Rumble & Truth Social Sue Brazil’s Chief Censor Moraes in US Court; DC Establishment Melts Down Over Trump's Ukraine Policy
Rumble and Truth Social sue Brazil's repressive judge Alexandre de Moraes in a U.S. court, fighting against the creep of global censorship. Plus: the bipartisan ruling class tries to smear Trump as a Russian asset because of his commitment to ending the Ukraine war.
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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, the long-standing simmering conflicts between the MAGA movement and Brazil's repressive censorship regime are likely on their way to becoming quite overt.
Earlier this morning, Donald Trump's media company, which owns his social media site Truth Social, filed a lawsuit jointly with this platform, Rumble, Against Brazil's notorious chief censor, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Notably, the lawsuit was filed in a federal court in the United States in the Central District of Florida where Rumble is based and alleges that Moraes' censorship regime violates American sovereignty, American law, and the U.S. Constitution since his orders now purport to direct American companies like Rumble to ban users that judge dislikes not just for their content being blocked in Brazil but globally.
We were the ones who broke this story on the front page of Brazil's largest newspaper this morning, Foley of Sao Paulo, the news about the lawsuit being filed there.
You see it on the screen along with an English version of that article published right here exclusively on Locals.
And we'll explain the story's significance and its implication for a free internet, which are very significant.
Then, President Trump significantly escalated his rhetoric against the West's longtime darling Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky after Zelensky made critical comments about Trump.
Which in turn followed Trump's endorsement of the need for elections in Ukraine.
After all, if you're fighting a war in defense of democracy, that country you're defending probably should have elections.
Instead, Trump slammed Zelensky as a, quote, modestly successful comedian who, quote, talked the U.S. into spending $350 billion for a war that couldn't be won.
He also accused Zelensky of presiding over missing money in Kiev and suffering from deep disapproval among his own people, labeling him, quote, a dictator without elections.
All of that was in the context of Trump's arguing that the war must end, not only for the sake of the United States, but also for the Ukrainian people.
In response to Trump's statement, the Coalition of Establishment Liberal Democrats and the neocons who still populate the Republican Party and much of the Never Trump movement Reacted with very predictable and very familiar outrage, rejuvenating yet again their failed innuendo that Trump must be a Kremlin agent or controlled by Putin.
Earlier today I was on the Piers Morgan show debating all of this with several people including Texan Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw, an ardent supporter of wars in general, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington, and the U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine specifically.
It feels like...
Having done that debate and just looking at the discourse today, we were instantly catapulted back to peak insanity of Russiagate, all because Trump spoke irreverently of St. Zelensky.
And most of all, because he wants to end this horrific war, we'll show you all the latest.
Before we get to all of that, a few quick programming notes.
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And then when there's original reporting that we have, as we did this morning, regarding this lawsuit brought by Trump's media company and Rumble jointly against Supreme Court Justice in Brazil, Alexandre Marais, for his illegal...
Censorship regime that he's reaching the United States to impose.
We publish those articles on our Rumble Locals platform as well.
There you see the local story that we published this morning, the English version of it, which was originally published in Folio Sao Paulo in Portuguese.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update.
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We have reported many times on the increasingly repressive censorship regime imposed by not just the Brazilian government, but more so a single judge on the Brazilian court.
It's something we've covered for lots of different reasons including the fact that Your free speech rights, if you're in the United States, are absolutely affected and threatened.
Whenever censorship regimes are imposed and accepted in parts of the democratic world, they become the new bar that other countries can then hurdle over.
We've seen that many times.
There has been extreme examples of this in Brazil, including the banning of X and forcing them to comply with and obey every censorship order issued from the single judge.
And it's just so extreme.
This judge is that it's really worth understanding how he functions, how the censorship is accepted, for understanding how easily and radically authoritarianism can take hold.
Now, as you probably know, Rumble had operated in Brazil for a long time and began receiving this tsunami of censorship orders demanding that they close the accounts or block accounts.
Of a whole long list of people, one after the next, always in secret court orders with no due process, no trial, no notice to the person being censored.
And Rumble began complying, but then got to the point where they said, we created our site to be a site that defends free speech.
We're not going to sit here and unjustly censor.
And the Brazilian court, the Brazilian judge, threatened Rumble that if you don't immediately comply, as they did with X, we're going to ban you from Brazil.
Rumble decided that they would not be available in Brazil rather than comply with unjust censorship orders.
Now, last month, because there's a new administration in the United States and there's a big movement as part of that administration to battle against censorship, especially aimed at American companies, tech companies, when coming from foreign governments like Brazil, and because of some changes in the political climate in Brazil as well, this judge withdrew some of the censorship orders that had caused Rumble to leave Brazil, and so Rumble decided to come back.
Rumble is now available in Brazil again without the need for a VPN. And almost immediately, when Brazil came back and was giving platforms to dissidents and critics of the Brazilian government, of the Supreme Court judge, who always censors criticism of him, or very often does, he immediately started sending Rumble censorship orders again.
Only this time it went way, way further.
Then the prior orders he had been sending to a whole variety of platforms, not just Rumble and X, but Facebook, Google, YouTube, Google's YouTube, Facebook's Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Telegram.
He threatens all these platforms and demands they censor whoever he wants.
But usually those censorship orders had been requiring that those companies block the user in Brazil so that Brazilians can't access it.
And their argument was, look, we have the right to regulate what content.
enters our own country, similar to the way the United States decided they could ban TikTok from the United States.
But this judge has gone now way beyond that.
He, in particular, issued an order to Rumble two weeks ago that required Rumble not just to block the accessibility to the Brazilian market for a Brazilian user who is legally residing in the United States, but to close his account completely.
Not to allow him even to speak to Americans or anywhere outside of Brazil, to censor him globally, to turn off his monetization, prevent him from monetizing his content, even if it's being consumed by Americans or people in Portugal or other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world, and to turn over user data and to save the data of this user's postings.
And I'll get into who that user was, but...
When Rebels saw this, they said, what right does this Brazilian judge have to tell us that we have to close people's accounts so that they can't be heard anywhere in the world?
It's one thing to do it in Brazil, that's about enough, but to now be the censor of the world and say, oh, those people living in the United States legally, I demand that you close their accounts and not let them be heard on your platform or be monetized?
Who is he to reach into the United States and control American companies that way?
And constrain the speech of American citizens.
But this is how far these authoritarians go when they get inebriated with this censorship power.
It doesn't stop.
They become convinced of their own righteousness.
We discovered this week that not only Rumble, but also Donald Trump's media company, which owns and operates his true social platform.
We're preparing to jointly sue this Brazilian Supreme Court Judge, Alexandre de Marais, not in a Brazilian court, but in an American court, American federal court, specifically one in the Southern District of Florida, where Rumble is based.
And we were able to break the story this morning exclusively.
We published it first.
There you see it on the screen in Brazil's largest newspaper, Folio São Paulo, where I often write and...
Publish columns, but also do reporting.
When I have reporting to do in Brazil, that's who I do it with.
I don't know why I'm welcome in Brazil's largest newspaper, but I have a great relationship with them.
They've always supported the reporting I've wanted to do, never interfered, in fact, always stood behind it.
So, obviously, that's a great relationship.
I've been working with them for many years.
And here you see the headline of the article, Alexandre de Marais becomes a target.
In the United States, I have a lawsuit, a joint lawsuit filed by Trump's media company and the Rumble platform.
And it essentially says that a secret order that he issued against a Brazilian who lives in the United States named Alonso Santos, who I'll tell you about in a second, violates American sovereignty and American law.
That's the article we published.
It's the most read article by far on the site.
It's obviously made a big impact, even though Bolsonaro was indicted.
Last night for allegedly plotting a coup, an indictment that came just days after polls showing that Lula's popularity was declining, was in fact collapsing, that Bolsonaro would win an election over him.
Bolsonaro's already ineligible in 2026 to run.
They're trying to reverse that.
He got indicted, but now this story came as well.
And then we published for our English-speaking audience the same article, but in English, on our Google's platform.
There you see the title, "Exclusive Trump's Media Company and Rumble Sue Brazil's Barrage in the U.S. for violating U.S. sovereignty." Sub-headline is, "The lawsuit alleges that a secret order issued to Rumble by the Minister requires the platform to ban all accounts of Orlando Santos worldwide, thus violating U.S. sovereignty in the Constitution." We made this article available for everybody.
It's not behind a paywall.
Even if you're not a member, you can go read it.
But I just want to emphasize that this is not a story about Brazil.
This is a story about American social media companies who have made very clear that they are fed up with being told to censor dissident views, being told to censor people whom governments dislike.
They're fed up when the U.S. government did it under Joe Biden's administration.
And they're particularly fed up when it's coming from foreign governments.
And the fact that not just Rumble, but Donald Trump's media company jointly sued this Brazilian Supreme Court judge in an American court obviously signals an intention to very affirmatively and actively fight against that.
Here is the CEO, Chris Pawlowski, who I have to say, he's the founder of Rumble.
He founded it in 2013, not with very, with no real political ambitions.
Rumble just kind of, it was really designed to give small Creators which YouTube was abandoning a way to monetize their cooking content or their lifestyle content or pet content.
But over time he realized that YouTube and others were censoring in a way that offended him and he decided he was going to devote Rumble to offering a haven of free speech on the internet.
And I've watched him do it even at the expense of his company.
Which isn't available in France, wasn't available for a long time in Brazil, probably soon will be unavailable again there.
These are major markets we're talking about that they are willingly sacrificing rather than submitting to a censorship order that they regard correctly as unjust.
So, lots of credit to Chris and Terumbo for not just branding themselves as free speech warriors, but as walking the walk, even when it comes to the hardest challenges.
And here's what he...
Posted today in response to news of this lawsuit.
Hi, Alexander.
Rumble will not comply with your illegal orders.
Instead, we will see you in court.
Best, Chris Pawlowski.
Here is the statement issued by Trump's media company, Trump Media and Technology Group, that, as I said, is the owner of True Social.
And the fact that Trump's media company is suing this judge is significant for reasons that I don't need to explain in and of itself.
So far, Brazil has not been a target country for the Trump White House or the Trump administration to threaten with reprisals, threaten with punishment, threaten with tariffs.
It was only a matter of time, though, for so many reasons because of these latent conflicts between some of the people most important to the Trump world on the one hand and the censorship regime of Brazil on the other.
But here's their press release where they're announcing, as they say, Trump media joins rumble lawsuit to stop censorship.
Brazil's Supreme Court Justice's gag orders are challenged.
Rumble left Brazil in December of 2023. And at the time, here's what Chris Pawlowski, the Rumble founder and CEO, said, quote, I will not be bullied by foreign government demands to censor Rumble creators.
My statement on turning off Brazil, quote, recently the Brazilian Supreme Courts demanded that we remove certain creators from Rumble.
As part of our mission to restore free and open internet, we have committed not to move the goalpost on our content policies.
Users with unpopular views are free to access our platform in the same terms as our million of other users.
Accordingly, we have decided to disable access to rumble for users in Brazil while we challenge the legality the Brazilian court's demands.
Now, in reality, challenging the Brazilian...
Court's orders is essentially impossible because it's coming from the Supreme Court, from this one judge, but he has the support of a majority of the court in doing this.
So there's no real challenge permitted.
You either obey or you get kicked out of Brazil like they did with Axe for over a month.
And when they did that tax, by the way, when Alexandre Marais, the Brazilian Supreme Court, banned Axe from Brazil for more than a month, they not only froze the bank accounts of Axe in Brazil, they also froze the bank accounts of Starlink.
Even though it's a completely different company, and eventually stole money from that account to pay fines that they said were owed by X. That's how extreme they got.
Now, the user in question that Maurício is trying to silence, again, not just in Brazil, but globally, somehow he thinks he has the authority.
He's a Brazilian citizen named Alain dos Santos, but he's also a legal resident.
Of the United States of America.
He does not reside in Brazil.
And the reason he does not reside in Brazil is because this judge ordered Orlando Santos, who's a blogger, who calls himself a journalist, he writes about the news, he analyzes the news, to be arrested.
There you see from Global News, Marais orders the arrest of blogger Orlando Santos, as well as another Bolsonaro ally.
The decision complies with a federal police request, an investigation into obstruction of justice, attempts to intimidate police officers, and corruption of minors.
Searches are being conducted in the federal district Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and the Amazonas.
The bloggers are outside of the country.
Now, just to give you a sense for how fraudulent that investigation was, the original crimes with which Alan DeSantos was charged that caused him to flee the country, and I have to say, there are a lot of Bolsonaro supporters, Who have been not just subject to searches and seizures, but imprisoned for claiming the 2022 election was fraudulent, for speaking negatively about the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court interprets negative speech about them, especially if they think it's false and what politician doesn't think criticism of them are false.
They interpret that as, quote, an attack on Brazilian institutions and Brazilian democracy.
So if you criticize the court in a way they find excessive, they will charge you criminally with attempting to overthrow Brazilian democracy by criticizing its sacred institutions, such as the Supreme Court.
Imagine how repressive you have to be to think that's an appropriate thing to do in a democracy, but that's what Brazil has been doing.
And a lot of Bolsonaro supporters, a lot of dissidents of the current government...
Many of them fled Brazil and are living in exile, many of them living in the United States.
And one of the people who went to the United States where he sought asylum from the U.S. government to protect him from persecution, political persecution back in Brazil, is Alonso Santos.
So when he was charged, this judge desperately wanted to see Alonso Santos in prison, but he ended up in the United States instead.
So the Brazilian government requested, and this is under the Biden administration.
Requested that Orlando Santos be expelled from the United States and extradited back to Brazil.
But the Biden administration rejected the extradition request saying that the crimes, quote-unquote, with which he's charged cannot be crimes in the United States because they're just expressions of political opinion, criticism of the government.
And under Extradition treaties, every country has the right, in fact, is obligated not to extradite someone to another country if the acts that are the basis of the criminal accusations cannot be criminalized in that country, that they're just political crimes.
That's not a legitimate basis for extradition.
So here you see the headline in Folio of Sao Paulo in 2024. The U.S. rejects the extradition of Juan de Santos for crimes of opinion.
And the meeting between U.S. and Brazilian authorities over this is tense.
So it's driving this judge crazy that Alondo Santos, who he desperately wants to put in prison, instead has legal residency in the United States.
The Biden administration refused to extrad him because said that the acts are protected by free expression.
And now he's on Rumble with a show that a lot of people watch.
And so he ordered the show banned, ordered Rumble to close his account to prevent any new openings of new accounts, cut off monetization.
Again, not just so that Brazilians can't watch that show, but so that nobody can, even if you're in the United States and want to, his order requires Rumble to block you from doing that, to just ban the account entirely, to close it, and threatens Rumble with massive fines if they don't.
Now, the reason the Trump media company, which is the owner of True Social, joined the lawsuit and argues they have a basis to do so, even though they're not yet directed the target of this order, It's because Rumble provides a lot of services to TrueSocial, including cloud services, such that if Rumble is destabilized by these Brazilian threats, TrueSocial will become destabilized as well.
And so the argument of TrueSocial is we have an interest in having these orders declared illegal.
That's what the lawsuit is about, a declaration that these orders are illegal, they violate American sovereignty, they violate American law, that Rumble and other American companies don't have to abide by them.
But obviously...
Beyond the legalisms, the political intent is to make a clear statement that the Trump administration will start fighting against censorship regimes of foreign governments to try and censor American companies.
When Mark Zuckerberg did a 180, obviously to curry favor of the Trump administration, but maybe out of conviction as well, he's been getting outspoken, even under Biden, about how repressive the Biden administration was with forcing them to censor dissent on COVID and other things.
Been talking about like that for a while.
But he made a big announcement on January 7th before Trump was inaugurated about how Meta was going to change essentially everything.
They were abandoning their third-party fact-checkers.
They weren't going to empower them to remove posts that quote-unquote experts decide is false.
Instead, they're going to use a community services community notes of the kind that X uses so that you get more information.
You see the post and you see the response.
Nothing gets deleted in the name of falsity.
But one of the things Zuckerberg said in that announcement was how important it was for the Trump administration to help these companies push back against global censorship of Americans.
Here's what he said.
Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
Now, when he said that Latin American countries have secret courts that enable them to quietly take things down, that was widely understood in Brazil to be a direct reference and criticism of Mareche.
who does censor in secret with no process.
A big debate broke out about whether that was accurate for him to say that.
I wrote an article in Folia explaining and documenting why it's very accurate.
I got my hands on these orders.
That was the first one to do it.
We published them and they're exactly that.
They take place in secret.
The court itself obviously is not secret.
It's the Supreme Court.
But the process and the orders are secret.
Not even the people censored are advised of it.
They only learn about it once their accounts are turned off.
They have no opportunity to contest the validity of that order.
And that's what he was referring to.
Then he went on and said this.
China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems.
They're never going to be perfect.
There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
I'm looking forward to this next chapter.
Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
Stay good out there.
Now, you don't have to like Mark Zuckerberg.
You don't have to believe in the authenticity of his convictions to understand the significance of that, which is he's essentially, and remember, he was invited to Trump's inauguration, sat very close to Trump on the stage, along with the Google CEO and Elon Musk, obviously, and Jeff Bezos and the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook.
They were all there.
And this is obviously an attempt by them to say, look, we're going to curry favor with the administration, and this is what we want in return, help battling the censorship regime of foreign governments.
And this pretty much clearly signals the Trump administration's intention to do so, given that Trump's media company is now suing, with Rumble, this judge in a federal court.
I would be remiss if I did not point out, finally, that someone very close to and important in the Trump White House, named Elon Musk, absolutely despises This judge, in fact, called him every name you could possibly think of.
And in August of 2024, in the midst of the battle between Brazil and X, that culminated in X's being censored from the country, Musk posted this on X, a photo of Alexandre Menaes behind bars, obviously, for now at least, generated by AI. And Musk said the following, One day, Alexander, this picture of you in prison will be real.
Mark my words.
This wasn't four years ago.
This was four months ago.
Do you think Elon Musk is the kind of person to just let that go and forget about it?
Here's just an example of one of dozens, if not hundreds, of tweets he posted about Moraes, and this is August 30th.
Brazil is controlled by a tyrannical dictator masquerading as a judge.
There are a lot of close ties between the Bolsonaro camp and the Trump camp.
Donald Trump Jr. is very close to Bolsonaro's son, who's a member of Congress, Eduardo Bolsonaro, just as one example.
You have Elon Musk and others inside the administration who regard this judge as a serious threat and a serious menace.
And now you have a lawsuit in the United States demanding the judge answer for his actions in the United States and get a federal court and Central District of Florida as a conservative district.
We'll see how this plays out.
But I think the political implications have been inflaming what had been these kind of, for the moment...
Under the radar of latent conflicts that are very, very acrimonious between Brazil and the new Trump administration are almost certain to explode as a result of the attention that will now be focused on all of this.
this, and we certainly intend to contribute to the focus remaining there, because it is crucial, not just for Brazil or for quote-unquote democratic world, but also for the United States, that this very increasingly invasive and extreme censorship regime be combated.
All of that is obviously the perfect segue to point out that free speech is under attack, and Rumble refuses to back down.
Rumble has always believed in empowering voices, no matter how unpopular, and now it's taking that fight to the next level.
As we just showed you, but also when major advertisers conspired to pull their dollars from the platform in response to negative media attacks, many brands did in fact turn their backs on Rumble.
They tried to make Rumble toxic.
But Rumble did not give up on its mission of free speech in order to curry favor with advertisers.
That we just covered makes that clear.
To strengthen this free speech mission, we're excited to offer Rumble Premium, a completely ad-free experience with exclusive benefits for viewers and creators.
It's more than a subscription.
It's a stand for free speech.
Your voice matters.
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Visit rumble.com slash premium slash Glenn and claim your discount today.
Together, we can turn the tide whether you join Rumble Premium or simply keep watching its shows like this one.
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Donald Trump spent the last year and a half or two years of his life condemning the NATO involvement in U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine, repeatedly vowing over and over and That he would end that war, that he would end U.S. support for that war, that he would negotiate with the Russians to facilitate a deal that both sides would agree to that would end the war.
By very stark contrast, first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, backed by the entire Democratic Party, said exactly the opposite.
They said, no, we're going to fight this war and fund it until the very end, until every Russian troop is off of Ukrainian soil.
And they said, we don't want to talk to the Russians.
We're not going to talk to Putin.
He's a war criminal.
And the American people heard this debate repeatedly and voted for the candidate who called for an end to the war and called for opening up of dialogue with and cooperation with the Russians.
I don't know what people thought.
That maybe Trump wasn't really going to do that, even though he continuously said he would.
And the fact that he's now following through on what he promised to do during the campaign is causing extreme amounts of meltdown and mania and paranoia and hysteria and melodrama from the same coalition of liberals on the one hand and their neoconservative allies on the other, many of whom populate the Republican Party in the House and the Senate, many of whom are part of the Never Trump movement.
All of them are aligned in this bipartisan foreign policy consensus.
One that Trump vowed to subvert and with his policy toward the Ukrainians and the Russians clearly is doing that.
And the reaction is beyond unhinged.
From The Guardian today, Trump calls Zelensky a dictator, a mere fears of irreconcilable rift.
The remarks follow the Ukrainian leader's claim that the U.S. president is living in a Russian, quote, disinformation bubble.
Essentially, after Trump's...
Leading officials, as we reported last night, national security officials like Marco Rubio met with top Russian national security officials, including their foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in Saudi Arabia.
And it was announced that Russia's condition, one of their conditions, is they want there to be elections in Ukraine so they know which government they're dealing with that's legitimate, that's supported by the Ukrainian people.
Trump said, yeah, I actually do think there should be elections.
Zelensky postponed the elections, basically imposed martial law.
And if we're saying we're fighting for democracy, there should be a democratic Ukraine, which requires elections.
We reported that last night.
We showed you that last night.
And so in return, Zelensky was very angry about this idea, like, how dare you suggest that I should be subject to elections?
I don't have to be subject to elections.
And he was also very angry because Trump said that There was a lot of corruption in Ukraine, which has been well documented forever that Ukraine is the most corrupt country.
Rand Paul and others tried to, when they saw that support for Ukraine was going to pass the Senate, he tried to say, well, at least we should have an inspector general or some safeguards over this.
And Mitch McConnell called him a Russian asset, and they rejected Rand Paul and said no safeguards.
And now Trump claims there's a lot of missing money and corruption in Ukraine.
They have to pay.
They have to find out where is the money going to?
We have, I believe, President Zelensky said last week that he doesn't know where half of the money is that we gave him.
Well, we gave them, I believe, $350 billion.
But let's say it's something less than that, but it's a lot.
And we have to equalize with Europe because Europe has given us a very much smaller percentage than that.
I think Europe has given $100 billion.
And we've given, let's say, 300-plus, and it's more important for them than it is for us.
We have an ocean in between, and they don't.
Now, that is something we've talked about before.
This is actually an argument that President Obama made on his way out when he was interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story for The Atlanta called The Obama Doctrine when that neocon editor-in-chief said, why didn't you confront Russia more in Ukraine?
And Syria, he said, look, Ukraine is a vital interest to Russia.
It always has been, always will be.
It's right on the other side of the border.
It's not a vital interest to us.
And it never will be.
We have an ocean separating ourselves from them.
And it would be idiocy and madness of the higher order, Obama said, to confront Russia over who governs provinces in eastern Ukraine.
And that's Trump's view as well.
When Obama said it, nobody minded.
When Trump says it, it means that he's an asses of Vladimir Putin.
The reality is this is just hardcore realism.
All of that is just basically true, undeniably true.
But you can fund this war and all that's going to happen is more Ukrainians, more Russians are going to die, more of Ukraine is going to be destroyed, and the Russian front line will continue to march westward toward Kiev, toward the western part of Ukraine, and gain more and more territory, which is exactly what's been happening.
It's an absolutely horrific war of attrition in which people are dying in massive numbers, and Trump really is the only person who seems to care about any of that.
Most people in the US political spectrum seem fine with a generation of Ukrainian men being wiped out.
Many of them resisting conscription, sometimes violently.
Because it's very easy to cheer wars and feel good for wars if you're not the one paying the price for them.
If it's not your country being bombed, if it's not your family members fighting and dying in them.
Very easy to cheer and put flags up.
In front of your house and write columns about how tough and purposeful and strong you are because you want the war to continue and it's not you doing any of the fighting.
Unsurprisingly, Zelensky did not like anything that Trump said there, didn't like that he was meeting with the Russians in Saudi Arabia, was going to go to Saudi Arabia as we reported last night, but then decided he wouldn't.
He felt excluded from the negotiations and decided to insult Trump even though Ukraine depends on America's largest is what he said.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy dismisses claims of his low approval ratings and said Trump lives in a, quote, disinformation space.
I would say it won't happen right now.
As we are talking about 4%, we have seen this disinformation.
We understand it's coming from Russia.
We understand that and we have proof that these numbers are being discussed between America and Russia.
So unfortunately, President Trump, who we respect a lot as a leader of the nation that we really respect, the American nation, who supported us all the time...
Unfortunately, he lives in this disinformation space.
So he's essentially saying that Trump is being manipulated by the Russians, Trump is being deceived by them, Trump has no idea what's going on.
I don't think that's a particularly constructive way to deal with Trump, especially when the only way that your country continues to fight this war that, in reality, only Zelensky and a few other people think can be won.
It's by convincing him to continue to fund your country and fund your military.
And if you accuse him of living in a disinformation bubble created for him by the Russians, what you're likely to get is exactly what Zelensky got today, which is this statement from President Trump.
I'm just going to read it to you.
It doesn't require comment.
"Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Vladimir Zelensky, talked to the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that couldn't be won, that never had to start, but a war that he, without the US and Trump, will never be able to settle." The U.S. has spent $200 billion more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed while the U.S. will get nothing back.
Why didn't sleepy Joe Biden demand equalization in that this war is far more important to Europe than it is for us?
We have a big, beautiful ocean as separation.
On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money we sent him is, quote, missing.
He refuses to have elections, is very low in Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden, quote, like a fiddle.
A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast, or he's not going to have a country left.
In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something I'll admit only Trump and the Trump administration can do.
Biden never tried.
Europe has failed to bring peace, and Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going.
I love Ukraine, but Zelensky has done a terrible job.
His country is shattered and millions have unsuccessfully died.
And so it continues.
And it is true.
If you actually care about the Ukrainians, and this was so obvious from the beginning, you would immediately try to put an end to their war with Russia, which is very possible at the start.
People like Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and others said that they were present for the talks in Istanbul.
The Russians and Ukrainians were very close to a deal that would have averted this whole war entirely, that wouldn't have given any Ukrainian land to Russia.
But Victoria Nuland and then Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson butt in and told Zelensky, you cannot agree to this deal.
And so he didn't.
And here we are three years later with Russia taking land more and more all the time.
Hundreds of thousands of people dead.
Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted.
Very dangerous conflict with Russia and the United States.
And nobody in the United States who cheered that war cares because it wasn't them losing an entire generation of people to a horrible war that people in that country have stopped wanting to fight for a long time.
The National Pulse today reported as an exclusive, quote, Vice President J.D. Vance warned Zelensky over, quote, disgraceful public attacks on Trump and he confirms that Ukrainian elections are now U.S. policy.
Vance said, quote, Zelensky is getting really bad advice and I don't know from whom.
He's not dealing with Joe Biden and the Biden administration anymore.
He's dealing with Donald Trump and the Trump administration.
Vance warned against Zelensky's public protestations in recent days, stating, quote, the idea that he's going to litigate his disagreements with the president in the public square.
I mean, you know the president very well, obviously.
I know the president very well.
This is not a good way to deal with President Trump, Vance said.
Now, the Democrats and neocons cannot give up the script that has so often failed them.
That the only thing Americans should care about is pouring all their resources into helping Ukraine continue to fight this unsuccessful war, that Trump must be a Putin asset or a toady, as Barry Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard on The Joe Rogan Show, even though she couldn't defend it when asked.
Here is the newly elected vice chair of the DNC, David Hogue, who they thought, they think, is going to appeal to young men.
That they're losing in droves.
Good luck with that.
Here's his message, quote, "If we abandon Ukraine, Poland is next," he said.
"You know what's going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine?
A third world war and a second Marshall Plan.
We are arguably in the most important moment in geopolitics since World War II and our president is letting a strongman castrate us and our ally." I'd like to remind David Hogue and people who think like this.
That at the start of the war, Zelensky knew that there was no chance Ukraine could win because Russia just has so many more people in it to send to the military, to send to the war.
And Zelensky begged people who think like David Hogue.
He said, look, if you think this is an existential fight, as we do, get offline.
Get rid of your Ukrainian flag emojis.
Come help us pick up a gun and come help us fight the Russians.
Come to Ukraine.
We'll give you a gun.
And so few people in the West took Zelensky up on that.
And that ultimately is the real metric for whether you believe a war is as existential as you claim is, whether people are willing to go fight in it.
David Hogue is a prime fighting age.
If he really thinks that all the fate of the world and the freedom and everything decent depends upon driving the Russian army out of all of Ukraine, why isn't he over there helping, as Zelensky asked?
And do you think it's a winning message with the American people to say, look, we know you think you're economically suffering.
We know you think you're buried in debt with no real chance to get ahead for yourself and your family.
But the most important thing is that we keep spending billions and billions and tens and hundreds of billions or more to fight this war in Ukraine.
Do you think that's something that's going to win people back to the Democratic?
I don't.
That's why people voted for Trump and not for Kamala.
Chuck Todd, who was at NBC News for 400 years and recently left, not sure what he's doing, don't actually care, but he did say this, out of the blue, thinking he was being very smooth, something folks ought to reacquaint themselves with, and it's an image of the Mueller report.
He was on MSNBC. Can you believe these people are still talking about the Mueller report?
Obviously trying to imply that the reason Trump wants to end the war and telling Zelensky needs an election is because he's a Russian asset.
They're going back to 2016. It didn't work then.
It didn't work in 2024. These people have been screaming this forever.
They're losing their minds so they're going back to the Mueller report to try and go back to that whole Trump is a Russian agent thing or whatever.
Here's Rachel Maddow, the queen of the Russiagate hoax.
She really was.
Please just watch this clip.
I don't even want to set it up for you.
This is from last night talking about The Trump administration is meeting with the Russians and the plans they have to open up cooperation and end the war in Ukraine.
Just watch one minute and 24 seconds so you can see the utter mania and insanity and schizophrenia and paranoia driving these people's brains.
Listen to this.
Not just what she says, but how she says it.
repeatedly and eerily and in a very out of character way tells the American people he is not allowed to discuss that relationship or his communications with that leader.
The political reality of this administration is going to be shaped by whether or not the people who oppose him oppose him strongly enough and effectively enough.
The political reality of this administration and this presidency will be determined by Also, by whether the people who voted for him are horrified enough by what they have wrought that they regret it and are willing to act differently and to speak out about their regret.
The reality of this presidency and this administration will be determined, in some part, by whether or not Republican officials realize that their own survival as politicians depends not on sucking up to Trump, but by helping their constituents survive him.
Strong evidence supporting all of those strikes against Trump so far, frankly.
But this is one other thing to watch.
If we really are now abandoning the free world and lining up instead with the world's dictatorships, and Trump is unwilling to even explain why, just watch.
The American people are going to have some feelings about that, too.
Just watch.
Any day now.
I know I've been saying this for eight years, but any day now.
Americans are going to wake up and they're going to be like, wait a minute.
The most important thing for us to worry about is whether Trump is an agent of Vladimir Putin's and the Kremlin is helping Russia.
Well, Russia is the greatest threat to our lives in America.
We wake up every day worried about Russia.
And is Rachel Maddow really right?
Is she finally convincing me after eight years of talking about this crap every day of her life in exactly this histrionic manner that Trump really is?
An agent of the Russian government.
After all, Rachel's battle says, look, they're going to realize it soon.
Just watch.
Just watch.
They're going to realize it soon.
You're going to hear from them.
I also love the conceit that only now is the United States lining up with the world's dictators.
Does she have any idea who American allies are?
What governments we've installed?
Which governments we prop up?
Did she watch Joe Biden go and meet with?
Mohammed bin Salman, after promising to turn the Saudis into outcasts after he got caught murdering a journalist for the Washington Post, as she watched the billions of dollars every year going from Moscow from Washington to Cairo to prop up the incredibly violent, brutal Egyptian dictators.
Does she know anything about American history?
These people really believe...
In this fairy tale that the United States upholds the rules-based international order, the same country that cheered the ICC when it declared Putin a war criminal, said, oh, that's very good, ICC. That's the right move.
That's very important what you did.
And then sanctioned them, the same court, when a year later they reached the same conclusion about America's ally, Israel.
And then sanctioned the judges and the prosecutors responsible.
Only in the United States and a few capitals in Western Europe can you still say that crap?
Oh, the United States stands for the 80 years of the post-World War II rules-based international order and not provoke a laughing fit.
Everyone outside of the United States understands that that is a joke.
Rachel Maddow really believes it.
I remember when General Sisi in Egypt visited Trump in the White House and he embraced him in all the media.
I was like, this is such a departure from American tradition.
We don't embrace dictators.
It's like, what?
We don't?
Since when?
We put Sissy in office.
We give him millions and billions of dollars every year.
Here's Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat fanatical Russiagator.
He went on CNN today to talk about Trump and Putin and Russia.
Like, it's 2017 these people are partying.
And here's what he said.
So, what do you make of the latest comments from President Trump about Zelensky, Congressman?
Thank you, Pamela, for your question.
Donald Trump acts like he is scared of valvment Putin.
I don't know why that...
Scared of who?
Scared of who?
...of valvment Putin.
I'm sorry, who?
Thank you, Pamela, for your question.
Donald Trump acts like he is scared of violent Putin.
I don't know why that is, but it is highly disturbing.
A few years ago, Donald Trump said he trusted Vladimir Putin more than our own intelligence officials.
You see Trump when he's with Putin, the body language Trump sends is one of weakness.
They're back to this.
Do you remember when Trump went to, where was it?
They called it the Treason Summit.
I think it was in, it was 2018. I think it was Helsinki in Finland.
And Trump went there, and supposedly the way he stood next to Putin, they got body experts to say it was a very strangely submissive posture.
They implied that this showed that Trump was at the beck and call of Putin.
They were outraged that Trump didn't honor the decree of the CIA, which had accused Trump of being in a conspiracy with the Kremlin falsely.
That was when John Brennan called it a treason summit, as Donald Trump was a traitor because of the body language.
This was 2018 they did all this.
And it turned them into a joke.
And they're back to it because they really have nothing else to say.
Trump is ending the war in Ukraine.
He is opening up relations with Russia.
He announced today an 8% or 9% cut in the Pentagon budget.
Without any conditions.
The largest cut to the defense budget, the military budget, in 10 years, the United States spends more on its military than the next 13 countries combined.
This is all things that Democrats and the liberals have said they were in favor of for years, but they can't admit that Trump is doing something good, so they have nothing else to say.
What are they going to say?
No, we want the war in Ukraine to continue forever, like dumb David Hogue did?
So they're back to this, you hear it, like this insinuation, like, he seems very scared of Putin.
I don't know why.
Oh, probably because there's a pee-pee tape that the Russians have that they filmed while Trump was in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow.
Remember that?
The Steele dossier told us that.
They're just back to this.
It's desperation.
And now you see Trump giving away the store when it comes to the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
And name-calling is certainly not helpful.
And I wish the president would stop that and show strength.
The American people does not want the American president to show weakness.
And that's what Trump is doing right now, showing weakness.
Now, do you notice Democrats, this is one of the reasons why they have become kind of a laughingstock.
Everything they say seems like they're just reading from talking points.
I guarantee you this is the talking point that went out.
You're going to hear every Democrat on every cable show saying, Trump seems like he's scared of Putin.
I don't know why.
Trump needs to be strong.
He's weak.
The American people don't like weakness.
Knowing that the American people perceive Trump as very strong.
They can't speak ever from the heart.
They can't speak openly.
They're so petrified of a wrong word.
They all stick to their party.
Scripton, people see that and nobody trusts it.
Nobody likes it.
Nobody wants it.
The one thing you cannot say about Donald Trump is that he's ever been afraid to speak his mind.
Which is how most people go through the day.
That's how we communicate with one another.
We don't read from talking point scripts.
And when you see politicians who do, you want to run in the other direction.
Kamala Harris seemed petrified in every interview of saying a single wrong word.
And so she ended up saying nothing.
And most people, a lot of people said, They wouldn't vote for her because they had no idea what she believes, who she is, what she stands for, what she would do.
That's a terrible thing in a candidate.
I was on Piers Morgan's show earlier today, and I will confess to you that I get asked to go on there a lot, but I really hate being on panels.
I won't do panels.
If you see me on cable, it'll be just myself.
I'll do a one-on-one debate.
But to be, like, on a panel with, like, five windows and you have to, like, scream and yell, it's just so undignified and degrading and worthless.
I don't know why I decided to say yes today.
I think it was because they told me that I could debate Dan Crenshaw in Ukraine.
They were honest.
They didn't deceive me.
They told me who else was going to be there.
And I said yes, knowing I shouldn't.
But there were a couple moments where...
I think it was constructive, one of which was when I first spoke and I tried to explain not just the importance of Trump opening communications with Russia after it had been closed so dangerously for years, but also the fact that the American people ratified what Trump is doing with respect to Ukraine.
Here's how I describe this.
To the panel now.
Glenn Greenwald, great to have you back on Uncensored.
What do you make of this?
I mean, Trump, at the very least, what he's done is immediately reestablish diplomatic ties with Russia.
Do you think that's a good move?
I actually do think it's good for the two countries with the world's largest nuclear stockpiles.
That have come close to nuclear Armageddon in the past to actually speak to one another.
I think one of the worst parts of the last decade in Washington, the Russiagate hoax and all of that, was that it created a climate where it was almost criminal for American officials to speak to Russians.
Even during the Cold War, when we viewed each other as existential threats, we had all sorts of open communication.
The Russians would come to the United States.
We would hear from their leaders.
Our leaders would go over there and speak.
Of course, these kinds of communications Are vital.
Trump deserves a lot of credit for opening that up.
It's dangerous to the world when the Russians and the Americans don't speak.
And I think we have to begin with, since we all love democracy here so much, we're all so eager to advance it around the world in between arming and propping up the Saudis and Egyptians.
But in general, we're good people.
We love democracy.
We just had an election in 2024 in which the winning candidate, Donald Trump, went around saying, not as an ancillary view, but as central to his campaign.
It's time that we keep American money in the United States for American citizens.
We have to stop funding all of these foreign wars where our country's not at risk.
And specifically said he wants to end the war in Ukraine.
The Biden-Kamala Harris view, the view of the Democratic Party was, no, we can't talk to the Russians.
We have to fund Ukraine until the very last Ukrainian is dead.
In order to expel all Russian troops from Ukrainian soil, a complete pipe dream from the start.
And Americans voted for the candidate who said he wanted to end U.S. involvement in the war.
That should matter if we love democracy so much.
Americans, and I think that's what Trump, above everything, whether you disagree with him or agree with him, and I have both, is following through on what he promised he would do in the campaign.
And that kind of responsiveness democratically in the United States is very rare to see.
And then Piers went on and talked about this tweet, this brilliant tweet that he posted about how it's weird to see liberals angry that Trump's trying to end two wars and how it went so viral and millions of people read it.
So that was the view I laid out.
But then I had this pretty contentious exchange with Dan Crenshaw.
I have to say, just looking at things from where I am, I really, sometimes people in Washington pursue policies and make claims that You almost have to believe they're so deluded.
They live in a complete bubble where this conventional wisdom takes hold and they don't realize how much dissent there is outside of that bubble.
And they're able to believe things that they want to pretend to believe, that they have to say to justify what they're doing.
It's hard to believe they really believe.
I want to show you this argument I had with Dan Crenshaw about Ukraine and NATO war and US war funding of the war and what's happening in that war because it's so exemplifies to me how I don't know how how willing these people are to say blatantly untrue things as I'll show you I just think we should save our fury about whether Ukraine get included or not for when they actually get excluded.
Can I just assert a little bit of realism into the conversation?
Because I know Dan started off by saying, oh, Russia's this crappy little second-rate power.
We have to flatter them and make them think they matter, but they really don't.
They're really weak.
It's always a pretty weird contradiction to simultaneously say that and then at the same time warn that Russia is going to start invading Western Europe, this crappy little second-rate power.
But the reality is, this is the reality whether you like it or not.
Russia has fought a war now for three years against unified NATO and the United States, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars and highly sophisticated weapons into Ukraine, and the front line continues to move westward, not eastward, where the Russians are gaining more and more territory, more and more Ukrainians are being killed.
There are fewer Ukrainian men left in that country who want to fight.
They're being forcibly dragged in there and used as cannon fodder, or they're fleeing and risking their lives to do it.
The reality is Russia is winning the war or has won the war.
And you can say, oh, you must be a Kremlin agent to say that.
You just got to know nothing about military information or tactics.
That's what you have to do to say that.
You just have to know nothing.
It's clearly what you do.
I mean, you've got so many facts wrong, it's hard to know where to even start.
Oh, you think Ukraine is winning the war?
In which direction is the front line moved, Dan?
Has it moved westward or eastward?
It depends on where you're looking at.
It depends on where you're looking at.
I hate to break it to you, but it depends on what you're looking at.
And the ratios of Russian deaths to Ukrainian deaths, it's like four to one.
You just don't know what you're talking about.
You've never fought anything.
You don't know anything about the military.
I fought a lot of things.
Just because you were in the military doesn't make you an expert.
I'm sorry to say that Donald Trump is an election based on rejecting...
Clearly, Russia is winning the war.
The Ukrainians don't even want to go and fight this war any longer.
They're fleeing the country.
It's a war of attrition with a stalemate.
That's what we're looking at right now.
That's the most honest way to look at it.
I'm sorry to say, one of the things that I know that you don't actually have to go join the military to understand is that Russia is many, many, many times larger than Ukraine.
And that's the reason why the most prescient geopolitical experts, people have been on this show, I've interviewed them many times, people like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Wald, all said since 2022. Ukraine will inevitably lose this war and Russia will win it.
And I'll tell you why.
This is one point I want to make.
When President Obama was on his way out of office in 2016, Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed him for a cover story on the Obama foreign policy doctrine.
And he criticized Obama for not standing up to Russia in Syria and in Ukraine.
AND WHAT OBAMA SAID WAS THE REALITY IS UKRAINE IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE A VITAL INTEREST TO RUSSIA BECAUSE IT'S RIGHT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BORDER AND IT HAS NEVER BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE A VITAL INTEREST TO THE UNITED STATES.
THE IDEA THAT WE'RE GOING TO CONFRONT RUSSIA OR GO TO WAR WITH RUSSIA OVER WHO GOVERNS VARIOUS PROVINCES IN EASTERN UKRAINE IS ABSOLUTE MADNESS.
PRESIDENT OBAMA WAS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT AND PRESIDENT TRUMP THINKS THAT TOO.
ALL RIGHT.
OKAY.
NOW, HONESTLY, I DID NOT EXPECT TO BE CHALLENGED ON THE EXTREMELY WELL-DOCUMENTED FACT THAT WE'VE REPORTED MANY TIMES ON THIS SHOW THAT THE UKRAINIAN FRONT LINE IS CRUMBLING, that The Russians are gaining more and more territory.
Everybody admits this to Ukraine, but you're on the show and you have some guy there saying, like, I fought in a war.
I get briefings.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
And I've read all of these reports.
I've covered them.
I've talked about them.
And so I told him at some point, like, once we're done with the segment, I'm going to shove all those reports in your face that are from pro-Ukraine media outlets in the West, even the ones that have been cheering this war from the start, Admit all of what I just said.
Because anyone can say anything when they're on one of those shows.
In a one-on-one debate, you can engage it more.
I would have pulled up those articles.
I would have read them right to his face.
But when you're on a panel with a bunch of people screaming, it's very difficult.
Just to give you a few examples of what I mean.
Here's The Economist, the British magazine that's extremely pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine.
Just a week ago, or last month rather, January 27th, amid talks of a ceasefire, Ukraine's front line is...
What's that word?
Crumbling.
Crumbling.
Ukraine's front line is crumbling.
You can find articles of this kind in The Economist, despite being extremely pro-Ukraine, for at least the last six months.
Here from France 24, a French mainstream newspaper.
This was from December 31st, 2024, just two months ago, less than two months ago.
Russian advances in Ukraine grew sevenfold in 2024, the data shows.
I'm sorry, what about the Russian advances in Ukraine?
Oh, they grew sevenfold in 2024, the data shows.
Russia advanced by almost 4,000 square kilometers, 1,500 miles in Ukraine in 2024, seven times more than in 2023. An AFP analysis of data from the Institute of the Study of War showed Tuesday.
So think about what that's like.
You're in a debate with a member of Congress who votes for these wars, who funds these wars, who defends these wars.
Dan Crenshaw is one of these Republicans like Tom Cotton who despises Trump's foreign policy, despises the MAGA ideology but has to pretend that he's on board with it because he knows he can't thrive or survive in the Republican Party if he admits that he prefers Bill Kristol and Chuck Schumer's foreign policy to Trump's, which is absolutely the case with them.
You're sitting there and you're trying to have a debate about the war and you're saying what you know is true.
That Russia's gains are significant.
They're moving.
The Ukraine front line is collapsing.
And then some guy tells you, you never fought in a war.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I got briefings.
That's not true.
Hear from BBC, November 20th.
Ukraine front could, quote, collapse as Russian gains accelerate, experts warn.
Experts warn, here from The Guardian, January 16th.
"Their human resources are unlimited.
Russia's advances signal a bleak spring for Ukrainians.
If Moscow forces manage to take all of the Adonis Oblast, it would be a symbolic moment for Putin and for Kyiv." I know you've seen these before.
We've covered them many times.
I had so many people on this show in 2022. Mir Shimer and Walt and Jeffrey Sachs and others.
Who tried to say, look, this is madness.
The U.S. and NATO are never going to help Ukraine drive out every Russian troop from Ukrainian soil.
They would go to nuclear war before they gave up Crimea because of how crucial it is not to have NATO control that access to the Black Sea.
And they're going to protect their Russian-speaking ethnic Russians who are loyal to Moscow and the eastern provinces of Ukraine who have been increasingly repressed.
NATO's all over Ukraine.
We did a coup in 2014 there.
Biden was micromanaging it.
Remember that call that he had where he talked about it?
He bragged how he called up and said, I want this prosecutor fired.
And if you don't fire them, we're going to withhold a billion dollars.
We've been micromanaging this country right on the other side of the Russian border, the most sensitive part of their border, while threatening to move NATO, which includes Germany, eastward right up to the Russian border.
And we've known forever that that would be extremely provocative, not just to Putin, but to all Russians.
Obviously, if China put an adverse antagonistic military alliance in Mexico and then engineered a coup to put in a pro-China leader who was more hostile to the U.S. and had intelligence officials buzzing all over that place, the Dan Crenshaw's of the world would be insisting we go to war to force China out of there.
But they can't apply these principles consistently to other countries.
They can't look at things from anyone else's perspective.
But they're so drowning in propaganda to the point where they just say things that are blatantly untrue.
That is what Washington is.
That is what the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the blob, has been for so long.
It's the reason that it's been so destructive.
These people are imbeciles.
They're ideologues.
They live in a fairy tale.
They can't face reality.
They have a perception of themselves in the United States that nobody in the world shares outside of Paris and London and Berlin, maybe.
And you see it when you confront them.
I couldn't believe it.
I really couldn't believe it.
I knew saying Russia was winning the war was going to be provocative, but I never expected them to deny it factually.
I thought, no, if we send more, whatever.
I thought they were going to say something like that.
To deny these reports that are all over the place, including very, very pro-Ukraine Western media outlets, that everybody admits, you just can't believe it.
And yet that's the people who have been running U.S. foreign policy and their ideology for a long, long time.
And it's the reason why our treasury has been drained.
We've destroyed so many things around the world, never for any gain other than for a few companies in the military industrial complex and a few ideologues like that.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening.
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