Pentagon in Turmoil Over Iran Policy as Israel Pushes for War; Lee Fang on New NIH Censorship Policy Threatening Medical Researchers
Establishment pro-Israel factions within the Trump administration continue to push the U.S. toward war with Iran amid major Pentagon shake-ups. Plus: Lee Fang reports on a repressive censorship law prohibiting NIH employees from boycotting Israel.
----------------------
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
Read Lee Fang's article on Substack
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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.
I was away the last couple of nights, mostly because I was under the weather, traveling in New York City, got home, just felt a little unwell, but happy to be back, fully recovered and ready to go.
We have a lot to talk about.
Tonight, there is a...
Highly unusual and clearly consequential purge of some of the highest national security officials taking place for the Trump administration.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in particular has had his longtime and most trusted confidants, whom he chose just two months ago, for the most influential policymaking positions reporting directly to him now fired.
And while this sort of bureaucratic intrigue is often opaque in Washington, And Hegseth, the ultimate team player for Trump, is insisting that there is nothing out of the ordinary taking place.
One cannot help but notice that several of his fallen advisors are among the most vocal skeptics, if not outright opponents, of a U.S. military conflict with Iran, beginning with his longtime friend and the former Marine, Dan Caldwell.
All of this is taking place against a backdrop of increasingly intense and increasingly public pressure being placed on Donald Trump and his administration to endorse either a direct U.S. military strike against Iran or give a green
light for Israel to do so, which, as always, would depend on heavy U.S. military backing and would certainly drag the U.S. into that conflict.
Having the U.S. bomb Iran with the ostensible but futile goal of disabling its nuclear energy capabilities, but with the real goal being regime change, Has long been the number one priority of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu going back decades,
as well as his legion of very powerful loyalists spread throughout the U.S. government and in virtually every American major power faction.
We'll examine what is clear in all of these events and whether the war drums that are clearly beating more loudly and more loudly every day in Washington against Tehran can really be stopped.
Then, one of the primary topics of our show over the last three months, I think by necessity, since Trump's inauguration, has been the seemingly daily issuance of new censorship programs designed with one goal, to protect Israel and the Israeli government from criticism and protest and to exploit,
to abuse, the power of the federal government in multiple ways to punish and threaten Israel's critics.
Every time we think we have seen the peak of these silencing efforts, That was certainly the case today when the National Institute of Health Issued brand new guidelines announcing that any medical research institutes or medical researchers who support a boycott of
Israel will instantly lose all federal grants and funds no matter how important their research might be.
They may be finding treatments or coming close to finding cures for cancer or Alzheimer's or developing other life-improving or life-saving medications.
And yet, under these new rules issued by the NIH today, as is true for most similar Trump policies thus far, researchers are completely free to boycott any country in the world.
They're even allowed to boycott specific American states.
And that would pose no risk whatsoever to their funding.
The only way to lose medical funding under these new NIH guidelines is if they refuse to sign a pledge that they will not support or participate in a boycott of this one specific foreign country, Israel.
Which really does seem to be the subject of new regulations, new policies, and new laws issued seemingly every day by the Republican Congress and the Trump administration.
The independent investigative journalist Li Fong has written today about these new NIH regulations on his substack.
These regulations, when we show them to you, you're going to see how extraordinarily clear and shocking they are.
And he'll be with us tonight to discuss these regulations, but also the broader implications of the censorship campaigns that they represent.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few programming notes.
First of all, I don't know if you heard this or not, but we're encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
Once you do so, it works on your smart TV, telephone, Xbox, many other different devices.
And then when you do that, you can follow the programs you most like to watch on this platform.
If you activate notifications, which we hope you
Different, all sorts of different ways to be notified.
You just click on the link.
You can begin watching the program live.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of every program on Rumble and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble as well.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting.
We really do rely on the support of our viewers and members in order to do that to support our program.
You can sign up to become a member of our Locals community, which gives you access to a wide array of benefits, interactive features where we speak to you throughout the week.
We put a lot of original video content only for our Locals members, including sometimes when we go...
We do a Q&A session with questions solely from our local members.
A bunch of other features there as well.
But most of all, it's the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right after this brief message from our sponsor.
System Update.
Here is a news 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 agendas and censor voices, make sure you only see one side of the story.
That's exactly why I started this show on Rumble, because I believe in free speech and real conversations and the best pursuit of the truth possible.
And it's also why I partnered with an app and website that believes in those values as well.
Ground News prioritizes free speech over controlling the narrative.
For every story, every news story, you can find all the articles reporting on it worldwide with context, such as if a news source has any political bias, how credible they are, and if any major corporation is influencing their reporting.
All I have to do is swipe through coverage with tags indicating if it's coming from liberal or conservative sources or corporations or independent voices and from there I can decide for myself if Mexico's unprecedented extradition of 29 cartel members to the U.S. really
is proof that Trump's tariffs are working.
Different sources are saying different things as usual.
If I had just read one of these stories, or one of these sources, I'd have a completely skewed or incomplete view of reality.
But with ground news I can now pull all of them side by side and decide for myself who's actually telling the truth.
Ground News even created a dedicated feed called Blindspot that exposes stories that either side of the political spectrum isn't reporting on, making it possible to spot stories that many people who control the narrative don't want you to see for whatever reason.
Ground News is bringing back transparency in the news and civil discourse right from your phone or computer.
Best of all, they're independent and subscriber supported and they're offering my viewers 40% off the same Vantage plan that I use that gives you unlimited access to all of their features this month.
So you can scan the QR code to check them out or go to groundnews.i, groundnews.i, groundnews.i, for 40% off.
If you like this show, I am certain that you'll really trust and love that platform.
Music. Music.
One of the things that you realize for the first time if you live outside the United States is just how aberrational it is for a country to constantly spend its time talking about which country it ought to go to war with next.
It's usually unheard of for most countries to even consider the possibility of a war
And in the United States, we have an endless array, a really, literally endless array of military conflicts, bombing campaigns, wars, invasions, and all kinds of covert actions in other countries as well.
And it seems always like the public grows increasingly.
Tired of that.
Poll after poll constantly demonstrates that people are eager for an end-to-endless war, that these wars are not in the interest of American citizens or American interests.
Candidates who run on a platform of being anti-war, of avoiding war, as Barack Obama did, as Donald Trump did, tend to do extremely well because they're...
Telling the American people what they already want and believe, which is that these wars are being fought in a way that not only doesn't benefit their lives, but in so many ways undermines and subverts and prejudices it.
The war in Iraq is something that should have put an end to this forever.
It was the supreme expression of a war begun and sold based on falsehoods and lies.
Not just about the cause of the war, but also how the war would end up being prosecuted.
We were told, oh, it'd be over in a few weeks.
We're so much more powerful than Iraq.
We're just going to remove the Saddam Hussein regime.
We're going to be welcomed as liberators.
It's going to be quick in and quick out.
And then we're going to have freedom and democracy spreading throughout the Middle East.
Absolutely none of that happened.
All the people who told us those things, which ended up disproven and debunked.
Didn't lose any stature at all in Washington.
If anything, they gained it and are more powerful than ever.
And that's why, basically 20 years later, the same people are back and have been back for the last 20 years, selling similar wars of regime change in Syria and Libya and getting us involved in all sorts of conflicts all around the world.
Obama bombed multiple, eight Muslim-majority countries, killing all sorts of civilians, generating anti-American hatred and instability.
We fought in Afghanistan for 20 years.
As soon as we left, the Taliban marched right back into power as though nothing had ever happened.
Iraq went from whatever else you think of Saddam Hussein, an actual adversary of Iran, to basically being a proxy state of Iran, strengthening Iran, the country we were told is the greatest terrorist regime on the planet.
None of what we were told was going to happen actually happened, and that's true for essentially every single one of these conflicts.
And yet every time There's an attempt to sell the U.S. and American citizens into participating in or funding a new war as we're doing funding the Israeli destruction of Gaza, as we're funding the Ukraine war with Russia.
The propaganda is very intense.
All you have to do is keep people's fear level high enough for a certain period of time to get them to sign on or emotionally manipulate them enough to get them to sign on.
And once they do...
Even if a few months later or a year later they start regretting it, the war just continues without any end in sight.
And the current target, clearly, openly, if you pay attention to the news at all, you would know, is a new war with Iran.
It's being sold just like the war in Iraq, in the sense that, oh, this is a very limited war, don't worry.
It's not going to be a full-on, years-long war.
It's going to go bomb a few other nuclear reactors.
Or Israel's going to do it and we're going to help them.
And all the fear-mongering, oh, Saddam Hussein was on the verge of getting nuclear weapons.
He's going to hand it to Osama bin Laden, who will use it to smuggle nuclear weapons into the United States.
Same exact narrative.
Iran is just seconds away from getting a nuclear bomb.
We can't allow them to do so.
It would be the end of all of history.
Everyone in the world would die.
You're going to die if Iran gets a nuclear weapon or is allowed to get close.
And therefore we have to go to war.
And it's coming from the same people who have been debunked and exposed as liars over and over because in Washington there's an accountability-free zone for people who advocate wars.
In fact, they get more and more powerful both within media and politics.
It really doesn't make a difference what happened in the past.
They're able to use the same tactics over and over.
Now the difference is that Donald Trump He ran in 2016 on trying to break that bipartisan war policy of endless war.
He ran not only against the Democratic Party, but the Bush-Cheney regime.
He had to do so.
Jeb Bush was his primary opponent, backed by the entire Republican establishment and all of the muddied interests that support the Bush family and the Republican Party.
And Trump prided himself and often boasted about the fact that he was the only president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war.
And by all accounts, there is massive pressure now being put on Trump, barely three months into his presidency, to go and bomb, just coincidentally, what happens to be Israel's primary enemy, the country that Netanyahu has dreamed of inducing the United States into bombing,
which is Iran.
Massive pressure being put onto Trump.
And by all accounts, his posture seems to be he does not want a war with Iran on his legacy, that he prefers instead a diplomatic solution that would provide confidence that Iran is not able to obtain a nuclear weapon.
There was an agreement along those lines, negotiated not just by the Obama administration, but with the help of many foreign countries, not just in Europe, but also Russia, that allowed inspectors in, that by all accounts was, And had prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Trump ran in 2016 on a promise to nullify that deal on the grounds that it was insufficient.
He pulled out of that deal.
All inspectors were gone.
That has created the crisis that we're now in, or at least the ostensible crisis that we're now in, where we're told that Iran is again close to a nuclear weapon.
But at least this time there is serious division and serious debate taking place within the Trump administration.
On the question of whether or not that is in the United States' interest to pursue, notwithstanding the extreme amounts of pressure being placed on Trump and his administration by not just Israel, but the legion and army of Israel loyalists who are all over the United States,
who are inside the U.S. government.
And a lot of news outlets have been reporting not just on the...
Two camps within the Trump administration, the one that wants to take the diplomatic route and the one that wants to take the bombing route, but also giving a lot of details about who's on which side.
And my own reporting, my own speaking to people very close to the Trump administration absolutely aligns with several of these reports, including this one from Axios that was published on April 16th with the headline, Trump Team's Iran Divide, Dialogue vs.
Detonation to End the Nuclear Threat.
Quote, one camp, unofficially led by Vice President J.D. Vance, believes a diplomatic solution is both preferable and possible and that the U.S. should be ready to make compromises in order to make it happen.
Vance is highly involved in the Iran policy discussions, another U.S. official said.
This camp also includes Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, who represented the U.S. in the first round of Iran talks on Saturday, as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
It also gets outside support from MAGA influencer and Trump whisperer Tucker Carlson, who I should say has been probably doing more, at least consequentially, to prevent a military conflict between the United States and Iran than almost anybody else going back to when he had his Fox show during the Trump administration and denounced Trump's targeted killing of General Soleimani on the grounds that that was likely to provoke a war.
With Iran, and there was no, or at least possibly would provoke a war with Iran, and there was no interest in doing that.
So there is a group of serious, influential people who have Trump's ear, J.D. Vance, Steve Whitcoff, Dr. Carlson, Pete Hegseth, who are strongly in the camp of pursuing a diplomatic resolution.
The Axios article goes on, quote, Remember, the United States has military bases all throughout the Middle East.
I'm not talking here about sprawling, highly fortified military bases.
Basically, small military bases of 1,000 troops here, 2,000 troops here, in Jordan, in Iraq, in Syria, that are not highly vulnerable in theory, but that have been attacked over the last two years.
Service members have died.
U.S. service members.
At military bases, attacked by drones, by Iraqi militias, by other forces in the region, and all of them will be extremely vulnerable to counterattack by Iran if the United States or some combination of the US and Israel attack Iran.
This is a country three times the size of Iraq with a vastly more sophisticated military than Iraq had.
You had a bunch of...
Sheep herders, basically, in Afghanistan who fought off the U.S. military for 20 years.
And the idea that it will be easy to defeat Iran, which is what we were told about Iraq, a country with a fraction of the military strength and size as Iran, is a pure fairy tale.
And there are lots of targets, human American targets in the Middle East, business targets in the Middle East, to say nothing of...
What the Axios article goes on to describe, quote, they also argue a new conflict in the region would send oil prices skyrocketing at a very, quote, sensitive time for the U.S. economy, to put that mildly.
Lots of very negative repercussions from a U.S. military conflict with Iran.
On top of the fact that it is proven to be the case that maybe if you bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, you can slow down their program for a couple months.
Iran is a vast country, geographically.
It's extremely large.
They have proven the capability to covertly put nuclear facilities underground, very, very far underground.
And you can't eliminate the know-how.
You may be able to eliminate the infrastructure, but you can't eliminate the know-how.
And the more you go around attacking countries because they don't have nuclear weapons, while Avoiding any conflict with the countries that do.
Note that we don't ever threaten military action against North Korea or Pakistan or India or China.
Those countries have nuclear weapons.
We're creating a world in which any rational government would say to itself, wow, I better get nuclear weapons.
Because that's the only way to prevent the United States or Israel or some combination of U.S. allies from constantly threatening my people and my country to attack.
Nuclear weapons are the only thing that gives respect enough to deter these kinds of attacks.
The article goes on.
The other camp, which includes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, unsurprisingly to members of Congress with a long record of neoconservative militarism.
It's highly suspicious of Iran and extremely skeptical of the chances of a deal that significantly rolls back Iran's nuclear program, U.S. officials say.
Senators close to Trump, such as Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, also hold that view.
This camp believes Iran is weaker than ever and therefore the U.S. should not compromise but insist Tehran fully dismantle its nuclear program and should either strike Iran directly or support an Israeli strike if they don't.
Iran hawks like Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, are lobbying hard for that approach.
Quote, In case you think that there's alarmism about the prospect of a U.S. conflict with Iran or that it's just sort of a Consider the fact that a lot of people extremely close
to the Trump administration, extremely supportive of the Trump administration and Donald Trump in particular are warning that the likelihood is very high.
And these are people who are not speculating from a distance.
These are people very well connected to exactly what's going on at the highest levels of the Trump White House.
On April 7th, Tucker Carlson tweeted the following, quote, This is suicidal.
Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States but an enemy.
And he's saying that because it may be the case that if you're Israel, you want regime change in Iran.
The United States once engineered regime change in Iran.
It was in 1954 when we overthrew their democratically elected government, replaced him with the...
Shah of Iran that proceeded to dictatorially and savagely rule that country with an iron fist for the next 25 years until there was an Islamic revolution in 1979.
And people wonder, why did the Islamic revolution constantly chant death to America?
It's probably because they know that we overthrew their government and imposed the savagery and brutality of the Shah of Iran who crushed all kinds of dissent, all kinds of religious expression, aligned himself as a puppet state with the United States and Israel.
And every time we interfere that way in another country, that's a story that has happened over and over with the same results on virtually every continent on the planet.
And they want to do that again.
They want to go and try and change the regime again.
That might be beneficial to Israel.
I don't think so.
But how would it improve the lives of American citizens?
Charlie Kirk, who also is very close to the Trump White House and a very vocal and important supporter of Donald Trump, on April 3rd said, quote, It's going unnoticed because so much other news is happening, but the war drums are beating again in Washington.
The warmongers worry this is their last chance to get the white whale they've been chasing for 30 years.
An all-out regime change war against Iran.
A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.
One, our military stockpiles are depleted from three years of backing Ukraine.
Our effort to reshore manufacturing has only just begun and would take years to bear fruit.
War would worsen our already immense deficit and national debt.
Iran is larger than Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined.
A war would not be easy and could easily become a calamity.
Thanks to President Trump's restraint during his first term, America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good.
We shouldn't throw that opportunity away so that some D.C. has-beens can feel tough by sending young Americans to die yet again.
in. Thank you.
Hard to say anything but amen to every word of that tweet.
Not just Tucker Carlson, not just Charlie Kirk, also Steve Bannon.
Sounding the same alarms from the New Arab, April 18th, the headline, quote, Arrogant Netanyahu trying to pressure U.S. into an Iran attack, says Steve Bannon.
Speaking on his podcast, Steve Bannon said Netanyahu, quote, forced his way into meetings with Trump in a bid to win backing for a strike on Tehran's nuclear sites.
Trump insider Steve Bannon has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of attempting to pressure the White House to approve a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Speaking on his podcast on Thursday, Trump's former chief strategist said Netanyahu had, quote, forced his way into two meetings with the U.S. president and accused him of, quote, arrogance in trying to force the issue.
Netanyahu has been to Washington twice since Trump's inauguration in January in a bid to lobby the White House into supporting Israel's escalation in Gaza and a military strike on Iran.
Now, I know the arguments in favor of the military strike, which is, well, we can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon.
If we don't do anything, Iran's going to get a nuclear weapon.
That's going to be cataclysmic.
There's a lot of reasons to doubt that Iran will get a nuclear weapon.
But let's assume that they get one.
I think there's a big question.
Why would that be cataclysmic?
It isn't Iran that has really demonstrated this sort of apocalyptic extremism over the past several years of bombing whatever country they want, of occupying whatever country they want, seizing territory.
That's Israel that's doing that.
It's currently occupying and has seized large parts of Syria, large parts of Lebanon.
Is in the process of annexing the West Bank using military force and obviously has destroyed all civilian life in Gaza based on an increasingly religious fanaticism and nationalistic fanaticism of that government.
Israel, of course, is the only country in the region that does have nuclear weapons.
It has a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons.
They got caught spying on the United States' nuclear program and other nuclear programs in order to acquire that.
And people like Professor John Mearsheimer argued that why would it be destabilizing for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon?
A lot of countries have nuclear weapons.
Iran and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.
India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.
France and the UK have nuclear weapons.
China has a nuclear weapon.
Other countries, Russia obviously has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
And his view is that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, there'd be equity.
Between Israel and Iran, they couldn't keep constantly threatening one another.
There wouldn't be this constant threat of war in the Middle East.
But leave that aside.
The idea that Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon is just a couple weeks or months away.
This is something that you would believe only if you're completely unaware of the history of these fear-mongering campaigns from Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
They've been saying exactly the same thing for at least 15 years now.
I just want to show you a little bit of this.
Here's The Guardian from September of 2012, which is 13 years ago.
The headline, Benjamin Netanyahu demands a, quote, red line to stop the Iran nuclear program.
Israel's Prime Minister tells the UN General Assembly that Iran is more than 70% of the way to producing a nuclear weapon.
Netanyahu marked a line near the top of the bomb.
He drew a graphic of a bomb and there was a line there beyond which he said Iran should not be allowed to pass.
That line representing 90% of the way to making a warhead would be reached by next spring at most by next summer.
Netanyahu added, quote, from there it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.
Now, at the time, there was actually a leaked report from Assad in 2012 that said that was actually completely false.
There, you see from the Guardian, a leaked cable shows that Netanyahu's Iran bomb claim
There's that little primitive graphic that he nonetheless showed to the UN knowing it was false based on his own intelligence.
But this is the sort of thing that the Israeli government has been doing for Quite a long time.
And here's what the Guardian said about that quote, "Bendham Netanyahu's dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service according to a top secret Mossad document.
Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli Prime Minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt that process.
But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, an Israeli intelligence agency concluded that Iran was, quote, not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.
The Mossad briefing about Iran's nuclear program in 2012 was in stark contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu as long presented the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to world security.
Behind the scenes, Mossad took a different view.
In a report shared with South African spies on October 22, 2012, but likely written earlier, it conceded that Iran was, quote, working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors.
Which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given.
But the report also states that Iran, quote, does not appear to be ready to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons.
To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%.
Assad estimated that Iran then had about 100 kilograms of material enriched to 20%.
Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear program for civilian energy purposes.
These are the people who have lied continuously.
These are the people who told you Iraq had a nuclear program, that Saddam was in the market for nuclear weapons, that he had biological and chemical weapons, which induced people to invade Iraq at huge cost to the United States, to Iraq, to the entire region.
Who in their right mind would believe them now with the same exact claims but about a different Israeli enemy?
The Jerusalem Post, February 2013.
Headline, Netanyahu, Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear bomb.
Quote, Iran is closer today than ever before to obtaining the necessary enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Prime Minister Ben-Yu Netanyahu said on Thursday evening.
He was reacting to the publication of details of a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment plant.
Netanyahu termed the report, quote, very grave and said it proved that Iran was moving swiftly toward the red line he had set out the UN in September.
He said during that address that Iran must be stopped before it crossed the line, something he said at the time could happen as early as the spring.
Lots of domestic criticism happened in Israel at the time from Netanyahu's very exaggerated claims.
Here, former prime minister, Olmert criticizes Netanyahu's alarmism from Ynet News in April 2013.
Olmert, Iranian threat is exaggerated.
Former prime minister said the Iranian nuclear program is not progressing.
Calls on Netanyahu to work intelligently and calmly with U.S. leaders.
So, over and over, this is the sort of thing that has happened.
The Jerusalem Post, months later, July of 2013, Netanyahu, Iran is, quote, weeks away from crossing the red line.
This is 2013.
Weeks away.
The Times of Israel from January of 2013, Netanyahu, Iran set back only six weeks by nuclear deal.
Prime Minister said the whole world notes Iran is after nukes.
Final agreement will be the true test of Tehran's intentions.
Here's the Times of Israel and three years later, March of 2015, when Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal, Netanyahu, the deal will leave Iran, quote, less than a year away from having a bomb.
Quote, the time Iran will need to break out of a nuclear program if it signs a deal with world powers in Lassan, quote, will be reduced to less than a year and probably a lot less than that, the Prime Minister warned.
Such a deal, whose emerging terms have been the subject of many reports, will, quote, pave the way to a nuclear weapon.
That was the deal that ultimately was signed.
Iran did not get a bomb in less than a year, to say nothing of far less than that.
Do you see the relentless tsunami of propaganda coming from Israel, Netanyahu, and its legion of supporters trying to induce the United States to participate in an attack on Iran based on The sort of propaganda that induced the United States to attack Saddam Hussein.
Look at how many times these warnings have been issued with great urgency.
Iran is weeks away, months away.
If you do the Iran deal, they're going to get it in a year or far less.
None of it ever happens.
At some point, a rational person has to start doubting these claims.
Last year in May, I participated in a debate with Alan Dershowitz of the Soho Forum in New York.
Where he was advocating U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Of course it has to be the United States doing the dirty work of Israel.
And I made a similar point about just how many years we've endured the kind of fear-mongering and false warnings that have emanated from Israel and people like Alan Dershowitz.
We've been hearing this exact same thing for 20 years, and none of it ever came true, so you should decide tonight whether there's any reason, after hearing this for 20 years, you're now suddenly willing to believe that Iran is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons to the point that we have to go start a new war with Iran.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who's the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a strong supporter of Israel, wrote a cover story for The Atlantic called The Point of No Return in 2010.
Where he told Americans it was more than 50% likely that the Israelis were about to go bomb Iran in the next three months because...
They didn't have more than months before Iran finally acquired a nuclear weapon.
You can go all the way back to 2005 where NBC News reported the following.
This is 2005, 20 years ago, quote, "Israel should take, quote,'bold and courageous action against arch-foe Iran's nuclear program,'similar to its 1981 strike on the main Iraqi reactor, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
on Sunday, Israeli officials have said that unless stopped, Iran will achieve the know-how to build a bomb by March of next year."
In 2010, Jeffrey Goldberg said, In other words, March of 2011, that's all Israel has.
If we assume that nothing changes in these estimates, this will mean we have to begin thinking about our next step beginning at the turn of the year.
The New York Times in 2012, President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told the UN that Iran's capability to enrich uranium must be stopped before next spring or early summer, arguing that by the time the country will be in a position to make a short, undetectable sprint to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Reuters in 2015, CBS in 2018, BBC in 2019 all say exactly the same thing.
Oh, we're only months away.
We have for sure these intelligence photos with a big red arrow pointing at some random building that we have discovered is where Iran is about to proliferate their nuclear weapons.
It's been happening over and over that you've been lied to for 20 years.
I mean, you could just go on with all of that evidence for a long time.
Now, in case you think I'm exaggerating the extent to which this is essentially identical to the propaganda that led to the invasion of Iraq, and not just propaganda from the U.S. government, from neocons in the United States, but also Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
Who came to the Congress at the Congress's request in 2002 to urge the United States to go and invade Iraq.
Here is what Benjamin Netanyahu told the Congress in 2002 about invading Iraq.
No question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons.
No question whatsoever.
No question whatsoever, these people lie as casually as you change your shoes or socks.
They will say anything.
And you see the evidence of this.
This is not me predicting that their statements will end up being lies.
This is years of the same people lying in exactly the same way for exactly the same motives.
Here's the rest of what he said.
And there is no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately.
The dangers posed by a nuclear-armed Saddam were understood by my country two decades ago, well before September 11th.
In 1981, the late Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, dispatched the Israeli Air Force on a pre-dawn raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak.
This probably took place months away from Saddam's ability to assemble the critical mass of plutonium for the first atomic bomb, or more than one.
And today, the United States must destroy the same regime because a nuclear-armed Saddam will place the security of our entire world at risk.
And make no mistake about it.
And once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.
Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam's nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation.
But today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do.
Because Saddam's nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two decades.
He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs.
He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country.
No, he's saying that, look, I'm not even saying that you should just go bomb their nuclear facilities because that's not enough.
You have to go change the regime.
He wasn't saying you should let us, Israel, go change.
No, you have to send your men and women, your service members, All the way across the world to invade Iraq in order to change the regime that we consider to be one of our number one enemies, if not our number one enemy at the time, which is Saddam Hussein.
Change the regime.
Just bombing their nuclear installations is not enough.
Here's one more thing that he told Congress during that same testimony.
Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say, the time of such regimes, of such chess spots, is gone.
There is a new age.
Something new is happening.
And is there speculation on your part, or do you have some evidence to that effect?
You know, I was asked the same question in 1986.
I had written a book in which I had said that...
The way to deal with terrorist regimes, well, with terror, was to deal with the terrorist regimes.
And the way to deal with the terrorist regimes, among other things, was to apply military force against them.
The way we did in Afghanistan.
The way, for example, I want to answer your question.
I guess I'm running out of time, so I quickly was trying to get there.
We've done, I think, what you proposed in Afghanistan, yet I haven't seen that sort of neighborhood effect.
Well, I think there's been an enormous effect.
The effect was we were told that there would be a contrary effect.
First of all, people said that there would be tens of thousands of people streaming into Afghanistan, zealots who would be outraged by America's action, and this would produce a counter-reaction in the Arab world.
But I think you're not saying that when you take an action like we did in Afghanistan, we're going to see all of the other countries just fold.
No, what we saw is something else.
First of all, we saw everybody streaming out of Afghanistan.
The second thing we saw is all the Arab countries and many Muslim countries trying to side with America, trying to make...
To be okay with America.
The application of power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism.
If I had to say, what are the three principles of winning the war on terror?
It's like, what are the three principles of real estate, the three L's?
Location, location, location.
The three principles of winning the war on terror are the three W's.
Winning, winning, and winning.
The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes.
The first victory in Afghanistan makes the second victory in Iraq.
That much easier.
The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier too, but it may change the nature of achieving that victory.
It may be possible to have implosions taking place.
I don't guarantee it, Mr. Attorney, but I think it makes it more likely.
And you see there, he had a...
He didn't want just war in Afghanistan and war in Iraq.
He had a third war and a fourth war, and all of these words have been laid out for a long time.
The top of the list has always been Iran.
They achieved every other one on that list.
Syria and Libya and Somalia.
They got the United States to go fight in every one of those countries.
Netanyahu and the Israelis did.
The one left, the white whale, as Charlie Kirk called it, is regime change in Iran, and that is what absolutely is at stake now.
As Reuters reported on April 19th, Despite the fact that Trump told Netanyahu he wants to pursue a diplomatic path, Israel is now saying, exclusive, Israel still is eyeing a limited attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, knowing that there's no way for Israel itself to do that without all sorts of military assistance from the United States.
And once Israel actually did anything like that, the United States would of course feel compelled to get involved, just as we did when...
The United States, when Israel and Iran ended up in some sort of very limited military conflict over Gaza, when they were shooting missiles at each other, we deployed all sorts of military assets to the region under Biden.
We gave all the arms to Israel to destroy Gaza.
And it's a pressure campaign on the United States to say, look, if you don't do it, we're going to, and you're going to end up helping us.
Again, the threat to American lives in the region is not theoretical.
From the BBC, January of 2024, last year, quote, a U.S. drone attack, three U.S. troops killed in a drone strike on a U.S. military base in the Middle East.
Quote, three U.S. troops have been killed and dozens injured in a drone attack on a U.S. base near Jordan's border with Syria.
U.S. President Joe Biden said the attack was carried out by, quote, radical Iran-backed militia groups.
He added, quote, we shall respond.
Iran has denied any involvement.
You see there the Iran capability to, and not just the Iranian capability, but the Iraqi capability, other militias throughout the Middle East, the United States military bases and service members would be sitting ducks, and we'd be putting U.S. service members' lives at risk in defense of what and whom?
Not the United States.
And all of this leads to this very strange And Hegseth has been a target of establishment forces in Washington from the time that he was nominated.
Trump used a lot of capital to get him into that position.
Not because he's some sort of foreign policy He has not been in the past.
Quite the opposite.
But his loyalty now is to Trump, and he has been siding with the America First foreign policy for the most part.
He was obviously a big advocate of bombing Yemen, and I have a lot of opposition to that.
But when it comes to Iran, he has been perceived as an impediment, and the people closest to him are now being targeted, and the Wall Street Journal, always the voice of the GOP, Establishment, not just when it comes to economic policy and neoliberalism, but also to GOP militarism,
is very excited by exploiting the Pete Hegseth problem in order to do the following.
This is their editorial from today called the Hegseth Pentagon Chronicles.
Quote, no doubt the Beltway Press would love to knock Pete Hegseth out as defense secretary, but that doesn't come close to explaining the mess at the Pentagon.
The staff infighting dismissals and leaks over Signal app chats look to be a self-inflicted mistake of a management neophyte.
If Mr. Hegseth is wise, here's what the Wall Street Journal says he should do.
He'll use the staff shakeup to hire some loyal grown-ups who know the building.
Instead of self-promoting isolationists, he brought in.
Look at that formulation.
Hegseth hired a bunch of people who have become extremely skeptical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the idea of endless war in the Middle East, of war with Iran.
And the Wall Street Journal is saying, look, we've stripped you of all your advisors.
Now is the time to get ordinary establishment militarists surrounding you.
As opposed to these worst skeptics that you hired to be your closest advisors that are now gone.
One of the people who was Hegseth's closest advisor, who was the target in kind of the fallout of this firing, he was escorted out of the office last week under very strange circumstances, is Dan Caldwell.
A former Marine who has fought in wars and has that sort of skepticism about these wars from having fought in them that I've seen in many other people like him.
Tulsi Gabbard has similar skepticism about regime change wars after having gotten fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lots of other people like that as well.
And Dan Caldwell was interviewed today by Tucker Carlson.
It's a 90-minute discussion.
You can find it on Tucker's show.
It is about the dangers of U.S. military conflict with Iran, the multifaceted dangers, the bipartisan and multilevel pressures being applied to the Trump administration to pursue a war with Iran,
notwithstanding the fact that there are no American interests there.
And Dan Caldwell has an excellent grasp on the history of U.S. foreign policy.
He's a young guy.
He is not part of this kind of Republican militarism machine.
He talks about how there's been this very clear breakdown in left versus right when it comes to militarism and interventionism.
You find a lot of opposition to a war with Iran on the left and also the populist right, and those are the people who are being systematically targeted now within the Trump administration, hoping to amplify the voices of people like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz and these other traditional neocons that populate the Trump administration.
And I cannot recommend enough listening to Dan Caldwell speak to Tucker for 90 minutes about what he thinks, what he learned from his short time in the Pentagon, but also the broader experiences and foreign policy theories that have led him to this skepticism that has made him a threat to a lot of people in Washington.
Now, I just want to conclude, because I want to bring on Lee Fung in just a second.
One of the points...
Dan Caldwell made is that Trump absolutely is committed to the diplomatic resolution.
He does not want to cast aside the possibility of diplomacy in pursuit of war, even though people like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, all the usual suspects, Mike Walz, Mark Rubio, are encouraging that.
He's saying, I think we can do a deal that will result in assurances that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.
And a lot of the hardest core neocons, the most fanatical Israel loyalists, are going insane because the idea of stopping Iran's nuclear program is the pretext.
What these people want is a change in the regime in Iran.
They want to go back to installing the Shah of Iran's monarchy that they installed back in 1954.
And the Shah of Iran's son thinks he's the legitimate ruler of Iran.
They want to put him back into office.
Dan Caldwell called him the ultimate fail son.
You may remember the Iraq war, the exact same strategies.
They had a bunch of Iraqi exiles who had no connection to the Iraqi people, hadn't lived there for 40 years.
People like Ahmed Shemaldi, who was going to float in and govern.
Iraq, once they got rid of Saddam as a U.S. puppet, a puppet of neocons, a puppet of Israel, just like the Shah of Iran was, that is still their plan.
That is the real goal, to scare Americans about Iran's nuclear program as a pretext for changing the regime of Iran.
Here's Mark Dubowitz from one of the most neoconservative think tanks in Washington, giving up the game because he's scared that Trump is going to succeed in diplomacy.
He says, quote, Meaning, we're going to be welcomed as liberators, same thing we heard in Iraq.
Hammered by the IDF and Mossad, its terror armies, air defenses, missile production capabilities are in ruins.
Never a better time to dismantle its nuke program and finish off the regime.
Will another POTUS blink?
Meaning, will Trump be too scared to send Americans to go die for a regime change war in Iran?
Notwithstanding the utter and complete and total failure, There's also an attack on Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence because she has been giving intelligence to Trump,
saying that there's no good intelligence that Iran actually is moving toward a nuclear weapon, which U.S. intelligence has been saying for quite some time.
And there's now an attempt, and this should sound very familiar to anyone who understands the Iraq war on the part of neocons, to target and coerce Tulsi Gabbard into altering the intelligence to say the opposite, that Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons to be able to justify the war.
Like Dick Cheney used to go to the CIA, like Paul Wolfowitz had his own stovepiped information from the CIA.
Lots of people in the CIA were saying there's no evidence Saddam had nuclear weapons.
Let alone biological and chemical weapons.
And they went there and insisted and pressured intelligence officials to give the intelligence they wanted that Colin Powell then destroyed his reputation by going to the UN to presenting to justify the war.
That's exactly what's happening here.
Hear from the journal American Greatness.
DNI Gabbard must reverse, quote, stupid U.S. intelligence weapon, U.S. intelligence on Iran's nuclear weapons program.
U.S. intelligence still claims Iran has no active nuclear weapons program despite stockpiles of near-weapons-grade uranium and evidence of covert weaponization efforts.
So they're saying the U.S. intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard, have to change the intelligence from what they have, which is that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons actively, to say that they are so that we can have a regime change war against Iran.
Here is neocon Mark Levin, who cited this article today, said, Very important.
Please read to the end.
Red flags are everywhere.
Can't say we've not been warned.
happened.
What's going on here is as dangerous as it is manifest.
These are the people who have led the United States into the most disastrous foreign policy debacles, the most destructive wars based online for decades.
You can debate why they have an interest in doing that.
But what we know for certain is it is not in the interest of the American people.
It doesn't produce prosperity or security for the United States.
In fact, the opposite is true.
When you go around constantly invading other countries and meddling other countries, you produce a lot of anti-American sentiment that leads to things like 9-11 attacks and other terrorist attacks by people who are extremely angry that you're bringing violence to their country.
It unites all sorts of countries in a coalition, in unison.
Against the United States, who, as Dan Caldwell pointed out in that great interview he did with Tucker Carlson, ought not to have anything in common.
Why should Russia and China and Iran and North Korea be in an alliance against the United States, given their grave differences?
It's because we force them into one.
We're turning the world against us with all these constant wars.
That are in the interest of some people, the people demanding it, but certainly not in the interest of the citizens of the country who pay for it or who go fight in them.
And the pattern should be so immediately recognizable to anyone who understands not distant history, but very recent history.
drank a cup of coffee that makes you feel younger?
75's Rejuvenative Coffee is a bold, dark roast infused with CAAKG, the same compound studied to reverse biological age by up to eight years.
It fuels your cells, sharpens your mind, and supports long-term strength, all without popping or a cabinet full of supplements or drinking swamp water.
This isn't lab junk.
No mystery blends, just real single-origin, small-batch coffee roasted weekly with one powerful proven ingredient.
Here's the best part.
When you buy from 1775 Coffee, you're backing free speech, freedom of choice, and a company that backs the same creators and values that you do.
No corporate overlords, just great products made for people who still believe in something real.
Go to 1775coffee.com, grab their anti-aging longevity roast, and use promo code GLEN.
For 15% off, feel sharper, stronger, younger, and know you're fueling the companies that actually give a damn about your health and about your freedom.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Lee Fong is somebody who, for our viewers, needs no introduction, so I don't know exactly why I'm about to...
I'll give a short one, but he is an independent journalist who is based in San Francisco where he covers political and corporate wrongdoing.
He does a lot of shoelace investigative financial reporting on Substack at LeeFong.com.
He previously was a reporter for The Intercept where he was my colleague for several years.
He also worked at The Nation and Vice.
He has a new article out today on his Substack entitled The Trump Administration Enacts Vast Censorship.
of American scientists over Israel, which regards what I mentioned at the top, which are these new rules from the National Institute of Health that punish medical researchers with a denial of funds unless they're willing to sign a pledge that they do not support or participate in a boycott of Israel,
just the latest in a multitude of censorship programs just in three months of the Trump administration aimed not at protecting Hey Glenn,
great to see you as well.
Alright, so I talked a little bit about these regulations, which you've written about, but before...
I get to your article and to your analysis of them.
I want to show people what the regulations are because a lot of times we talk about regulations, people might wonder, well, is it really as extreme as people are suggesting?
Is it really so clear that this is what's happening?
It sounds kind of impossible that the NIH, especially now run by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who made his name as a free speech advocate during COVID, he himself was censored despite being a...
Medical expert and a scientist at Stanford made a big deal out of the importance of free speech is an agency run by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya really telling cancer researchers and Alzheimer researchers that they'll lose federal grants if they participate in the boycott of Israel and that they're required to get that money to sign a pledge saying they don't support the boycott of Israel.
So I just want to show people the relevant part of the regulation and read it to them just so people understand how clear it is.
This is the regulation that was issued today.
It's from the National Institute of Health, which is part of the Health and Human Services Agency.
So it's technically RFK Jr.'s agency.
The National Institute of Health often has a lot of autonomy.
It's dated April 21st.
The title is Notice of Civil Rights Term and Condition of Awards.
And here's the tax policy.
"Effective with the issuance of this notice, "the following term and condition applies.
"Recipients of federal grants must comply "with all applicable federal anti-discrimination laws "material to the government's payment decisions "under the law governing grants." The definition as used in this clause, quote, "Discriminatory
prohibited boycotts "means refusing to deal cutting commercial
Two, grant certification,
award certification.
By accepting the grant award from NIH, recipients are certifying That, quote, one, they do not engage in and will not engage in, for the term of this award, a discriminatory prohibited boycott, which was defined to mean boycotting not any country in the world other than Israel,
just Israel.
And then it says, NIH reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients during the term of this award operate any program in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws or engage in a prohibited...
Boycott. Now, the thing about this, Lee, that is so amazing to me is that under this NIH rule, you're eligible to receive major medical grants from NIH, major research grants to find cures or treatments for diseases if you boycott any single country in the world on the planet except for Israel.
And in fact...
You're even allowed to boycott American states.
We've seen boycotts organized politically toward American states over the past 10 years.
They boycotted Indiana and North Carolina over so-called bathroom bills.
They boycotted the state of Georgia over their voting rights or their voting laws about voter ID and the like that they compared to Jim Crow.
They lost all sorts of opportunities.
You're perfectly allowed to boycott American states.
You can boycott, in fact you're required to boycott because the government makes you Russia and Cuba and Venezuela and Iran and China.
You can boycott Peru or Indonesia.
You can boycott Uruguay or Norway.
You just can't boycott the state of Israel if you want to receive federal funding for conducting medical research to find cures and treatments for diseases.
Do I have that right based on the language of the policy?
Yeah, I believe you do, Glenn.
You just look at the last...
10, 20 years of political advocacy at universities and colleges around the country, oftentimes the ways that students or faculty attempt to express their concerns around policies around the world,
whether that's human rights suppression in China or Russia, gun rights laws in the South, LGBT laws, as you mentioned, in Indiana and North Carolina, really a litany of other Perceived and very real abuses is to pressure a university and to discuss policies around divestment and boycotting,
that the university through its pension fund should remove its investments from companies doing businesses in those jurisdictions, or that businesses engaged in alleged human rights abuses or other...
reported violations should be boycotted in some way.
The university should no longer purchase goods from that
This is very normal and routine.
We've seen it on the left and right, and we've seen it all across the country on many different jurisdictions, as you mentioned.
What these rules, the NIH rules, do is that they Prohibit only one form of boycott, only one form of divestment, and that is against the state of Israel.
Over the last 10 years, since 2015, we've seen a number of state legislatures enact very similar laws, the so-called anti-BDS bills.
Now, I believe 37 or 38 states have enacted these since 2015, and these laws prevent government contractors from engaging in boycotts or divestment or similar protests of the state of Israel, from engaging in state commerce, I mean,
many have been challenged in court as a suppression of First Amendment rights.
But these NIH rules that were released last night and are now enacted nationally, you know, the NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, really touches every corner of our research institutes, almost every major university,
every major kind of medicine and other kind of...
Biomedical research effort.
These rules are going to apply to any organization that currently has grants or is seeking grants with the NIH by certifying that they're complying with these newly redefined civil rights rules.
That means they're going to have to police their own employees and carefully watch any of their researchers or people who work at their institution from not running afoul of these rules.
And I want to note that the...
The kind of legal code that's attached to this civil rights announcement, that's the False Claims Act.
So folks who were found in violation of this certification, they could face civil and criminal penalties for running afoul of these boycotting rules.
Yeah, I do want to note, you're right, that this has been going on for years without a lot of notice in the United States.
It's been mostly red states.
Due to a variety of reasons that have enacted these unbelievable laws that say, as a condition for having a contract with the state, you can be like a small builder and some local commission wants to hire you to repair a building.
You can be, and this is a case that I reported on, a contractor, a speech pathologist who works with speech deficiencies for young children.
If you want to have that contract, if you want to continue with your contract employment, you have to sign a loyalty oath, a certification promising that you will not support or participate in a boycott of Israel.
And the first case that I ever reported on was this woman.
She was a speech pathologist.
She specialized in certain languages in the Austin School District that very few speech pathologists had expertise in, in terms of helping native speakers who were learning English to avoid certain kinds of speech deficiencies.
Everybody in the school loved her.
The parents loved her.
She had a perfect performance record.
But she and her family didn't buy Products from Israel because they wanted to help end the occupation of the West Bank.
It was a totally peaceful form of protest against Israel.
People are saying, why do Palestinians use violence?
You can debate whether they have the right to, as an occupied people, but this is a non-violent form of protest.
People use boycotts all the time.
Conservatives boycotted Bud Light and all sorts of other companies if they felt like they were engaging in things that were against their values.
People boycott countries all the time.
And she refused to sign it, and she got fired.
And a lot of courts, including in her case, said that these laws are unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment, although it's still making its way through the court and maybe get to the Supreme Court.
One of the things, the examples that I've always found most amazingly, and I've tried to always just show this as something that is shocking, actually.
Andrew Cuomo, when he was the governor of New York, and I think we have this on the screen, He ordered New York state employees to boycott the state of Indiana and the state of North Carolina.
He forbade any travel to North Carolina or to Indiana.
These are not foreign countries.
These are American states.
Based on his attempt and desire to participate in the boycott of those states for having passed bathroom bills, saying people have to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological...
gender and they can't use any other bathroom.
There was a boycott organized of Indiana, North Carolina, he mandated
He then turned around months later and announced that anyone who boycotts Israel will be prohibited from having contracts with...
New York State, he wrote this op-ed in the Washington Post, Governor Andrew Cuomo, if you boycott Israel, New York State will boycott you.
How is this not, you know, for people especially who call themselves America first, but even just for any American citizen, not producing enormous amounts of outrage that, like, under the law and under government policy,
you are able to participate in the boycott of your fellow citizens, your own country, your own, the states within the United States.
The one thing that you cannot do is participate in a boycott
Well, this is just part of a wave of suppression of speech and activism around Israel.
There are forces, pro-Israel forces, and this is not just coming from the...
The pro-Israel Jewish community, there are many Christian Zionist groups that are very in support of Israel, but in any case, very powerful advocacy groups that have pushed the government in this direction.
They support Israel.
They want kind of lockstep support of Israeli policies and Israel's war in Gaza.
They can't tolerate any dissent.
That's why we've seen a wave of laws over the last few years passing the IHRA, which redefines anti-Semitism to include a number of provisions, one of which is describing the state of Israel as racist.
That can now land you into some prison time in some states because they've updated the hate speech codes in places like Georgia and Arizona, and they've attempted to pass federal legislation to that effect as well.
They've attempted to encode the IHRA into the kind of speech codes at various universities, including Harvard University, which actually accepted the proposal from pro-Israel advocates in the Trump administration, despite
They've actually accepted that change to their campus policy.
You look kind of just across the board, the fact that they are taking legal foreign students, people who are here on a green card, who are getting their PhD or a graduate degree, who have engaged in nonviolent protests or simply...
Writing a column in their student newspaper criticizing Israel and calling for their university to divest from Israel, people like that have now been abducted from the streets by ICE agents and are now sitting in a cage in Louisiana for simply engaging in speech that is critical of Israel.
And for folks who are watching these kind of ICE abductions of students over Israel criticism in the last month, The slope is incredibly slippery.
Now we're having this NIH announcement that is really radically changing the definition of our civil rights codes.
Having them simply based on nondiscrimination on the basis of race or gender or something along those lines, it's now redefined to say, oh, if you engage in a boycott of Israel, entire universities, entire laboratories, entire research institutes are going to be cut off from NIH funding.
Yeah, you know, and I think it's worth noting, just like with the focus on these foreign students and Mahmoud Khalil, Who was in the United States legally, is married to an American woman, had a green card, was not accused of breaking any laws,
was never arrested, never charged with any crimes.
His wife gave birth yesterday and he asked permission to be present for the birth of his first child, who's an American child, who is being born to an American woman, and ICE, within 23 minutes of his request, barred him from doing so.
So there's a lot of vengeance against people who committed the crime of criticizing Israel.
But a lot of the focus has been on foreign students, but the reality is that these speech codes, like the ones that you mentioned, these expanded speech codes, are now being imposed on American universities at the demand of the Trump administration, saying if you don't want to lose your federal funding,
you're going to implement these expanded definitions of anti-Semitism that preclude, as you said, People from engaging in all sorts of common criticisms of Israel.
You can't say Israel is a racist endeavor.
You can't compare it to the actions of the Nazis.
Huge numbers of common criticisms of Israel are now outlawed by a movement that was elected based on a promise to restore free speech.
And these speech codes don't just apply to foreign students.
They apply to American students and American faculty.
There are war on academic freedom.
I want to show you one of the two tweets.
That RFK Jr. posted to X shortly after being confirmed as HHS secretary because, you know, RFK Jr. ran for president on a platform of improving American health, of getting additives and chemicals out of our diets,
of no longer having our FDA process captured by Big Pharma.
A lot of...
I think noble and well-intentioned promises that he made about what he wanted to do as HHS secretary in order to improve American health.
He's in office for about six seconds, and two of his first tweets are designed to claim that one of the gravest Here's what he tweeted on March 3rd.
Anti-Semitism, like racism, is a spiritual and moral malady that sickened societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history's most deadly plagues.
In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.
Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect based on speech freedom and open debate.
Which very quickly translated into punishing people who criticize Israel.
Do you think that these kinds of policies, and I heard from people who know Jay Bhattacharya very well because he is the head of the National Institutes of Health that issued these regulations to insist that this did not come from...
his initiative that this is not something he got into office.
He's only been the head of the NIH for I think less than a month now that this was sort of coming from an administration-wide pressure campaign to demand that
What do you make of the political kind of pressures that are producing this avalanche of free speech attacks about this one issue in such a short period of time?
Look, the Seventh Eye, an Israeli investigative news outlet based in Israel, engaged in the equivalent of Freedom of Information Act requests, public document requests, litigation against the government of Israel to obtain internal documents.
They eventually succeeded and obtained hundreds of documents that show that since 2017, the Israeli government has poured Millions of dollars into a secret effort to pass the original anti-BDS laws in state legislatures.
I mean, it's really well documented that they were sending money through various proxy groups to groups like the Israel Allies Foundation, which included some of the very first state legislators who passed these laws.
Not only that, they were inviting those state legislators to Israel.
There's a video press conference of Benjamin Netanyahu giving a big ceremonial check and thanking the state legislators for passing these laws.
It's not in secret that Israel has campaigned to restrict American speech, to pass laws like the anti-BDS and IHRA.
But of course, it's also the many billionaires and very wealthy interest groups and organized interest groups that are pressuring this administration.
It is incredibly hypocritical on one level for an administration that campaigned last year on a mantle of free speech and free expression and social media free speech to now flip and engage in this kind of rampant, really draconian clampdown.
On free speech.
But this is also an administration that has worked hand in glove with many of these pro-Israel advocacy groups.
And these advocacy groups, whether based in Israel or based in the U.S., have been very clear about their interests in suppressing speech critical of Israel, suppressing reporting critical of Israel, taking anyone who criticizes Israeli government.
policy and deeming them an anti-Semite, a racist, a bigot, and having them disqualified from the
I mean, David Friedman, the former Trump ambassador to Israel, really laid it out very clearly at a speech in Israel just last month.
He said, look, if you're an anti-Semite, you know, in his...
We're going to make your life miserable.
We're going to deport you and we're going to put you in prison.
And that's what the Trump administration is doing.
I mean, if you watch that clip, you listen to David Friedman's words.
That does not sound like a government or a government official that is interested in the basic principles or foundation of the First Amendment or free speech.
This is someone who's looking to suppress and literally jail their political opponents.
Yeah, he was Trump's ambassador to Israel in the first...
And Trump has talked about the possibility that he might become his U.S. ambassador to the U.N. now that at least Stefanik is going to stay in Congress.
I want to ask you, like, there have been a couple of, there's so many of these examples, you know, and sometimes people say, like, why are you talking so much about Israel?
Why are you covering this so much?
It's like, it's not my fault that every week there's some great escalation in the attack on free speech in the name of Israel.
I'm not the one doing that.
I'm reporting on it.
I'm reacting to it.
I'm describing it.
But there's been, like, in retrospect, so many—it's almost—it is that, you know, boiling frog cliche that, you know, you keep escalating the heat level of the frog in the pot.
It sort of stays in there until it dies because it doesn't realize the heat is being turned up.
Back in 2022, when Ron DeSantis was gearing up to run for president, he actually went to Israel where he signed a bill.
into law for Florida that increased hate speech, the definition of hate speech for anti-Semitism that made all sorts of previously legal views that you could express about Israel illegal.
And he went to Israel to sign the law.
An American politician going to Israel to sign
And then also people have...
Forgotten that the TikTok ban, though originally justified in the name of stopping Chinese influence, by all reports only ended up getting enough votes to pass because of the perception that TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech after October 7th.
And that was the reason why so many Americans have turned against Israel.
So we've seen so many extreme examples on a bipartisan basis.
It was Biden who really pushed the TikTok bill for Israel, not really for China.
And one of the things we've seen, Lee, over the past couple of months is a pretty sharp and noticeable decline in support for Israel across the Democratic groups in the United States, with the exception of older sort of Fox News-watching Republicans who still solidly support Israel.
But even younger Republicans have had a sharp decline in their support for Israel.
And I'm wondering about the sort of cause and effect of this.
Like, on the one hand...
We've seen before, we've seen this with left liberal censorship, that when you start telling people over and over that they can't say certain things, that they're going to be punished for expressing certain ideas, it creates a resentment and therefore a backlash, almost strengthening the ideas that you're trying to suppress.
But on the other hand, I think censorship is often a tool of the desperate.
Like, the more people perceive that they're losing a debate, a debate they really care about, that they feel like their interests are at stake in, I'm wondering what you make of the cause and effect.
Is it sort of both fueling each other, or is it one or the other?
For the stated goal of reducing anti-Semitism or hatred or persecution of Jews, that this will not accomplish those goals.
This will, if anything, do the reverse and possibly fuel conspiracy theories and hatred.
I think we've seen this over the last 10 years of, for lack of a better term, woke.
There were many abuses by people.
Who were affiliated with the Black Lives Matter and other kind of critical race theory movements, who were very concerned about historical injustices, concerned about a minority group that has faced discrimination in the past.
And in order to kind of express their concerns around discrimination, they kind of engaged in a form of revenge discrimination, attempting to censor what people were allowed to say.
...around race-related issues, deplatforming conservative speakers or anyone who basically disagreed with them on these issues, kind of pushing efforts to silence speech and suppress speech around identity-related issues,
racial identity-related issues, which I think has not...
Produced better race relations.
It has, in fact, increased kind of racial animosity and has not improved where we stand today in terms of racial discourse in this country.
I think the same kind of essential elements of the dynamics of woke are now playing out with Israel.
Of course, some of the variables are different.
A nation state is involved.
There's some other powerful interest groups that are involved that were not involved in the kind of racial debate.
But on Israel, on Jewish matters, taking people who have a sincere concern around Israel, who are not anti-Semites, who simply do not agree with Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, whether that's in the West Bank or in Gaza or elsewhere,
who have very genuine concerns about this war in Gaza.
And branding them as anti-Semites, attempting to censor them, attempting to de-platform them, attempting to get them fired or deported or to suffer in some way, and to do this under the mantle of fighting anti-Semitism, I think is going to cause a real backlash.
And it will not further, I think, all of our shared goals of promoting no racial discrimination, of promoting peace in the region, of promoting...
I see this as a very dark trajectory.
The similar dynamics did not improve with BLM, and I think we're going to see that with these attempts to silence criticism of Israel.
Yeah, it's especially important to preserve free discourse on Israel since it's not just a criticism of what Israel is doing in Gaza, but also our own government's policy of funding.
everything Israel does and arming it and standing by it and attaching the US government to it that makes it particularly compelling to ensure that there's open debate not about Israel's actions necessarily but about American policy toward Israel.
You know, I just want to end with one thing that I shared before, which is, you know, a lot of my views on this are shared by the activism that ultimately led to greater acceptance of...
Gay people and ultimately the recognition of same-sex marriage, which is, you know, I remember having been part of that activism, having followed it very closely.
There was never this idea that, oh, there's all these anti-gay, pervasive views that have been cultivated through religion and culture and social influences for decades, and so the solution to it is to censor it or to punish its expression.
The idea was always to engage it, to try and figure out how to show people, how to convince people that the preconceptions they had about gay people or gay relationships was distorted, was the byproduct of propaganda, to convince people to win them over, and eventually that's what happened, not through censorship.
And then you see these kind of new social movements, certainly Black Guys Matter, but also gender ideology, you know, issues surrounding...
Gender identity and trans issues and non-binary identity and the like that have very much relied on a similar sort of suppression that I think in turn has created the same kind of backlash that we're seeing in terms of the Israel debate because at some point people are going to start to ask,
wait a minute, why are all these rules being implemented in my country that make it punishable or in some other way?
It's outlawed for me to question this foreign government and my own government's financing of it and support for it.
And it's so predictably likely to lead to the opposite of what they say their goal is, which is reducing anti-Semitism because people generally do have a backlash toward, a resentment toward those who they think are trying to prevent them from saying what they believe or even asking questions about things they don't understand.
And I think we're clearly headed down that path in a way that is very dark and dangerous, as you said, not just on the principle of free speech, but in terms of the goals that these people say that they're trying to achieve.
All right.
With that, I just want to note one more time Lee's article.
It was published today.
To my knowledge, it's the only one about these NIH regulations, at least before we aired the show, which is the Trump administration enacts vast censorship of American scientists over Israel.
It has a long analysis of not just the NIA regulations that we talked about today, but the broader implications of the Trump administration's growing campaign to censor speech critical of Israel and to punish Israel critics as well.
Lee, it's always great to see you.
I hope people will continue to follow your work at Substack, and we will, I'm sure, see you back on our show shortly.
