Trump’s Latest Interviews Reveal A More Focused Vision; Why The CNN Syria Rescue Deserves Skepticism; Is There Anyone Who Opposes All Luigi-Style Vigilantism?
Do Trump's TIME and "Meet The Press" interviews signal a shift in his governing approach? Then: a CNN reporter rescues a prisoner in Syria...should we be skeptical of the spectacle? Plus: commentators on the right have loudly condemned the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, but refuse to admit that there are many people whose deaths they would celebrate.
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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, since his election victory, Donald Trump has given two major lengthy interviews about his intentions for his second term in the presidency.
First, a one-hour sit-down with Meet the Press host Kirsten Welker, and today a printed interview with Time Magazine after it named him Person of the Year.
And one can't help but notice, or at least I can't help but notice, I don't know what is the necessity for that pompous formulation, one can't help but notice.
Maybe one can help, but I can't help but notice that the version of Trump that we are seeing is a much different one, at least in some key respects, than the one we saw during the campaign.
In one sense, that's to be expected.
A political candidate in a highly contested race is naturally going to say and do things intended to win votes, while a victorious candidate who no longer has to face the electorate does not need to worry about that and naturally will be more liberated and be able to speak more genuinely and authentically.
Still, Trump's constrained demeanor and the content of what he is saying are all really quite striking.
It is a very calm, sober, focused, coherent, cogent, one might even say thoughtful Trump that we are seeing in these post-election interviews.
And what he is saying aligns in many cases with how he is saying it.
It's a more consistent and cogent Trump, one who has a clearly defined worldview on many issues accompanied by an obvious desire to be less polarizing and alarming for those who do not vote for him.
Not exactly what has characterized Trump in the past.
One might even say a more moderated and serious Trump.
Now, that doesn't mean he's being compromising on every or even most issue, though he is on some, only that he's avoiding gratuitous provocation or flailing.
I don't even mean this as a defense of Trump, just purely my observations about how he's conducting himself in these interviews, how he's explaining himself, and what it is that he's saying.
And we'll look at this ethos that I'm at least seeing, but more so the substance of what he's been saying in these post-presidential elections is perhaps a window into what the second term will be.
Then CNN's foreign correspondent, Clarissa Ward, produced and broadcast an extremely strange and very melodramatic video of her and her CNN crew magically discovering a previously undetected prisoner in Syria lying motionless under a blanket.
Ward had previously admitted in her book just a few years ago that she relinquished being a journalist when it came to Syria and was basically an activist, someone enraged that the U.S. government wasn't doing more to fund and arm the anti-Assad rebels in order to help remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria. someone enraged that the U.S. government wasn't doing more to Now, many people have raised questions about this bizarre video CNN broadcast and are asking whether it was staged by CNN and or the network's Syrian handlers for propaganda purposes.
And while I don't certainly at all purport to know the answer to that question, what I do know is that extreme skepticism of such propaganda is very warranted given how often the U.S. government and its media have blatantly lied.
Really always lied when it comes to wars and coups that are important to Washington as the one in Syria is now.
And we'll take a look at that as well.
And then finally, the apprehension of alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangioni has triggered an endless amount of discourse, both online and off.
One of the primary debates that has triggered is whether it is ever justified to support or even cheer Killing people in vigilante form is never justified,
many insist, and are very angry at those who seem to be supporting the killer here, or at least expressing some empathy with him.
And while I have no doubt, That they really do oppose vigilante justice in this case.
Is there really anyone who believes in that proposition as a principle, namely that vigilante justice is always wrong, that it's always wrong to go and murder somebody, an advancement of a cause?
I think the question is a lot more complicated than it might appear at first glance, and so I think it's really worth examining, so that's what we're going to do.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the many reasons why I think that the media campaign and the Democratic Party campaign to make people afraid of Donald Trump, of his character, to depict him as Adolf Hitler, to claim that he's a white supremacist, seeking to impose a Nazi dictatorship on the United States,
One of the many reasons it failed, and there were many, but one of the reasons it definitely failed was because it's easy to do that to somebody that the public doesn't know.
We're fear-mongering is, has space to grow.
But for people, someone is known to the American public as Donald Trump, and he was very known to the public before 2016 when he first ran.
But after basically dominating our political lives over the last eight years, being president for four years, Americans already know who Donald Trump is so well that they really don't need the media to try and fill in the gaps for them.
They have their own perceptions of who he is, of how he conducts himself, of how he acts in power.
This is the third presidential campaign that he's run in the last eight years, 2016, 2020, and 2024, four years in which he was the president.
And so the media just was unable to scare people who weren't already scared of Trump based on what they have seen.
And that's why I have to say Donald Trump as a character has been pretty consistent.
I don't think he's been aligned at all with the caricature that has been manufactured for him by the media outlets most hostile to him.
But he has been fairly consistent in his behavior and his character and how he responds to certain events.
And I say that as somebody who lived in New York City for a long time beginning in the early 1990s and when Trump was a larger than life figure all the way back then and people had a good understanding of who he was then.
He was very much in the media.
And that's why I think these two major post-election interviews that he did, one with Meet the Press and Kirsten Welker, the host of that program, about two weeks ago, two weekends ago, And then today, a new one that was published with Time Magazine after it named him Person of the Year and put him on the cover, obviously much to his delight.
It's actually quite striking because there are some palpable changes in the way he's speaking, in the tone he's using to speak, in what I think is the remarkable cogency of how he's articulating his views. in what I think is the remarkable cogency of how There's no ramblings.
There's not a lot of stopping and starting.
He's being more articulate than usual.
I think that's one of his failures as a politician.
He has a great amount of charisma.
He's hilarious to most people who are willing to see it.
He draws a lot of attention to himself.
He understands instinctively how to communicate with people, but I don't think he's a great order at all.
A lot of times in debates and in interviews you kind of almost have to know what he's trying to say in order to really understand it because he just doesn't fully articulate and I think a lot of that has changed.
It is possible, I think one might even say likely, that the two attempts to take his life, particularly the first one that came about a centimeter away from blowing his head off, would have to change even the most hardened, fixed in your ways person.
And by all accounts, people close to Trump speaking off the record or on the record say they noticed visible changes in Trump and what he values and how he speaks.
After those incidents, no matter how cynical you are in general about Donald Trump, I think it would be very hard to reject that out of hand.
In fact, it would be much more surprising to me, much, if someone didn't change after two incidents like that, particularly the first one.
But it's also the case that if you look at these interviews, it just seems a different Donald Trump.
It's the same Donald Trump in a lot of ways.
I'm not saying there's a radical transformation or departure from what he's always been, but it seems like it's a much more content Donald Trump, a much more secure Donald Trump, someone who no longer is desperate to win the election because, remember, winning the election was really his only way of staying out of prison.
Not only did he win this time, there's no one questioning his win.
No one's claiming it's illegitimate.
No one's claiming it's because of Putin.
He didn't just win the Electoral College.
He won the popular vote.
It was a pretty sweeping victory.
We knew he was going to win almost by 11 o'clock at night, certainly confirmed by 1 in the morning, which is pretty early for American politics.
And so it was a pretty sweeping vindication of who he insists he's been and what he's been.
And I think this is appearing in interviews.
And one of the things substantively that is appearing as well is that he is clearly attempting to be less provocative.
He's not only...
Avoiding making statements that might play into the worst smears about him or his character, but he's going out of his way to try and be reassuring in a way that I find convincing because it does seem to me more consistent with his worldview than what one might do during a campaign.
I think that's true of all politicians.
So let's look at the Time Magazine cover today.
It was released today, and there you see him on the cover.
He was named Person of the Year, 2024, The Choice.
And there's a picture of Trump.
There you see him on the cover, Person of the Year, Donald Trump.
And the article reads, quote, For 97 years, the editors of Time have been picking the Person of the Year.
The individual who, for better or worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months.
In many years, that choice is a difficult one.
In 2024, it was not.
It's hard to argue with that.
I don't really care who time chooses, but I'm more interested in the interview.
But given what they said, I think it's very, very difficult to argue there was anybody who shaped political culture, political life, not just the United States, but through the democratic world more than Donald Trump did over this past year.
The fact that he came back from being impeached twice, from being indicted four times, And then he rolled to the victory in the GOP nomination against a lot of credible opponents, well-funded, credible opponents, and then won with a fair amount of ease in the general election as well.
And what is a polarized country brought a lot of other people to his side.
Clearly, he's reshaped political life in the United States in ways that no one else can compare, and even, therefore, globally, even that the U.S. is still the largest, most powerful country in the world.
The magazine published a transcript with Trump, a pretty lengthy, detailed transcript.
And I want to give you a sense of what I mean when I said all the things I said about how Trump appears to me.
Now, as you know, during the campaign, an ad that the Trump campaign ran and ran and ran and ran over and over and over that Paul showed was quite effective was one that focused not so much on the issue of transgender people It was really more focused on something Kamala Harris had said in 2019 when responding to a questionnaire by the ACLU and running for office where she said in response to the ACLU's
question that she does support having U.S. government funding of sex reassignment surgeries and other treatments even to people who are imprisoned or who are illegally detained.
And I don't really think the reason why that ad worked so well, showing Kamala Harris saying that and concluded with that famous phrase, therefore Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you.
I don't even think the reason it resonated so much is because people think much about that issue, whether the government should pay for it.
Sex reassignment surgeries or treatments for prisoners and illegal detainees, I think that became a proxy for trying to say, look at how out of touch the Democrats are with your lives.
That's the reason that you're suffering under their governance is because they don't care about you at all.
They have these lofty, radical issues and factions that they please, but they don't think about the things that you're going through.
And that's what the commercial was about.
Not, let's go stop the evil of transgenderism, but more, you need people in Washington who care about you and your lives.
And so I thought it was so interesting what Trump said when he was asked both about this issue in general but also the specific issue of whether the newly elected, the first ever member of Congress who's transgender, Sarah McBride, who was elected from the state of Delaware and the Democratic Party should be able to use the women's bathroom that has become a who was elected from the state of Delaware and the Democratic Party should be able to And they asked him about that as well.
And I think his answer was surprising, at least to me it was.
No, actually, I don't think it was.
It's what I would expect him to say.
I guess what was surprising was that he's just willing to say it even if it means alienating.
A lot of people who are on his side, especially on this issue.
So here was the exchange.
Quote, can I shift to the transgender issue?
This is the question.
Obviously sort of a major issue during the campaign.
In 2016, you, Donald Trump, said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they choose.
Do you still feel that way?
And then here was Trump's answer.
I don't want to get into the bathroom issue because it's a very small number of people we're talking about and it's ripped apart our country.
So they'll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees.
On that note, there's a big fight in the Congress now.
Oh, then the question was after that, he said, look, I don't want to get into it.
It's a small number of people.
It's very polarizing.
It's ripping the country apart.
So let...
Whatever the law is, is what the law will be.
And then the reporter followed up and said, well, on that note, there's a big fight on this in Congress now.
The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should be focused on more important issues.
Do you agree?
And Trump's answer is this, quote, I do agree with that.
On that, absolutely.
As I was saying, it's a very small number of people.
So what he's saying is, look, this issue is not an issue we should be focused on.
The issue of transgender people using the bathroom, right?
Now, as I said, I know there are a lot of conservatives, a lot of Trump supporters who disagree with that, who think that is an issue on which we should be focused.
There are a lot of people who are focused on that issue, which is what I think is so notable about the fact that Trump didn't choose to demagogue this issue.
He didn't choose to exploit the polarization that it engenders.
And, in fact, he said, yeah, I agree with the newly elected trans member of Congress when she says we should be focused on the question of which bathroom people use, but instead on far more important issues facing the country.
Here is Donald Trump in 2016. And I think it's really worth remembering that when Trump ran, announced he was running, he was extremely emphatic on the issue of immigration and But Trump has never been a hardcore conservative on any social issues, to put that mildly, and it's pretty easy to understand why.
He's been a Manhattan billionaire for his entire adult life.
He was a star in Hollywood on his own show.
Obviously, he's coming into contact with gay people all the time, constantly, in Manhattan, in Hollywood.
He himself is on his third marriage.
Those three women to whom he were married were not the only women with whom he has had sex.
He doesn't live a life focused on this.
He never cared about social issues before.
And he's given checks to the Democratic Party.
What motivated him was immigration, trade, and economics.
That clearly was what gave him the most passion, but obviously during a campaign you have to focus on the things that will get you votes.
And I always knew that Trump's heart is not in social issues.
And you saw him, quite calculatedly, in this election, afraid of what the abortion issue could do to his campaign and backing off a lot of hardcore pro-life stances that were once the requirement of the Republican Party, including saying he doesn't believe in a national abortion ban.
Here was Trump in 2016 addressing, kind of briefly when asked, the question of trans people in bathrooms.
Leave it the way it is, right now.
There have been very few problems.
Leave it the way it is.
North Carolina, what they're going through with all of the business that's leaving and all of the strife, and that's on both sides.
You leave it the way it is.
There have been very few complaints the way it is.
People go.
They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.
There has been so little trouble.
And the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment that they're taking.
Do you have any transgender people working in your organization?
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I probably do.
I really don't know.
So if Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses.
That is correct.
By the way, this is somebody who a lot of LGBT groups convinced LGBTs was coming to put them into camps because he so hates gay people and trans people.
He said in 2016, yeah, Caitlyn Jenner wants to use the woman's bathroom in Trump Tower.
I don't care.
This isn't an issue worthy of strife.
It's too insignificant and trivial of an issue.
It never caused problems before.
That's something we talked about last week.
It is true that for a long time the trans issue was never anything that anybody bothered with.
It only became a source of controversy when it got pushed into areas that were predictably designed to provoke a lot of conflict, one involving Trans women in sports,
biological males who transition to women and putting them in women's sports, and especially the question of administering treatment to children to pre-adolescence to stop their puberty or give them hormones, cross-sex hormones.
We talked about all that last week.
But I think Trump is very representative of most people, which is, this is not the issue that's driving me.
Live and let live.
And this is not something that he newly unveiled.
It's something he's been saying for a long time.
Now, during the campaign, Trump did talk about trans issues.
And I remember seeing the first time he did it, I think we have the video of this being the first time, but I remember exactly what it is, where he basically said, in a kind of sardonic way, ironic way, wow, when you mention the trans issue, people go wild.
Kind of like, I don't know why, I don't know why people care about this so much.
But they do, every time I mention it at my rally, they go insane.
So being a politician wanting to win, he definitely did raise it and talk about it.
But even when he saw the benefit it was bringing to him politically, he never quite understood why this was something so important to other people since it wasn't to him.
Here's one example at a rally in June of 2023.
In critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.
It's amazing how strongly people feel about that.
You see, I'm talking about cutting taxes.
People go like that.
I'm talking about transgender.
Everyone goes crazy.
Who would have thought five years ago you didn't know what the hell it was?
I mean, he was basically mocking the audience that gave him a standing ovation.
He said, yeah, I talk about tax cuts and the economy.
People were like, yeah, okay, I care about that a little.
But you mentioned trends.
I mean, for people who are listening, the audience there in North Carolina where he was speaking gave him a standing ovation, a prolonged applause.
And he noticed that.
He said, look at this, how crazy people go for this one issue.
They don't care about the economy or tax cuts nearly as much.
So Trump was obviously subtly, at least being confounded by it, not criticizing the audience for prioritizing this issue to such an extent because he does not.
And there you see in this article today where they basically ask him about whether he agrees that this is not the issue that we should be focused on.
He said, "Yeah, this affects a tiny number of people." And he even went on after the part we showed you, where he said, "Look, I mean, what the majority wants matters, but so do minority rights.
And I want to make sure we're treating everybody justly and fairly." Not only was there no hostility to trans people, there was compassion and empathy towards them of the kind you saw in that clip going all the way back to 2016.
And I think that is who Trump is.
It's who Trump consistently is.
Now, another thing that I found very interesting in this article is that there's a lot of confusion among some people on what exactly Trump wants in Ukraine.
In part because so many people whom he's chosen for very key positions in his foreign policy part of his administration are people who have been critical of Joe Biden for not having done more.
Not having done more and sooner, including allowing American long-range missiles to be used to bomb Russia, which is what Joe Biden just about three weeks ago announced he would do.
And so the article, the reporter asked in the following, quote, And Trump said this, quote, We're
sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia.
Why are we doing that?
We're just escalating this war and making it worse.
That should not have been allowed to have been done.
Here's what I mean.
I know there are people in both parties who disagree with Trump on this, saying, I don't want to escalate this war.
It's crazy to allow the Ukrainians to use American missiles and probably personnel to shoot deep inside Russia, bomb deep inside Russia.
Why are we doing that?
But the way he's answering these questions is very uncalculated.
He's speaking kind of from the heart in terms of what he really thinks.
And I had made the point actually once before a couple of months ago when I was on Fox.
I think I was on with Laura Ingraham.
And she had played a clip of Trump talking about the war in Ukraine.
And he was basically saying what he said there, which is like, this war has ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, young people.
What is the point of this, the sense of this, of all this bloodshed?
And I remarked that it's very rare to hear a politician talking about war in that way.
That is the only way, or at least the primary way, to talk about war.
That is war.
It's spilling blood.
It's ending people's lives.
It's extinguishing their existence.
Young people just, who don't even want to be in the war, who don't know why they're there, And it doesn't mean war is always unjustified.
It means that one of the reasons why it should be an absolute last resort, only done when absolutely necessary, which is not the case for this war, is because, as he often puts it, so many people are bleeding and dying and losing their lives and it's tragic.
And I made the point on Fox News in response when I heard that clip that, wow, Trump's really one of the only politicians these days who talks about war in that manner.
Most people in Washington from both parties talk about it as a geostrategic issue.
We can't let Russia expand.
They almost never talk about the human cost of war, in part because it doesn't really come to American soil.
We haven't had a war where people were drafted since Vietnam.
And so most people in the United States see war as kind of a game, as an abstract issue.
It's not fought on our soil, and it's not fought with most of their families.
But when Trump talks about it, he talks about it always in this very humanistic way, which is why I also do believe, at least to some extent, there's authenticity to his desire to avoid war.
Along with, as I talked about before, what is his obvious fear of nuclear weapons, which he talks about a lot.
Now, one of the reasons why this was so interesting that he so adamantly said he opposes the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine is because a lot of people in his cabinet, who are going to be in his cabinet, and who are supporters of his, have said the exact opposite.
Just a couple of weeks ago, General Keith Kellogg was on Fox News, and here's what he had to say on that same exact issue.
You know, John, here's what I'm really hoping.
I'm hoping that Jake Sullivan talked to Michael Walsh, who's the incoming National Security Advisor, or President Biden, who's talked to President Trump.
And said, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm really hoping that happened.
Because what he has done, Biden, through his actions, he's actually given President Trump more leverage.
Really?
Because now he can pull back.
He can go left.
He can go right.
He can do something.
And I think what he did is he basically said, well, this is what I want to do.
And I'm hoping there's something to this.
I don't know.
But it does give President Trump more ability to pivot from that.
Oh, that's interesting.
All right.
Just one quick question before we let go, but it's like five seconds, General.
So you're not buying the White House's, the Biden administration's justification that they launched, they approved these new long-range weapons because of the North Koreans on the ground inside Ukraine?
It sounds good, but Jillian, what I'm really hoping is there was another reason to it, which allows, gives leverage to President Trump.
Maybe that may be a good reason to do it.
Look, they should have been doing this a year ago, but they've basically pulled back.
You don't fight a war allowing other countries to have sanctuaries.
If you're going to fight a war, you fight a war.
And we've basically pulled back on letting Zelensky fight a war that he should have been fighting a long time ago.
And the casualties were horrific.
Yeah, of course.
But the advantages that he had this last summer are not there anymore.
And that's Trump's former National Security Advisor, and that is the representative view of the establishment of the Republican Party, people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and others whom he's chosen, whose criticism of the Biden policy toward Ukraine is not that we've gotten too involved, that we've fueled that war, that we've risked escalation too much, that we haven't done it enough.
And so for Trump to just come out and say...
After people like this are saying, oh, we should have done this a year ago, Biden's doing the right thing, and to say this is crazy to send that kind of missiles there, I think is indicative of why I say we need to wait to see what the Trump administration is and not judge based on the people he's choosing, because it seems a very engaged Trump, a very determined Trump to make sure that this time his policies are the ones who end up shaping his administration and not people who are supposed to work for him.
Here was...
Let me just skip to this.
The Time Magazine article also asked Trump about the war in Israel and Gaza.
And here's what Trump had to say about that.
The question is this, quote, You mentioned the Palestinian people.
In your first term, your administration put forward the most comprehensive plan for a two-state solution in a long time.
Do you still support that plan?
Trump said, quote, I support a plan of peace and it can take different forms.
The reporter, do you still support a two-state solution?
And then Trump again says, I support whatever solution we can do to get peace.
There are other ideas other than two-state, but I support whatever is necessary to get not just peace, but a lasting peace.
The real question at the heart of this, sir, that she's now asking again, is do you want to get a two-state deal done?
Outlined in your peace to prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?
And then Trump says, so what I want is a deal where there's going to be peace and where the killing stops.
The reporter, would you tell Israel, Bibi tried last time and you stopped him.
Would you do it again this time?
And Trump says, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I did.
I stopped him.
And then the reporter said, do you trust Netanyahu?
And Trump says, I don't trust anybody.
That is not the answer that most of the people who are working for Trump, whom he's chosen, would give.
None of them is saying, in fact, oh yeah, we want peace.
They're saying we want to unleash the Israelis even further.
Now, we'll see what happens in the administration.
That's the area where I'm least optimistic and hopeful for, given the people who funded Trump's campaign and who he's surrounded himself with.
But I do think Trump prides himself on ending wars.
And there again, you're seeing his view that the first priority has to be ending wars.
And he has no reason at this point, unlike two months ago, to say things he doesn't believe because he's never going to face the electorate again.
When Trump was on Meet the Press, one of the issues he was asked about was whether he would allow RFK Jr. to ban childhood vaccines or to otherwise codify the idea that vaccines cause autism.
And here's what Trump said about that.
Going back 25 years, studies show that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and yet it sounds like you are open to the possibility of him looking at getting rid of them.
I'm open to anything.
I think somebody has to find out.
If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism.
Now you have it...
Well, they say because they're better at identifying it.
One in 100,000, and now it's one in 100. That's a pretty bad number.
I mean, something is going on.
I don't know if it's vaccines.
Maybe it's chlorine in the water, right?
You know, people are looking at a lot of different things.
I want them to look at everything.
So childhood vaccines have prevented about 4 million deaths around the world every year.
I think that's great.
I'm all for it.
I think it's great.
I'm not against vaccines.
The polio vaccine is the greatest thing.
If somebody told me get rid of the polio vaccine, they're going to have to work real hard to convince me.
I think vaccines are, certain vaccines are incredible.
But maybe some aren't.
And if they aren't, we have to find out.
But when you talk about autism, because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it's pretty scary.
Well, again, scientists say that's because they've gotten better at identifying it, and there's no link in studies.
But the drug companies are going to be working with RFK Jr., and he's been an interesting guy to me.
I've watched him for 25 years, and he's been an interesting guy.
So...
Yeah, he's saying, look, I'm not asserting that childhood vaccines cause autism, but I do want to know why autism has skyrocketed.
She keeps saying, scientists say it's because we identify better, as if he's just supposed to swallow that and say, well, there's no longer any need to research.
Like, do all scientists think that?
Is it possible scientists are wrong?
Like, there were in so many instances with COVID. And it's just a very, again, reasonable, non-dogmatic way of looking at it.
I want to study these causes.
I want to work with drug companies.
If somebody wants to ban all childhood vaccines, like the polio one, that's going to be pretty difficult for them to get me to do.
So again, you're seeing this kind of image of Trump that if you were to believe what you've been hearing about him for the last year, you would not recognize this person.
Here's one particularly good example, and I think this not only surprised a lot of his supporters, but even angered them, where he was asked about whether he would really intend to deport every single person in the country illegally, all 11 million, including the so-called Dreamers, the people who came here very, very young, who have studied here, who went to school here, who have integrated into the society, and she asked him, would you even...
Deport them.
And here's what he said about that.
Out of our country.
What about dreamers, sir?
Dreamers who were brought to this country illegally as children?
You said once back in 2017, they quote, shouldn't be very worried about being deported.
Should they be worried now?
The dreamers are going to come later and we have to do something about the dreamers because these are people that have been brought here At a very young age, and many of these are middle-aged people now.
They don't even speak the language of their country.
And yes, we're going to do something about the dreamers.
What does that mean?
What are you going to do?
I will work with the Democrats on a plan.
And if we can come up with a plan, but the Democrats have made it very, very difficult to do anything.
Republicans are very open to the dreamers.
The dreamers, we're talking many years ago, they were brought into this country.
Many years ago.
Some of them are no longer young people.
In many cases, they become successful.
They have great jobs.
In some cases, they have small businesses.
In some cases, they might have large businesses.
And we're going to have to do something with them.
You want them to be able to stay.
That's what you're saying?
I do.
I want to be able to work something out.
And it should have been able to be worked out over the last three or four years.
And it never got worked out.
You know, Biden could have done it because he controlled Congress to a certain extent, right?
He could have done something, but they didn't do it.
I never understood why, because they always seem to want to do it, but then when it comes down to it, they don't.
I think we can work with the Democrats and work something out.
Let me ask you about it.
So again, here's the person we were supposed to believe.
Hates all brown people, wants them all extinguished and wants them gone.
Going to put up concentration camp for millions of people.
And here he's asked about Dreamers.
And again, I know this made a lot of people angry who are supporters of Donald Trump, particularly his immigration policies, who don't think anyone in the country, including Dreamer, should be able to stay.
And he said, yeah, I want them to stay.
Of course they have to stay.
We need to get something worked out.
And he even criticized Joe Biden and the Democrats for not having done it when they had full power.
Here's Trump being asked about the prospect of raising the minimal wage from $7.25.
And I found this...
And one of the things I have to say is, again, all of this is very cogent.
Do you see how easy it is to understand, to listen to him, to follow the logical train of thought that he is asking us to travel with him on?
It's a very relaxed Trump.
It's not that hyper-combative, defensive Trump.
And again, I think that comes from the security of having just won an election that nobody can challenge the legitimacy of.
Remember, when he ran in 2016, it was instantly delegitimized as the byproduct of Russian interference.
There's no one who can do that this time, and so he's just extremely secure when he's talking to anybody, and that makes him, I think, a more effective candidate.
I'm a communicator and a more effective speaker.
I know I'm being pretty positive and I'm praising a lot of aspects of what I see of Trump and this is just what I'm seeing and I'm showing you the reasons.
Here he is talking about the unbelievably low compared to other countries, compared to the cost of living, minimal wage in the United States that has not been raised in decades.
I've had that conversation.
Let me ask you about another aspect of the economy, sir, the minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. There are 20 states that still have the federal minimum wage at $7.25.
And I actually have a map.
19 of these states actually voted for you, sir.
And you can see it right here.
I don't know if you remember this, but during the debate in 2020, I asked you if you would raise the minimum wage.
You said you would consider it.
And so my question for you is, now that you are going back to the White House for these 19 states that voted for you, Are you going to raise the federal wage?
It's a very low number.
I will agree.
It's a very low number.
Let me give you the downside, though.
In California, they raise it up to a very high number.
And your restaurants are going out of business all over the place.
The population is shrinking.
It's had a very negative impact.
But there is a level at which you could do it, absolutely.
What is that level?
I don't know.
I mean, I really don't know.
And he went on to say, you know, part of the difficulty of doing it on a national level is that the cost of living in places like New York or Los Angeles are radically different than the cost of living in Idaho or Alabama or any of those 19 states that she showed voted for him that have a very low minimum wage.
So again, I think it's just a very non-dogmatic Trump.
Like, yeah, $7.25 is absurdly low.
But on the other hand, if you raise it too high, you end up costing people jobs because businesses can't afford them, can't afford to pay that.
And then there's this extra issue that in some places you need a lot more money to live and other places you need less.
But again, it's far from dogma.
It's the opposite.
Here is...
Trump, just to make sure that I'm not depicting him as this kind of conventional politician, one of the superpowers of Trump has always been that he is extremely funny.
The things he said that were funny, that were clearly intended as jokes, the media just could not comprehend or intended humorously.
A lot of times they purposely distorted it, other times they simply were confused.
I think the time that I really became radicalized when it came to media lying about not just Russiagate but Trump in 2016 Was that time he stood at a press conference and he was asked about Russia.
They were obsessed with Russia and hacking, Russian hacking into the DNC. And he said, I don't know about that, but Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can find Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, the ones that she had deleted.
And they decided to pretend.
Trump was obviously making a joke.
Hey, you want to know about Russian hacking?
Maybe the Russians can find Hillary Clinton's emails.
And they decided to pretend that Trump was standing up in front of cameras in front of the world and earnestly placing a request into the Kremlin about what they should go hack.
And they took that as proof that he obviously was in collusion with Putin and the Kremlin since he was specifically requesting that they go hack in a way that was politically advantageous for him.
The stupidity of this was so self-evident.
If Trump was in collusion with the Kremlin, why would he stand in front of cameras and submit his hacking request to them?
It was such an obvious joke and they decided to take it seriously and it made them look like idiots.
Like deranged, hysterical idiots.
Trump is still funny and I just want to show you this one clip just to underscore that while he does seem to be a sort of more sober and serious communicator, it's also the case that he has retained that, especially that kind of bitter sardonic humor that comes from certain kinds of resentments.
Here's what he said when he talked about the first debate he did with Joe Biden.
We have the highest crime rate, and during the debate, a man whose ratings have gone way down, David Muir, said to me, no, crime is, because I had to debate three people, not one, debating one was easy.
Debating three was actually pretty easy, too, if you want to know the truth.
But David Muir said, the crime rates have gone down.
I said, no, they've gone up.
And then the following day, they released the crime rates, and they were way up.
Yeah, the FBI statistics, you're talking about those FBI statistics.
Yeah, well, no, but he gave the wrong answer.
Confusing.
So, he says, yeah, I mean, it's one thing to debate one person, just Joe Biden.
That's pretty easy.
And then he said, but to debate three people, actually, that's pretty easy, too, to be honest.
And, again, I think that...
I don't have any reason to believe this is a contrived Trump.
And if this is the Trump we get, kind of a combination of...
Being unwedded to extreme views simply because he's defended them in the campaign combined with this level of what I think what is most striking to me is the level of engagement and focus and confidence he has because I think that's what was missing more than anything in the first term was I don't think he was that focused.
He wasn't that engaged.
He was more focused on the vendettas he had with Russiagate and the like and he just allowed all these other people To do policy in a way that contradicted not only what he ran on, but what I think is his worldview.
And I am still skeptical of whether that will change in the second term, despite how many people close to Trump insist it will, that he's aware of that, that they're aware of that, that that's the first priority.
But this Trump...
Someone very clearly focused on policy, speaking about it in an informed way, feeling strongly about it, but not so strongly that it becomes just this obsession, this inflexible obsession, but still not compromising on the core worldview.
That's a Trump that I think has the best chance to correct that fundamental problem that happened in his first administration where he simply didn't know enough or care enough Wasn't confident enough.
Was more focused on criticisms of himself.
And this Trump, I think, has the best chance of actually being a Trump that can align his actual worldview and ideology, regardless of whether it appeared in the campaign, with what administration policy actually is.
And it remains to be seen, but this is what we have to go on.
And I think it's very interesting how he appeared in both interviews.
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A very moving, emotional, and deeply melodramatic segment was aired this week on CNN when the foreign correspondent Clarissa and deeply melodramatic segment was aired this week on CNN when the foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward, who has gone to Syria in the wake of the ouster of longtime who has gone to Syria in the wake of the ouster of longtime
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, purported to have entered one of the notorious Syrian prisons and discovered to her great shock that there was a single purported to have entered one of the notorious Syrian prisons and And it gave her the opportunity to comfort him and to hug him and to show how oppressed these heroes are.
Now, one of the interesting things about the emptying of these prisons and the liberation of prisoners is no one seems to be questioning whether any of these people deserve to be in prison.
It is certainly true.
There are a lot of political prisoners.
The Assad regime tortured people.
When we wanted to torture people, interrogation in the United States as part of the war on terror sent people that we kidnapped from Europe.
To Egypt and Syria, both of which were Mubarak and Assad, were our allies at the time.
There is a lot of torture.
There's a lot of political persecution under Assad.
But there's other people who were in prison because they committed violent crimes or egregious crimes.
There seems to be an assumption, though, that every person in a Syrian prison is an unjustly persecuted person there simply because of their dissent.
And so that we embrace them all, we free them all, and they're all evidence of Assad's tyranny.
So here is CNN, and you can see on the screen there, there's Clarissa Ward.
And the graphic is CNN is on the scene the moment a Syrian prisoner is freed.
And here's what CNN claims is what happened in real time as they discover it along with you.
I can't tell though.
It might just be a blanket.
But it's the only cell that's locked.
Is he gonna shoot it?
The guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door.
We go in to get a closer look.
It's still not clear if there is something under the blanket.
Is there someone there?
Is someone there?
Or is it just a blank?
I don't know.
Hello?
Okay, let's just move.
Yeah.
Move.
It's okay.
Muffy, Muffy.
It's okay.
It's okay. - So there's one guy alone in a cell, He was Very dramatically, to give a suspense, to build a suspense, he wasn't just sitting there, he was under a blanket, perfectly in a way that you couldn't even tell if there was a human being there.
So we're all waiting with bated breath to see what would happen when the blanket was removed.
And it turns out there's a very seemingly clean and well cared for person under a blanket.
And he puts his hands up and they've discovered a prisoner, one of the only ones or one of the very few who have not been released.
CNN did.
CNN's about to rescue him with their Syrian handlers.
And here's what happened.
I'm a civilian, he says.
I'm a civilian.
I just need to show you this because I just want to show you some of the acting that was done here, some of the emoting that I didn't catch the first time I watched it.
But as you saw, Clarice Award of CNN was in the room.
She She was speaking English to him.
I'm a civilian, and I'm not sure why she was speaking English to him, but that's what she was doing.
And then when he gets up, she goes back behind the door.
She leaves the cell to her.
Just a moment, and this is what she does.
There you see her.
She's behind the door.
And she just is, she's very, she just has to, she needs a moment to compose herself.
She puts her hands on her heart.
There you see her, her hands on her chest.
She's like, oh my god.
She just, she's so emotional about what they just discovered.
A guy in a prison, under a blanket, and then here's the rest.
He tells the fighter he's from the city of Humps and has been in the cell for three months.
Okay, you're okay.
You're okay.
You're okay.
He clutches my arm tightly with both hands.
Does anyone have any water?
Water.
Mike.
Okay, it's water.
It's water.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay, you're okay.
You're okay.
You're okay.
Now, there were a lot of people had a lot of questions about this, where CNN said, we rescued, we found and rescued a prisoner and No idea at all why he was there.
Obviously, their Syrian handlers are people who are rebels who want to show the world how vicious and brutal the Assad regime is or was.
And so I'm certainly not suggesting that CNN stage this.
I don't know if the Syrian handlers did, but a lot of people did close-ups of the hands of this prisoner.
He had very well-medicured and very clean hands.
There was no one else in the prison with him.
The other prison cells we've seen were overcrowded.
Huge numbers of people came out when the doors were open.
And there doesn't seem to be any human waste in the prison.
So a lot of people were thinking this might have been staged as propaganda so that CNN could not just interview a prisoner but actually participate in the rescue of a prisoner, a Syrian prisoner or someone in an Assad dungeon.
Now, the reason I found it so notable that it was Calissa Ward in particular who was participating in this story is because she had previously admitted that she was basically somebody who...
Gave up on any pretense of journalistic neutrality or journalistic distance when it comes to Syria.
She admitted that she was, in fact, a hardened advocate of the U.S. policy to remove Bashar al-Assad from power.
In fact, she was sending deranged voicemails and emails to Obama White House officials because they didn't do more to remove Bashar al-Assad.
In 2021, she did a podcast entitled Intelligence Matters.
which is hosted by the former acting director of the CIA under President Obama, Michael Morrell, one of the people who, A, accused Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton, and needless to say was one of the people who signed the letter, the notorious and needless to say was one of the people who signed the letter, the notorious letter of 51 intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop had all She was on his podcast.
She's a journalist on the podcast chatting very friendly with the former head of the CIA, because that's, of course, the loyalties that she has.
And she was asked about Syria, and this is what she said, quote, I will cop to the fact that I think I crossed the line in Syria.
I became so emotionally involved and I was crushed by the U.S. response and the U.S. policy.
I felt that there wasn't really a strong U.S. policy and that we had said, quote, Assad must go and then we had done nothing to make him go.
We had said chemical weapons were a red line and then that red line was crossed and there wasn't really anything done in terms of repercussions.
And I wrote to Ben Rhodes...
Who was an Obama national security assistant.
She says, I wrote him an email, Ben Rhodes, while he was in the White House to his official White House account that said the following, quote, Dear Ben, I hope you're sleeping soundly as Aleppo burns.
At least we have the Russians to sort it out.
Best wishes, Clarissa.
So, I don't think I even need to prove that this is somebody who is a long-time activist for U.S. policy removing Bashar al-Assad and for putting in whoever these rebels are.
Because she herself admitted that.
I crossed the line.
She's sending these angry, enraged emails to Obama officials.
Sarcastic and embittered.
It's not a journalist.
Sure it's fine if people go around wanting to advocate for Obama doing more to remove Assad beyond giving the CIA a billion dollars a year as he was doing to fight alongside ISIS and Al Qaeda.
But to be a journalist covering Syria and at the same time berating the government for not unleashing the CIA even more to do regime change in a country?
Obviously that's crossing the line journalistically but also it's a good reason why we ought to be skeptical when then she starts putting out this kind of propaganda that is highly questionable.
Now, here she previously, in what became controversial in October of 2023, showed herself on CNN laying on the ground to avoid what she said was rocket fire.
Here's what happened.
Clarissa is on the ground right now.
Clarissa, tell us what's happening.
Stand by.
Hi, John.
So forgive me, I have a slightly unelegant position, but we have just had a massive barrage of rockets coming in here not too far from us, so we have had to take shelter here by the roadside.
We're just about five minutes away.
Gaza is in...
That direction.
We can hear now a lot of jets in the sky.
We can also hear the Iron Dome intercepting a number of those rockets as they were whizzing overhead and making impact in that direction.
So that was very helpful.
She was lying on the ground out of breath in Israel on October 9, 2023, talking about these primitive, crude rockets that Hamas was sending when Israel was sending 2,000 pound bombs and 1,000 pound bombs to destroy Gaza.
She was there to convey the drama of being in Israel, the dangers of that.
Now, I'm just offering these facts about what we know.
As I said, I'm not here to assert that CNN staged that very melodramatic and convenient prison rescue.
If I had to bet, I'd say it's likelier that the Syrian handlers who are rebels did it for CNN, but I don't even know that.
It could be just this huge coincidence that CNN stumbled into some forgotten prisoner and he grabbed her by the arm even though she's speaking English to him.
And he's perfectly manicured nails, and he's holding onto her arm, and she's saying, get water, get water.
And she gives him water, and he just drinks it down out of great thirst.
That could all have happened.
It could be a very excellent stroke of good luck for CNN and for Clarissa Ward, who is a strong advocate, as she said, of this policy to remove Assad.
But I think that it's very worth remembering.
And I want to be as fanatical or at least as emphatic as I can be about how I phrase this because every single time there's a major geopolitical event that the United States cares about, extreme, deliberate, blatant, material lies come spewing forth both before and afterward to influence public opinion in the way that Washington wants it to be.
They disseminate those lies themselves or through their media.
It happens all the time.
In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson wanted to involve the United States directly and militarily in combat in Vietnam, the story that the media told that came from the government was that the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
And that was proof that this was an aggressive regime that we had to go and confrontationally and militarily confront that became the Iraqi WMD of the Vietnam War.
And that led to the Senate to enact what was called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized the deployment of direct combat forces in Vietnam.
And it turned out it was all completely a lie.
The story that led to the U.S. entrance into the Vietnam War in 1964, where we stayed for the next 11 years, Lost tens of thousands of American lives, killed hundreds of thousands, more than a million Vietnamese, destroyed that country, used Agent Orange, had an illegal war in Cambodia.
All of that, the story that was in the media that convinced Americans to support it and the entire Senate to support it was an absolute lie.
It's not me saying that.
Here's the U.S. Naval Institute in February of 2008. The headline is, if we can put this up on the screen...
The truth about Tonkin.
We're gonna get that on the screen in just a second.
If not, I'll read it, but when I just get it on the screen 'cause it's so definitive in terms of his historical condemnation of this lie and it comes from the U.S. Naval Institute.
All right, the title is, we'll get that up on the screen if we can, The Truth About Tonkin.
Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incident have persisted for more than 40 years, but once classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts.
And deceive the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War.
And again, this is from the US Naval Institute.
A lot of people know about Iraqi WMDs, not as many people know about the lies that led to the Vietnam War.
When President Obama announced the intervention, the US participation in the war in Libya, He swore to the public that it had nothing to do with regime change.
It was not about removing Muammar Gaddafi.
The only thing we were there to do, he said, was to protect the population in Benghazi, who the Western narrative said was about to be massacred by Gaddafi.
We're just there to impose a no-fly zone.
And of course, that was a massive lie.
The only point of that war was to remove Gaddafi, because he had been talking about using his oil no longer for the West, but for the benefit of his own people.
And here in Foreign Policy, are we going to be able to get this up on the screen or any other documents?
We're going to get this up on the screen as well.
We're just going to get it fixed.
But here in Foreign Policy Magazine in 2016, and this is a journal that is highly accommodating to, friendly toward the U.S. security state, published an article that was entitled The Big Lie About the Libyan War.
Quote, the Obama administration said it was trying to protect civilians.
Its actions reveal it was looking for regime change.
And that was obvious all along.
The war in Ukraine was filled with so many lies and such blatant myth and disinformation that even the New York Times, early in the war, was forced to admit that despite how much they supported the war in Ukraine and the U.S. involvement in it.
The New York Times, in March of 2022, less than a month, just a couple of weeks after the Russian invasion, had an article entitled, Fact and Myth-Making Blend in Ukraine's Information War.
Experts say stories like the Ghost of Kiev, which was this supposed heroic Ukrainian fighter pilot who had on his own taken down 41 different Russian airplanes that was spread by Adam Kinzinger and a whole variety of other Ukraine fanatics.
And Snake Island, you remember that?
When the Ukrainians were supposedly on an island and a Russian warship came and said, either surrender or we're going to kill you.
And these brave, feisty Ukrainian fighters said, F you Russia warship.
And then the Russians murdered them all.
All of that was an absolute lie, too.
But look how gentle the New York Times is being.
Fact and myth-making.
Fact and myth-making blend.
Imagine if Donald Trump said something that was slightly inaccurate.
You'd think the New York Times would say, Donald Trump blends fact and myth-making.
But when it comes to lies, absolute fairy tales, fabrications, to influence public opinion about the war in Ukraine, the New York Times is very gentle about it, but the forces say, experts say stories like the ghost of Kiev and Snake Island, both of questionable veracity, are propaganda or morale boosters, or perhaps both.
And obviously you can go down the list.
The first Gulf War, the United States brought an Iraqi exile.
A young woman who claims that she saw Saddam Hussein's troops pulling babies out of incubators as a way of punishing the parts of the country that had been hostile to him, particularly the Iran-linked militias, the parts of the country that are Shia.
And that became, in the minds of the public, the thing that made Saddam Hussein the new Hitler, as George H.W. Bush 41 called the Saddam Hussein.
And that story was everywhere.
Saddam Hussein pulls babies out of incubators to kill them to punish dissenting parts of the country.
And it turned out the young woman who went and testified that, unbeknownst to anyone, had worked for an exile group that had long been advocating for the U.S. to go and do regime change in Iraq.
It was promoted by neocons.
And the whole story proved to be a fabrication.
Obviously, we did a whole show on the lies that were told about October 7th, including the fact that babies were beheaded and put into the oven by Hamas.
And these are all deliberate lies that are necessary because the Israeli government knew what it was about to go do in Gaza, and they needed to be able to say to the public, Hamas is worse than ISIS, which is what Netanyahu said.
And so it's not enough to just go and say, oh, they killed about 600 civilians and another 600 active military soldiers and police officers.
And some of those 600 people died by the Israeli military because of the Hannibal doctrine that says we should kill our own citizens rather than let them be taken hostage or through tanks that were being used to fight Hamas that killed huge numbers of people as well.
The idea had to be no.
Hamas did something so...
Morally repulsive that not even Hitler would do it.
Not even ISIS would do that.
And so these lies are not just arbitrary, casual lies.
They're very deliberate.
They're very deliberate.
They're very purposeful.
And obviously when it comes to Muslims and making the West hate Muslims, the caricature is that they chop people's heads off.
And so saying that they chop people's heads off, but not just any people, they chop the heads off of babies.
And Joe Biden said he went to Israel and saw the pictures of beheaded babies.
And none of this proved to be true.
It all proved to be a lie.
Babies in ovens.
We've gone over the evidence many times from Israeli newspapers, from European newspapers, from official documents, that only one baby died on October 7th.
And he was shot in crossfire.
He wasn't put in an oven.
He wasn't beheaded.
And you just go down the list of every major conflict.
So when you see things coming out of Syria designed to convince people that the goal of removing Saddam Hussein Bashar al-Assad from power was justified and that the aftermath is good, And you see very emotionally powerful, heart-stringing stories like the one CNN purported to have discovered in this prison rescue where CNN itself heroically rescued a prisoner.
Of course you should be extremely skeptical.
In fact, if you're using rationality, if you're being rational, it's far more justified to be reflexively skeptical Skeptical, not saying assume everything is a lie, but be reflexively skeptical that it is to put credence into what the government is saying, given the unbroken, constant, easily documentable record of the U.S. government and its media allies lying, not just in some cases of wars and coups that they care most about, but in every single case.
There's been a lot of discourse, a lot of discussion, a lot of think pieces, a lot of debate about the killing of the CEO of Universal Healthcare, which is the largest health insurance company in the country.
And we covered that ourselves in the context of examining why people hate the health insurance industry, not just people on the left, people across the political spectrum.
I talked about what we confronted personally from a health insurance company in Brazil that was owned by Universal Healthcare that operates very similarly, the way they deny coverage to you at your most difficult time after you pay premiums forever.
They'll concoct ways to deny you the opportunity to visit doctors.
It's an industry that people despise.
And so the The fact that someone clearly targeted the CEO produced all over the political spectrum a lot of, I wouldn't say celebration of the fact that the CEO himself died, but a lot of unleashed rage at this industry that impeded people from being particularly empathetic with the victim and in some cases quite supportive of the killer whose identity at the time we did this segment was not known.
Since then, as you've undoubtedly heard, The police apprehended someone that they claim is the suspect or the killer.
He is the suspect.
They claim is the killer.
His name is Luigi Mangioni, who is 26 years old.
And his lawyer says he intends to plead guilty, says he hasn't seen any forensic evidence linking him to the crime.
So we don't know if he is the killer, in fact.
But the...
This manifesto that he had with him was leaked and the independent journalist, Clint Kippenstein, obtained a copy of it.
It was very much exactly what one might expect, namely that I did this because I hate the health insurance industry.
There was a document, an online trail, a long online trail, written by Luigi Mangione, including having commented on or reviewed the Unabomber's manifesto, where the Unabomber justified why he sent mail bombs to people, killed innocent people, and the Manifesto was actually one of the most interesting things you could ever read.
It was very prescient, warning about the dangers of advancing technology and atomization of society.
And in that review, he said while he was justly imprisoned because he ended up killing innocent people, violence is often justified when there's no other way to get attention for a cause.
That's what his view was.
So a lot of people...
Turns out Luigi Mangione is extremely attractive, physically attractive, and that has absolutely shaped the way people are reacting to this story.
Human attractiveness, human beauty is a very powerful force, and that unquestionably is generating a lot more sympathy for him, a lot more interest in him, a lot more support for him.
There's more and more photos that are being uncovered, and it's absolutely true.
There's no denying that he's a very good-looking person, and there's been a history in the United States before.
When defendants are young or looking, there's a lot of empathy and support for that person, including romantic or sexual attraction.
It happened with Ted Bundy, the serial killer.
It happened with Charles Manson.
And it's definitely happening in this case.
And there was already a lot of support before anyone saw pictures of the suspect, who we still don't know is the killer, but that's what the police insist on.
And then once he became known, once his pictures became known, once more was known about him, support for him has increased.
And so there's a lot of anger around the fact, in some circles, that people seem supportive of the idea that vigilante justice in pursuit of a cause can be justified.
And there's a lot of people who are insisting, as a matter of principle, vigilante justice can never be justified.
It's never justified to use violence to murder someone in pursuit of a cause in an extraditional way.
Here, just as one example, here's the New York Post from December 11th.
Ghouls launched legal defense fund for UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying suspect Luigi Mangioni.
So they're calling people ghouls who created a legal defense fund for him.
Here is Jesse Waters, the Fox News host, who's shown on quite frequently, who ranted and raved with a lot of anger and rage.
This is before or right when they say they caught the killer at the McDonald's.
And here's what he had to say about people he perceives to be cheering for the killer.
And good.
He's got it.
Now, he's a prep school kid.
He's politically connected in Maryland.
Is he ready for prison?
I don't think anyone's ready, Brian.
Maybe you are, Brian, in a different way.
But this guy's not ready.
He's way too soft.
He's going to get annihilated on the inside.
And good.
If he's not going to get the death penalty, maybe someone will do him justice behind bars.
That's all I have to say about that.
You should stop there.
Right.
Now, there's a gigantic irony there.
That on the one hand, you're saying that vigilante justice and murdering people extrajudicially can never be justified, and people who support it or cheer it or encourage it are ghouls and monsters.
And then on the other hand, in the same segment, turning around and saying there's a good chance he's going to get raped or murdered in prison, and I hope he does.
He deserves it.
Obviously, if somebody's murdered in prison by a fellow prisoner...
That is the very definition of extraditional murder, a vigilante justice.
So I've seen this happen quite a bit where people claim that they're opposed to vigilante justice or people murdering for a cause on the one hand, but then turning around and cheering it when their politics makes them more supportive of it.
And it really makes me question whether people actually oppose this sort of violence for a cause, the killing of somebody extraditially.
Who they think deserves to be murdered for their political acts or their acts that harm society or whether people actually believe in it, anybody, as a principle.
Just to give you one more example, here's Michael Moynihan of the Free Press.
Here is what he had to say on some free press podcast talking about what he says are people on the left cheering for this murder.
This kid was a spoiled rich brat who went to a $40,000 a year private school.
His family, wealthy for generations.
The guy that he murdered, father was a grain elevator operator and he went to the University of Ohio, a public school.
So we want to put, you know, put that kind of...
This kid is a privileged, privileged little rat.
And he deserves a rotten hell and rotten prison and then rotten hell.
The person who...
All right, so...
And I think we have one more.
This is...
Okay, so that's been the discourse that either he's kind of heroic or at least he acted in a way that's good for society by not just necessarily killing this one CEO but kind of signaling to the country that people are so angry about what's being done to them by large faceless corporations.
Not just the health insurance industry, but large corporations in general, the way they exploit people, don't look at them as humanity, don't care about their lives, are willing to destroy their lives just to add some profit to the bottom line, and that this killing is beneficial because it forced an examination of why so many people have the health insurance industry.
You have that kind of view on the one side, and then on the other side you have this sanctimonious, on the moral high horse, The lecture that it is grotesque and immoral in every case to murder somebody for a political hazard to engage in vigilante justice.
Here is the aforementioned manifesto that the police claim they found on Luigi Mangione when they arrested him.
And it was a pretty short manifesto, all things being considered.
These are usually a little longer.
And it was leaked to the journalist who I think is a...
Reliable journalist, Ken Klippenstein, I worked with him at The Intercept.
And here's part of what the manifesto said.
Quote, a reminder, the U.S. has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly 42 in life expectancy.
UnitedHealthcare is the largest company in the U.S. by market cap behind only Apple, Google, and Walmart.
It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy?
No.
The reality is these, and it's indecipherable, it could be these pigs, these cretins, these companies have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.
Evidently, I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
And there's another part that says these vermin had it coming, things of that nature.
So, at least if you believe that this is the killer and you believe that this is his manifesto, he was acting in an ideological cause out of anger and rage that maybe it didn't even affect him negatively.
There was a report today that he had never been a universal healthcare insurance carrier.
He was never insured by universal healthcare.
He does come from a wealthy family.
There's reports he had medical problems with his back.
Some say that surgery was successful.
Others say he suffered a lot from his back.
But sometimes people just act in a cause that isn't necessarily directly about them.
Some people can actually be angry at injustices towards others, genuinely angry about it.
You've had wealthy people before become socialist or even communist, even though doing so requires them to give up their wealth.
FDR, for example, was someone from a very wealthy and aristocratic family and yet was responsible for the New Deal, probably the single largest socialist program in the United States that changed the course of how American capitalism functions.
Even though FDR didn't mean Social Security or any of the other social net benefits that he ushered in.
Same with Lyndon Johnson.
So the fact that somebody themselves is not directly injured by an injustice or victimized by it doesn't preclude their authentic rage at that injustice.
Lots of people become enraged at injustices that don't affect them but affect others.
This is called basic human empathy.
But what I really...
Seriously doubt.
And I've talked about these sorts of things before when people claim that they believe in a certain principle, yet in reality seem to only really find it objectionable.
In this particular case, I remember, for example, we covered on the show, there was an American about four months ago, five months ago, who set himself on fire, engaged in self-immolation and died as a symbolic act of protest in front of the White House to the Biden support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And a lot of people on the left who believe that's a genocide, who believe it's a crime against humanity, said this is a noble act of protest.
It's an effective, noble, just cause of protest.
And I saw a lot of people on the right saying, and in the media as well, saying it's despicable to praise self-immolation and suicide as a form of political protest.
And one of the things we did on that show where we talked about that was we looked at other instances where not Americans engage in self-immolation and protest of U.S. government policy, but where people in China did or people in the Arab world did against governments we dislike, and they were widely venerated as but where people in China did or people in the Arab world did against governments we
So it wasn't that these people so angry about the praise for that protester hate self-immolation as a principle like they were claiming.
They just hated it in this case because they support the Israeli war in Gaza and this person was against it.
I think it's very important to examine whether people who are claiming that they believe in a principle that they apply in all cases are in fact only claiming it for this one particular case.
I am quite certain, positive, The people like the New York Post, Michael Moynihan, Jesse Waters, the vast majority of people on the right and in the media.
It's not just people on the right.
Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania, most Democrats in Washington, most media outlets in Washington have said, this is despicable.
You can't support in any way a cold-blooded murder like this.
I have no doubt we can imagine those exact kind of people supporting it, cheering it.
If someone went and murdered tomorrow as an assassination, Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Maduro or the Iranian Ayatollah.
I have no doubt that a lot of people would not be saying vigilante justice is never appropriate.
You can't murder people extraditially because of a perception that they're engaging in some sort of political harm or harm to the society that can never be justified.
I have no doubt that people would be cheering that.
Every time somebody on the left dies, a hated figure on the left and the right celebrates, the left says it's despicable to celebrate someone's death.
That's a human being, a father, a son, a grandfather, whatever, a husband.
And then every time somebody on the right dies and the left celebrates, the right turns around and says the same thing.
Of course there are people who we think are doing so much harm to society that it's justified to cheer when they die and even when someone goes and kills them in the name of stopping the harm that they're doing to society.
If, after O.J. Simpson's acquittal, someone from Nicole Brown Simpson's family or Ron Goldman's family had gone and killed O.J. Simpson out of rage that he murdered their loved one and then got away with it, would people really be saying, this is outrageous?
I'm so empathetic and sad for O.J. Simpson and his family.
I'm disgusted by the people who say he had it coming, that they understand why people in the victim's families would go and do that.
Of course not.
There'd be a lot of people saying, I absolutely understand that, including people who are now saying, vigilante justice, extraditional murder is never justified.
You can think of all sorts of examples.
There's all these times when some defendant is on trial for pedophilia or molestation of a child and in court the father Or some male relative of the child, out of rage, attacks him and beats him, breaks his nose, and everybody stands up and applauds that, even though that's the definition of vigilante justice, even though that is, by definition, trying to harm somebody outside of the court system, try to kill them for acts that they did that are bad.
All the time, people who get killed in prison, if Harvey Weinstein got murdered in prison, or some other notorious criminal got murdered in prison, Or as we saw with Jesse Waters, if Luigi Mangioni, or if he's convicted, ends up going to prison and gets murdered, there are a lot of people cheering that.
Not because he had due process and was given the death penalty, but because someone looked at this person and said, I think that person is so evil, has done so much harm to society, that it's justified to engage in violence against them.
That's exactly what happened.
In the case of Luigi Mangioni, but there are a lot of people who see health insurance executives as benign and not malignant, and they're reacting to that.
Not that nobody deserves this, but that this person in particular didn't deserve it, or the political cause in which it was done is not actually a justifiable one.
It's not a principle at all.
There was actually a case, and I don't want to go too deeply into it, because some people are trying to compare it to Daniel Neely's chokehold on...
Daniel Penny's chokehold of Brandon Ealy in the New York subway, which he just got acquitted for.
But in 1984, there was a case that was a lot more extreme of vigilante justice that divided New York City and generated a lot of support.
It was the case a lot of you probably don't remember because of age.
I don't remember either.
I just read about it.
I'm much too young to have remembered this or have lived through it.
It was 1984 in New York City.
A person named Bernie Goetz was on the subway and four black teenagers got on the subway and one of them walked over to him and said, can you give me five dollars?
I want five dollars.
And then one of his other friends came over and said, yeah, give me five dollars too.
And Bernie Goetz pulled out a gun and shot all four of them.
And when one of them was laying on the ground, scared and petrified because he had been shot, Bernie Goetz said, oh, you don't look that bad.
Let me give you another one and shot him a second time.
And that second bullet went into his spine, caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down for life and to have severe brain damage.
He has the mental capacity of an eight-year-old because of that second shot after the guy was already on the ground.
And for a lot of people, Bernie Gates became a hero, a vigilante hero.
Oh, thank God somebody finally gave these thugs on this subway what they deserved.
There's all kinds of evidence that Bernie Gates had made all sorts of racist statements, that he was racist, but he became a hero.
He was like an outpouring of, yeah, these people deserve it.
Maybe these four guys weren't that bad.
Maybe they weren't going to murder anyone.
They were just panhandling.
But in general, this whole group of people, Thugs who get on the subway and menace people on the subway.
It's time they get scared.
It's time they got something back.
They got what was coming to them.
And then there were a lot of people who said vigilante justice is not justifiable.
There was no reason for him to kill anybody.
He wasn't being threatened.
He wasn't being menaced.
He wasn't in danger.
And they...
He indicted Bernie Goetz and the jury acquitted him on most of the serious charges.
He was convicted on a gun crime and spent about eight months in prison.
And then his worst victim, the victim who suffered the worst injury, the one who was already on the ground shot, he said, you don't look that bad.
Let me give you another one and shot him again.
And he ended up paralyzed and with brain damage, sued him and got something like a $40 million judgment.
Never recovered any of the money.
But nonetheless, the jury found that the shooting was wrongful.
And there were huge numbers of people who supported Bernie Goetz, not even because, again, this particular person deserved it, just because the cause of saying enough is enough, and as a message to other people who do seriously threaten or even attack people on the subway, it was time for them to finally understand that they have something coming to them, too.
That sounds to me a lot like the rationale.
A lot like, in fact, almost identical to the rationale of those supporting the murder of this CEO, which is this health insurance industry has destroyed so many people's lives.
It's killed people by denying coverage.
It's put entire families into bankruptcy at their most vulnerable moment, that this industry finally deserves what's coming to them.
This CEO may not have been the worst.
He might have been.
It's not that we're happy that that particular person got shot or dead, so this thinking goes.
It's that...
Someone needed to finally take this cause that people have been ignoring and bring in attention through violence.
Kind of similar to the Ted Kaczynski rationale about why he engaged in violence to force people to pay attention to what he said they were ignoring that he ended up writing a manifesto about and got it published in the Washington Post and the New York Times by negotiating with them.
So I don't think this issue is as clear cut as it appears to be or at least in terms of how people are insisting that it is.
And I do think a lot of times discourse becomes very reactionary, where people are in fact reacting to their opposition to the political cause or the ideology involved, and they're pretending that they have some universal moral principle and they get so much up on their high horse that I'm certain you could find in their past and and they're pretending that they have some universal moral principle and they get so much up on their high horse that I'm certain you could find in their past and easily imagine hypotheticals in the future where they would
All right, so that concludes this show for this evening.
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