Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse Look Back on Trump’s First 100 Days; Lara Friedman on New Laws Barring Israel Criticism
Lee Fang talks to Leighton Woodhouse about the first 100 years of the new Trump Administration. They discuss tariffs, free speech, corruption and much more. THEN: Lee is joined by Lara Friedman, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, to discuss the barrage of laws banning criticism of Israel and how they open door for an escalation of censorship in the US. ----- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
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For now, welcome to an episode of System Update, restarting now.
Our esteemed host, Glenn Greenwald, is out today, so I'll be guiding you through the show.
My name is Lee Fong.
I'm an independent journalist based in San Francisco.
Yesterday marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump's second term in office.
Like many Americans, I tried to keep an open mind.
For all his very well-established faults, Trump has forged a very new political identity for the Republican Party.
One that has drifted away from deference to the business elite and more towards populist economics.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to protect entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Trump advanced declared last summer at the RNC that multinational corporations would no longer take precedence over the interests of average Americans.
On foreign policy, Trump bristled at the established order and signaled a strong interest in ending America's forever wars, especially the conflict, the bloody conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump promised peace on day one of his administration in Europe.
For a moment after the election, he also seemed committed to negotiating peace in Gaza.
His envoy for the region, Steve Witkoff, temporarily delivered a ceasefire, a momentary end to the Israeli military's bloodshed in the confined territory, and a release of hostages and prisoners on both sides of the conflict.
And on the many other domestic priorities, there were other glimmers of positive reform.
Trump and Doge promised to clear out the many bloated government contractors like Booz Allen and McKinsey, and Trump promised to end discriminatory DEI programs.
Meanwhile, he announced a new golden era for free speech.
After years of suppressed speech.
From pandemic policies to stifling cancel culture, there was hope for a new embrace of free expression from this White House.
But the last 100 days, with some exemptions, have exemplified failure after failure, a series of false promises, lies, and mismanagement.
Worst of all, the administration has lurched towards some of the most brazen forms of corruption and authoritarianism in modern American history.
Rather than cracking down on corporate power, we see tariff exemptions and mass pardons for corporate crime handed to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and for major Trump donors.
Rather than an era of free speech, we see a ruthless crackdown on campus expression, unconstitutional arrests of students for criticizing Israel and new speech codes that safeguard the country of Israel.
Rather than a break from the corruption of Hunter Biden, we see a new era of graft and influence peddling, especially the self enrichment of the Trump family using cryptocurrency.
Rather than a moment of peace, we so far have seen the resumption of Israel's war in Gaza and no end in sight to the brutal conflict in Ukraine.
Rather than an end to the weaponization of government, we see partisan weaponization of
On this episode of System Update, we'll bring on Leighton Woodhouse, a writer on Substack, to further discuss Trump's 100 days.
And we'll also discuss the latest clampdown on speech related to Israel with Lara Friedman, an advocate who promotes peace in the region.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
tuned.
My guest today is Leighton Woodhouse.
Leighton is an Oakland, California-based writer, former union organizer.
We often do a weekly Kind of recap of the news, politics, other kind of cultural, political issues on our sub-stacks.
And, you know, we host a podcast together.
Since we are kind of hijacking Glenn's show, I think it makes sense to do a hundred days recap rather than just a weekly recap of the administration.
Leighton, how's it going?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
I'm dressed a little bit differently than our normal podcast attire.
I kind of sell it in for Glenn.
But, you know, just yesterday was the 100-day mark of the Trump administration.
We've been kind of...
I think, you know, it's worth kind of just giving an overview for listeners to the show who might not be, you know, audience members of our podcast.
I think we have some different views, but we kind of share some...
Concerns in the Venn diagram of people who were associated with the progressive left, who were very badly burned and had a lot of concerns around the last four or five years around the pandemic, around censorship,
around suppression of free speech, around some of the public safety issues that the left kind of ignored.
I mean, you live in Oakland where it's much worse, but in San Francisco we've had such incredible problems around kind of de-policing and...
You know, out of this kind of left-wing outburst in 2020, a lot of harmful policies that have disproportionately affected working-class people.
So, you know, I've had, you know, kind of guarded optimism about the Trump administration.
I was hoping for a clean break around some of these issues around speech, around public safety, around some of the illiberalism from the left.
DEI and other concerns.
And in some ways, in the first few weeks of the administration, I think there were many glimmers of hope.
But it seems to have taken a pretty dark turn.
And I think for folks who are feeling very politically homeless over the last couple of years, we're even maybe more homeless.
I don't know.
Or maybe being pushed back into the left.
How do you feel?
I feel like we've been consistent, actually, because if our reservations with the left back in, say, the period of like 20...
15 to 2024 or so was its creeping authoritarianism, the way in which dissent was squelched through cancel culture, orthodoxy was enforced,
you know, that kind of a thing.
This is just a continuation of that.
With a different political valence.
I mean, and when I say continuation of that, I mean like it's the exact same playbook, specifically around anti-Semitism and creating safe spaces on campuses.
This is identical to what we saw under the left.
And so I think that if you were concerned about that with the left and you're not concerned about it now, then you are inconsistent.
Possibly hypocritical and partisan in your outlook.
The principal position, I think, is to be opposed to this kind of authoritarianism, whether it comes from the right or the left.
And I just see it as a repeat.
It's just a funhouse mirror of what happened with the left.
Right.
You were told, we were told, everyone was told, if you didn't agree with some of the extreme policies of the left over the last couple of years...
Shut up, you're a racist.
You shut up, you're a bigot.
And now it's, if you don't get onto the agenda of the Trump administration, it's no, you're an anti-Semite, unless you agree with us.
We're going to put you in a cage if we accuse you of that, even if there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
Yeah, and so I should point out that it's far worse, actually, than the woke excesses, because at least with the woke excesses, as bad as the penalties were for violating orthodoxy, you know, being sort of...
Experiencing social death online, being fired from your job, all these things were not trivial punishments.
They were very significant prices that people paid for their political dissent.
Even then, it's not as if armed agents of the state...
We're rounding people up and throwing them in prison.
And I realize that there's this distinction that's going to be made by people who disagree with me that these are all non-citizens.
We can get into that.
But the question is, but first of all, we're getting into the gray area now where it's not necessarily just non-citizens.
There have been two citizens who were rounded up and sent and deported.
These are U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants.
And then also the rights of people who are legally here on green cards has always been understood to be constitutionally protected.
You know, they enjoy the same constitutional rights that U.S. citizens do.
And now all of a sudden they don't.
And that should be of concern to everybody, regardless of your.
Yeah, and the other kind of opening that I think Trump has...
Very kind of ruthlessly exploited, and maybe there's some sincere belief there, but now I kind of question it.
Is this opening around populism, economic populism, that is another area where we talk a lot about the last 30, 40 years.
Over the last 30 or 40 years, the Democratic Party has shifted away from its kind of core labor-centric concerns that define the party during the 20th century.
More towards the service sector, the professional class, towards free trade agreements that put blue collar American workers directly into competition with much lower paid workers all across the world, but especially in Asia.
And simultaneously became more lax on immigration, again, to kind of place American workers in direct competition.
With a foreign workforce, with a pliable, undocumented workforce that could be paid less.
And, you know, as much as I'm concerned with what the Trump administration is doing in these very theatrical and draconian moves and putting people in this maximum security prison in El Salvador, which goes beyond deportation.
There's really no justification for this, no legal basis.
Putting people in prison.
And threatening deportation for criticizing Israel.
There's this whole other dynamic of it.
Like, look, actually, that's these alleged gang members, these Israel critics.
It's a couple people.
We have millions of people in this country who just came here looking to make a better living for their family, big corporations in America that are looking to pay people less.
And it doesn't seem like Trump is changing the fundamental dynamic around there, even though...
This was a big opening for him, right?
He could have gone out and prosecuted the big corporations for exploiting foreign labor.
He's actually giving big pardons to major corporations.
As much as J.D. Vance talked last year about changing the dynamic around the status quo of American policymakers giving deference to multinational corporations, it looks like multinational corporations are just fine in this administration.
There's been no change.
No prosecutions.
If anything, they're settling all these old investigations around fraud, corruption at the DOJ and the affiliated financial regulatory agencies.
It's basically business as usual, plus kind of the ugly side of populism of just kind of humiliating and harming people who seem the most vulnerable.
Yeah, I mean, the irony is that on the deportation front, I believe that the reason why the Trump administration has been going after green card holders and asylum seekers, if you read the accounts of these people who have been rounded up,
they were generally people who were...
Complying with the law, who had hearings, who were, you know, this guy who just was released from custody in Vermont, who was rounded up for criticizing Israel, was on his way to a citizenship interview when he was arrested by ICE agents.
So these are people who are playing by the rules, and they were snatched up because they're easy to, because they're people who...
You know, you don't need they're not living in the shadows there.
You just at their next appointment, you just arrest them when they get to the immigration office.
And so these are not the people who Trump promised to be getting.
I mean, these were not the people who are a priority for American voters, in my opinion.
These are people who are who were supposed to be at the end of the list in terms of deportations.
Then in the meantime, around the tariff stuff, you know.
In terms of populism, it's like he's put up all these tariffs in order to reshore jobs, and that was sort of a stop to his working-class populist bona fides.
That's something that I was optimistic about.
I mean, I favored that agenda, at least in terms of its broader vision at the time when he was running.
But now he's made all these exemptions.
He's made exemptions for...
For iPhones, maybe exemptions for electronics made in China.
He's made exemptions now for auto car parts.
So it's like the companies that...
Can actually afford, if they were forced to, to reshore jobs, are exactly the companies that he's exempting from the tariffs.
And meanwhile, all these, like, just small business people who are, like, importing Christmas trees, you know, to sell in LA are being screwed by these tariffs and are looking at consulting with bankruptcy attorneys because...
These people can't afford to move factories into the United States to create what they're buying from China.
So it just feels like the exact inverse of what was promised.
Little, just middle class, small business people getting screwed.
Big corporations getting a break.
Yeah, it's the inverse of what was promised.
And it almost feels like a conspiracy against populism, right?
If you couldn't make a movie script that is a better caricature of a...
Vulgar populace that promises, you know, American jobs and the golden era for American reshoring of factories and industry, and then delivers on something that is just totally different.
And look, like, again, I just want to want to state that, like, I'm open to tariffs.
I think tariffs are an important tool in the tool set for bringing American jobs and important industries back to the States and for protecting kind of vital national security interests as well.
But it's like you couldn't have implemented it in a worse way.
First, the kind of Liberation Day, the announcement was an attack on close American allies and based on a formula that didn't make any sense at all.
It was based on the trade deficit, not even on bringing back jobs.
And then they said that, look, it didn't matter because we would replace our income tax with tariff revenue.
It's like you can't have both.
Both massive tariff revenue and American jobs that are reshored.
You've got to pick one.
Like, logically, it doesn't make sense.
And when they were called on that, then you have the Treasury Secretary saying, well, look, that's actually not the goal.
The goal here is to crash the stock market and then get a lower interest rate on American Treasuries as global investors kind of look for safe haven investments in long-term Treasury notes.
Well, that didn't happen either.
Global investors started fleeing American treasury bonds.
The interest rate went up, potentially making interest payments more expensive, increasing the chances of a recession, increasing inflation.
And then, as you mentioned, now it's like, okay, they put a 90-day pause on all these nonsensical tariffs, and they say, okay, we're going to have a global American-led trade alliance against China.
Well, guess what?
Each of these countries that you just basically attacked with these Liberation Day tariffs, they don't want to enter deals with America.
They don't want to work with America to box in China.
Trump's delivered zero deals.
And meanwhile, if anything, China seems emboldened and much stronger because at least they have steady leadership and they're not alienating potential allies.
We're seeing no major announcements really on reshoring American jobs.
I mean, who would make the investments for hundreds of millions of dollars in the very expensive machinery and facilities and land for rebuilding factories if you believe that Trump will just change on a dime and reverse his policies with a true social tweet any random day?
Or what's more expensive as a major industry?
Would you rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new factory or spend a few million dollars on a campaign donation or buying access to administration for a tariff exemption?
It's much cheaper and more efficient just to lobby.
It seems like the red carpet is rolled out for industries to buy exemptions to these tariffs.
So it's just a complete mess.
And I think for any kind of American populace moving forward that wants to argue for tariffs...
Their credibility is shocked because who would want to be associated with this mess?
Yeah.
There was a really interesting interview in New York Times Daily podcast with a small business owner who just shows these unintended consequences because she can't afford, as a small business owner who produces some kind of baby product,
she can't afford to build a factory in the United States and also keep her prices competitive.
She's now looking at building her – she has no choice but to look for a consumer market abroad.
So now she's kind of retooling her strategy to not even sell to Americans anymore so that she can get around the tariffs, which is just completely not what anybody voted for in terms of making America great again or putting America first.
The question I have for this whole first 100 days around the tariffs specifically but around really everything is, Do you think that this stuff is by design, or do you think that it's incompetence?
It's hard to tell the difference.
For example, with the deportation stuff, it seems like a lot of mistakes were made, but it also seems as if there is a conscious political design to try to test the limits of executive authority, to try to dare the courts to intervene,
essentially.
And it's almost as if they're...
Choosing these legally sketchy targets in order to assert their ability to be able to deport anybody short of and up to that point.
And so it feels like it's almost by design.
Whereas with the tariffs, it feels like it's just completely ad hoc.
Completely improvised.
So I don't know, but it would make sense that it would be consistent across all these things.
Is this a well-run administration with authoritarian aspirations?
Or is this more like what we saw in 2016 with just a lot of improvisation, a lot of mistakes, a lot of recklessness?
Yeah, I don't have an answer to that, but I do think there's a distinct difference between The first administration, where it was much more in the camp of lots of mistakes, lots of big personalities who eventually had a falling out or had their own agenda.
I guess in Trump's defense, you know, a lot of people he brought into his first administration didn't share his vision.
So you had this crazy level of mismanagement.
But here it does seem, as you are kind of pointing out, that there is this coherent strategy to test the limits.
of constitutional confines, of due process, of what the courts will say no to, what the public will accept in terms of unitary executive power.
toilet in terms of public opinion polls on almost every issue except for immigration.
Biden, I should point out, let in a historic amount of people
Of undocumented, of illegal immigrants.
And, you know, this problem has festered as, you know, we had very rapid wage growth in the first years of the pandemic.
And then for blue collar workers, wages stagnated.
Inflation has been a huge problem.
The cost of living has exploded.
Housing prices have exploded.
And for better or worse, people see a shrinking pot and they tend to, for...
Both good reasons and bad kind of blame folks who are coming outside their community and are perceived as taking those resources.
And Trump has a mandate to do something about immigration, but he's doing it in such a way that does seem like he's not seeking to cut off the magnet for new migration, you know, which again, he could prosecute the big employers,
home building, restaurants.
Landscaping, slaughterhouses.
There are so many industries that rely on illegal labor, that exploit illegal labor, that pay low market rates, that undermine American wages, exploiting American labor.
And there are many statutes.
You can go to jail as an employer.
There are criminal statutes for knowingly employing an illegal alien.
These laws are almost never used, Democrat or Republican.
Almost no American executive ever goes to jail for doing so.
But this is something that is in the law that Trump could do.
He doesn't do that.
Instead, it's this weird kind of push and pull attempt to feel out what are the boundaries of what a president can do.
In terms of this immigration issue, sending people to a maximum security prison, a hairdresser, someone who might have tattoos that vaguely look like a gang, and instead of just a deportation, sending them to this jail and refusing.
a court order to facilitate the return of someone just refusing to do so and saying, hey, test me.
What are you going to do about this?
actually just seems like immigration is the Trojan horse to test
I think you're right.
There's actually a piece in the New York Times today about how Bukele was having sort of back-channel conversations with the administration asking for solid evidence that these guys really were a trenderagua, which means that Bukele actually cared more about due process than Trump did in this case,
which is a sad state of affairs for the United States.
The other kind of issue here is corruption.
You know, I've reported on Biden family schemes.
You know, it looks like there's money from interest groups hoping to buy connections to the Biden family going to several Biden family members, his brother, but most famously his son, Hunter Biden.
You know, I don't think it was a coincidence that Ukrainian oligarchs and Chinese interests and, you know, many other kind of foreign interests were funneling money.
Into Hunter Biden's private equity fund or putting him on the board of various companies, just because of Hunter Biden's expertise as a businessman, you know, it was pretty clearly an influence peddling scheme, but it all just seems very,
very small compared to the gargantuan corruption that's been rolled out from Trump.
Trump has said that conflict of interest rules don't apply to him, and he's acted on that.
The World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company that his family runs since January, this is according to the New York Times this week, has generated more than $100 million in transaction fees.
So regardless of how many coins they're cashing out on or any kind of other crypto...
Schemes around buying and trading coins.
There's basically a transaction tax for everyone buying these crypto coins, these Trump coins.
They're pocketing fees.
And now the administration is saying the top 220 holders of the Trump coin, they're going to have a private dinner with Trump.
They get a private White House tour.
They're literally selling access to the White House.
Using cryptocurrency, and it's Chinese buyers, it's people from the UAE and Israel, according to blockchain analysis of who's buying these things.
I can't think of a comparison in all of American history.
It's like the Lincoln bedroom with Bill Clinton, right?
It's worse, but it's...
Exponentially, because that was going to campaign dollars, which is unethical.
That's wrong.
But this is going into their pockets.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that concerns me at least as much if not more than what the administration is doing is the way in which the norms are changing to meet this level of lawlessness.
So, like, for example, with the deportations, I've just noticed, you know, when...
When liberals used to say that the only reason people were opposed to illegal immigration was because they were racist, I pushed back hard against that in years past because there's obviously very legitimate concerns about driving down working class wages.
But I don't know if you've noticed this, but I've noticed that...
You rarely hear about depression of U.S. wages anymore.
That doesn't seem to be the chief rationale for these deportations.
So first of all, you hear about crime and lawlessness, about people who are just, you know, these preying on American citizens.
And then you get past that and it's about this, well, if we just let people in, then we won't have a country anymore.
And it's much more existential and less materialistic.
And so that concerns me because I feel like...
Part of it is a rejection of multiculturalism, essentially, and that's where a lot of this nativism is coming from, which is not a premise that I used to have about the people who are opposed to this stuff.
And then the other things, I read an interesting piece in The New Yorker by Andrew Morantz about...
About this moment and whether it's authoritarian or not, where he goes to Hungary and he talks to people there about the transition to this illiberal democracy that reigns there.
And one of the things they said is that, you know, you think that there's going to be this moment where Trump defies the Supreme Court, tells him to go to hell, and then all of a sudden we don't have a democracy anymore.
That's not how it worked in Hungary.
And that's not how it worked in other cases of sort of post-democratic societies in recent years that have shifted to more authoritarian models.
It's more like we may never get that moment because the Trump administration may always have some flimsy excuse where they say, no, we're not defying the orders, actually.
This is completely in compliance with the Supreme Court's rulings.
And then it starts to just matter less and less that they're clearly misrepresenting the facts and that they're clearly defying the court and people just start to not mind.
And pretty soon it's like the pot...
Yeah, you know,
there's this bitter irony around...
Western ideas and Enlightenment thinking.
We heard from the far right and from conservatives over the last few years that Western ideas are under attack.
There's all this illiberalism coming from the left and to protect and defend the Western order, we had to elect conservatives, we had to beat back immigration, all these political demands.
Yet, in practice, what Trump appears to be enacting is actually almost like a third world ethno-narcissism that is completely divorced from the very ideas and principles of Western thinking,
of, you know, the scientific method, of due process, of that, you know, as a citizen, your rights come from the Constitution, not from your ethnic.
Or genetic background or your tribal background.
That's how much of the world is run.
You know, there are big parts of the Middle East and Africa and parts of Asia where ethnic tribalism and kind of top-down governance from leaders that is not democratic,
that does not have protections for free speech.
That's the norm, you know?
You see this kind of tribalism above.
A constitutional order.
That's the case for a lot of countries from Western Africa to Turkey and Lebanon and many other places.
That's not what's practiced in Western Europe or the United States traditionally.
You know, we have this kind of, I think, a more enlightened view of citizenship, of rule by law, of kind of divided powers and authority where different parts of government serve as checks on one another
and a process for enacting legislation and government policy.
Despite being elected on this promise to defend Western ideals, the government that was elected on this promise is getting us actually much more to a Turkey situation.
I wrote about something similar to that on my Substack recently.
Which is, you know, J.D. Vance's rhetoric about how his ancestors built this country with their bare hands.
You know, on one hand, it's just like political rhetoric, whatever.
On the other hand, he invokes it quite a bit.
And it's what I refer to as ancestral nationalism, which is sort of this idea that you're...
Patriotism and your belonging to the nation is somehow dependent upon your family lineage.
And this is just a fundamentally un-American, I would say anti-American sense of American-ness.
It goes back to feudal Europe.
This is what the original colonialists were trying to get away from, this obsession with bloodlines, this idea that your status is determined by the station of your birth and who your grandparents and great-grandparents were,
whether they were an aristocrat or a noble or a peasant.
And now it's like with this ancestral nationalism that's coming back into the right wing, It's as if they're trying to replace the binary that we have.
You're either a citizen or you're not a citizen.
You know, you can get into legal niceties around permanent green card holders, but fundamentally there's this divide.
If you become a citizen, you are as American as anybody else.
If you're not a citizen, you're not American.
It's a very clear, bright line into something that's more like there's a spectrum of citizen-ness and somebody can be more of a citizen, can be more American than somebody else.
So somebody who's a second-generation immigrant whose parents came from Yemen or whatever, they might be technically a citizen, but they're not.
As American as somebody who grew up in rural Ohio, whose parents were in the Appalachians in the 18th century, clearing the land with their bare hands or something, that person is more American,
somehow more deserving of respect and privilege than these other Americans.
And I feel like that's what's being introduced into our value system.
It's fundamentally at odds and is really just a rejection of the values that this country is founded on.
Yeah.
It seems kind of dark in the sense that the trajectory is bad.
I was pretty open to a lot of the Trump promises, especially on speech.
Doge had a lot of promise to just clear out a lot of the waste in government.
We've had this status quo problem across administrations where you have this contractor class of Booz Allen and others that glom onto every single major agency.
They suck out, you know, billions of dollars.
No one can kind of dislodge them.
You need this kind of cudgel of this, you know, maybe you do need these kind of crazy 23-year-olds to come clear out the mess because everyone else is too conflicted out.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
There are some glimmers of reform.
That's just not what we've gotten over the last couple of months.
And if anything, they're just so quick to weaponize online hysteria, you know, for lack of a better term, misinformation.
I mean, there's just so many exaggerations and lies from this administration just designed to kind of corral people to get on the agenda.
I don't know.
I mean, I...
I don't know where that leaves us, and I'm not sure if I even trust the Democratic Party or the left to stand up to this.
I mean, I don't know if you saw that just yesterday, there's this demand to redo the DNC election because David Hogg, the vice chair, who's a white male, somehow violated some of the DEI guidelines around having a gender preference for Democratic leadership.
It's like, You know, that's our opposition.
Yeah, and Chuck Schumer is writing sternly written letters, and Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries are on the Capitol steps, like doing sing-alongs.
Like, this is the resistance to the Trump administration.
It's pathetic.
It's pretty awful.
All right, well, I think we have to leave it at that.
But good to see you, Leighton, and thanks for joining us on System Update.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
My guest is Laura Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a nonprofit that works to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians and to help forge a peaceful future for the region.
Laura, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Well, let's get into the news of today, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which was debated, proposed on a national level.
Around this time last year and actually failed in the Senate over free speech concerns was re-proposed this week and kind of discussed in committee.
Could you talk a little bit about the latest for this legislation and what are some of the concerns from a free speech perspective?
Sure.
So I should clarify, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act has been with us for a really long time, actually.
I think it was first proposed in 2016 or 2017, and it's been floating around ever since, and it's failed to pass over and over, largely because, as you said, free speech concerns.
This is legislation that in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, raising awareness of anti-Semitism, it's seeking to legislate.
The IRA definition, that's the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which is a definition that the main purpose of which is to conflate criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.
And that clearly, I think, for a lot of people is a violation of free speech.
So, you know, it's been floating around and it's never passed into law.
About this time last year, it passed the House.
The latest iteration of it.
And the passage in the House sort of opened the floodgates for a torrent of opposition to it.
And it was opposition from across the political spectrum.
Right.
So you had the regular sort of free speech people on the left and people who care about Israel, Palestine on the left.
And on the right, you had the crazies from the far right who basically said this is going to make it illegal to be anti-Semitic.
But you also had a lot of people in what would be considered sort of the center from Democrats, but also Republicans and Libertarians.
Who were complaining about the clear problem for free speech.
You had Republicans calling it a stealth DEI measure.
And it was really quite extraordinary.
I documented it.
I've got a compilation I posted on our website about this.
So what we saw was since then, we saw this narrative that was created.
By backers of the bill, which kind of ignored all of what I've just described in the middle and really framed this as you had Democrats who gave in to the far left that's anti-Semitic or likes anti-Semitism or wants to enable anti-Semitism.
And you had the far right who are, you know, the Jews killed Christ people and pretended that there was nothing else.
So where we are, we had it reintroduced this year.
It's in the Senate.
They marked it up today in the Senate Help Committee.
And, you know, it's a fascinating hearing.
I actually would strongly encourage people to go and watch the video of it, because what you saw in the HELP Committee was strong bipartisan on the Republican side, led by Rand Paul.
Opposition, principled opposition to this bill on free speech grounds.
And it was a pretty raucous circus of a hearing, which, by the way, didn't actually lead to any conclusion.
They were unable to complete action on the bill because I think at this point the chairman doesn't have the votes to move it as written.
I don't know what's going to happen to it, but, you know, Democrats were able to get some substantive amendments passed because Republicans joined them in those.
And, you know, it's not even it's not clear to me at all what's going to happen.
But this is super controversial legislation.
And it's coming in the context now of the Trump administration and Republicans seeking quite openly to use what I would call the false.
Fight against anti-Semitism or exploiting the concerns about anti-Semitism to launch a far-reaching offensive against free speech, particularly on campus.
And I think that is now better understood by people as what's going on.
So if you're in favor of that happening, then you really like this bill and you hope it passes.
And if you're opposed to that happening, whether it's on free speech grounds or something else, then you're going to oppose this bill.
And right now I think it may be stuck.
That's interesting.
You know, we've seen, and you've documented through your foundation and through some of your other work, that very similar legislation on the state level has rapidly passed with almost no scrutiny.
I mean, there have been some, you know, the state legislatures don't receive the same kind of attention on the national stage.
But even in these hearings from North Dakota to South Carolina and other states, we haven't seen much debate.
Or opposition, where there's kind of a mirror attempt at the same kind of legislation that was debated today.
And in some cases, it's actually much more draconian.
It's updating hate speech laws with the IHRA, which includes a redefinition of anti-Semitism to feature some criticism of the state of Israel, such as the claim that Israel is a racist endeavor.
You can make that claim about any other country in the world, including the United States, and that is not seen as an illegal form of discrimination.
But the IHRA redefines anti-Semitism as that form of speech and other forms of criticism of Israel as an illegal form of discrimination.
Redefining hate speech laws in some states can increase criminal penalties, even some mandatory minimums for hate speech.
Or violent acts related to hate crimes.
I want to talk to you a little bit about that because that's kind of where there's been some level of opposition to a national version of encoding the IHRA.
Rapidly on the local level, we're seeing these advances.
What's happening with the local IHRA laws?
Well, look, I mean, you've described it really well.
And again, if people want, I actually have a, I keep a compendium, a document that I update constantly of these laws, just trying to track what's going on.
And again, maybe you think this is great news and maybe you think it's bad news.
But the reality is there has been a quite deliberate campaign.
To pass laws, and either sometimes by executive order, sometimes proclamation, sometimes by legislation, sometimes a combination, to legislate this definition as the official definition for discrimination, hate crimes, across the whole of state government in some cases,
including where it becomes part of enhanced sentencing guidelines, like in Arizona, where they adopted the definition.
As part of a law that's about tracking hate crimes.
And then later on, they reference it in the enhanced sentencing guidelines, which is their hate crimes law.
So effectively, you know, you can if you are someone who's in a protest and you get arrested for a certain kind of violation in a protest and you have a shirt that says, you know, River to the Sea, you could plausibly face hate crime sentencing for that in a state like Arizona.
I think Iowa, it's all over the states now.
Look, what's going on in states is fascinating because what you really have here at a more of a micro level, we see people pay attention on the federal level because, you know, it gets a lot more news.
At the state level, what you have is a systematic process that goes back really over the past, you know, five or six years of legislating a free speech exception when it comes to anything related to Israel.
We saw this with the so-called anti-BDS laws, which in effect are actually anti-boycott laws.
And we know this.
These are laws that say, again, it has to be...
You have free speech, you can criticize Israel, but you have no right to have contracts with the states.
You have no right to get state tax funds for anything.
So we're going to make it a condition of contracts that you give up your right to free speech, your right to boycott.
And in Arkansas, that was the case that actually went to the Supreme Court.
You had the Eighth Circuit en banc.
There's this circuit that covers multiple states.
They ruled that from their perspective, and this is now the policy across these states, they ruled that boycotts are not protected free speech.
They effectively overturned what had been settled law by the Supreme Court during the Civil Rights era.
And it's not just boycotts of Israel or settlements.
They determined that boycotts are not a form of free speech, that free speech under the First Amendment applies to the expressive part.
You can call for boycotts, you can support boycotts, whatever, but the actual act of boycotting, they said, isn't expressive.
It's a commercial financial action, so therefore not protected.
So for the sake of creating a free speech exception for Israel, we now have a large circuit court in the United States which decided that...
No boycotts are protected speech.
And, you know, the IRA laws are sort of another brick in that wall where you have multiple states now that are using the IRA definition as a pretext to go after, you know, curriculum from kindergarten up to universities.
We have a, it's happening now in Texas, I think you wanted to talk about this, where you have the governor of Texas who is threatening sanctions against a city in Texas because they may adopt a non-binding resolution opposing their taxes going to Israel.
You know, you sort of create this edifice which says in the United States you can boycott anything, you can criticize anything as long as it doesn't touch Israel.
And I will say also the boycott laws are fascinating.
And Texas is another example.
This came up at one point for me when Texas came out very proudly saying that they were boycotting or they're cutting off contracts and investment with this, I think, a Scandinavian telecom firm some years back because they said this firm boycotts Israel.
And what it really was was a firm that was refusing, as a European company, refusing to work in settlements.
It had investments in Israel, but not in settlements.
But if you looked at this firm, this European firm's screens that they used to screen out things they didn't want to invest in, it included multiple American companies.
But Texas didn't care about that.
They cared that they were screening out some companies in the West Bank.
So basically what they were telling the world is, it's fine for you to boycott American companies, but you can't boycott Israeli companies in the West Bank, mind you, not even in Israel.
So you see this absolute bizarreness of what this means for Americans' free speech.
We are in the process of constructing a far-reaching exception to Americans' rights to free speech explicitly on Israel.
I find it just astounding.
I mean, just in the last 10 years, we've observed a series of officials from government.
from governors, from senators, from other political leaders, and of course, just cultural, you know, political movements that have called for political pressure in the form of boycotts.
And there has been no state action, you know, sanctioning them, threatening penalties or, you know, creating statutes that prevent that type of behavior.
California, you know, instructing its employees not to...
We've traveled to Indiana or North Carolina to, you know, boycott those states because of bathroom bill-related laws around LGBT issues.
We've seen NRA-related boycotts.
We've seen kind of efforts by big pension funds in blue states boycotting certain companies that engage in, you know, the selling of arms and guns.
Or in red states, the kind of attempts at blacklisting BlackRock and other asset...
It's really just across the board, whether it's, you know, sanctions on China, on Russia, or boycotts of other countries, or American states and American entities, there's no problem.
There's no sanctions, you know, there's nothing to do the equivalent.
I'm actually going to disagree with you, but it still relates to the Israel piece of it.
So I wrote a piece in 2016, I think, basically warning people that the anti-BDS legislation offered a generic template, which you could use to quash, to suppress free speech and activism around any issue you wanted from the right or the left.
And that happened.
We started seeing this in 2020 and 2021.
You basically had the template bills that were used against BDS.
It's been an evolving template.
Every time there's a court challenge to an anti-BDS law, they basically amend the law a tiny bit to make it harder to challenge, and that becomes the template.
But that template was repurposed to go after ESG, CRT.
You had at one point ALEC, the organization that writes these base bills that are then, you know, the model bills used across the country on the right.
They had a model bill, which basically was exactly the template for it was the anti-BDS legislation.
And they just basically had to fill in the blank, list all the different things you want.
And these have been used to go after or to try to punish and prevent contracts and prevent, particularly with banks and financial services companies, anyone who has any policy that discriminates against.
Guns and ammunition industry, the fossil fuel industry, the industrial farms.
You pick the whole set of issues and then they started throwing in trans issues, abortion.
So it becomes a kitchen sink thing.
But that template, I mean...
I've spoken for years about, you know, Palestine being this sort of political or policy laboratory where people develop, test, and perfect legislative tools and lawfare tools, which then can be used against anything.
And that's exactly what happened here.
This BDS language, this BDS legislation has become a template.
And it's like, well, and you had members in state legislatures, when they'd explain their law, they'd say, We base this on the Israel legislation, which was bipartisan and non-controversial.
So why wouldn't we do this?
So it's basically been a wedge.
These anti-BDS laws have created an opening for other groups seeking to suppress boycotts or other kind of commercial activity to apply it to their own kind of pet issue.
I think that's fascinating.
And I think that's actually something else I want to talk to you that opens up another area I want to talk to you about.
in terms of campus suppression of free speech.
Greg Abbott, who had been a big advocate for free speech on college campuses, who attended rallies and gave official proclamations supporting free speech on campuses, demanded police to crack down on student protests
and speakers in the aftermath of October 7th to suppress pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
As you mentioned, there's this...
Bizarre letter from Governor Abbott just yesterday threatening the little town of San Marcos for this non-binding resolution.
And now we're seeing just kind of this campus, this suppression of pro-Palestinian or criticism of Israel speech on elite college campuses across the country.
Even Harvard University, which has gained a lot of headlines and media attention for fighting the Trump administration on some of the demands around a list of issues, some of them around concerns around alleged anti-Semitism.
Although they're gaining all this notoriety and attention for fighting the Trump administration,
They're already basically doing what the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act attempts to do.
Which is encode this form of the speech code that prohibits certain forms of criticism of Israel.
It just seems like the Overton window has shifted so much in just the last few weeks.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know about the last few weeks.
It's certainly shifted massively over the past year and a half.
And I think it's really important to say at the outset, none of this has anything to do with Jewish safety.
I mean, I am all for, you know, fighting anti-Semitism, you know, calling out anti-Semitism.
That's not what any of this is about.
And if you don't believe me, go look at the latest article by Kenneth Stern, who wrote the IRA definition.
He's testified on the Hill.
Listen to what he has to say.
This isn't how you fight anti-Semitism, and this isn't how, clamping down on free speech, this isn't how you ensure Jewish safety.
The fact is that what we've seen in terms of the response to campus free speech, and it's not just Governor Abbott, it's people like, you know, I was...
Think about, like, Marsha Blackburn, the senator from Tennessee, who's one of the, like, fierce free speech warriors who has had multiple floor speeches and legislation.
And she really means, you know, free speech on the right, which she felt under Democratic administrations was being suppressed on campus.
But she has these very generic statements about the absolute inviolability of free speech rights, except when it comes to Israel.
And then they frame it as fighting anti-Semitism.
But what we've seen since October 7th, in terms of the response to student protest, and the framing that I've heard from students, which I think is entirely accurate, it's not how they're protesting, it's what they're protesting.
The response to this is different than we've seen on campus for any kind of protest in my lifetime.
And if you look at some of the steps that have been taken by campuses since the outset of these protests, we had, I forget which campus, one of the campuses, right from the start, we've had campuses banning all kinds of protests, which were always allowed in the past.
So they're banning all of them, not just on Israel.
In order to prevent people protesting Israel, we're going to prevent protest of anything in the normal way.
We had one campus where, I remember it was a specific story where the students had always had these little whiteboards on their doors so they could leave each other messages.
But because people were putting pro-Palestine messages on their doors, they took them down for everyone.
You can't have any messaging on your doors at all.
For fear, someone will write something that's pro-Palestinian, and then the university will be accused of anti-Semitism because some student feels that they are hurt.
Right?
That's that difference, as Ken Stern would talk about, between actual problems for your safety and your comfort.
You know, universities where people are supposed to actually have their comfort zone challenged by intellectual pursuits.
You're supposed to actually learn things.
And maybe you change your views.
Maybe you believe your original views more strongly, but you've had them challenged.
And all of this stuff around campus completely, we were talking about Jewish safety, it completely invisibilizes.
The Jewish students on campus who are a huge part of the protests, which is something that is utterly surreal as you have, you know, the people who purport to be the spokespeople for Jewish Americans effectively saying, if you are a Jewish student who is part of protests,
using your voice, your speech to stand out there and protest.
You are effectively not Jewish in our eyes.
Your safety as Jews in the protest is irrelevant, as we saw last year with the protests in UCLA, where you had counter-protests basically engage in an absolute violent riot against the protesters.
Or what we saw this week in New York, where we saw protesters, it wasn't on campus, you had protesters who were protesting a far-right-wing racist Israeli minister who was giving a speech at a location in New York.
And the counter-protesters, you know, beat and bloodied a woman who was wearing a keffiyeh, who turns out to be an Israeli-American Jew, right?
That is not something that I've seen anyone in this.
I think, you know, Jerry Nadler came out and said something.
In general, that's not getting any blowback.
The safety of Jewish people in that context is simply not relevant.
And all of this ignores the safety of Palestinians who have spent the past year and a half being accused of being anti-Semites for caring about their own people, accused of being supporters of terror for challenging Israel, being attacked violently in some cases.
We had a child killed in Chicago.
People have forgotten about that.
We had three students shot in Vermont, one of them permanently injured, permanently handicapped.
I mean, there's actual violence here.
Their safety is considered not relevant.
All that matters is anti-Semitism, which is reframed to mean almost exclusively having your deeply held support for Israel challenged or made uncomfortable by other people's
criticism of Israel.
It just seems like there is also a total imbalance, not just in the media coverage, as you mentioned, these violent attacks against protesters from pro-Israel groups or activists not receiving attention in the major media outlets
or from political leaders, but also just on Capitol Hill.
It's like, you know, there's a gigantic coalition of pro-Israel groups, some of them Jewish-American advocacy groups, some of them Christian Zionist organizations, evangelical churches, other organizations that have formed this
coalition that really has no equivalent.
There's no kind of--
Really organized opposition to them.
You have these kind of daily visits from lobbyists.
You have groups that are tied to the Israeli government.
You have AIPAC with a really unprecedented super PAC that intimidates lawmakers, anyone who's kind of critical of pro-Israel positions or of the Netanyahu government.
Israel is not monolithic.
There are many opposition groups within the Israeli government that are not represented in American.
It's really just the far right and the center right of Israel that receive a lot of support from these pro-Israel groups here in America.
And it just seems almost deafening that there isn't an organized opposition.
I find there's just this incredible disconnect because you look at the public opinion polls, people are very concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that 2 million people over...
Almost two months now have been shut off from medical supplies, from food and water.
They're concerned about the speech issues.
They're concerned about what they see.
But there isn't a group that represents these concerns in Washington in a very strong way.
You're in Washington.
You talk about these issues.
But could you talk a little bit about the imbalance in terms of the interest group lobbying and the pressure on lawmakers?
Yeah, I mean, look, this isn't new, right?
This is one of the basic facts about how Washington makes policy.
I mean, the loudest groups and the groups that have the best ground game, and that's a ground game both in terms of constituent engagement and funding, they're the ones who have the most impact.
That's always been the case.
I think I do want to really actually start, though, by...
Really doubling down on something you just said, which is all of this misses the fact that in the greater public, the American public, Republican and Democrat, there is a shifting of public opinion.
And, you know, that is something that I don't know at what point you see.
I don't know at what point you see politicians become more responsive to that.
I think some already are.
You get the masses on the Republican side.
You get the squad and even some of the more conservative or not squad adjacent Democrats who basically look at this and say, my base has moved.
My base is not happy about this.
And look, the base, when you've had a year and a half of live stream genocide.
And I know people get really, you know, spicy when you try to use the word genocide.
I feel, I don't know, for people who are going to be watching this, you know, if you haven't, if you have discomfort with how I speak about this, fine, ignore the word.
I would encourage you to spend some time looking at the videos on YouTube, on TikTok or whatever.
The videos posted by IDF soldiers.
If you don't trust the media, say, I don't trust that the mainstream media isn't trying to, like, make me think something.
Look at the videos posted for the past year and a half by IDF soldiers.
Less so now, because the Israeli government has really told them to stop doing it, because it's getting them in trouble.
It is live-streamed genocide.
And you can't gaslight everybody all the time for a year and a half.
That's one of the reasons opinion is moving.
And when you try to gaslight people, and on top of that, you try to not just tell them, don't believe your eyes, but you tell them, and we're going to impose laws on you and rules that say you can't have these beliefs.
And if you have these beliefs, you're actually an evil person or an anti-Semite.
I think you get blowback.
And that's a significant, there's a significant shift at the grassroots level.
In Washington, though, you have a, what I would really call just a poisonous confluence of two political trends that really otherwise have nothing in common or shouldn't have a lot in common.
And that's where you see, you know, the groups that are not normally, I mean, who are normally affiliated with maybe more progressive democratic thinking.
They're the ADL, the AJC, the groups that normally, I think, are very much at home in what is seen as the mainstream Jewish community, which is largely Democrat.
Who have, since October 7th, they were always very pro-Israel and centered defense of Israel in their agenda.
But since October 7th, you know, this is the be-all and end-all of what they do.
And they have gone in full force in this illiberal course of action, which says if we have to give up free speech, if we have to give up rights and liberties in order to protect Israel from pressure and criticism, so be it.
And they are making common cause and giving legitimacy to what we saw during the Biden administration, and now we're seeing on steroids in the Trump administration, which is the effort by the anti-woke right to shut down an entire category of what they think of as woke speech,
woke thinking.
And that's not just related to Israel.
if you watch the hearings that we had last year in the House, which were ostensibly about antisemitism on college campuses, those hearings weren't far afield from Israel-Palestine discussion.
They went to discussions of whether or not members, members of Congress asking an administrator from an Ivy
It got into LGBTQ and climate change and all the things that they hate, which they view as the evil, woke stuff.
But because they're using the fight against anti-Semitism ostensibly as their tool, you have this conflation, this confluence.
And together you have some very, very powerful action.
And a lot of it is, again, it's not about, none of this is about Jewish safety.
And I would argue if you look at what's actually happening now, particularly on the right in terms of actual growing antisemitism, in response to what they see as in the name of Israel, which a lot of people conflate now because the ADL has basically said it's antisemitic to conflate Israel and the Jewish people,
and it's also antisemitic to not conflate them.
But what you have is the growing conflation on the right.
So if we're going to basically be undermining Trump's, you know, liberal or capitalist agenda of, you know, MAGA agenda in order to protect Israel from criticism, because that's DEI, we're going to blame that.
You actually have, I would argue, an erosion of safety for Jewish people in this country, which is being created by all of these efforts around inoculating Israel from pressure.
I think that's right.
Well, Laurie, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
