Glenn takes questions from our audience on DOGE, pro-Israel indoctrination, censorship in Brazil, and more. -------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow Prof. Ha-Joon Chang's work Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Welcome to a new episode of our mailbag, which is a new segment that we decided to do where we take questions from the members of our locals community and then we answer them here live on our Rumble program | |
| if you want to be one of the people who can ask questions and And there's a lot of different ways that you can ask questions. | |
| You can do it by text or audio or video. | |
| Soon we're going to have a call-in opportunity as well where people can call in while we're live on the air and we can have that kind of... | |
| Interaction, all you have to do is click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to the Locals community. | |
| We have a lot of great questions as we often do from our Locals members. | |
| The first one is from The Millman who asked the following quote, Do you have any specific personal stories? | |
| You've heard that you can share about what Israel does to indoctrinate American Jews from a young age and generally Americans. | |
| Maybe there are some examples from the Holocaust industry, which I have not read. | |
| That's the book by Norman Finkelstein. | |
| I watched Israelism, the Awakening of Young American Jews, a documentary that examines the indoctrination techniques Israel uses on American Jews, including free trips to Israel, dehumanization of Palestinians, the equating of Judaism with Israel, etc. | |
| It's a great question, and it's really interesting because if you grew up as an American Jew, which I did, in a largely American Jewish culture, and my school was predominantly Jewish, most of my friends were Jewish who went to that school, my family is 100% Jewish, so I certainly have a lot of personal experience about that as well. | |
| Everyone understands exactly what happens with this kind of indoctrination. | |
| And it's almost like something that everybody agrees not to talk about because it sheds so much light on why there's so much Jewish-American loyalty toward Israel. | |
| It's because this is something that is drummed into people's heads from basically the moment that they're born. | |
| Not just a Jewish identity, which is very common. | |
| Christians have a Christian identity. | |
| Italians have an Italian identity, etc., etc. | |
| But it's specifically about the vital role of this foreign... | |
| Now, for me, my parents weren't very religious, and that's true of a lot of American Jews who are secular. | |
| It's true of Israeli Jews as well. | |
| They're not overwhelmingly religious, a lot of them necessarily, but it still is a central part of the identity of American Jews. | |
| My father grew up in Brooklyn. | |
| My mother grew up in the Bronx, and they were both part of a 100% Jewish family, so it was a central part of our family's identity. | |
| It was always, we were a Jewish family. | |
| And even though my family wasn't religious, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, was an immigrant from Germany. | |
| She was one of the two siblings of 11, her and her younger sister, who left Germany to come to the United States in the late 1930s to escape the persecution of Jews in Germany. | |
| She spoke with a heavy German accent her whole life, and she thought it was extremely important that we have Jewish upbringing and Jewish traditions and even Jewish religion, and so sent both my brother and myself to a Jewish summer camp every year for, I think, five or six years. | |
| So I spent two months during the summer in the middle of Florida somewhere, in Ocala, sometimes in southern Georgia, in Jewish camps. | |
| And there was all kinds of indoctrination, religious indoctrination, where you learn Jewish prayers, but also constant. | |
| Talk about Israel and the history of the Jewish people and the persecution that Jews face. | |
| You weren't all about the Holocaust. | |
| And we're indoctrinated with the idea that Israel is a place that guarantees the safety of Jews uniquely. | |
| And that without Israel, Jews around the world could never be safe. | |
| You're talking about the long thousands of years of persecution, but obviously culminating in the Holocaust. | |
| Childhood from adolescence is constantly reinforced in people that your identity is as a Jew, this makes you different from other people, and you need to have a sense of devotion and loyalty to Israel, and it's fostered in all kinds of ways. | |
| I think almost every friend that I have who I grew up with who was Jewish went on birthright trips to Israel, which are trips that you can go on where it will be free. | |
| The Israelis do have extremely sophisticated Propaganda programs that are catered to all sorts of specific kinds of people. | |
| For example, they have an LGBT propaganda tour where gay politicians from all around the world go to Israel and they take them to gay bars in Tel Aviv and to the gay culture around Israel. | |
| They teach them about the freedom of Gay people in Israel and compare them to the treatment of gay people in the West Bank and in particular Gaza under Hamas and I've seen left-wing politicians even who go on these trips and they're often paid for by Israel come back and out of nowhere they're suddenly fanatically pro-Israeli. | |
| They start to believe that Israel is Excuse me, is an important project to defend. | |
| You see it with people like Richie Torres who went on those kinds of propaganda tours and they cater them to each one. | |
| So there's one for American teenagers as well. | |
| And you go to Israel and they indoctrinate you with love of and support for Israel. | |
| And these are very, like I said, sophisticated programs where they play on your emotions of the most primal and visceral kind. | |
| Your fears, your identity, your place in the world. | |
| It's very, very powerful. | |
| And propaganda is a very sophisticated science. | |
| We tend to think of it as just some messaging that people do, but it's actually been studied in many fields of discipline, psychology and sociology and anthropology, and the techniques have become increasingly powerful in terms of how people are propagandized. | |
| And one of this... | |
| One of the things that really struck me, and I think I talked about this before, is that I have a friend who I've been friends with almost my entire life, and he's a person, he's Jewish, and he grew up in a typically Jewish tradition, not overwhelmingly religious, | |
| but going to synagogue, was bar mitzvahed, just had the Jewish identity always reinforced, but he was largely apolitical, didn't particularly feel that strongly to Israel, didn't talk about Israel much, Knowing that I'm a vocal critic of Israel and have been for a long time, it never was a topic of conversation between us, let alone any sort of thing that might impede our friendship. | |
| He was always pretty apolitical about it, pretty neutral about it, and yet after October 7th, and I didn't just see this in him, I saw this in so many Jews that I had known who were similarly neutral to, even a little bit critical of Israel, just awakened in them. | |
| Was this very primal notion that Jews were now under attack and they were enraged by what had happened on October 7th and it deeply radicalized them and they began defending what Israel was doing and expressing contempt for those who were critical of it and this lifelong system of indoctrination which could be latent at some points, might just be lurking. | |
| It's very present there. | |
| And I have to say more broadly that I think this is the sort of propaganda with which we're all inculcated, not just about Israel, but about a whole range of topics, including the United States. | |
| I can remember very vividly when I was six years old, in the first grade, second grade, we had classes, civics classes, and I remember the teacher that I had, she was this older woman, obviously had lived through the Cold War, probably was born in... | |
| This was the mid-1970s. | |
| By then she was probably 60 or 70, so you're talking about born in 1910, lived through that 20th century. | |
| And I remember every day her teaching us that the United States was the greatest country in the world, that we stood for freedom, that we fought against tyranny, that the Soviet Union was the opposite, that was our enemy. | |
| And we're very tribal animals. | |
| We evolved for thousands of years as part of a tribe. | |
| We needed to be part of a tribe. | |
| We had to be... | |
| We maintain our tribal good standing because if you're ostracized or expelled from your tribe, it would mean typically for a long time that you would wither away and die. | |
| You couldn't survive without a tribe. | |
| So we're very tribal. | |
| And so to have these tribal instincts constantly stimulated from birth, the United States is the greatest country in the world. | |
| It fights for freedom. | |
| It fights for democracy. | |
| These other countries are the bad countries. | |
| These are things that... | |
| are deeply embedded in our thought process and how we understand the world subconsciously consciously and it takes once you're an adult a concerted effort to say wait I want to uproot all the things that I was indoctrinated with maybe some of them are correct maybe some of them aren't and I want to reevaluate the world and see what is inside me that was put there for whatever purposes and what actually is my own ideas and it's not easy to do for any of us no matter how much you try because these Formations that | |
| shape us for years when we don't have any defenses against them, when we're children or adolescents, these are very, very powerful. | |
| And the experience of seeing not even the full panoply of pro-Israel indoctrination as an American Jew, but certainly a lot of it, and seeing the full range of it in a lot of my friends, and then seeing how this plays out and manifests in adulthood. | |
| It is incredibly enlightening. | |
| So you look at how many American Jews there are in media or politics, and it's very difficult to find ones who position themselves as Israel critics. | |
| The Norman Finkelsteins of the world are known precisely because of how rare they are. | |
| Why is it that, overwhelmingly, people who grew up Jewish, who are taught to have Judaism or being Jewish as a part of their identity, end up... | |
| On this polarizing question that divides the entire world so radically and fanatically and aggressively pro-Israel, obviously, it's because it's a byproduct of what they've been indoctrinated with. | |
| They were taught from birth to love Israel, they become adults, and they love Israel. | |
| There's never any critical reevaluation at any point of whether that's something that they actually want to continue to believe. | |
| And I think that project of not just with Israel but of everything, of reevaluating what it is that we were... | |
| uh taught to believe with which we were indoctrinated re-evaluating it uprooting it and then kind of reconstituting our belief system is one of the prerequisites to being an adult to being an autonomous person a free person to make certain that the ideas and the values and the emotional reactions that shape who you are and how you think actually are coming from you and not from external sources that have been implanted in you when you had No idea that this was even being done. | |
| So for sure, it is a very powerful system of propaganda. | |
| It is overt. | |
| It is engineered. | |
| It's not just through absorption. | |
| The Israelis understand the importance of it. | |
| There's a lot of money spent on this sort of thing. | |
| They have them for evangelicals. | |
| They have them, as I said, for gay people. | |
| They have them for Americans. | |
| They have very different propaganda projects for all kinds of different people in the world. | |
| They're experts at it, and it succeeds. | |
| In lots of ways and people who really surprised me by how radicalized they were in favor of Israel after October 7th were kind of testaments to how much that worked. | |
| All right, the next question is from TheRealAF, and it says the following, quote, Hi, Glenn. | |
| It's fascinating to watch the success of Doge, what's being exposed with U.S. aid, etc., and two of Trump's most controversial picks, Tulsi and RFK, being confirmed. | |
| It does seem like we're headed for some sort of renaissance or course correction, long overdue. | |
| I'm curious about your take on Chris Hedges' recent remarks about the empire self-destructing, which is the alternate way of viewing these events. | |
| Here is his first paragraph. | |
| Quote, And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse. | |
| I do, without all of that invective that he put there, and I'm not sure why that's there, just leaving that question to the side for the moment, I do think that a lot of what's happening is through necessity. | |
| The reality is that this American empire is unsustainable. | |
| I'm not somebody who thinks that the United States government has a deficit or even debt, that that's kind of apocalyptic. | |
| It is not the same, and I've never accepted the analogy that just like a family has to balance their budget, so too do governments. | |
| Governments can use debt financing and have for lots of different reasons, but that doesn't mean there aren't limits on them. | |
| And if you look at the debt of the United States and what is required to be serviced, just the interest payments alone, and you lay on top of that the trillions and trillions of dollars that we've spent. | |
| On foreign wars all over the place, it is obvious that that needs to be reined in. | |
| Even if you're morally supportive of it, even if you think it's strategically advantageous, it's simply not sustainable. | |
| The United States cannot continue to endure, sustain the level of debt that it has and the policies that generate that. | |
| So I think a lot of what Trump is reacting to and a lot of what Elon Musk is doing That is almost an inevitable recognition that there has to be a radical course correction. | |
| But at the same time, I think it's an important course correction. | |
| I do not think that American empire has been good for the world. | |
| And often the argument is, well, even if it wasn't good for the world, the alternatives would be worse. | |
| We don't have to live under a single superpower or a single empire. | |
| In fact, most of world history has not been A unipolar world. | |
| There is a benefit from balancing powers, and yes, that was tried in the 18th and 19th century, and it often produced wars, this idea that we were going to have a balance of powers and no one would be dominant, but it just simply is the fact that if you look at how many wars the United States has started, how many of the wars the United States has fueled, how many of the wars of wars the United States has fought, how many of the proxy wars the United States fuels. | |
| So much of the world's violence emanates from the United States. | |
| And there have been empires in the past that would use wars to use it as conquest. | |
| Take land, take assets, and for a while that could be fed, but ultimately even those empires collapse because it just becomes so sprawling and so unmanageable. | |
| And so I think that part of what is happening is this late-stage empire that Trump is reacting to and the recognition that most people in Washington have but have been unwilling or afraid to express that this cannot be sustained for much longer, that this needs to all be reined in. | |
| But I also think, in the case of Trump, there is a real ideological conviction that most of what The United States does in the world when it comes to interfering in foreign countries, trying to control foreign countries, trying to start wars, is very bad for the United States, very bad for American citizens. | |
| I believe there's an ideological conviction there. | |
| And if you're on the left and you believe that that impulse comes from a more paleoconservative or right-wing or isolationist impulse, maybe you can... | |
| Find it disturbing even if you think a left-wing version of that would be good. | |
| I guess if you're really intent on not just demanding radical change but demanding it in exactly the way that you want it based on the exact premises that you want it. | |
| I don't really have that demand. | |
| I want to see the National Endowment for Democracy defunded and shut down. | |
| I want to see the CIA and the NSA and the FBI severely limited in the role that they play in the world. | |
| I want to see U.S. foreign policy far more oriented toward getting along with other countries rather than dominating them and manipulating them and exploiting them. | |
| I want to see the military-industrial complex radically reduced so that it doesn't have an incentive as its only profit. | |
| And power mechanism to constantly start and fuel wars. | |
| And whether this comes from this kind of an ideological perspective or that is far less important to me than the fact that it happened. | |
| And so when I see it happening, I'm going to be encouraged by it. | |
| I'm going to applaud it. | |
| I don't have a need to call the people doing it deviants or psychopaths or whatever. | |
| In fact, the first thing that we saw from Donald Trump was the imposition of a ceasefire. | |
| That ended, at least for some time, the single worst expression of state violence I've seen in my lifetime, which is the absolutely nauseating, complete destruction of the society of Gaza and the lives of 2.2 million people by Israel, funded by the United States, that came to an end because of Donald Trump. | |
| You want to call people psychopaths and deviants and monsters, call the people who funded that those things, which are... | |
| The Democrats and the Biden administration, and certainly they didn't have opposition from the Republicans, but they were still the ones who did it and who stood up every day and defended it and financed it. | |
| And to me, the way that you judge a person is by the outcomes they produce. | |
| And so far, the primary outcome that Donald Trump has produced has been that ceasefire in Gaza, along with a serious attempt to end the war in Ukraine, what has put the United States on a path. | |
| To clearly resolving that war sooner rather than later. | |
| And then at the same time, expressing a worldview that I think is very healthy and long overdue about the way in which the United States has tried to bully the world. | |
| Elon Musk said that the United States has been bullying the world, has been interfering in other countries and we should start minding our own business. | |
| So, whatever you think of the people who are doing it. | |
| And whatever you think of their motives or whatever you think of the impulses that are driving it, seeing these things being done and hearing these things being said are things that I regard as extremely positive and all along, from the very beginning. | |
| When I was far less negative about Trump and the emergence of Trump and the Trump movement than most people who had been associated with the left, the reason for that is that I could hear and see This realignment, and so could neocons. | |
| Neocons left the Trump movement, were petrified and did everything to sabotage it because they understood what I understood as well, which is that their project was endangered by a Trump-led Republican Party. | |
| And it was for exactly that reason, the reason that neocons hated him, that I found potential value in Trump. | |
| And in the Trump movement and in the realignment that he could usher in, knowing that the Democratic Party would never deliver any of those things, that reforming the Democratic Party or trying to work within it or whatever was a fool's game. | |
| That was something I believed for a while and then saw the futility of it for so many reasons. | |
| And then with the emergence of Trump, it got even worse because they became defenders of establishment dogma and institutions of authority. | |
| And so all the things that made the Democratic Party irrevocably rotted Intensified a great deal, and I think you're seeing the wisdom of that view being vindicated in just the first weeks of the Trump administration. | |
| All right, next question. | |
| If Truth Be Told is the person who delivered this question. | |
| Hi, Glenn. | |
| I am a longtime fan of your show. | |
| I have a question about your segment on the Organization of American States, OAS, visiting Brazil to, quote, audit. | |
| Alexandre de Moraes and the STF, that's the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice who has become notorious for censoring, and the STF is the Brazilian Supreme Court. | |
| It was an interesting juxtaposition with your segment on U.S. aid, which highlighted the damage caused by foreign interference in other countries by groups like aid. | |
| The OAS has traditionally been a tool of U.S. influence, intervention, and, quote, democracy spreading in Latin America, and incidentally receives U.S. aid funding. | |
| Why do you think the ULAS interfering in internal Brazilian matters is laudatory in this case? | |
| How do you make this distinction? | |
| Wouldn't it be better if resistance to censorship in Brazil surged organically from domestic elements? | |
| Also, I strongly suspect the OAS visit to Brazil is not motivated by a dedication to free speech, but an effort by the Bolsonaroistas, who are close to the Trump administration, to weaken Lula and tilt Brazilian politics back in their favor, but I welcome your views on this and your broader thoughts on how to make normative Excellent question. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Very smart question. | |
| Not easy to answer. | |
| I think it does point to some tensions that are important to try and navigate and resolve. | |
| So I will begin by saying this. | |
| The Organization of American States is a member organization that only has jurisdiction in countries where the countries voluntarily join that organization. | |
| Brazil is a member state of the OAS because Brazil joined it at its founding and therefore submitted, as say member states of the UN do, to its charter, to its processes, to its rules, to its values, to its investigations. | |
| Brazil has requested OAS investigations of other member states before, endorsing the idea that this is a legitimate role of the OAS, including Lula's government, the first two terms. | |
| Have done that. | |
| They've requested it with Venezuela. | |
| They've requested it with right-wing countries with allegations of human rights repression. | |
| But it is true the OAS has largely been dominated by the United States. | |
| Unsurprising that an organization of American states would be dominated by the richest and most powerful country on the planet. | |
| So I agree that OAS has been an imperialist tool and you have to be very careful about cheering the interference of or the use of international organizations In a foreign country, even if the outcome is one that you applaud or hope that is brought about. | |
| So I take that critique. | |
| Like I said, I do distinguish OAS from, say, USAID. USAID just intervenes in any other country, regardless of whether they've submitted to the jurisdiction or not, whereas at least there's some voluntary submission on the part of Brazil to the OAS, given how Brazil joined it and could leave it at any time. | |
| So there is that aspect. | |
| And it is true I'm not actually comfortable, and I want to make this clear as well. | |
| I think the premise might have overstated the extent to which I'm happy about the fact that the OAS is in Brazil and investigating. | |
| And I also share your concerns about the motive, the politicization of it. | |
| I don't think this is some pure concern about Free speech. | |
| I do think that the Trump administration, allied with the Bolsonaroishas, influenced the OAS to do this. | |
| So it's not some pure concern for free expression. | |
| And I am not necessarily thrilled that the OAS is there in order to conduct a politicized investigation, even if I do think Alexandre de Moraes and the censorship regime in Brazil is extremely dangerous and oppressive for reasons I've said before. | |
| So, by highlighting this, I'm really attempting to simply bring the censorship regime in Brazil to light. | |
| And I do want Brazilians to feel as though there is some international cost in their standing if they completely abandon free speech. | |
| Sometimes the only way rights can be protected is with international attention. | |
| I do agree there is tension between acknowledging that and then at the same time wanting the U.S. to stop interfering in other countries or other organizations like the EU to do so. | |
| I absolutely prefer that opposition to the censorship regime emerge domestically. | |
| But the nature of repression domestically is oftentimes that it's a very difficult challenge precisely because any challenge to it becomes criminalized. | |
| They imprison those who challenge it. | |
| They censor those who challenge it. | |
| They silence those who challenge it. | |
| And so perhaps I'm a little more comfortable with the OAS doing what it's doing simply because Brazil is a member of the organization and chose to be and can choose not to be at any time. | |
| But that is not my preferred way for censorship in Brazil to end. | |
| I have talked a lot about before how the OAS has been a tool of American interference. | |
| I will say, interestingly, that although throughout the Cold War, The U.S. security state, the CIA, etc. | |
| were almost always supportive of right-wing governments, especially in Latin America, and opposed to left-wing governments. | |
| Over the past decade, the U.S. security state has adopted the position that the most dangerous movement is right-wing populism. | |
| They're way more afraid at this point of right-wing populism than of left-wing governments, especially moderate Left-wing governments like Lula. | |
| Lula is not Fidel Castro. | |
| He's not Nicolas Maduro. | |
| He never has been. | |
| Brazil is a capitalist country. | |
| Corporations thrive. | |
| The market thrives. | |
| There's economic growth under Lula, especially in his first two terms. | |
| The United States can live with Lula. | |
| What they really fear is right-wing populism. | |
| And under Biden, the CIA visited Brazil several times. | |
| So did Anthony Blinken. | |
| So did Jake Sullivan. | |
| And aggressively tell Bolsonaro that there will be severe consequences if he tries to challenge the integrity or the accuracy of the 2022 election. | |
| They were hoping that Lula would win. | |
| Europeans were hoping that Lula would win. | |
| It is a big change from the U.S. posture, but the reality is that the U.S. security state works mostly against right-wing populist movements, no longer against left-wing governments. | |
| I'm sure they prefer some nice, center-right, pro-capitalist government, but between those two choices, Especially like a moderate left-wing government that has long done business with the United States of the kind Brazil has under Lula and a populist right movement of a kind that Brazil had with Bolsonaro. | |
| You see their preference. | |
| That's why the U.S. security state sabotaged Trump. | |
| They absolutely prefer the Democrats and the neoliberals and the militarists of the Democratic Party to right-wing populism. | |
| So I think we have to be very careful about those premises. | |
| But of course the OAS visit is politicized. | |
| And I did try and be careful about not cheering it too much. | |
| I was more just kind of rubbing it in the face of Jim Reich and his supporters that Brazil is now perceived and increasingly being perceived as a state that relies on online censorship and political repression because I think that they do. | |
| But I absolutely want the end of that to come from internal Brazilian politics, from domestic sentiment and not from Outside organizations that are obviously controlled by the United States. | |
| All right, so those are all the questions we have time for. | |
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