RFK Jr. Hearing Reveals DC Pro-Pharma Consensus; Trump's Executive Order to Deport Student Protesters Criticizing Israel; Untangling DC Think Tank Funding & Influence
Dems viciously maligned RFK Jr. during his confirmation hearing, depicting him as a science denier and corrupted sell-out in an effort to stop him from disrupting the DC status quo. Plus: Trump announced he would issue an executive order that would deport U.S. student visa holders if they criticize Israel. Finally: the Quincy Institute is investigating the ways think tanks' corporate and foreign donors shape pro-war policies.
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Good evening it's Wednesday January 29th Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7pm Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified today before the Senate Finance Committee as part of his confirmation process to become Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Democrats on the committee, led by people like Ron Wyden, Liz Warren, and Bernie Sanders, were quite vicious and scathing and maligning virtually every aspect of RFK Jr.'s character, repeatedly portraying him as a corrupted sellout, a science denier, an opponent of vaccines who will directly kill huge numbers of children with his policies.
If you had told someone that Trump would appoint a lifelong, pro-choice, Democratic Party environmental lawyer to lead our country's health agencies, and that Democrats would then unite in enraged opposition to him, you would likely be very surprised.
Especially if you heard that just a week ago, all those Democrats unanimously united to vote to make Marco Rubio Secretary of State.
Yet this is exactly what is happening.
Much like Democrats' other top priority for personal destruction, Tulsi Gabbard, whose confirmation hearing begins tomorrow, is also a lifelong Democrat.
Their primary crime, RFK Jr.'s and Tulsi's, is one they have in common.
Questioning and skepticism of D.C. institutions of authority in the case of RFK, big pharma and corporate regulatory capture of our science, and in the case of Gabbard, We'll show you the key highlights from today's RFK confirmation hearings to see the dynamic that was at play.
Then, for months now, Israel supporters have been looking for a way to criminalize both protests against the Israeli war in Gaza and, even more menacingly, speech that is critical of the foreign government that they revere.
They have been far more successful in accomplishing those goals than the First Amendment suggests they should be.
First forcing mass firings and even obtaining legislative and regulatory abridgments of free speech, all aimed at Israel's most passionate critics.
That effort to destroy the First Amendment in order to protect this foreign country received a major boost today when President Trump announced he would issue an executive order to order the deportation of anyone legally in the United States on a student visa but who participated or participates in protests against the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
This is a pure speech-based order.
By which I mean that if you're a foreign student legally in the U.S. and you protest in favor of Israel, even if you commit crimes while doing so, you're perfectly fine.
No worries at all.
You're a foreign student, you're allowed to protest in defense of Israel, and your visa will not be jeopardized even if you break the law.
It only threatens this order as deportation of those who protest against Israel, a classically unconstitutional assault on free speech, which is purely viewpoint-based for reasons that we will lay out.
And then finally, Washington think tanks play a far greater role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, or U.S. government policy, especially foreign policy, than most people realize.
They often serve as kind of like a parallel government or even a shadow government when their party is out of power.
They're a major reason why, for instance, Washington stays on permanent war footing.
Yet their funding that enables them to exist, that enables them to hire former government employees, is often very opaque.
And sketchy and often comes from foreign governments with a direct interest in shaping American foreign policy.
Nick Cleveland-Stout is a research fellow in the Democratizing Foreign Policy Unit of the Quincy Institute.
He has conducted research on U.S.-Brazil relations as a 2023 Fulbright Fellow at the Federal University of Santa Catarina with a particular focus on the influence of American think tanks in Brazil.
But he has also been producing some very interesting and important reports on exactly who is behind the most influential think tanks in Washington.
And how that funding shapes their influence over our government.
And he'll be with you here tonight to talk about that work and those questions.
Before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the first things that really angered me about liberal politics in the United States and then alienated me from it is that for decades, the cause of free speech had been one that left liberals had claimed to embrace.
Starting all the way back with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 60s, some of the most important First Amendment cases throughout the 20th century being issued by some of the most liberal and left-wing judges that gave us this absolute version of free speech that pretty much alone in the world the United States upholds.
And then to watch not just liberals, but many people on the left turn around over the last 10 to 15 years and embrace censorship on the Internet, in academic institutions, in politics, in journalism, as one of their primary tools to achieve their agenda, really did repel me.
It's an absolutely foundational value for reasons I've gone over many times before.
And conservatives, obviously, over the last 10 years, primarily because they were so often the targets of it, by no means the only targets, but very often the targets of it, also took up the banner of free speech, even though conservatives in the United States have had a history of cheering for censorship, including on social grounds throughout the 1980s with the moral majority including on social grounds throughout the 1980s with the moral majority and the like, and a lot of the battles over what Americans can read and
But it was the American right that really began championing the cause of free speech because it was their views that were most under attack.
And I've been around long enough to know that if I align with a particular movement or a particular group of people supports my principles that I'm supporting because it happens to align with or coincide with their political faction at the moment, it's by no means a guarantee that they will continue to do so even when that principle starts operating against their political agenda.
And of course, we've seen over the last year and three months, huge numbers of conservatives, by no means all of them.
Some of them are principled, some of them are not fanatical supporters of Israel, but a huge number.
Including the ones who got very rich branding themselves as free speech opponents.
Suddenly deciding that actually censorship is justifiable when it comes to speech on Israel.
There was an executive order issued today by Donald Trump that targets anyone participating in protest against Israel and its destruction of Gaza and threatens them with deportation that we will get to in just a bit.
Before we get there, I just want to show you a couple of clips from RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearing today that took place before the Senate Finance Committee because it was really something that was far more virulent, I think, than a lot of people expected.
Obviously, Democrats in large numbers were going to be opposed, although some suggested they might be open to it.
And yet the venom that they used to treat RFK Jr., a lifelong Democrat, a pro-choice environmental lawyer who Donald Trump has tapped to lead the health agencies, was something that was really quite remarkable. was something that was really quite remarkable.
They really tried to do everything possible, not just to suggest he was unqualified for the position or dangerous in it, but really to destroy his character in every way.
And we got a little glimpse of that when we saw his cousin, the daughter of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy Onassis, Caroline Bouvier-Kennedy, publish a very personally scathing attack on RFK Jr., publish a very personally scathing attack on RFK Jr., her own family member, because she's a Democrat and he supported Trump and now was appointed by Trump.
It was a preview for the kind of attacks they were going to launch on RFK Jr. that were ugly and repellent, so out of proportion to what he actually represents.
First of all, here's Senator Ron Wyden, who's the ranking Democrat on the committee from Oregon, and here is how he opened up the hearing.
...promoting junk science.
In 2021, in a book called The Measles Book, you wrote that parents had been, quote, misled into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective.
The reality is measles are in fact deadly and highly contagious, something that you should have learned after your lives contributed to the deaths of 83 people, most of them children, in a measles outbreak in Samoa.
So my question here is...
Mr. Kennedy, is measles deadly, yes or no?
The death rate from measles historically in this country in 1963, the year before the introduction of the vaccine, was 1 in 10,000.
Let me explain what happened in Samoa.
In Samoa in 2017 or 2015, there were two kids who died following the MMR vaccine.
And the vaccination rates in Samoa dropped precipitously from about 63% to the mid-30s, so they've never been very high.
And in 2018, two more kids died following the MMR vaccine, and the government in Samoa banned the MMR vaccine.
I arrived a year later when vaccination rates were already below any previous level.
I went there, nothing to do with vaccines.
I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.
I never gave any public statement about vaccines.
You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, I didn't get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.
I went in June of 2019. The measles house break started in August.
Oh, clearly I had nothing to do with the measles.
Not only that, Senator, not only that, if you let me finish.
You have had some time and I'm going to respond.
If you let me finish, Senator, if you let me finish, there are 83 people died.
When the tissue samples were sent to New Zealand, most of those people did not have measles.
We don't know what was killing them.
The same outbreak occurred in Tonga and Fiji and no extra people died.
There were seven measles outbreaks in the 13 years prior to my arrival.
I would like to get my time back.
This to me is the most important issue here.
I don't know nearly enough about the outbreak of measles in Samoa in order to identify who was to blame.
Was it the lack of vaccines?
Was it the vaccines?
What role did RFK Jr. play?
But what I know is this.
We just lived through a worldwide pandemic in which we know for certain that The leading health authorities, the people we were told that would pronounce to us the unvarnished truth that we could rely on and accept, instead repeatedly lied to us.
We went through the anatomy of that last night when it came to Dr. Fauci and the question of the origins of COVID, the efficacy of vaccines, the efficacy of masks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much else.
Social distancing.
And the strategy was to prevent any questioning or debate.
We just had to swallow and ingest everything that we were told.
There was no questioning permitted.
And for decades in the United States, it has been a left-wing critique of the government that our regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they're supposed to oversee, in large part because of the revolving door where people who are industry executives get appointed to Those executive branch agencies that are supposed to oversee the industries from which they come, they're obviously very favorable to those industries.
And then when they stay in government and serve these industries and protect them or make decisions that give them massive profits, they go right back to the industries and they get rewarded.
That's why the Defense Department is like the way it is with hundreds of billions of dollars flying out where nobody knows it's going.
It's because they take people in from Raytheon and General Dynamics.
And of course it's happening in the health industry as well.
You're talking about a massive industry of pharmaceutical products and insurance companies and hospitals.
And the health agencies in the United States exist for one reason only, and that is to serve the corporate interest of these pharmaceutical companies and these health insurance companies.
You finally have somebody being appointed to lead the health agencies, the infrastructure of health institutions of the United States who is making this critique and at least saying, look, we need to question more what these pharmaceutical companies claim.
They're using junk science.
They've peddled on the public.
We saw that in the pandemic when we were told that the vaccine stopped the ability of the human body to contract the coronavirus and then to transmit it, and it turned out to be completely false.
Along with hiding all the questions about its efficacy and its safety.
And the Democrats clearly...
Have one goal in mind.
With every single one of these nominations, they want to make sure that the status quo institution of authority is protected.
That institutional bipartisan consensus in Washington is not disturbed.
Even though they just lost the election in defense of that D.C. consensus.
Because they became the party of the status quo and Trump portrayed himself successfully as the party that would overturn it.
And here they are demonizing somebody.
Because he wants to kick the tires harder when the pharmaceutical companies have a product that they want to force on children and on adults as a whole.
Here is his exchange with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democrat from Nevada, and just watch their attempt to absolutely destroy him here as though he's, I was going to say as though he's Dick Cheney.
But obviously, if he were Dick Cheney, he would be embraced and appointed to whatever position Dick Cheney asked to be appointed to by Senate Democrats.
But they're acting as though he were Dick Cheney from 20 years ago.
So it doesn't matter that you're before us.
It could be anybody coming before us, as long as they're a rubber stamp for this administration and disregarding your beliefs and what you think.
I guess my question to you is, if it really is fundamental to what you believe, how do you live with that?
How do you address those issues as you're moving forward?
Knowing that it's going to harm Americans.
You want me to answer the question?
No, I'm asking you.
Okay.
President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again.
So is that the only reason why you're at HHS? Is that the only reason why then you're at the HHS to address that one issue?
He says, I've been asked to go and make America healthy again.
He listed all of these extremely disturbing statistics about chronic illness and obesity and diabetes and allergies appearing in huge numbers for the first time in American children.
He's talking about our food supply and how unhealthy it is, how it's filled with all sorts of chemicals because there's no regulation on it because the corporations control our regulatory agencies.
And he says, President Trump asked me to go and make America healthy again.
And she says, That's your only issue?
As though it's some little side boutique issue.
He's talking about improving the health of American citizens.
If that's not the role of the Health and Human Services Secretary, what is?
Here's to the rest of this.
President Trump has asked me, because I'm in a unique position, to end that.
And that is what I'm doing.
And if we don't solve that problem, Senator...
All of the other disputes we have about who's paying, whether it's insurance companies, whether it's providers, whether it's HMOs, whether it's patients or families, all of those are moving deck chairs around in the Titanic.
Our ship is sinking.
Our 60% increase in Medicaid over the past four years is the biggest budget line now, and it's growing faster than any other.
And no other nation in the world has what we have here.
No other nation has a chronic disease.
We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.
We had, during COVID, we had 16% of the COVID deaths in a country.
We only have 4.2% of the world's population.
We had a higher death count than any country in the world, And when CDC was asked why...
He said it's because Americans are the sickest people on earth.
The average person who died from COVID, American, had 3.8 chronic diseases.
This is an existential threat economically to our military, to our health, to our sense of well-being.
And it is a priority for President Trump.
And that's why he asked me to run the agency.
And if I'm privileged to be confirmed, that's exactly what I'll do.
I mean, we all know there's this public health crisis.
We can all see it in our daily lives.
You can see it in the statistics.
There's a mental health crisis in the United States and in the West more broadly, but there's also a physical health problem.
Obesity is shocking.
As somebody who spends a lot of time outside the United States, whenever I return to the United States, it's the first thing I notice.
It's the first thing I notice.
And it takes me a couple of days to get acclimated to it.
It's not just middle-aged adults or older adults.
You see so many obese children.
Just fat, obese, overweight.
There's obviously something very wrong with our public health.
And finally, you have somebody who's making what had been the left-wing critique that a major reason why is that pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies only care about profit and they're willing to sacrifice the public health in order to pursue it.
And food companies and big agriculture and everybody else is able to run wild doing whatever they want because they employ very high-priced lobbyists that come from the offices of these members of Congress, if not the members of Congress themselves, and they get their way in Washington and they get their way in the executive branch and in Congress.
And, by the way, he's a pro-choice environmental lawyer who has spent his life suing large corporations over corporate waste dumping.
You want to say that he's a little bit, his skepticism is a little bit excessive from what you think in terms of vaccine efficacy?
Go ahead and say that.
He's sworn and promised a thousand times he has no intention of preventing parents from getting vaccines they want to get for their children.
He said he believes in the vaccine child protocol that the CDC has in place.
This is all about defending institutions of authority and most importantly being extremely upset that it's not the Democratic Party that has finally decided to undermine and question and subvert I'll give you the best piece of evidence that illustrates that.
Elizabeth Warren, when questioning RFK Jr., she was on the verge of tears.
I mean, she was about as emotional as you will ever see a senator in one of these proceedings get.
And one of the reasons I want to show you this is because, despite how emotional she was, she demanded her time to denounce him in the harshest terms as a danger to Americans.
She could only express that thought...
While she read from a script that had been pre-prepared by some 27-year-old staffer, she has no ability, no confidence, so many of these Democrats don't, to just say what she thinks, to speak extemporaneously, even when she's condemning somebody for being a menace and a danger to the public health.
She has to sit with her head down, reading a pre-prepared statement, trying to emote while she's doing it.
It's the most bizarre thing.
Why can't she just speak extemporaneously?
I'm not speaking with a script right now.
I'm capable of expressing my views in a clear and coherent way.
I do that every night here.
She's been in the Senate for many years.
If she's really this enraged by RFK Jr. and wants to denounce him in such vitriolic terms, why can't she just do that?
Why does she have to read a pre-prepared statement that just is so artificial in the context of what she's trying to do?
Watch that and the other part of the dynamic as well.
I'll comply with all the ethical guidelines.
That's not the question.
You and I, you have said...
You're asking me not to serve vaccine pharmaceutical companies.
No, I am not.
Yeah, you are.
That's exactly what you're doing.
Look, no one should be fooled here.
As Secretary of HHS, Robert Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing across our country.
And for all of his talk about follow the science and his promise that he won't interfere with those of us who want to vaccinate his kids, the bottom line is the same.
Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it.
Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.
Senator, I support vaccines.
I support the childhood schedule.
I will do that.
The only thing I want is good science, and that's it.
How about then say you won't make money off what you do as Secretary of HHS? Before we go to...
I just want to remind you again, these people, every single Democrat, including Liz Warren, voted for Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State.
They voted for Elise Stefanik to be the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. These are people who have advocated wars.
They have no anger, no rage, no opposition to those kind of people.
They all unanimously approve them.
RFK has spent his life advocating for public health, opposing corporate threats to it.
He's simply saying we need to question more the...
The ability of these pharmaceutical companies to get their way in our regulatory system because Americans are getting sick as a result of this system that is so fundamentally broken.
And they treat them like a Satan.
Which, okay, again, if you really want to spew that kind of venom at somebody, why can't she just do it?
Why does she have to read a piece of paper in front of her that was prepared, obviously, well before the hearing by some staffer?
I really don't understand.
I'm not picking on her.
They all do that.
And Justin Amash, the former Republican congressman from Michigan, when I noted this today on X, responded by saying, this is all theater.
They do this all the time, especially in the Senate.
They all read these statements and act all angry and enraged.
And then when the camera's off, right, when they're done, they go out into the hall and they congratulate each other and say, wow, that was a really great, great job you did.
Here is Senator Clems Tillis, the Republican from North Carolina, who asked, RFK Jr., whether he's a conspiracy theorist, which is always the title, the label, the insult that they apply to people who question whether powerful actors in secret are engaging in negative conduct.
That's how the world runs.
But if you say that, they'll say, oh, that's a conspiracy theory.
There are a lot of conspiracies that are real.
There are people sitting in prison for conspiracies.
And he had a great answer to that.
Are you a conspiracy theorist?
That is a pejorative, Senator, that's applied to me, mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interest.
I was told that I was a conspiracy theorist.
That label was applied to me because I said that the vaccines, the COVID vaccine, didn't prevent transmission and it wouldn't prevent infection.
When the government was telling people, Americans, that it would.
I was saying that because I was looking at the monkey studies in May of 2020. I was called a conspiracy theorist.
Now everybody admits it.
I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said red dye caused cancer.
And now FDA has acknowledged that and banned it.
I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ. Last week, JAMA published a meta-review of 87 studies saying that there's a direct inverse correlation between IQ loss.
All right, so I'm going to assume a lot of us...
I could go on for about a week.
Is there any one of them that you can say, you got me?
That really was a conspiracy theory?
Are you in a position to submit for the record?
I think it'd just be helpful for every one of these narratives for you to submit that maybe for the record.
Again, the context for this that's so crucial is that we just learned how many different times the scientists abused their power, spread lies, politicized their actions and power.
How the pharmaceutical companies made enormous profits based on vaccines that even if you believe on balance they were healthy, even if you were helpful, even if you're happy you took them, even if you would have taken them again, it's your choice.
They were mandated on people.
People were fired and their lives were ruined for not taking it.
But also we know for certain that their benefits were wildly overstated and their dangers covered up.
And so if this is not the time to have as Health and Human Services Secretary somebody who says we need to be a lot more skeptical and questioning and investigative when massive pharmaceutical companies come and make claims that align with their financial interests at the expense of the health of the American people, when will it be?
And if this were a Democratic president and appointed RFK Jr., and remember President Obama was very close to nominating him to lead the EPA, this is exactly what they would all be standing up and applauding and saying, but because it's Donald Trump who appointed him and he supported Donald Trump, they have to treat him like he's some kind of massive danger, rather than somebody who's just attempting to bring attention almost single-handedly.
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The relentless assault on the free speech rights of American citizens are all in the name of protecting this foreign country called Israel, continues unabated.
And in fact, not only continues, but today it got a massive escalation.
Not one that was surprising, given that Trump during the campaign vowed to do this, but now he's confirmed that he is in fact issuing an executive order targeting people who participated in protests on campuses against the state of Israel and its destruction of Gaza.
Here is that news report, the news reports describing this executive order from Reuters, January 29, 2005. Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters.
You can protest in favor of Israel.
You can go out in the street and chant and call for Israel to kill every last Palestinian.
You can call for them to start a war with Iran.
You can say we should give even more billions to Israel, the U.S. Congress should.
If you're a foreign student and you're here on a visa, totally fine.
You won't be deported.
This executive order has nothing about you.
This is only for people who are on the other side of that political debate.
Quote, U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Wednesday to combat anti-Semitism and pledge to deport non-citizen college students and others who took part in pro-Palestinian protests, a White House official said.
Now let me just pause there on this other issue, too.
The executive order that was issued today about combating anti-Semitism basically rests on this premise.
The United States has an epidemic of bigotry and racism in the United States.
The Biden administration failed to use the power of the federal government to combat this bigotry and racism.
As a result, Donald Trump is now ordering every federal agency to submit reports demonstrating that it has used all of its federal state power.
To fight against animosity toward Jews, bigotry against Jews, anti-Semitism.
No resources spent on bigotry or animosity or racism or discrimination toward any other group of people in the United States, including white people, Christians, all the things that I thought the American right believed were groups being discriminated against.
It's only against, it's only for bigotry.
With respect to this one single group, which are American Jews, and I think it's very hard to make the case that they're singularly marginalized or even marginalized at all.
Here the Reuters article goes on, quote, A fact sheet on the order promises, quote, immediate action by the Justice Department to prosecute, quote, terroristic threats, arson, vandalism, and violence against American Jews and marshal all federal resources to combat what it called, quote, the explosion of anti-Semitism in our campus and streets since the October 7, 2023 the explosion of anti-Semitism in our campus and streets since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by
I know there has been an effort to create a narrative that American Jews are uniquely vulnerable, uniquely marginalized, uniquely victimized in the United States.
There have been efforts to set aside jobs solely for Jews in the United States, including by Palantir, the defense and intelligence contracting firm.
That announced last year that they were setting 180 jobs aside, new jobs solely for American Jews who claim to have been the victim of anti-Semitism on American campuses.
You can be extremely qualified for that job, but if you're not Jewish, you're not eligible to get it.
And people like Ben Spiro and Barry Weiss both expressed support and happiness and cheered for these things.
In Ben Spiro's case, he was forced to retract it, sort of.
When people said, hey, wait a minute, isn't this like the thing that you're supposed to be against?
Isn't this DEI? Now you're for it because it's your group that benefits?
This is what the American right, the pro-Israel sector of the American right has been doing, is basically renouncing every pretended principle on the altar of serving and protecting Israel.
And this is...
More of that.
Here from The Forward, the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, today, Trump anti-Semitism executive order will target, quote, leftist, anti-American universities.
President Donald Trump plans to sign an expansive executive order Wednesday intended to address, quote, the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets with a focus on what the administration called, quote, pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals, according to a White House fact sheet obtained by the forward.
Quote, immediate action will be taken by the Justice Department to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities, the document stated.
It added that the executive order demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.
All right.
How about this as a suggestion, a proposal?
How about we have laws that...
Prohibit people from engaging in certain actions and call for criminal prosecution or punishment for people who engage in those laws, and they get applied equally to everybody, including people here in the United States on student and work visas.
There's no targeting of people who the government perceives as, quote, left-wing.
There's no extra targeting of people, of students who are perceived to be opposed to Israel as opposed to fanatically in favor of Israel.
This is exactly what the First Amendment is designed to prohibit, having the government target people not based on their actions but based on their views.
If you want to say that you think some of these protesters were engaged in criminal behavior or whatever, we've gone over studies before showing the overwhelming majority, I don't mean the majority, I mean the overwhelming majority, have been the sort of peaceful protests that the Constitution guarantees every person the right to engage in.
But if you want to claim that, Oh, some of these people have committed crimes.
You can already deport people in the United States on work visas or student visas who commit crimes.
You don't need an executive order announcing specifically that you're going to target people who are opposed to Israel or who are quote-unquote left-wing.
It's exactly the sort of thing that conservatives are pretending to oppose.
Imagine if Joe Biden had issued an executive order saying, henceforth, We are going to use our deportation powers to target anybody who is a right-wing extremist and who is anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel.
Anyone who participates in a protest that's unruly, anybody who in any way expresses anti-Muslim sentiment by siding with Israel over Gaza.
Given how right-wing extremism has permeated our institutions, it's now time to deport those people.
Every single conservative I know would be screaming bloody murder.
This is tyranny.
This is censorship.
This is an attack on our constitutional freedoms.
And they would be right.
I would be yelling that same thing.
But you reverse the politics and the ideology and which foreign country you're supporting and which one you're critiquing and everything changes for so many of these conservatives that are complete free speech frauds.
And all day they were applauding this and cheering it.
Here is the Harrods article that the reporter from Harrods, Ben Samuels, got a hold of the executive order on anti-Semitism.
And there you see the text of it.
Now, as I said, this is not a surprise.
When you have people like Mary Madelson, The Israel-obsessed and focused Israeli-American billionaire who gave $100 million to Trump's campaign and not just this one, but others.
Along with people like Bill Ackman, the Israel-obsessed billionaire who gave a lot of money to Donald Trump's campaign as well.
They were doing so specifically to try and outlaw and criminalize or otherwise punish people who are opposed to Israel and the United States.
So let me just say very clearly that If you are in the United States legally, as I'm about to show you, not just citizens, but visa holders as well, you have the right under the Constitution to say whatever you think.
You can say, I want Israel to go into Gaza and slaughter all the remaining Palestinians there because they deserve it.
You can say, I want Israel or I want the United States on behalf of Israel to go and bomb Iran and blow it back into the Stone Age.
Killing millions of Iranians if necessary, no matter how innocent or civilian.
You're allowed to say that.
You're also allowed to say, I think the Israeli destruction of Gaza is a genocide.
I think that the Israelis have been persecuting and repressing the rights of the Palestinians for decades, giving the Palestinians the right of violent resistance that we would have if somebody came to our country and blockaded us or occupied us.
There's been films about this.
A film called Red Dawn in 1984 about how the Russians came and invaded the United States and the heroic American civilians took up arms.
They didn't wear uniforms.
They often used terrorism against the Russian invaders.
They blew them up.
They shot at them.
They ambushed them and they were heroic because...
The right of violent resistance is recognized to any population to defend against invasions or occupations or blockades.
So if you want to argue that you have every right to do so in the United States, you can't be punished by the U.S. government for having any of those views.
And yet that's exactly what this executive order is designed to do.
And if you think, if you have any doubt about that, here is an actual terrorist group, an actual far-right extremist Israeli group that has been known to be associated with and supportive of actual terrorism.
In the name of extremist views of Zionism, even people in Israel regard this faction as dangerous.
They're called Batar U.S. And they're basically a group of ardent Zionists.
That's how they define themselves.
They've been collecting dossiers on people inside the United States who they perceive to be excessively critical of Israel and are now turning over these dossiers, these lists of people to the United States government and to ICE. To have ICE deport them, not because they committed any crimes, but because they have participated in protests against the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Here they are boasting about this.
Join us at the Jihad rally as we assist ICE in deportation efforts.
We will document all attendees, and even those in kafiyas and masks will be identified thanks to Terror Watch 613. Batar will submit names of attendees to real Donald Trump.
Get out now.
We are vastly approaching the situation where a condition to remain in the United States is expressing love and support for Israel, or at least remaining silent.
Our academic institutions are being cleansed of the right to criticize Israel.
We went over those new anti-Semitism definitions at Harvard.
Today there was a finding that a graduate student had violated the rules of Colombia because they linked to documents and literature on...
Astronomy in Gaza as part of a course, and that is now no longer allowed.
These are graduate students.
Not just adults in college, graduate students.
And our institutions are being cleansed of the right to criticize the state of Israel.
By the way, you're allowed to criticize the United States all you want.
Just not Israel.
Now, prior to this executive order, for any of you thinking that you're going to defend this by saying, oh, people who come to our country...
Don't have the right to stay here if they break the law.
That's already true.
That's already true under immigration law for a long time, that if you're in the United States on a student visa or a work visa, not illegally, but legally, and you violate the law, you could be deported.
What relevance does it have what you think about Israel and whether you're pro or anti-Israel?
Hear from the Immigration and Nationality Act.
It's 8 U.S.C. Code 1227, Deportable Aliens.
A, Classes of Deportable Aliens.
This is a 2005 law.
Any alien, including an alien crewman, in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens.
2, Criminal Offenses.
4, Security and Related Grounds.
C, Foreign Policy.
In general, an alien whose presence or activities in the United States, the Secretary of State has ground to believe what have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.
And then 1228 provides for the expedited removal of people convicted of committing aggravated felonies.
So if you think people in the United States who are here legally are engaged in crimes, then Charge them with crimes, and if you convict them, you can already deport them.
You don't need a special executive order targeting people who have been protesting against the state of Israel.
That is not a crime in the United States yet.
That is protected by the Constitution.
Now, just as one final point, I just want to address something that is a huge misconception among very well-read, educated, and perfectly intelligent people.
But it's such a massive misconception.
I was seeing it all day today in response to this executive order.
People saying the United States Constitution only gives rights to American citizens.
So if you're in the U.S. and you're a foreigner and you're here on a work visa to study or a student visa to study, the Constitution doesn't apply to you.
The government can do whatever they want to you.
This is completely and indisputably false.
First of all, the Bill of Rights is not really a document that gives And there have always been people in the United States who are not American citizens who are in the United States legally.
Obviously, you can't just take those people and throw them into prison forever without a trial.
They have due process rights, and this is not even in doubt.
Here's a Supreme Court ruling from I believe this...
Let's check the date.
I think it's 1880...
It says 1886. That may be correct.
It's called Yick Woe versus Hopkins.
Basically, a Chinese national, not an American citizen, a Chinese national was convicted of a crime in California.
He appealed by arguing that his rights to due process under the Constitution had been violated.
And the Supreme Court accepted the appeal, overturned the Constitution, and said that his right to due process had been violated, even though, under the Constitution, even though he's not an American citizen.
And here's what the court in the 19th century said when resolving this question, quote, the rights of the petitioners, as affected by the proceedings of which they complained, are not less because they are aliens and subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.
It says, quote, The
Constitution limits what the U.S. government can do with respect to any territory where the U.S. government is sovereign.
If you're here in the United States illegally, that's a different question.
Summary deportation.
Is permissible under the Constitution.
But if you're in the United States legally and you're not a U.S. citizen, you're here because of a work visa or a student visa, you absolutely have rights under the Constitution.
There's not some radical left-wing modern theory.
This is something that has been foundational to the way the U.S. government has worked forever.
In 2008, at the height of the War on Terror, Guantanamo detainees who had been thrown into a prison there, and we're going to cover another executive order that President Trump hasn't issued yet but promised, Which is to open 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to put what he called the worst of the illegal immigrants there, similar to what Cheney used to call the worst of the worst for terrorists.
And basically he had people who go there and have a hard time getting out, meaning they'll just stay forever.
We'll talk about that tomorrow once the executive order is issued.
But in 2008, the issue was there were detainees in Guantanamo that had never been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of any crime.
Yet they were being kept there indefinitely.
Guantanamo detainees sued the United States, sued George Bush and Dick Cheney and the U.S. government, and said, under the Constitution, we have the right of habeas corpus, meaning we have the right, when we're in prison, to petition the court and argue to the court that we've been wrongfully detained, wrongfully imprisoned.
And the court decided by a 5-4 decision that Detainees in Guantanamo have the right of habeas corpus even though they're not American citizens.
All nine of the justices, including the four conservative justices in dissent, people like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, everybody on the court agreed with that case I just referenced that people who are in the U.S. jurisdiction legally because they're brought here or because they've been let in have the right to Have the Constitution respected with how they're treated by the U.S. government.
It's not only for citizens.
Nobody in this 2008 case called Boumediene v.
Bush, which I reported extensively at the time, disputed that.
The only dispute there was whether Guantanamo should be considered U.S. sovereign territory.
The U.S. government was arguing, we don't have sovereignty over Guantanamo.
It's a Cuban island.
Therefore, the Constitution doesn't apply.
The majority said no.
Guantanamo is a sovereign...
U.S. sovereignty, and therefore people they bring there as prisoners have the right under the Constitution, whereas the dissenting judges said, no, it's not a...
That was the only dispute.
Everybody agreed that Guantanamo detainees, if they were inside the United States on U.S. soil, had the right under the Constitution to habeas corpus.
In fact, in his dissenting opinion, Antonin Scalia, not exactly a left-wing...
Judicial activists in the mind of a conservative citizen underscored that point by approvingly citing a ruling by Justice Jackson.
Here's what Scalia wrote, quote,
This This is not even in dispute.
So if someone is here in the United States, even though they're a foreign national, on a work visa or a student visa, they are covered by the constitutional protections, which means they cannot be deported or punished or singled out.
Because they have political views of the Trump administration and their very wealthy pro-Israel donors dislike, which is exactly what this executive order accomplishes.
I also heard people saying you're not allowed to, in the United States, defend a terrorist group like Hamas.
Where do people get that from?
I have every right to stand up and say I support and defend Hamas' right of violent resistance against Israel.
That's an idea.
It's a political thought.
I can't give money to Hamas.
I can't send them weapons.
That's material support for terrorism.
But of course I have the right inside the United States constitutionally to express support for Hamas.
You can't ban political opinions inside the United States.
This is what free speech means under the Constitution.
I also find it bizarre that a lot of conservatives seem so willing to just blindly empower the U.S. government to designate who is a terrorist and who isn't to the point where you're no longer allowed to even say anything positive about that group.
Given how subjective and arbitrary and malleable these concepts are, let's remember that in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela and the ANC were officially deemed terrorist groups by the United States government.
There was nobody arguing that you're not allowed to defend Nelson Mandela or the ANC, or you'll get deported from the United States, or that it's somehow illegal, even though they were terrorist groups officially in the 1980s.
From France 24, in July of 2008, U.S. drops Mandela from the terrorist list.
It only did that in 2008.
The White House announced that it has dropped former South African President Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress Party from its terror watch list.
Their original placement on the list occurred during the Reagan administration.
But again, there was no suggestion that if you defended Nelson Mandela in the '80s, you you were somehow breaking the law or could be deported, even though he was an official terrorist, according to the United States, list of terrorist organizations.
That's because we have free speech in the United States.
Even defending or supporting a terrorist organization with our words is not something that can be criminal.
It cannot be punished.
The 1980s, by the way, were also the time when Osama bin Laden and his Mujahideen were considered freedom fighters, Designated as terrorists later on.
But just to underscore the point, the Biden administration and many Democrats believe that the January 6th rioters with whom they considered insurrectionists were domestic terrorists.
Thankfully, there's no law that allows domestic terrorists to be designated that way, the way foreign terrorists can be.
Adam Schiff has a law pending that he pushed for with a lot of Democrats to give the government that power.
So assume that law had been passed.
And the U.S. government under the Biden administration succeeded in characterizing and designating January 6th protesters at the Capitol to be terrorist groups.
Does that mean, for people who are saying, oh, you're not allowed to defend terrorist organizations inside the United States, that it would have been a crime for anybody to come and defend the January 6th protesters or to say that they're being treated too harshly?
Based on this...
The invented idea that somehow in the United States the government has the right to punish you for defending or supporting designated terrorist organizations, that is a completely arbitrary list.
Again, once a group is designated as terrorists, you can't give them money or arms, but of course you don't have to express views that they are justified in what they're doing.
And I'll tell conservatives who love Israel so much and want us to all sacrifice our free speech rights on the altar of protecting this foreign country, what I've always told liberals when they supported censorship as well, that one day the time will come when you're no longer in power, even if you can't see that right now.
And if you endorse this precedent that the U.S. government is now allowed to deport anybody who expresses views you consider dangerous, then don't come crying to me the next time there's a Democratic president.
And they say we're going to deport anybody who supports January 6th insurrectionists or who supports the state of Israel or who expresses anti-trans views such as there are only two genders since that incites violence against trans people.
If you can't think of any cases in which you've defended and invoked the belief in free speech and denounced censorship except when it comes to people on your side and people who express views either Which you share or with which you have some kind of an affinity.
Just please don't pretend that you're a defender of free speech.
And do not do that, especially if you're defending an executive order that gives the government the responsibility to hunt down people who are perceived to be anti-Israel.
Everyone who's criticized Israel is considered a Hamas sympathizer and then punishes the people who are in the country legally because some pro...
Israel Zionist groups are collecting lists and dossiers of people who have the wrong idea and turning them over to the government to deport them.
If you support that, you do not support free speech.
We all know how manipulative mainstream media can be.
Certainly viewers of this show know that.
Only showing us one side of the story and not the other.
That's why I started my show, why I entered journalism, because I believe in freedom of speech, as I just explained, and having candid conversations about what's really going on in the world.
Luckily, there's an app and a website that believes in that, too.
Ground News also prioritizes free speech over controlling the narrative.
For every story, you can find all the articles reporting on it worldwide with context, like if a news source has any political bias, how credible they are, and if any major corporation is influencing their reporting.
All I have to do when I'm using this app is swipe through coverage with tags, indicating if the narrative is being controlled by liberal corporations or independent conservative voices, and from there, I can decide myself if, for example, Trump's new external revenue service is actually a dangerous or preposterous proposal, like the Huffington Post is claiming, Trump's new external revenue service is actually a dangerous or preposterous proposal, like the Huffington Post is claiming, or if it's a fair trade If I just read one of those sources, I'd have a warped perception of what's going on,
But thankfully, Ground News lets me see both of those headlines side by side.
So I can decide for myself what is accurate.
Ground News even created a dedicated feed called, quote, Blind Spot, that exposes stories that either side of the political spectrum isn't reporting on, making it possible to spot stories that people in charge don't want you to see.
Ground News is bringing back transparency in the news and civil discourse.
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off if you like this show I'm quite certain you will of this platform one of the primary themes of my reporting over the years is that there's a part of the federal government that really should not exist It's not really there as part of our democratic accountability.
It's an invisible permanent power faction in Washington that exerts enormous influence, even though they really are not supposed to be within the policymaking part of our government.
That's the U.S. security state.
There's a similar framework, a similar faction in Washington that on some level exercises influence like that, even in a more opaque and sinister way.
And that is the network of institutions that are referred to as Washington think tanks, which play a far greater public role in shaping U.S. policy, especially foreign policy, than most people realize.
And there are a lot of questions surrounding their funding sources and how those funding sources exist to shape their influence that they have over policymaking.
There are a lot of reasons why Washington stays on permanent power footing.
And one of the major reasons is because there are so many think tanks in Washington that are there for that reason who get funding in order to influence them that.
That funding is often very sketchy and unknown.
Nick Cleveland Stout is a research fellow in the Democratizing Foreign Policy Unit of the Quincy Institute.
He has conducted a lot of research on U.S.-Brazil relations as a 2023 Fulbright Fellow with a particular focus on the influence of American think tanks in Brazil.
And he has also produced very interesting and important reports on exactly who is behind the most influential think tanks in D.C. and how that funding shapes their influence over our government.
I'm very excited to delve into the important work you've been doing.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
Thanks for the invite.
Glad to be here, Glenn.
Yeah, absolutely.
So before we get into the actual work you're doing on think tanks, you are doing this work as part of the Quincy Institute.
Can you tell us what the Quincy Institute is and what it's really devoted to doing?
Yeah, so the Quincy Institute is also a think tank.
We are sort of an anti-war think tank.
You know, always looking for the next endless war to end.
And kind of our focus within the democratizing foreign policy program is on exposing some of the special interests that play a role in militarizing our foreign policy.
You know, looking at conflicts of interest, looking at the role of, you know, lobbying, looking at the role of campaign contributions, kind of that under-the-hood look at the role of money in foreign policy.
So, generally, people understand why it's important to know the funding sources of an influential institution, but a lot of times, I think it's not always incredibly helpful in terms of assessing the role that that institution plays.
For example, there's a lot of times a mismatch between, say, funding for a media outlet and what the role of the media outlet is actually there to do.
I know, for example, when I was at The Intercept and we were funded by the billionaire Pierre Midiar.
Oftentimes the things he was saying were the exact opposite of the things we were doing.
The causes that he was supporting were ones we were working against.
But obviously it's something that ought to be known so that people can make their own assessments.
And of course it has an influence.
Why do you think it's so important to do this work and for people to know the funding sources of think tanks?
I think it's important because it is Hardly talked about in Washington.
I think when you think of other issue areas, you know, in domestic policy, people are aware of these sorts of conflicts of interest.
But think tanks are sort of the Wild West in that, you know, when we made this database, which I very much encourage anyone and any of your listeners to check out thinktankfundingtracker.org, largely with journalists in mind.
Like, we want members of the media to Good faith journalists should be better at disclosing these sorts of conflicts of interest because think tank experts are the people that you see on TV, that are quoted in interviews, that are testifying in front of Congress, serving on congressional commissions.
They have this immense amount of influence over the policy process, but rarely do these conflicts of interest get called out because they very much present themselves as these Independent, objective actors, you know,
most think tanks will have some form of academic independence policy in which they say, you know, donors don't have an influence over our policy, we come to our own conclusions, and a specific position that an expert takes does not reflect necessarily the view of the institution.
Do have influence, you know, at the very least in the case of self-censorship.
Most think tanks, though, do even go a step beyond that, you know, looking at they have these programs called corporate sponsorship programs, which are essentially pay-to-play research.
They will say, you know, you get access to the think tanks, resources, experts.
You know, contacts that they have on the Hill, receptions, all sorts of different things, even in some cases being allowed to make recommendations for research areas.
And so it's important to understand the way in which these relationships are influencing our foreign policy, because, you know, that's step one.
Like, we don't even have that.
You know, one of the things I remember being actually shocked by when I was probably still in a state of naivete when I started We're good to go.
We're getting paid by clients, lobbying clients or consulting clients who had a very obvious and clear investment in the policy debates in which they were participating or the things on which they were commenting as experts.
And none of it would ever be disclosed.
In fact, it's a very common practice to this very day.
If you go and look at newspaper articles that are being That are citing some sort of an expert at a think tank or just some floating expert.
So often they're paid by people who have very vested interest for them to give exactly the analysis that they're providing with no disclosure of any kind.
And for whatever reason, nobody thinks there's anything wrong with that journalistically.
Let's look at a little bit of concrete examples.
I think we have, and we're going to link to the tracker that you've created, which is incredibly helpful.
But I think we have a screenshot of it to put on the screen.
There is part of it, and basically, and we want to encourage people to go look at this, but it lists the most influential and significant think tanks and the amount of foreign funding that they get.
It has groups like the Atlantic Council, Brookings, RAM, the Center for American Progress, pretty much every recognizable and significant name within mainstream Democratic and Republican Party politics in Washington.
What is it that you were able to find about this and how were you able to track it?
So to build out this website, we looked at all of the financial disclosures from think tanks going back five years.
And we looked at three different categories.
We looked at defense contractor funding, we looked at foreign government funding, and we looked at U.S. government funding.
And it's important to note also that...
All of that is voluntary information.
So think tanks will have varying degrees of transparency.
All the think tanks that you just mentioned, even though they are taking these millions of dollars from special interest sources, and then some, they at least disclose that information.
They might hide it.
They might bury it.
They also will not come out with that information until the end of the year, by which time it might not even be relevant.
And there are plenty of ways they can obfuscate that information.
But at the very least, they disclose some about that.
And so the Atlantic Council, they come out as number one in defense contractor funding and foreign government funding, taking millions and millions of dollars from sources like the UAE, Northrop Grumman.
At the same time, they're writing about Gulf policy or defense policy.
But then, on the flip side, you also have what's not in the database.
And that's something that we really wanted to make clear in making this, is that over a third of all think tanks are actually completely opaque, or at least of the major foreign policy think tanks.
They don't disclose a single dime of where they're getting their funding sources.
Many of those think tanks are also the ones, you know, they're not just like some black sheep organization.
They're also testifying in front of Congress frequently.
You know, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, American Enterprise Institute.
These are quite hawkish organizations in D.C. that, you know, because of their views.
They're still invited to these private circles to testify, to serve on commissions.
And we think that that should raise more eyebrows.
You should put your cards on the table, and then that should help build your legitimacy.
Among the work that you've done, you spent, I think, a couple of years in Brazil, which is where we're based in Santa Catarina.
And I remember when I first, I don't know if you had this experience, but when I first started living outside the U.S. in Brazil, I remember during the first year when I was in Brazil, maybe the second year, I had this realization when I was like, wow, there's never a moment when you pick up a newspaper or you turn on the television and people are talking about what country they ought to go bomb or who they should have a war with next.
It just isn't part of the political discourse.
And as someone who had been raised in the United States and lived my entire adult life in the United States, where you're just steeped in constant debates about should you bomb this country?
Should you overthrow that one?
Should you invade this one?
The difference, once you realize it, is so stark.
And I think if you're immersed in the United States, you don't realize just how aberrational it is that basically our foreign policy exists to just constantly prop up militarism, to ensure a close to trillion dollar a year budget for these giant defense corporations.
There's obviously a massive agenda geopolitically and financially behind that.
What is the relationship between the work you're doing and detecting and tracing the funding sources of these think tanks to the fact that these think tanks basically provide the intellectual fuel that keeps this war machine going?
Yeah, absolutely.
First of all...
No, I'm not even exaggerating.
What got me interested in foreign policy in the first place was living in Brazil because I realized that, oh, we can actually do things differently.
It's amazing, as you said.
You don't constantly see experts funded by opaque sources saying we need to invade X country.
And so the relationship that that has here in the U.S., though, is obviously...
Very different.
You know, we're inundated with it on the daily.
And what that looks like in practice, I mean, I can give an example.
One thing that I was following is what think tanks have been putting out in the last few weeks now that Trump is in office.
And each think tank kind of released their own version, their kind of mini version of Project 2025. Everyone's familiar with the Heritage Foundations and several other organizations there.
Project 2025, which was this kind of blueprint for what they believed that the second Trump administration should do.
And think tanks kind of came to terms with the fact that Trump is going to be in office for another four years, and they all released sort of a wish list.
And these defense contractor-funded think tanks...
Pretty much down the line were expressing sympathetic policy recommendations to their donors.
I mean, I saw, like, the Atlantic Council, for example, was saying, you know, it was very supportive of the Iron Dome for America idea.
It was suggesting that we need to send F-16s to Ukraine.
It was suggesting we need to send ATACMS to Ukraine, just amongst several policies.
And obviously, if the Trump administration were to take up the Atlantic Council on any one of those recommendations, it would be a windfall by orders of magnitude for their donors.
You know, donors like Lockheed Martin, like Northrop Grumman, who are the who would be the manufacturers of those systems of F-16s, of the Sentinel program, which is sort of the new intercontinental ballistic missile program.
And so, and shockingly, in some cases you even have I think you were alluding to this earlier, Glenn, is that a lot of these people will wear these dual hats.
You can have a think tank scholar who might have a side hustle working for someone.
That's in the defense industry.
Like, that is not uncommon whatsoever.
Like, I think one famous example is that James Taislet, who's the CEO of Lockheed Martin, he's also on the board of the Council of Foreign Relations.
And, you know, CNAS has plenty of conflicts of interest there, too.
So there are all these kind of dual hats, and it blurs...
It's almost, I would say...
Quite purposeful that think tanks occupy this kind of nebulous space.
They're not academia, they're not in government, they're not in media, they're not in advocacy, but they touch on all of these things.
And I think they also both simultaneously signal independence while signaling a certain dependence to their donors.
So it's sort of like public-facing independence, private-facing dependence on these folks who they rely on to continue existing.
I remember the first time I ever noticed that the Brookings Institution uses a website with the internet suffix .edu, which is generally reserved for academic institutions.
I think I talked about it for two years.
Because the deceit involved in that, as though they're just involved in some neutral scholarly studies, when in fact that they're highly politicized actors, funded by all sorts of people with vested interests in geopolitics, that was just too much to bear.
Again, probably from my naive mind at the time.
Another thing that I recall, and this is back in the lead-up to the war in Iraq back in 2002-2003, You know, like you, I was too young to have actually lived through that.
I think we're roughly the same age.
But I went back and looked at the history of that and discovered that there was this article I remember that really stuck with me where people inside Washington were observing the fact that the range of accepted debate was let's go and invade Iraq right this second.
Or let's wait until the inspection process plays out and wait for UN approval, and then we'll go and invade Iraq and remove Saddam.
And the people who were saying, like, hey, we shouldn't really invade Iraq, like, at all, were really not part of the conversation in Washington.
They just were people who, you know, the kind of admission price to get into the door was that you had to say, yeah, of course I believe we should go and remove Saddam, and now let's have a meeting about the best way to do that.
And, you know, you're worried about your career or the influence of the think tank.
The only incentive you had was to make sure to support a war.
That's how you ended up inside these meetings.
People who were against the war, you know, they were just irrelevant and excluded from that.
Is that pro-war incentive something that you think continues to shape and drive the think tank culture in Washington to this day?
Very much so.
Yeah, I think in the lead up to the Iraq War, I believe the Project for a New American Century, which is one of these think tanks, you know, it's now defunct.
But, you know, they played a pretty prominent role.
They were like the hardcore neocon one of like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and those people.
Yes.
And they, you know, a lot of them ended up going into the Bush administration and they sort of laid out this blueprint.
And that was, you know, before a lot of other people were doing this, you know, before it was cool in the 90s.
And, yeah, I think it still exists today.
I think the incentive structure is very much the same, I think.
And the reason the incentive structure is the same is that these funders are not just giving Generously doling out funds to one or two think tanks.
It's sort of like placing an outside bet in roulette.
They are funding across the board.
If you go to our website, you can see for yourself.
Most think tanks that disclose their funding sources will take funding from all three of the categories that we looked at, U.S. government funding, foreign government funding, defense contractor funding, and then some.
I mean, there's so many.
Special interest that, you know, we couldn't even incorporate it into one database.
You know, big tech, all sorts of things, oil and gas companies, telecommunications industry, banks.
And so, you know, these incentive structures exist to this day.
And I think you see that, for instance, Most think tanks are pretty much unequivocally supportive of sending arms, pretty maximalist positions on Ukraine, pretty maximalist positions on the U.S. supporting Israel,
Israel's war in Gaza, and down the line, especially on these flashpoints, because those are the ones that represent, I think, the largest windfall for You know, their donors, Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel, you know, there are dissenting viewpoints.
And I don't want to say, for instance, that they all sing with one chorus only because of these donations.
But the point is that it is a prevailing incentive structure and certainly plays a role in it.
It is not the entire story, you know, ideology, experience, all these things.
They play a point.
They play a role for sure.
I think that our point with carrying out this investigation is that this needs to be a larger part of this conversation so that folks can kind of call balls and strikes as they see them, rather than being left in the dark over...
You know, who's funding these people and, you know, all these think tanks have.edu addresses and we just think of them as these objective sources of research.
And, by the way, I should also say it's not really, you know, me or the coincidence that you're saying this.
This is like something that there's like a real crisis of confidence in think tanks writ large.
I mean, this is something that, you know, a majority of Americans have said they don't trust policy experts.
And the number one reason for that being that they suspect that there's some sort of hidden agenda.
And so I really want to make that point clear is that, like, For the betterment of think tanks as a sector, they should disclose these funding sources and be much more forthcoming in their reports and articles and testimony that they are receiving funds from these sources.
Yeah, I mean, at the risk of appearing to use this cliche of romanticizing ordinary people, it really is so striking how often they realize things about Washington that so many people paid to follow Washington simply don't realize, mostly because they're paid not to realize it or they're so immersed in that culture that they've lost the ability to critique it.
Everything's just so normalized to them that, in fact, ought not to be.
And it also strikes me that this is really work that media outlets and journalists ought to be doing.
And there has been some work on it.
I remember a pretty lengthy investigation from The New York Times maybe 2015 or so about foreign funding of think tanks, including the Brooklyn Institution and Center for American Progress and others.
But given how often it's the media outlets that are presenting these people as these objective kind of neutral experts that we're just supposed to trust because they're not part of any ideological agenda when, of course, they are, I'm really happy that people like you and the Quincy Institute I'm really happy that people like you and the Quincy Institute are doing We will link to the tracker and the other reports that you published.
I think they're incredibly helpful, and I really appreciate your taking the time to come on and talk to us about it tonight.
