NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
The NIH finally ends brutal taxpayer-funded experiments on beagles. White Coat Waste SVP of Advocacy and Public Policy Justin Goodman explains why these horrific experiments continued for so long and why they needed to be stopped. Then: Congress shuts down an extreme anti-boycott law meant to shield Israel. Reason assistant editor Matthew Petti unpacks the origins of the repressive law and the efforts to prevent its passage. ------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow Matthew Petti Follow Justin Goodman Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
And I know my accent in Spanish was extremely good when I said that.
Feel free to leave praise in the comments if you want, but I already know.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40...
For years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing, and in many cases, widely disliked.
Many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed.
He, of course, was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero-villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics.
But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of, an ample funder of, some of the most grotesque And cruelest and most pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs.
And when doing these experiments on dogs, which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who is...
Spent any time with beagles will tell you they have a particularly loving and docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them and then to harm them in labs without them losing that trust in humanities or their calm disposition.
Over the last decade, numerous animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coats Lab Group waged a well coordinated and very clever campaign.
To make this a bipartisan issue and to make the public aware not only of these gruesome experiments but also how much waste of government money they entailed for no even theoretical benefit, let alone any value for human sufferings from diseases.
It was like inflicting horrific cruelty, sustained cruelty on dogs for no real reason.
These groups scored today a major win.
When the National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr. announced, Dr. Bhattacharya did, that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles.
That was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later.
One of the most effective strategies of white coast waste has been to fuse the issue of cruelty to animals.
On the one hand, once associated more with liberalism, although not really now, Trump actually signed into law a first-ever law that makes it a federal offense to engage in cruelty to animals, but it's long been associated with the left, with the cause, they fused it with the cause of government Justin
Goodman, who is the senior vice president, Then one of the topics we have,
of course, covered most on our show since the last three months, since Trump's inauguration.
has been the multifaceted, relentless, and always increasingly extreme assault on free speech rights and academic freedom on our campuses and other core civil liberties Americans are supposed to enjoy, all in the name of protecting Israel.
For reasons that are very well known and well documented and have been tread over many times, politicians in both parties are generally extremely reluctant to express any public criticisms at all.
Of anything which Israel and its legion of loyalists in the US, called the Israel lobby, demands be enacted.
But at least some of that seems finally to be changing.
One of the most shockingly and blatantly pro-Israel censorship laws that had been making its way steadily through Congress and seemed on its way to possible passage.
It's not the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which we've talked about many times, that expands the definition of hate speech to include a whole array of common criticisms of Israel.
But instead, this law would actually create felony charges for up to 20 years in prison, punishable by 20 years in prison for anyone who participates in a boycott of Israel or even promotes information that helps a boycott of Israel.
If that boycott is advocated by some foreign institutions such as the UN or the EU.
And as I said, the bill criminalizes activities even to promote information that might help a boycott of Israel, such as what every journalist would have the right to do, publishing a list of companies that do business in Israel or substantial business with Israel.
Those are the activities.
Campaigns to boycott Israel, to not participate in buying Israeli products, to promote or talk about the boycott that the Congress was on the verge of criminalizing.
Not as a misdemeanor, but as a felony, a serious felony.
Now, there are some laws that are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed it.
And for me, this is one.
As it's true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, It had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties.
Reasons magazine Matthew Petty wrote an excellent article today, a real good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded, in his words, that it would, quote, arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date.
And when you're talking about the array of measures and laws and bills and executive orders that have been issued in the last decade for sure, but especially in the last three months with regard to punishing people who criticize our protest against Israel, that is quite a statement indeed, and he will be with us to talk about.
All of that in just a little bit.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at Right Coast Waste, the nonpartisan nonprofit organization I just got done heralding and explaining.
It exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous.
And pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically.
For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals.
I've long been an admirer of that group and of his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight.
Justin, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
It's an honor to be here.
Long-time listener, first-time caller.
Absolutely.
I can say the same to you.
All right.
So before we get into the specifics of what happened today, what this program was about, other programs that you've been working on, I want to talk a little bit about your organization because, you know, so many political advocacy groups, when they begin, when they get into their work, say, oh, we're going to try and make this so that it's not a right-wing issue.
It's not a left-wing issue.
It doesn't matter right or left.
You know, the cause is just and it should unite everybody.
Everyone says that.
Very few groups succeed in actually doing that.
And yet, as the reaction to your victory today demonstrates with huge numbers of people across the political spectrum in Washington, you know, MAGA people and traditional Republicans and centrists, a few liberals as well, celebrating this victory in all sorts of ways, what has your plan been?
In order to accomplish that, and why do you think you've succeeded where others have failed?
That's a great question.
I mean, White Coat was started over a decade ago by my friend, my boss, the founder of our group, Anthony Bellotti, who came out of Republican politics.
And actually, the way he got involved in this issue to begin with is he worked in a taxpayer-funded animal laboratory as a teenager.
He thought he wanted to go to medical school.
And he got an internship at a local hospital in New York City.
Didn't know what the job was going to be.
It turns out it was a lab that was torturing pigs in cardiac experiments.
And he quit after a few weeks.
He was just horrified by what he saw.
Went into politics and ended up working on a number of high-profile defund campaigns.
And connected the dots.
He was like, oh my god, I could be using the same strategies and tactics that the GOP is using to defund other programs they don't like to attack.
The U.S. government is the single largest funder of animal testing, not only in the country, in the world.
About $20 billion of our tax money is wasted each year on animal experiments.
So he had this idea for a new organization.
That brought the issue back to the center where it belongs.
Ending animal experimentation didn't begin as a liberal issue.
It was actually a very, very bipartisan issue.
It goes back 150 years in the United States, and it was always something that attracted people from all ends of the political and social spectrum.
But because of the nature of the organizations that ended up kind of commandeering it in the '70s and '80s and '90s, like PETA, it became a very far-left issue that people on the center and right Just did not identify with.
It was associated with organizations that wanted to ban and tax everything and that they saw as, you know, food police gun grabbers.
And as a result, issues that could get traction across the political spectrum, like animal testing, which is truly a nonpartisan issue, it was getting caught up in kind of the...
People's concerns about the broader animal rights agenda, and rightfully so.
Listen, we live in a very diverse country.
1% of the country is vegan.
Most people aren't.
So how do you meet everyone else where they're at?
And the idea was to unite folks, we like to say liberty lovers and animal lovers, so people who are concerned with animal welfare, people who are concerned with government waste, or folks who are concerned about both, and bring them together to make some actual change for animals and laboratories, because despite 50 years...
Of work by establishment groups, the number of animals and labs had gone up.
The amount of money that was being wasted by the government and labs had gone up.
So we saw an opportunity to really break in there and widen the tent, create a group that had no litmus test and a fanatically single-issue focus on just getting animals out of government labs.
So as an organization, our position is we don't want to ban animal testing.
Most of it's taxpayer-funded.
We'll cut the funding.
For the two-thirds of animal testing in this country that is paid for by taxpayers.
And then the challenge to them is let the private sector fund it.
And guess what?
They're not going to.
No private company or foundation in their right mind is going to pay to put puppies on treadmills and give them heart attacks until they...
You know, until they collapse.
I mean, the type of things that the government's funding has no return on investment for a company or public health, so no one's going to pay for it.
So that was our challenge.
And we were able to then unite people, small government folks who wanted to cut spending and also liked animals, with more traditional people on the left who wanted to get animals out of laboratories and bring them together and build this very robust bipartisan coalition of people in the Freedom Caucus, the squad, and everyone in between to fight against government-funded animal tests.
I want to talk about the specifics of this last-standing program that you helped pressure the government to close.
And specifically, we obviously have a new set of officials at HHS, including RFK Jr. and Dave Patatara at NIH.
But I just want to focus a little bit more on the kind of reason why this succeeded, because, you know, I've been around for a long time watching Washington and advocacy groups, and these kinds of wins really don't come easily.
And when they happen, they're often a byproduct of very well thought through and executed strategies.
But there's also— Some component of it that, for whatever reason, breaks through all the other issues and activist groups.
And I'm sort of interested in this one because, you know, just my own personal experience growing up, I absolutely loved dogs.
You know, I just had an affinity for them from the time I was very young.
You know, opened up things for me that I don't think, you know, that were difficult to open up that maybe would never would have had it been for dogs.
And I always knew I wanted to have like a gigantic space with tons of rescue dogs which I now have.
So they always played an important part of my life.
But what they also did was having this kind of love for dogs, this like appreciation for what it means to be a sentient being, this majesty that these animals possess.
It's kind of like became the gateway for me to then thinking about other animals.
I've been mediated my whole life.
I didn't care where the food was coming from.
It's all hidden, how it's made, so we don't think about it.
But most people don't need to do any work to think about what pigs are, what cows are, how sophisticated they are, whatever, because they know they're dogs.
So I'm wondering, do you think that was an important component of this, that this is not just like Animal testing generically, but specifically testing on dogs, which most people have in their lives, and a breed of dogs that in the most sadistic way was chosen because of how trusting and loving they are in beagles?
Yeah, absolutely.
And actually, we can trace back the victory that was announced yesterday, too, at the very beginning of our campaign in 2016, focused on dogs.
But I just want to say, that's part of how White Coat launched, and that's why we chose focusing on dogs when we first put out our campaigns in 2016, I felt like, we felt like as an organization that the big groups running the show at the time had kind of lost the plot.
That they were all in on anti-speciesism and a rat as a mouse as a dog.
And whether that's morally accurate or not, in real life that's not how things are.
We have a nation of dog lovers, two-thirds of this country has a dog or a cat in their household and considers them members of the family.
And to build an effective social movement, sure, part of it's, you know...
It's not idealistic thinking about what the world could be, but you also have to accept where it is and then find common ground with people to kind of build that future you want to see and not operate as if that's the way things are now.
So we accepted that this is a nation of dog lovers, a nation of cat lovers, people who love their pets.
So let's meet them where they're at and start there.
A lot of the other groups have moved on and assumed...
That somehow the dog and cat issue would just fix itself and they can just work on mice and rat issues because there's many more of them in laboratories.
And as a result, dogs and cats got left in the lurch and there was no one really advocating for them.
So when we launched in 2016, we made a tactical and strategic decision to start.
Let's bring the focus to dogs.
This is a way to bring people on the left or right center together, bring people across this country together for fighting for a common cause.
And we released a report called Spending to Death.
And this was in November of 2016.
It actually came out right after Trump was elected in the 2016 election.
And we put out this report focusing on what the federal government was doing to dogs in its own laboratory.
So to your point, the government...
Funds a lot of animal experimentation in colleges, universities, private companies, but also conducts a lot of animal experimentation in its own laboratories.
So we were focusing on what's the government doing in-house, thinking if we can make reforms there, then we can use that success to build a campaign to then apply those successes outwards towards these non-governmental targets like the colleges and universities that were getting government money.
So we released this report, and two of the projects that we focused on back in 2016 were, one, a program that was being...
It's been done in Fauci's own laboratory right outside of Washington, D.C., in Maryland, where they were covering beagle puppies and biting flies and then taking photographs of the lesions and wounds that the dogs are suffering from as a result.
And these were maximum pain experiments, meaning it caused pain and distress to these dogs and then completely withheld pain relief intentionally.
The other lab we focused on at the NIH was the lab that was just shut down, which was a septic shock laboratory.
And this one had gone on.
For 40 years, killed over 2100 puppies according to our calculations and documents we got through FOIA.
And what they were doing in that lab is that they would take bacteria that caused pneumonia, pump it into the puppy's lungs to make them sick, and then slice their arteries to cause them to bleed out and put them into septic shock.
Then do experiments on them and see how many of the dogs would survive over 92 hours.
A lot of them died and the ones who survived were killed.
And that went on for 40 years.
So we've been fighting that specific laboratory for the last nine years.
Freedom of Information Act investigations, lawsuits against the NIH for records, grassroots campaigns.
Over a million people wrote to Congress and the NIH asking for these tests to be cut.
Introducing legislation with members of Congress that targets this specific laboratory.
Writing letters to agencies, etc.
And we were able to trip down the NIH laboratories to this very last lab.
Congress was told a month ago that not only was there still one active protocol, but they were actually intending on reviewing it and possibly approving it.
So we were disappointed that this project was still going on under the Trump administration because President Trump To his credit, and he doesn't certainly get enough credit for this, and a lot of people don't know this, is that I would argue that the first Trump administration made more progress to end animal testing than any other administration in history.
If you look at USDA, we exposed the largest cat lab there.
Trump shut it down.
They shut down dog and cat testing at the VA.
They shut down nicotine tests on primates at the FDA and sent all of the primates to a sanctuary in Florida.
They retired cats from the USDA.
Some of them who live with our president now.
So there was a lot of great progress.
So we were disappointed.
And then Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, Laura Loomer and other folks started to jump in and say, Trump, what?
You know, why is this still going on?
You've been in office 100 days now.
You've got to clean up your own house before we start going after these other labs.
And lo and behold, Sunday, Jay Bhattacharya went on Fox& Friends and announced that they were shutting down this laboratory.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
I mean, victories like that, you know, after 90 days of the new administration in office, people often get excited with the new administration, the potential for it.
But this victory was so complete, so decisive.
You know, it was Jay Bhattacharya sent out to announce it, the head of the NIH.
I want to ask you a little bit more about sort of the effects of all of this, because I think a lot of, you know, one of the reasons why I became so interested in the suffering and telling dog experiments was I was doing a lot of reporting on the...
Indescribable evils, the moral evils and the spiritual rot that takes place in, I don't even like to call them farms, these industrialized warehouses where animals are kept and tortured and processed over the years.
And I say that because I think farming life for all of its potential criticism, including that you kill an animal at the end to turn it into food.
This is a big tradition, but they treat their animals well.
They keep them outside in natural habitats.
They feed them.
They treat them well until it's time to go to the slaughterhouse, and that's the exact opposite of factory farms.
I remember just kind of getting into this vista into animal experimentation when I did some reporting on these programs that are for beagles.
And I think it's important for people to know when they experiment on beagles.
They're not buying them.
Maybe sometimes they buy them, but oftentimes they're not buying them.
They're not finding them on the street.
They're not getting them from rescue shelters.
A lot of these programs entail the government breeding beagles.
So they're born in these labs.
Their only reason for creating this life and bringing them into existence is to immediately subject them to some of the most horrific experimentation that Personally, I have trouble even when I'm reporting on it, reading about and we're seeing about it or hearing about it.
That's how sickening it is.
And I think one of the things that we've learned about industrialized animal farms is that a lot of the people who work there end up Being psychologically traumatized because you have to see this cruelty and inflict this cruelty every day.
And, you know, you watch a video where some dog gets kicked by somebody gratuitously and if it goes on the internet it viralizes and everybody's so enraged.
How can you be, you know, how can anyone do that?
And yet these people are doing that every day.
Do you think there's—and sometimes I really do wonder, like, hey, how is it that these people get themselves to do that?
Like, what do they do to justify it in their head?
So I think there's often an assumption that, well, there must be some medical value, medical necessity, where they can tell themselves, yeah, we wish we didn't have to do this, but at the end of the day, we ought to be prioritizing humans.
And these kinds of horrific experiments, as torturous as they are— Are what ends up saving lives.
In other words, there's a medical necessity to them.
Is that true?
No, absolutely not.
And you have these agencies that are the top funders of animal experimentation, like the NIH, which is, again, the single largest funder of animal experimentation in the world, constantly lamenting the fact.
And finally, we have someone in the Trump administration, like Jay Bhattacharya, acknowledging this publicly and very broadly, that animal experimentation is incredibly wasteful.
There's a horrible return on investment for taxpayers and obviously an incredible amount of suffering for animals for nothing.
For no reason.
The only people who benefit from animal experimentation are the ones lining their pockets and personally conducting it.
It's big business.
Colleges and universities are raking in billions of dollars.
College professors have built careers torturing dogs and other animals.
And then you look at all the other kind of ancillary businesses that you're speaking about, like the puppy mills.
There are puppy mills across this country.
That are subsidized with tax dollars specifically to breed beagles to be tortured and killed in experiments.
Not only that, there's small-scale puppy mills at colleges and universities across the country where they intentionally breed beagles, scotty dogs, Irish setters, other animals to suffer from deadly diseases from birth to be...
Physically deformed, to be blind, to suffer from hemophilia where most of the babies are bleeding out because they get a small injury that can't heal.
This is all stuff that's being funded with taxpayer dollars.
So it's a big business and people become invested in that from earlier in their career and there's no incentive to innovate.
Because the second you solve a problem, your grant gets cut off.
So what do you do?
You just keep tinkering away forever and ever at the expense of taxpayers, at the expense of animals.
You get your name on a plaque at your college university, you get promoted, you publish papers, and you're heralded as a hero.
There's a guy at the USDA who ran the largest cat lab, the one we exposed.
They were flying to the wet markets in China, buying dog and cat meat, flying it back to the USDA, breeding kittens, and then force-feeding the kittens, this cat.
And that's why the best solution...
If you're talking about shutting down the labs, putting animal experimenters out of a job, shutting down these puppy mills, it's cutting the money, because they're all subsidized by taxpayers, and they couldn't possibly exist.
And whether you're center, right, or left on the political spectrum, this is just the practical reality of this business, of this $20 billion-plus-a-year business, is that it's propped up by taxpayers, and if you remove those subsidies, it's going to collapse.
You know, when I first started looking at the question, because I was very open-minded when I started thinking about animal experimentation, I think there's always been an assumption that there must be some value to it.
Even those very controversial ones where rabbits were blinded by cosmetics or perfumes, as horrific as that seemed to subject an animal to that level of suffering, people thought, well, it's what keeps, you know, Makeup or shampoo or perfume safe, and therefore, you know, we want to prioritize humans.
And I assume there was some component to that at least with some of these things.
And the more I look at it, you know what reminded me a lot of in academia, everybody...
In every school around the country and in the world is pressured and required to publish some sort of whatever in a journal in order to get an academic job.
The problem is it's not easy to find things that haven't already been written about in a thousand times.
That's just what academics are constantly doing.
And so you can find these papers that are basically the same as things that have been written previously.
Very slightly change the date or the place where they're going in a way that adds nothing of value, but at least they can say that it's new and therefore get published.
When the COVID pandemic happened, and as we know, we had all these epidemiologists telling Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, look, this seems a lot like...
It was manipulated by scientists that it probably leaked from the Wuhan lab and within a week he had every single one of them signing onto a Lancet letter saying we know for sure it came from an animal to human leap and not because and that is basically racist misinformation to suggest it came from the Wuhan lab.
I remember wondering like Why would these established leading scientists be willing to jump on board with that?
And of course, the answer is because between Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, they basically control all government, all funding.
If you want to be in a research lab, if you want to do medical research, those are the only ones who can basically fund it.
And then the more I looked at this question of medical necessity, I was finding exactly what you were describing.
You know, they would like take dogs at three months and subject them to some horrific disease for a year.
And then the next time they would take dogs at five months and subject them to the disease for 10 months.
And they would keep getting grants every time they just tinkered with it and modified it slightly with no conceivable medical necessity to all these other studies.
What is in the culture that permits that sort of thing to keep happening?
Well, I think people like Anthony Fauci are part of the problem.
There is a culture of waste, fraud, and abuse and corruption at the NIH.
The Wuhan lab is a great example of that.
You know, we were the first group to expose Fauci's funding for the Wuhan lab in April 2020.
To your point, we were called racist conspiracy theorists and loonies.
And then fast forward now, Joe Biden's intelligence agencies now believe that the lab leak caused COVID.
And those, let's just remember, those experiments going on in Wuhan...
And this is the reason why we got involved in investigating it, were animal experiments.
They were going into the wild, capturing bats very far away, thousands of miles away from Wuhan, bringing them back to the laboratory, harvesting viruses from them, and then injecting those viruses into humanized mice, who were genetically engineered mice, and supercharging those naturally occurring coronaviruses to be extra dangerous to humans intentionally.
There is literally no medical necessity or justification for that.
That is bioweapons development.
There would be absolutely no other reason to take a naturally occurring virus and soup it up in a laboratory in animal experiments to make it more deadly to people.
The chances of a virus, the same virus actually breaking out in nature that you created in a laboratory, the chances are astronomically small that you would create the same virus that nature is going to create.
So instead, you end up with a...
Human-made virus that could leak out and kill millions of people, and that's exactly what happened.
Again, no medical necessity, no medical benefit, but you have lunatics running this agency who think that's actually a good use of our money.
And that's why it's great that people like Fauci and Francis Collins are gone.
However, Fauci's been gone since December 2022.
His legacy is still alive and well at the NIH.
One of his deputies just got appointed to be the new head of his division, a gain-of-function lunatic.
Who at once ordered somebody to dig up a dead body to get the 1918 flu from them, from this corpse, to then supercharge and again a function experiment.
This guy just got appointed the head of Fauci's old division.
And we have lots of experiments that Fauci funded that have been renewed since Trump came into office.
So we are thrilled that we wiped out the last dog lab inside the NIH.
But there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse to clean up across this country that Fauci personally signed off.
That's why we've been big fans of the slash-and-burn approach at the NIH.
They just got-- the White House just proposed a 40% budget cut for them, which is absolutely warranted after what happened in Wuhan and the cover-up that the government orchestrated.
And then, of course, there was the government orchestrated the cover-up that you helped expose of Fauci's beagle tests, where we had a long list of receipts, like a CVS receipt.
You know, from floor to ceiling showing all of this evidence that Fauci had funded these sandfly experiments on beagles in Tunisia.
And the Washington Post was fed misinformation by the NIH saying it was fake news.
They ran a cover story saying fake beagle research claims when there was evidence the whole time that it was absolutely true.
And they only made a culprit last year.
So, you know, you have these liars and losers and lunatics running the government who have no concern for public health.
Don't care at all about animals, only care about their careers and progressing, keeping their jobs and amassing power.
And that's how you end up in a situation like this.
So good riddance to Fauci, good riddance to Collins, and we're cautiously optimistic that Jay Bhattacharya is going to do more good at the NIH.
I'll ask a question for you, maybe a second one, but I don't think so, but I'll ask one, which is, you know, you raised the issue of gain-of-function research in Wuhan and how they were deliberately Taking these viruses and essentially making them more dangerous, weaponizing them, basically.
And you said the only conceivable purpose of this is to develop biological agents, biological weapons.
I remember very well, because I was covering it a lot at the time, actually after the anthrax attacks, which for a long time we were told came from Iraq.
And what we were told was these are not just anthrax strains.
These are the most sophisticated weaponized strains you can possibly even think of creating like you would only create them for evil because they're so deadly.
Like, why would someone else create them except as a biological weapon?
And, of course, at the end of the day, it turns out that all of that came from the U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick from an Army researcher who had been working on these strains who had created them himself and sent them out.
Presumably because if you believe the FBI's story, he wanted to scare people into wanting more funding for ant facts research.
And when that issue came up, like, hey, wait a minute, why is the U.S. Army purposely making Anthrax, more sophisticated, so deadly, weaponizable, you're not supposed to be creating biological weapons.
And their answer was, no, no, we're just creating biological weapons so that we can then study what we can do as an antidote in case other countries, or it just occurs in nature, do it also.
So this kind of subterfuge has been going on for a long time.
But I wanted to ask you this.
Whole issue of the kind of shift in public sentiment, which, you know, you're going to be too humble to say, but I think you guys have played really the leading role, is how I would put it.
Maybe there are a couple others who have been, but certainly you've been at the center of this, and it's a great success.
I want to congratulate everybody there.
But now that, you know, you have this victory, and this is the last dog experimentation lab standing that's government-funded, One of your big successes was that- Experiment that you made that you publicized where the dogs were put in with those mosquito nets and those horrific flies consuming their head and they couldn't escape just for no reason whatsoever.
Just kind of, hey, let's see what happened.
And that's what led the Washington Post to smear your organization as some crypto-right fascist kind of group that disguises itself as bipartisan when you couldn't have been further from that.
But what are your kind of next steps?
Like, what are your agenda items now that- You have such a conclusive and decisive victory with this one.
So we've wiped out the dog experimentation and cat experimentation inside the government laboratories, but they're still funding.
Hundreds of projects at colleges and universities and private labs across the country.
The NIH, DOD and others are still footing the bill for cat and dog experimentation across this country and actually in foreign countries.
There is currently an NIH and DOD contract to a lab in China that is torturing 300 beagles a week in experimental drug tests at US taxpayer expense.
Kind of tying this up in a bow, bringing it back to what you were saying at the beginning, the justification for using dogs in this contract is, these are quotes, they are cute.
They are docile and they're easy to domesticate.
So we want to wipe out every single taxpayer-funded dog and cat lab in this country.
We want to defund labs in China.
Despite what happened in Wuhan, there's still 20 animal laboratories in China that are eligible for NIH funding for animal experimentation specifically.
So hoping to defund that soon.
And our maybe boldest proposal is abolishing NIAID, Anthony Fauci's former division of the NIH.
There's just so...
Much rot in there.
It's beyond repair.
And we're working with Rand Paul, Chip Roy, and other members of Congress who have proposed legislation to abolish NIAID and reconstitute it as something with more oversight, more accountability, so we don't end up with another Beaglegate or Wuhan laboratory disaster on our hands again.
Yeah, I think Anthony Fauci is very lucky to have secured that last-minute pardon, and not because he was going to be the victim of political persecution, but because he's exactly the kind of person who, in a fair justice system, needed a pardon.
All right, well, let me just say, once again, I really am an admirer of your work.
I think you guys are incredibly effective.
Please send congratulations to everybody there for this amazing victory.
It's great to have you on the show.
We really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for your years of support, Glenn.
Very grateful.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Have a good evening.
All right, come closer.
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Viewers of this program understand, of course, that one of the things that we have most focused on since President Trump's inauguration, and really before because a lot of it was foreseeable, is the onslaught of attacks that are coming from Washington on the core civil liberty rights of Americans, including Free speech and the right to petition the government and academic freedom.
Seeming every day the Trump administration or the Congress or various officials issue some new order, some new measure, some new law, some new resolution, some new executive order that seems to have as its only goal.
And sometimes you think that this is what American politicians do more than anything else is to protect the people of Israel and the government of Israel.
But apparently by Forcing Americans to give up many of their rights, many of our most important defining rights.
And we've seen that over and over in so many of the laws that we've talked about, including the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.
There's a new law, though, that had not been getting much attention until today when an excellent reporter, Matthew Petty, who is an assistant editor at Reason, Wrote about them.
He joins us tonight for that article, which is entitled Should Sharing Information About Israeli Businesses Get You 20 Years in Prison?
Sort of a headline that answers itself.
He has previously reported for the BBC, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, New Lines Magazine, Responsible Statecraft, Middle East, The National Interest, and many others.
He covers his national security policy in his interactions with American society and domestic politics, and we'll forgive him for having worked with The Intercept because of how good this article today was.
All right, Matthew, great to see you.
Thanks so much for coming on to talk to us.
Oh, thank you for having me.
I've been a huge fan ever since, you know, the Snowden leaks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Let me ask you, it makes me feel a little old, but I nonetheless appreciate it.
Let me ask you, you know, as I said, we've been covering a seemingly, you know, relentless onslaught of these kinds of measures.
And honestly, even somebody who's been around for a while, I kind of can't believe just from like a PR or perception perspective.
That they're just willing, like, almost seemingly every day to unveil some policy or measure that has no real effect on the lives of American people and is really explicitly about Israel.
And some of them have been quite radical, quite extremists.
We've all talked about them.
And so one of the things that caught my attention in what you said is that this arguably might be the most Kind of extreme or dangerous type of law of this kind.
I think we're talking about regulating boycott, but free speech more broadly.
We haven't actually covered this.
It kind of fell under the radar, but it was seemingly making its way through Congress, so I'm glad you did.
Tell us about the specific background and development of this law and what specifically in it makes it so menacing.
Sure.
So the U.S. has actually had anti-boycott.
Regulations on the books since the 70s, because the Carter administration, ironically enough, given where Jimmy Carter is today, or where he was on his politics before he passed, passed basically regulations meant to prevent American businesses from complying with...
Foreign sanctions against a friendly country.
And it was explicitly in response to the Arab League embargo against Israel.
So if you're an American company doing business abroad and the government asks you to sign a paper that says, "I will boycott this third country," then you are supposed to report that to the US government and refuse to sign.
Which is already, I think, kind of a heavy-handed measure, but this is...
You know, a foreign policy measure that Europe has something similar.
Ironically enough, European countries are supposed to defy U.S. sanctions on Cuba, for example.
Can I just interject there to clarify just one thing about that?
So in other words, in that case, in the 1977 prohibition on these kinds of boycotts, it wasn't enough if you say, hey, I'm going to boycott country X. It wasn't enough to criminalize it just because, say, some Middle East country also supported boycott acts.
The idea here was is that what we want to avoid specifically— Is Americans complying with coerced or required boycotts?
Like, if you want to do business in Saudi Arabia, they're like, yeah, you can do business here.
You just have to agree to submit to and comply with this boycott that we want to impose on an ally of the United States that the government itself doesn't support, right?
It wasn't like someone in their own discretion or judgment joining a boycott.
It was one they were forced to by some foreign government.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And you're also not supposed to snitch on business competitors to foreign governments.
And in the 2010s, you have the rise of the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement, the BDS movement, in which Palestinians were calling for foreigners to personally boycott Israeli businesses that are seen as complicit with Israeli military rule in Palestine.
Then the U.N. in 2016 said it was actually going to come out.
The U.N. didn't explicitly endorse a boycott, but it said it was going to come out with a list of businesses that were complicit in human rights violations against Palestinians.
And then you see this mobilization by the government of Israel and its foreign supporters to adopt the anti-boycott measures from the 70s to something that could be used against personal political boycotts.
Non-governmental boycotts.
And in 2018, they changed it from just a trade violation to a criminal violation to either boycott or furnish information or refuse to report a boycott request.
And this latest bill would have broadened it from foreign governments to any kind of international organization like the UN or the EU, which then could arguably be used to say, well, as you said, it's not just...
The government of Saudi Arabia is saying, sign this paper.
This is like the UN saying, these businesses are violating human rights.
And then if the business changes its behavior, the US government can come after them and say, you are criminally liable for an unauthorized boycott.
So that's what I want to actually get clarification on as well, because that's an important distinction.
Aside from the 1977 law that was sort of enacted to say to Americans, we don't want you by complying with these Middle East countries who are forcing you to boycott Israel, as well as other cases as well, but that was the kind of nature of it.
There was this precursor to the one now that you mentioned that came in 2018 under the first Trump administration that Congress passed that was a little bit similar in that it said, we don't want you engaging in boycotts of countries we like.
If there's some international body like the UN or the EU that also is supporting the boycott, and this was basically for companies, right?
So if you're doing business in the EU or the UN, we don't want you then complying with these boycotts from these other International institutions.
So what are the primary changes between that 2018 law?
And feel free to talk about the problem with that one if you want, but this much more extreme version that, until it got a lot of attention, including from some MAGA people who raised their voices in opposition, seemed to be headed toward passage.
Well, the 2018 law actually did not—so in 2018, they attempted to pass this law that they're currently trying to pass, which— Brought international organizations into it.
All they successfully did in 2018 was add a criminal penalty to the existing anti-boycott statute.
So if you sign that piece of paper that Saudi Arabia, for example, is demanding you sign, not only can your business be fined, but you also can be sent to jail.
And again, the violations are not just if you sign the piece of paper.
It's also if you furnish information on other people doing business with Israel.
Or if you refuse to report this demand to the US government.
Now, this law that was about to be voted on and sort of got frozen, that was going to add the UN and EU boycotts.
And they've been trying to do this for a while.
There was an Israeli government strategy memo that they had commissioned some American consultants to write.
In 2016, when the UN first came out with its blacklist, and the Israeli government consultants said internally, okay, the way we're going to fight this is by getting American laws changed so that the anti-boycott statute can apply to the UN.
But every time they've tried to do that in Congress, the bill has died, because I think a lot of members just...
We don't want to have to publicly take a stance on that issue, so the leadership sort of kills it.
What's different now is that it's not Democratic leadership killing it.
It's Republicans doing that.
Well, there's this part about the law, and I'm not sure you were talking about this part when you were saying snitching on businesses or telling people about these companies, but one of the parts of the law that I think is already in the 2018 law,
but correct me if I'm wrong, but it's definitely in the 2025 one, Is that it's not just that you're criminally barred under this pending bill if you participate in a boycott that the EU or the UN or some international group also participates in, but that you're not even allowed to.
And when I say you're not allowed to, it could be a crime, publish information that would help other people boycott.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about.
I'm a journalist.
A lot of people don't know if I'm boycotting Israel, and there's been zillions of boycotts.
It's not like Israel is the first company to be boycotting.
In fact, there were very powerful boycotts in the last six years against North Carolina and Indiana for their bathroom bill.
Against Georgia for their voting rights bill.
I mean, obviously the big boycott movement, which the Israelis fear most, was the 1980s anti-apartheid activism that also started on college campuses.
But the idea here is like, okay, you want to, you know, divest from Israeli companies until they— Create a Palestinian state or get out of the West Bank or you want to, you know, avoid Israeli institutions or companies that do business.
Obviously, you have to know, like, what those companies are.
Most people don't know them.
And then you go to, like, a site that is an official boycott site or maybe reporters report on that.
It seems like this law, if it becomes enacted, would actually criminalize, even if you're not participating in the boycott of Israel, if you're publishing information that encourages or enables others to do so.
So I don't know specifically whether they'd be able to enforce it against journalists, but it certainly would criminalize providing information to be used in the UN blacklist.
That's really what this law was aimed at.
It's at the UN list.
And again, this UN list is not like, oh, the government of some country is monitoring America to see who does business in Israel.
It's so that they can, you know, snatch them up.
It's publishing, you know, publicly available information about what, what Foreign companies are doing in the West Bank with Israeli settlements.
Again, this law is an earlier version of it, specifically mentioned the UN blacklist.
This 2025 version of the bill does not, but it's the exact same law.
And the Israeli government strategy memo said, this is what we're trying to do.
We're trying to make it so that you cannot basically contribute to this list that's going around.
Yeah, by providing basically accurate factual information about what these companies are doing in the West Bank.
That's another aspect of this I wanted to bring up is, you know, they're not just trying to prevent boycotts of Israel, the country as a whole.
They're trying to prevent specific targeted boycotts at Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories.
And I think the big example of this was Ben& Jerry's, the ice cream company, said in, I think, 2021, they said, You know, we are going to continue doing business in Israel.
We have a factory there.
We're going to sell to Israeli supermarkets, but we're not going to let our distributors sell to Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories because that we disagree with.
And a lot of states, because a lot of states already have their own anti-boycott statutes, basically tried to say, well, Ben and Jerry's, you were boycotting Israel, even though they went out of their way to say, we're not boycotting the state of Israel.
We're boycotting a specific Israeli policy.
You know, I want to ask you, I think a lot of people assume that all of this stuff or most of it has been coming in response to October 7th and the student protests that were so effectively demonized around the country where people were protesting, obviously not Jews, but the Israeli devastation of the civilian population of Gaza that we all watch for ourselves.
And the reality is way different.
I mean, obviously the 2018 boycott law that you were just describing under the Trump administration Proceeded October 7th by five or six years.
But beyond that, there's this, and I've done a lot of reporting on this.
It frustrates me because no matter how much you talk about it, people still don't realize it.
I think it's now up to 37 states, but 34, something in that vicinity, that have a law that they enacted that say, if you want to have a contract with the state, you're a private citizen, and let's say like you're a freelance.
Educator who helps kids with a certain learning disability but you're not a full-time employee.
You're a small construction company that gets hired by the city or the county to do like some reforms on buildings or whatever.
It is a requirement of that contract that before it can be approved, you have to sign a loyalty pledge saying that you will not support or participate in a boycott of Israel.
You're allowed to support a boycott of literally any other country in the world, including the United States.
You can support a boycott of other American states.
Because, like I said, for a long time now, what Israel has feared the most is the possibility of a growing boycott movement against Israel, because that's what took down South Africa.
They succeeded in getting the EU to adopt laws saying an advocacy of a boycott of Israel, by definition, is anti-Semitic and therefore illegal or even criminal in many EU states.
Who is behind this new law, and out of what sort of cultural assumptions is it emerging?
So the sponsors of the law were Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer, and Gottheimer is my member of Congress, so I've written extensively.
I don't know if it's verboten to refer to my intercept work here, but I've written extensively about it.
No, I already said I forgive you for that.
And I did a little of my own as well, so I'm not on very solid ground criticizing you for that.
Well, look, there was an article I wrote last year about Josh Gottheimer's war with local high school protesters that I think is worth reading, first of all, because it goes way beyond college campuses.
It's against minor children, which is kind of strange.
Also, because it's just worth reading because there's a lot of weird characters involved.
It's fun.
But third of all, I think it does illustrate how a lot of this stuff works.
Where Teaneck, New Jersey is a town with a big...
It has a lot of divides, but it has a big generational divide where the adults that run the town are very staunchly pro-Israel and the kids at the public high school are not.
And, you know, this sort of had existed before.
There were sort of conflicts about this going back to earlier rounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 2021, for example, there was a big controversy in the town.
But October 7th, I think...
In Teaneck, New Jersey and across the world, turbocharged a lot of these pre-existing dynamics.
So you have this big open generational conflict where the adults are suddenly shocked that the kids just don't agree with their view on things.
And at first, you have this sort of angry mob reaction by people who are just like, you know, shut up, kids, which then sort of...
It turns into a more organized counter-campaign, which then sort of activates these levers of government, or it activates organizations that know how to pull the levers of government.
And so suddenly you have Gottheimer basically pushing the Department of Education to bring in a Title VI investigation that's an ethnic discrimination against the high school for allowing this protest.
You sort of ask who is behind it.
I mean, there is an organized pro-Israel movement in the U.S. that has been organizing for a pretty long time against the possibility of a boycott movement and has been learning pretty well what the different levers of power you can pull are, what are the sort of anti-discrimination laws and anti-boycott laws and counter-terrorism laws that you can use to sort of draw guilt by association.
I haven't been the most immersed in this.
There are other journalists who have covered this a lot better than I have.
But, yeah, I do think that there is a sort of organized campaign, and some of it does come from people who are in touch with the Israeli government.
There's a great documentary called The Lobby that was put out by Al Jazeera in, I think, 2018.
Gottheimer actually was one of the people who tried to get it suppressed.
He personally led a sort of letter along with Lee Zeldin to punish Al Jazeera, basically.
And it demonstrates, you know, you have think tanks and political advocacy organizations talking to Israeli government ministries about, well, you know, what do you guys consider threatening?
Let's figure out how we can...
Massage the American political system.
And you say cultural assumptions.
I think that's a good way of putting it.
I think a lot of Americans assume that the Israel lobby rules by fear or greed or something.
And I do think that there is an element of carrot and stick, but a lot of it works because American politicians of the older generation generally like Israel on an emotional level.
Joe Biden...
Really believes that the US has a duty to protect the Jewish state.
And so they're willing to hear it and they're willing to do these things.
And I think only now that it's become a crisis and the question has been forced on Americans of the younger generation that has become apparent that a lot of these measures are...
That they've done in favor of Israel are both exceptional and not necessarily popular and actually sort of come off as repressive and heavy-handed.
I don't think the older people see it this way.
I think they see it as like, oh, well, of course we love Israel.
Yeah, of course we'll do this.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
You see public opinion polls over the last...
Three to six months, and they show an absolutely vivid, undeniable, I don't want to say collapse, maybe that's melodramatic, but serious decline in the amount of support for Israel inside the United States across almost every demographic group, including young Republicans.
Using Young in a very generous way, Republicans 50 and under, a majority of them now say they disapprove of Israel.
The only group that has maintained this normal, you know, historically bipartisan level of support are basically like older Fox News watching Republicans.
And that leads me to what I want to show you and ask you about, which is, you know, for a long time now, I've been very interested in the way that the Trump campaign Changed Republican politics, you know, I had a kind of brief with a breach with a lot of my I guess you could say left liberal friends or even friends on the left, friends in quotation marks, who, you know, really just didn't want to hear about any possibility that anything good could come from the Trump movement.
But it was clear to me that they were, you know, challenging every Republican orthodoxy.
I mean, Trump ran against the Jeb Bush machine, criticized Reaganomics, certainly criticized neocons and foreign intervention.
It was attacking the deep state.
These had been longstanding left-wing views, and I saw them growing inside the right-wing populist movement, and I thought there was value in trying to explore that and kind of see where that might lead.
The one issue where it never really happened in was Israel.
If you look at Trump's not just top-level cabinet appointments, but even the sub-cabinet level, With very, very, almost no exceptions.
You find a lot of ideological diversity on a ton of different issues.
Like right now you have people wanting to attack Iran, other people who don't want to attack Iran.
Every person seeming like at admission price to walk through the door was that they are fanatical supporters of Israel.
And so this is like the one area where you never saw very much dissent.
Like Thomas Massey here, pretty much only that.
And yet when it came to this bill, as you suggested earlier, it wasn't the Democrats who stopped it.
It was like major MAGA-based voices, both inside elected office and outside.
I just want to show our audience a few of these.
And by the way, the list of co-sponsors, on the other hand, as you said, Gottmeier was one.
He's a Democrat from New Jersey, like conservative Democrat, but still a Democrat.
And Mike Lawler is supposedly a moderate Republican, but he's in a very difficult district to get reelected.
And I guess he's made, you know, Israel, like Richie Torres has, like his number one issue.
I guess he thinks there's political benefits.
He wrote this bill.
The whole normal bipartisan crowd co-sponsored it.
But then you had, like, here's Marjorie Taylor Greene, and this was today.
And she said, I will be voting no.
And she's referring to kind of a graphic about this bill.
She says, "It is my job to defend Americans' rights to buy or boycott whomever they choose without the government harshly fining them or imprisoning them for it.
What I don't understand is why are we voting on a bill on behalf of other countries and not the president's executive orders that are for our country?" So a very America first mentality that we've heard applied in many ways, but almost never to Israel.
And here it got applied to Israel.
Thomas Massey said, I agree with Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I'll be voting no on this bill as well.
Charlie Kirk, a big MAGA influencer, said...
Quote, "Tomorrow the House will be voting on H.R. 867, a bill that will criminalize private boycotts of Israel, fines up to a million dollars in prison time up to 20 years.
Bills like this only create more anti-Semitism, which I certainly agree with, playing into growing narratives that Israel is running the U.S. government." Yeah, you don't...
I mean, it's kind of becoming harder and harder to claim that that's some anti-Semitic trope when we're seeing things like this every day.
In America, you are allowed to hold different views.
You are allowed to disagree and protest.
We've allowed far too many people who hate America move here from abroad.
But the right to speak freely is the birthright of all Americans.
The bill should not pass.
Any Republicans that vote for this bill will expose themselves.
We will be watching very closely.
Those are some, you know, those are not like throwaway cursory, You know, kind of ambivalent sentiments.
These are people with not a real history of ever opposing Israel.
In fact, I think all of them have supported Israel in various ways over the years who seem to have really reached a breaking point like this is not common language for prominent people in the Republican Party at all who AIPAC could take out.
What do you think is happening there?
Yeah, I mean, I was always more skeptical than you were about the sort of Republican foreign policy shift, not just on Israel, but the Middle East more broadly.
I thought, you know, this was sort of this war on terror mentality was very ingrained, and people would say the right things about forever wars, but not actually want to change anything specific.
So I've been actually very surprised at how rapid, and I think pleasantly surprised at how rapid the shift has been in the Republican base.
I think, you know, it's just that the question has been forced so dramatically.
For a while, it seemed that the wars in the Middle East and the sort of general apparatus that the U.S. has there could be sort of political background noise, right?
It's not really worth rocking the boat.
There's not really anything happening there.
The area is going to be miserable no matter what.
And, oh, look, we have the Abraham Accords.
And actually, you know, this is sort of this mythology that people, within both the, you know, Traditional neoconservative movement and the Baga movement sold that, like, oh, everything, if we just keep our military presence there, everything will solve itself.
And I think that was proven very wrong in a very dramatic way.
I mean, post-October 7th, the U.S. had to intervene directly on Israel's behalf in ways that it never really had to.
And even though Israel's, I mean...
More or less gotten what it wanted, can do whatever it wants to Lebanese and Syrians and Palestinians.
It's still pushing for a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran pretty openly, too, which I think would be bigger undertaking than even the Iraq War.
So a lot of people who had these sort of America-first beliefs, in theory, really...
I mean, this was go time in practice to...
To show them.
And I think the first kind of conflict between the MAGA movement and the pro-Israel movement did start with the sort of intrigue around Steve Whitcoff and Mike Waltz and the possibility of war with Iran.
I'm sure you've covered this in your show.
And I think the boycott bill then became another very sort of like now-or-never moment for the America Firsters.
Because it was just so egregious.
Even though this is something that would have flown under the radar before, just the whole context of it and how much further this bill goes than other bills.
Yeah, the question was sort of forced.
And we've discovered that, like, yeah, actually, the America First Prince, like, America First does mean America First to a lot of these folks.
Yeah, this is my last question.
But, you know, that's such an interesting point you were talking before about.
How you didn't share the same, necessarily, like, optimism about this potential within Monga.
And, you know, I certainly didn't think, like, oh, well, look, they're all saying anti-adventacism.
There's going to be no war under Trump.
I knew it was going to be a mutt.
Just aside from the fact that the Israel lobby is still very powerful.
A lot of these people have been fed on traditional Republican politics for a long time about wars in the Middle East.
I do think you're right that this idea of how quickly the Israelis are pressuring the United States to go to war with Iran.
I think has galvanized a lot of the willingness to kind of speak up here.
We're to the point where Marjorie Taylor Greene was talking about the prospect of war with Iran.
And has Charlie Kirk.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene said, when talking about this, she said, I'm really sick and tired of having the United States have to go and fight wars for other countries in the Middle East that have large nuclear arsenals and a sophisticated army.
And it's like, gee, Marjorie, who might you be talking about when you say we have to fight other wars for a country with a large nuclear arsenal in the Middle East?
You know, these kind of thoughts have been pretty taboo, especially in right-wing politics for mainstream right-wing politics for a long time.
And you're seeing it now.
On the other hand, let me just give I'll give you a counterexample.
You have Governor Greg Abbott, who is the Republican two-term governor of Texas.
He was one of the people who championed that bill I mentioned before that requires you to pledge you're not going to boycott Israel.
He actually issued an executive order, I think in the early to mid 2024 in response to these protests, proclaiming that he was banning anti-Semitism.
In Texas, which is so funny because the right has been mocking liberal politicians for thinking they can purge the society of racism through government acts, but it was basically the same thing.
But there was this interesting event where this small city of the city of San Marcos in Texas Had done some sort of analysis where they were able to calculate, I think based on how much the state spends in their per capita of what they pay in taxes, that $4 million of their tax money, this little small city with a lot of problems, is being sent to Israel.
And so they introduced a resolution saying we're not going to allow those $4 million to be shipped overseas to some foreign country.
This is for our people and our residents and our well-being and the well-being of our community.
And, you know, representing this sort of like what I think is his growing resentment at how much this is being shoved down people's throat.
And Greg Abbott that day was enraged, and he issued a statement, the title of which was, anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies, which I'd love to hear someday someone explain why are anti-Israel, like why if you say you're against the Israeli war in Gaza, is that anti-Texas?
But the letter was filled with threats like how dare you, you know, try and stop your tax money from going to Israel.
You can debate like the particulars of whether a city has the right to try and reorganize this money, whatever.
I mean, there's like little technicalities there.
But the spirit of this, like to be in the middle of Texas and be like, why is there a tax?
Like, I always felt like this MAGA rhetoric was eventually on a collision course with Financing Israel with doing everything we can for Israel.
You know, I'd have a lot of MAGA people on my show during the Ukraine War, and they would say they were against it.
And I would say, why?
I'd luring them into it, and they would say, oh, we have to stop financing other countries' wars.
They can take care of themselves.
We have to take care of money.
You know, use this money to take care of everything in our community, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and RFK Jr. and many others.
And I would say, wow, that's really interesting.
Does that same rationale apply to Israel and are sending all the money there?
And they would, like, stutter around knowing that They couldn't answer it, but also not yet ready politically to say, yeah, Israel is included in that.
And now you see that.
So I wonder, from your perspective, like, have all these measures, including the ones that you so expertly analyzed and warned about today, it's like just tsunami of them, including what I just read from Greg Abbott.
Do you think that they realize there is a danger that they're kind of forcing people to start asking these questions that they previously kind of hid from them?
Why is it that our politicians are constantly demanding we do things from Israel?
And why are they silencing us and censoring us and sending our money over there?
Why is it so focused and obsessive on Israel?
Do you think that is changing the political climate some?
That Texas story, I hadn't heard that before, and that is weird.
Yeah, that's something else.
Well, look, as someone who proudly works for Reason magazine, I will say censorship does not work.
I think that's an important bottom line, that when you try to shut up healthy discussion about a topic, that it ensures there's going to be a lot of resentment and unhealthy things coming out.
I think we are for sure seeing that.
I think politicians' reactions are very typical of...
Of politicians in these kinds of repressive contexts on any issue, where you see that the kids don't agree with you, and then you sort of try something very ham-handed to get them to shut up, and then you wonder, oh, why don't they like this?
I think this is very common around the world when power is threatened to sort of reach for repressive measures and then...
Be kind of confused when people get resentful of that.
I do think that there is a sort of older and perhaps unsustainable sort of cultural reverence for Israel that is kind of unique out of all foreign policy issues.
I mean, we could talk about that for a long time.
And I think, again, I think for the older generation, this does not...
Come off as weird.
I think it comes off as something very natural and something very near and dear to their identity.
...
I just want to be clear.
This is not Jewish Americans who are necessarily like this.
Joe Biden was like this.
Greg Abbott, who's Christian, very Christian, is like this.
There's a big evangelical component to it, for sure, and a big kind of national security component.
And I think there is also a sort of, like, Post-World War II liberalism that does see Israel as the response to Nazism.
Israel's the anti-Nazism, so if you're anti-Israel, that means you're anti-anti-Nazi.
Which, of course, it's very different in the Middle East, and there's a whole other context, but the war on terror just reinforced that when you had people talking about Islamofascism.
Yeah, this attempt to always say, oh, look, your enemies are our enemies, and so you should go to war to stop our enemies because they're also your enemies.
You see that now with Netanyahu always saying, oh, you know what they chant in Iran?
Death to America, death to Israel.
You're the great Satan.
So this attempt to kind of conflate all of this has been successful for a long time.
I just really question whether it can continue to be.
And one of the worst things, if you depend on a certain Belief, being pervasive in the culture, it's very scary if you're, say, Israel, to watch basically just older people who are going to be dying off in the next few years, couple decades, whatever, and everyone who's replacing them is feeding on this steady diet.
Of increasingly going in the opposite direction.
I think that's part of why you're seeing almost like a desperate attempt to just impose these previously unthinkable measures that are designed to control the public debate in a way that they've made it almost overt, which I also agree.
We just saw the liberals have that problem, like that whole censorship scheme on almost every issue caused the public to resent it and go in the other direction.
And I really do think you're seeing that with Israel now.
All right.
Well, Matthew, it was great to have you on.
I really encourage everybody to read your article because the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a pretty straightforward thing.
You can just understand it quickly and why it's so menacing.
This one's a little more— It's complicated to understand, especially with the background.
But I actually agree with you that it's even more sinister.
Like, it's more shocking on its face because you're talking about criminal penalties here, like felonies that could send people up to 20 years in prison.
And the Congress just seemed to be like, yeah, this is a normal bill.
Let's be on our way to passing this.
So I really want to encourage people to go to Reason and read it.
And we'd love to have you back on the show.
It was great speaking to you tonight.
Thank you so much.
I'm very, very, very glad to have been on and I really appreciate the invite.
My family's texting me screenshots of this because they're also fans of you.
