Trump's Tariffs: A Threat to the Neoliberal Order? With Journalist David Sirota; Biden CBP Fabricated Doc to Help Imprison Bolsonaro Adviser? Plus: Israel Support Collapsing
Journalist David Sirota explains the political implications of Trump's tariffs in the U.S. and their potential effects on Wall Street vs. Main Street. Plus: did Biden's CBP fabricate documents in order to help Brazil imprison a Bolsonaro advisor? Finally: new polls reveal declining support for Israel while DHS unveils a program to search immigrants' social media for "antisemitic" content.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Donald Trump's global tariff plan continues to dominate the news.
last night.
And this morning, the stock market was once again plummeting.
And perhaps even more menacingly, the bond market was becoming unstable and even threatened.
As a result, President Trump today announced a plan that one of his billionaire donors, Bill Ackman, had publicly demanded that he do on Monday.
Namely, that Trump impose a 90-day pause on his tariff plan to allow negotiations to take place.
Trump essentially did that, although he did lower all tariffs on every country to 10% except on China, which retaliated again today with higher tariffs and it doesn't affect the trade war with China.
Now, Trump's pause predictably not only calmed the markets, but sent them higher and higher throughout the day, erasing much of the losses over the last week.
David Sirota is a longtime investigative journalist and the founder of Lever News.
He's also a friend of the show, though he is part of the progressive left.
So does Sirota's reaction to Trump's tariff has actually been quite...
Trade war with China.
Has actually been quite nuanced, and you can't say that for many people.
While certainly not in agreement with how Trump's tariff plan was devised, Sirota has been reminding the left that they have long regarded free trade and globalism as a leading enemy, and that Trump is the first president in quite a long time to say that and to target that scheme for erosion.
He'll be with us here tonight to help us sort out the tariff debate and the latest developments.
But first, before we get to that...
There's a very interesting and potentially explosive case making its way through the United States Federal Court involving the United States and Brazil that we really wanted to tell you about.
We previously reported on the case of Felipe Martins.
He was the former international affairs advisor to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Martins was unjustly imprisoned last year based on a clear and demonstrable falsehood by Brazil's chief censor and authoritarian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes.
Now, As it turns out, in the middle of Martin's six months imprisonment, which he was imprisoned without even any charges, right in the middle, even as prosecutors were saying that he ought to be released, a fabricated entry from the Biden administration's Customs and Patrol Agency Suddenly materialized out of nowhere that Maraich then instantly pointed to and used to justify Martin's ongoing imprisonment.
There have long been questions about how and why a fake immigration document suddenly appeared in the CBP system in the United States.
And now Martin is suing in a federal court to determine who and what was responsible for this false entry that justified his unjust imprisonment.
And in federal court, a Clinton-appointed judge seems quite sympathetic thus far to the obviously explosive possibility that there was a fabricated or forged immigration document in the United States system to help Alexandre de Moraes keep imprisoned Bolsonaro's top foreign affairs advisor.
We'll tell you about this amazing case and what the consequences could be.
And then finally...
A Gallup poll last month showed a clear and substantial decline in support for Israel among Americans.
We reported on that at the time.
A newly released Pew poll yesterday showed these trends even more starkly.
According to the survey, a majority of Americans, a majority, now have negative views of Israel, including 73% of Democrats under the age of 50 and 50% of Republicans under the age of 50. Basically, the only people who continue as a group to support Israel are older Republicans.
Such data is really unprecedented in American political life, which has long been steadfastly pro-Israel and a bipartisan consensus.
But these numbers also help explain why there is an intensification of censorship measures to punish and silence Israel critics.
That is often the tactic of desperation when a faction or group realizes they're losing the battle of public opinion.
Yet, as we saw with the liberal censorship regime of the last decade, trying to silence people for their views that you dislike typically only creates resentment and backlash.
We'll tell you about this polling data as well as a brand new and quite creepy Homeland Security program unveiled earlier today aimed at criticism of Israel.
Because of the time, we will likely have time for most of that third segment about the Israel polling and the new censorship scheme that we will have to stream exclusively.
On our Locals platform.
But 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.
Obviously, I follow Brazilian politics very closely.
I've been involved in Brazilian politics as a journalist, and my husband was a member of the Brazilian Congress, so it's something that we follow very closely.
Lived in Brazil for a while, and so it's something that is obviously a main focus of mine.
I write for the country's largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, where I do a lot of reporting, but I really try not to talk about...
Brazilian politics per se on this show, unless it really does have major international implications.
We talked a lot about Brazil's really unequaled censorship scheme because of the way that jeopardizes free speech in the broader West.
Every time one country in the democratic world goes further, it's a sign or a signal that other countries can as well.
And there's a case now in the federal court that really does have major implications, not really for Brazil, but for the United States.
Because the question is whether the Biden administration fabricated immigration documents in order to help Brazil's authoritarian censorship judge Alessandro de Moraes justify the baseless imprisonment.
of one of Jair Bolsonaro's top officials, his foreign policy advisor, Felipe Martins, whose imprisonment we've reported on before.
Now, I just want to tell you a little bit about the case
I'm not saying it will be proven, but there's certainly a lot of grounds.
As the federal court in the United States that's now looking into this has obviously concluded as well to believe that something extremely strange, if not corrupt, happened here with American immigration records.
Now, first of all, Felipe Martins was arrested in Brazil in February of 2024.
Here you see the headline in Folio, Sao Paulo.
At the time, it says the federal police targets Bolsonaro, Vladimir, former ministers and military officers in cooperation with a coup attempt.
Targets include various people.
And the key here is that Felipe Martins was never charged with a crime.
He was being investigated for what Reich says was his suspicion that Felipe Martins participated in a plan that would have led to a coup if Bolsonaro lost the election.
and that's the allegation against him at the time he was not charged.
yet he was nonetheless ordered to be arrested by, out of the way,
Now, the interesting part about this was when Felipe Martins was arrested, The argument was that the reason he needed to be arrested,
even though there were no charges pending against him, is because, said Moraes in the Brazilian court, Felipe Martins had left Brazil when Bolsonaro left Brazil.
You may remember that Bolsonaro, right after the day before, the last day of his presidency, the day before it was to be inaugurated in 2022, left Brazil for the United States.
He ended up staying in...
The United States and Orlando for six months, three months or six months, one of those, and then he came back.
And the court said that this top advisor, Felipe Martins, went with him to the United States, entered the United States, but then he, in the words of the court, evaporated.
He just disappeared because there was no record of him leaving the United States and coming back into Brazil, even though they knew he was in Brazil.
So they said, look.
This proves that he can just disappear.
He's like the invisible man.
And that shows that he can flee justice at any time.
So we have to put him in prison while this investigation is ongoing because of what he did.
He left Brazil, entered the United States, but somehow came back without leaving a trace of having done so.
The whole thing was a lie.
An absolute, provable, demonstrable lie.
I spent months working on this case.
And there was a mountain of evidence proving that Felipe Martins never left Brazil.
He was in Brazil the whole time.
He just never went with Bolsonaro to the US.
None of this ever happened.
Just to give you a couple of examples, a week after he was alleged to have gone to the US with Bolsonaro, Felipe Martins flew on a domestic flight inside Brazil.
And the court got those records.
It was a Brazilian Airlines.
He flew from one city in Brazil to the other a week after he was said to have gone to the United States.
So just on that alone, they knew he was in Brazil.
They had iFood receipts and credit card charges, his phone records, mountains of surveillance data that the police, the federal police obtained showing that he was in Brazil the whole time.
And there you see from Wall, one of the Brazilian outlets, while he was imprisoned, Felipe Martín presents iFood receipts, an airline ticket, in order to argue that his imprisonment should be overturned.
And the fact that this was such a lie from the start
I would not have written an article arguing that he was wrongfully imprisoned unless I was truly convinced with certainty that he was in Brazil all along.
And I saw this evidence.
I worked with his lawyer.
And I ended up writing this article.
This was in August of 2024, so basically five months into, six months into his imprisonment.
I wrote an article in Folio.
There you see it in Portuguese, but the headline of that translated is Brazil, Bolsonaro's former advisor is imprisoned based on a false allegation.
Alessandro de Moraes ignores evidence proving that Felipe Martins did not try to flee Brazil at the end of 2022.
And what was amazing about this was that the evidence was so immediately apparent that Felipe Martins never left Brazil and came to the United States, that even his prosecutors, who are part of the government under Lula da Silva,
even they, right after he was in prison and then again in May, went to the Supreme Court and said, Look, we don't think he should be in prison.
We realize now there's no evidence that justifies this allegation that he left Brazil and evaporated.
He was in Brazil the whole time.
Even his own prosecutors were arguing that.
And Marais twice ignored them and just rejected that petition to release him.
And here you see from CNN Brazil, May of 2024, Marais rejects a new request for release and keeps Felipe Martins in prison.
The prosecutor has already spoken out in favor of the release of Bolsonaro's former advisor.
Quote, the arrest was based on the argument that Felipe Martins left Brazil aboard a presidential plane on November, on December 30th, 2022, with then President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Attorney General's office has already expressed itself for the release of Martins on March 1st, a month into his imprisonment.
In the most recent motion submitted on April 23rd, the defense indicated what it considers a new and relevant piece of evidence to prove that Felipe Martins did not in fact leave the country on the presidential pain that departed Brasilia for the United States on December 30th, 2022.
It is a response from the US Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for the entry of foreigners into the United States to a request
...regarding Martin's entry...
And records into the country.
The U.S. agency stated its system contains no record of Martins entering Orlando on December 30th, 2022, the date when Bolsonaro and his entourage landed in the country.
It also confirmed that his last recorded entry in the U.S. was in September of 2022 via New York.
So he never even entered the U.S. until two months before they claim he did, and then he came back.
He just never went to the U.S., and the evidence was overwhelming in this regard.
Here is the headline where the prosecutors again went back in August, which is when I wrote my article, saying, again, the prosecutors, the Attorney General's Office, request his release, precisely because there was no evidence.
And all the evidence that was available disproved Maraisha's argument that he disappeared and therefore had to be in prison.
He kept him in prison for six months.
The reason they wanted him in prison, and they've done this many times before, they imprison people, and they say, You're not going to get out unless you start turning on Bolsonaro and his top aides.
And if you admit that they actually did a coup and you participated in it, we'll let you out.
But if you don't, we're going to keep you in prison.
So even knowing the whole imprisonment was based on a false accusation, they kept him in prison anyway.
Now, the key event here that happened is after all that evidence was demonstrated, That he never left Brazil.
And after the Customs and Border Patrol said we have no record of him entering Brazil, suddenly, in the middle of his imprisonment, somehow in the Customs and Border Patrol system, there was created, or there emerged, out of nowhere,
a record that country, what they had said previously, now said, oh yeah, we actually do have a entry record in our system.
For Felipe Martins.
And that was when Marais said, oh, look, even now the Border Protection Agency in the U.S. says, yes, he did enter the U.S., but that he actually never left.
It just, it got manufactured out of nowhere.
And then Marais used that to justify it.
Here's the U.S. Custom and Border Protection record, the first one that was, that was, Produced that appeared in the middle of all this.
This is the Customs and Border Protection Agency under Joe Biden.
And here they purport to have the most recent entry date into the United States of December 30th, 2022.
That's when that president of pain with Bolsonaro came to the United States.
Suddenly they had, oh, there I go.
No, we do have a record of him entering the United States on exactly that date.
And then Rice said, oh, look, he got some.
A reporter extremely close to the Supreme Court that serves as their spokesman, Sebastian Reisch, published an article, oh, there is now an immigration record showing that he entered the U.S. and evaporated, even though before there wasn't.
And this record was so bizarre, not just because it appeared out of nowhere, but because it had so many mistakes in it.
For example, it misspelled his first name.
There you see the American spelling of Felipe.
F-E-L-I-P-E.
His name is actually F-I-L-I-P-E.
So they misspelled his name.
They also had here a passport number that was actually an old passport number right here.
This was an invalid passport from years before that he hadn't used.
And also it had him entering on a type of visa that he never had and never used.
It's like three Very clear mistakes on this document that appeared out of nowhere.
Then once they started interrogating and saying, what is this document?
Where did it come from?
How did you get that?
They started kind of backtracking.
And what they did was, first, they took all three of those errors that Felipe Martins' lawyer said.
How can this be a real record?
It has three errors.
And they just quietly changed it retroactively in the system.
So now they spelled his name correctly.
They changed the document number to reflect his document number and changed the type of visa they said he entered on.
They just retroactively changed the immigration records quietly with no note that they had done so.
And then as more pressure was put on them saying, what is all this?
They finally changed the record to reflect the reality, which was that his most recent entry into the United States was actually in September of 2022, so two months before that Bolsonaro plane went.
He clearly was not on it.
They had his name right, his passport right, but you see they just, they eliminated that record saying that he entered.
At the end of December, which is what the whole basis was for his imprisonment, why were these immigration records in Customs and Border in the United States trifled with, played with, and potentially fabricated at exactly the time that Barysh needed some evidence to keep him in prison?
One thing I can tell you is there are a lot of Brazilians who work in the United States, who live in the United States, who have become citizens of the United States, but obviously pay a lot of attention to Brazilian politics.
And there's a lot of them who work there.
I know Martin's lawyer one time called the Orlando Customs and Border Patrol where this came from, and they ended up speaking to the person who was responsible or overseeing this, and he had a clear Brazilian or Portuguese accent in English.
So there's a lot of mystery here.
And not just mystery, but a lot of basis for suspicion.
Obviously, if someone's going in, if the Custom Border Patrol can go in and start manipulating immigration records or changing them or just erasing data, that's a huge national security threat.
These are the records that tells us who comes into the country, when they come in.
And if somebody committed immigration fraud of this kind, if somebody created fabricated records in this system for purely political reasons to help keep a Bolsonaro advisor, who the Biden administration obviously hated, lots of people hate the Bolsonaros, the Bolsonaro movement,
all to help this judge, Judge Marais, unjustly keep someone in prison.
And that's something people should go to prison for in the United States.
That's forgery.
That's fraud.
Here from Folha de São Paulo, too, as the investigation went on, as he was in prison, just more evidence.
July of 2024, cell phone data shows that Martin was in Brazil during Bolsonaro's stay in the U.S. Information by Chim, which is the big cell phone carrier in Brazil, to the Supreme Federal Court proves he did not travel with the former president.
And they knew this very close to the beginning.
In fact, right after Lula was inaugurated, just a couple weeks after Felipe Martín supposedly went to the US with Bolsonaro and then disappeared, they submitted a Freedom of Information Act request,
the equivalent of that, to the government, which by this point was run by Lula.
And they said, request for information about the flight to Miami that transported the former president of the republic, Jair Bolsonaro, among others.
And the government said the official delegation on the plane was composed of, and they list the people, former president Jair Bolsonaro, his wife, the former first lady, and you just go through that list, and Felipe Martins is not on it.
This was available a year before Marais ordered him imprisoned.
He just wasn't on the plane.
He never was on the plane.
He never left Brazil.
So now what has happened is they have filed a lawsuit.
If we can pull that up.
Felipe Martins and his lawyers did filed a lawsuit in the federal district court in Orlando.
There you see the lawsuit in the middle district of Florida.
Felipe Martins against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United States.
Customs and Border Protection, raising all these issues, showing the federal court, look, there's good reason to believe that something very untoward happened here.
And we want discovery to find out how this false document emerged in the middle of his imprisonment, right when the prosecutors were saying, release him, all the evidence proves he never left Brazil.
He was in Brazil the whole time.
Conclusive. Decisive evidence.
And then suddenly this thing appears in the middle of the Custom Border Patrol system when previously they had no record of him entering.
And then that became the foundation, the basis for keeping him in prison.
Here was that reporter who serves the agenda of the Supreme Court, who published several false articles, one of which had to be heavily retracted.
About how he left the United States.
It's from Metropolis.
His name is Guillermo Armado.
And there you see the title, which is, under investigation, Felipe Martins has a recorded entry in the United States and then vanished.
A document on a U.S. government website states that Felipe Martins entered Orlando at the end of 2022.
Again, this is June.
This is four months after he was first ordered in prison, or five months.
This is the article that appeals under a journalist well-known to be aligned with Rice, who's basically his spokesman.
And he's like, oh, look what I found.
A custom and border record.
A new one.
A year into this whole thing.
That now suddenly shows, oh no, he did actually enter the U.S. And then they had to retract it.
They say, quote, the first version of the headline for this article was, under investigation, Bolsonaro's former advisor went to Orlando in 2022 and vanished.
This column understood, based on information available from the public consultation of Felipe Martins' I-94 entry form, that Martins had traveled to Orlando on December 30th, 2022.
At the time, the column made extensive efforts to contact Martins, but he never responded.
Months later, Martins provided information to the Supreme Court showing that he was in Brazil on that date, which suggests that the U.S. government website contained incorrect information.
They even had to admit it, the people who were desperate to keep him in prison, because it was so provably false.
So even this reporter who found this record And said, oh, look, this proves he evaporated, came to the U.S. and evaporated, now had to go back and retract the entire story, saying that, quote, the U.S. government website contained incorrect information.
Though we have never received a response from Martin's lawyers, in the interest of accuracy, the column made this correction.
We understand it was necessary because as of the publication date of this text, based on the I-94 data, the most accurate statement would have only been that there was a received entry.
Not that he had, in fact, traveled to the United States.
I mean, this is, regardless of why this happened, this is a massive scandal because you cannot have radically incorrect information in the U.S. customs and border system about entry into the United States.
Again, it's a huge national security problem.
That is the border.
That's what's supposed to keep out people to tell the United States government who enters.
And I guess it's possible sometimes mistakes get made in bureaucracies, but this would be an extremely coincidental mistake that exactly at the time when the Supreme Court judge, Moraes, knew that Felipe Martins had never left Brazil, that all this information that he long had even before he ordered Martins in prison,
including federal police surveillance, all kinds of receipts showing that he was in Brazil the whole time.
It was dispositive.
Even the prosecutors admitted it.
Suddenly, at the exact right time, this Customs and Border Protection form in the United States emerges in their system, showing exactly what Maraich needed it to show in order to justify his ongoing imprisonment.
And it is really remarkable.
The whole case is remarkable.
The... Uh...
Involvement of the United States is remarkable.
Whether there was evidence to believe that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection participated corruptly in these events or just recklessly, either way, this should be a matter of great interest to the U.S. Congress, to American policymakers, to investigators.
Now, fortunately, we have this judge in the United States, who, as I said, is a Clinton-appointed judge, but clearly, based on his commentary thus far on this lawsuit, It's only pending for a short amount of time, but he's already shown at least some degree of sympathy,
some degree of concern about what really happened here.
Here's Foley on April 2nd of this year reporting on the court case in the U.S. U.S. court schedules a hearing in the case alleging fraud in the entry of Bolsonaro's former advisor into the country.
Felipe Martins, one of those indicted by Brazil's Attorney General's office, will be heard on April 9th in Orlando.
The hearing will aim to clarify what the former advisor's defense sees as signs of fraud in the U.S. immigration records.
The records appeared in April 2024 during his imprisonment.
And were deleted in July of the same year.
I just want to stress, this newspaper, this is where I work, they are not pro-Bolsonaro.
To put it mildly.
It's like the New York Times of Brazil.
I personally consider them to be the most journalistically fair mainstream outlet in Brazil.
That's why I work with them.
I've worked with them for many years.
I did a little bit of Snowden reporting with them as it pertained to Brazil.
I did the investigation of the...
Anti-corruption probe in Brazil.
This past year, when I got the archive from Moraes' chambers, along with a reporter there, they very aggressively published every story on the front page, even though Moraes is a sacred figure in Brazil.
They're not supposed to criticize him.
I really respect the editors of this paper.
But they are still anti-Bolsonaro editorially.
And this is what they're saying.
As a news article, that suddenly it appeared in April, right when he was in prison, they needed it, and then was deleted in July of the same year.
And then Marais released him in August, two weeks after my article went.
It became clear that this was a scam.
It goes on, quote, the former advisor to Bolsonaro is one of the individuals indicted in the alleged coup plot said to have been orchestrated by Jair Bolsonaro, according to a statement by...
Judge Gregory Presnell, Martins may attend the session either in person or remotely.
And then after that article, the judge actually authorized discovery to take place.
Martins lawyers have a right to request multiple documents relevant to understanding how this false immigration entry emerged right when it was politically convenient and necessary to do so.
And so a discovery is going to take place.
I believe they have the right to depose officials at the Customs and Border Patrol as well to determine whether or not there was actual immigration fraud for political reasons to keep someone unjustly in prison who was disliked by the United States government.
And I just want to underscore what an absolute tyrant and authoritarian Alexander Dimitris is.
I just want to underscore this for you.
After this lawsuit was filed, And he knows that his reasons for keeping Felipe Martins in prison have now been completely disproven.
He kept someone in prison for six months who had not been charged with a crime.
He now has been.
Just a couple months ago, he was part of the indictment, along with Bolsonaro, of trying to engineer a coup.
I don't think it's actually been formally accepted yet by the courts.
He was not formally a defendant.
But at the time, he hadn't been charged with anything.
It was just an investigation.
And Maraich knows that he put someone in prison for six months despite the foundation and justification and rationale for that imprisonment having been completely debunked.
And so now Felipe Martins is suing in a U.S. District Court.
And so a week after that lawsuit was filed, Maraich threatened Felipe Martins with return to prison.
When he released Felipe Martins from prison, Because there was no evidence to justify his being there.
He imposed, obviously, unconstitutional conditions that he's not allowed to use social media.
He's not allowed to publicly talk about his case.
In other words, he can't criticize Marcin.
See, that's a condition for the release.
Four months ago, or five months ago, in October of last year, Felipe Marcin's lawyer came out of the courthouse and made a statement to the press while Felipe Marcin stood next to him.
He didn't speak, Philippe Martins.
Only his lawyer did.
And so Marij, obviously vindictively, in response to this embarrassing lawsuit, issued an order saying you have 24 hours to justify why your lawyer posted this video or recorded this video when there was an order for you not to speak.
And if you don't justify it to my...
satisfaction you're going back to prison I'll put you back in prison that's the kind of maniacal authoritarianism that we we have that that Brazil has but I do want to emphasize I just hope people understand the consequences and I hope people in Congress start to take this very seriously that there was absolute trifling with the immigration system and the immigration records of the United States Whether it was done recklessly and a huge coincidence or
corruptly, knowing that it was necessary to keep Philippe Martins in prison is something that this law student ought to find out.
But obviously, it should be a huge concern to the Republican-controlled House and Senate to find out whether or not people are just entering the custom of the border system, the immigration system, and just playing with documents, fabricating documents, erasing them, deleting them, just willy-nilly because of what they hope to achieve.
By doing that.
Certainly the answers are going to be discovered in this court case, but I think the Congress ought to be looking very seriously at this well, since it affects the integrity of the American immigration system, the entrance system in the United States, and therefore, obviously, lots of implications for national security as well.
all.
Here's a new story.
Mexico extradites 29 drug traffickers to the U.S. to avoid trade tariffs.
We all know how deceptive corporate media can be.
They push gender, censor voices, and make sure you only see one side of the story.
That's exactly why I started this show, especially on Rumble, because I believe in free speech, real conversations that are unconstrained, and the best pursuit of the truth possible.
And that's why I've also partnered now with an app and website that believes in all of those values too.
Ground News prioritizes free speech over controlling the narrative.
For every story, news story, you can find all the articles reporting on it worldwide with context such as if a news source has any political biases, how credible they are, if any major corporation is influencing their reporting.
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coverage of the news article with tags indicating if it's coming from a right-wing or a left-wing source or from corporations or independent voices.
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David Sirota is a long-time investigative journalist, a very dogged one at that.
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He's the founder of The Lever, which is a reader-supported outlet reshaping political and economic reporting in America.
Identifies, I believe, explicitly as someone on the progressive left, and yet his reporting is exactly the kind of journalism we need, where he just pursues facts without that kind of agenda driving it.
His work has often shaped national headlines from exposing Wall Street's secrecy to prompting government investigations.
And he was even nominated for an Academy Award for co-creating the Netflix blockbuster Don't Look Up.
I've known David for a long time.
We've had him on our show before.
It's always great to have him back.
Good to see you, David.
Good evening.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely. So obviously, I want to talk about the latest developments in Trump's tariff plan.
As I'm sure you know, earlier today, he announced a 90-day pause on that tariff plan, as many of his billionaire funders like Bill Ackman have been calling for.
The only exception is China, where he's keeping those tariffs in place, and now they're retaliating.
And I want to get into the Kind of minutiae of the deal itself and what your thoughts are.
But before I get to that, I just want to ask you kind of like as a broader perspective.
For as long as I can remember, the left's critique of the Democratic Party, people like the Clintons, was that they had devastated The manufacturing base deindustrialized the middle of the country, shipped jobs overseas with things like NAFTA and the Obama-Clinton support for TPP.
They were just very aggressive advocates of free trade.
And the argument was that was when the Democratic Party started representing much more the kind of...
Affluent and wealthy class in Wall Street and abandon what had been their base of the working class.
That's certainly a lot of how working class voters perceive it, too.
I mean, if you lose your jobs, if your town becomes shuttered, you're going to have a good understanding, even if you're not a political junkie, of who and what did that.
And I guess, I mean, Trump did do some tariffs in the first term, but this is really the first time in years where we have a president standing up and saying, the current status quo of globalism, free trade, Offshoring jobs has destroyed the United States in so many ways,
and it's time that we have to implement a new financial order that doesn't produce those kinds of consequences for the United States.
Do you consider that fact, independent of the specifics of Trump's tariff policy, to be a positive development?
Well, it depends on how successful the tariffs are.
And by that I mean...
It depends on whether the tariff policy actually gets this right.
Because if the tariff policy doesn't get things right, I think there's going to be a backlash to the free trade backlash.
So I agree with you that Donald Trump has made an opportunity out of Democrats' advocacy for things like NAFTA.
The China PNTR deal, the TPP that you mentioned, all sorts of free trade deals.
By the way, the Democrats weren't alone.
George W. Bush's administration pushed for all sorts of free trade deals.
John McCain, all of them.
John McCain, exactly.
So this is the sort of bipartisan elite push to...
Over the last 30 years to change America's trade policy into a tariff-free trade policy, which Ross Perot, by the way, warned of.
I mean, Ross Perot warned that if you force American workers to compete with workers making a dollar a day in countries that do not have any real environmental laws or any environmental enforcement, you're going to essentially incentivize corporations to pick up shop and troll the world for the worst possible conditions,
the most exploitable.
That has happened, and the Democrats have really stuck with free trade.
Most of the Republican Party had, up until this point, stuck with that idea that this sort of transition would be great for everybody because the benefits would outweigh the consequences, the benefits being lower prices.
Now, there's even dispute over whether that's true, whether there's been studies showing that the benefits of lower prices have actually not outweighed Wade, the losses in wages and jobs for the average American.
And so Trump has tapped into a very real and, to my mind, very legitimate backlash.
The problem is, to my mind, is that what Trump is proposing is not really a strategic use of tariffs in a way that I see, at least I don't see any evidence yet, that is really designed to rebuild manufacturing in the United States.
Doing sort of across-the-board tariffs with no...
A timetable for implementation, to allow factories to be reshored, for the production capacity to be rebuilt, I think then raises the question, well, what are we really doing here?
Just throwing up tariffs, you wake up one day and say it's Liberation Day, throwing up tariffs is not giving industry a chance to react to the tariffs, to build that production capacity, to rehire Americans to do manufacturing jobs.
And so I think, in a sense, what we're seeing now is kind of a power grab by Trump.
Trump wants to, and maybe a shock to the system, a way to say, hey, we're not doing free trade anymore, so I'm going to shock the system in a really aggressive way.
And there's also a power grab element where every corporation that wants an exemption has to come and kiss the ring of the president to try to get an exemption.
So I guess what I'm saying is I don't see necessarily any evidence that this is a well thought out.
...use of tariffs that will deliver what Trump says it will deliver.
And if it doesn't deliver, this is a long way of getting to your question, is if it doesn't deliver it, what I fear is that gives...
The people who push NAFTA, the people who push China PNTR, an opportunity to say all tariffs are bad, all tariffs are destructive, and there is no such thing as a smart, managed, fair trade policy.
We have to continue with the free trade policy that we've been with for the last 30 years.
Yeah, that's absolutely a fair concern.
I guess time will tell.
What he is planning to do, do you think today was a kind of retreat or maybe a modification?
I want to talk about that in a second with this pause and the idea that now we're going to negotiate not just tariffs but investment or opening up factories in the U.S. or whatever.
We'll see if that works out.
I just want to ask one more question, though, about the sort of debate that has been provoked.
I saw Trump's billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Benson, who had long worked for George Soros and his wealth fund, and then opened up his own hedge fund, was very successful in trading in the way that makes you a billionaire.
Always has been a Republican, for the most part.
But once he had to go out and defend these tariffs, I saw him at least twice, maybe three times, in a very clear and passionate way, arguing this.
He was saying, and people are saying, well, you have to be concerned about the...
The reaction of the stock market, the decline in the stock market.
He was saying, look, the top 10% of wealth in the United States owns 90% of the stock market.
The bottom 90% of the stock market owns 10% of the wealth.
And the reason for that is we pursued this policy in this global free trade system for so long that only benefited Wall Street.
And so who cares if Wall Street is angry?
Now is the time when we can't please and pleasure and accommodate Wall Street.
We instead have to be thinking about Main Street and the ordinary person.
And then on the other hand, I'm not saying this is true of all Democrats, obviously, but the kind of mainstream Democratic reaction to this is like, oh my God, look what Trump's doing.
Wall Street is collapsing.
Kind of saying like, oh, our concern has to be what Wall Street wants, what Wall Street thinks is good.
I mean, I guess, I mean, again, independent of your concern about the Trump tariffs and their results, which I want to get to next, having the Trump Treasury Secretary come out with this extremely populist rhetoric with these accurate facts about the vast gap in wealth that this system has created in the United States and the need to erode it or erase it or reverse it,
I mean, isn't that in some way a helpful contribution to how Americans understand the economy?
I think it is, in the sense that I think that reminding the country that Wall Street is not Main Street is important.
When you turn on cable TV news, you're led to believe that Wall Street is Main Street, that the stock market is the economy, when clearly it isn't.
And I've been kind of struck by the fact that this Treasury Secretary, who comes from Wall Street, In many instances that I've seen him interviewed, he sounds like Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders would be making that point, but that's that.
Now, I also don't think it's that simple in this way, that it is true that the wealthiest 10% own about 90, 93% of the stock market.
But that doesn't mean the other 90% owns.
I mean, millions of people...
Have 401k plans.
That may not represent among working class, middle class people, a large portion of the stock market, but it represents at an individual level a significant portion of people's retirement savings if they're lucky enough to have retirement savings.
Same thing for union pension funds.
Union pension funds have large holdings in the stock market.
So I don't think it separates as cleanly as the statistic seems.
I think that the country does have, the country's economy is woven into or at least has a relationship with the stock market.
And I don't think the stock market going down is something that we can just say, oh, it completely doesn't matter, or even celebrating it going down.
There is a linkage there.
I don't necessarily think that...
We need to take policy cues.
Oh, if this or that policy happens and the stock market reacts, that means the policy is bad.
When I see liberals or conservatives say that, oh, look at this policy, the stock market's going down, that's not the right way to judge the merits of a policy.
I mean, for instance, if there was a President Bernie Sanders and he put forward a Medicare for all bill, my guess would be the stock market for at least a little bit might react negatively to that because the stock market reflects a lot of health insurance companies.
That doesn't mean the policy is wrong.
So I don't like the idea that look at the stock market and the stock market should tell us what policy is correct.
I would say look at the stock market to see what.
But again, we're talking, you know, hours after Trump set aside or at least delayed some of these tariffs and the stock market went back up.
So it's also a pretty volatile, sort of not consistent barometer of what's really going on.
For sure.
I think the statistic that I've seen and like right in this area is something like 60 percent of Americans have some I
don't know what Trump planned from the start.
I'm not sure.
He necessarily knew, but I got the sense, David, that given how many decades Trump has been pounding this issue, like other countries, everything is off, the United States has to stop this, we're taking a bloodbath,
whatever, that he was prepared, and there's been some reporting in general that Trump, in his second term, probably not...
Thinking about a third term in reality, kind of has a sort of devil-may-care attitude.
Like, he doesn't care if what he does creates negative media reaction, even performs badly in the polls.
He has an idea of what he wants to do in his second term, and he's going to do it no matter what.
And so my belief is that he really was truthful about what he was saying from the start, which was, look, we are going to have some short-term pain.
You're just going to have to bear it.
Because on the other side of that, We're going to finally have a fairer and more prosperous system for everybody.
And then suddenly today, he announces this 90-day pause, which is what several of his billionaire supporters were calling for.
Bill Ackman was actually on Monday.
He said exactly that.
I want a 90-day pause on this.
And then it wasn't just even the stock market.
What I think was alarming so many people was what the bond market was doing, which has taken down presidents before in the UK and France and elsewhere.
People are super afraid of bondholders in the bond market.
And then Trump did a very uncharacteristic reversal, obviously tried to paint it in a positive light or whatever.
There's a lot of talk these days about how the United States is an oligarchy, kind of like the richest people.
I think it's hard to psychoanalyze Donald Trump.
So I try not to try to get inside of his mind.
What I can say is this.
I think you're absolutely right.
This is one of the areas that Donald Trump has actually, one of the few areas that he's actually been consistent on, at least in terms of rhetoric.
He has been talking about a fairer trade policy.
Whether you agree with the policy or not, he has been talking about this issue for a very, very long time.
I mean, he almost ran for president in 2000.
Under the party of Ross Perot.
I mean, you can go look that up, the Reform Party.
So this is something that he has thought a lot about, spoken a lot about, written at times about in his books.
So he clearly has pretty set-in-stone views, overarching views, about America's current trading system, the sort of free trade system.
He may have a theory about how he is going to try to get a supposedly fairer deal, or at least what he perceives to be a fairer deal.
Maybe this is one of these situations where he thinks there's sort of the madman theory.
I'm going to show the world that I'm really serious about this by saying I'm doing 100% tariff on China, we're doing across-the-board tariffs on all these countries, and slowly but surely after I make that announcement, the world is going to get scared and try to cut...
More favorable trade deals with our country to kind of even things out.
Like, is this three-dimensional chess?
Maybe that's what's going on.
Maybe it's not.
It's really hard to know.
Was he controlled by the oligarchs in the 90-day, this 90-day pause?
Or was that, or did it come to be?
Part of his thinking that it would be a good negotiating strategy, that ultimately he is fearful of actually crashing the stock market, crashing the economy.
And so this is all a game of chicken to try to get a better policy.
Or, Glenn, you know, is this just a pure power grab?
I don't think we can write that out of the story here.
This is in the context of Donald Trump, in all sorts of ways, kind of trying to create an even larger unitary executive theory across the government, firing people at independent agencies, consolidating power.
Tariffs are another way to consolidate power, forcing corporations and economic actors to, again, kiss the ring of the president to try to get exemptions.
And I go back to, you know, Where is Congress here?
Because to my mind, as much as this is a chaotic situation, it's a reflection of the fact that Congress has delegated so much authority to the president.
Tariffs are written into the—...into the Constitution as something that should be the purview, that is the purview of Congress.
Congress has, in various ways, ceded that authority to presidents to wake up one morning and a president can say, I'm going to use this or that emergency power to create tariffs.
I would argue that one of the benefits of the way the Constitution was written was that...
Especially in the light of the Tea Party, like the literal Tea Party, was that the founders didn't want that to happen specifically on tariff policy, that the founders wanted tariff policy to have to go through a slower process so that there was consensus around it.
And so my hope is that out of this, there is some effort for Congress to reclaim some of that tariff power that it's supposed to have.
Because at a base level, one thing is for sure, whatever tariff Tariff policy is in place, needs to be consistent to create an environment for investment.
If a company is thinking about reshoring jobs or not reshoring jobs, one thing it wants to know, it really has to know is whether the tariff policy is going to be in place for the next two years, five years, ten years, to know whether it really should make that investment, billions of dollars worth,
in a big factory or not.
Right now, the last thing we have right now...
I think it's fair to say, is consistency and stability with Trump saying, we're going to do tariffs, we're not going to do tariffs.
I think whether you're for higher tariffs, lower tariffs, free trade, not free trade, the fact that it's not been consistent in this period, I don't think is very good.
I want to delve into that, the issue with Congress in just a second.
But I just want, you mentioned Ross Perot a couple of times.
I just wanted to say.
When that 1992 election happened, which is where Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate, very well may have helped Bill Clinton get elected.
I was very young.
I didn't really understand free trade.
But what I remember about it is the sucking sound.
That was his big calling card, which was, oh, you hear that sucking sound?
That's the sound of jobs.
Being moved out of the United States to Mexico, to parts of the developing world if we do NAFTA.
And he was debating on that stage two hardcore free traders in Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.
If you go back and look at those debates, which I've done a couple times, it is actually shocking how prescient he was, how much he understood exactly what was going to happen.
And I remember so well at the time that the media basically depicted him as like this unserious crackpot.
This like crazy conspiracy theories, which is what they do to third party candidates.
You had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush advocating policies that would destroy the country.
He was the only one who foresaw that on that stage.
And yet they were like, oh, this guy is a lunatic, a crackpot.
You can just laugh at him, even though he was a billionaire and understood business very well.
You mentioned this thing with Congress, and it's so true.
It's not just in the area of terrorists, but also war powers, right?
We're not supposed to ever go to war unless Congress declares war.
There's federalist papers on this that if you're going to fight a war, you want to make sure the people are consenting to it through the ones closest to them, which is not the president, but their representatives in their district.
There's no...
Roll. Congress doesn't want any role in war.
They want to leave that to the president.
It's like too hard of a call.
They don't want that on there.
Same with tariffs.
Same with everything.
They've kind of just abdicated, you know, any role at all.
That said, one thing that caught my attention was a couple days ago, you know, there's this legislation pending in both the Senate and the House to take back that power to say the president doesn't have a right to unilaterally impose tariffs.
If he does, we have the right to nullify them or approval as needed.
And there was reporting that at least, you know, a dozen, maybe more, House Republicans are ready to sign on to that.
And that would be the first real break with Republicans and Trump.
And I guess I wasn't surprised by that because the one thing that could get House Republicans to break from Trump is if their corporate donors are angry and afraid.
Like if their corporate donors say, you need to do something about this.
That's probably the one thing that can move them.
Again, I agree with you completely that we can't segmentalize Trump, but do you think that might have been a factor of the concern that the Congress is going to step in and take away some of those powers from Trump?
I certainly think that's probably part of the White House's calculus, that they are getting pressure, they are hearing from Republicans, and I think you're right.
Republican lawmakers are hearing from both their donors, but they're probably also hearing from their constituents who are afraid of higher prices.
And I think we can't write that out of the story.
I mean, Donald Trump did campaign.
I mean, in some ways, he campaigned on two contradictory things, at least in the short term.
There is a contradiction in saying, I am going to put in tariffs that are going to make trade fairer.
And saying my top priority is bringing down inflation tariffs.
are inherently inflationary.
Now, that doesn't mean a strategic use of tariffs isn't a good idea.
That doesn't mean the inflation that if you strategically use tariffs carefully, that doesn't mean the inflation is permanent or long-term.
So there is a tension there.
Obviously, the public is sensitive to inflation for good reason.
It's basically the affordability crisis.
So I think Republicans are under sort of dual pressure from people worried about higher prices.
their voters, their constituents, and the corporate class, which is worried about having to change its business model around a new tariff policy.
And I think that here's the thing.
In a sense, regardless of the motivation, I think it would be a good thing if the Congress took back some power here and frankly got into the habit of taking back power that it's supposed
to have under the Constitution across the board.
I don't think we want to live in a country where we perceive the president to be an elected king.
And there's a difference between a president and an elected king.
A president is supposed to be the head of a co-equal branch of government.
That wasn't incidental.
It
An elected king, which I think a lot of people perceive the president to be, is basically somebody who's elected who gets to do whatever they want.
I mean, we've seen the White House make this argument, oh, you know, anything Trump does is the small-D democratic process because he was elected, which is not true in the sense that, yes, he was elected, but what's not true is that...
He wasn't elected to be the only branch of government.
There were 435 other elections for a separate branch that is supposed to be a check on that power.
I don't think it's a good thing for business.
I don't think it's a good thing for workers.
I don't think it's a good thing for civil liberties, war policy, any of this, that we now live in a country where it's presumed to be normalized and acceptable for one person to wake up on a given day and radically change a policy across.
without any consensus from the other 435 people who were elected in 435 separate elections.
Yeah, and not just the Congress, but maybe not in the case of terrorists, but in the other examples you raised, the judiciary as well.
I mean, these people who say we want to preserve American values, I mean, the first thing you learn about the unique design of the Constitution is it has a balance of power.
They wanted the three branches struggling and fighting for power because that would create a balance where no one branch got too powerful.
And it is amazing.
I mean, that was what...
You know, the Bush-Cheney administration was to me as well, which is where Cheney was the kind of pioneer of these unitary executive power theories.
Just a couple more questions.
I remember this incident from 2016 where Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and basically said to the coal workers who were out of a job, look, your jobs aren't coming back.
You just need to accept that.
Coal is not our future.
You know, renewable energies are our future.
Maybe you can have those jobs, but coal's not coming back.
And Trump went to West Virginia and said, I'm going to bring back your coal jobs.
And I remember they interviewed like coal workers, coal miners who were there.
and I remember several of them said the same thing, which was like, look, we are not so certain Trump's gonna bring back our coal jobs.
In fact, we think it's probably very difficult, but at least Trump is expressing empathy for our situation, whereas Hillary's just coming in and saying, get used to it, get over it, your jobs aren't coming back.
One of the arguments I've heard people making in criticizing Trump's tariff plan, not just this one, but any one, is that
Those jobs are not coming back.
That's a byproduct of an archaic, obsolete world.
And that even the best-designed tariff policy, whatever you think that might be, or others, as opposed to this broad-based, almost arbitrary tariff, is not going to bring back these jobs.
Do you agree with that?
I think we have to understand what comparative advantage really is, the economic theory of comparative advantage.
It's been abused.
The old idea of comparative advantage was pretty simple.
If a country, let's say, has the soil, the best soil to grow coffee, it has a comparative advantage in growing coffee, and most of the coffee should be grown in that soil.
That's an efficiency idea.
It has a comparative advantage.
That basic idea makes sense when it comes to natural things, things of the natural world.
Where it becomes problematic is when we say this or that authoritarian country has a comparative advantage when it comes to allowing for indentured servitude.
I think you can make an argument for various forms of inherent...
...comparative advantage, saying certain jobs maybe aren't coming back and shouldn't come back to the United States because of countries' inherent comparative advantage when it comes to things of the natural order.
I think the job—it becomes a much dicier argument when you say— Jobs should not come back to the United States to produce things because we want corporations to be able to exploit effectively slave labor in other countries or bad environmental conditions.
At that point, you're having a trade policy that is rewarding countries for exploiting their environment and exploiting their workers.
And you're additionally putting American workers in an unfair competition.
So basically, that's a long way of saying I don't agree that, like, All the jobs that have gone to China, especially high-tech manufacturing and the like, all those jobs are gone and we should never have a discussion about having them come back.
And that's not even talking about the idea that there are national security implications to a country not being able...
Right? I mean, this is a, it's national security not just when it comes to war, it's national security when it comes to your basic ability to provide for your people.
If your country can't make things, can't make hard assets, can't make hardware, computer chips, you know, all the things integral to modern life, and you're relying on other countries,
well, When things happen in those other countries, instability, wars, etc., etc., you have suddenly, that policy has risked your ability to sustain yourself.
And that is real national security risk.
Yeah, we saw some of that with COVID when the spy chain started breaking down and it was possible that vital medicines wouldn't, because so much of our medication is produced elsewhere.
All right, last question before I let you go.
I just want to ask you about the politics of things.
Even though I said before I didn't appreciate the argument that, oh my God, Wall Street's angry, they don't like it, therefore we can't do it.
It is, I think, an effective political argument when you just have this massive instability.
You look at these charts, everything's crashing.
As you said, people's 401ks.
Now, though, it seems like, at least for the moment, all of those losses have basically been erased today once Trump said he was doing that 90-day pause.
I don't know about all of them, but if not all of them, the vast, vast majority, everything is stabilized again.
And so Democrats don't really have that argument for now.
Like, oh, Trump's crashing the markets because the markets are actually back to where they were.
So just politically speaking, if Trump's argument is, look, I did these tariffs.
Now I have all these countries coming to beg for a deal.
We're not going to accept a deal where they just get rid of their tariffs.
That's not enough.
They have to open factories in the United States, invest money in the United States, create jobs here.
We'll see if that happens.
But that's his argument.
Like, I'm fighting for the working class.
I'm fighting for the American worker who's been so screwed over.
What political lane do Democrats have to criticize this approach now that there's no more, oh my God, the stock market and the bond market are crashing?
Look, it's a great question.
And it's a difficult...
I mean, I think the Democrats certainly may have an inflation argument.
They may have an affordability argument.
Now, look, I don't think the past Democratic administrations have done a really good job.
On affordability, on various inflation issues, although I do think the Biden administration really did have a story to tell that it frankly didn't tell when it came to antitrust, when it came to the American Rescue Plan.
I mean, that's past, and that's in the past.
But I would also say this.
What I think is interesting is that Trump has an opportunity to split the party apart if he behaved in a way that was a little bit more Non-Trumpian.
There are Democrats in various swing districts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, one congressman in Maine, who have said, look, I may not think Trump's particular tariff policies,
as they were rolled out last week, are exactly perfect, but...
But tariffs can be used and need to be used in a constructive way.
Gretchen Whitmer said that today.
The Biden administration used them.
Gretchen Whitmer went further and said, like, look, this is a bipartisan cause to use tariffs.
Exactly. And so the political move that I'm wondering whether is going to happen or not is for Trump to reach out and say, listen, you may not have liked the first gambit I put out here, but let's make a political deal.
Right? I'm trying to make deals with countries.
Let's make a political deal here where I...
Heal off the piece of the Democratic Party that is in these working class communities and try to actually create a new bipartisan consensus.
Now, the question is, I mean, that speaks to the question of, is Trump really serious about trying to create a really strategic, bipartisan, new paradigm when it comes to trade?
Or is this just, you know, Trump being Trump?
And again, I go back to, we can't really psychoanalyze him.
But I guess it's all to say is that there really is an opportunity.
I think that could really create or continue accelerating what a lot of people think is kind of a realignment.
All right, David.
Super interesting.
I find this all very fascinating.
Really appreciate you coming on and helping to kind of break down these issues and clarify them.
I hope people follow your excellent reporting, your original reporting at The Lever and everything else that you're doing there.
And it was great to see you.
Hope to see you back soon.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
Really appreciate it.
Absolutely, have a great evening.
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Alright, there's a lot going on in terms of American public opinion with regard to Israel as well as a new Homeland Security program that the government released today about using social media to detect who has Wrong views on Israel and anti-semitism that make them a danger.
I'm just going to show you a little bit of this DHS announcement and because of the time we're going to start we're going to just go to our locals community where we'll stream the rest there so if you want to join our locals community you can just press the join button right below the video player on the rumble page gives you access to all that exclusive streaming to a bunch of exclusive video Interviews and content that we don't have time to put here,
all the other benefits like written transcripts of our show, the ability to ask questions that we answer every Friday night, and basically to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
So just in a couple minutes we're going to move there, but I did want to just show everybody this, what's called the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS, that they announced today.
Homeland Security, they begin screening alien social media activity for anti-Semitism.
So they're screening either people who want to come to the country or who are already in the country on green cards, student visas, work visas.
And it says, And the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.
This will immediately affect aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students, and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to anti-Semitic activity.
Consistent with President Trump's executive orders on combating anti-Semitism, additional measures to combat anti-Semitism and protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats, DHS will enforce all relevant immigration laws to the maximum degree to protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens,
including those who support anti-Semitic terrorism, violent anti-Semitic ideologies, and anti-Semitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or Ansar al-Salah.
There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here, said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Trish McLaughlin.
Secretary Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism, think again.
you are not welcome here.
Under this guideline, USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting anti-Semitic terrorism, anti-Semitic terrorist organizations, or other anti-Semitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis when adjudicating
immigration
Now let me just say a couple things.
In general, you don't want the government scrutinizing and monitoring People's social media to understand what their ideas and opinions are, to judge their worth?
That's like the kind of social criticism that exists in China that I thought especially all conservatives were opposed to, find horrifying.
We want Homeland Security now scrubbing the internet and social media to see what people's views are?
Additionally, why is it only anti-Semitism they're concerned about?
Like, is it okay if people are spewing virulent anti-black racism?
I think black people are genetically inferior, they should be killed, or that's okay.
Or like, I think LGBTs are morally decadent, they should be put in camps, that's totally okay.
Talking to American citizens here, American black people, American LGBTs.
I think Muslims are a menace, they should all be murdered and killed, let's bomb them all, let's kill them all, that's totally fine.
The one group that you're not allowed to speak ill of is American Jews, or Israel.
If you're going to have a system that does this, that scrutinizes people's social media for bad ideas, for wrong think, for dangerous thought, why is it only this one issue, Israel and American Jews, yet again, over and over and over and over and over, that are the sole beneficiaries of these protective programs?
I mean, isn't that odd?
Isn't that like the exact kind of DEI-type thinking?
Like, oh, there's this one minority group that...
Somehow is the most endangered and vulnerable.
And they're the only ones who need government protection.
We're going to create program after program after program after program to protect just these people and nobody else.
It just happens to be the group that thrives most prosperously, economically, in power centers.
Somehow that became the group that is the most vulnerable, according to them.
Maybe there's a relationship between those two.
Like, if you actually have power, you can depict yourself as a vulnerable minority group.
But either way...
Do we want the government spying on social media and judging people based on their opinions?
You can see how easily that's going to expand outward, not just to non-citizens, but citizens.
And more to the point, when they say support for terrorist organizations like Hamas, I promise you, that is a very broad category.
If you criticize Israel at all, if you question U.S. funding of Israel in support for their war, You will instantly be characterized as a terrorist supporter, a Hamas supporter.
We've seen it over and over.
If you don't believe me, just go online and post something negative about Israel and count down the seconds until you're accused of being an anti-Semite and a terrorist supporter.
It's really another program, yet another one, designed to criminalize criticism of Israel, speaking critically of Jews, even though you're allowed to do that for every other country and every other group.
And there's a reason for it, which is that Public opinion is collapsing when it comes to support for Israel and oftentimes the panic response is to impose censorship as a way of suppressing the ideas that you're afraid are taking hold and yet one of the things we've seen is oftentimes when you do that,
we saw this with the liberal censorship regime, it only creates backlash and resentment and people cling even more to the prohibited ideas.
All right, we're going to go to the local stream now.
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And so we're going to bid goodnight to those of you who are just watching here and go to our...
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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