DHS Seizes Greater Control of Columbia and its Departments; Glenn Takes Your Questions on Ukraine, DOGE, and Free Speech
The Trump administration continues to place increasingly tyrannical demands on Columbia University, from controlling its departments to pressuring the school to demand the IHRA's definition of antisemitism. Free speech advocate Alex Abdo explains the legal issues surrounding the administration's demands and what the letter means for academic freedom. Then: Glenn takes your questions about Ukraine, Russia, DOGE, and free speech.
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Welcome to 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, several U.S. government officials sent a letter to Columbia University today that is, without any hyperbole, genuinely chilling.
The letter informs Colombia that they must immediately comply with multiple government demands about how they run their private Ivy League university, including putting their Middle East Studies program into a receivership for five years and reporting all progress to the U.S. government.
Colombia has been long the target of pro-Israel advocates for the presence of harsh Israel critics on its faculty.
You can't have that.
And as a result, Colombia is already jumping through multiple hoops that are demanded by the U.S. government, announcing multiple expulsions and suspensions of students who committed the crime of protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza, as well as even in some cases retroactively revoking their diplomas.
All of this comes when the Trump administration is escalating.
It's attacks on students who committed the crime of protesting, divide administrations, funding, and arming of Israel with all sorts of multi-pronged attacks on that university that are reverberating throughout, as intended.
All of American academia.
To sort through all of this, we have the ideal guest.
He is Alex Abdo, who is the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia.
And he previously worked for years at the ACLU, where he was the forefront of litigation relating to things like NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9-11 abuses of detainees in U.S. custody.
So he will join us in just a little bit.
And then, as is our custom on Friday night now, we will take and answer questions submitted all week long by our local members.
This week's questions are great and cover a wide range of topics, including the value and meaning of liberal democracy, the situation in Ukraine, the increasingly virulent feud between Tucker Carlson and Congressman Dan Crenshaw, other types of issues relating to free speech, and much more.
As many as we can get to, we will get to in terms of your questions.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We've obviously been covering, because it's one of the things that we cover most, the extraordinary attack on free speech that has been ushered in by the Trump administration, specifically Homeland Security's arrest of the extraordinary attack on free speech that has been ushered in by the Trump administration, specifically Homeland Security's arrest of a Columbia University student who is the holder of a green card,
He has that because he's married to an American citizen who happens to be eight months pregnant.
And he was arrested not because he's committed of...
Having committed any charge, accused of having committed any crime, but because the State Department under Marco Rubio, in secret, with no process, no evidence presented, invalidated his green card, and the minute they did so, declared him to be on U.S. soil illegally, sent ICE agents to detain him.
There is a court hearing that is now taking place.
In the meantime, there's an injunction preventing him from being deported, but there are all other students, kind of students.
Being targeted for arrest.
A second one was arrested today at Columbia.
And the implications of those kinds of assaults on free speech, arresting and deporting people who are in the United States illegally as a result of their views on Israel or their protest and activism against the war in Israel or against the Biden administration's funding and arming of that war are obviously very significant.
We've spent the week analyzing those.
But today, there was a much more serious escalation, one that I have to say...
I can't say I was expecting one that genuinely astonishes me.
And rather than tell you about it, I just want to show you the letter that was sent by three different government agencies inside the Trump administration, the United States Department of Education, the Health and Human Services Department, as well as the General Services Administration.
It was sent to Columbia University.
And there you see the letter.
It stated March 13th.
And it is addressed to the interim president of Columbia, Katerina Armstrong, as well as David Greenwald, no relation at least that I know of, and Claire Shipman, co-chairs of the Columbia Board of Trustees.
I think if I had a relative who was the co-chair of the Columbia Board of Trustees, that's something I would know and I don't.
So anyway, this is a letter sent to them and this is what it says.
Quote, please consider this a formal response to the current situation on the campus of Columbia University.
And a follow-up of our letter of March 7, 2025, informing you that the United States government would be pausing or terminating federal funding.
Since that date, your counsel has asked to discuss, quote, next steps.
And here are the next steps.
It says U.S. taxpayers invest in colleges, and therefore we...
I want to tell you that these are the things that you have to do as preconditions for even having conversations with us about the possibility of restoring your funding.
And just as a reminder, the reason the United States government provides funding to universities isn't that they pay for the salaries of the professors.
It's because that's where a lot of research takes place.
Research into science, research into technology, into medicine.
And all sorts of things.
It supports hospitals and medical facilities.
It allows people who don't come from extremely wealthy families to be able to go to our best colleges based on merit.
And this is the lever, the leverage that the U.S. government is now using for the first time in a very long time, not just to dictate to universities what their policies have to be regarding their students, but even to start compelling them to make changes to their curricula.
That aligns it with the ideology of the current administration.
Particularly, you'll be unsurprised to learn in the Middle East Studies program at Columbia, which is the program that teaches about the Middle East, about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and other hot-button political issues in the Middle East.
A list of what the U.S. government is saying Colombia is required to do, just as a precondition to even talking about the possibility of restoration of their funding.
First, enforce existing disciplinary policies.
The university must complete disciplinary proceedings for Hamilton Hall and encampments.
Meaningful discipline means expulsion or multi-year suspension.
So they're requiring that everybody who participated in the encampment against the war in Israel The war in Gaza by Israel, rather, or the protest at Hamilton Hall face either expulsion or multi-year suspension.
Is this the sort of thing that you think the federal government ought to be doing, is micromanaging private universities inside the United States, micromanaging their student disciplinary decisions?
The next item on the Bulleted list, primacy of the president in disciplinary matters.
Abolish the university judicial board and centralize all disciplinary processes under the office of president.
And empower the office of the president to suspend or expel students with an appeal process through the office of the president.
So they're actually dictating the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic structure of the student discipline process at Columbia.
And obviously, Every other school in the country is monitoring very closely what the U.S. government is doing to Colombia.
That's part of the point, is to then signal to them what they have to do, too, unless they want to come under the scrutiny of the U.S. government in the way that Colombia has.
The next item on the list, time, place, and manner rules.
Implement permanent, comprehensive time, place, and manner rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life.
In other words, free speech zones.
As the U.S. government has called them.
In other words, if you want to protest, you're free to do so.
You can do so from 8 a.m.
to 9.30 a.m., and then 5 in the afternoon until 6.30 at night.
You can do so only in this fenced-off area over here.
It's a way of pretending to allow protests, but making sure the protests are invisible or as completely inconsequential as the government wants them to be.
Next item on the list, mask ban.
Ban masks that are intended to conceal identity or intimidate others with exceptions for religious and health reasons.
Any masked individual must wear their Columbia ID on the outside of their clothing.
This is already the policy at Columbia's Irving Medical Center.
So you have no right to participate in a protest anonymously.
You have to be identifiable at all times so that the government, if they want to, punish you for the...
Your participation in that protest will have no trouble identifying you.
They can use facial recognition technology, which is now extremely sophisticated and pervasive.
In fact, I don't know how many of you know this, but if you arrive at various ports of the United States, entry points, including at the airport, you no longer show your passport at customs the way you used to.
You just walk through, stand in front of a camera for about a second, and all the information that they want about you, your name, your date of birth, where you live, Where you've been just all appears immediately based on facial recognition because all our faces are in a database.
And so the requirement that if you want to participate in a political protest, you can't cover your face is to ensure that the government can identify every person who still participates, even if it's not on their property, if it's on a private property like Columbia.
Next item, deliver a plan to hold all student groups accountable.
Recognized student groups and individuals operating as constituent members of or providing support for unrecognized groups engaged in violation of your university policy must be held accountable through formal investigations, disciplinary proceedings, and expulsions as appropriate.
Here's the next one.
Formulize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of anti-Semitism.
President Trump's Executive Order 13899 uses the IHRA definition.
That's the definition that is radically and aggressively expanded.
It was promulgated by the Israeli government to include a whole long list of criticisms of Israel that are now officially declared to be anti-Semitism.
Many states in Europe have adopted this expanded definition, and now, as a result, the examples of Anti-Semitism that include things like saying Israel is a racist project or comparing Israel to what the Nazis did or applying so-called double standards to Israel that you're not applying to other countries.
All of this is formally regarded now as anti-Semitism under the definition that President Trump adopted.
It's also the definition that the House of Representatives last year adopted.
In order to radically expand the definition of anti-Semitism to make it essentially illegal on college campuses to express a whole wide range of criticisms of Israel.
The letter goes on.
Anti-Zionist discrimination against Jews in areas unrelated to Israel or the Middle East must be addressed.
No more anti-Zionist statements allowed.
No more anti-Zionist protests that are unrelated to Israel or the Middle East.
It is so ironic that this is the same movement that has spent a decade at least endlessly whining about wokeism on colleges and how it's being used to constrain what is permissible or impermissible to say on college campuses that is now not just using societal pressure or even administrative action.
The way that liberals have done over the last 10 years on college campuses, they're using the power of the state, Homeland Security specifically, to dictate to our private universities, our most consequential and prestigious universities in the Ivy League and elsewhere, what can and can't be said on college campuses and what types of discipline and punishment are required for those who do.
Next item, empower internal law enforcement.
The university must ensure that Columbia's security has full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators who foster an unsafe, hostile work or study environment or otherwise interfere with classroom instructions or the functioning of the university.
And then here is arguably what is the most remarkable.
The most invasive of academic freedom and of government attempts to control what professors at private universities are and are not permitted to teach.
The whole idea of academic freedom, you go to college, people on faculties have academic freedom and tenure precisely because they're supposed to be able to question anything, talk about anything, teach anything.
Academic institutions only have value if they are A free venue for unlimited discourse.
That's one of the reasons why I've been so opposed to liberal attempts to constrain what can be taught, what can be said, what ideas can be expressed in academia because it destroys academia.
And it's at least is true probably more so when the government is doing things like this.
Regarding the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department, MESAAS Department.
The government is requiring Columbia to put that department under, quote, academic receivership.
And here is the relevant language.
Begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a maximum of five years.
The university must provide a full plan with date certain deliverables by the March 20th, 2025 deadline.
We're going to talk to our guest, Alex Abdo, in just a little bit about all of this, including exactly what that means when you place an academic program at a university under receivership.
But essentially, it's designed to limit and restrain and place under outside control the entire management and operation of that department.
This department, the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia, Has long been a primary target for Israel loyal fanatics inside the United States.
It is, for example, the place Barry Weiss got her start.
As we'll show you in just a little bit at Columbia.
I actually wrote about this when the New York Times hired Barry Weiss.
The New York Times' newest op-ed, Hire Barry Weiss, embodies its worst failings and its lack of viewpoint diversity.
And I described there how...
Under the guise of viewpoint diversity, they were actually hiring somebody, Barry Weiss, who had spent her time at college, at Columbia in particular, trying to get professors fired for the crime of criticizing Israel too much, usually Arab or Muslim professors, of course.
That's the queen of free speech and free discourse and liberal, or the battle against illiberalism, as she calls it.
This has been a long-standing dream of Israel fanatics in the United States to get control of what Colombia teaches about the Middle East, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is now attempting to do, and is now succeeding in doing.
And then the letter finally says, deliver a plan for comprehensive admissions reform.
The plan must include a strategy to reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admission practices to conform with federal law and policy.
We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps.
So you have all these people on the right who have spent so long complaining about attempts to limit speech in general, but limit speech in particular on college campuses in the name of protecting certain minority groups and keeping them safe.
Two months after being inaugurated to power, using every arm available of the federal government to try and control academia, private universities, and obviously focused most on what can and can't be said about Israel.
There's a reason Miriam Adelson, who before the election we devoted a whole show to examining, gave $100 million to the Trump campaign.
It was exactly for things like this.
This is being done because there's been polling data that we showed you earlier this week that support for Israel and the United States has an all-time low.
Not surprising.
People have been watching Israel blow up children and families and schools and mosques and hospitals for a year and a half using American-made weapons and American money that paid for all of it.
So unsurprisingly, people have been watching that on places like TikTok, which is why...
They started to think more about banning TikTok than ultimately did.
It's a desperation to try and stem the tide of that declining support for Israel.
And the two places where they think it's most happening are online and in academic institutions.
And so that's exactly what they're targeting.
Here is the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, at the Justice Department today, where President Trump also spoke.
Expressing theories about how they're going to escalate even further their attempt to gain control of Colombia to punish people who participate in protests against Israel using terrorism laws.
Not even Bush and Cheney tried this.
Here's what he had to say.
The president promised that under his watch, we will no longer stand by while universities tolerate and facilitate anti-Semitism and support of terrorism on their campuses.
So just to be clear here, whatever your views are on all of this, this is the United States government promising to ban anti-Semitism on college campuses.
This is exactly what the American right has been shrieking about for years now.
The idea that, oh, if you believe certain speech or activism can be classified as racist or xenophobic or transphobic.
Or Islamophobic or misogynist.
It means that you can censor it.
And now they're turning around and saying, oh, yeah, all of those kind of claims, racism and xenophobia, transphobia, that's all nonsense.
But anti-Semitism, that's the real bigotry.
And we need the government to go in and stop it by curbing speech in the way that we just showed you in that letter they were attempting to do at Columbia.
And obviously, again, other universities are looking at that.
There's already reports of UCLA canceling in its public health school a class on the health crisis from the Israeli war in Gaza for Palestinians.
No teaching about that.
No examining that.
No allowing professors on the faculty of public health to teach a course on One of the worst humanitarian disasters on the planet and the health implications of it because it might make the Trump administration angry.
And we have to make sure that the curricula at all our universities are aligned with the Trump administration's ideology, in particular their pro-Israel fanaticism that is generated by huge numbers of people throughout the government who revere Israel, are devoted to Israel, are loyal to Israel and want to use every arm of the government.
To ensure that everybody else has similar loyalties, including censoring on our academic campuses.
And then to call it terrorism, to say that if you protest against Israel, if you express opposition to the word Israel, if you believe the Zionist state is whatever you want to say, as an American, you have the right to say whatever you want.
If you're on American Story illegally as a green card holder or a student visa, you do as well.
To say they're committing genocide or they're racist, whatever you want to say.
You can say the United States is racist.
You can say China's racist.
You can say Iran is a terror state.
Certainly you can say that about Israel as well.
But the Trump administration, as you just heard, wants to characterize that now as advocacy for terrorism and use terrorism laws against people in American universities who are criticizing Israel.
Escalation is reported by The Atlantic.
There is a second name on Marco Rubio's target list already.
Marco Rubio has promised.
There's going to be a lot of other names.
There you see the Trump administration has identified another green card holder at once deported in addition to Mahmoud Khalil.
And I want to be careful how I say this because I don't want to disclose things that I shouldn't disclose, but in the course of our reporting on the...
Protest movements, the students who were involved in it and the like, and the student groups involved.
We have heard from many people who exercised what are their constitutional rights to protest.
They're not charged with any crimes, but they are living in great fear that they will now be targeted by ICE, by Homeland Security, by the FBI. Including American citizens because part of the promise of the Trump administration is it's not just deportation but imprisonment for people who protested against Israel.
They're talking about using terrorism laws to do so.
And obviously there is immense fear.
And that's what is intended is, look, if you know what's good for you, if you don't want trouble, keep your mouth shut about Israel.
Don't criticize Israel.
Don't question our financing of Israel.
That's what all of this is for.
From a political movement that just three weeks ago cheered when J.D. Vance went to Europe and castigated the Europeans for waging war against liberal values and European values by imposing censorship regimes.
This is infinitely worse than anything that Europe has done.
Infinitely worse.
Here is Axios.
Today reporting, and this has been reported by multiple outlets around the country, Columbia expels students involved in building takeover in the 2024 protest.
Hear from AP. Also, this was last week, facing Trump's threats, Columbia investigates students who are critical of Israel.
Quote, Columbia University senior.
Mariam Awan was visiting family in Jordan over her winter break when she received an email from the school accusing her of, quote, discriminatory harassment, her supposed top offense.
What is the offense that caused the Trump administration and Homeland Security to notify her she was under formal investigation?
Writing an op-ed in the student newspaper that called for divestment from Israel.
Actually, this was an email.
Where the school was accusing her of this, obviously operating under pressure from the Trump administration and their threats, her crime was she wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper advocating divestment of university funds from Israel.
If you have spent any amount of time parading around as a free speech advocate or somebody opposed to censorship, And you are now at the point where this is something that you support or this does not bother you, please just give up that fraud, that pretense.
The AP went on.
In all one's case, the investigator said the unsigned op-ed in the Columbia Spectator was also urged.
The school to curtail academic ties to Israel may have subjected other students to, quote, unwelcome conduct based on their religion, national origin, or military service.
They promised a thorough investigation with sanctions ranging from a simple warning to expulsion.
In other words, what the school is saying is that if this op-ed made anybody uncomfortable, then by definition it was harassment.
Because she expressed views that made supporters of Israel uncomfortable.
You're comfortable.
Thank you.
This is the sort of thing that is being fostered deliberately by the Trump administration.
They promised to do exactly this, and they have been doing it.
I'm happy to say that there are some groups that have been standing up in protest, including fire.org, which has become a I'm an aggressive advocate of free speech, both defending conservative students who have been the target of censorship, but also the Palestinian groups that have long been targeted with that.
And it's important that anybody who purports to believe in free speech at all is somebody who is willing to Take that stand.
And we have a guest, Alex Abdo, who is with Columbia's First Amendment Center, who will be with us right after this message.
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That's Cotedefense.com, promo code GLEN. Speaking of people who have been consistently defending free speech and the First Amendment for quite a long time, our guest tonight is Alex Abdo, who's the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
He previously worked for years at the ACLU. I got to know his work well.
He was the best of the ACLU. He worked at the forefront of litigation relating to things like NSA surveillance.
Including cases brought in the wake of our Snowden reporting, encryption, the right of anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9-11 abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in the Knight Center.
And the Knight Institute has been working as well on the recent attacks by the Trump administration at Columbia on people who have been participating in protests against the Israeli war in Gaza.
And we are delighted to welcome him to the show to help us sort through all of this.
Alex, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Great to be here, Glenn.
Nice to see you.
Yeah, absolutely.
The Institute, unsurprisingly, issued a statement about this letter that Columbia University received from three different agencies inside the United States government.
Quotes in it, and I think this was attributed to Jamil Jaffer, who I've also worked with, who was also at the ACLU with you and now is at the Knight Institute, who said, quote, The subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy.
No one should be any under illusions about what is going on here.
What is going on here with this letter?
Why is this autocratic and disturbing?
This is a frontal assault on higher education.
It's an attempt by the Trump administration.
To force a private university to adopt free speech rules that the administration is dictating to them.
This is the kind of thing that you associate with strongman autocrats who are trying to silence dissent.
They go after institutes of higher education and they shut down political speech.
This is not something we typically associate with a country like the United States, which historically has had Very strong protection for free speech.
This is an aberration.
One of the things that struck me was this demand on the part of the administration that the Middle East Studies part of Colombia be put into what they call an academic receivership for five years.
Of course, this Middle East Studies program at Colombia has been one of the most prestigious of its kind throughout the world, but it's also been a bugaboo.
For Israel supporters, that's where people like Professor Edward Said worked and others who were on the faculty who were considered critics of Israel.
They've been longtime targets of Israel supporters.
And so this attempt to single out this particular part of the faculty at Columbia and demand that they put them into an academic receivership is obviously an attempt to control the curriculum.
But what specifically...
Would it mean to put a program into academic receivership?
And are there examples where the government has required that in the past?
I'm not familiar with any example of what the government is trying to do here.
And it's worth just taking a step back.
The government sent this letter and basically said, we are not going to continue negotiations with the university.
Unless and until the university takes a series of steps, including the one that you just mentioned, and many of the steps that the letter outlines.
And these were the negotiations over the...
Government's freeze of federal funding to Colombia, the freeze of $400 million in funding that Colombia receives for things like scientific research and the like.
And the list of steps that the government set out is chilling.
One of them is the one you mentioned.
It requires Colombia to place an entire academic department in a receivership, which presumably would involve having an outside auditor.
Take control of the department, and I'm not sure exactly what that means because I'm just not familiar with any example of this.
But there are other troubling parts to the demand, too.
One of them is a requirement, or at least a very strong suggestion, it's a little bit ambiguously worded, that the university Adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that would cover a whole range of constitutionally protected political criticism of the state of Israel.
There's another item on the list that would require the university to take specific disciplinary action, expulsion or multi-year suspensions against all of the students involved in the encampments last year or in the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
You know, seemingly without any regard for the severity of any particular student's involvement in those events.
So, you know, it's an absolutely chilling letter.
And I honestly can't recall seeing a more, you know, straightforward threat to the First Amendment principle of academic freedom ever set out on government letterhead.
Yeah, I have to agree with that.
You know, I think it's important to note when you say it's chilling, it's chilling in both.
Senses of that term, one is just kind of alarming and menacing, even kind of terrifying, the idea that the government thinks that it has this power, but also it's chilling in the other sense, the kind of First Amendment sense, where a lot of times the purpose of censorship is to force people to adopt.
A certain kind of posture of fear where they self-censor in anticipation of being punished as well.
And we're already seeing examples, obviously.
A lot of every other academic institution in the country is looking at what is being done to Columbia and anticipatorily already canceling courses and trying to avoid attracting the attention of the government, not think that what's being taught at the school is something offensive to government ideology.
Let me ask you about the Just so people are clear and we're being precise about the letter, the letter's not saying, if you don't do these things, we're going to come and arrest you, we're going to shut down your university.
The leverage that the government is asserting is based on the fact that the government provides a great deal of money to most universities, most leading universities, including Columbia.
As you said, they froze $400 million in funds.
I think there's additional funds that might actually be frozen or that the government is threatening to freeze.
And so what they're essentially saying is, look, you can do whatever you want, but given that we take taxpayer money and transfer it to you every year and provide it to you, that gives us the right, in fact, the responsibility, to make sure that you're using these funds in a responsible manner.
And that's what gives us the foundation to start saying, this is something we find destructive.
This is something you can't do.
And we're not saying you have to do it.
We're just saying, if you want federal funds, these are the things that you need to do.
Why doesn't the government have that authority?
Yeah, it's good to be precise here because nobody has a right to federal funding.
But there is a long line of cases in the Supreme Court that says the government cannot condition federal benefits or federal funding.
In a way that would, if the government imposed the limitations directly, violate the First Amendment.
So the government couldn't, for example, say, we're only going to hire people who are Democrats or Republicans.
And the government couldn't say we're only going to fund biology research being undertaken by Democrats or Republicans or people who have a particular view on the war in Israel and Palestine.
That is unconstitutional for the government to do, and that's why this letter seems on its face to just blatantly violate the First Amendment.
And I'll say that there is obviously a role for government in monitoring the use of federal funding.
And the law that is really at the bottom of all of this is Title VI, which is a good law.
It's a law that requires...
There not to be any discrimination in federally funded programs.
And this is the law that requires even private universities who receive federal funding to abide by limits on racial or gender or religious discrimination.
And the government should enforce Title VI. It serves really important values.
But what the government can't do is Rely on Title VI as a pretext to suppress constitutionally protected political disagreement.
It can't use it to suppress dissent, and that seems to be exactly what's going on here.
But I think this gets into the danger of exactly when you start kind of defining the government's power in that way, which is namely the government, at least in part, is invoking exactly that theory to justify what they're doing.
They're saying...
These protests were designed to be menacing to Jewish students, even though, as we know, there were many Jewish students inside the protests.
There are a lot of Jewish students at a lot of these campuses who came and testified and said, we felt threatened, we were targeted, our ingress and egress were blocked.
And so part of what the government is saying is that we're doing exactly what you just suggested the government should do under Title VI, namely that...
We're combating anti-Semitism and harassment of Jewish students and using the leverage we have with federal funds under the law to do it.
Why isn't that persuasive?
Well, listen, the government can rely on Title VI to enforce anti-discrimination laws, and it can impose remedies to address any violations of the anti-discrimination laws.
But it can't impose remedies that themselves violate the First Amendment.
And so...
Even if Colombia had violated Title VI, and that's a really complicated factual question.
I don't actually know what the answer to that question is.
But even if Colombia had violated Title VI, the government could not impose as a remedy to that violation, for example, a requirement that Colombia adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that sweeps in constitutionally protected criticism of Israel.
It could absolutely say you have to have a definition that meaningfully identifies I think it's important to think about discrimination and harassment and intimidation of Jewish students.
Every university should have a policy like that and they should vigorously enforce it.
But the government can't go beyond that and say, and you also have to forbid criticism of the state of Israel.
That's where the overreach is.
In other words, even if you assume that Colombia violated Title VI, this letter is a dramatic overreach because of the specific terms that it is trying to impose on the university.
Last question before I let you go.
This case of Mahmoud Khalil has obviously attracted a lot of attention because it's so shocking to watch somebody who has a green card, which is...
As always, confer permanent residency.
It can be revoked.
It's not absolute, but that's generally how it's been treated, particularly when, as the case for him, the green card is based on the fact that he's married to an American citizen.
In this case, his wife is eight months pregnant.
He's not charged with any crime.
He's never been convicted of any crime.
He clearly had his green card revoked because of the protests in which he was involved that represent a view that the State Department finds hostile to its agenda.
You know, we've heard from students in many different colleges, including Colombia, who are obviously extremely scared now about whether they can post on social media about what they think about the war in Gaza or the U.S. relationship to Israel.
Foundational rights of this country is supposed to guarantee.
These people are extremely afraid now of exercising it.
A lot of them are.
And for reasons that I can't tell them are paranoid or unjust, they ought to be worried.
It is a very valid worry.
As somebody who's associated with this institute that is tied to Columbia and just someone who's around this world of free speech and First Amendment a lot, what has been your perception about the reaction and the climate that this has created?
The fear is palpable.
It's exactly what you said.
We've heard from students and faculty around the country who are just absolutely terrified to express a public opinion about Israel or Palestine for fear that they're going to be targeted by the federal government.
And people have scrubbed their social media presences.
They've gone back and deleted years or decades of public posts on blogs and the like.
They've asked.
academic publications to take down their old writings so that they're not used as a basis for targeting them for deportation now.
And you're absolutely right.
People who are here lawfully in this country have First Amendment rights.
They have a right to criticize the government.
They have a right to criticize the state of Israel or to criticize the Palestinians if they want.
They have that right.
And so what we are seeing with the Trump administration's Targeting of those protesters is absolutely the stuff of tyranny.
This is the kind of thing you would expect from Erdogan or Orban.
It's not the kind of thing you would typically associate with America, and that is what makes it so troubling.
Yeah, I mean, I thought there were some censorship, serious censorship overreaches under the Biden administration and talked about those a lot.
But without even comparing those, this is clearly the sort of thing that the Constitution was designed to prevent.
And they are saying, you know, this is just the beginning, by no means the end.
And I do think it is terrifying and enraging.
I really appreciate your work on this and appreciate your time coming on to talk about this with us tonight.
Thanks so much, Alex.
Nice to see you.
All right, you too.
- You too, bye bye.
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One of the new segments that we have introduced for Friday night in particular is that throughout the week, we take questions from members of our locals community, the supporters who make the show possible, and we try and get to them, as many of them as we can on this part of our show. as many of them as we can on this part It's one of the benefits of being a local member if you would like to join that community.
And there's a wide range of questions this week.
I'm going to try and get to as many of them as I can.
Some of them are pretty in-depth questions, so I might take more time than I anticipate trying to break them down and analyzing them.
Let's get into these questions.
The first one is from Kevin Kotwas, who asked the following.
Hey, Glenn.
Your discussion with Alexander Dugin was really fascinating.
And for those of you who didn't see it, Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher and analyst.
He has a lot of influence in Russia.
He's a Putin supporter, but pushes Putin in different ways.
And I was in Moscow a couple weeks ago.
We did an interview with him and posted it.
On our Rumble show, I found the conversation fascinating myself.
Kevin goes on, quote, he alluded to what many public intellectuals are starting to point out, a cultural shift toward, quote, re-enchantment and, quote, post-liberal or post-enlightenment thinking, essentially that the secular reductionist worldview is dying and something new is being born.
This obviously has profound implications.
What do you think of this?
P.S., we'd love to see you have more philosophical discussions.
So I've said this before.
One of the reasons why I found that doing an interview so compelling and so interesting to me is because I think it's so important to reason from first principles, to have an understanding of why you hold a certain view, to be able to demonstrate that the view that you're advocating is one that you have come to on your own by kind of dismantling all the different presuppositions.
That might give rise to such a view.
And then ensuring, critically examining each one to make sure that those premises are really ones that you believe, not ones that have just been implanted in your brain through social influence or propaganda or any of the things that is political and social animals shape how we see the world.
We're never going to escape our subjectivity, but we can do our best to subject our views to Rigorous critical scrutiny by making sure that we're always reasoning from first principles.
It also makes you a much more consistent thinker.
So you're not just picking and choosing what view you hold at any given moment based on your desires of the moment or your political agenda, whatever serves your political agenda.
So one day you're saying you believe in free speech because it helps your side and the next day you're twisting yourself into pretzels to justify censorship because that helps your side.
Just an example.
And Dugan was somebody who Thinks in those terms because he's a philosopher, and ultimately that's what philosophy is.
It's an examination of every thought about what truth is.
It's an examination of the process of knowing of how we understand the world, and it requires this very rigorous dismantling of ideas and their reconstruction and an understanding of what that process is, and Nugent was able to articulate that in such a clear way regardless of what you asked him.
It doesn't mean You had to agree with him, but you walked away understanding exactly what he thought and why and the trajectory of how he got there.
And it's really rare to be able to have a conversation where somebody's able to do that about very complex thoughts.
Now, one of the things that I really found interesting about what he had to say is that we hear all the time About other countries that aren't like ours, that aren't liberal democracies, that don't choose their leaders based on the system of elections like we have, based on the values of liberal democracy that we've been taught to venerate.
That, oh, these are just repressive regimes and authoritarian, dictatorial countries because evil people have taken over the system and everybody else is miserable and subject to their whims.
And oftentimes if you hear from them, they try and kind of justify their system as, no, actually having elections, they have sham elections, or they try and pretend that there is a process democratically.
But when I went and talked to Dugan and asked him, for example, about the lack of free and fair elections in Russia, he said, yes, that's precisely what— We have a lack of free and fair elections because we don't believe in liberal democracy.
It's not part of our tradition.
It's not part of our culture.
It's not part of our civilization.
And we don't think liberal democracy of the kind that you have in the United States and the West has served your populations very well at all.
There are other ways to look at the world.
There are other ways to choose leaders.
There are other ways to arrange your society.
And he did reference this idea that was very popular in large parts of the West with the fall of the Soviet Union.
This idea that there was an end of history, that liberal democracy had prevailed, that that was going to be the way in which the world was organized, the entire world, based on the American and European model.
And this was an arrogance, a sort of...
Assumption that came from having the United States be the world's superpower, having its competitor in communism collapse of the Soviet Union.
And he talked about this notion that this assumption that our way of organizing ourselves politically is not just better for us, but better universally, better objectively, which then leads to the temptation To want to impose it on everybody else.
Because if this way is better, objectively, universally for everybody, then we want to go around the world to fixing it and making sure that everybody has the way of thinking that we have, which is what U.S. foreign policy has been about.
Oh, we're going to invade this country and we're going to create it as a liberal democracy and we're going to make sure this candidate wins.
So they have the same view as basically homogenizing the world.
That was the end of history, the theory that was so popular.
His argument was that this is incredibly destructive and he called it racist way of looking at the world because it assumes that Western culture, American culture are inherently superior to Chinese civilization and Islamic civilization and Russian civilization and even indigenous populations.
Talk about, you know, you find a tribe and there are tribes in Brazil and the Amazon, for example, which still are completely disconnected to the outside world.
And the idea is, oh, as soon as you find one of those, you have to transform it.
You show them the better way of life.
And the idea is then that you can go to travel anywhere in the world.
You go to Japan, it's exactly like Ireland, which is exactly like Peru, which is exactly like Indonesia, which is exactly like...
Iran and Russia and China, they've all been flattened and homogenized into liberal democracies.
And this very much was the idea, and among a lot of people still is the idea, about how the world should function.
And he essentially said that one of the reasons he was a Soviet dissident was because he opposed the exportation, the attempt to export the Soviet ideology to the entire world.
That what he believes in is the preservation of these different civilizations.
It makes the world diverse.
It actually creates more human freedom because there's different ways of understanding the world.
And his arguments about why liberal democracy are not optimal, though unpersuasive to me as somebody who has been inculcated for a long time in the view that that is the only way that you think, and still not persuasive to me nonetheless.
It's a very well-thought-out idea.
It's not just, oh, we don't have democracies because we live under dictatorship, and it's just an iron fist that rules us.
It's something that I think is so important to try and understand things that you think are not subject to understanding.
And just quickly on those lines, Daryl Cooper, who is better known to a lot of people as Martyrmaid from Twitter, but has become pretty well-known.
And highly polarizing and controversial voice.
He's been on my show before, but the interview that really created a lot of controversy was when he went on Tucker Carlson's podcast and talked about his view of World War II. He does these podcasts that are extremely long.
In their deep dive examination into some historical event, he's done one on Israel-Palestine that a lot of Israel supporters hated.
He's done one on the Jim Jones, the cult led by Jim Jones that mass suicided in the 1970s in Guyana to try and understand that.
But he's also done one on World War II and the attempt to understand World War II from the German perspective.
And he was on Joe Rogan's show earlier this week.
I didn't listen to all of it, but I listened to most of it.
And what he was essentially saying was that the reason his work has become so controversial is because he doesn't just affirm the good, evil narratives about the events that we're supposed to avoid understanding and just sort of dismissing as, oh, that's crazy, that's wrong, that's evil, to understand it from their perspective.
And it doesn't mean that you...
Justify it.
It doesn't mean that you're an apologist for it.
He did talk about the danger of once you understand how another person thinks and why they've done the things they've done, even though they seem evil, there's a very tiny jump from understanding somebody, really understanding somebody, and why they did what they did, to empathizing with them.
And he talked about the importance of guarding against that so that you're not empathizing with people who have done what you believe is evil.
But the idea of understanding other people, even people who seem like they believe things or have done things that are just beyond comprehension, is absolutely vital to having a true, free understanding of the world and to just understanding historical events or even contemporaneous events in a way that Is at all accurate.
That frees you of just this moralism so that you can actually understand rather than judge things that are happening.
And I felt like the conversation with Dugan, above all else, had that value.
That you have the society in Russia that is a very rich and complex and incredibly important culture and civilization historically.
And Russia as an empire and then as a nation, as a Soviet empire, has gone through so many different crucial defining events that we talk about Russia all the time without any humility about the difficulty of understanding how Russians think.
I mean, just look at what they produced in terms of literature, in terms of art, in terms of music.
In terms of architecture, in terms of politics and philosophy and science, it's a remarkable culture, no matter what you think of their current government.
And to be able to go and find somebody who's capable of explaining it unflinchingly and unapologetically, but in a very clear way, in a very rigorously systematic way.
It's something I just found extremely valuable from the perspective of understanding.
Not agreeing, not being persuaded, but of understanding.
And I think there is a lot of sense in the world that the idea of just liberal democracy where the masses choose who they want to lead them.
And by the way, the founders of the United States were suspicious of mob rule as well.
That's why they limited who could vote, but it's also why The Bill of Rights is basically a minoritarian document.
It's there to prevent majoritarian mobs from depriving minorities of rights.
Oh, if there's a majority religion, it can't suppress or deny the right of some strange religious minority to practice their religion because there's religious freedom.
If there's a view that commands 80% of Agreement in the United States, they can't then suppress the expression of whatever the minority view is.
It's all about protections of minorities because they, too, feared untrammeled liberal democracy.
It's not like it's entirely foreign to our tradition either.
But I think you're seeing it in a lot of parts of the world, including democratic parts of the world.
You could even argue the 2024 election in the U.S. was about this.
Certainly, Hungarians, I was just in Hungary, a place I visited many times.
And there are a lot of Hungarians who love their form of government, despite what we hear about it in the West.
And there are countries in the world that seem to be moving to a model that is more authoritarian, that is more based on the idea of a strong man leading the country and not necessarily subject all the time to every whim and every desire and every thought of the population.
And you can dismiss that away and kind of just instinctively condemn anything that is that is riddling of that in any way and there's an instinct that I have to do that again because of the culture in which I was formed and indoctrinated but hearing The views of those who do not believe in that form of political organization, I think, is incredibly valuable.
It just gets you thinking about a lot of different things, and at the very least, it enhances your understanding.
In fact, that's what the Dugan interview did, especially because what he's defending is not just prevalent in Russia, but increasingly a lot of other parts of the world that are increasingly important.
All right, next question from KCM71, quote, there is so much going on both domestically and in foreign affairs, it's hard to focus on any one issue as an American, but living in a foreign country, what concerns you the most about the changes taking place?
What is your top priority?
Where will you put most of your energy to stop the changes occurring at this moment?
Well, one of the priorities that I have always had, not just as a journalist, but previously as a lawyer, and...
I think anybody who watches this show, including tonight, sees this, is the cause of ensuring that people can speak freely without punishment by the state or by other institutions.
Because everything I was just talking about, the freedom to dismantle your own ideas and reconstruct them, to subject your own presuppositions to critical scrutiny.
To have open discussions with people who have different views than you?
To ensure that propaganda from power centers can be challenged in question?
None of that is possible.
None of it.
Unless there is the right of free speech and free discourse aggressively preserved.
And obviously there were, as I said in that interview, policies of the Biden administration that I found.
Beyond what had previously been done in the United States at least for decades on the censorship front in terms of the systems and programs to coerce big tech to censor the descent of American citizens on a wide range of issues including COVID. The idea of just controlling the internet or censoring the internet in general is extremely disturbing to me.
And obviously these steps promised by the Trump campaign are now being implemented by the Trump administration.
To not just punish the expression of speech and protest, rights that are foundational to the United States, but also to intimidate and put into fear people who would express those views or just participate in debates, I find extremely disturbing because everything is secondary to that for me.
If we don't have that right to question government dogma, to dissent from it, to explore...
The challenge of orthodoxies and pieties, then we're just going to be the byproduct of whatever external stimuli has been permitted.
It's very, very difficult, very, very difficult in a society that is controlling and limiting what can and can't be said, what ideas can and can't be heard, to Ensure that you yourself are escaping that closed system of information.
It's risky.
It's difficult.
It's time-consuming.
To find it, most people aren't going to have the ability to do that.
They're going to be working, taking care of their family, taking care of their kids.
And it will guaranteed be a propagandized society.
And a propagandized society is one that becomes conformist and acquiescent.
Every other substantive policy issue from there becomes almost irrelevant because there's no means of actually doing anything other than quiescing to what we've been told to think.
Now, on the foreign policy front, I'm obviously extremely interested in how not just this war in Ukraine is resolved, but the implications that it has for foreign policy dogma going forward.
There was a Forum in the Atlantic, hosted by the neocon Jeffrey Goldberg, a bunch of other neocons, the types I was just describing who think liberal democracy is the final expression of superior human expression that U.S. foreign policy should be about imposing that, except in cases where it suits us not to when we support dictatorships.
Basically, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has prevailed in Washington for the last four or five decades that President Trump three times ran based on the promise to undo.
I don't think he succeeded the first time, the second time he didn't win, the third time, which is now.
He seems to be more devoted to that.
And this idea of decades of U.S. foreign policy being upended was supposed to be alarming.
I think it's very promising.
This foreign policy consensus has been incredibly destructive.
It's shed so much blood.
It's drained away so many resources.
It's justified a ubiquitous surveillance state.
I think it's something that needs to be dismantled.
The question is what comes in its place, but the first step is dismantling it.
And so how the war in Ukraine ends up being resolved, if it is resolved, how it does, if this affects our relationship with Europe and with NATO, all of which seems to be happening.
That is something that is of great interest to me as well, and I've talked about this before.
I think the best quote that expressed this idea came from Seymour Hersh, who talked about the possibility of a Trump presidency, a second term as being a, quote, circuit breaker on how Washington works.
That, at the very least, it will go in and break things.
Things that have not been broken and nobody could have broken for many decades that probably deserve to be smashed.
And so that's definitely something that I'm looking for a great deal as well.
All right, Pushy Pants says, Hi Glenn, the subject has been discussed a lot this week.
Why is Tucker so disdainful of Dan Crenshaw?
So, I actually, obviously this is a personality dispute.
It is two very strong personalities who are essentially waging war against one another.
Tucker has been a longtime critic of Dan Crenshaw.
He's often used him as a symbol of everything wrong with the Republican Party.
And it really escalated when Dan Crenshaw was caught on a hot mic when asked about Tucker, not knowing he was being recorded, saying, no, I've never met Tucker, but if I did, I would kill him.
And obviously, I don't think it was a serious threat by Dan Crenshaw to want to go murder Tucker.
But that's not something that you say about somebody unless you really are harboring a lot of hatred for them.
Yeah, if I met him, I would kill him.
And the way it was said, too, it was not joking.
It was not lighthearted.
It was indicative of a lot of internal hatred.
And so Tucker, needless to say, He escalated his war on Dan Crenshaw after hearing that, and then Dan Crenshaw has been asked about it and been replying constantly about why he dislikes Tucker.
So you can dismiss it as an internet personality beef, and part of it is that, which doesn't make it uninteresting.
In fact, it could be interesting just for that reason.
But I think there's something much more important going on underneath, which is What a lot of American liberals and people on the left have refused to recognize for a long time that I felt was so important that I've been trying to focus on and talk about and see the benefits of in a way that really alienated a lot of people who were on the left, who had previously been readers or viewers or allies or whatever.
But it has been clear to me for a long time that the real debates about foreign policy, about domestic policy, about the kind of country that the United States should and should not be began to take place on the American right with the introduction of Donald Trump into Republican politics precisely because in 2016,
by necessity, since he was running against the Republican establishment, as embodied by Jeb Bush, who they all thought was the inevitable nominee, and that's where all the establishment money was, and Trump won.
Not just by opposing Jeb Bush, but by the entire Republican establishment ideology that had been dominating the Republican Party going back decades, since at least Ronald Reagan, even before that.
Railing about neocons, about corporatism, about the CIA and the FBI and the security state, about endless war.
You listen to Steve Bannon.
Who was the architect of that 2016 campaign and still has a lot of influence among the world, and he often sounds in a lot of ways like what a leftist sounds like in the 1970s or 1980s.
Not coming from the same place, not with the same premises, but oftentimes with the same sensibility, the same objective, the same viewpoint.
And it was clear to me that As I just said, if the foreign policy dogma, the bipartisan dogma of the United States was going to be smashed, it was never going to be smashed by the Democratic Party.
It was going to be broken by what was going on on the right, particularly with this MAGA populist movement.
But even though Donald Trump has obviously taken over the Republican Party, is by far the most powerful figure in it, there are still huge numbers of elected officials in the Republican Party and in Trump's Who very much hate Trump's anti-establishment views,
hate his populism, are absolute advocates and loyalists to the standard Republican foreign policy that the Republican establishment has long espoused and Republican corporatism.
They hate Trump's tariffs.
They hate this talk of They hate labor unions and the working class, and they particularly hate the attempt to reorient foreign policy.
They're huge supporters of the war in Ukraine, of the military-industrial complex in general, and a lot of them are too afraid to challenge Trump or to explicitly disagree with Trump because at the moment That means you're the end of your career in the Republican Party.
They look at Liz Cheney or Adam Kissinger, people like that.
And there are others, people who have been dissenters to Trump, and most of them are gone.
But that doesn't mean that their ideology is aligned with Trump.
A lot of them are waiting for the moment for Trump to become weakened, to become vulnerable.
And all these people are lurking there.
And Dan Crenshaw is such a perfect example.
There are a lot.
In the Senate as well, people like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham.
But Dan Crenshaw, and I say this in his defense, I guess, is he has a very high opinion of himself.
He was injured in combat.
He has, I believe, advanced degrees from Harvard, Harvard or Yale.
I mean, his curriculum is sterling, and he knows that, and he's very impressed with himself.
And so he's less willing to pretend or to sacrifice his dignity than most other Republican politicians.
He is willing to.
I've heard him try to claim that Trump's views on Ukraine are his views, even though it's so preposterous, so that he doesn't have to criticize Trump.
He is just a little bit more candid about what he really thinks, and especially in terms of what he really thinks, his belief in Bush-Cheney, Republican establishment, John McCain, Lindsey Graham type of foreign policy that is also very much the Democratic foreign policy as well.
And Tucker could see that from the beginning and knew that Dan Crenshaw was the kind of Republican that, in Tucker's view, That would sabotage the Trump agenda and that needed to be purged from the Republican Party.
And so we often use Dan Crenshaw.
And I think in part because Dan Crenshaw sort of became a very popular figure for a while.
He was somebody Republicans, including MAGA, really liked.
You know, on the surface, what's not to like about him?
He's a good-looking guy.
He has this impressive combat record.
He has the eye patch.
He speaks well.
He understands social media.
I think he has several million followers on Instagram.
So he seemed like a kind of potential future conservative leader.
So a lot of people were enamored of him.
And I think that was one of the reasons why Tucker wanted to alert people to the fact that, no, he actually has this ideology that is very archaic, that is not in any way whatever you might think of the America First or MAGA ideology.
This, I think, is one of the things that's most misunderstood, especially by people on the left and American liberals, is these divisions inside the American right are vituperative.
They're not just questions of style or degree, the way that the debates mostly are within the Democratic Party, like the AOC and Bernie wing.
You have some disagreements with the kind of Pelosi, Obama, Biden wing, but they're not very fundamental.
They're not very ideological.
There's questions of degree and style.
Whereas the real debates are taking place within the Republican Party, and I think that the question of whether the Republican Party will revert back to what it was before Trump is very much the concern of a lot of people who want Trump's ideology for bail and not, say, Mitch McConnell's or John McCain's or Dan Crenshaw's.
And so I thought—and remember as well that— When Tucker got fired from Fox, and he got fired for ideological reasons.
I mean, his show was as successful as you could hope it was.
They never really recovered.
I mean, Jesse Waters has very good ratings, more than I think anybody else in cable news, certainly.
But they're not at the level that Tucker's was.
He doesn't have the falling, the intense falling that Tucker had.
And you see now Tucker's podcast.
It's one of the top four or five.
The most popular podcast in the country is gigantic, following huge amounts of influence.
When Tucker was fired from Fox News, there were all sorts of Republicans, none of them willing to put their names on it.
But at the time, anonymously running to Politico and Axios saying how happy they are that Tucker is no longer on the air because that will make their lives so much easier, especially on things like funding foreign wars like in Ukraine.
And now a lot of them are just willing to attack Tucker all the time.
Now that he's been labeled an outside Semite and all of that, and an isolationist, a Russian propagandist, they feel like they've sufficiently marginalized him or demonized him or they feel more comfortable to attack him.
And this dispute between Tucker on the one hand and Crenshaw on the other is interesting in and of itself, is entertaining, but it has that importance that it really shows what these ideological divisions are still on the American right.
And Trump in In a few years, won't be the standard bear of the Republican Party, and there's going to be a massive war to ensure that the Republican Party becomes essentially the mirror image of the Democratic Party so that Americans don't really have a choice on the issues that power centers care most about.
That's why they wanted Jeb Bush.
Imagine Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton.
Who cares?
It's the same exact factions being served in exactly the same way.
And that's what Ron DeSantis was for, by the way, as well, to stop Trump, to give this kind of feel of anti-establishment.
But Ron DeSantis was there, and if you look at who was behind him and what money was behind him, you will see that it was largely people who believe in the kind of foreign policy that Trump rejects, at least ostensibly.
And that is the most important thing to power standards in the United States is that neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party adopt an ideology that truly challenges their interests.
And for all the reasons I was just saying, Trump is promising in the sense that he can break things.
He's a circuit breaker, as Seymour Hersh put it.
That's the same reason that he's feared and despised by so many people who had control of the Republican Party and want to remake it in the image of the old Republican Party, which is basically an image of the Democratic Party so that Americans Nothing really changes no matter who you vote for.
Some social issues are different.
Some ancillary things are different.
But the foundational distribution of power and how things are organized remains the same.
And Trump is a threat to that, which is why The Atlantic held a forum today saying Trump is, quote, upending decades of foreign policy.
They wouldn't say that about anybody else.
So I've always been interested in these splits in the American right.
It's part of what I think is most interesting and promising and exciting about American politics.
I've seen people try to foster these debates inside the Democratic Party for a long time, and it always ends up failing for institutional and structural reasons.
So this to me is the thing that...
I still think, in terms of what the Trump administration, the second term, is going to become, is one of the things that is most important.
All right, let's do one more, which is from Sally Wexler.
Oh, by the way, I wanted to say just one thing about YouTube.
Some of you have noted that a few of our videos were removed from YouTube.
Speculated that that might be because of censorship issues or other kind of shadow banning.
And just by the way, I just wanted to say we definitely have investigated this.
We've worked with YouTube.
It's really just a technical glitch.
YouTube has been extremely cooperative about trying to help us fix this.
They've restored all these videos, I think, that just kind of fell off.
There was no consistent pattern to which videos.
It ended up just kind of disappearing for whatever reason, so there wasn't a likely censorship scheme.
It was just some sort of technical lich that YouTube has been helping us fix and I think is now fixed.
All right, just wanted to note that for those of you who are asking.
Sally Waxler says, hey Glenn, before I get to the question, I just wanted to tell you, thanks for helping me see a bigger perspective.
You randomly called my smug self out on Twitter one day.
And so I did some hate listening that turned into frustrated listening that transformed into adoration for your principled stances in a time of wacky waving inflatable to men of ethics and morals.
That's very nice of you to say.
I really appreciate that.
I do think Twitter exchanges can be rambunctious, but I think it's extremely important that if you want to be a journalist, and this is probably just a byproduct of my becoming a journalist as a result of the internet.
I didn't go to work for a local paper and cover zoning board meetings.
I didn't go work for the New York Times and have this understanding of a journalist sitting on a mountaintop speaking down to the masses.
I started a blog and that was the start of my journalism and central to that was constant interaction with readers and people who were hearing what you were saying and felt affected by it and disagreed with it or had questions about it.
It's absolutely a responsibility to answer, so that is the reason why, to this day, I think online interactivity is so important.
It can have these effects as well, that it can breach people in a way that if you just ignored them, you never would.
Anyway, here's my question.
Quote, I heard you say in passing almost at one point that you...
Oppose overturning Citizens United based on First Amendment grounds, but what would be a practical fix for the open bidding that takes place for political seats anymore?
It really feels like it's kind of a huge part of our issues.
Thanks so much, and be well.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
Citizens United was, for those of you who don't know, just very quickly, was a...
It was both a 7-2 and a 5-4 ruling.
It was a 5-4 ruling on the core question.
And the core question was whether campaign finance rules that restricted the right of corporations to spend money near a campaign on political speech was or was not a violation of the First Amendment.
And the whole case emerged out of what was such an obvious First Amendment problem for me, which was that an activist group called Citizens United, formed by a conservative activist, but it was considered a corporation because it was a nonprofit like the ACLU or any other advocacy group as a nonprofit corporation,
produced a film about Hillary Clinton thinking that she would be the nominee in 2008. And they produced this film that was very critical of her, that purported to expose all sorts of things about her.
And the regulators who manage and oversee campaign finance laws sued Citizens United and said that they had been in violation of campaign finance laws because they were a corporation and used their corporate funds within 60 days of an election or whatever the rule said, and therefore they were in violation of campaign finance laws.
And Citizens United sued the Federal Elections Commission and said that this rule is in Violates the First Amendment right.
They have the absolute right to spend their money on political speech.
And when the ruling was issued that did invalidate that regulation on First Amendment grounds and said it's a violation of free speech to tell a corporation, especially a nonprofit corporation, an advocacy corporation, that they cannot spend corporate funds to produce a film about a candidate before an election, it was probably At that point, the most unifying event for liberals.
This was the Obama administration, so a lot of liberals had already split.
You had a lot of people who were unified when George Bush was the president, who then, when Obama became president, some of them stopped caring about civil liberties and other things and didn't care that Obama broke a lot of his campaign promises and other liberals.
Ones who typically were my readers who did want Obama held accountable.
But Citizens United united all of them in rage and anger at what the Supreme Court had done.
And I remember, of course, I had to write about it as being a constitutional lawyer, somebody who was focused on constitutional issues, free speech in particular.
There was no way I could avoid it.
But I knew that the view I had, which was that I agreed with the majority's ruling on First Amendment grounds, was going to enrage.
Most of my audience.
And it did.
I wrote about it and I explained why I thought the ruling was correct.
As it turns out, by the way, the ACLU also was on the side of the majority ruling.
They had issued an amicus brief urging the majority to strike down these regulations on First Amendment crowns.
There were some other liberals who did as well.
But by and large, it was considered heresy to be anywhere near the laughter.
Anything near the Democratic Party in support what was basically a ruling by a conservative majority.
There were a lot of misconceptions about that case, people who were opposed to it, who thought money isn't speech, corporations aren't people.
This was actually not anything that the Supreme Court ruled.
Everyone in the Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on how you can spend your money to express political speech implicate the First Amendment.
Obviously, if there's a law that says you're not allowed to Buy a billboard to express a political view about a certain issue.
You're not allowed to take a billboard that says Free Palestine or Support Israel or whatever.
Obviously, even though it involves the regulation of money, that's a First Amendment issue.
The question was whether, even though it did violate the First Amendment, which everyone agreed that it did, or at least violated free speech, whether under constitutional doctrine, which says you can violate I
did agree, and I do agree, that the untrammeled money that floods Our campaigns, the insane amounts of money it costs to run, increasingly not just presidential elections, but statewide elections, even House district elections, is a huge threat because it means that people with the largest amount of money have the most political say.
And that is oligarchy.
I just don't think the solution is violating the First Amendment and preventing people from spending money on their political views.
I think instead, the solution is public financing of campaigns.
Where if somebody gets $30 million, then their opponent gets public financing.
And a lot of times with public financing, there are conditions that go with it and limitations that go with it, but also benefits that come from it.
And really, the ultimate solution would be small donor mass donations.
Bernie Sanders basically Almost beat the Clinton machine in 2016. I think would have beaten the Clinton machine had the DNC not cheated.
Based entirely on small donors, I mean, mostly on small donors, the amount of money that he raised to compete with the Clintons was something that previously thought was impossible.
And the other day we covered Trump's attack on Thomas Massey and his threats of primarying Thomas Massey.
Who is incredibly popular.
And this week, without even asking, Massey's campaign was inundated with hundreds of thousands, I think more than a million dollars maybe.
I'm not sure of the exact number, but it's very high.
Again, of small-dollar donors.
So having small-dollar donors get behind particular candidates who serve the interest of large numbers of working-class people, people who donate small money, is also an effective way to combat the flow of money.
But I do think public financing that is intended to even the playing field without violating the First Amendment can also be an effective way to do so.
So the fact that I think it's unconstitutional to prevent people from spending money on political expression doesn't mean I don't think it's a problem.
I think it's a massive problem.
I just think there are other ways to solve it that don't violate the Constitution, including the ways that I just described.
It's to find candidates who inspire enough people that they want to give their money that they do give their money and allow that candidate to compete even with candidates who have massive money behind them.
And we've seen with Bernie Sanders and a couple of other cases how that can be viable and effective.
All right.
That is always fun to do.
It's something I sometimes don't see the questions until They're put up on the screen.
I like it that way.
I rely on my colleagues to pick and choose the best questions, and they do a great job of that.
But ultimately, the most important part is the ability of our Members of our local community are supporters of the show to submit questions, so thank you to all of you who did that.
There are a couple other questions we hope to get to.
We will put them on the list for next week, but it's a segment that we really enjoy doing that will conclude our show for this evening.
As a reminder, for those of you who do want to join the local community, 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 that community.
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We put a lot of original exclusive video content there.
We've been adding third segments to our show here that we just carry over exclusively onto the Logos platform for our members.
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And it's the community on which we rely to do everything that we do here.
So those interested can just click the join button and it will take you directly to there.
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