, any ability to empathize with others, a curiosity about why other people think differently, which is usually a byproduct of their own, kind of arbitrary upbringing about religion and society and the kind of arbitrary upbringing about religion and society and the communities in which they were raised versus the ones in which you were raised.
But at the same time, these human attributes don't really depend upon political ideology.
You have terrible people in all camps.
You have great people in all camps.
And I never really thought that was such a profound realization for me before.
It was something that when I had it, obviously transformed how I think.
But ever since then, it just seems so obvious to me.
And yet to see this very rigid, political, hate-driven discourse.
That is encouraging people to cut off ties with family members and their marriages over these kinds of differences based on this childlike view that people who see politics differently than you do must be of evil character is something that to me is something that people very early on in life overcome and yet as it turns out at least a lot of people who are paid to write about politics and who work in political media Are people who have no conception that this is true.
They're very insulated.
They lack empathy.
And if anybody deserves to have social relations cut off, it's these people, not the ones that are encouraging others to scorn and avoid.
All right, so speaking of Thanksgiving, as you know, the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the start of Christmas season.
And one of our oldest, earliest, and most loyal sponsors, which is CB Distillery, is having a massive Black Friday sale where you can save up to 60% off their entire site with the promo code RUMBLE. If holiday chaos has you stressed out and sleepless, you can bring back the, quote, merry and bright.
With CBD from CBD Distillery, they have natural solutions for pretty much everything.
stress, sleep, post-workout pain, even mood and focus.
And instead of having your cabinet filled with narcotics from Big Pharma, it's all made with the highest quality clean ingredients.
It's the perfect gift, not just for yourself, but those on your list of people that quote unquote have everything.
You can stuff their stockings with better sleep and treat your gym friends to less pain after exercise.
Grab a little holiday comp for yourself with over 2 million customers and a solid 100% money back guarantee.
Seaweed Distillery is the source to trust, right?
Right now you can save up to 60% during CB Distillery's Black Friday sale.
It's the perfect time to stock up and get all of your shopping done.
Visit cbdistillery.com, enter promo code RUMBLE, and you will get up to 60% off.
That's cbdistillery.com, code RUMBLE. Peaberry coffee is not, and I say, is not your average bean.
In fact, if anything, it's the opposite.
Coffee's best kept secret.
Only 5% of coffee beans, only 5% grow as pea berries, making them denser, more flavorful, and packed with your bold energy to kickstart your morning.
This isn't just coffee.
It's a richer, more powerful brew.
1775 pea berry coffee is for those who refuse to compromise.
Each bean is handpicked at high altitudes for that small It's not just about the coffee.
It's about what it stands for.
Whether it's Peaberry or the Darker Medium Roast.
Or the new mushroom blend, 1775 Coffee, is about quality and freedom and living with purpose.
You can head to 1775.coffee.com and grab your Peaberry and join the coffee revolution.
You can use the promo code GLEN to save 15% off.
Your mornings deserve better.
Brew Rebellion.
All right, as many of you know, the act of rescuing dogs and taking care of them and treating their health problems and trying to nurture the act of rescuing dogs and taking care of them and treating their health problems and trying to nurture them out of abuse and mistrust issues that they have because of their past lives that you typically don't It's a very important part of my life and my family's life.
As I said at the start, we have 26 rescue dogs at home, which I know sounds like I'm a crazy person when I say it, but we have a house where it's kind of constructed on purpose, the outdoor space to accommodate that, and it's something that is a great experience.
It's a great source of happiness and fulfillment for us, not just having the dogs, but the act of rescuing dogs.
And then we did, as I said, get to the point where 26 dogs, even for us, was a bit too much.
We knew we weren't going to stop rescuing dogs from the street.
There's a lot of strays on the street.
So we opened a shelter.
NGO for dogs, where we have about another 175, where we have a staff of primarily homeless people who have lived on the streets with their dogs, where they themselves bring their dogs and then try and place the other dogs that we have there for placement, for adoption, and we've adopted and placed for adoption, I don't know, hundreds, if not close to 1,000 dogs over the last 10 years or so through this.
Sheltering, one of the ideas we had, because whenever I see content on the internet about dogs, is I realized that every dog is so idiosyncratically different.
You talk to anyone with a dog who rescued them off the street or from the shelter, they'll all tell you, my dog chose me.
They'll all tell you about the unique idiosyncratic personality traits of their dogs, which is absolutely true because dogs are evolved to adopt to humans.
But the act of rescuing a dog itself is It is incredibly profound.
A lot of people think when you do it, you're engaging in an act of charity or benevolence because you're helping the dog.
And maybe that is true to some extent, but I can assure you as someone who has done it so many times, they do as much for you as you do for them.
The fulfillment they give you, the understanding that you've rescued them, the role that they start playing in your life and your family's life and your kid's life is something that is at least as much as what you've done for them.
And we've been talking about it a lot on the after show.
Just sort of doing a quick segment at the end of each show that ends the week.
Usually that'll be Friday.
Because of the holiday, it'll be tonight, where we just spend about five or six, seven minutes narrating every story of the rescue dogs in our home, but also the ones in our shelter.
Because some of these stories are absolutely amazing.
The way in which these dogs were rescued, the things they had to overcome, the way they've contributed to people's lives.
And I just want to say, I think, a lot of people obviously love their dogs, but sometimes think, even for people who don't, oh, this is just a nice, uplifting dog story.
And one of the things I think is so important, and my now deceased husband, who was in the Brazilian Congress, used to always point this out, that How a society treats its animals, how a society treats its dogs.
It's not just about, oh, dogs deserve love and support and therefore they should have it because then people say, well, there's so many humans suffering, why would you prioritize dogs over them?
And the answer is because the less cruelty we have to our dogs, the more as a society and as a species we connect to dogs and to other animals, it improves our society as well.
Lots of Enlightenment philosophers, pre-Enlightenment philosophers even, I've often observed that society is more degraded.
It's cruder when people are encouraged to be cruel to dogs, when they're encouraged to be loving with dogs and form relationships with dogs.
They become happier.
Their families become happier.
The society improves as well.
So we think it's a little bit more than just a light-hearted, nice way to end the show, but if you think it's only that, that's fine, too.
We do very intense, often heavy political content throughout the entire week, and so ending our week with a five- to seven-minute segment on each one of these dogs, their trajectory, their story, I think is a great way to end the week.
The segment title I wish I could claim credit for, but someone on our team did, is called System Law.
Pup date?
I think it might have actually been even a viewer of ours in the locals community who came up with this title as we were talking about it.
And the dog that we're going to begin with is a dog very known to the viewers of our after show because every after show we typically have two or three canine co-hosts.
We bring three different dogs, kind of try and rotate them so it's fair.
And that dog is Sylvester.
Unfortunately, Sylvester passed away very suddenly.
Actually, sadly, the day I was traveling in the U.S. and he...
I had an aneurysm the day before I got back, and I only learned of that once I got back.
But you learn to focus on the fact that even though dogs have shorter life cycles, all you can hope for for a dog is that they have the best possible life, which for a dog means a lot of human connection, a lot of human love.
And he certainly had that, so I don't consider this a sad story.
The rescue itself was very unusual, and here is the story of Sylvester.
Hey everyone, it's Glenn Greenwald and we are really thrilled to introduce our new series which every week we're going to have a guest starring dog where we're going to tell you about their trajectory, their history of being rescued, their personality.
We have 26 dogs at home, all rescues, another 150 in the shelter and each week you're going to meet a new one.
Here I am excited to present our guest starring dog of the week.
Hey everybody, I'm here with the guest starring dog of the week.
His name is Sylvester.
He's actually a dog who often appears on our after show on Locals.
I'm Glenn Greenwald here with my co-host Sylvester.
He was actually another dog who was found by David.
When David found him, He was already an adult, so we don't actually know how old Sylvester is exactly.
David found him in 2011, so that means he's at least 13 years old, 14 years old, kind of in that realm, and he's still incredibly healthy, incredibly active, lots of energy.
I don't really even see a lot of signs of aging, not in terms of how he looks or in terms of how he behaves.
He's maybe slowed down a little bit, but that's it.
The way that it happened was there was a huge thunderstorm, I mean a really torrential downpour in Rio and at the time we lived up this hill near a forest and David was coming up the hill in this car and he saw a dog on the side of the road in this torrential downpour by himself.
And so David stopped his car, got out in this rain, and tried to walk over to Sylvester, but he was so afraid of any person getting near him that he kept backing up and kept backing up.
Every time David would try and get near him, would get on his knees and call him over, he would just keep backing up to the point that he was actually really close to a cliff.
And if he had backed up anymore, he would have fallen down this cliff and died.
It was a huge cliff.
And so David had to sit there and just kind of wait for him to come over.
And all he really did was kind of inch over because he was trying to get away from David and David was able to grab him.
And when David grabbed him, he got aggressive, tried to bite David, but you know, if you rescue enough dogs, you kind of know how to handle that situation.
You know how to avoid getting bitten too much.
You hold the dog in the back and all you want to do is get the dog in the car.
So he got Sylvester into the car and brought him home.
And we put them in this room downstairs that we had used for dogs that we were rescuing where of course you don't want to immediately integrate the dog into this huge pack of other dogs.
You don't know if they're sick and they can pass viruses or other diseases to other dogs that are contagious but also you have no idea how this dog is going to react to suddenly being around the pack of 10 or 15 dogs or even to humans.
So we kept him in this room downstairs by himself, gave him a little bed, water, food, obviously.
I would say for at least two months, every time we tried to enter that room, he would back up into a corner, and show extreme amounts of fear and then if you tried to get near him just stick your hand out even to let him smell your hand which is one of the common ways that you try and get accustomed to a dog accustomed to you he would start growling and if you got near him he would just snap and we got bitten multiple times by Sylvester but we knew it was fear it wasn't aggression it was fear And we
knew it was just a question of time before he would start to trust us.
You sit in the room for an hour.
Sometimes I would work in the room, just staying on the floor, sitting on the floor.
So he got accustomed to my presence, knowing that I wasn't a threat.
But usually it's a matter of a couple days or like a week at the most.
With Sylvester, it was two solid months where he was so afraid.
He obviously had been maltreated by humans or he would never have reacted that way.
Maybe a lot of different humans, maybe the People who had been taking care of him.
He was obviously domesticated, but he had been out on the street for a long time, but he was still pretty.
He wasn't quite as sick as most dogs that we rescue.
Once Sylvester started getting comfortable with us, he became an extremely affectionate dog.
And now, I mean, I wouldn't say he's the most affectionate dog.
He's not the dog that when you get there, he's going to like jump all over you and lick your face and just like wag his tail continuously.
But what he is is he's the most intensely loyal dog.
Like if I'm anywhere in public, anyone gets near me, he stiffens up and he like growls and he wants to protect me.
There's just like an intensity to everything that he does.
Like he was so intense at the beginning with this kind of aggression and now he's just like just as intense but with love and devotion.
Like the way he'll look at me if I'm nearby or the kids, he really loves my kids too.
It's the same intensity that he used to show us with fear and aggression and just like abuse transformed over time into the same kind of intensity, but all positive attributes.
Again, I think that dogs that you rescue in terrible situations, they actually know that.
I mean, it's a very anthropomorphizing thought to say, Oh, he knows that we rescued him from a terrible situation, so now he loves us.
I think it's just more instinctive.
It's more kind of subliminal.
And so when you get a dog that you rescue in that kind of a situation, the rewards are going to come back a hundredfold from what you've given the dog.
And also, this is another dog that we rescued as an adult.
And we didn't have to go through, like, weird puffy phases or try and, like, have him destroy things or prevent him from destroying things or, you know, work him into adulthood.
He was an adult dog when we got him.
He was pretty mature.
And now he's one of the most important dogs in my life.
So again, adopting adult dogs, which most people for some reason don't want to do, even though a lot of people should do that.
Is something that I think a lot of people consider.
In fact, for a lot of people who say they want to adopt a dog, everyone assumes they should get a puppy.
I make an argument a lot of times that they would be better served getting an older dog.
Sylvester is yet another example of a dog that we got when already an adult.
And I can't put into words how gratifying it's been and how much we've gotten from him and continue to get from him.
All right.
So that is a little bit of taste for this series that we want to produce.
I think we've already recorded maybe six or seven of them, so we have the next six or seven weeks.
We obviously have a lot of work to do if we're going to do a dog every week, although we certainly have no shortages of dogs.
And I think one of the things that you'll find that I find so interesting is that each one of their stories is so radically different.
Hero Sylvester, very distrustful, to the point of very fearful, took a lot of time to kind of transform.
There are other dogs who just get there and they're just so happy and they integrate and they're super social.
There's a lot of dogs in between.
A lot of ones have really terrible rescue stories where you find them, they're near death and you have to nurse them back to health and then you kind of can trace what they become as well.
And like I said, I think it's a way to think about Not just the dog story themselves, but the interaction between humans and dogs, but humans and all animals and why that has become increasingly important in a way I think relates to the first segment, which is that we have so fewer connections, so less connectivity as humans and we need that because we're social and political animals that dogs have become increasingly important in the way we think about them.
I think matters a great deal as well, as well as just our relationship to animals and And generally, so I hope that you will enjoy the series.
Like I said, it'll just be about five to six minutes at the end of each week, so once a week at the very end on the last show.
That is the debut episode of System Pupdate, and we hope that you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed putting it together.
Alright, so that concludes the show for this evening and for this week.
As a result of being the Thanksgiving holiday, we will not be here Thursday and Friday, but we will be back on Monday at our regularly scheduled time for the entire next week.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after they first appear live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of our show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday nights when we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals where we have our live interactive after show.
That after show is available only for members of our Locals community.
So if you'd like to join, which gives you access to the after shows, multiple interactive features, we put a lot of exclusive original content there that we don't have time to broadcast here.
We put original transcripts of every show there.
And most of all, it's the community on which we most rely to support and enable the independent journalism and the show that we do here every night.
You can 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 have been watching this show, we are, of course, very appreciative and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
