Glenn Reacts to News of the Week; Plus: Audience Q&A
Glenn Greenwald reacts to the major stories of this week including the FBI's arrest of a Wisconsin judge, Trump's TIME interview, a Coachella scandal, and more. PLUS: Glenn answers audience questions on the Douglas Murray/Dave Smith debate fallout, independent journalism, and the possibility of war with Iran. ----------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday, every single one, no exception, at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight?
We are, whenever possible, as I think you know, attempting to use Friday night for two of our semi-regular segments.
The first is a week in review where we try and cover and go in-depth into various news events or debates that we did not have the opportunity to cover in-depth previously.
We like to do that either with a guest or just with myself.
Tonight it will just be me since I have a lot to say on a wide range of issues that we didn't have the opportunity to cover that we will cover.
Tonight from the FBI's arrest today of a county court judge in Wisconsin based on allegations that she helped a person they were seeking to flee to a new interview that Trump gave to Time Magazine where he discussed Among other things,
the war in Ukraine and the controversies over his deportations to El Salvador and for criticizing Israel, as well as a very revealing controversy that emerged after an Irish band playing at the Coachella Music Festival displayed a sign reading, quote, We have other news stories that we want to touch on as well.
And then the second Friday night segment, what we like to do every Friday night, is a Q&A with our audience where we take questions that were posted throughout the week from our locals members, our show supporters, and address as many of them as we can.
As always, we have a great quality and a wider range of questions that came from our locals
We're going to try and get to as many of them as we can and give the best answers that we can possibly give.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update right after this brief message from our sponsor.
System Update.
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So I know that a lot of you on the very rare occasion when we have to miss a show on the scheduled time start thinking that I'm being slothful or lazy like I'm just slanting around doing nothing and sometimes that's the case very rarely but most of the time it's because I am very busy with other kind of commitments with other things that I'm doing relating to my work.
And just to illustrate to you how true that is, how actually extremely busy I am, how diligent and hardworking, even when you think that I'm being slothful, I just want to show you several of the interviews that I did just in the last day and a half.
For those of you who might be interested, I spent two hours on The Megyn Kelly Show on Wednesday.
Actually, it might have even been yesterday, these are all blending together now, where we talked about a wide range of issues, generally ones that are outside the scope of things I discuss.
We first talked about the chaos at 60 minutes, but then I'm not really sure why it led to a discussion, quite lengthy one, of Michelle Obama's podcast and Michelle Obama herself.
The grievances of that all-female astronaut crew that went on a little ride for 11 minutes on Jeff Bezos' rocket and then got back angry that they weren't being called astronauts.
We talked a lot about that.
We even talked about Meghan Markle's show, but it was, like I said, outside of the realm of topics I would certainly cover on this show, but nonetheless, talking to Meghan always is very substantive regardless of what you're talking about, and I enjoyed it.
Then, I had a 90-minute discussion with Reason Magazine for their Just Asking Questions show, where we actually covered Many of the topics that I do spend a lot of time talking on this about particularly civil liberties that's a libertarian magazine they're very focused on free speech and due process and the like they actually printed a transcript of the entire interview as well as well as posting it on YouTube and we covered a lot of ground there over the course of 90 minutes that might be of interest to you as well also yesterday
I Did a 35 to 40-minute interview with Emily Jashinsky, who is a co-host of Breaking Points, but she also has her own program on the Unheard magazine channel called Undercurrents, where we talked about the attacks on free speech with regard to students criticizing Israel,
the comparisons between some of the rationale that the left liberal censorship regime invoked and on which it depended versus the one that people on the right are now using.
And I think Emily's also always an excellent questioner, and so that interview I really recommend.
And I also spoke, I think today, this morning, for about 30 minutes with Professor Glenn Deason, who is one of the most knowledgeable experts on Russia and Ukraine.
I usually go on a show to talk about that, though this time I went on instead to talk about free speech issues, some of the civil liberties concerns being raised by these new policies of the Trump administration, how it compares to prior ones.
If you miss me on the days that I'm not here or if you miss me during the weekend, I know some of you really do.
I know some of you struggle a lot with that.
There are all sorts of things for you to consume yourself with, fill your time with where I'm either engaged in conversation or giving interviews.
We also have posted All of those to our Locals platform as well, just to make it easy for our members to view and consume if you are so inclined.
All right.
So that was my self-justification for what a hardworking journalist I am, even when I seem like I've just disappeared.
But I now want to get into what we're calling the Week in Review.
I have a lot of different topics that I want to cover.
That really were worth covering but as a show that really does just two at the most three topics a night we often don't get to ones that we wish we could and we're trying to use Friday night as the weekend review to be able to Cover those.
And the second part of our show is going to be the Q&A, where we get questions from our Locals members and try and answer them.
But in this case, the topic I wanted to begin with just so happens to be one of the most common questions throughout the day we got from Locals members, including this question from Christiana Kay, who asked this, quote, I would love to hear your thoughts on today's arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan by the FBI.
Biggest topics, news topics of the day, certainly consuming a lot of news and a lot of commentary.
It's also generating a lot of hysteria, a lot of inaccurate commentary as well, so I actually did want to address this.
Just to give you the bare-bones facts for those of you who haven't heard it, Judge Dugan is a local judge in the county of She's a judge in the state court system in Milwaukee, not a very high-ranking judge.
In fact, at what I believe is one of the lowest levels of the judicial system.
She was elected, and she's somebody who has spent a long time affiliated with working with low-income people, which I regard as noble, but also causes generally associated with the left, including immigrants.
She was arrested by the FBI today.
At her home and obviously that created a lot of shock because this was the FBI going and arresting a sitting judge in Wisconsin who clearly is a political opponent or someone with ideological views that differ from the administration.
The arrest was originally announced by FBI Director Kash Patel and a lot of people became instantly alarmed for reasons I guess are understandable.
Saying, oh wow, this is a huge escalation where the Trump administration is now arresting judges.
And the implication was, especially from a lot of Democrats, I don't mean like Democratic random commentators, I mean from major Democratic Party leaders in D.C. and a lot of media personalities who are Democratic, they were essentially trying to claim that this was some huge red line that had just been crossed.
Because this was an instance of the Trump administration now weaponizing the FBI to arrest judges for issuing orders they dislike.
And if it were that, if this were the FBI, say, going to one of the judges that have been ruling against the Trump administration, issuing rulings that certain Trump administration policies are unconstitutional or issuing injunctions, and the FBI went to their chambers or their home to arrest them as punishment for or in response to,
A judicial ruling that they issued in the course of their judicial work, I would be as alarmist as the English language permits.
I would actually consider that to be a major escalation of the civil liberties threats that, as you I think know, I believe are genuine over the past three months that we're seeing.
But that's not what happened today.
This is not a case where This judge issued an adverse ruling, and for that reason, the FBI went and arrested the judge, as a lot of people were attempting to imply.
And I just want to note, it's not that uncommon for judges to be arrested.
Judges commit crimes all the time.
The FBI catches judges taking bribes or embezzling money or engaging in judicial corruption or on the state-level election corruption.
There are all sorts of judges who have been arrested, who have been prosecuted, who have been sentenced to prison, who are sitting in prison.
No, judges are not any more above the law than anybody else.
So the mere fact that the FBI arrested a judge doesn't make this a political scandal or a cause for alarm.
Obviously, if a judge breaks into somebody's house and steals, if they rape somebody, if they're caught engaging in pedophilia, if they murder, et cetera, et cetera, if they engage in tax evasion, if they're taking a bribe, They ought to be arrested and are arrested.
It's really not an out-of-the-ordinary event.
I'm not saying judges get arrested every day, but it's not that it happens once every century either.
So the question then becomes, what was the reason for the arrest?
What was the basis for the arrest?
Was it as punishment for a judge who issued a ruling that the Trump administration disliked?
Which, as I said, would be on the far end of The extremist wing of what would justify alarmism, and that's what a lot of Democratic senators and other media figures tried to depict it as being to scare people.
Oh, Trump is now arresting sitting judges.
Obviously, there's a context for this, which is the Trump administration has been very loud in its grievance about what they regard as the inappropriate rulings of federal judges, the excessive...
Assertions of power over what the president is doing and so they made it seem like oh now the Trump administration isn't just complaining about this they're actually going and arresting them.
And as I said had it been that I would spend my whole show on that.
Not just this show but many shows.
But that's not what happened.
Pam Bondi the Attorney General who supervises as Attorney General the FBI went to Fox News today.
And this is the explanation she gave about the series of events that led the FBI to arrest Judge Dugan in Milwaukee.
And to set the stage for you and Sandra, this was truly horrific.
This guy was in court being prosecuted by a state prosecutor for domestic violence battery.
He had beat up two people, a guy and a girl, hit the guy 30 times, knocked him to the ground, choked him, beat up a woman so badly they both had to go to the hospital.
And John, you know, it's so rare for victims to want to cooperate.
They wanted to cooperate.
They were sitting in the courtroom with the state prosecutor.
The judge learns that ICE was outside to get the guy because he had been deported in 2013, came back in our country, commits these crimes, charged with committing these crimes.
Victims in court.
Judge finds out.
She goes out in the hallway, screams at the immigration officers.
She's furious, visibly shaken, upset, sends them off to talk to the chief judge.
She comes back in the courtroom.
You're going to believe this.
takes the defendant and the defense attorney back in her chambers, takes them out of private exit and tells them to leave.
While a state prosecutor and victims of domestic violence are sitting in
Now, let me just issue an important caution, which is that Pam Bondi is a prosecutor.
She's the Attorney General of the United States, the highest-ranking prosecutor in the country, and the FBI is a law enforcement agency.
And in our country, one of the responsibilities of citizenship is that we don't just assume that the version of events offered by the FBI or the police or the prosecutor is actually the full story, the accurate story, the correct story.
So there's no chance I'm going to sit here and say, "Oh, this judge committed a crime.
I want to hear from the judge.
I want to hear from her lawyer.
I want to see the evidence being examined and tested with witnesses in a court."
And only then will at least I be willing to opine on whether there was really a crime committed here.
But what is the case is that the FBI's theory or the Attorney General, the DOJ's theory about why this judge got arrested was that she committed what is in fact a crime, whether you think it should be or not.
Which is that if the government is looking for somebody in order to arrest them, Or detain them.
And you do something actively to obstruct law enforcement from being able to find them.
If you help the person escape, if you hide them, if you lie to law enforcement about where they are so that they don't find them, that's a crime in every state in the country and in a federal court.
Now, there is a context here, an important context, which is We have this very odd situation in the United States where you have, on the one hand, the federal government that is charged with enforcing immigration laws.
And this is not just under Trump.
I mean, in fact, immigrant rights groups called Obama the "deporter in chief."
Obama deported millions of people who had entered the country illegally, millions.
And that's done through Homeland Security, through ICE, and through the other agencies charged with enforcing immigration laws by finding and detaining and then deporting people who are in the country illegally.
That's a legitimate function of the federal government.
And then on the other hand, you have states and cities, and Milwaukee is an example of such a city, that have declared themselves to be sanctuary cities.
By which they mean that if there's an illegal, if there's a person who's in the country illegally who Milwaukee becomes aware of, for example, let's say there's a person who's in the country illegally and they're raped and they call the police and the police in the course of talking to the person discovers,
oh, they're not a citizen, they're in the country illegally, the rape victim is.
Or let's say that there's a murder on the street and one of the witnesses is a person in the country illegally.
And they go and talk to the police and tell the police what happened.
And the police discover the person is in the country illegally but still wants them to serve as a witness to this murder.
Or let's say there's an older person in the country illegally, been here for a while, has a heart attack, a stroke, shows up in an emergency room in a public hospital.
And in the course of getting their papers and the like, the medical staff, the hospital discovers they're in the country illegally.
Ordinarily, if a government or law enforcement discovers that someone has committed a crime, they notify the relevant law enforcement agency, which would be ICE.
Oh, we found this person.
They are in the country illegally.
Come get them.
What a lot of cities have done, though, is declare themselves to be sanctuary cities because their argument is we don't want people in our city who are in the country illegally to be hiding.
We want them to come forward if they're a victim of a crime without fearing they're going to be detained.
We want them to come forward if they're a witness to a crime.
We want them to seek medical attention if they're or someone in their family is in the middle of some serious medical crisis.
That's a policy decision.
That cities and states through their elected officials have made.
But you see the tension this creates.
You have on the one hand the government searching for and wanting to detain and deport, especially now, people in the country illegally.
But a lot of these people are in these so-called sanctuary cities where these states and cities have said we're not going to help the federal government.
That's the other things.
Even if ICE finds out That there's some person in the country illegally they want to detain in, say, New York City or Chicago or Milwaukee.
The police in those cities will not cooperate with ICE.
They will not help the federal government find illegal aliens.
So this is a kind of passive policy.
It's saying we're not going to help the federal government.
We're not going to report people because we don't want people living underground, petrified that if they seek police help, Or medical help.
Or send their kids to school.
All things we want them to do.
We don't want them petrified that we're going to turn them over the minute that they stick their head up.
So that's already a strange conflict.
That it's the policy of the federal government to find them and obtain them and deport them.
The policy of states and cities to basically harbor them.
To give them sanctuary as that says.
And in that case there's probably no real legal Liability on the part of the state or the city because what they're really saying in those cases is we're just not going to help.
We're not going to call the government.
We're not going to snitch on these people.
We're not going to tattle on them.
We're not going to expend resources to turn them over.
But the question becomes what happens if a city official or a state official doesn't just passively refuse to help the federal government but actively seeks to obstruct what they're trying to do.
So ICE agents show up in New York City and say, "Hey, we know this person is here and we want to go get them."
And then city officials say to the person that they're after, "Hey, come here.
Let's hide you because they're coming after you."
Now, the city officials aren't just engaged in passive non-cooperation.
They are instead engaged in active impediments.
Actively impeding or obstructing what the federal government under the law is attempting to do.
And Trump's immigrations are, Tom Holman, this is one of the things he has said from the start, is if we find any city or state officials actively impeding or obstructing or harboring or hiding people in the country illegally that we're trying to detain and arrest,
we will prosecute them because that is a crime.
Let me just take it out of the immigration context for a second just to illustrate the point.
Let's say there's somebody who robs a bank and you know they robbed a bank.
You didn't help them rob the bank.
You didn't even know they were going to rob the bank beforehand, but now you know they robbed the bank and that the police are after them.
They're a fugitive from justice.
If you tell the person, "Hey, come hide in my basement so that the police can't find you," or you give them money in a car to be able to flee, You are absolutely committing a crime of helping a fugitive flee justice,
impeding or obstructing justice.
These are just ordinary crimes.
And I've confronted this many times before.
In fact, when we went to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden to do the reporting, we were always very concerned about what was going to happen to him after he had to leave Hong Kong.
Like, where was he going to go?
We tried to talk to him about that.
He said, "I don't care about that.
I'm not the issue.
Work on the journalism and I'll take care of that myself."
But we had felt like we had a responsibility to him.
So I was working at The Guardian at the time.
I called The Guardian.
Their lawyers came to Hong Kong.
We were talking about how we could help him.
And the U.S. government and the British government made very clear that if we take steps to try and hide Snowden to help him get out of Hong Kong, to help him get to safety.
They would regard our behavior as criminal because now we're aiding and embedding a fugitive from justice.
This is not a radical theory of criminality that the Trump administration today invented in order to arrest this judge.
So if this judge knew that ICE agents had come to the courthouse because the person they wanted to detain was in court as a criminal defendant accused of Domestic assault and battery,
which was the charge against him.
And then the judge, upon learning that ICE agents were out in the hallway, adjourned her court, adjourned the proceeding in order to whisper to the defendant and his lawyer, "Hey, come here.
Come to my secret chambers.
There's an exit that you should take, that's secret, that's private, that will allow you to get away."
If that's really what she did, and again, I'm not assuming that she did that, but if that's really what she did, this does start to seem to me like more of an ordinary criminal offense than it does some political abuse of power designed to take retaliation against judges.
If you did what that judge did, you would also get arrested.
People have been arrested before for Harboring or helping escape not just criminals in general but people in the country illegally as well.
It's considered a crime.
And the idea is just because she's a judge doesn't make what she did any less criminal.
Just like judges are arrested all the time for common crimes like bribery and all the other things I've said.
So when I heard that a Trump administration, when I heard Kash Patel as FBI director go onto Twitter and say we just arrested this federal judge, this state judge.
Obviously was alarmed.
Like the FBI arresting a judge in an immigration case seems like it has the potential for the abuse of power.
But then once you hear the allegations, and there's affidavits and other things, you understand that at least if the set of facts alleged by the FBI is accurate, then this is far from the sort of political Scandal that a lot of Democrats were trying to make it out to be.
And this is the problem that I have with Democrats for a long time is one of the biggest gifts that they give to Trump is that they seem incapable ever of criticizing him without using maximalist language.
Everything is a threat to democracy.
Everything is fascism.
Everything is Nazi-like or Hitler-like or some sort of drastic Deviation from the norm, even when that's not true.
And that creates the boy who cries wolf syndrome.
I do think there are things the Trump administration is doing that are serious threats to basic civil liberties.
We've talked about them a lot on this show.
But the reason I feel competent to talk about them is because I am not somebody who has or will ever Just instantly react to everything the Trump administration does with this deranged kind of chicken running around with its head cut off rhetoric that a lot of Democrats instantly use.
And again, the problem is that if you call everything he does fascist or a threat to democracy, on the times he really does do those things, people will tune out that rhetoric.
It's similar to using...
Overusing the racism accusation or the anti-Semitism accusation, if you just start throwing that around almost reflexively, people are going to tune it out so that when it really merits that term, it will have lost its impact.
Same with a lot of this rhetoric.
So many Democrats sounded exactly the same today.
Here is Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in response to this story who wrote, quote, "This is not normal."
The administration's arrest of a sitting judge in Wisconsin is a drastic move that threatens the rule of law.
While we don't have all the details, this is a grave step and undermines our system of checks and balances.
Okay, the act of arresting a sitting judge is not in and of itself a drastic move.
Everything depends on what is it that she did or has said to have done that led to the arrest.
So when she says, well, we don't have all the details, this is a grave step and undermines our system of checks and balances.
No, it doesn't.
Not if she actually took action that is plausibly within the realm of criminality.
And so she's using this language in a way that's utterly inappropriate for the set of facts as we know them.
Here's from Mark Levine, who's the Manhattan Borough President in New York.
He went onto Twitter today.
There was some Democratic operative for Media Matters who said Trump's FBI just arrested a sitting judge.
No other details, just trying to make it seem like they're going around randomly arresting judges.
And Mark Levine, the Manhattan Borough president, the Democrat, said this is North Korea-level scary.
Now, again, I think this rhetoric would be appropriate if this were being done as retaliation for some ruling that this judge issued.
But if the judge did what they claimed she did or anything like it, then this is totally inappropriate rhetoric.
And I say that as someone who believes there are very grave civil liberties threats that have been posed by certain Trump administration policies, this isn't one of them.
And if the accusations are untrue, then they'll fall apart in a court.
If this isn't really what the judge did, if she did something else besides what the FBI thinks she did or is claiming she did, That's what courts are for.
But this is a case of actual criminal allegations based on an actual criminal statute that has been applied many times to many other people and to use this kind of rhetoric instantly without knowing anything just again is what does Trump the biggest favors because then when people like me Who are much more restrained with this kind of rhetoric and try and be much more discriminating about when we raise civil liberties concerns,
like when it's actually deserved, when it really is something unprecedented to try and convince people that it's true, a lot of people will understandably tune out because this is the kind of language Democrats have been using for 10 years against Trump.
From the smallest and most trivial stories to the biggest to everything in between.
So we'll see how this plays out.
I understand that It can be an intimidating message to judges in immigration cases.
They probably want that message to be sent because there's another judge in Arizona that just got arrested earlier this week because he was actually harboring someone illegally in his house, who the government claims is a member of Trandal Raghu.
And they probably want to tell judges, like, look, it's one thing if you're a part of a sanctuary city and you're not going to help us.
We're not going to like it.
We're not going to be happy about it.
Okay, that's one thing.
We can't force you to cooperate.
But if you actively impede us, we're going to consider that a crime.
They have said this many times.
And so we'll see how this case plays out.
But either way, it does not warrant this hair on fire melodramatic language that a lot of people quite counterproductively are giving it.
All right, let me talk about a few more stories before we get to the Q&A.
There's this Irish band called Kneecap which appeared at Coachella 2025 just I think like four days ago over maybe the last weekend and a huge controversy was created and the reason is not that this band attacked Jewish people in the audience nor that they They didn't encourage people to attack Jewish people
in the audience, nor incited attacks on Jewish people who were in the audience.
But they did instead, in a very common way, very common way, especially for a rock band, but even for just musicians or anyone who is political activist, they criticized a foreign country, one that's at war.
And they used this image in order to do so.
The image reads, "Fuck Israel, free Palestine."
Now, you would have thought that they had committed some kind of grave and moral transgression because a lot of people describe what they did as that.
Now, obviously, if this had said, "Fuck Russia" or "Fuck China," like, "Fuck China, free the Uyghurs."
Fuck Russia, free Ukraine.
Fuck Iran, free whatever, women in Iran.
Or pretty much any, like, fuck Paraguay.
Who knows why?
Maybe they just don't like Paraguay.
Or, you know, Denmark, because they think that Denmark should give Greenland over to Trump.
If they had said this about any other country, literally, even fuck the U.S. It wouldn't have even registered as a controversy.
I mean, that's what rock bands do.
Rock bands express political ideas all the time, including transgressive ideas.
I mean, Woodstock, probably the most famous rock festival or rock concert of all time, was gathered in order for the world's most famous musicians to come and condemn the United States government for the Vietnam War.
This is what music and musicians and artists have done forever.
It's not unusual in any way.
But in this environment where criticizing Israel is considered some unique and singular crime, where people are losing their green cards and student visas for doing it, where the Trump administration is forcing colleges and universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes that would make expressions like this punishable and prohibited on campus.
Where we just showed you earlier this week that the National Institute of Health instituted new guidelines saying that if you are getting grants from the NIH, do cancer research or Alzheimer research or research into treatments or cures for any diseases, but you support a boycott of Israel,
you'll be ineligible for...
NIH grants, even though you're permitted to boycott any other country on the planet, boycott other American states, you just can't boycott Israel.
In this climate where there's an obvious attempt to basically try and criminalize expressions of animosity toward Israel, which I'd like to remind you again is a foreign country inside the United States.
It's a foreign country for an Irish band as well.
They have no loyalty to that country.
It's considered almost criminal, like shocking morally.
And ironically, the framework being used is itself somewhat anti-Semitic.
They're conflating the Israeli government with Jews.
As if you say, fuck Israel, what you're really saying is, fuck the Jews.
Fuck all Jews.
Even though, as you know, huge numbers of Jewish Israelis inside Israel are vehemently opposed to that war or opposed to the Netanyahu government.
Jewish students from around the world have been protesting.
Jewish people of all kinds.
Have been protesting Israel.
But that's the trick that they do.
Just like liberals used to try and say, if you oppose immigration, open borders immigration, if you question Black Lives Matter, if you believe there are two genders, what you're really saying is, I hate Black people.
I hate trans people.
They find those unspoken messages embedded in the opinion they actually want to Punish by depicting them in a much more malignant and hateful light than they're actually expressed and then justifying their banning or punishment based on that wild interpretation.
That's exactly what's being done here.
Like, "Fuck Israel" really means, in our discourse, kill all Jews.
I don't know how that happened.
Well, I do know how that happened, but I don't know when that became convincing.
Something very similar happened at Cornell University.
There was a band that was scheduled, or a singer rather, scheduled to perform, whose name is Kalani.
And she was going to appear at what is called Slope Day in Cornell.
We have someone on our staff who's a Cornell graduate.
I'm sure he'd be happy to go on and on about what this is.
It doesn't really matter for the moment what it is, though I can see him moving to the microphone trying to tell me.
I actually don't want to know for the moment.
You can tell me afterwards.
But it's a sort of tradition, a yearly event held at Cornell.
Very, very important to people at Cornell.
And they had a singer that they had invited to come.
But it turns out she had previously expressed opposition to Israel, which, as we know, is the supreme crime, caused all sorts of upset.
And so the Cornell administrators, the administration of Cornell, sent a message.
To all Cornellians, that's what they call each other, people who are at Cornell, the students and faculty or whatever, they're Cornellians.
So they wrote an email note to all Cornellians saying, Slope Day is a cherished tradition at Cornell, a time for our community to come together to celebrate the end of classes for decades, blah, blah, blah.
Unfortunately, although it was not the intention, the selection of Kalani as this year's headliner has injected division and discord into Slope Day.
For that reason, I am rescinding Kalani's
and will try and get a new lineup.
In the days since she was announced, I have heard grave concerns from our community that many are angry, hurt, and confused that Slope Day would feature a performer who has espoused anti-Semitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos, and on social media.
No anti-Israel person allowed.
In her music, is it a she?
I don't know who this is.
I'm not pretending.
But if this musician had written songs, it's a she.
I knew it was a she.
I don't know why you think I'm like so old that I don't know new magicians.
Like I said, it was a she.
If she had had all these songs heralding Israel, saying kill Hamas, get our hostages back, level Gaza.
No cancellation would have happened.
And it's, again, so ironic that all the people who have spent the last decade complaining about cancel culture, about disinviting and de-platforming speakers because of their controversial political views on college campuses, not all of them, but many of them, are not just cheering this,
but they're the ones who are behind this.
This is happening almost every day now.
All right.
I have this video.
I'm a little bit...
I'm in doubt about whether I even want to bother with this, especially for the moment.
So I'll just give you the background about it.
I don't think I'm going to delve into this.
It's a video from this person named Myron Gaines, who is one of these people who is in what's called the Manosphere.
He has this show where he has these women on all the time, and he calls them all whores and tells them all what's wrong with them.
Thing about how men are supposed to be like the dominant figures and male, female.
It's this sort of thing.
And he had a big controversy recently because his co-host, it's called Fresh and Fit.
It's on Rubble now.
I think it got banned from YouTube.
But anyway, their whole thing is about how men are constantly getting manipulated by women.
They're dating like OnlyFans models and prostitutes.
And getting played by them where women make these losers think they're in love and they give the women all this money and it turns out they're not really in love.
Well anyway, that's their big theme and it turns out that his co-hosts, one of the co-hosts on the show, claimed that he fell in love with the woman.
It turned out she was actually an OnlyFans model with the history as an escort and he gave her, I mean like...
$40,000 diamonds.
Exactly what they mock and say is like the worst thing you can do.
He got caught doing it.
In any event, he went to college, a college campus, Myron Gaines did, and he did the Ben Shapiro tactic of trying to show how smart and like based he is by arguing with 18-year-old college students.
And he gave this little speech.
About how nobody has any worth to society unless you are currently engaged in a nuclear family raising children.
And he said for that reason, and he spoke to the gay and lesbian students who were there, they have no societal worth of any kind.
He then went on to say that gay couples should be banned from adopting.
You know, trying to be, like, as provocative as possible, but it's very easy to do that when you're talking to 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds.
It's obviously ironic because he's an unmarried, childless hedonist in his late 30s.
It's sort of odd to hear somebody like that, of all people, saying that you have no value unless you're in a nuclear family raising children.
So I was going to play it for you.
I was going to respond.
But the thing is, we actually asked him to come on our show and said, we'd love to talk to you about this, your views, love to ask you about these views.
But he evidently is afraid to.
And this is so often what so many of the people do.
They'll go to colleges.
They'll talk to 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds who just aren't equipped yet with information, with the confidence, with the wherewithal to confront what they're saying.
So they sit there all proud.
These videos circulate like, "Oh, look at how we crushed these 18-year-old students."
That's, again, how Ben Shapiro made his name.
But if you actually want to...
Invite them to actually have to answer questions from somebody who's not an 18-year-old college freshman.
They tend not to want to do that.
So I'm not going to go into this video.
I do say all this in the hope to pressure him even more to come on, and we'll continue to do that.
We invited him on in several different ways, and we haven't heard from him, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
But we'll see if we can get him on, and then we can play that video and talk about his views and subject them to critical examination.
All right.
Donald Trump gave an interview, an extensive interview with Time Magazine.
I have to say, despite the many criticisms I've had of the Trump administration, and not all criticisms, I've been very supportive of his attempt, for example, to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
One of the things you have to give Trump credit for is that I can't remember a president who is even remotely as available to journalists, to the media, to the public, to answer questions.
He basically does it every day.
And he just has open court and they can ask anything.
And he answers as honestly as he can.
He obviously likes that.
He thinks it's important.
Like, that's transparency.
That's accountability.
Genuine credit to Trump for doing that.
Here he is with Time Magazine.
And I just want to show you a few key passages.
They asked him about the Abrego Garcia case, which is the case of the...
El Salvadoran citizen who's in the United States married to an American woman raising their American child together.
And there was a court hold, there was a court order barring his removal, barring his deportation, pending further proceedings to hear his asylum claim to see if he's earned the right to stay in the United States.
And ICE went and picked him up anyway and included him in the group that they shipped back to El Salvador and then The U.S. government, the Trump administration, admitted it was a mistake.
And then it went to the Supreme Court, and by a nine-to-zero ruling unanimously, so including Jess Thomas and Alito and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and all the favorite right-wing judges, in addition to the centrist and the liberal wing of the court,
all of them nine together, said his removal was, quote, illegal.
And that the Trump administration is required to do what it can to, quote, facilitate his release.
And not only to do that, but then to report to the court what steps they've taken to prove they're in compliance with disorder.
We showed you this decision.
We went over it in detail.
If you're a viewer of our show, you know what it actually says.
But what happened was, and we showed you this as well, when Trump was meeting with President Bukele and members of the press asked him about that ruling, And said, you're openly defying it.
You're saying you're not going to do anything to try and get him back.
Even though the Supreme Court said nine to zero that you have to, how do you justify that?
And Trump, and I believe this is totally true, he doesn't read Supreme Court decisions.
He relies on his lawyers and his aides to tell them what the court is doing.
He said to Stephen Miller, his top advisor on immigration, he said, Stephen, what happened in this decision?
And Stephen Miller lied directly to his face.
He said, "Mr.
President, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 unanimously in our favor.
They said we do not have to get him back.
They can't make us get him back.
There's nothing they can do to get him back.
And they ruled in our favor.
There's no requirement to get him back."
And while, if you want to be super semantic about it, It is true the Supreme Court said, look, we can't force the Trump administration to get him back because let's imagine the Trump administration has to invade El Salvador or sanction the El Salvadoran government in order to get him back.
We can't force Trump to alter his foreign policy or to start a war.
So we can't say we're ordering you to get him back because it may be impossible, but what we're ordering you to do is do everything possible to facilitate his return.
And so Stephen Miller lied and said, oh, the court by 9-0 ruled totally in our favor, so we don't have to do anything.
So Time Magazine asked him about that.
And this was the discussion that ensued.
Time Magazine, quote, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Omar Abrego Garcia.
Now, that's not entirely an accurate description of what the court ruled for the reason I just explained.
They did not rule that he, quote, has to bring him back because what if he can't get him back?
But that's far closer to what they ruled than what Stephen Miller said.
It goes on, "You haven't done so.
Aren't you disobeying the Supreme Court?"
And then Trump responded, "Well, that's not what my people told me.
They didn't say it was.
They said it was the 9 to nothing was something entirely different."
Which is true.
Stephen Miller lied to him and said, "Oh, they ruled 9 to nothing in our favor."
And then the journalist said from time, "Let me quote from the ruling."
Quote, the order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.
Are you facilitating a release?
And Trump said, I leave that to my lawyers.
I give them no instructions.
They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying.
But I leave that to my lawyers if they want.
And that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country.
I don't make that decision.
And then the journalist said, have you asked President Bukele to return him?
And Trump said, I haven't.
He said he wouldn't.
And then the journalist said, but did you ask him?
And Trump said, but I haven't asked him positively, but he said he wouldn't.
And so the journalist said, but if you haven't even asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?
And Trump said, well, because I haven't been asked to ask him by my attorneys.
Nobody asked me to ask him that question except you.
But I leave that decision to the lawyers.
At this moment, they just don't want me to do that.
They say we're in total compliance with the Supreme Court.
Now, I do think this is the case where the Trump administration is openly and deliberately defying an order from the Supreme Court.
I believe that Trump believes it doesn't say what it says because Stephen Miller lied to him, and we all watched them do that.
And we went over all the reasons why, but that does give you insight into Trump's thinking.
He did actually go on to say, look, if the Supreme Court ruling says that, I don't mind bringing it back here.
And then going to court and showing the evidence that we have that he's a member of MS-13 and letting the court decide.
He said, I wouldn't mind that, but that's not what my lawyers are telling me to do.
All right, here is what they asked him about Ukraine.
The journalist said, quote, following that call, I'd love to hear, and I believe what happened was at some point in the middle of the interview, India's President, Prime Minister Modi, called Trump.
And they had a conversation, so that interrupted the interview.
So I think this is following that call from Modi.
"Following that call, I'd love to hear a little bit about the role that you're playing on the world stage, and I think that you campaigned on that too."
Trump said, "I have that relationship with many leaders.
If I can stop losing 3,000 human beings a week on average with Russia and Ukraine, it's only because of me.
Nobody else could have stopped it."
I think we're going to do that, by the way.
I think that'll be done.
I think that we're going to make a deal with Iran.
I think we're going to make a deal with Iran.
Nobody else could do that.
And then the journalist said, you said you would end the war in Ukraine on day one.
Trump said, well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, distorted by the fake news.
Obviously, people know that when I said that, I said it in jest.
But it was also said that it will be ended.
And the journalist said, well, what's taking so long?
When do you think it will be ended?
And Trump said, well, I don't think it's that long.
I mean, look, I got here three months ago.
This war has been going on for three years.
It's a war that would never have happened if I was president.
It's Biden's war.
It's not my war.
And they said, do you think peace is really possible if Putin is president?
And Trump said, I think peace is possible.
You say, if Putin is president, yeah, Putin is president.
Can you really have peace?
And Trump said, I think with me as president, it's possible.
It's very probable.
If someone else is president, no chance.
And I think what's very interesting there is that despite Trump's foreign policy steps so far, of which I've been critical, the resumption and escalation of the bombing campaign in Yemen, which is still going on, Costing the United States a lot of money,
killing a lot of people in Yemen, but not actually degrading their capabilities.
In fact, they've been shooting down, the Houthis have a lot of very expensive drones.
One of the most sophisticated missiles that the United States has landed in Yemen undetonated and the Houthis took it and have it and likely will be able to reverse engineer it along with Iran to understand how that missile works and then replicate it and build one of their own, which happens all the time.
So aside from that, aside from the restarting of the war in Gaza, which I obviously am vehemently opposed to, I think two things Trump is doing.
Number one, genuinely attempting to end the war in Ukraine.
And of course it's going to be on terms more favorable to Russia than Ukraine because Russia has the upper hand.
But he seems genuinely committed to wanting to do that.
It won't be easy.
Russia has its own interests.
The U.S. doesn't have that much leverage over Russia.
But clearly that's something that is on Trump's mind and that he wants to do.
And then you also notice, and there was another passage in this Time interview where they asked him, are you worried that Netanyahu is going to drag you into a war with Iran?
Because we heard that the Israelis want to bomb Iran and you basically told them not to.
Are you worried that they're going to drag you in?
Here's what this exchange was.
The Time reporter says, quote, "Are you worried Netanyahu will drag you into a war?"
And Trump says, "No."
And then the reporter says, "Let's talk about some of the issues."
And then Trump says, "By the way, he may go into a war, Netanyahu, but we're not getting dragged in."
And then Time said, "The U.S. will stay out if Israel goes into it."
And then Trump said, "No, I didn't say that.
You asked if he dragged me in, like I'd go unwillingly.
No, I may very well do it willingly."
If we can't get a deal, if we don't make a deal, I'll be leading the pack.
So you see here Trump saying, like, look, I believe we're going to get a deal done with Iran.
Every report from every source says that when Netanyahu was in Washington, he tried to convince Trump to give him the go-ahead to go bomb Iran and his nuclear facilities, but they would need the help of the United States to do that.
Trump said, I don't want to do that.
I want to get a deal with Iran, and I believe I'll be able to.
And he said that in other parts of the interview as well.
I believe that's what he wants.
And then he's overtly threatening Iran, saying, like, if we don't get a deal, it's not Israel that's going to bomb you.
It's the U.S. that's going to bomb you.
We're going to lead the way.
And obviously that's something that you say in negotiations with another country, I guess.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, but it is a very dangerous situation because the question is, what does Trump want from a deal?
What do the Iranians, are they willing to give for a deal?
And what will the Israelis be satisfied with?
And there may be no meeting ground for those three to make willing concessions, willing concessions to get a deal done.
And the question is, what happens if the U.S. and Iran reach a deal that is satisfactory to the U.S. but not to Israel?
Is Trump going to really tell Israel, we don't care that you don't like this deal, we're doing it anyway?
Which is basically what Obama told.
Netanyahu about the Iran deal along with Russia and Europe?
Or is Trump really willing to defy Netanyahu?
Or if the Israelis say, "We don't like this deal," will Trump say, "Okay, if this isn't satisfactory to you and we can't get a deal that you're happy with, I guess it's time to go bomb Iran."
That's definitely something we'll look for.
But I do believe Trump's preference based on not just things he's saying, but things I've heard from a lot of people inside the administration.
is very much that he strongly prefers a deal that does by no mean guarantee though that a deal will happen and that we'll be able to avert a
All right, we're going to get to the Q&A in just a second, but before we do, here is a news story.
Mexico extradites 29 drug traffickers to the U.S. to avoid trade tariffs.
We all know how the step that mainstream media can be.
They push agendas, censor voices, and make sure you only see one side of the story.
That's exactly why I started this show.
Because I believe in free speech and real conversations and the most open and unconstrained pursuit of the truth possible.
It's also why I partnered with an app and website that believes in that too.
Ground News prioritizes free speech over controlling the narrative.
For every story, you can find all the articles reporting on it worldwide with contacts like 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, their tags, indicating if it's coming from a liberal or conservative source or from corporations or independent voices.
And from there, I can decide for myself if, for example, Mexico's unprecedented extradition of 29 cartel members to the U.S. really is proof that Trump's tariff tactics are working, like some of his defenders claim.
Or if it's just a routine legal process and one of the cartel members pled not guilty anyway.
And it's just an ordinary...
Event between the two countries, as many center and left sources are insisting.
Different sources are saying different things as usual.
If I had just read one of these sources, I'd have a skewed view of reality.
But with Ground News, I can put 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 the people in charge don't want you to see.
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 exact Vantage plan that I use to get unlimited access to all of their feed.
I'm very confident you will love that platform.
more.
All right, so Friday night we reserve, in addition to doing this week in review, taking questions from our members of the locals community that are posted throughout the week.
We already kind of covered some of those questions in the week in review because several of you asked questions about the stories I just ended up covering, including the very first story that came from our local section asking me to analyze and assess what happened with the arrest of this judge in Wisconsin.
But we still have other questions that we want to...
Get to as many of them as we can in the time that we have allotted.
Here is a question from Antiwarism, who asked the following, quote, Why isn't there a mass movement of Americans opposing the looming war with Iran?
Tucker Carlson and other independents seem to be the only ones sounding the alarm right now.
The current climate demands a unified movement of progressives, libertarians, and America firsters on this issue.
I highly doubt they're going to go through Congress, and even if they did, we all know where most of Congress's loyalties lie.
This war should be crushed before it begins.
Once it does, the establishment will smear dissidents the exact same way they do with the pro-Palestinian movement.
If Bernie and AOC could draw the crowds they have with their meaningless, quote, fight oligarchy rallies, the American people can certainly organize and have their voices heard loud and clear, quote, no more Middle East wars.
Yeah, a lot of interesting points there that I think are worth examining.
First of all, this whole thing with the Bernie and the AOC rallies, they really are attracting a sizable crowd in almost every place they go.
You know, 20,000, 30,000 people, sometimes more in not even our largest cities, sometimes in red states and the like.
And clearly they're tapping into something.
But at the end of the day, what are AOC and Bernie's real message?
Like, what is their real agenda?
Are they really attracting huge numbers of people to some new way of doing politics?
No, they are not.
They're attracting Democratic Party loyalists and Democratic Party voters who want to feel like they have some outlet for fighting Trump.
Bernie and AOC always lead people into the Democratic Party.
That's what they do.
Now, Bernie has been making more noises lately about creating some kind of an independent party.
I'll believe that when I see it.
But I don't want to say I find what they're doing irrelevant or trivial because it's not.
If you're attracting that many people, you're exciting a good number of people.
But toward what end?
I think toward the end of gathering Democrats who really have nobody else but Bernie and OEC doing this sort of thing to let them kind of gather and feel like they're engaged in this protest movement, this kind of rallying against the Trump administration.
There's nothing else to it.
To the extent they have a critique of the Democratic Party, the critique is the Democrats aren't fighting hard enough against Trump.
It's not an ideological critique.
It's not anything.
It's just that's all it is.
It doesn't necessarily indicate that a bigger or equal in size anti-war movement joining different people from different factions is possible.
But I do agree that if anything warrants that, it's opposition to a war in Iran.
So let me say a little bit about why I don't think that's happening yet and why, unfortunately, I'm a little skeptical about whether it would.
Let's look at what just happened with this war in Yemen.
One of the things that we've seen from the Trump administration is that most of what the Trump administration has been doing are things they promised to do during the campaign, including deporting foreign students who participated in protests against Israel, including invoking the Alien Enemies Act in order to deport people they regard as alien enemies on U.S. soil with no due process.
You can point to a Trump speech or multiple Trump speeches interviews where he promised to do all of the things he's doing.
One of the exceptions, though, is bombing the Houthis in Yemen.
In fact, during 2024, Joe Biden was bombing the Houthis, and not lightly, continuously.
If you go look and just use Google and look at how many bombing Raids Biden ordered throughout 2024 and on what dates?
There are most months where they were bombing every day.
And when Biden was bombing the Houthis, their argument for doing so, the Biden administration's, was, well, they're attacking our ships and we need to stop that.
And at the time, they actually were attacking American ships.
And Trump was asked about the bombing of the Houthis in mid-2024 by Tim Pool.
And we showed you this video before, and Trump criticized Biden for bombing the Houthis.
He didn't say, oh, the bombing isn't intense enough.
He should either really bomb or not bomb at all.
He said, why would we bomb the Houthis?
There's no reason to bomb the Houthis.
You just use diplomacy, and you pick up the phone, and you get that solved.
So not only didn't Trump ever say he was going to bomb the Houthis in the campaign, he actually criticized Biden for having done so.
And that was at least at a time when the Houthis really were attacking American ships because they perceived, obviously correctly, that it was the United States funding the Israeli destruction of Gaza, which is what they were protesting, and so they regarded America as a legitimate target.
Once the ceasefire was imposed or agreed to, the day before Trump was inaugurated, that Trump deserves credit along with Steve Whitcoff for having facilitated, the Houthis said, "Okay, there's a ceasefire."
We're not going to attack any ships anymore.
And they stopped.
And they only resumed attacking ships once the Israelis started violating the terms of the ceasefire by refusing to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza as required by the ceasefire.
And when they resumed, when they said they were going to resume and resumed attacking ships, they said we're only going to attack Israeli ships.
Not even American ships.
So now they're only attacking Israeli ships as opposed to 2024 when they were actually attacking American ships.
And Trump said out of nowhere, oh, we're going to start bombing the crap out of the Houthis.
And Trump has been bombing the crap out of the Houthis.
It's not just a daily bombing like Biden was doing.
They're using much heavier weaponry.
They're bombing more intensively.
They're bombing with fewer constraints about civilian deaths.
I watched the MAGA movement saying, "We need to stop Middle East wars."
And they heard Trump criticize Biden for having bombed the Houthis.
And yet when Trump said, "We're going to start bombing the Houthis," and now that he's bombing the Houthis, how much resistance or opposition from MAGA have you heard?
I've heard very little.
In fact, I remember one of the most sickening things I've seen in a while, which is Trump Posted video of about 60 Yemenis standing in a circle.
And he claimed, oh, these are people who gathered to plot attacks on American ships, which made no sense for so many reasons.
Like, why would they be standing outdoors doing that when they know they're American drones hovering overhead, bombing them all the time?
There was zero evidence that that's what it was.
And then the footage showed an American bomb, a very heavy American bomb.
Probably like 1,000 pounds, maybe 2,000 pounds.
Drop there and just incinerating all of them.
You see the aftermath?
There's no one there anymore.
They're gone.
All 60 people extinguished, wiped out.
And I saw huge numbers of MAGA people saying, yeah, we got the terrorists, yeah.
You know, like it was Dick Cheney in 2002, 2003.
And that started alarming me.
I said, wait, if Trump does Middle East wars after...
One of the primary views of MAGA was that we're fighting too many Middle East wars.
Is there really going to be no opposition?
Are they just going to get on board with the ever-Mideast wars?
Trump says we need to fight, including against Iran.
Am I going to now start hearing, yeah, it's the Mullahs.
They hate America.
They hate Israel.
These are the dangerous ones.
We got to go to another.
We got to do regime change.
We got to bomb their nuclear facilities.
It started making me wonder.
Now, what has given me more hope Is that it isn't just Tucker Carlson, though.
He's an important voice.
But Charlie Kirk, who probably in terms of influence within MAGA is at least on Tucker's level now, came out and said something very similar, which is, look, the war drums are beating very loudly in Washington.
This is very real.
There's a good chance that we are actually going to go to war with Iran.
And if Trump does that...
That will kill the MAGA movement.
This is exactly the kind of war that has destroyed our country that we can't allow any more of.
So my hope is that this kind of trans-ideological cross-factional section of the political spectrum that you identified will actually come together in some way, even if it's not, you know, a kind of overt union that still people will be Raising their voices very loudly in opposition.
I think one of the reasons why it's not happening yet is because they're not really prepping the United States population for a war with Iran.
In fact, as I said, you have Trump saying, no, I want to deal with Iran.
I don't want to bomb Iran.
I don't want to go to war with Iran.
I want to do a deal with Iran.
And I think we can do a deal with Iran.
They've had these initial meetings that Trump was very positive about, saying, you know, we made some great progress.
So, in order for people to really get worked up over this, I think they need to feel like they're getting signals from the government that a war, if not imminent, is at least much more possible than the government is suggesting now.
Even though we have plenty of signs that the war is very plausible.
But I think people have to feel the urgency a little bit more.
I think there are a lot of MAGA supporters.
Who feel like they have to stay consolidated behind Trump for the moment.
There's a lot that they like what he's doing in deportations, especially in immigration, and in other areas as well.
And they feel like it's not the time to really go to war with anything Trump does.
I've seen a lot of them sort of stay quiet on things that I know they don't like Trump doing.
But the war with Iran will be the real test.
I mean, bombing the Houthis, it stays invisible.
There's not a lot of media coverage over it.
A lot of people think, yeah, the Houthis, it's like the poorest country in the region.
They're probably all terrorists anyway.
Just drop some bombs as long as you're not sending American troops there or whatever.
Who really cares?
That's what I think the attitude is.
Whereas a war with Iran, even a bombing raid against Iran would be far more consequential.
But until I see a real rising up of the kind of core MAGA faction...
Against something Trump does, I'm going to have doubts about whether they're really going to do it.
It was really interesting to me, remember in that transition period, when Vivek Ramaswamy really agitated a lot of people when he came out and talked about the problems of American culture.
We value leisure too much and we don't value hard work and nerds, all of that.
And then that led to Elon Musk coming out and Demanding more H-1B visas to bring in skilled workers from China and from India, from wherever, to work for Silicon Valley and other tech companies.
And a lot of people in MAGA said, "What?
What do you mean?
You want to bring in foreign workers to do jobs in the United States?
I mean, the whole idea is we're supposed to do these jobs."
And the message of the VEC explicitly and Elon implicitly was, "No, Americans aren't smart enough or skilled enough."
We're trained enough to do these jobs.
We need to bring them in from China and India and other places where their education is better.
And that created this kind of huge war where a lot of people in Naga wanted to go to war with Elon Musk and Vivek over this issue.
Like, H-1Bs, no, you're not going to bring in foreign workers.
The whole point is we want fewer foreigners in our country and more Americans doing jobs.
And then Trump came in at a certain point, and even though he had previously said, We need fewer H-1B visas.
We have to give these Americans these jobs.
He had said that in his prior campaigns.
He came in and sided with Elon and said, "No, H-1B visas are important for our country, important for our companies."
And that pretty much put an end to the MAGA uprising.
Daddy came in and said, "This is how it's going to be."
And they all said, "Okay."
And you haven't heard from that again.
And that did disturb me because that is fundamental to the MAGA agenda.
Not bringing in more foreign workers to work for American companies, but having those be available for American jobs.
And soon as Trump sided with Elon, they kind of said, okay, I guess that settles it for now.
Now, it was during the transition.
The Trump administration hadn't even begun.
So I was willing to say maybe they just don't want to go to war with the Trump administration before it even starts.
That kind of makes sense.
But I'm still in wait-and-see mode on whether...
The MAGA movement is really willing to vocally object to what Trump does, even something as significant as a war with Iran.
And I'm not entirely convinced yet that I'm sure some of them will, but whether masses of them do, I'm not yet convinced.
But I hope I'm wrong about that.
All right, next question from Karl Malone.
Who says, "I've been watching Douglas Murray, Sam Harris, and Constantine Kissin make arguments for expertise and standards since the Wizard of Oz moment Murray inflicted on the Joe Rogan podcast with Dave Smith.
I'm curious what you think generally about this story."
I definitely followed all of this with a great deal of interest.
And what I found so notable about it is that the people you named Douglas Murray, Sam Harris, Constantine Kissin, are all people who have basically created careers and thrived within independent media.
And one of the kind of defining ethos of independent media, a flag I've raised myself before, is that the The scope of the voices that corporate media believes is worthy of being heard is extremely narrow.
Even when they're giving you "experts", they're not just randomly finding experts on a topic and then seeing what they have to say.
They're choosing them based on the agenda and the narrative they want to promote.
I don't know many people who have more in-depth expertise on international relations than Professor John Mearsheimer.
When was the last time you saw him?
Quoted in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or on NBC or CBS analyzing world events, he doesn't have the right narrative.
It's not a question of credentials.
And part of the idea of why we need independent media is precisely because corporate media selects a tiny range of voices and a tiny range of views that can be heard and they have a very stifled sense of what expertise is.
And the idea of independent media was like, "Hey, no."
Ordinary citizens deserve to be heard too.
A lot of times they have an understanding of things or a view of things which is more informed and more valuable than the "so-called experts."
I really try hard not to fall into romanticization of working class people or people who haven't gone to elite schools because Every group of people has their flaws and their bad characteristics.
And when you start to idealize the working class as this group of people with wisdom and superior empathy or knowledge or whatever, it's always a little bit manipulative in its own right.
It's kind of the mirror image of romanticizing elite Ivy League professors.
But I did have this experience once.
Where, and I'm sorry for how trite this sounds, but it really did happen, and it really was illustrative for me.
I was in Milwaukee, in like a kind of suburb just outside of Milwaukee, like a very working class suburb.
And again, I'm sorry for the cliche, but I was sitting in a diner.
I was having lunch.
And at the next table was a group of like five guys who were on their lunch break.
They were like in labor uniforms.
I don't know exactly what they did.
But, you know, they were in like their work uniforms.
And it happened to be at the time when The Intercept got involved in a big scandal because The Intercept had received this document from a source who turned out to be a reality winner, purporting that the Russians had sought to invade the electoral system in ways we previously didn't know.
And then The Intercept made a bunch of mistakes that led to the detection of reality winner.
Anyway...
On their phones, they would get New York Times headlines.
There was a big New York Times headline on that story, on what The Intercept did with the source.
And they were talking about it.
Again, not because they were reading The Intercept, because they were getting the New York Times headline on their phone.
And there was a big story about that.
And obviously, they had no idea.
I was sitting at the table next to them.
And I remember them saying, like, this is what they said.
They all kind of said it.
They're like, Yeah, you know, with these stories about Russia, it's so hard to figure out what's true and what's not because they always come from anonymous sources.
It's always, like, people with an axe to grind.
There's always some, like, agenda to it.
And so it's just, you can't really know, like, what's true or false.
And I remember thinking, like, that understanding of how to view these stories, this reporting.
It's so much more well-informed, so much more rational, so much more skeptical than the people who are online every day being paid to follow media and politics and journalism as their profession.
The experts who are, you know, running around crazy believing every Russiagate thing that appears, including many things that ended up being wildly debunked.
The point of which is that It just is true that sometimes people who are "experts" in the sense that they have the credentials you expect people to have end up too consumed in a kind of subculture where the only views that they get exposed to are the views that they're constantly hearing.
I did a debate in New York 10 days ago, maybe, about Misinformation, disinformation, internet censorship, all of that.
And it was a debate between myself and two other people.
One is a woman who's on the faculty of George Washington University and does research into disinformation.
So like a disinformation expert, though to her credit, she doesn't like that term, but that's essentially what she was there to be.
And then a University of Virginia professor, who's a professor of media studies, who is regarded as some great expert in studying media.
Disinformation or whatever.
And it was about a two-hour debate, and I was obviously more adversarial to both of them, though I liked her much.
I was more impressed with the nuances of her view.
But he, with all these credentials, you know, PhD and this and whatever, and on the faculty of a very good university, the University of Virginia, every view that he had was like this extremely banal, cliched, predictable, inch deep.
He's a liberal MSNBC view of politics, kind of prettified with the language of scholarship.
But everything he was saying was just so reflexive.
And the idea that there's even another way to look at things besides how he looks at it was offensive to him, like he could not conceive of that.
He really believed that his political worldview was so correct that it ought to be deemed the truth and anything that deviates from it is By definition, disinformation.
Even in topics that he's not an expert in, like COVID, where he was saying, you know, anyone who disputes Dr. Fauci, people like Jay Bhattacharya, don't really have expertise in science.
They're just crackpots, no matter what their credentials are.
And so there are a lot of people who are so-called experts who just get so immersed in a certain subculture where they just get validated all the time in their political views that they become Far more blind as a result of their expertise than they are open-minded.
And so I think one of the most important things that independent media does is it allows people to build their own credibility.
And I absolutely think you can become an expert in a particular field without necessarily having degrees from top universities.
Now, I'm not somebody who disbelieves in expertise.
If I want to understand how a plane works, I'm likely to seek out a pilot or an aeronautical engineer than just some random person on the internet.
If I have an issue with some organ of mine like my heart or something my kids do, I'm going to go to a cardiologist.
I'm not going to just do a Google search for somebody who claims to understand the heart.
So it's not that I disbelieve in expertise, but especially when it comes to political debate, I think confining yourself to that is extremely Stultifying, and that has been what independent media ultimately has been fueled by, is this idea that, no, you know what, we can listen to a lot of people and ultimately decide,
like, who's the most informed?
Who really is thinking most independently, most critically, most skeptically?
And sometimes it's people who don't necessarily have credentials.
And that has been what independent media has been about, is finding new voices, different voices, people with different perspectives than what the expert class is offering.
And the king of independent media for years has been Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan has built many of these people's careers, many of their careers, by going on multiple times, by having him endorse their work.
I was on Rogan's show once, but he very, very often talks about my work and recommends it, but not somebody whose career or platform has in any way been built on Or dependent on Joe Rogan, but a lot of these people have.
And so typically you hear almost no criticism of Joe Rogan in the realm of independent media because of the power that he possesses because of his gigantic audience.
Suddenly, lo and behold, over the past couple months you're now hearing not just criticism of Joe Rogan but very assertive, vocal, accusatory critiques of him from many of these people who have Thrived in independent media and often been on Rogan's show many times.
And the only thing that has really changed about Rogan's show is that over the past year or so, he has been putting on more and more people who are vocal critics of Israel.
And when Douglas Murray went on to Joe Rogan's show with Dave Smith, he clearly went on with the intention not to debate Dave Smith but to scold Joe Rogan.
For having too many Israel critics on and not enough Israel supporters.
And I was like, what?
I remember so well.
Basically from the time of October 7th onward that most of the people Joe Rogan had on to talk about Israel were vehemently pro-Israel.
He had Ben Shapiro on.
He had like Coleman Hughes on several times to talk about Israel.
He was a fanatical supporter of Israel, worked for the Free Press.
I mean, just one after the next.
I even was going to make a list, but it was too long.
Somebody recently put together a video, I just saw it today, where Douglas Murray says you don't have any people on who have the other view on Israel.
And he just did this huge montage of the huge numbers of people who are fanatically pro-Israel that have been on Joe Rogan's show.
But that's the norm in the view of Israel supporters like Sam Harris and Douglas Murray and Constantine Kisson.
Israel supporters on because those are the people who have the right view and who are all throughout the media.
It's basically almost a requirement to be a supporter of Israel to get into media.
But the problem is that Joe Rogan has been putting on a lot of people who are not just opponents of Israel but pretty aggressive ones.
He's had on Ian Carroll and Daryl Cooper who writes under Martyrmaid, Dave Smith several times.
And that is really starting to worry a lot of very pro-Israel people, that it's not just once in a while now that Joe Rogan is putting on pro-Israel, critics of Israel, opponents of Israel, but doing so with more and more frequency,
despite how often he also still has on heavy support of Israel, but that is not permitted.
Israel supporters look for any source of Israel criticism, and they target that.
That's why college campuses are being targeted.
That's why TikTok got targeted.
We talked before about how the original claim about TikTok was it was dangerous because of China, but that wasn't enough to get votes.
Only once people became convinced that there was too much Israel criticism on TikTok.
Did that get banned?
And now they're after Joe Rogan's show and they're using this idea of expertise.
Like, hey, you're putting on these people like Dave Smith and Ian Carroll and Daryl Cooper.
And other Israel critics who aren't experts.
They don't know anything.
You should only have experts on.
Somehow, Douglas Murray considers himself an expert, even though the only degree he has is an undergraduate degree in English.
So if you were, like, judging expertise through normal credentials, you might invite Douglas Murray on to, like, analyze the Canterbury Tales and Schelser, but not much else.
Just like if you're going to do a show on English literature.
He also got into a tank in the IDF, took him around for about eight seconds to a few places in Gaza that they wanted to show him.
Like, hey, look, here's a tunnel.
Here's this.
Here's that.
And he thinks he's an expert because of that because he went on a propaganda trip.
And so now suddenly you see these people on independent media desperate to tell Rogan why they can't have Israel critics on and they're invoking the same kind of gatekeeping's conception of expertise.
That corporate media for so long has embraced in order to exclude voices which they think ought to be excluded.
Everyone can see what's going on here.
Everyone understands what's motivating this.
And I think that a lot of Israel supporters are getting increasingly desperate as Israel critics find more and more of a platform, as there's more places that are giving voice to Israel criticism.
There's more parts of the political spectrum open to that.
Polls show that support for Israel is declining.
It's kind of like lashing out like oh my god, you can't put him on.
He's not an expert.
You can't put him on.
He's not an expert.
When of course it's not about expertise because how is Sam Harris or Douglas Murray or Constantine Kissen an expert in Israel any more than Save Dave Smith is?
They're not.
They just are deemed to have the right Level of knowledge because they're supporters of Israel, and that's essentially, if you're an expert in the Middle East, by definition, according to them, you're going to be an Israel supporter.
So I do think it's very revealing, but also very expected.
Whenever some new venue or new faction is the outsider force, it's easy to wave these rebel flags like, yeah, we're the dissidents, we're the disruptors.
But then the minute...
They start to become the gatekeepers of opinion and information.
They start replicating the tactics of the establishment they set out to subvert because they're now engaged in Ruling class or establishment behavior and it's very interesting to watch Rogan become the target of that by people who he's valued and has helped build a career for and we'll see whether or not he's influenced by it to the extent to which he is.
It's a very powerful critique they're bringing and it's not people who Rogan doesn't like or hates but who he knows and respects and they're all unified now trying to pressure him to either stop putting on so many Israel critics or making sure that they always have an Israel supporter right by their side when When he does,
and we'll see how that works.
All right, last question.
ScottishBear92 asked the following, "Hey Glenn, I am considering a career change through journalism.
I'm trying to figure out if this would be a good path for me.
I love engaging with political, social, and cultural issues and big ideas, but not sure if journalism is the right path for me.
Could you offer some guidance on how to discern such an important decision?"
Yeah, it's interesting.
I used to talk a lot more than I do now at colleges, journalism schools.
I just don't travel as much unless necessary for family reasons, but I would get this question a lot.
And, you know, basically what I would always tell people is that you have to begin, if you're going to take a riskier career path, which is what journalism is, there's a safer career path.
You can go to law school and become a lawyer.
You know, medical school and become a doctor.
Accounting school, become an accountant.
You're going to have a much easier path of security, guaranteed income, and the like.
Journalism has a lot-- the ceilings are higher, but the floors are lower, too.
I mean, in a lot of ways, it's a collapsing profession in some ways, but in other ways, it's a thriving and growing one, depending on what you want to do.
And the question becomes, do you have a passion?
An actual passion?
Like, do you just like talking about political and social issues or is there something you're very passionate about?
And if you are passionate about that, you have to know what that passion is and then do everything to make certain that it becomes your driving force at all times.
And I think that's advice for anybody who's entering some kind of line of work that they're doing not because it's the most stable or the safest.
But because they believe that it's something they really want to do.
And so many of these graduate schools, you know, when I went to law school, I had so many ideals, so many passion-based ambitions.
And a lot of people who went, I went to NYU Law School, it's, you know, regarded as one of the top law schools, but also kind of a more permissive law school.
It's not necessarily intended to be this feeder into corporate law.
And so a lot of people end up there with all this passion.
And I watch as they go through law school and corporate media, corporate law firms start luring them with big paychecks and all sorts of other access.
That passion starts to get extinguished, starts to fade out, becomes kind of this relic of young adulthood and now it's time to be a real grown-up where you care about your paycheck and stability and building a family and whatever.
And these educational institutions, same with journalism school for sure.
Are designed to extinguish that passion.
So unless you want to take the safest path, like I'm going to go to Columbia Journalism School, and even then that's not as safe, but at least it's safer.
You can do that as a career choice, like as any other career choice, doing this to become known or make money or have different career paths.
But if you actually feel passionate about something, I really believe that On the internet, in independent media, people who are passionate, who have a real voice, a real conviction, a real, genuine commitment to a set of ideals, and then the ability to pursue them,
to articulate them, a willingness to really work on them, offer something unique that other people aren't already offering within media, I still believe there's massive paths for fulfillment and success.
In growth, but it's a lot less secure of a path than it used to be because you used to have a very clear path laid out.
You'd go to top journalism school, you would start a newspaper, you would cover zoning board meetings, then city council meetings, and then work your way up to the state and then become a national reporter.
That's pretty much gone.
I mean, or certainly radically reduced.
The future is in independent journalism, but that requires a lot of self-sufficiency.
A commitment to really trying to find a unique voice that is needed, that offers some value.
And to me, that in turn requires not just having passion, but being committed to keeping that passion protected and preserved and nurtured.
Even if along the way you have to make a few concessions, a few step backs.
Like, yeah, I'm going to take this job, not because it's really going to fuel my passion, but because it's going to get me to a place where I can then do that.
I think it's very important to keep...
Contact with and not ever let anyone suffocate or extinguish that passion, which ultimately is what drives unique work.
Last question actually from antiwarism again.
Glenn, do you like cats?
Highly important geopolitical topic.
I like all animals almost equally.
That's why I'm vegan.
That's why I'm disgusted by the cruelty and immorality.
Disease-ridden filth of factory farms.
The problem is if you have 25 dogs, as we do, you can't really have a lot of cats around you, but I always had cats before I started having dogs.
We have cats at our shelter.
Sometimes I rescue cats and bring them to that shelter.
So you can pretty much replace cats with any animal and ask me if I like them, and the answer will almost certain be yes.
Life itself, human life, animal life, and just animals in general, I find to be some of the most majestic and worthwhile and fulfilling things on the planet.
So it's very hard for me to think of an animal that I don't like, even one that you might think people wouldn't generally like.
All right, so that concludes the show for this evening.
Got a little confused.
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