Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
Glenn takes questions from our Locals subscribers on lawfare in the democratic world against popular candidates, Trump's tariffs, the changing role of independent media, Douglas Murray's debate against Dave Smith, and more.
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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, as you may know, we typically devote our Friday night show to a Q&A session where we take questions and comments posted throughout the week by our Locals members, members of our Locals community.
Various reasons we are going to have our Q&A show tonight rather than tomorrow night.
We will be here tomorrow night, but not with our Q&A session.
We'll do that tonight.
The questions that we receive cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare.
In this so-called democratic world to ban leading anti-establishment candidates from the ballot, the latest example of which was banning Francis Marine Le Pen.
The ongoing accumulation of executive power vested solely in the president and what that means for the central concept in the American founding of what the founders called the balance of power among the three co-equal branches.
We'll talk about some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariff policies and much more, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.
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All right, so a couple months ago, we instituted this new segment that we typically do on Friday nights.
Sometimes we do it on other nights if scheduling requires that, if we have a guest on Friday night or some other thing planned for Friday night as we do for tomorrow.
where locals members submit their questions throughout the week they can do so in audio or video form or text form and i know i've said this before but we're still waiting we think it's very shortly we'll be able to actually call in as well to the show and we can have a conversation directly it's sort of like a call into a radio program but most of these questions for tonight are We're submitted by text throughout the week.
I'm excited to get to them.
We're going to try and devote the whole show to that.
Before I get to those, though, I just want to give you a little bit of breaking news that just happened.
Only a few minutes before we came live on the air, I just spent the last 10-15 minutes reading about it, so I don't have very in-depth knowledge of it, but you may have heard this case where the U.S. government sent to El Salvador A person who is living in the United States,
who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the United States, has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever.
And as a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court that barred the government from removing him.
And yet he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega...
Horrific president in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings and the like.
And even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally.
That's what they said.
Oops, whoops, it was an accident.
Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet in El Salvador indefinitely with no way out, incommunicado?
Their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to them.
They're gone, they're in El Salvador.
A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their,
let's face it, puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back.
And remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there.
So it's not like...
We have no influence there.
The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do, and the Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order.
Like, who are you to tell the president to go get from El Salvador?
This prisoner and the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, said, well, tell the court to call El Salvador.
That was her attitude.
The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court.
Composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents.
I believe one Obama, one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken.
And more or less unanimously, they had some differences about the rationale.
Upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for when there's a court order barring his removal to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it.
And the problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs.
And then that would raise the question, well, how can you send people to El Salvador, to a prison in El Salvador, without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things.
And we covered last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans Obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus,
the right to go into court before they're removed, and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused.
And all nine justices of the Supreme Court, all nine, not just Kagan and Sotomayor and Brown-Jackson, but also Clarence Thomas and Judge Alito, Neil Gorsuch.
All nine of them said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus hearing.
They had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about how and when or where, rather, that proceeding had to be brought.
And it had been brought to Washington, D.C. That's why it was under Judge Boasberg's jurisdiction.
And they said, no, it has to be brought where the person is detained.
They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona.
And already those Venezuelan detainees who had these injunction against them immediately went into court in Texas.
Supreme Court says you have to go into Texas.
And yesterday a Trump-appointed judge, a Trump-appointed judge, upheld the or issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they've actually have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership.
Not for all deportations.
You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal.
But if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy, every time it's been invoked, World War II, World War I, the War of 1812, the people, even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers,
got hearings first.
And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said.
And then right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the...
original court the district court issued a ruling saying you cannot remove these people as well keep hearing about all these left-wing judges we talked about this before these are not left-wing judges a lot of times they're reagan or bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been trump appointed judges in fact yesterday a different trump appointed judge ruled in favor of the associated press as you might recall the white house He issued marching orders to the American media
saying, you cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore.
You have to call it the Gulf of America.
Not really sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things.
But when the Associated Press continued to call it the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Mexico rather, the Trump White House cut off all access.
To press bowls, to briefing rooms and the like.
And a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House, but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say.
Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling, and it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the...
...opinion of the court unanimously, which involved this case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent.
Mistakenly, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction, saying courts can't tell us how to deal with other countries, how to conduct ourselves diplomatically, and the court said, no, we are maintaining this injunction.
By a 9-0 vote, apparently.
There was no dissent.
Again, Judge Thomas, Justice Alito, the whole court.
And they did say that courts have to be careful not to interfere in the president's right to conduct diplomacy.
So you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back.
But they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return.
And that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's own admission.
Congress is completely impotent.
They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans.
As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him.
And the Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself.
We talked about that last night with David Sirota.
They've given up their role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy.
They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars.
The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval.
Obama did the same thing.
Biden did the same thing.
So we don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense.
And so the courts now have the responsibility.
As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in their power.
It's supposed to have a balance of power.
They're supposed to be co-equal branches.
And if the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment, punishing the press for things they say, it's the role of the courts to come in and say this violates the Constitution in the Supreme Court.
Has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump appointed judges are doing it as well.
And even if, whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power.
You don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful.
THERE'S ALL SORTS OF CHECKS ON THE JUDICIARY.
THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN BE ON THE JUDICIARY ARE ONES THAT THE PRESIDENT NOMINATES.
EVEN ONCE THE PRESIDENT NOMINATES THEM, THEY HAVE TO GO THROUGH A CONFIRMATION HEARING IN THE SENATE, EVERY SINGLE JUDGE, ARTICLE 3 JUDGE FROM THE LOWEST DISTRICT COURT ONES TO THE APPELLATE COURT TO THE SUPREME COURT.
AND THEN FOR WRONGDOING, THEY
So they have a lot of different...
Checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president.
As David Sveta said last night, the founders feared most an unelected or an elected king.
They just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch.
The last thing they wanted to do is recreate one.
But that's what you would have if the president says, oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want.
Ignore the Constitution.
It doesn't matter.
No one can do anything to stop me.
That is not something any American citizen would want.
So, second time this week that the Supreme Court, by a 9-0 ruling, placed limits on what the president can do under the due process clause.
And now you're seeing Trump judges rule that the Trump administration is exceeding their authority as well, including a Trump-appointed judge in Texas.
Imagine how conservative those are.
Texas is a red state.
Senators typically recommend federal district court judges, so you have two Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, John Cornyn.
But then it goes to the Trump White House, which has their own vetting, and then the Trump White House appoints this person to the Supreme Court.
They have to then get to the district court.
They have to then get confirmed by the Senate, and they were.
He's a conservative judge who, after that Supreme Court ruling, said, yeah, you cannot remove these Venezuelans to El Salvador unless you first have a hearing.
So that's just an update.
I'll read the case more carefully.
If it weren't, we'll break it down tomorrow.
But from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling.
It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that.
But they do require the the the order is that the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made.
So the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.
All right, so let's get to our locals mailbag.
These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our locals community, and the first one is from John Mann.
Quote, do you think that the mainstream media has become less fair, less honest, and less objective over the past 40 years?
Or has it not really changed, but their dishonesty and lack of objectivity has become more obvious?
I do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past.
It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the security state.
Every time they overthrew a government, the CIA did.
New York Times, Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people.
And can I say that?
And you can just go back and look at that.
I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how the New York Times covered that.
And it was essentially, oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime when, in fact, it was an elected center-left government and the...
Terranical regime was the installment of these right-wing military junta.
And in fact, the worst offender was probably Time Magazine.
Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine.
He was extremely close to the US government, a hardcore cold warrior.
Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country.
As a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandized in the entire world.
So there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other.
They worked hand in hand.
But you did have occasions when that didn't happen.
on very well-known occasions.
When Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s, Walter Cronkite in the 1960s turned against the
Vietnam War, editorialized on air.
He was the most trusted news person there was, saying he went over there, the government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.
Shortly thereafter we had Watergate, which I think retrospectively has been revisited.
But it was still a series of reporting that led to the downfall of the administration and the president.
You have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
So you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some point.
Well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media.
I wasn't trying to be a media critic.
I wasn't looking at the world that way.
And only over time did I realize that with the war on terror, the war in Iraq, that the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the national security state.
Not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the national security state.
Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them and criticize them.
I dissect their propaganda when I was writing every day in the 2000s, 2010s.
I absolutely think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump.
Once Donald Trump emerged, Even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective, comportmentally,
he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won.
And they went completely insane.
They really did start concluding.
That their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump.
And they just started lying.
Just openly.
We've been through all those lies, Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked.
Spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election that came from the CIA that it was Russian disinformation.
All the COVID lies.
Everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned.
Anyone who questioned was a conspiracy theorist.
And on and on and on and on.
And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media.
If you look at the graphs, I mean, it had been going down over time.
And you can even see, prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources.
Talk radio became very big among conservatives.
Millions and millions and millions of people listened to Rush Limbaugh, and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media.
I mean, talk radio in general, and then the advent of Fox News.
So it was already collapsing, but with 2016, it fell off a cliff.
They're Cliff.
And that's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties.
And that's something they really hadn't done before.
The media was always a liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York, lived in Washington.
They were probably more liberal on social issues.
But when it came to war, remember, the New York Times did more to sell the New York Times and the New Yorker with Jeffrey Goldberg did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did.
Conservatives were already behind the war in Iraq, behind the war on terror because it was a Republican administration.
They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, no, these things are real.
Saddam Hussein is a weapon of mass destruction.
He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.
And that bias, that central bias, was never right versus left or Democrat versus Republican.
And it really became Democrat versus Republican in 2016 for the last, until the 2024 election.
They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter, a much higher mission they were serving now.
Very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves.
Like, no, we're on the front lines of this world historic battle to preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.
That's what they told themselves.
It feels much better than saying, oh yeah, our job is just to report facts.
Without fear or favor to anybody.
That's kind of boring.
And they became, you know, heroes in liberal America.
I mean, all these journalists, they wrote best-selling books because they were anti-Trump, you know, kind of the Jim Acosta effect.
Just like the most mediocre people, Rachel Maddow, you know, became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that.
All those people who...
They abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one.
And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party.
That was their mission.
That was their goal.
Remember, Sam Harris said when he was asked about all the lies that were told by the corporate media fed to them by those 51 intelligence agencies, That the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, even though it turned out it had nothing to do with Russia.
It was completely authentic.
He basically articulated the rationale very candidly that was driving them all.
He let the cat out of the bag when he said, look, I mean, at the end of the day, Trump is such a menace.
Trump is such a danger that whatever was done with the Hunter Biden laptop, whatever lies were said about it, in the scheme of things, it's basically worth it.
And that was what their mindset became.
Remember, heading into the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology.
We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government.
And that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something.
It was right before the election.
I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's...
And the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China.
And they just said, no.
You know, you cannot do that.
Even though it was so obvious to me for reasons I've talked about many times before that it was authentic.
Actually, the day before I quit, I went on Joe Rogan and I talked a lot about how corrupted the media had become.
I was talking from personal experience, but also just hearing from other people at other outlets what had been going on.
Same with Russiagate.
Obviously, one flew into the other.
I don't think corporate media ever has recovered.
I don't think they ever will recover.
I think that trust and faith is gone.
And the fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive to them any longer.
And you can see their audience disappearing.
Basically, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60, 65. It's really true, especially MSNBC and CNN.
If they have like 700,000 viewers total for a primetime show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000.
Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks?
You just see that medium dying.
And, you know, I think they did it to themselves.
All right, next question.
Balds asks, with the ever-growing weaponization of the legal system to ban and sometimes even imprison anti-establishment electoral candidates, what is the future of democracy in the West, and are we in real danger of a majority of voters losing complete faith in it?
I just did a show with two other leftists.
One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe.
And the other is Yiannis Varkosis, who was the former finance minister of Greece.
And a very smart, I think, figure on the left.
And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular.
Focused on the Marine Le Pen banning.
And I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was.
To basically steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well.
And we talked in kind of, I've learned more about the Le Pen case and...
Both of them have a lot of nuts and bolts knowledge of it.
I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke.
I mean, it was called embezzlement in the United States.
That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself.
That's usually what embezzlement means.
That's not what it was at all.
It wasn't even close to that.
Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament...
Get a lot of money a month for staff.
Something like 30,000 euros a month for staff.
And you can hire people if you're a member of the EU Parliament, even though they don't really do anything.
And one of the things Marine Le Pen's party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it Essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU,
but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party.
And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened.
Although it's a very gray area.
It's like...
Oh yeah, I have my 30,000 euro budget a month and I'm going to hire this assistant and that assistant.
And the question becomes like, did they do more work on the EU or were they really more working on internally on the party?
But there's no self-enrichment.
Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money.
The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work.
You know, how do you determine who does more of what?
But what they all said was that essentially every party does this.
Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally.
They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back.
And so at best, it was very selective prosecution.
They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done.
And, you know, you can say, well, if she did it, who cares if it's enforced against anybody else?
It would kind of be like saying, let's say the city has a speed limit, but it's, like, absurdly low.
So everybody, you just stand on the corner, you watch every car, 90% of cars going not 25, but 35 or 40. And then you have the police sitting on the corner letting everybody go except people that they know who say are Trump supporters.
Or Biden supporters.
And they're like, the only people we're going to enforce this against are well-known Democrats or well-known conservatives.
Obviously, that would be a huge problem.
That's selective enforcement.
The fact that they were speeding too doesn't justify selective enforcement if they're actually using it to weaponize the law against people for political reasons.
At best, that's what happened with Marine Le Pen.
And I think in general, any time...
You have a candidate who's leading the polls.
Either probably will win or highly likely to win.
As in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was by no means a shoo-in, but she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run.
And they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime.
I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering.
It's like, Misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched.
Kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen.
Bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and almost never prosecuted.
Whenever you start having that, you...
Definitely, immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country, who polls show close to a majority or even a majority, want to elect to keep them from actually running?
And if this were an isolated case where Marine Le Pen were the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever.
But it's so clearly part of a pattern.
Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly.
And a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula.
Some polls show it tied within the margin of error.
But again, clearly Bolsonaro would have a chance to win.
Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president.
But they're not denied the choice because in 2020...
Three, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process.
And they said, oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that.
You can't run again.
And then obviously in Romania, we have Colin Georgescu who won the Romanian election.
And he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO Pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate.
The EU hates him.
The US hates him.
And they just invalidated the election.
They said this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy.
As if the US and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected.
But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count.
The candidate we don't like won.
So it doesn't count.
And then as polls showed that for the new election, they're going to try again.
Let's try it again.
Let's see if maybe this time we can get the candidate we want to win.
Let's just have a do-over.
He was again leading in the polls by even a higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him in order to prevent him from winning.
And so they then went back and they said, you can't run.
Russia helped you.
You're now ineligible.
There was another populist right figure in his party or as an ally who was then also banned.
And this is becoming a trend.
Obviously, the Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try and charge Trump with as many crimes as possible.
Not only convict him of those crimes, but even try and put him in prison before 2024.
It's so obviously a...
A tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy.
I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship.
And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the UK leave the EU.
Do you know how significant that is?
To have the UK leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people?
Just because of how perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and bureaucrats in Brussels.
And then three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment power and dogma, Hillary Clinton.
And that was when Western liberals decided...
That they can no longer trust people to be free.
They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control anymore what people think and therefore how they vote.
And that was when this whole disinformation industry arose.
Oh, we're going to block disinformation.
We're going to make it a crime to spread disinformation.
We and we alone are going to decide what's disinformation.
We're going to fabricate this new expertise called disinformation experts.
And they're going to issue decrees about what is true and false, even though the whole purpose of the Enlightenment was to liberate us from exactly that, the idea that we have central institutionalized power that dictate to us what is true and false, and then ban us from saying what they have said is false.
The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was, no, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.
We can all do that ourselves using free speech.
As long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false.
That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding among other things was based.
So they're waging war in the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful will win.
And they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village in order to save it.
We have to eliminate democracy in order to save democracy.
And I think all of this is going to happen, kind of like I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel and the United States, and how their action is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments.
That I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender and gender ideology.
Created resentment and a backlash.
I think that's going to happen with Israel.
I think it's going to happen here as well.
I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, like, hey, wait a minute.
All these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned.
It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot.
Whereas all the establishment favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity and they're just abiding by the law.
I mean, who believes that?
It's always like this.
The people who stand up and say we are the guardians of democracy are the ones who censor, ban people from the ballot.
I mean, how often have we heard that Putin is bad and tyrannical because he doesn't let his opponents run on the ballot?
Or all these countries we're supposed to hate because they have sham elections?
These are sham elections.
If you ban your primary opposition, the most charismatic and well-liked political figure, you ban them from the ballot.
You have the illusion of democracy, sort of, but you certainly don't have democracy at all.
And the fact that it's being done by the people who incessantly say we and we alone are the emblem of democracy.
You have to let us have all this power so we can protect democracy from its erosion.
The fact that they are engaging most anti-democratically shows how propaganda really functions.
So if you want to see this at one hour long, Show that I just did this week on the Marine Le Pen prosecution in this broader trend that I just described.
It's on G-E-M 25 TV.
It's D-E-I-M 25 TV.
It's on YouTube and a lot of other places.
And like I said, it was so relieved to be on with a few leftists who were adamant that all of this is wrong.
All right, next question from Tucker the Dog.
I don't know if...
I don't know what that means, but I'm always happy to take questions from canines.
In regards to the independent media environment, I am interested in your opinion of Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, and I think a few others, having a secretive meeting with Netanyahu.
Do you think this is concerning for independent media?
Do you have any ethical concerns, or is it a normal practice for journalists to meet with foreign leaders in this way to get out information?
It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders.
Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist?
Or why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with influencers?
Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with That country's agenda, or that leader's way of thinking.
Now, the people they met with are already very pro-Israel.
Dave Rubin, I mean, there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu, and I mean, it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy.
That's like a sustained one.
I mean, he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu, who basically is his leader, Dave Rubin.
Few people love worship and are more loyal to Israel than Dave Rubin.
He got to stand next to Netanyahu.
So I don't know what possible impact that could have.
Dave Rubin was already somebody who puts Israel at the center of his world.
I don't know how he could do that even more.
Maybe he'll be like more excited.
Kind of like preaching to the choir can get the choir more excited even though they were already on your side.
I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel.
I know he's very pro-Israel, but I don't know that there's nuance there.
I've seen a little bit, maybe.
I just don't know enough to make definitive statements.
But it's not that it's that unheard of.
And my understanding is, like, Dave Rubin posted a picture of it.
I think Tim Pool talked about it.
I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on...
Anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe like general impressions.
So it was rules of secrecy, basically.
They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu.
They weren't allowed to talk about what he said.
And I do think this points to a problem in independent media.
I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too...
And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media.
I've talked before about how the easiest way to have success, financial success, rating success, In this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, this is who I am.
This is where I am.
This is who I defend.
This is the ideology I believe in.
I'm never going to deviate from it.
You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction and they want to hear their views validated all the time.
And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to kind of keep informational closure and always have their views validated and never challenged, let alone Rejected.
And a lot of people making a lot of money in independent media doing that.
And, you know, I think, I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the amount of alternatives people have.
And there are people who have tried the independent media who have not succumbed to that kind of Group thinker, audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example.
Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Republican Party.
He's always had kind of a mixture of views.
He has Gaston, who have a very wide-ranging set of ideas.
And he obviously became the most popular program in the country now.
It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political.
Sometimes it's political.
You know, it's cultural.
He considers himself a comedian.
He has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of apolitical content.
Just kind of along the way there's political content.
But I'm talking about political shows.
It's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that.
And once you do that, in a lot of ways you become no different than the corporate media.
Now they have a lot of proximity to power.
You know, if you're suddenly now, because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day, now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits.
To what extent is that really independent media?
I mean, I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at arm's length.
The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being let into their world, people with power, they can open doors.
Like, oh, I get to go to the White House.
I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader.
Not just a foreign leader, but the Prime Minister of Israel.
Of course that's going to compromise your independence.
Or maybe not of course.
Maybe you can resist that and fight against that.
But it's certainly going to have a big effect.
That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way.
Like that White House correspondence dinner.
I absolutely despise it.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
Where they all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with the president.
It's just so corrupting.
It creases like this.
Culture of Versailles, you know, like you're either in the royal court or you're not.
And a lot of these people have not been in the royal court, they have been outsiders, and now suddenly their party, their faction, their candidate is in power, and so are they.
And you think, having sat there and met with Netanyahu, getting invited to these events, that they're going to go and criticize Trump even when he warrants it?
Or criticize Netanyahu, who they just sat in a small group with?
Who knows very well how to manipulate Americans, as he posted up before.
And on some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media.
It didn't used to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal.
Your local newspaper?
But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan.
Like I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan.
Now there is absolutely audience capture among corporate media.
The vast majority of the New York Times subscribers, the vast, vast majority, are liberals.
They hate Trump.
Same with the Washington Post.
They had mass cancellations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris.
Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks, for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was The byproduct of fraud,
that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud.
Many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that.
And some of them actually were opposed to it.
Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims that she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show it, she won't come on.
She never shows his proof.
And a lot of Fox viewers started getting very angry because they were loyal to Trump, and Trump was saying this is what happened, and Fox wasn't saying that, but Newsmax was.
Newsmax was totally on board.
And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax.
And as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative.
That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media.
Because they are now all in silos.
You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets.
But I think with independent media, because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers, not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support, most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers.
Supporting them financially.
You know, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever.
That's what independent media does rely on mostly.
Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them.
I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away.
The subscriptions drop and fall.
But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy.
I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that.
And I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody Even when they're saying things that are so against your views, as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it.
I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time.
I really do.
I don't like it.
I don't find it compelling or engaging.
There's too much agreement.
We're already on the same wavelength.
So I do think independent media is an absolute positive.
I've been a big defender of it.
I still am.
I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing.
But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of which are more inherent to corporate media than to independent media that I think are worth being aware of.
All right, next question is from A.O. Brown1.
Who do you think is the, quote, brain trust that has been advising Trump on terror policy?
It doesn't seem that Musk is or was.
Or if he was, that Trump listened to him.
I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that, I'm sure you've all seen this, you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young.
Because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings.
He was good looking.
He always attracted attention.
Always had a certain charisma.
His dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention.
He had his first wife, Ivanka.
I remember when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children.
He ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples, and the media went insane.
Like, the New York Post, those tabloids, every day.
I mean, he was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success, and he ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between, and the tabloids loved this.
They ate it up.
And so you can see an interview with him in the 80s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on their extremely popular show.
And she asked him, like, would you ever run for president?
He said, probably not.
But he was really passionate about one topic in particular, and that was the idea that Japan, back then it was not China, but Japan in the 80s, that people feared that was taking over technologically and economically.
They were buying a bunch of land in the United States that Japan but other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices.
This has been a view of Trump's for many years.
So in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things.
I think this is something that Trump really He was devoted to doing, especially this time around.
You can see this time he's more, he wants to leave his mark.
He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger.
He doesn't, and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024 was that they got outflanked in the first term.
They had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle.
They didn't really know how Washington worked.
Trump was an outsider.
He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state.
And they were determined to make sure that did not happen.
Again, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year.
And they got in, and they were very serious about it.
They had a real plan for it.
So this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen.
And tariffs are probably the leading example.
But of course, he's not an economist.
He's not a specialist in tariffs.
But Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability.
My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs.
That maybe he talked to his Treasury Secretary.
Maybe... He talked to some billionaires who he trusts.
But what I know for sure is that when these tariffs were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him.
And they were harming these billionaires quite a bit.
I mean, you could watch Tesla's stock imploding.
You know, when Tim Walz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was at 225.
It then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to, you know, 210, 215.
Like, losing 20% of its value.
And Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that...
They wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation.
So I know for a fact, there was a lot of reporting on this.
I've heard this as well.
Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs.
Other people were as well.
And Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it.
And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out.
They panicked.
And they were panic selling.
And what really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way and it bounces back.
They knew the stock market was going to go down.
They were willing to endure that.
What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market.
Because that reverberates the entire economy very quickly.
And I think people are coming to him.
And I'm sure Republicans in Congress were panicking as well.
Imagine that.
If things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism are going to be, take some time to show up.
Layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up.
I mean, like I said last night, I have...
you know people in my life who don't care much about politics but you know and they're middle class but they people in my family friends of mine but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this it's not just billionaires it's ordinary people really feeling that and feeling fear and anger about what's happening And then that reverberates Republicans in Congress as well,
because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade.
That's the classic Republican position.
But then also, they have to run for re-election every two years.
And 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans.
In general, midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control.
The opposition is much more motivated.
You've already seen some of these Elections for state, senator, house, these kind of off-year elections, these special elections, and a couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly.
They were even afraid that Elise Stefanik's seat, even though it's plus 20 Trump, if she went to the UN and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for Now,
we'll see what happens.
It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did.
I don't care what anyone says.
They said from the start, these...
Tariffs are staying in place.
We don't care.
If the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grin and bear it, have some short-term pain.
We need to radically overhaul our economy.
It's not been working, which I agree with.
Free trade, globalism has been great for billionaires.
It's created massive income inequality, sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility.
But suspending the tariffs kind of contradict that message, like we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism, even if they get deals with these countries.
If the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything.
You've gotten some better deals, but you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy.
But imagine putting those tariffs back in place.
What it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions.
I don't know if they can put it back.
I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions.
Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today.
They had kind of a debate between Dave Smith, on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars,
who loves the wars, he thinks they're all great.
There's this phrase I once heard.
That I once read.
It might be something that a lot of people have said.
I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true.
I realized as soon as I read it how true it was.
I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent.
They all think, oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.
And that they subtract 20% or 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with a southern accent.
An American Southern accent.
It's so true.
People's perceptions of who's smart and who isn't are very warped by those sorts of things.
And the relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's show today with Dave Smith.
Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kind of debates.
It got very heated.
Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.
And I...
Usually Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show.
Basically the entire Joe Rogan audience, which again is not left wing to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray.
They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically, and personally.
I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan's comment section be that universally disgusted.
And contemptuous of anybody since Matt Uglasius went on Joe Rogan's show.
I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Uglasius went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal.
I mean, they hated Matt Uglasius.
It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it.
And they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked.
I mean, everything about him.
But it came close with Douglas Murray.
And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way.
In fact, after October 7th, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times, and at first he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on.
He doesn't want to be challenged.
He wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon.
And just he loves to hear himself speak.
He thinks he's so eloquent.
He knows Americans are like, oh my God, this is so brilliant.
But he will never be challenged.
And he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan, and he just fell apart.
Fell apart.
It's really worth watching.
It's entertaining, and I encourage you to read the comment section as well.
But it's not just that it was a good internet fight.
They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues.
He came on.
Douglas Murray did and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith.
That didn't go well, and then the rest of it was just complete fluster.
So I recommend that.
It was pretty illuminating as well.
It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger.
Someone who wants to send people to war all the time but never goes is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours, and it's unrelenting, that show.
I loved when I was on, but by the third hour, I was like, is this ending?
It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith, and more importantly for Douglas Murray, by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly.
So I really recommend that.
All right.
Thank you so much to everybody who submitted these questions.
We have more.
We always try and save them for the next week.
We really appreciate our Locals members who come up with these questions.
It's what enables these shows to cover so much ground, to really talk about things that maybe on my own I wouldn't talk about, but they're still really worth talking about.
We are super appreciative of all of our Locals members, but especially the ones who Submit these kind of questions.
For those that have been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m. Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble.
