Substack CEO on Protecting Writers from Speech Crackdowns; Week in Review: Matt Taibbi's Censorship Hearing Testimony, Fascism Expert Flees the U.S., and More
Substack teams up with FIRE to protect writers across the political spectrum, especially those criticizing foreign governments. Plus: the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University dramatically leaves the U.S., pro-Israel fanatic Randy Fine wins his House race in Florida, and members of Congress derail hearings on JFK and censorship.
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Good evening, it's Wednesday, April 2nd, which means we're finally past April Fool's Day.
The only thing I really saw yesterday anybody doing that made any impact was Tiger Woods came on too.
Axin said, oh my god, a huge miracle, I severely injured my Achilles a month ago, everyone knows that, but somehow through the miracle of my doctors, And my treatments, I'm now going to be able to play in the Masters.
And everyone's like, oh my god, Tiger Woods playing.
And then like an hour later, he came back, haha, April Fools.
And everyone's like, oh god, I guess we got fooled.
I don't know why people enjoy that, but very grateful that we're done with that.
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, we're going to be talking Over the last three years on this program, one of the topics we have covered most, if not the topic we have covered most, are the various threats to free speech and free thought in the U.S. and the West more broadly.
During the two-plus months of the Trump administration, we have covered significant new weapons being used to punish dissent when it comes to foreign policy and more specifically criticism of Israel.
Expanded hate crime campus speech codes demanded by the administration, legal residents and even green card holders having their visas or green cards stripped in secret so ICE can snatch them off the street and ship them to a deportation cell in Louisiana.
And a seemingly endless array of demands that universities and other institutions refrain from tolerating, even in their curriculum and in their professors' classes, any criticism of Israel, all under the very familiar guise that all censors use.
Oh, we're not centering, we're just combating bigotry.
Seeing this free speech crisis, two entities in particular who have justifiably cultivated and really developed a credible reputation for defending free speech, FIRE.org and Substack have united to announce a plan to protect writers from punishment for their views.
The CEO of Substack, Chris Bast, one of the founders, will be here tonight to discuss what this free speech protection program is, what prompted it, and other developments at Substack as well, which formed to be a platform that preserves free speech on the internet, very similar to Rumble.
Then we have a potpourri, a smorgasbord of various events we want to cover quickly tonight.
The behavior of the Democrats at the congressional hearing held yesterday on the censorship regime featuring the testimony of Matt Taibbi as well as the would-be Homeland Security disinformation czar Nina Yankovich.
Remember her?
We also want to talk about the behavior of both parties at yesterday's hearing on the newly released JFK files and the possible role of the CIA.
A hearing that featured the director of the film JFK, Oliver Stone, as well as the longtime JFK investigator, Jefferson Morley, whom we interviewed on our show last night and I thought had a lot of really interesting things to say.
We also want to cover the utterly pointless but media-celebrated 25-hour filibuster by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
The newly elected Israel-focused member of Congress, the Republican from Florida who is taking Mike Walters' seat, Randy Fine, and time-permitting several other issues as well.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few quick program notes.
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You click on the link, begin watching.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of Rumble shows and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble as well.
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You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our show, it really does help spread the visibility of the program.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right after this quick word from our sponsor.
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For a limited time you can save 25% off When I resigned from The Intercept,
media outlet that I co-founded, I immediately went to Substack, a platform I didn't know very much about and had an extremely positive experience there the entire time I was there, in large part because they were very committed to giving their writers total freedom and protecting freedom of speech.
So you didn't have to worry about saying something that the platform would dislike or that would ban you.
They were and are a platform really devoted to free speech.
Chris Best is a co-founder and CEO of Substack and he has really fought, as has Substack, to defend the rights of free speech while connecting users with creators, ideas, and communities they care about most.
It was founded in 2017.
Substack is building a new economic engine for culture by putting publishers in charge and enabling subscribers to support the work they deeply value.
And from 2009 to 2017, he helped scale Kik and built a platform used by over 300 million users.
It is always a pleasure to welcome him to our show.
Chris, good evening.
Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
Thank you for having me.
All right, so let's get right into this because you have teamed up, you meaning Substack, with Fire.org, which I sort of consider to be The new ACLU, what the ACLU was before they kind of prioritized partisan agendas above their original values.
And FIRE has been speaking out quite vocally, even though they had developed a mostly conservative audience because they had been defending conservative speech on campus about a lot of these new censorship attacks coming from the new administration.
And you joined with FIRE, and the idea was to partner to protect writers in America, especially ones who are somehow being targeted or punished for their dissent on foreign policy or Israel or any other topics.
And I just wanted to read some of this statement and then kind of ask you what prompted it before we get into the details.
The statement says, In his farewell address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan remarked that America is freedom, and it's this freedom that makes the country a magnet for those around the world.
In recent weeks, America has sent a very different message to foreigners residing in America.
You can stay here, but only if you give up your freedom of speech.
Since our founding, America has long welcomed writers and thinkers from across the globe who come to this country and contribute to the richness of our political and cultural life.
Christopher Hitchens was one of President Bill Clinton's.
Sharpest critics, Alexander Cockburn, punched in all directions, and Ayn Rand minced no words in her condemnation of socialism.
To preserve America's tradition as a home for fearless writing, FIRE and Substack are partnering to support writers residing lawfully in the country, targeted by the government for the content of their writing.
Those who, as Hitchens once put it, quote, committed no crime except that of thought.
If you fit in this category, whether or not you publish on Substack, we urge you to get in touch.
Immediately. Now, I want to delve into the specifics of the program, but before I do that, it's not all that usual for a company that is a for-profit company, which is true of Substack, to take such a vocal position on controversial issues.
What is it that prompted you to do so?
You know, Substack doesn't take positions broadly on political issues.
We don't take a position, for example, on immigration policy or foreign policy.
But we do see freedom of speech and freedom of the press as centrally important to our business and our mission.
And so this felt really important.
But I get that.
And free speech, in my view, has been kind of central to your Identity into your function and your mission from the beginning and and I've never really seen it in conflict with your Business model though it certainly can be if you take any kind of position even one just vaguely In support of free speech that certainly can but the statement refers to New sorts of attacks on the right of free thought the right of free expression I'm just kind of wondering was there like a Tipping point or a triggering point for
you over the last couple months where you decided substack needs to do something I think the event that put this in kind of like the sub-stack Ballywick was the Ozturk editorial and Deportation.
The fact that somebody is being, as far as we know, targeted for the contents of an editorial that they co-published.
To us, that's a very clear free speech issue.
And so even though it's not, you know, we wouldn't take a stance on Any old thing that happened, that felt like a very clear line in the sand where, you know, we've had this Substack Defender program for years that helps defend free speech from legal threats.
It's helped dozens of cases, and we wanted to make sure that we were Yeah, for those who don't know and viewers of the show know because we covered that story in depth, what you're referring to is a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts who was in the United States very legally working on her PhD program.
She was recently Snatched up by plainclothes officers on the street.
She was obviously very frightened.
She didn't even know these were agents of the state.
They arrived in marked cars.
They grabbed her phone that she was using so they could have access to her phone and then shipped her away to a deportation facility in Louisiana.
And the only thing the government alleges, or the only thing groups that monitor people like this allege, is this op-ed.
There's no claim that she even participated in the protest, let alone harassed anybody or blocked anyone's entrance or You know, there aren't that many consistent defenders of freedom of the press.
Freedom of speech is something that I think has a lot of fair-weather friends.
You know, it's something that we've tried to be consistent about over the years, and I've been very impressed by FIRE as well.
You mentioned in the intro, you know, they were sort of known for defending right-wing people against threats of censorship, but they also do that across the political spectrum.
I think they're just very values-aligned on this issue, and I know Greg Lukianoff.
I think they're fantastic, and we're just happy to partner with them.
Yeah, just to underscore that, I mean, I know some of the people who founded and run FIRE, including Greg, who you just mentioned, who actually are quite vocal supporters of Israel, very vocal support of Israel, just in their personal views.
And yet they've spent a lot of time defending pro-Palestinian speech on campus, because their mission is to defend free speech, regardless of what they think about it.
You know, Chris, I was thinking about this earlier today, and kind of it's very ironic, because when I first came to Substack, it was late 2020.
So a little bit more than four years now.
It wasn't very well known, but it was starting to be better known before I got there, and certainly over the next year.
But the criticism of it at the time was that because it allowed free speech, It was basically some sort of right-wing or even hospitable to fascism kind of outlet, when in reality you weren't promoting right-wing speech, you were just offering a platform for people who had been censored, who wanted to come, and you had a ton of writers who weren't even remotely on the right.
But that was the argument was, oh look, you have some far-right writers and you have some You know, writers who are Trump supporters and therefore you're platforming fascists and that was the attack on you.
Now here we are four years later and what you're essentially saying is you want to make sure that people who are writing at Substack have the right to criticize foreign policy including US foreign policy toward Israel or to the Middle East or anything else and kind of protect them from some of these programs we've seen from the Trump administration.
My There's certainly a possibility that if you start protecting people who have that perspective, you kind of now get the opposing accusation.
Oh, you're protecting left-wing radicals or even that you're anti-Semitic, which if you haven't gotten yet, I'm sure you're likely to given this program.
What is the mission of Substack in terms of dealing with any types of those accusations?
I think the biggest thing is to have principles, know what you stand for and why, stay calm, and make sure that you're sort of consistently trying to live up to the principle.
And you're absolutely right that, you know, I think free speech is a mechanism that protects the, you know, protects writers and thinkers from power.
And so at any given time, you know, People will look at freedom of speech as a partisan issue or as a one-sided issue, but over a long enough time horizon, we've just seen this.
We've had people come to Substack in recent years who had been former critics of us, who used to say, Substack is this evil right or left-wing place because it platforms this thing.
They wind up finding themselves censored when the worm turns, and they come to appreciate the wisdom of a consistent, One of the things that being here at Rumble has impressed me about is that they have a very kind of
Vigorous commitment to this same principle.
It's a place for anyone to come, anyone to be heard.
It's not their place to sit in judgment of which opinions are sufficiently right or wrong to be allowed to be heard.
And at times, this has in fact jeopardized their commercial benefits.
As a result of that position, their refusal to censor, they're not allowed in certain countries, including in Brazil.
I was just in France about a month ago.
I tried to access my own show and got that message that says Rumble's not available in France because they wouldn't remove RT and other Russian outlets that the French government demanded they remove.
And I guess their position is, you know, sort of twofold.
One is that in the long term we think free speech will help our commercial interests, but number two, even if they don't, even if they do undermine them somewhat, we're not willing to profit by violating our own I do think it's both.
You know, we've designed the company to be aligned with this mission.
You know, writers on Substack, creators on Substack are independent.
They own their work.
They own their connection to their audience, so they can leave at any time.
And so if we turned around one day and said, We've sold out for some short-term profit, we're going to start censoring, we would lose all of our business.
We've tried to build a company that puts us on the side of writers and thinkers who have the right to say what they think, and readers and viewers who have the right to choose what to subscribe to and what to hear.
I don't think that there is a conflict, but it is both a commercial and a moral proposition for us.
And do you get pressure from investors or from people interested in the more financial side of Substack that if push comes to shove they don't want you choosing this kind of mission of free speech if it is going to undermine the financial profitability of the company?
If anything, the opposite.
We have wonderful investors.
We have wonderful employees, too.
I think we've been at this long enough that people know what we're about.
They understand the theory of what we're doing.
People would not sign up to work at or invest in Substack if they didn't see these things as valuable.
And so we're quite fortunate that we've been pretty aligned.
So let's talk about the program itself, like kind of the specifics of it.
When I was there, you started introducing programs that would kind of support the writers, including some really important support mechanisms, such as if a writer gets sued by some subject that they're writing about to help them be able to have legal counsel that defends them, which is incredibly important, especially if you're an independent journalist.
You know, if you don't have that, you could be deterred from writing about Wealthy people or powerful people because of the the threat that you could be sued you began offering other kind of support services for research and the like And it's really become not just this neutral platform But a place that is designed to support the writers that you attract which is one of the reasons I think you're attracting so many so what is this program?
Specifically intended to do the new one that you just unveiled It is spiritually similar to the Defender program that you're talking about, which was we noticed, you know, the genesis of that was we noticed you're an independent journalist, you're writing something about a local businessman or politician that is We're good.
like valid journalism and they send you this legal threat in an effort to shut you down.
And it's basically like censorship by lawfare.
And so we just felt like the platform had an interest in helping defend against those kinds of activities.
If it was costless to do that, if people could just be rolled over at no cost, it was going to have this massive impact.
I think we're good to go.
All right, just one last question, because I found this funny too.
When I was there at Substack and the kind of awareness of Substack was growing pretty significantly, it was attracting a much larger audience, a lot of writers who had a big platform previously.
It wasn't just, the accusation wasn't just Oh, they're some sort of proto-fascist site because they're allowing a bunch of right-wing people who should be banned or whatever.
You know, that was at the height of the kind of left liberal censorship regime as opposed to the one we're getting now.
But the other attack on it that I remember quite well came from corporate journalists because they're afraid of anything that might be a competitor to the hegemony or monopoly on a discourse that corporate journalism has.
And certainly Substack, you know, detracting so many readers became a threat.
And I remember Very well that the consensus was that Substack could ruin journalism.
It was allowing all these people to write and to do journalism, in quotes, without any kind of editorial fact-checking structure.
And it was just for people to kind of sound off and it was, you know, something that would erode journalism.
Now, just yesterday I think it was, the New York Times has an article on Substack.
About how many refugees from corporate media, who four years ago would never have been caught dead associating with Substack, are now finding, not just going to Substack, but finding success on Substack after they were basically expelled from their company for one reason or another.
I think we have the New York Times article.
Do we have the headline?
We're gonna put that up there.
The title is The Loosening of American News Anchors.
Don Lemon, Joy Reid, and Jim Acosta, exiled or extricated from their networks, are now on Substack trading sleek studios and, quote, pancake makeup for their living rooms.
And it kind of details, not just that they're there, but that they're finding a lot of success.
What do you think changed in kind of the ecosystem over the last few years that I do think part of it's just that there is a lot of pressure on those business models.
That's been a tough business for a bunch of reasons.
But I think the big thing is, I think a lot of people, you said it before, people were worried that if you give people freedom, it's going to make the thing bad.
something that you don't want.
It's something that can't make a good product.
And I think the reverse is true.
When you set the incentives up correctly, when you give people editorial freedom, when you give them the right to their own platform, the right to set their own standards in their community, when you give them a viable business model for doing the work they believe in-- Ultimately, it works.
Ultimately, you can make good things, and that is attracting more and more people, and I guess more sides of the political spectrum are seeing the value of freedom of speech owning your audience.
Yeah, as you said, people kind of like the idea of a controlled discourse until it kind of starts coming for them.
Until they're the ones being controlled.
Exactly, and then they find the virtues of free speech.
All right, last question, actually.
There's a Hollywood Reporter piece.
Again, this is amazing to me, just seeing positive Corporate media press about Substack because there was certainly none of that when I was there.
It was quite the contrary.
But there's a Hollywood Reporter article from March last month that says Substack surges past 5 million paid subscribers, thanks to video and Trump.
Kind of goes on to say that a lot of these refugees from corporate media, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hassan, Joy Reid, are a big driver of the growth.
I know some of them are doing quite well.
Are you Pleased with the growth of Substack?
Has it been kind of a continual growing as a result of these new issues in the media?
We're thrilled.
You know, more than 5 million page descriptions.
The Substack app is growing very quickly.
You should get the app.
Get the Rumble app too.
Get the Substack app as well.
It's going great.
And it's been a steady growth over years at this point.
And, you know, we think it's working.
People are hungry to take back their mind, to have something different, and we're delighted that more and more people are choosing Substack.
All right, Chris.
It was great to see you.
Congratulations on this initiative, which I obviously, not just support, but think is incredibly important.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you.
Thanks for everything.
Have a good evening.
Have a good evening.
There's a lot of different things going on, and we wanted to try and just sort of, instead of delving in very, very deeply to each of them, kind of Just give you a sense of some of them, because that has been the news cycle.
The news cycle has been extremely filled.
It's been a very fast news cycle.
I don't think there's been a slow news day since Trump's inauguration.
And sometimes our challenge when we want it, we tend to do stories more in depth here.
Maybe two, maximum three a night is sort of which ones we're going to leave out, because there's always so many things to cover.
Obviously, the big news of today is this New scheme of tariffs that Trump introduced that has become quite controversial.
I'm not an expert at all in tariffs.
If we're going to talk about it, we would have someone on to talk about it.
Some people are saying that these tariffs are going to tank the stock market, tank the economy.
Others are saying that The reality is it's designed to eliminate tariffs entirely by forcing other countries who put tariffs on American products to get rid of those in order to get rid of American tariffs on those.
We'll certainly see that but that's just an example of the kind of thing that we wouldn't cover even though that's a huge news story for today.
But I wanted to show you just a few quick things that we would mean to talk about that I think are interesting kind of in a faster paced order.
Yesterday there was a hearing on the JFK documents and we covered that by having Jefferson Morley on our show, who was a witness at that hearing.
He talked about the hearing itself, the discovery of CIA-related documents in the JFK files.
But there was also, in a different committee, a hearing to investigate the censorship industrial complex, the program by the Biden administration to censor dissent by coercing big tech companies, by threatening big tech companies, In terms of what they can allow and what they can't allow, cajoling them to remove dissent on COVID, Ukraine, a whole variety of other issues.
And one of the witnesses who was testifying was our friend, the journalist Matt Taibbi.
And he did that, of course, because of his work on the Twitter files, which was one of the main sources of information to show how the government was pressuring social media companies and big tech.
So that's why he was there.
The Democrats invited to sit next to him.
That utterly crazy woman who they wanted to put in charge and make the disinformation czar as part of Homeland Security, Nina Yankovich, and even in our society that loves censorship and that is in love with this idea of experts identifying disinformation for you because they know more than you do about what is true and what is false, and they're going to protect you from false things.
She was such a caricature of a liberal censor that she was just a bridge too far, even for our political culture when Biden was president.
They had to kind of scrap that, and she's been very angry about that ever since.
But I just want to show you how scummy people in Congress can be.
So, Matt Taibbi was there as a journalist, and if you know Matt, he has a very mild-mannered demeanor.
He's very polite, very soft-spoken.
If you engage him in debate, he's not really a combative personality.
You know, sometimes I watch Matt in these circumstances, my aggression kicks in.
I just say, Matt, say this, you know, push him.
But that's not how Matt is.
His efficacy is in just always kind of remaining even keeled.
I've never seen him be disrespectful to anybody.
So, of course, you know, if you're going to denounce the censorship regime of Joe Biden, you're going to have Democrats who are going to be angry at you, even though it's Again, something that had been so fundamental to left liberal politics for decades, the idea of free speech.
Now it's not at all.
So Matt Taibbi was there.
He got invited.
He went to testify in Washington, left his family, left his kids to go do it.
And here's the ranking member of that committee.
Her name is Sydney Commager Dove.
She's a member of Congress, a Democratic member of Congress.
And here's what she did in response to Matt's testimony.
The majority is relitigating a made-up conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists to distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their star witness in the process.
Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record two articles about the Republican witness Matt Taibbi.
The first is a Chicago Reader article entitled, 20 years ago in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist a-hole, and possibly worse.
And a Washington Post article titled, the two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow.
Without objection.
This hearing could not be more out of touch with the concerns of Okay, do you see how scummy that is?
20 years ago in Moscow, according to newspapers, and these were old newspaper articles, so now it's 25 years ago, almost 30 years ago, Matt Taibbi terrorized women.
This all came from a work of fiction that Matt Taibbi's partner Mark Ames wrote, and it was a Like the newspaper Exile that they had, an extremely satirical newspaper.
They were quite young.
They were, Matt, you know, kind of in particular got known for a sort of raucous style of writing.
I remember reading him when I was in law school or even as a lawyer in the New York Observer, the New York Press.
He had a column there and it was very, you know, it was very satirical.
It was very ironic.
But this book in particular was fiction.
It was a work of fiction.
And a lot of articles that came out right when Mac Taibbi had a new book out were designed to depict him as some sort of misogynist, like a victim of the Me Too movement, you know, like a perpetrator or a predator of the Me Too movement.
And then once these newspaper articles ran, several of them ended up retracting the article because the thing that was missing from Mac Taibbi's reign of terror against women in Moscow was a single woman who identified herself as his victim.
No one ever complained about Matt Taibbi in any way.
There's no woman to this day who has ever said, oh Matt Taibbi harassed me, he treated me inappropriately.
And yet this this scumbag of a congresswoman is exploiting the MeToo movement.
Let me just say too that right now in New York City the leading candidate to become mayor of New York is the Democrat Andrew Cuomo who had to resign from his gubernatorial position several years ago because he was engulfed in a multiple woman scandal alleging sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior.
He was forced out of office and the entire Democratic establishment is now going to align behind Andrew Cuomo.
Because they don't actually care at all.
Those were, they were actually victims, alleged victims, that are rising up and saying, yes, he treated me improperly.
They don't care about that at all.
Every four years, the Democratic Convention hosts Bill Clinton, who's been not just credibly accused of sexual assault, but even of rape.
In feminist groups throughout the 90s, defended Bill Clinton, defended Bill Clinton against all of these women accusers.
Hillary Clinton demeaned their Character attacked the victims.
James Carville said, oh yeah, if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you never know what kind of trash you're going to find.
Joe Biden himself had all kinds of accusations about inappropriate behavior with women.
You think these people care in the slightest?
They so cynically and cheaply exploit this issue, the Me Too issue, sexual harassment, womanizing, feminism.
They don't believe in it at all.
And like, what relevance did it even have?
Matt's there to talk as a journalist about an investigation that he did, and she's like, hey, by the way, 30 years ago, some newspaper said that he was harassing women.
He never got sued, he was never charged, there's no victim.
Newspapers retracted it when they understood that it was actually based on a work of fiction, primarily written by his partner, Mark Ames, who also has never been accused of any of that by any woman.
But they'll just, Whip it out because they just want to demean and malign anybody who criticized Biden's censorship regime.
And here's the rest of what she said.
Objection. This hearing could not be more out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.
People's retirement savings are being decimated as Trump's arbitrary temper tariffs tank the stock market.
They are staring down the barrel of cuts to their Social Security and Medicare because the Republican majority wants to give a tax break to billionaires like Elon Musk, who have deep financial ties to our adversaries.
Meanwhile, Trump is siding with Putin against our national security interests and risking the lives of American soldiers Thank you.
have concerns about censorship, censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word in their job title and be terminated by an administration that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech.
If we want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump's unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and rule of law.
Okay, first of all, these people are such frauds, it makes me sick.
It makes me sick.
It is the left-liberal establishment in the West that has largely imposed its censorship regime.
It came from 2016 by the dual traumas for Western liberalism of the British people voting to leave the EU in contempt of the Brussels bureaucrats that rule their lives, followed three or four months later by the shock of Trump's victory over The ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. After that, they decided, all of them, that they could not afford free speech.
They could not permit free speech anymore on the internet.
Because when you do so, you can't control how people vote.
And they concocted a whole new industry called the disinformation industry.
A whole expertise they fabricated out of whole cloth disinformation experts that really does not exist.
And none of these people pretended to believe in free speech.
None of these people have any concern about it.
And she began by saying, Why are we even talking about these things?
The only things that we should be talking about are the economic suffering of ordinary Americans, which is so ironic because the reason people hate the Democratic Party is because they've never been interested in that, not in the last decade.
They've been talking about Russiagate and Putin and Trump loving Hitler.
Just anything that they could fabricate and concoct that had nothing to do with the lives of ordinary Americans, who are they gonna fool now by pretending, oh, we shouldn't be even talking about an attack on people's fundamental free speech rights because it's just really irrelevant?
But that is the Democratic Party, just pure and simple.
Even when they try to kind of change their brand, And feign concern with the working class or whatever.
It's just so unconvincing.
Everybody knows that's not at all what their interests are.
They know that they've been told, that consultants have told them, you need to start making people believe that's what you care about, but that's not what they care about.
And the slightest and sort of distract attention from Taibbi's reporting and from the other reporting about the censorship regime that they presided over for so long.
First, they're going to say, hey, 30 years ago, he harassed women, even though it's a lie.
And then say, by the way, who cares?
And we should only be focusing on Signal gate or whatever.
Here is part of the hearing as explained by Matt Taibbi as well as former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kaine.
Here is what they had to say.
Thank you.
Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Weingarten, can you please explain how the Global Engagement Center...
Sorry, this is Congressman Kane, who is the son of the former New Jersey Governor Tom Kane.
He's now a member of Congress because we have...
A very dynastic political system in both parties.
Their sons take over their seats or whatever.
But here he is questioning Matt Taibbi as well as another witness about the censorship industrial complex.
Can you please explain how the Global Engagement Center and the federal government as a whole use coercive power to censor Americans?
Well, Mr.
Congressman, first of all, I would say that the Global Engagement Center and this entire effort is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system.
And the First Amendment.
The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech.
The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves.
They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what's true.
We don't need a truth squad.
And that's exactly what GEC was designed for.
It was designed to suppress any information.
that countered national policy and to identify people who may have had opinions that were controversial or unwanted as foreign inspired when in fact, they had no connection whatsoever to foreign governments, which is both slanderous and detrimental of the First Amendment.
Now, there is some hypocrisy, obviously, on the Republican side as well, because there is, as we've been covering, a systematic assault on the rights of people in the United States, citizens, green card holders, people who are here illegally on student visas to criticize Israel.
We've covered that at length.
That's a whole different type of censorship regime that is at least as menacing as the one they're talking about here.
But just for Reporting on this, Matt Taibbi is so hated by the Democratic Party, which used to pretend to have free speech as one of its core values, that they're willing to try and demean his character even with no foundation.
All right.
At the other hearing, the JFK hearing, we showed a little bit of this clip last night while we were interviewing Jefferson Morley, because we were...
Jeff Morley identifies himself as a liberal, as a liberal Democrat, someone sort of on the progressive side of the Democratic Party, and he always has been.
He's not a conservative in any way.
And yet it's very notable that the people who have the most interest in his reporting, especially when it comes to the role that the CIA played in that assassination and covering it up, tends to be right-wing media.
He was on our show last night and he had a hard out at 8 o'clock because Jesse Watters wanted to put him on his show and did, and not for the first time.
Jesse Watters was very interested in the JFK hearing.
A lot of right-wing media wants to understand whether the CIA had a role to play in the Kennedy assassination, and by and large, Democrats could not be more uninterested, even though the target of that assassination was a Democratic president, a kind of skeon of the most elevated Democratic royal family, which is the Kennedys.
You would think they would have the biggest interests, especially because back then they were the ones who regarded the CIA as sinister, but no more.
There's no iota of concern about the CIA, barely, in left liberal politics and Democratic Party politics.
And that's why Jasmine Crockin had this to say when she attended the hearing where Oliver Stone and Jeff Morley, people who have spent, you know, decades in depth studying this issue, investigating this issue, An issue that Jasmine Crockett knows almost nothing about.
And here's what she had to say.
Previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy.
I mean, can you believe how much dumbness and or dishonesty is required to say that?
You think Jasmine Crockett has read the 80,000 pages of newly unclassified and released documentation in order to be able to conclude having studied this very carefully in her congressional office that the documents now exonerate the CIA of any involvement.
That is so stupid.
Obviously some staff member prepared for that for her.
She's reading it.
But then she goes on to say after declaring the CIA innocent because the Democrats love the CIA because they recognize quite validly that has been their political But what I find funny about this hearing is that the Republicans are here re
-litigating whether CIA agents lied 60 years ago.
Aren't doing anything about the CIA director lying to Congress just six days ago.
So that's what she finds funny.
Funny. Like, why would we as Congress want to investigate who killed an American president?
Whether the CIA, which has grown enormously since the early 1960s, the Vietnam War, the dirty wars of the 1980s in Central America, and most of all, The endless wars after the war on terror and many other things in between.
Why would we be concerned at all if they actually murdered an elected American president because they were concerned about his foreign policy or disliked his foreign policy or concerned that he was going to constrain them or weaken that agency?
Why would we be concerned about the CIA?
The new proof of the CIA, top-level officials of the CIA, lied to investigators, covered up all sorts of relevant information including the fact that the CIA had been surveilling and monitoring and in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald for many, many years. Nobody really knew that, as Jeff Morley explained, until the documents were released.
She's like, who cares?
It's so funny that people are interested in this.
And also, the CIA was exonerated.
These documents, the 80,000 that I, Jasmine Crockett, have read very studiously and carefully prove that they were innocent.
It exonerates them.
So what are we even doing here?
Here was another member of Congress, Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic member of Congress, who decided that she was going to exploit this hearing in order to try and force Jeff Morley, who was only there to talk about these documents and the JFK assassination, the CIA's involvement, to talk about anything but that.
Mr. Morley, you said that JFK, quote, took great risks on behalf of all Americans in resisting the forces of militarism and racism.
Yes. Donald Trump, on the other hand, recently eliminated, believe it or not, the prohibition on federal contractors using or maintaining racially segregated facilities.
JFK would have rejected what Trump recently did, correct?
You know, I was invited here to talk about the JFK files, and I don't want to make a partisan political issue of it.
Like I said, I'm a liberal Democrat, and if in general I had to choose between a conservative Republican like Donald Trump and a liberal Democrat like JFK, I would choose JFK.
Well, let me talk about USAID for a second, because that was something that JFK actually established.
Sir, recently, USAID is now being shuttered.
Again, that is something that is a very important part of his legacy, and that's something that he would have opposed, obviously, correct?
I think President Kennedy would have said that no government agency is sacrosanct, and I'm sure he would have said that any federal agency that should be abolished should be done in consultation between the President and Congress.
And that hasn't been done here, yes sir?
Not that I know of.
You can see how angry he is.
This is an investigative journalist who has devoted a substantial part of his life to documenting the cover-up by the Warren Commission that had a massive influence of Alan Dulles, the longtime CIA director who JFK fired.
They put him on the Warren Commission.
The decades-long cover-up by the CIA.
The documents are now finally being released.
In their full form, their unredacted form, that sheds considerable light on this information.
He's very excited by this.
This is what he does.
And he comes there and they're trying to get him to talk about what JFK would say about various Trump policies.
I mean, the idiocy of it.
And you can see just how resentful he is about it.
And he even said, look, I'm not here to make this a partisan issue.
He told us last night on his substack, on his site, where he He writes about the JFK investigation.
He said he has equal numbers of people across the political spectrum, people who are right-wing and concerned about what they call the deep state, people on the left who have always been anti-imperialist and anti-security state, and everyone in between.
But these people in Congress have no interest in anything substantial.
All they want to do is ignore everything and speak about Trump and his evils.
Now, speaking about Donald Trump and his evils, there is this remarkable and darkly hilarious and blatantly pathetic trend that's going on every four years, for as long as I can remember.
YOU HAVE ALL THESE ELITES, CELEBRITIES AND THE LIKE, YOU SAY, OH, IF GEORGE BUSH WINS, IF JOHN MCCAIN WINS, IF MIT ROMNEY WINS, I'M LEAVING THE UNITED STATES.
2016, I'M LEAVING THE THEY NEVER DO, EVEN WHEN THE REPUBLICANS WIN, EVEN THEY SAY Finally, in the second victory, Donald Trump, there were actually a few people who did leave the United States.
Ellen DeGeneres moved to London.
Rosie O'Donnell went to Ireland.
So at least they're carrying through on this, but these other celebrities are not even worth mocking.
What is worth looking at is the fact that you have these self-identified experts, these honored, heralded experts in the highest levels of American academia who are also now fleeing America, they say, because it's not safe for them to stay any longer.
One of them is the Yale professor Jason Stanley, who Really just became a laughingstock the more he exposed himself on X. I mean they have these like lofty titles at Yale, you know, the chair, the founded, funded, named chair that they hold.
Everything's designed to like elevate their, their stature and their prestige and their intellectual elevation and then they go on to X and they just, you realize what complete morons these people are.
Just like politically banal in every way, you know, totally on board with Russiagate.
So he's one of them, his fellow Yale professor Jeffrey Timothy Snyder, who became pretty much like the academic hero of American liberals because he wrote, he was extremely enthusiastic about Russiagate, he's an absolute fanatic about funding the war in Ukraine,
he thinks Trump is in bed with Putin, and he wrote this book on tyranny that liberals think is the guidebook for how you avoid The authoritarianism and tyranny of Donald Trump and then his wife who is also a senior professor at Yale.
All three of them are together fleeing the United States to Canada and they're saying they're fleeing.
It's not like they just got a job at another university.
They did get a job in a Canadian university, but they're saying we're leaving because we fear America.
We don't feel safe.
He's very protected, lofty, extremely wealthy.
Celebrated academics don't feel safe.
Obviously, there are people whose civil liberties are at threat.
We've been covering them a lot.
It's not wealthy, shielded, coddled, highly credentialed Dale professors.
And if you're going to make a career out of saying, oh, I'm a fascism expert, I'm going to teach you how to fight Trump's authoritarianism, you should be the last person running away and fleeing.
You've told people, stay and fight.
That's how you got rich.
You wrote a book saying the key is to disobey, defy them, stay and fight, and now not even two months into the administration, you're admittedly fleeing, and of course they get a glamorous write-up in Vanity Fair.
Hear from Vanity Fair on Monday.
The fascism expert at Yale who's fleeing America.
Quote, philosophy professor Jason Stanley is leaving the US for Canada.
Can we put that up?
The philosophy professor Jason Stanley is leaving the U.S. for Canada.
I... Yeah, it's a sub-headline.
So it says, Vanity Fair says, philosophy professor Jason Stanley is leaving the U.S. for Canada, which he calls, quote, the Ukraine of North America, because he believes Trump's America is, quote, pretty far along in the grips of fascism.
Here's what the interviewer asks.
She says, I'm a dual Canadian citizen.
I went to high school in Canada.
My family's there.
I don't think I personally have witnessed anything like the tension between the two countries that I'm seeing now.
What do you think Canada's role in all of this will be?
And then Professor Stanley, the philosophy professor at Yale says, Canada is going to be at the forefront because they're being squarely targeted by the United States.
So just like Ukraine is squarely targeted by Russia, Canada is the Ukraine of North America right now.
We, meaning the United States, are a fascist regime, so we can't tolerate a free democracy next to us.
Canada is going to be like Ukraine, except they don't have the Ukrainian army.
Trump has said he's not going to use the military against Canada, and I actually believe that, but he's going to relentlessly target Canada.
And he talks about how his close friend, Timothy Snyder, is going with him, along with his wife, who, to be frank, I don't recall her name, but she's a celebrated professor at Yale as well.
What is it?
Marcy Shore, exactly.
Thank you.
Now, here is an excerpt of Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny, which has become a massive bestseller.
I mean, he's made millions of dollars on this book because he wrote it.
It came out in April 2017.
It was obviously about Trump.
I am the academic expert, the historian and the expert on tyranny, and here I am to tell you that Trump is a tyrant.
Authoritarianism is coming, and here's how you have to resist it.
The title, Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance.
Timothy Snyder takes us from Nazism in Austria to the Milgram Experiment.
Quote, this is Snyder from his book.
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.
In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.
A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Now, in fairness, a lot of people are suggesting that it's really his wife who's demanding that they flee and he's just going with her.
But it's this trio.
And Jason says, oh yeah, they're my best friends, those two.
We're all fleeing together.
After you wrote a book telling other people, fight, stand your ground and fight.
Don't give in ahead of time.
Because that's what teaches them that they can go further.
And here he is fleeing the country, not fighting anything.
No one's even targeted him.
No one's even interested in him.
Like, if, you know, the FBI starts snooping around and he hears he's about to be re-arrested, okay, flee the country, but no one's even remotely suggesting that's gonna happen.
And they're the first ones out.
In case you don't know who Jason Stanley is, let me show you this promo video of him talking about himself.
It'll really give you a good sense of who this heroic, self-exiled dissident is.
My name is Jason Stanley.
I'm the Jacob Urofsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
My name is Jason Stanley.
I'm the Jacob Urofsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
Hi, my name is Jason Stanley.
I'm the Jacob Urofsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
My name is Jason Stanley.
I'm a teacher in the Philosophy Department here at Yale University.
Do you see how we almost forgot to add that?
It's so crucial to his identity and then he corrected it.
I'm a teacher in the philosophy department here at Yale University.
I'm the Jacob Jurofsky Professor of Philosophy.
I'm the Jacob Urofsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and the author of five books, most recently, How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us and Them.
What is success?
You can be successful at many things.
You can be successful at counting blades of grass.
Is that success?
It is like that.
I'm the Jacob Jurowski Professor of Filth Street at Yale University.
I'm the author of five books, most recently, How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us.
Alright, so do you get a sense for who he is?
Are you at all surprised that he's fleeing the country thinking he's being persecuted?
Like I said, I do think there are people whose civil liberties are in danger, whose liberty is in danger, but it's not them.
And by the way, just as a side note, although he loves to, you know, like, in academia, there's sort of like assistant professor, and then associate professor, and then full professor, and then you get tenure, but the top is a named chair, a named professorship, which comes from people funding a certain chair or professor, and then you are like the, you know, George Soros professor of finance or whatever.
It's supposed to be the most prestigious.
Funny thing is, nobody knows who this Jacob Urofsky person is.
Try and Google them.
You can't find anything.
The only thing that comes up is this person.
He's apparently some anonymous person who, I guess, gave money to Yale for a chair in his name.
And Jason Stanley is very proud of that.
But no one even knows who this is.
But it really shows you this kind of character of The most elite people who love to convince themselves that they're the most endangered.
There was recently a trailer for a new film produced by Israel supporters, one of whom is the multi-billionaire Facebook mogul Sheryl Sandberg.
And it's obviously coming out right as Gaza is being destroyed and hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of children are being killed.
And it starts off with her saying, On the verge of tears, obviously Jews like me are very afraid, and I said to my friend, I need to ask you something.
If it comes down to it, will you hide me?
Will you hide me?
And the friend said, what do you mean?
She wasn't Jewish, the friend.
And then Sheryl Sandberg explained, well, you know, like Anne Frank, she was hidden by a non-Jewish family during the Holocaust.
Will you hide me?
And then she said, oh, the friend right away knew what I was talking about.
But if she had been Jewish, she wouldn't have asked.
She would have known exactly.
So the person in danger, the person who needs to be hidden, the person who has to cry because she's victimized and persecuted, is a multi-billionaire Facebook mogul who can, and I'm sure does have, her own small army of security and private islands that she can escape to on her yacht or private plane.
And there is this tendency for the people who have the most security, who have the most power, to simultaneously want to depict themselves as the most persecuted and endangered victim.
It's like a power play.
It's not enough to have all that power.
You then have to insist that you're simultaneously the ones who are victimized.
It's a very common psychological dynamic if you look for it.
All right, a couple other items.
Last night, in two different, There were special elections for the House of Representatives in part because one was an open seat because Mike Waltz left his Florida district to become Donald Trump's National Security Advisor.
He had previously been a Republican member of the House.
And the other was the seat abandoned by Matt Gaetz when he became Trump's nominee for Attorney General.
And although he didn't Get confirmed.
He withdrew his nomination, likely because he wouldn't get the support of Republican senators.
That seat is now open as well.
So there were two different special elections and both these elections should have been automatic for the Republicans because one of them, the one that is Matt Gaetz's seat, is a plus 30 Republican district, meaning Trump won that district in 2024 by 30 points.
Overwhelmingly red district.
And the other, Mike Waltz, is even more overwhelmingly red, plus 36. And yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats tend to come out more in low-turnout elections.
It's generally the party out of power that's more motivated in midterms, which is why it's typical for the party out of power to do very well in the midterms, because they're more motivated because of their loss.
But in both districts, the Republicans won by something like 15 points, 16 points, a significant decrease, obviously, from 30 and 36. And then in Wisconsin, where Elon Musk poured a huge amount of money because he wanted to change the majority, which is a liberal 4-3 majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to a 4-3 conservative majority.
So he backed the conservative candidate there with tens of millions of dollars.
He went to Wisconsin, Tried to insert himself into the race, said that all of Western civilization depends on it.
The Democrat won by something like 13 points, even though Trump just won Wisconsin a few months ago in the 24-24 election, but by a very small margin.
Still, it was a big Democratic turnout.
The Democratic judge won easily.
Now they're going to be able to redistrict in favor of Democrats.
Probably Democrats will gain a seat or two in Wisconsin for the 2026 midterms.
So there was a lot at stake.
George Soros put some money in.
J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois.
But Elon Musk put by far the most.
One of the Members of Congress, the candidate, the congressional candidate who won in Mike Waltz's seat, but with a much smaller margin than Mike Waltz did, or Trump did, is named Randy Fine.
Randy Fine will easily become the most embarrassing, pathetic, but fanatical supporter of Israel.
He, you can't, he doesn't even hide it, that for him, Israel is the number one issue.
Trump backed him because he obviously wants the Republican to win.
He so ironically called him America first, even though he's nothing of the sort.
Here's a sum of what Randy Fine has said over the last year or so.
On October 24th, on October 10th, 2024, he said about Gaza, there is no suffering adequate for these animals.
May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood.
December 4th, 2023.
Kill them all.
Hashtag no mercy.
Hashtag bombs away.
June 4th, 2021.
This is before October 7th, obviously.
Somebody put a picture of a baby that was killed by an Israeli tank.
And the Twitter user said, supporting killing innocent people and babies and smearing voices for that fight against genocide for some AIPAC money says a lot about your character.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
How do you sleep at night?
That was to Randy Fine.
And he responded, I sleep quite well, actually.
Thanks for the picture.
Here is a picture of Randy Fine in his office.
He was, before just getting elected, he was a member of the State Senate.
By the way, Ron DeSantis hates Randy Fine.
He said that he has an extremely alienating and repellent personality, that the reason he won by a much smaller margin wasn't because of some pro-anti-Trump or pro-Democrat swing.
It's because he's such a horrific candidate.
And here he is in his office with his gigantic Israeli flag.
He goes to Israel constantly.
Michael Tracy interviewed him for our show.
We actually had him on our show for an interview with Michael Tracy on one of his roving trips.
And he talked about how he thinks Israel doing everything that Israel wants is also good for America.
But here you see him.
Maybe there's an American flag somewhere in the distance.
You see the Israeli flag, a little bit the Florida flag.
Big yarmulke there.
Big Hanukkah menorah there.
But no American flag, at least not front and center.
So that's the new member of Congress.
He said, At least as horrific things.
And that's just sociopathic.
I mean, you can support the war in Israel.
And obviously, I'd be clear what I think of that.
But there are people I know who support the war in Israel while also actually lamenting the loss of innocent Palestinian life.
He revels in it.
He said before, there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
Let the blood flow.
So that is a new member of Congress.
And to be completely honest, I think he's going to actually be a very valuable instrument for those who oppose Israel.
He's so grotesque on all levels.
He's so, as Ron DeSantis said, alienating and unappealing.
He's so flagrant about his first loyalty that usually people who are more subtle are more effective communicators.
He's everything but that.
And I think people are going to make him the face of the pro-Israel movement for good reason.
And I think that'll help bring transparency to what this movement is.
A couple more quick items that I just wanted to go over because I think they're very relevant.
The senator from Arkansas, the Republican senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, is somebody who pretends to support President Trump quite a bit.
When, in reality, he actually despises the MAGA foreign policy on which Trump ran.
Not necessarily the one he's pursuing.
Restarting the bombing campaign of Biden in Yemen and escalating it.
Restarting the Biden-fueled war in Gaza for Israel.
Threatening Iran with war.
But Tom Cotton hates what the MAGA foreign policy is.
As opposed to what Trump's so far doing.
And... Although...
I certainly give Trump credit for trying.
We'll see if it works to end the war in Ukraine.
Nobody's really tried before.
But as far as the Middle East is concerned, you're not really seeing this peacemaker Trump pledge to be quite the contrary.
Here's Tom Cotton at a hearing yesterday.
The subject was what to do about Iran, whether to go to war with Iran, whether to bomb Iran, which Trump is threatening to do.
And here's what Tom Cotton had to say about that.
And finally, there's some hysteria about the prospect of the president ordering these strikes or someone like you in uniform providing him advice that it's going to lead to another forever war or another endless war.
Are you aware of operations, maybe operations against Iran, like the tanker wars?
By the way, for those listening to the show, when Tom Cotton snidely said, oh there's this hysteria that if we bomb Iran, it's going to be another forever war, Or another endless war.
He put that in scare quotes to mock the fact that the United States has been on a posture and a footing of endless war and forever wars, which obviously is true.
And here's what we heard in Iraq, by the way.
Oh, don't worry, it's going to be an invasion.
It's going to be over very quickly.
Bill Kristol said it would be over in eight weeks.
And like eight years later, American troops were still there.
Nine and 10 years later, none of what we were promised would happen happened.
It turned into an endless war.
As Tom Cotton calls it, a forever war, as did the one in Afghanistan.
So when these people start mocking quote-unquote hysteria, meaning people's concerns, are we getting into another Mideast war against Israel?
That's when you know about things are about to happen.
Here's the rest of what he said.
Yes, sir.
Those examples in our history do exist.
Maybe the Qasem Soleimani strike in 2020 as well that caused Iran to pull in its horns for the rest of President Trump's first term.
Thank you, General Cain.
So this is the sentiment, obviously asserting itself very aggressively among the Republican Senate caucus.
Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Obviously, Lindsey Graham's on board.
Their dream is to go to war with Iran, since Iran is Israel's worst enemy.
That is their dream.
They've been wanting this for a long time.
And they clearly feel with President Trump in office, even though he ran, saying that the proudest part of his legacy from the first term was he didn't involve the U.S. in any new wars.
That he wanted to be a peacemaker, that it's time to come home, to use our resources at home, to not fight these foreign wars.
Clearly Tom Cotton, at least, and many others, think that it's very likely.
We'll see how that turns out.
I'm not convinced that Trump's gonna go to war with Iran.
I do think he threatens war a lot in order to get what he wants.
But if he doesn't get what he wants, he told Hamas while the ceasefire was still in place, the one that he facilitated and took credit for it, rightly so.
He said if you don't release all the hostages immediately, as opposed to in accordance with the agreement that we negotiated with you, hell is gonna rain down upon you and that's exactly what the Israelis are doing now.
There was an article from the Wall Street Journal today about how Miriam Adelson and Ben Shapiro were the ones who arranged for Trump to meet with the family members of the hostages and other hostages and who were released.
And they told him all these stories and enraged him, and he was like, we need to get those hostages out immediately.
And when Hamas said, no, we're going to stick to the agreement, that's when Trump greenlit Israel going back in and bombing far more indiscriminately still.
Earlier this week, there's a lot of evidence that they just summarily executed 15 aid workers, ambulance drivers, And so when Trump's threatening Iran,
you cannot be so certain that it's only to have negotiating leverage to get a good deal for their nuclear program.
We had a deal in place, of course, that Trump withdrew from and invalidated.
He said it wasn't a very good deal.
And of course Trump's saying, "I prefer to have a deal, but if we don't have a deal, we're going to bomb Iran." And you have to take seriously, given what's just happened in Gaza, given what's now happening in Yemen, that Trump's perfectly willing to start a new midi-swar, and certainly Tom Cotton All right, last point.
There is a New York mayoral race that is happening and obviously the current incumbent Democratic Mayor Eric Adams is all but dead politically.
The federal court yesterday, the strategy of the Trump DOJ was to say to Eric Adams, if you cooperate with us on deporting people in the country illegally by letting us come into New York and deport these people, we'll agree to dismiss the criminal case against you brought by the Justice Department for bribery and all kinds of money inappropriately and secretly accepted from Turkey and others.
that he was indicted for.
And Trump DOJ said, if you play ball with us, we'll just drop this case.
But we're not going to drop it completely, meaning with prejudice.
That means we drop it and it can never be brought again.
They said, we'll drop it without prejudice, meaning we can bring it back at any time.
So it's like kind of a leverage that's hanging over your head.
So if you don't do what we want, you know that we can bring the case back.
And what the federal court did instead, just yesterday, was they said, no, you cannot have it both ways.
The Justice Department said it wants to dismiss his lawsuit.
We're rejecting their request to do it without prejudice, meaning they can bring it back at any time.
He dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department can never indict Adams on these issues again.
But still, politically, people are very unhappy with him, not just because of the indictment, but well before that, because of perceived mismanagement of the city, widespread corruption.
And Andrew Cuomo stepped into the breach, and he obviously is the one with the biggest name recognition.
As I said before, Democrats don't care at all about sexual harassment scandals or Me Too stuff.
That's just a way to demonize their enemies or to wield power.
So that's not impeding Andrew Cuomo at all.
But he's ahead in the polls, but the mayoral race is just kind of getting started.
And there is what I find to be an interesting candidate, Zoran Mamdani.
He was now in the New York Assembly, as an elected member of the New York Assembly.
He's a Democrat.
And he comes from the more left wing of the Democratic Party.
He's been supported by DSA, the Democratic Socialist America.
But the campaign he's running is really devoid of ideology.
It's very, very focused on cost of living.
And he's gotten so much money that he's actually asking for nobody to send more money.
He's already reached the maximum for matching funds.
There's a lot of grassroots support for him.
He's very charismatic and I think he's a very good politician.
The kind of campaign he's running is designed to talk to people, the majority of working class New Yorkers, about the cost of living problems in their lives and the way to fix that.
He's trying to offer very practical solutions, avoid the mistakes of Democrats of culture war focus, And all that.
And he's actually rising in the polls.
Nowhere near Andrew Cuomo yet, but there's still a lot of time left.
He's enough of a threat that the New York Post decided to run a smear campaign on the cover of the New York Post against him.
And here is the title.
Anti-Israel Lefty Zoran Mamdani's New York mayoral campaign is a preposterous bid for a radical city hall takeover.
That's the headline.
So there you see it.
It says Anti-Israel lefty.
So the first thing they can think to say about him is that he's anti-Israel.
And so the question then becomes, and it talks about how he's a Muslim, he's 33 years old.
The first question becomes, why is this even relevant to deciding the New York mayoral race?
Is it a requirement to take any office in the United States, including municipal office?
That you love and support Israel.
This is a requirement of like American patriotism or American citizenship or being in good standing in the United States.
You have to like fully support the wars and policies of this foreign country on the other side of the world.
I saw someone today saying, well yeah, of course it's relevant to New York because there are a million Jews in New York.
And I just found that very odd because that implies that Jewish Americans vote in presidential elections not based on what's best for America, but based on what's best for Israel, which is a long-standing anti-Semitic trope that Jews aren't really loyal, they have dual loyalty, they vote based on what's good for Israel.
It's really interesting because if you say that Jewish Americans vote based on what's good for Israel or have loyalty to Israel as a criticism, you'll obviously immediately be branded as anti-Semitic, promoting the dual loyalty Trope.
But if you say it as kind of a pro-Israel spokesperson, I remember the weekly standard under Bush and into Obama, run by Bill Kristol, funded by Rupert Murdoch, used to run articles all the time saying, Democrats are insane.
No, Jewish voters would be insane if they vote Democrats because Democrats are now so anti-Israel.
Meaning American Jews, But I do find it so telling that the New York Post,
as their first line of attack to smear Zoran Mamdani, and part of it is because he's Muslim, obviously, is that he's anti-Israel, as though that's a relevant metric for deciding who should govern New York City.
Obviously, Andrew Cuomo is a fanatical supporter of Israel.
In fact, Andrew Cuomo, just a quick story about him, just to show you where he is politically.
Andrew Cuomo Copied the laws of a lot of red states.
The laws of a lot of red states say, if you want to have a contract with our state, you're like a, you're not an employed school teacher, but you're like a specialist in speech pathology, or you have a construction contract with the state.
In order to get a contract with the state, you have to vow.
You have to sign a form saying that you do not and will not support a boycott of Israel.
You can boycott any other country in the world.
You can boycott Any American state you want, you just can't boycott Israel.
Many red states have that law in place and it's been declared unconstitutional by several federal courts but never reached the Supreme Court.
Obviously on First Amendment grounds that you can't make it a condition.
You're allowed to boycott Israel.
You're allowed to boycott South Africa.
You're allowed to boycott Iran.
You're allowed to boycott whatever country you want, even Israel, under the First Amendment.
That's what courts have said.
Andrew Cuomo said that he participated in a boycott of North Carolina and then also a boycott of Indiana because they enacted trans bathroom laws.
You may remember North Carolina was the first state to do that, that said you can only use the bathroom that corresponds to your biological sex at birth to prevent trans women from using the women's restroom, trans men from using the men's restroom.
And liberal America decided this was one of the most biggest laws ever and they're going to boycott North Carolina.
They boycotted Indiana as well.
Andrew Cuomo not participated in that boycott.
He ordered New York State employees not to travel to North Carolina or to Indiana except for an emergency, except for emergency travel.
He banned New York State from doing business with other American states to harm them through a boycott.
At the same time, Andrew Cuomo posted a tweet and wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post with the title, if you boycott Israel, we're going to boycott you.
And he issued an executive order saying, you cannot do business with the state if you support a boycott of Israel.
Think about that priority scheme.
Not only are you allowed to boycott other American states, in the case of Andrew Cuomo, if you work for him, you are required to boycott them.
You have to boycott North Carolina, boycott Indiana, actual American states with Americans living in them.
But In Andrew Cuomo's world, what you cannot do, the one boycott you cannot do, is of this one foreign country, Israel.
And so, he's extremely pro-Israel.
You know, I think conservatives probably understand that they're not going to get, they're going to get a Democratic mayor, and so they'd be very happy with Andrew Cuomo, and that's why they're attacking him.
But I just found it so interesting that the thing they have on him is that he's, quote, anti-Israel, as though that is an important qualification for this job.
Which, Let's face it, it actually is, in terms of how a lot of voters vote.
It's just good to have that air, to have that out there, that you have to have loyalty to this foreign country if you want to hold office in America.
And that's true for a lot of people who describe themselves as America first.
They too have that demand.
Believe me, I've seen many of them and heard from many of them over the last couple months.
It's just good to have this priority scheme, this value scheme, Out there and as explicit as possible, I think Randy Fiennes' election elevation to the Congress is going to help with that, and I think things like this help with that as well, as do obviously the prioritization by the Trump administration not of mass deportations of people in the country illegally,
as they promised, but of people in the United States legally, but who commit in their mind the gravest crime, which is speaking out or in some way denouncing the State of Israel and its wars.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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