Curt Mills on the Trump Administration's Foreign Policy, Israel, and Iran; Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions
The American Conservative's Curt Mills discusses the Trump/Netanyahu split, Trump's foreign policy speech in Saudi Arabia, the meaning of "neocon," and the Ukraine war. Plus: Glenn answers questions from our Locals audience. ------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, promptly at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Trump's three-country trip to the Persian Gulf states this week, as well as a foreign policy address he delivered while in Saudi Arabia.
Have many people believing that the president laid out a radically new foreign policy vision that sharply departs from the bipartisan dogma of the last 60 years?
And it's not just his words, but his actions that have many people believing this, from Ukraine and Iran to Syria and Israel.
How real is this new foreign policy vision and how new is it?
And how concrete is it as well?
And what conclusions can we reach after four months of the second Trump presidency about how serious he is about his long, repeated vow to reorient U.S. foreign policy on a truly different path?
It's hard to overstate how crucial that question is, not just for America's foreign policy, but for the lives of its citizens at home as well.
We really can't think of many people better to explore this with than Kurt Mills.
He's the executive director of the journal The American Conservative, long identified with the paleoconservative tradition and the non-interventionist wing of the American right.
He has been one of the most vocal voices from that wing on Trump's foreign policy and the urgent need to move the U.S. away.
From its bipartisan foreign policy of fighting endless wars all over the world that have no benefit to the American people or its country, but much harm to the country and to the world.
Then, every Friday night we have a Q&A session where we take questions from our local members and do our best to answer as many as we can.
As is usually the case, the quality of the questions is quite high, and the range is far-reaching, so we really look forward to doing our best to discussing the questions raised by our members.
Before we get to that, a programming note.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Miles is the executive director of the American Conservative and has long been one of the most informative voices on foreign policy, especially the paleoconservative version of it, non-interventionist version of it.
Just as a side note, the American Conservative happens to be the first magazine ever to pay me to publish an article.
That was back in 2005, right when I was just starting, maybe 2006, where they asked me to write about I ended up writing several other articles for them over the next few years, including against the war on terror and the wars that it entailed.
So there's been a lot of alignment between me and that magazine, not fully, but a lot of alignment because they come from this part of the Republican Party that I do happen to have a lot in common with.
And we're very excited to have Kurt with us.
He's a really interesting thinker who ponders on these questions quite a bit, and so we have Thank you for running the magazine that helped give my journalism career a start as well.
All right.
This week, Trump gave a speech in Riyadh as part of his three-nation trip, swing through the Persian Gulf that notably did not include Israel, which we'll talk about in a minute.
And in this foreign policy, he laid out some principles that he described as a brand new way of thinking America's role in the world.
I heard a lot of this in previous speeches.
Including denouncing neocons and endless war.
That was sort of what Trump began his 2016 campaign by doing, the foreign policy orthodoxy of both parties being wildly out of whack and needing a fundamental reform.
But this seemed to be a, I guess you could say, more comprehensive and maybe more emphatic expression of this foreign policy and the fact that he chose Saudi Arabia to unveil it.
I thought was notable as well.
What did you think of this speech in terms of whether it signals a real break from bipartisan foreign policy dogma?
Yeah, so the speech itself is interesting because so much has happened this week, and obviously the sort of warp speed of the Trump presidency generally, I think, you know, kind of got passed and it was paid attention.
But I think it's notable that he even did a speech.
I mean, he could have made these maneuvers and just kind of left it up to the referees to draw a conclusion.
But he went out of his way to deliver this sort of broadside, this bromide against neoconservatives.
And this is now a talking point of the admin.
Now, of course, people would want to get into the definition of what a neocon is.
But effectively, it has become, and I think, an effective and accurate byword for all members of the Republican Party who want to take it back to basically, you know, use Trump as a mascot to win elections, but then essentially do George W. Bush's third term.
And so Trump explicitly castigating neocons.
He's attacked endless wars in both the 16 and 24 campaign most prominently.
But to go after neocon in a foreign policy speech in Saudi Arabia was...
Quite a move.
And then additionally, the term itself is becoming a key talking point of the administration itself when apparently Former FBI Director James Comey, you know, sort of Instagrammed an assassination threat or implication thereof.
One of Trump's leading spokesmen said that this was, you know, effectively motivated by Trump's anti-neocon rhetoric.
So this is clearly a choice by the administration.
They could have done the policy separately.
But to sell it and to lay it on so clearly, I think, is a clear statement of where the administration has gone.
And also it implies a bit of a break even from where the administration is.
You know, it was a long speech.
There was a whole part first telling the Saudis how fantastic the president is doing to help America be strong and economically prosperous again, which I suppose is part of what he's trying to pitch there.
Like, hey, we're back.
We want to do business, you know, that can benefit all of us.
The foreign policy part seemed like it had different people providing different input into it.
Because it is true that, like, on the one hand, you had a rhetorical and quite vehement repudiation of neoconservatism and the fact that, you know, he said, we've had all these people who think they can nation-build and they've destroyed far more nations than they built because they tried to interfere in countries whose complex histories and politics they simply didn't understand.
And amen to that.
All I can do is applaud that.
But it seems like...
The fact that it was in these particular countries, which are not really models of democracy, to put them mildly, they're some of the most savage and repressive dictatorships on the planet.
They're countries where Trump's family has done a lot of very lucrative business and continues to do a lot of lucrative business.
Jared Kushner got $2 billion from the Saudi Sovereign Fund.
They've done business in the Emirates as well and are pursuing other deals.
I feel like the speech had a lot of that influence in the sense that I thought it catered a little bit to the Saudi audience, where he blamed Iran for being the root of all the problems in the Middle East, which is, of course, a thing that the Saudis like to hear.
They've had a longstanding rivalry with Iran.
Maybe it's gotten better over the last few years, but, you know, it's still there.
And I think his vision of—and you tell me if you think it's different, but I think his vision of it is, like, he always says, like, I don't really care if countries are— Democratic or authoritarian.
I don't care if they're strong men.
That's kind of good.
That means they're tough.
I find that honesty very refreshing because that is what U.S. foreign policy has thought.
It just always was accompanied by this deceit, this pretense that, oh, we only partner with democracies and we fight to extinguish authoritarianism.
So his vision seemed to me like, look, the model of the Middle East.
Is what we're seeing in Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh.
These very economically prosperous countries.
They're extremely modernized.
I guess he believes they're trying to liberalize their politics.
And that essentially they're really interested in joining the world economy, exporting, as he said, technology, not terrorism.
And I feel like his view is basically like these three countries plus Israel form the future of a peaceful, prosperous...
Middle East, but in order to make that happen, we have to get rid of the people who want to keep the Middle East at war and unstable, meaning Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, which you can on the one hand repudiate neoconservatism, but that is a view that neoconservatives would be more or less comfortable with.
So how do you reconcile all of that?
I think there's a lot there.
I think that, of course, within Trump's world, there are different people who want to put their gloss on it.
Of course, probably the most enduring legacy of Trump's first term in terms of Middle East policy is the Abraham Accords.
And you saw it this week.
Wyckoff, who I think is obviously one of the more superlative members of the administration, is shopping Abraham Accord expansion.
But the reality is that the conditions on the ground have significantly changed from the first term.
So while there may be the old hymn books, the old catechisms, the religion has somewhat shifted by just changing circumstances.
I would say, first of all, the big two, Saudi and UAE, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, are much different.
Players and characters vis-a-vis Trump than they were, say, eight years ago.
They were the driving force for hawkishness, not only on Qatar, but Iran and also Yemen.
And you see them now being a far more pragmatic, moderate, seeking to de-escalate tensions in the region.
You know, the Saudis are constantly, you know, sort of under pressure to sign the Abraham Accords.
It looks like instead it's more likely that they're going to sign an independent deal with the U.S. or agree to some sort of civil nuclear.
Nuclear infrastructure with even the Iranians.
So a lot's changed.
I mean, I would say that the driving force of the speech or the subtext of the speech, the driving force of Trump's trip, was a potential break with Netanyahu.
I mean, Netanyahu was not sufficiently on hand.
He was not sufficiently represented.
He was not on hand for these summits.
He was totally absent.
Meanwhile, the U.S. had pulled out of major planks of his favored policy.
I mean, the U.S. unilaterally, without consulting the Israelis, for all reports, got rid of the sanctions on the Emiratis, and the Gulf states helped wipe out their debt.
No consultations with Jerusalem.
Pretty extraordinary.
The sanctions on Syria.
Curious.
I'm sorry if I misspoke.
Yeah, and so, I mean, the handshake with Ahmed al-Sharah, I mean, Netanyahu in Israel has to be asking himself whether or not he even profited from the fall of Assad at this point, which was, of course, the longstanding quasi-goal of the Israelis.
All right, so let's tackle that for a second.
Actually, before I do, I want to really get into that Trump-Netanyahu rift.
How extensive it is, how real it is, how consequential it is.
And that was the perfect segue, but I actually have a question for you I want to ask first before we get into that, which is you made a point today, and I've heard you make it before, that a lot of people who kind of support Trump's non-interventionist foreign policy are angry about his protectionism and tariff policies at home.
And you made the point that You cannot extricate the two, that the vision that drives the protectionism and the tariffs is the same vision that drives his new foreign policy approach.
Why is that?
What do you mean by that?
Yeah, I think this is a pretty important point.
One that might not be terribly popular, because I think there are a lot of people who say, "Oh, well, you know, I'm in on industrial policy, I'm in on tariffs, but I don't know about all of this negotiating with the Iranians' business." And I think there's another group that is very comfortable, effectively, pursuing realism and restraint, but is aghast on a lot of the elements of the White House's economic program.
In terms of what Trump has consistently pitched, Since coming down the escalator in 2015, he has portrayed a country in economic ruin and disrepair as a result of what I would call globalism, what he and his allies would call globalism, Steve Bannon, etc.
It is to export the jobs, invade other countries, and import populations from the countries that are wrecked by U.S. foreign policy.
And so this might be a sort of superlative or grandiose picture.
It might be an embellished picture, but it's one that very much resonates.
Out in the public.
I mean, this is this is the key pitch in the linchpin of Republican control.
That is the Midwest.
They are saying to you, we exported all these jobs, imported all these immigrants.
No discussion about that.
And additionally, you know, your children bore the brunt of the wars and you got very little for it.
And so Trump himself has always linked it.
Wyckoff, who I guess is increasingly ominous Greece of the administration, has explicitly linked it.
He has said that in the attempts to do business with the Russians and the Iranians, they found the Gulf partners a lot more acclimative, a lot more pragmatic, a lot more manageable to work with than the Europeans, who of course, they are a democracy, but they are highly ideological on foreign policy and totally adrift and recalcitrant at the moment.
Speaking of Bannon, one of the things that first I don't know if I want to say attracted me, but caught my attention about Trump 2016.
That caused me to be more open-minded to it than most people who were not explicitly MAGA.
It got me subjected to all sorts of, you know, expulsions and labels about being a fascist apologist or whatever.
But the campaign that he architected, Steve Bannon, in 2016, I remember this very well because I was surprised when I heard it.
Steve Bannon's plan was let's get in and do a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Democrats so that we spend huge amounts of money modernizing our country and putting all these people who we promised we would take care of back to work and create all these jobs.
Then let's raise taxes on the rich because the tax code is far too favorable to the wealthiest.
And then we can use that to pay for the wall.
And leaving the specific questions aside, it does illustrate exactly what you just said, which is this kind of globalism.
And of course, he was also promising to roll back all the foreign wars.
So from my perspective, you had someone saying, let's stop all these foreign interventions that have been so destructive.
Let's stop this endless war.
Let's spend money inside the United States instead to benefit the people of our country who have been so run roughshod over.
Let's make the tax system more equitable so that the riches are paying a more fair share to make all this possible.
And then let's build a wall so that the only people who can benefit from all the things we're doing are American citizens.
We're not inviting other people from around the world.
And as you said, we're not forcing them to come because we're no longer destroying their countries.
I thought that was an extremely interesting...
Approach to politics, far more so than anything that was going on in the Democratic Party.
Remember, this is 2016.
You're talking about Hillary Clinton, just like the queen of establishment institutions and bipartisan dogma.
And then Bannon gets into office, along with Trump and Jared Kushner.
In about eight months, Bannon's out.
I think he clearly lost a power struggle to Jared Kushner, which is probably not a good idea to go to war with the husband of- The president's favorite daughter, so I guess it was kind of predictable.
But to me, that was always like a pivotal turning point in the first Trump administration.
Like, I always wondered what would have happened if Steve Bannon's agenda had prevailed instead of Kushner's.
Now we're in the second administration.
You still have Bannon kind of on the outside.
He definitely seems to have a lot of influence and be looked upon favorably by at least some factions inside the White House.
These kind of competing factions, like the non-interventionists represented by Bannon, I think you could put J.D. Vance in there, probably Tulsi Gabbard, a couple others, Trump himself.
And then on the other hand, you have, you know, the standard warmongers like Marco Rubio, and you had Mike Waltz, and now he's gone.
But then you have Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham and the Republican senators.
Like, are they still— At war and the outcome is uncertain or do you think one of those sides is starting to emerge more powerful?
We'll just say two things about what you just said.
Number one, I think that the chronology you just provided is very useful.
So, you know, Bannon, of course, had all of these ideas, infrastructures, tax raise, et cetera, et cetera.
And they pursued, you know, it's actually Paul Ryan's health care plan and Paul Ryan's tax plan.
Right.
That's sort of the equivalent.
Yeah, that's sort of the equivalent of the earlier question.
You know, why does it?
Why does the administration have all this sort of?
I think that's sort of the explanation.
Trump has, in fact, taken over the Republican Party.
It is a bit of a hijack job.
He is sort of a populist, centrist, nationalist person.
He is not a neoconservative.
And so, you know, it's a continuously fractious marriage, one that he has increasingly...
Getting full and total control over, but it's an ongoing process.
As to which side is prevailing, I mean, I think what is notable about this administration is actually how few official hawks there are and how vulnerable...
Someone's position becomes when they are identified as a hawk.
Waltz had a hawkish predigree.
I think he was a surprising selection for National Security Advisor.
And once he was disclosed in the press and just through his own incompetence, was exposed as a sort of fanatic, he was quickly removed.
And he got caught by Trump plotting behind Trump's back with Netanyahu on how to attack Iran, which I think might have been even the bigger cause than the signal stuff.
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, I think for the perspective of the sort of neocons and the hawks, like, you know, consulting with the Israelis behind the president's back is almost like, what was so wrong with that?
So, like, it's not even an offset question.
It's like a question of...
Morality in a weird way.
I mean, Bolton did a lot of the same stuff, too.
I mean, he was very close with the Israelis, and it's the first thing he did when he became a national security advisor.
So, you know, Walls probably thought he could get away with it.
The Israelis, I think, have overplayed their hand, and we'll see.
I think it was just—it is not a liability.
I mean, they're trying to make it so, some people.
And I would say the Israel lobby are trying to make it so.
But it is not a liability to be labeled a restrainer.
Or a realist or even a dove within the ranks, right?
So, I mean, there was a little bit of attacks on J.D. Vance, you know, during the signal gate thing for showing, you know, the only person showing some hesitation about bombing the Houthis.
And I think you saw a lot of your usual voices being like, ah, J.D. Vance is attacking the president.
None of that stuff went anywhere.
The attacks on Walt, though, lost him his job.
And I think it's been pretty clear that Hegseth as well, since he has sort of irrationally fumigated his top...
Yeah, I think that's a lot of, you know, Yeah,
and the official religion is actually now Trumpism, realism, restraint, as understood within this administration.
you know, I...
It's hard to, you know, divine anybody's true feelings, true motives like deep inside them.
Probably even harder with Trump for a lot of reasons.
But I do actually believe that his hostility toward warmongers and neocons is genuine.
You know, when he talks about it, he kind of summons a kind of intense rage that he doesn't often channel.
You know, when he talks about Liz Cheney, you know, anytime that name comes up, he's just like, she's a war pig.
She wants to go to war with everybody.
You know, that's why he says, like, let's see what would happen if, you know, she were on the other side of the guns.
Maybe she would change her tune, which CNN then said was an announced plan to hang Liz Cheney.
But whatever.
It was Trump really kind of—and I've seen him do this before with others.
Like, oh, yeah, they want to just go to war all the time.
So I think this instinct that he has as aversion is very real.
I think he prides himself on being— You know, that he wants his legacy to be as a peacemaker, someone who didn't start wars, who avoided wars, who resolved wars.
I think it's very real.
And you have, you know, on this Netanyahu Trump rift some real evidence of it.
You know, not only did Trump lift sanctions without bothering to consult with the Israelis, which would have been unthinkable, he also— He negotiated a ceasefire with the Houthis, and he didn't even bother to tell the Israelis.
They learned about it afterward in the press.
And even more so, the Houthis said, yeah, we'll agree to stop attacking you, but we're going to still attack Israel.
And when Trump was asked about that, how can you do a ceasefire when they're saying we're still going to attack Israel?
He kind of said, nah, I don't know about any of that.
That's not my business.
What I know is if they're going to stop attacking us.
And then you have, you know, other things as well, like negotiating with Hamas directly for the release of Eden Alexander.
And just the whole idea of going to these Gulf states and reaching an agreement with them without requiring them to first normalize relations with Israel, which is why Biden wouldn't do deals with any of these states until they normalize relations with Israel.
So you have this mounting evidence that, on the one hand, that there clearly does seem to be not— Not necessarily hostility toward Israel, but just a refusal on Trump's part to allow Israel to impede or interfere with the things he wants to do for the country or perceives to be in the country's interest.
On the other hand, and, you know, I have a lot of friends who say, no, this rift is, you know, a scam.
It's designed to make Iran feel safe in order to do a surprise attack on them.
Or just that in general, it's kind of, there's no meat to it because Trump is, of course, still Sending billions of dollars a year to Israel, not just the part we agreed to, but for their war.
He's arming the Israelis.
He's talking about, you know, moving a million of them to Libya.
He has various plans to move them out of Gaza, which is Israel's dream.
And, you know, Hamas says we gave them Eden Alexander because they promised they would start pressuring the Israelis to do a ceasefire, and that never really happened.
Steve Woodcock didn't follow through.
And you still have like the Miriam Adelsons and these very big money people who have a lot of influence with Trump in his ear demanding support for Israel.
So I guess I wonder, first of all, just like as a general question, is it even possible for an American president to like radically break from Israel even if they want to, even if they have the support that Trump has?
Like, would they suffer impeachment or worse if they really tried to say, look, we're— We're going to let Israel go on its own.
We're cutting off this aid.
We're cutting off these weapons.
And given the obvious willingness of the United States, of Trump, to continue to support what Israel is doing in Gaza, not really trying to stop them in Lebanon or Syria, how real is this rift in terms of what it might mean for the way Israel and the United States interact with one another?
I think it is possible.
I mean, I think the thing that I would flag...
Is that there was a big Axios report this week.
Big Democratic grandies, Ben Rhodes, senior Biden administration officials on the record saying we had no idea basically a president could just do this.
We wish we...
They called Trump corrupt.
They got in their licks, right?
But they said basically they wish they had worked for someone this decisive in this poll.
I'm not trying to say that Israel and Netanyahu don't have tailwinds towards them.
Netanyahu is extremely clever, extremely forceful.
He is intimidating to a lot of people.
I think he probably has another axe in his game, if I had to guess.
But I think so much of the Israel question actually has been one of taboo and fear.
And once broached, it is actually relatively easy, especially for Trump.
I mean, I think you flagged it out, Adelson, the big money, but also just sort of the muscle memory of the institutional GOP.
Trump's not probably— Trump's not running again, right?
You know, assertions to the contrary, respectfully acknowledged.
He doesn't need these people.
And he can do what he thinks is right.
I mean, the interesting thing, it's not language he so often uses for better or worse.
When he was asked why he did the Syrian maneuvers that he did, he said, "Oh, I just thought it was the right thing to do." And this is the way, you know, people around Trump were sort of talking on background to me in the last year or two, which was both a cause for celebration and concern because it kind of increases unpredictability for uncertain realms.
But on the celebration element, they were saying that Trump was very much using the L word, legacy word.
That's what he was telling people in Mar-a-Lago.
Do things.
And it's interesting because that's the real juxtaposition with the famous Bob Woodward quote about George W. Bush, you know, in history, history will all be dead.
And I think a lot of people assume that maybe that's kind of how Trump was.
He's sort of mercantilist, financially oriented.
What did he care?
Sort of atheistic.
It seems like he really does care about his legacy, and that's actually how he's operating.
Moreover, you know, he's fought.
Like a dog for the last 10 years.
He was, you know, indicted scores of times.
He was convicted.
His family's been thrown.
You know, his family's had good times, bad times.
They've been thrown through the ringer.
You know, his marriage has probably been, you know, impacted.
He was shot.
He was shot.
He was shot in the head.
Yeah.
Like, so, you know, like, you know.
Did he fight all of this way just for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hawks to tell him that here's what you got to do?
You have no maneuverability.
You have no option.
Because it really is a binary.
I mean, particularly on the Middle East.
We either de-escalate as the United States or we escalate like never before.
And I think Trump, you know...
He sort of was hesitant to make a decision on that.
I mean, that was kind of my reading of the original Gaza redevelopment plan.
There are people in the administration that want to do it.
Netanyahu came here in either early February or late January, and he kind of just said something to make him go away.
60 days later, after Liberation Day, the tariffs, he hauls Netanyahu in.
Ostensibly about economics, but everyone knows it's telling about the Iran deal.
From there, he brokers a deal with the Houthis.
From there, he fires Waltz.
And from there, he does this trip.
I think we have a clear trend line.
I want to ask you about something else that happened today that gives added credence to this.
There's a clearly declining support for what Israel is doing in Gaza all around the world.
Major magazines in the West, like The Economist and the Financial Times, that had been supporting what Israel was doing, who have suddenly come out and said, no, this is morally reprehensible.
There's mass hunger.
This is war criminality.
Sounding like the protesters who have been so maligned.
You've had conservative MPs in the UK who have stood up and apologized for having supported Israel, realizing that what they supported was just horrific.
You know, just utterly unacceptable from any moral or framework or decency framework.
And then you have polls showing, you know, especially in the United States, a massive change in every demographic group, including young Republicans, of a very precipitous slide in the number of percentage of people who support Israel.
The only demographic group that's sort of maintaining are like Old Republicans, meaning like Fox News watchers, like the people who have the muscle memory that you said, you just reflexively support Israel.
But the future is very grim.
And I think that's a big part of why Israel has targeted college campuses and the like, because they're desperate, banning TikTok, they're desperate to try and change this.
And Trump came out today, and I found this very notable, because one of the main allegations against Israel is that they're deliberately starving.
Two million people to death causing mass famine in Gaza by blockading any food from entering, any humanitarian aid from entering.
And here's a New York Times article from today.
The headline is, "Trump says, 'A lot of people are starving in Gaza and the U.S. wants to help.'" Quote, President Trump said on Friday that a lot of people are starving in the Gaza Strip under an Israeli blockade preventing aid deliveries.
Adding that the U.S. wanted to help alleviate the suffering.
Quote, we're going to handle a couple situations that you have here.
Trump said, speaking in the UAE, we're looking at Gaza and we've got to get that taken care of.
A lot of people are starving.
A lot of people, there's a lot of bad things going on.
Now, he's basically endorsing the view of human rights organizations, the UN.
Others who are calling what Israel is doing war crimes.
This didn't just come out of the blue.
Even if Trump doesn't follow through, just saying this itself is quite meaningful.
Do you see in all of this—I mean, obviously, you see the same polls I'm referring to.
You see the same events I'm talking about.
But do you think that presages a real change in what the policy of the U.S. and other Western nations will be simply in a response to the population's changing views?
I do, particularly with this president who is so media sensitive and who is so open source in the way that he makes decisions.
I think the conversation on the public airwaves and online, especially when the president's most senior employees and the world's richest man owns the premier social media site, I think this stuff really matters.
I think a lot of times, I mean...
I mean, you saw this sort of Seb Gorka person, who is the Deputy NSC Director.
He often talks as if he is behind the curve of leading journalists.
It is something to behold.
I mean, Trump is very...
We're very attuned to public opinion.
And additionally, something I've observed is that a lot of smart, successful older people are very sensitive to the opinions of young people.
They want to stay in the game, they want to stay alive, and they want to stay fashionable.
And Trump, you know, I think has seen uh that i mean i think trump's uh vp pick which a lot of people didn't think he was going to go in that direction the selection of someone like vance who is who's 40 you know nearly half his age and basically half the age of a major the average major player in u.s politics at this point i think was a clear sign that he is very much A, looking at the sort of younger intellectuals within his party and his movement, and B, looking at the public opinion writ large.
And it has turned, it has turned significantly.
And additionally, you know, there's a sort of miserly element to Trump, right?
He always thinks we're getting ripped off.
He's often correct.
And like, I mean, I mean, even if you were neutral.
On the question of starving Gazans to death, why should the U.S. have to pay for the pleasure in both financial resources and also its reputation?
I think that's what you see.
Yeah, I think when there were a lot of questions posed to Trump about, is he abandoning Israel?
Is he doing a split with Israel?
He said, and I was not surprised that he thinks this way, yeah, we're already doing enough for Israel.
We're sending them billions of dollars every year.
I think we're doing— More than enough for them.
So I'm not really receptive to that complaint.
It's a very Trumpian way to think.
Like, yeah, we're getting ripped off.
We're giving them all this, what they want more.
All right, let's move to Iran, which might be, you know, the key ingredient of all of this, the most important part.
I'm convinced Trump wants a deal for the reasons that you were alluding to, like his legacy.
He doesn't want another Middle East war.
He did restart Biden's war with the Houthis, but he stopped it.
You know, a month later when he realized it was going to be a protracted Middle East war, another one that probably didn't do any good.
And I think that's how he thinks about Iran, but even more so.
The challenge, though, is that we had an Iran deal, of course, that Obama worked with the Europeans and the Russians to engineer, and Trump campaigned in 2016 on the ground that this was a weak deal.
We were getting ripped off this normal Trump view of deals.
We got a terrible deal.
It was weak.
I'll get a better one.
And so we nullified that deal on the grounds that it was too weak.
Biden never reinstituted it.
So now we're in a position where the only way to avert war, as Trump himself will say, is if we get a deal.
But the deal needs to be in this sweet spot where the Iranians are willing to go further than they went with the Obama-Iran deal to enable Trump to say, oh, I'm not just doing the same deal that I bashed and— I got a better deal for us.
But at the same time, it can't be so much better that it crosses Iran's red lines, like dismantling their entire nuclear program, which they're just never going to do.
And we'll get to the second to the people trying to sabotage this plan, like Israel and their loyalists in the GOP Senate and the like.
But leaving that aside, do you think there is that sweet spot that is attainable?
Yes.
So I think that They have made clear they want an improvement and a broader deal than JCPOA.
For what it's worth, the Iranians...
Are saying the same thing.
Additionally, for what it's worth, the Iranian message discipline has been actually pretty astonishing.
They have been attacking Biden and Biden's team for ignoring their portfolio, which is basically accurate.
And I think the Iranians are willing to come to the table and sign a deal, especially one on a short-term basis, if for three years, the Trump administration, if not longer, that allows some very limited enrichment.
And perhaps some commitments about regional behavior and a commitment not to go for the bomb.
And I think that's very on the table.
I know you didn't want to talk about who's trying to sabotage it, but the alternative is going for this so-called zero enrichment strategy or and or this Libya model strategy.
Both of those are just obvious prima facie.
Poison pills for the deal.
Sure, I will negotiate with you if you give me literally everything I want.
Which will affect the state security of the Iranians, which, you know, I think if you were in Iran's position, you would walk away from the table, too.
And I think to an extent, Trump, who has, you know, famously said, deals with his art forms, this is his life, this is how he gets his kicks, sort of understands that.
And I think the comments this week where he's reiterated, despite all of the, frankly, lies to the contrary, that the only thing he cares about is no nuclear weapon.
And everything else is details.
Everything else is gravy indicates that he is comfortable signing it.
Additionally, I don't think it's ever been super clear that Trump had all of these super clear policy objections to the GCPOA.
What he objected to was Obama.
What he objected to was Obama's stewardship.
You could call that petty.
You could call it personalistic.
Certainly an argument to be made, but it doesn't mean and it does not predict the kind of deal that he will make.
Certainly he wants to claim it's better than Obama's, but he was not ipso facto opposed the diplomacy of Iran.
Far from it.
Even as late as 2019 into 2020, this is the assassination of Soleimani's zone.
He was talking about willing to meet with the Ayatollah in Tehran.
Who knows without COVID what would have happened.
The Iran thing was super hot in January 2020.
He isn't.
Always talks like this, and it has only escalated in recent years.
Yeah, which is why I believe that he's genuine, and I believe you're right as well, that the Iranians and the U.S. could easily figure out, you know, a way to give them what they both want, you know, something better than the JCP, but not crossing Iran's red lines, which is, you know, Iran's argument is, we have every right.
Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to have a nuclear program that's guaranteed for those countries who agree not to proliferate.
I think I saw Tom Cotton the other day saying, or Lindsey Graham, saying there are no countries that have nuclear power that eventually don't proliferate.
And it's such a lie.
I mean, Brazil is an example of a country that has nuclear programs and isn't even thinking about or getting near a bomb.
Several others as well.
I think Japan.
But there are definitely other examples.
This is, you know, I think the big impediment is not Trump and the Iranians' ability to negotiate a deal.
It's these kind of, you know, the Israelis and Netanyahu, but then also this core of the GOP Senate that has to pretend to be, you know, a supporter of Trump, but in reality hates Trump and hates his, especially his foreign policy.
And so, you know, just to lay clear for people who aren't familiar with it, you know, Netanyahu came to the White House the last time, I think it was in April, and thought he was coming to plan an attack on Iran with the United States.
And Trump said, yeah, we're not doing that.
We want to negotiate directly with Iran and get a deal.
Of course, Netanyahu had to come back and pretend that he was very happy with what he got at the White House.
And he basically said, yeah, we also want a deal, and the deal should be along the lines of the Libyan model.
And of course, the Libyan model was...
Saying to Gaddafi, hey, if you give up all your weapons of mass destruction, we're going to integrate you into the community.
We're going to let you have all these great benefits.
We're going to lift sanctions on you.
And, you know, in less than a decade, NATO is bombing Libya in order to dislodge his regime.
And he ended up getting, you know, sexually assaulted, raped to death with a broomstick on the sidewalk in Tripoli.
And so to say to the Iranians, yeah, we're going to deal with you.
Just follow what...
Gaddafi did.
Obviously, no country in the world would agree to that, knowing Gaddafi's outcome.
But then there's this more subtle attempt on Republicans, the part of Republicans like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and that crowd to say, we'll get a deal, but the only deal can be Iran completely dismantles its nuclear program and basically agrees to stop funding various proxies and the like.
Just basically Entirely dismantling Iran in a way that would be humiliating and highly destructive, leaving Iran very vulnerable.
And as you say, there's no way they could get that.
But there's getting so desperate that Lindsey Graham even said, look, if you don't get the deal that we want, that we're laying out with these conditions, you won't even get it through the Senate.
Like, it won't even be a treaty that we are willing to approve.
Now, they didn't do the treaty.
Approval by Congress in the first deal, but that was why it was able to be nullified.
So they're really threatening Trump in quite an overt way.
And as you said, Netanyahu is very shrewd.
He's very clever, very conniving.
I'm sure they have a lot of attacks planned as well if this gets too close.
Do you think Trump can withstand all that?
Yes.
Yes, I think he can.
I think he's unprecedented.
I think he's in good shape.
He seems to be thriving.
There's sort of a joke on staff that he should spend every weekend in the Middle East.
He seems to be in his element.
And he seems like he cares.
I mean, this is the point that I think bears repeating.
If Trump simply wanted to cash out, coast, he could have done that.
I mean, he had defeated all of his haters last autumn.
He had the world's most powerful CEOs in the front row in his inauguration in a servile sort of show of force.
If he wanted to just pass his tax cut, do sort of blob, hawkish maneuvers, take a whack at Obamacare for no reason again, he could have done that, could have maintained and consolidated GOP support, probably counted his approval ratings in the '40s.
And lived happily ever after.
He is doing what he has been talking about off and on for four decades.
I'm not implying that he is, per se, marinated in the kinds of things.
You know, he's not reading every single column on our website.
But he is well aware that he represents a different strain within the Republican Party and within American politics.
You know, I mean, it's been sort of talked to death with the Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan.
Strain of conservative anti-globalism that started in the 90s.
And he seems like he very much wants to see it through.
It's personal.
He is a foreign policy president.
He seems most engaged on it.
It's where he can take quickest action.
He's very used to that as the sort of monarch of his family business.
And I think he's rolling and is not going to stop.
I mean, he's taken on so many opponents in his life.
Netanyahu is potentially a dangerous and wily one, but it is a dance I think he can succeed at.
All right, last question.
Just I'd be remiss if I didn't ask.
There's another major war that's still raging on that we don't talk about much and haven't for quite some time, which is the war in Ukraine still backed by NATO and the United States against Russia.
And Trump, you know, made a lot of these campaign promises, oh, I would have it resolved in 24 hours.
And I think he's right.
Everyone understood that that was hyperbolic.
But I also think it was a bit glib because I don't think he really appreciated the importance of this war to Russia, the fact that they weren't going to just end it to please him.
They're going to want a lot of concessions and extractions.
They've lost a lot of lives in this war.
They've, you know, endured a lot in order to get there, sort of like what you were describing.
With Trump, they're not going to just agree to an end to the war to make Trump happy.
What do you think is the likelihood that within, say, a relatively short period of time, say the next three months, that some kind of an agreement can be fostered between the two or with Trump to put a real end to the war?
I think it is An uphill battle right now.
The Russians have seemingly dug in.
I think the chance for a deal in the first phase, the early 100, 150 days of Trump's presidency has passed.
But I would say Trump's capacity to move quickly and surprise.
I mean, we saw it this week where they announced a potential Putin-Zelensky meeting.
On Thursday in Istanbul, amidst all of this other stuff that was going on, is the blueprint of how this could kind of work.
I think what's going on, two things I would note on Russia.
Number one, it's not entirely delinked from what is going on with the Middle East and Iran.
Of course, the Iranians and the Russians are allies, and the sort of globalist or neocon cast of mind is very keen to link those two.
Number two, the Europeans themselves sort of link it.
They see the Russians as they're far less likely to have an accommodative approach to Iran than maybe they would have had 10 years ago.
So I think that's relevant.
And then two, the Russian demands I mean, the official Putin line right now, I believe, is that they effectively want territory they haven't annexed.
They want all of these provinces where the battle lines are.
Say what you will for annexation.
At least it's pretty clean.
You just take the territory and it's yours.
Demanding territory that you haven't actually conquered is a new one.
My understanding is that, or at least one speculation on it, is that they are looking for some sort of security guarantees or security controls.
I don't want to say it's quite Weimarizing the Ukrainians, but I would imagine they're pretty nervous about what the Ukrainians would do, even if Trump got a deal.
I think it's pretty clear.
Maybe your audience will disagree.
I think it's pretty clear the Ukrainians did Nord Stream.
And then additionally, I think it's pretty clear that the Ukrainians have the intellectual capital in the country to potentially rebuild their nuclear program.
So I think those are both causes of anxiety to the Russians and, you know, something that Trump's going to have to handle.
But again, a year from the inauguration, you know, much like with Richard Nixon, who Trump is often compared to, if Trump doesn't get these wars off his table, you know, within a year or so, they're not Biden's wars anymore.
The Trump's wars.
And I think he's keenly aware of that.
Yeah, you know, I remember about a year or two into Obama's presidency, he had, you know, made all these grandiose promises, inspired, you know, millions of young people with this transformative change he had planned to bring.
You know, he was a very, like, generational, inspirational figure.
And, you know, a year, year and a half into his presidency, it was like, eh, you know, just you seem very comfortable with the status quo.
The way things work in Washington and his excuse was he used this metaphor where he said the United States is like a gigantic ocean liner where like if you want to change directions you can't just like 180 degrees turn the boat around the way you can with a car.
All you can do is just kind of like millimeter by millimeter steer it in a slightly different direction and over time it gets to a different course and Trump is the proof of the lie of that metaphor.
And that is what I think the Biden people have expressed jealousy of.
Like, wow, you can just go in and break all the rules and all the protocols and meet with whoever you want and talk to whoever you want and get results.
You know, I do think that's been the most impressive part of Trump's presidency.
I always thought that was the big potential.
The Trump presidency, Seymour Hurst described it as like only Trump can be the circuit breaker.
You know, sometimes you break circuits and you get bad things, but sometimes you rebuild and you get things that are much better.
So we'll see how this all plays out.
But I definitely think there's a lot of spark and that spark is going to produce and is already producing some serious change.
I agree with you on that as well.
All right.
Thank you so much, Kurt, for Being with us tonight, I'm really a fan of your work and learn a lot from you, so I'm really glad to have had you on the show.
Thanks, Glenn.
All right, have a good evening.
All right.
you Thank you.
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Every Friday night, unless we have something else planned, but for the most part, every Friday night, we now have a Q&A session where we take questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our local community.
They put it on our local platform, and we pick a nice, diverse range of questions and try to get to as many as possible, but giving, you know, a good, thoughtful answer to them.
And we're going to do that tonight.
But before I get to that, I just have to get something off my chest and just excuse the rant if it sounds petulant.
As many of you know, we did a segment last night on the trend of red state governors, Republican governors, and Republican legislatures banning the sale or distribution of lab-based meat, which a lot of people have started to want to buy because they see it as an alternative to the disgusting and morally grotesque.
Filthy alternative of factory farms.
People don't want to buy from factory farms.
But they also don't want to go vegan.
They still want to eat meat.
So this is like a middle ground where they can eat meat, but it doesn't require the slaughter of animals, the torture of animals, and all of this.
And I found it very odd that Republican governors from a party that has long said that they believe in the free market and they hate a nanny state, hate paternalism in government.
You know, we gave examples like Michael Bloomberg tried to limit the size, the mega sizes of soda that are sold, and conservatives went berserk, even though it was just for New York City, saying, how dare you?
You don't intervene in our lives and tell us what we can drink.
You're not our nanny.
And even Michelle Obama's program to encourage kids to exercise and eat better, just encourage them.
Republicans and conservatives went ballistic about it as well.
How dare you?
And yet now you have conservative governors, Republican governors, banning...
A food product that has been tested repeatedly to be safe and has been approved for distribution in the U.S. by the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration and approved in many other countries as well, Singapore and Israel and places throughout Europe.
So it's all on the federal level approved, found safe, and eligible for sale.
And yet these governors are introducing laws to ban it, and they're not even pretending to care about The health effects of it.
They're not saying we're banning this because we believe it's unhealthy.
I mean, there's all sorts of foods that are deeply unhealthy.
McDonald's and junk food and Doritos.
Governors aren't banning that.
So they're not even pretending they're banning it because of health concerns.
They're admitting the reason we're banning lab-based meat is because we have our own meat industry, our own industrial meat suppliers who, coincidentally— Give a lot of money to the legislature of that state and to these governors.
And they're admitting we want to ban lab meat not because we think it's bad for you, but because we want to eliminate competition for this industry of our state.
We don't want them to have competition.
There's no free market.
We're the central planners.
We decide which industry should succeed and which one shouldn't, not based on the free market and consumer choice, but based on our dictates.
And they've actually made it a criminal offense.
For adults to sell lab-based meat, even though it's approved on the federal level, it's safe, to other adults who want to buy it.
And when I first noted this, and the amazement that it's coming from this party that has long claimed to be leaving the free market and hate communist planning and central planning and nanny states and all that, I heard all these responses that I just couldn't understand.
You know, a lot of people saying, like, I find lab meat disgusting.
You're not going to force me to eat that.
And I kept saying, no one cares if you like it or not.
If you don't like it, you don't have to eat it.
No one wants to force you to eat it.
No one cares what you eat.
Eat all the meat you want.
You don't have to eat any lab.
The point is that other people who want lab-based meat should be able to buy it if they want.
And you should be able to buy all the food you want.
And also people kept coming and saying, you know, oh, we're doing this because there's no way lab meat can be healthy.
And then I would say, but these governors aren't even claiming there's a health concern with these foods.
They're admitting they're doing it to eliminate the competition for their meat industry that funds them.
And I couldn't get this through people's minds on social media because it's very difficult to do.
And that's why I decided I was going to do a segment on it last night because then I could lay out the argument very clearly.
And I kept, and I'm sure people who watch it remember, like every five or seven minutes I was saying, look, I know some of you watching.
Are thinking to yourselves, how dare these vegans tell me what to eat?
I think lab meat's disgusting.
I don't want to eat lab meat.
And I kept saying, we don't care what you eat.
Nobody's trying to convince you that lab meat, lab-grown meat is good.
No one's trying to convince you to go vegan.
No one cares what you eat.
I don't even eat lab-grown meat.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone to eat it.
I kept saying, I know there are people probably in the chat listening who I know are having this response.
So I kept going out of my way to very clearly say, this isn't about trying to convince you to eat anything.
This isn't about trying to sell you on lab-based meat.
I don't care what you eat.
This isn't about defending the health benefits of lab-based meat.
It's only about one issue, that state governors should not be acting as our parents or as some communist centralized committee.
Dictating which food should thrive and which one should be eaten and which shouldn't be eaten.
This is something so basic to Republican and conservative politics.
And so even when I had my guest on, Emma Camp, the associate editor of Reason, I kept saying to her, look, I know people are thinking, oh, these are two vegans trying to convince people to buy this.
We both kept saying, we don't care.
You don't have to buy it.
No one cares if you buy it.
The issue is the tyrannical banning of it for the grounds of Protection of the industries that fund these governors.
And so I put these two segments, obviously we put them on Rumble first.
That's where they're broadcast live.
But then 12 hours later we put them on social media, Twitter and YouTube.
And we put these two of these parts of this segment on YouTube.
And I'd never look at the comments on YouTube because there's too much going on.
I don't have time for it.
But for whatever reason our team put it up and I decided to look at the comments just trying to see like Did I make clear to people who I know hate lab-based meat, it's kind of part of the culture war, we want to eat animal slaughtered meat.
Did I at least, with all these caveats that I kept stopping the segment to make to make sure people understood what I was saying, I wasn't saying, did it at least get through?
And I just felt like every top comment was like, sorry, can't agree with you on this one.
Lab-based meat is disgusting.
You're not going to get us to eat it.
What I was saying every five minutes was not the argument we're trying to make.
Or they would say they should ban it.
It's probably not healthy.
And I would say the FDA and the U.S. Agriculture Department, through rigorous studies, concluded it's healthy, as have many other countries.
But even still, the governors aren't even pretending that's the reason.
They're not raising that as a concern.
They're admitting it's for this other reason.
The number of comments of people who purported to watch the video but who nonetheless did not get the point and kept thinking like how dare you try to sell us on Lab 8.Me was so prevalent.
It was so massive that I was burning up with frustration like is it that you have to even be clearer and go even further out of your way?
To constantly say what you are and aren't saying when you know there's a likelihood that people will be misunderstanding.
We all misunderstand arguments.
I don't even have a problem with that.
But when you go out of your way to make it so clear that you're not saying X and everybody comes and says, how dare you say X?
You're like, what else do I have to do?
Or is it just that I have to lower my expectation for online discourse?
I've been around for long enough on the internet to understand you can't have very high expectations of online discourse.
But these are people who are in my audience who watch my show.
I guess I have A little bit of higher expectations for them than this.
I felt like I had to get it off my chest.
Maybe you have some suggestions about how this can be made clearer to avoid what I know in certain cases are inevitable misunderstanding as I go out of my way to say, "Don't misunderstand this.
I'm not saying this and I'm not saying that." Or if I just need to accept it and not let it bother me.
Thank you for indulging my diatribe.
Sometimes I have to use a show as a sort of therapy, which I guess was today.
But feel free to check out those YouTube comments.
And I don't know, I think you'll even be surprised at just how prevalent and how hardheaded it was.
And I actually responded to YouTube comments for the first time trying to explain to them.
And it still really wasn't getting through.
All right.
Excuse my indulgence there.
Let's get to the first question.
It is from The Millman.
Who says the following: "Hey Glenn, when it comes to civil liberties, how do A. Trump's deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador without due process?" And B, crackdowns on campus free speech on behalf of our dearest ally Israel.
Compare in severity to civil liberties abuses of other presidents.
Examples, Obama's drone bombing of the United States citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdurrahman al-Awlaki, his, quote, war on whistleblowers, including the imprisonment and torture of Chelsea Manning.
And his continued use of the Patriot Act and continued use of Guantanamo Bay, Bush's implementation of the Patriot Act, use of CIA black sites, an extraordinary rendition, legal embrace of torture, which led to Abu Ghraib, opening of Guantanamo Bay, and then there's abuses by Lincoln and Wilson and FDR during large-scale wars.
And then finally, how sincere do you believe Democrats are in their opposition to this?
All right.
Let me just update you on some news that happened today along these lines, and then I'll get to that.
As you probably remember, about two months ago, that judge, Judge Bosberg, who had been the target of a lot of hatred on Republicans in the Trump White House, because he said he enjoined the deportation of Venezuelans, including to El Salvador, under the Alien Enemies Act, saying that you can't support them without due process.
The Trump White House appealed that.
It went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court unanimously, nine to zero, including Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, all the justices the right wing loves, many, three of them Trump supporters, said that, all nine said, you cannot remove people in the country illegally under the Alien Enemies Act, which is a completely different statute than ordinary deportation.
Ordinary deportation, you just take them to Homeland Security.
If they can't show their hair legally, Homeland Security says you can deport them and then they're gone.
It's very quick.
It's very fast.
When you want to do it under the Alien Enemies Act, which is this radical statute that had only been invoked three times during wartime, World War I, World War II, and the War of 1812, which Trump has now invoked for immigration, they said the Supreme Court did nine to zero.
You can't call them alien enemies and treat them as such by sending them to El Salvador to prison without allowing them reasonable notice That you're going to deport them so that they can then get a lawyer and go into court and have a habeas corpus hearing where they have a chance at least to prove their innocence, to dispute the accusations against them.
And what also had the Supreme Court in that case also ruled was that, and this was by five to four, that these cases shouldn't be with Judge Bosberg because it shouldn't be in Washington, D.C. The right venue to bring these cases is where the detainees are in Texas or Louisiana or whatever.
So they had a disagreement on where the cases should be brought.
But by nine to zero, they said, if you want to remove somebody as an alien enemy, you have to give them a habeas hearing or at least notice that you're going to do it so they can ask for a habeas hearing so they have a chance to contest the accusations.
So they can say, no, this tattoo I have is not a Trenda Agua tattoo.
It's an autism tattoo, which is one of the things that ICE agents misread.
Or it can test the allegation that they're part of this gang.
And all nine justices of the Supreme Court said that, but because on a five to four split, they said it shouldn't be with Judge Boberg.
It should just be brought in states where the detainees are.
A lot of media figures who are loyal to MAGA and the White House itself, Stephen Miller, said, "Yeah, we won!" We scored a huge victory.
And Stephen Miller even said by 9-0, the court, that was a different case.
But the idea was, they were told the MAGA was, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor, no more Judge Boesberg, which is true.
But on the real issue, are they entitled to due process?
Can the Trump administration just pick them up and ship them out?
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that, no, you have to give them a habeas corpus hearing, and you have to give them reasonable notice ahead of the removal.
Sufficient to give them time to go in and get a lawyer and get to court.
The Trump administration took that decision and they started giving the people they wanted to remove under the Alien Enemies Act 24 hours, saying 24 hours from now we are notifying you that you will be removed.
Now obviously it's very difficult, almost impossible, in 24 hours to find a lawyer, hire a lawyer, prepare the complaint and get into a court with enough time to stop you from being removed.
They got an emergency ruling that prevented them from removing the detainees until the courts could consider it.
And today, the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 ruling, it was just Alito and Thomas in dissent, but Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were the three liberals, said that, no, one day is obviously not enough.
You can't give people a one-day hearing.
And so they upheld the injunction on shipping these people out.
And I know there are a lot of people who believe or who think that due process rights only apply to citizens.
But you can think it should be that way, but the Constitution isn't written like that.
The Constitution says due process shall be for all persons in the United States, not citizens.
For 150 years, courts have ruled that anyone in the country, not just citizens, have the right of due process.
And then in 2008, the Supreme Court said that even Guantanamo detainees have the right to a habeas corpus hearing.
And once they find, like I said, you can't just put them in prison for life with no opportunity to contest the charges, even though they're not citizens.
And once they got that right, huge numbers of them went to court and proved their innocence.
And that's why so many of them are released.
So that's the idea of due process is you can't punish people without a hearing because it might cause a mistake.
It's not me saying it.
It's the conservatives' favorite justices saying that under the Alien Enemies Act, you can't put people in camps the way FDR did.
You can't deport them as Nazis the way we did in World War II unless they first just get a hearing.
And even accused Nazi sympathizers got hearings in World War II.
So that's the state of the rule.
This discussion and debate all comes from the War on Terror.
And I want to tell you how.
It's all totally related.
As some of you know, I started my journalism career specifically to write about the abuse of the War on Terror.
And I'll tell you what the core flaw was in the War on Terror.
The core mistake and legal and constitutional error, but also moral error, was that we hate terrorists.
Terrorists attacked us on 9 /11.
The Bush administration accuses somebody of being a terrorist, not proves it, just labels them a terrorist, labels them an enemy combatant.
No evidence presented, no hearing held, no opportunity for the person to contest it.
Even American citizens they did this to.
Once the government labels you a terrorist, all bets are off.
Now the government can do anything they want to you.
They can put you in prison for life, in the middle of an ocean.
They can torture you.
They can kidnap you off the streets of Europe and send you to Syria or Egypt to be tortured or put you in CIA black sites underground.
And it was also used to justify NSA warrantless spying on Americans in the world by saying, yeah, we're doing it to stop terrorism.
And anyone who objected to it or questioned it and said, wait, you have to get people to do process before you can punish them.
It's not just enough to call them terrorists or you can't just bomb a country by calling them terrorists.
But enough people had been...
Indoctrinated sufficiently to believe that terrorism was such an evil that the minute the government utters the word terrorism, you have to agree with anything the government does.
And if you object, as I did and other people did, like, wait a minute, this is a total assault on our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and search warrants and our due process rights.
What we always heard was, why are you defending terrorists?
Are you pro-terrorists?
Do you want us to stop punishing terrorists?
And we were like, No, but the whole point is you don't know who is a terrorist and who isn't until they get a hearing, until they have the opportunity to disprove the accusations.
But it was such an emotional time.
The word terrorism just sent people into these apoplectic rage that they didn't want to hear anything about constitutional rights or legal niceties.
It's when everybody locked up or killed who was called a terrorist, whether they were or not.
And this is exactly what's happening now with immigrants.
I absolutely understand, I completely empathize with, and I think there's validity to the very serious concerns about what happens to a country when you just have unfettered open borders immigration where just millions of people who you don't vet, don't know who they are, just pour into the country.
It creates legal issues, social problems, economic problems, inter-group resentments.
It's a serious problem.
But you can't just throw away the Constitution and legal structures and legal rights and courts in order to solve it.
The whole point of having a Constitution is like, yeah, sometimes it's going to make it harder for you to do what you want, for the government to do what you want.
And I promise you, one reason why a lot of criminals get away, violent criminals, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, the worst criminals, is because of the Fourth Amendment.
That prohibits the police from entering your home without a search warrant.
Even though they suspect there's somebody inside or evidence inside, they have to have reasonable cause and probable cause with the court or the Fourth Amendment right of a warrant that prevents the police from listening to your calls without a warrant.
This helps criminals a lot.
It makes it much harder for the police to keep communities safe by capturing criminals.
But we decided as a country, on the founding, we want the government.
It's okay to have the government.
Have barriers and impediments to catching criminals.
Same thing with all the rights in trial, the right against self-incrimination, the right to a jury of your peers, the right to counsel.
All these things make it harder for the state to convict criminals, but we decided we're willing to have some criminals go free because those rights are important, even though we know it'll obstruct the police and the government from doing what they should, which is putting criminals in jail.
But we're at the point where, just like we were with terrorism, 15, 20 years ago, the minute you say illegal immigrant, people just shut off their brain.
Like, I don't care what you do, just get them out of our country.
Whatever you have to do, no courts, no rights, no constitution, nothing.
Just the only thing that matters is getting them out.
I guess saving the United States by incinerating its core founding documents and constitutional framework.
And so I do think a lot of these Attacks on due process rights in the name of immigration have a very similar pedigree to the way civil rights were destroyed just by uttering the word terrorism because a lot of these people, again, if they're here illegally, bring them to DHS and they'll be out of the country in a couple days.
But if you want to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, where now you're treating them as criminals, you can put them in prison, you can send them wherever you want.
That has to have a hearing.
You can't accuse somebody of being a member of a violent gang and punish them on the basis of that without giving them a hearing.
But so many people are so convinced that there's no bigger problem than illegal immigration, and maybe that's true.
Nonetheless, these constitutional structures and laws and courts are there for a very good reason to protect your rights as well.
So I think there's this very close similarity.
And then, of course, as far as the free speech attacks on Israel, critics are concerned and pro-Palestinian.
Activists are concerned.
It's very much like the war on terror.
It's totally related.
The minute I bring up, you know, deporting people for criticizing Israel or imposing much more stringent hate speech codes on college campus to prevent a much wider array of criticism of Israel than previously was barred, the answer immediately from everybody who wants to defend the Trump administration's free speech attacks is Yeah, these are terrorists.
So get them out of our country.
You know, terrorism used to mean, to the extent it had a meaning, you use violence or the threat of violence to frighten a country or a government or a society into changing their policies.
Threatening violence against civilians.
College campuses or people who wrote op-eds against Israel who are now being punished did any of that.
They didn't use violence.
They didn't blow things up.
They didn't threaten to blow things up.
I mean, yeah, some of them damaged buildings, not all of them.
That's not violence, property damage.
But they just label them terrorists, and then your brain is supposed to shut off, and you're like, oh, terrorists.
They have no right to get them out of here.
It's the same thing.
It's all very interconnected.
And yeah, we did have other abuses before, historical abuses like FDR putting Japanese Americans into basically internment camps, concentration camps en masse with no trial or accusation because they just feared that people of Japanese heritage would be less loyal to the United States and more loyal to Japan, which we were fighting in World War II.
And of course, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.
I mean, that was the Civil War.
An existential threat to the country.
You had, you know, horrific battles where Americans were fighting against Americans.
You had like 50,000 people dying in battle.
And even there, that is kind of controversial.
But, you know, as a Trump-appointed judge already ruled, Trump can't even invoke the Alien Enemies Act because we're not at war or an invasion from a foreign nation.
You have to be very careful as well about allowing the government to exaggerate the condition and the threat that we're under, because once you do that, basically you give power to the government to do anything.
And if they can deport people under the Alien Enemies Act or send anybody out of the country they want with no habeas corpus hearing, obviously that can apply to American citizens as well.
Stephen Miller was talking about suspending habeas corpus, like Lincoln did, the only time in our country when it happened.
And if they can suspend habeas corpus for non-citizens, they can suspend habeas corpus for you as well, for American citizens.
So a lot of these things they're typeling with are very dangerous, and I understand the emotion around terrorism and illegal immigration.
That's always how tyranny and authoritarianism work.
You elevate the fear levels of the population, and then you tell them, the only way we can keep you safe from these dangers that we've convinced you are threatening to you is if you give us unrestrained power.
That's the formula that leads to loss of freedom in every case.
All right.
From K. Kotlis, from Kevin Kotlis.
Hey, Glenn, this is more of a philosophical question, but I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts.
It's very clear that you are deeply committed to principles such as civil rights, free speech, human value, etc.
Do you think there are These are given to us by the law, therefore can be taken away by the government at any time?
Or do you see them grounded in a more transcendent principle that we participate in as human beings and therefore can't be taken away from us even by law?
That's a very complex and philosophical question, as you recognize in the preface.
Probably take a long time for me to lay out my views on that.
So I'll just say a couple things.
First of all, the foundational principle of the country, as was in the Declaration of Independence and many different writings of the founders, including the Federalist Papers, was that the rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution are not, in fact, bestowed by human beings or the state.
They're bestowed by God as in alienable rights that all human beings enjoy.
Whether the government thinks you should have them or not, these are just intrinsic to the state of being human.
These kind of freedoms, the freedom of religion to practice whatever religion you want, even if it's not the preferred one in the state, free speech, due process, all of the rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution come from the Creator, from God, or whatever you can see with that to be.
And without going into my personal views on all of that, I do think there is something intrinsic about the state of being human That bestows on you certain rights.
I think human rights are an inherent part of the condition of being human.
Whether you can say that comes from God or the universe, it doesn't matter.
I think it's the same point that you don't have to have a certain theological alignment with other people who think it comes from a certain conception of God.
But I absolutely think that when we talk about human rights, like the right not to be starved to death in mass on purpose, the right not to be thrown into a dungeon with no Good reason or no proven reason.
The right not to be tortured.
The right not to be under totalitarianism or tyranny.
I do think these are rights that are inherent to the condition of humanity.
And if the government tries to take it away, I think they are not engaging in the prerogatives of law and government.
I think they're undermining and subverting and violating the rights that are embedded within us as birth, as human beings.
All right.
This is from KCM 71. Trump's approach seems to tear all down and rebuild it to the benefit that he sees as worthy.
Is there an opening from the left to take advantage of the destruction of precedent in a system that seems untethered to actually back Trump's attempts at diplomacy and do so with the primary narrative of benefiting wage earners in the general population?
Any suggested strategies?
This is actually a related question from Book Wench.
Do you consider the fact that Democratic Representative Ro Khanna has submitted legislation to codify Trump's drug pricing executive order to be an indication that Democrats are maybe moving away from their anti-Trump focus, or is this just an aberration?
All right, let me answer that second question first.
Bernie Sanders also said, yeah, Trump, your executive order.
To control drug prices, to give most favorite nation status to the United States, to prevent Americans from paying more for drugs that are available for cheaper in other countries.
You know, this has been something Bernie Sanders has been talking about for a long time, that Democrats and liberals have been talking about forever and yet never really did anything about it.
And then Trump comes and signs his executive order, which no Democrat...
Would be able to publicly oppose.
They may oppose it because they're funded by health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, and they may actually really be against it and work to subvert it in the bowels of the House with lobbyists, but they're never going to come out and publicly oppose it.
And I think a lot of Democrats do support it.
And their argument has been, if you do it by executive order, you know it's going to happen.
You did it in the first term.
Big farmers are going to sue in court.
They're going to say your executive order.
It doesn't have a basis of law.
You don't have the right to do this without Congress.
Courts are going to rule that you need Congress to do it, and therefore it's just going to be a symbolic gesture that changes nothing.
And so the Democrats are saying, look, if you really believe in this, let us in Congress work together in a bipartisan way to enact legislation that embodies the key tenets of your executive order into law so that they're no longer vulnerable to legal challenge by big pharma.
Now, I haven't seen much receptiveness to that from Trump, and I think part of it is that the White House is interested in constantly creating the perception that the president can do whatever he wants and doesn't need Congress for it.
I think I mentioned this on a show the other night, that the Bush-Cheney administration position was, "We can invade Iraq.
We can attack Iraq, start a new war with Iraq.
We don't need Congress to do it." And so Congress was left begging, please let us vote on this.
And they were trying to say, we'll vote for it, but it'll be a much stronger policy if we support it.
And then Bush Cheney basically said, all right, if you want to vote on it, vote on it.
We don't really care.
We're going to do it anyway, but you can vote on it.
And it passed.
So executive branches, especially ones that believe in a very robust model of Article 2, often want to establish the fact that they can do whatever they want without Congress.
But in this case, If Trump really means it, if Trump is really trying to do this, you would think he would let Democrats do it.
But I don't think it indicates some broader willingness on the part of Democrats to work with Trump or to renounce this reflexive opposition to whatever Trump wants.
I just think that this issue, lowering prescription drug costs, has been so central to what Democrats have claimed they believe in for decades.
There's just no way on this one issue.
They can oppose Trump.
As far as the broader question is concerned, you know, one of the things that I have seen is that the reason Democrats have so many positions that they now hold, even though they were anathema to left liberal politics for decades, is simply because Trump took the opposite position.
So when Trump started critiquing and rallying against the corruption and malice of the deep state, And their nefarious interference and influence in our domestic politics and the CIA, the NSA, the FBI.
Long-term left-wing views, going back to the Cold War, kind of fundamental to the left-wing views to be very skeptical of and hostile toward these three-letter agencies that comprise the deep state.
But soon as Trump started opposing those agencies, Democrats united to support them.
And now you barely ever hear Democrats criticizing these agencies.
If a Republican criticizes these agencies, Democrats will say, how dare you?
These are patriotic men and women working to keep our country safe.
Remember the CIA and the FBI, which have long been bugaboos of civil libertarians on the left for most of the 20th century and for good reason.
And even when it comes to things like this Middle East trip to To the Persian Gulf and improving relations with the Emiratis and the Saudis and the Qataris, Hakeem Jeffery stood up and basically condemned Trump for meeting with Qatar in Qatar and said Qatar is the country that funds our enemies like Iran and Hamas, you know, like reading from the AIPAC script.
Who wouldn't want our country to have better diplomatic relations with countries with a lot of money and a lot of influence in their region?
But it's because Trump does it that Democrats then immediately oppose it, like reflexively oppose it.
Same thing with tariffs.
You know, the Democrats, or at least the left, have long hated free trade, these free trade agreements, globalist institutions.
The left famously protested against the world.
Trade organization in 1999 in Seattle.
And from there, that became a foundational view of left global politics.
You know, the free trade is what has de-industrialized the working class in our cities.
And then Trump comes out and says, yeah, I agree.
Free trade has been terrible for the United States.
We need to get jobs back to the United States by using tariffs, which have long been a very popular policy among unions and the left.
And then suddenly Trump announces it, and they're like, "He's crashing our stock market!" As though now the most important thing for Democrats is to keep Wall Street happy.
And you've seen this in so many instances, this radical reversal of Democratic Party values and policies and positions, primarily for no reason other than the fact that once Trump takes a position, they automatically take the opposite.
If you're feeding for so long on a closed discourse and narrative that tells you that Trump is a fascist, Trump is Hitler, Trump is ending our democracy, Trump is a Putin asset, a Kremlin agent.
I guess if you really believe those things, it kind of makes sense.
Like, we're not going to really want to work with you, given that you're Hitler.
Like, sometimes Hitler might have a good idea, but I'm still not going to work with Hitler.
But there are so many opportunities for Democrats to work with that wing of the Republican Party that Trump represents.
In order to accomplish things they claim to want to accomplish, but the reality is the vast majority of the Democratic Party does not see opportunity and potential alliances with the Trump, MAGA, nationalistic, non-interventionist wing.
They have much more in common with the Republican establishment.
They're way more comfortable working with Mitch McConnell, or Paul Ryan, or Tom Tillis, or John Thune.
They see much more in common with those people than they see with the Republican Party.
It's the reason why Trump nominated some people who were against wars, who were very vocal supporters of Lena Kahn and the anti-monopolist, anti-trade agenda that Democrats came to believe in, people like Matt Gaetz, who really was opposed to so many wars, who had so many views that Democrats could have shared.
Tulsi Gabbard, who was in the Congress for eight years as a Democrat.
And it's notable that RFK Jr., also a lifelong Democrat.
Those are the people the Democrats tried to stop.
But the Republican establishment appointees, like Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe at CIA, they breezed through the Congress.
In fact, Rubio got approved unanimously in the Senate.
Because the Democrats feel much greater comfort with and alignment with the Republican establishment wing rather than the populist wing of the Republican Party.
And I think that's all part of the reason why the character of Democrats has become so hated because they're basically just this amorphous, belief-free, status quo-perpetuating wing of the establishment.
And there's basically no way to make yourself more unpopular more quickly than to be that.
And Democrats just can't find a way.
They're trying to change rhetorically.
They're trying to get personality implants.
But the foundational identity of the Democratic Party continues to be defined by their affinity for the establishment and reflexive opposition to whatever Trump does, even when he's doing good things and popular things, that I think the Democrats are going to be stuck for a very long time, even if Trump ends up leaving office as an unpopular president.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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