Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
Glenn takes your questions on the Trump administration's war with Harvard, fallout from the murders of two Israeli Embassy staffers, libertarianism, why he doesn't like the term "gaslighting," and more. Plus: Lee Fang on the major unanswered questions from the Epstein files. ---------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Read Lee Fang's article here 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 at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, there was a lot of major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our local members tonight.
I'd expect nothing less from my viewers.
And we'll try to answer as many of those as we can.
And before we do that, we will talk to the friend of the show and the intrepid independent journalist Li Fong about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack, which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and other residue from his presence.
Before we get to that, a couple of programming notes.
First of all, as independent media, we do rely on the support of our members and viewers.
In order to do the independent journalism that we do here every night, in order to help with that, you just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It takes you directly to that community.
You have a lot of interactive features there.
We put live exclusive video content there.
We have written professionalized transcripts of every show we do here.
We take only your questions every Friday night on our Q&A session, and most of all, it is the As one more program note, I will be traveling in the United States all of next week, including in places like Scottsdale, Arizona, and New York, and Portland, Maine, and Seattle.
I'm actually doing a debate in Seattle, sponsored by NPR.
We'll get you the...
Like I said, we'll post the details on our local community and elsewhere.
Hope to see you there, but we will have excellent guest hosts sitting in for me all of next week.
I might do actually a show if I can find the time while I'm traveling, so look for that as well.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week is a good friend of the show, the independent journalist who I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places, now has one of the best substacks in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentary as well.
We want to welcome to the show Lee Fon Lee.
It was always great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Hey, Glenn, great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials last night in Washington.
We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues.
I don't think we need to.
Go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders.
I don't think any moral framework that at least I recognize as valid suggests that it is anything other than unjust and horrific.
But there's a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including essentially immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticized Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way or over some imaginary arbitrary.
and we see it more and more escalating on both the far left and far right, whether it's police killings, far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether it's the far right who take on, who grab,
And now we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim that all People who support peace in Palestine or justice or equal rights in that region are somehow guilty of violence,
that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a ceasefire in Gaza.
I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying, you know, of, We want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football or partisan cudgel to beat our political opponents.
You know, I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics.
At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9 /11.
Ironically, he became a sort of resistance liberal.
His name was Charles Johnson.
He wrote this blog called The Little Green Football.
And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment, and he would title it Religion of Peace.
And he would just publish some sort of random, you know, robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslims somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace.
And obviously you can do that to any race.
You could do that to black people.
You could do that to white people.
You could do that to Christians.
You could do that to Muslims.
You could do that to Jews.
Recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same-sex couples.
I remember all these people, you know, replying to me would show me stories about gay men molesting children, and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20. Of some uncle molesting his niece at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter.
It's such a stupid, obviously fallacious way to try and demonize a certain group of people.
And obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be anti-Semitic, even though you can find, you know, literally every day, Israel supporters in the United States saying the most.
Nauseating things about Gazan.
I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are our enemies because they grew up to be terrorists.
There's no such thing as innocent Gazans.
One official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men, 13 and above, so 13-year-old men, we're calling them, and put them on another side and just execute all the men.
It's such sophistry to try and argue this way, and it's done so often.
Well, it connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments.
They're not logical.
They're not rational.
They're certainly not empirical.
You know, it's very emotionally arresting when you see You know, people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos.
And the same for an immigrant killing a...
You can see why someone could say that's unjust.
This person was not supposed to be there.
There are guests in our home, and they're out killing or raping individuals.
Therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous.
It's that type of argument.
And it's just kind of being driven into overdrive with social media, with kind of the incentives around war.
You have very well-financed Pro-Israel advocacy groups.
It's not just AIPAC, their super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction.
And so for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents to continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government.
Of course, that's what they'll do.
But this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years.
It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that's very crude.
It kind of appeals to the most base instinct among us.
And it really should be rejected.
You know, there are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize this tragic event.
But it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, we should have more censorship, we should support crackdowns on students, You know, what makes it so much worse is, you know, over the past decade, let's say, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex or its zenith,
depending on your perspective, with things like #MeToo and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2020.
And just then the kind of wave that that produced of all sorts of language controls and taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions.
Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them.
Most of them, not all, but most of them have now done an exact 180.
And all day yesterday, you heard people saying things like there's systemic racism against Jews.
Your speech is inciting anti-Semitism and bigotry.
Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected?
And within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech in order to prevent it and protect these minority groups.
It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction.
One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker, who was the very well-known biologist at Harvard.
And he's also a very vocal supporter of Israel, but he's been a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere.
And he has an article in the New York Times today that I thought was super interesting.
Because it's also about, in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard, which I want to ask you about, too.
And he said, "For what it's worth, I have experienced no anti-Semitism in my two decades at Harvard, nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members." So, you know, we're talking here about this epidemic.
I was reading some people today, yesterday, rather, who were Jewish people in media.
Jake Sherman was one.
There were others saying it's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.
And not only did I live in the United States for I think 37 years as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time, I'm gonna be there next week, I've never once experienced an anti-Semitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor have anyone I know.
And yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated So he says, "I have experienced no anti-Semitism in my two decades at Harvard, nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members.
"My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay "by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, "who called the claim that one in four Jewish students "feel, quote, physically unsafe on campus, "an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously "as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah "around campus each day.
So that's not just a Jewish student, that's someone who wears a kippah around campus every day, and he's saying it's preposterous.
That people are saying there's some epidemic of anti-Semitism at Harvard.
He goes on, quote, the obsession with anti-Semitism at Harvard represents, ironically, a surrender to the critical social justice credo that the only wrong worthy of condemnation is group against group bigotry.
Instead of directing rebuttal to the flaws of the anti-Zionist platform, such as its approval of violence against civilians and its historical blind spots, critics have tried to tar it with the sin of anti-Semitism, but that can devolve into futile semantic What he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was fighting against when it was coming from the left,
these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now flooding our discourse from Israel supporters, of which he's one.
And yet he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction.
Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate.
You know, the tools of wokeness that, you know, these kind of studies that claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you know, you look back in 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing.
What was the name of that group?
Stop Asian Hate?
Stop Asian Hate, yeah, which was a spin-out from Chinese for Affirmative Action.
But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian-American hate crimes.
So, you know, they were basically grouping actual forms of violence, which, you know, a lot of times you don't know the intent.
Perhaps someone of one race attacks someone else of another race.
Is that a hate crime?
It's really context dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those.
And then they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets.
of something that he claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or a likely true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China.
Now, for the antisemitism kind of You look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show 300%, 500%, 1000% increase in anti-Semitism.
You look at the footnotes and it's the exact same dynamic.
It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies.
that's deemed now anti-Semitic.
It's groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led Each of these rallies in the ADL's report are tagged as anti-Semitism hate events.
So that's how they're quantifying this gigantic skyrocketing anti-Semitism problem.
Now, this would be laughably absurd if it wasn't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech.
And to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening.
the Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they're cutting federal funding, when they're attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which counts some criticism of Israel.
And it's part of this whole investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.
I mean, if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off.
any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of anti-Semitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured.
And yet, I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds.
This is a school that acts like a hedge fund that's accumulated huge amounts of wealth, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back.
Or even getting rid of some of their departments that even study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history.
I mean, it just kind of shocks the conscious that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence.
I mean, the idea that Harvard is someplace that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny.
At that time, the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood.
And you just can't believe it's even being said.
By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day, when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was, it was really the Lancet letter, you know, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet letter that, you
was like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever.
And then it immediately became canon.
That anyone who even raised the possibility that it might have come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people.
In fact, the New York Times COVID reporter, who became the COVID reporter when their real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something.
With him, and they were offended by what he said, and so they got fired.
So they put this woman in, and she said, you know, one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day.
What always drove me so crazy about this, besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from?
Like, all that mattered is what was the truth?
Like, who cares which theory was more racist?
It was like, where did it actually come from?
But the idea that it was somehow more racist To say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan funded and partnered by the United States and partnered with the United States.
But that was more racist than saying, oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things.
The far more racist theory was the ones they were insisting on to this day insist on.
And it just always drove me crazy.
And of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States.
All right, let me ask you about this.
Article you wrote in your substack, we can put it on the screen.
The title is Jeffrey Epstein's Dark Legacy Still Clouds the Virgin Islands.
And you say legal settlements maintain secrecy for Epstein's affairs in exchange for money to counter sex abuse.
Local Virgin Island politicians are now tapping the funds for earmarks.
So I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him.
What is it that you've been finding?
Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved.
There are still many unanswered questions.
Earlier this year in February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files.
You know, the FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein's homes in 2018, they collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day.
They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia.
Still, you know, nothing's really been released.
The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures.
There's nothing new there.
But, you know, my story takes a look at the other side of this, where the media has not really, the national media has not really paid attention.
Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off.
Politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the U.S., in the territorial U.S., they were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands.
Now, this sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, you know, a form of accountability after his death.
And they really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard and they countersued and alleged that the island officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations.
And from those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents.
Various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth.
As he was bringing young girls, ages between 12 and 15, to his island, custom agents saw that and looked the other way.
They refused to check on their safety.
There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to continue.
It's criminal enterprise.
Now, this piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure.
He quickly settled the lawsuit.
He fired the attorney general leading the J.P. Morgan lawsuit.
He later replaced the attorney general with one of Epstein's own lawyers who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
And as he promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein type Criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing.
Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank.
And legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent.
But for what we do know, it's going to backdated government wages.
It's going to vendor payments.
It's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands.
There's very little transparency on how this money is being used.
And it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor who now controls these funds, almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise.
He was receiving regular donations, gifts from Epstein.
He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks.
Later, pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list.
So while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein mystery, about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, those deserve to be disclosed.
But there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands.
You know, it's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, The Epstein files, as they've been called, was a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media.
And two people in particular who are very influential and popular in that realm.
Went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files.
And those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the assistant director and the director of the FBI.
They, I'm sure you saw one on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents, and the reporter said, the interviewer said, did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?
And they both said, yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself.
We saw the documents.
They were very uncomfortable.
But, you know, they're saying, we saw the documents that prove he killed himself.
Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, run on a platform of making the Epstein files public.
Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that?
But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?
And it's a binary question.
Maybe there's more complexity to it.
But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, four months in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation in part?
On banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released.
Not a single one that wasn't previously public has been released.
Well, we know from, actually, you know, I came onto your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every country that is an influence operation.
In the US that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy, there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel.
There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government, and it's evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations that show the Israeli government is pouring The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions.
One is just generally broadly about the rich and wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him.
They are kind of protected from scrutiny.
If this was any ordinary American, any lower class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice.
because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny.
And then for your question around the Israel issue, I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency.
Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue.
Actually, interestingly enough, within the JP Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process and some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023.
It was really just a...
Many other kind of emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to, quote unquote, manage their money, even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island or to his New York home.
These were kind of details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case.
Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case.
But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country, Um, Yeah, we don't know.
It could be Finland, really any of those Nordic countries.
But the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right?
Like in just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get...
You know, he had a close network, Richard Kahn, Indyke, Erica Keller-Halls, these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations.
In this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world.
If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist.
And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida, when he was, I don't
The U.S. attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got, where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors.
Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time.
And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence, some, like, community service or whatever, and then he was done, and he went back right to cavorting with all the elites.
Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right?
He didn't even spend much of that time in prison.
Right, he served it at home, exactly, exactly.
And Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, like, why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence, he basically said, he did, not basically said, he said, I was told that he was intelligence and to leave him alone.
So there's every reason to believe that He had some connection to foreign intelligence.
There's a lot of people with whom he was close associates, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member.
Les Wexner, who's the multimillionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel.
A lot of people try and say, oh, it was probably Qatar, as though they always try and say, like, oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.
That was something Barry Weiss just published.
I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, That was something we would know and have known very quickly.
And the fact that you have two, like, very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly, they're the ones running the FBI, and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen.
They did that ridiculous, humiliating debacle where they called those right-wing influencers, like, Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, Epstein files, you know, phase one, and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago.
It does really start to make you wonder, doesn't it?
Yeah, I mean, look, reporting these details has not been easy.
You know, some of this is sourced from just the Virgin Island, from my story, is sourced from the Virgin Island.
Legislature.
I talked to lawmakers there.
I looked at litigation files, some of which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023.
But also, you know, the Virgin Islands operates in kind of a weird space, you know, it's a U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures.
I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go.
In person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me, you know, reporting this out over the last few months on a story that, you know, really should have been public way earlier, which was not easy to do.
But it's clear that for Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, you know, they don't have to do all these kind of extra steps that I engaged in.
This is not a question of ability.
This is a question of will.
Do they have the political will?
Do they have the wherewithal to whether the criticism, the pressure from elite groups, potentially intelligence agencies, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and intelligence elite?
And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is, you know, another good reason for people to join your sub stack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do.
All right, let me ask you this last question.
You're somebody who began politics, began journalism, associated primarily with the left.
You worked at a lot, you know, left-wing think tanks.
Not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for the nation.
You worked at the Center for American Progress.
And you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things.
And you began to kind of have a breach with the left.
Around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about.
But crime was a really big one that, you know, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals.
You were particularly incensed by things like Defund the Police, that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
And that has been something that you've been taking seriously for very long, and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there was a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime.
Now you live in California and San Francisco.
There's a lot of crime there, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally.
So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as the flow of immigrants across the border, what do you—
I see a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian, as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral.
If you look at what What the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to SICOT, the maximum security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous.
The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.
Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you?
That was Marco Rubio.
He led that picture of it.
And so just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting.
But broadly speaking, I look at the kind of Confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that, you know, the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs.
And they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers of these kind of temporary visa programs that are, you know, that were created.
These programs have ballooned into kind of internal job replacement programs where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs.
And the Trump administration, which initially back in January rejected attempts to reform these programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs.
This is something that, you know, this is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the kind of more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time.
I don't see any problem with that.
For, you know, the other kind of enforcement areas of just, like, how do you get folks who are in this country illegally?
How do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair?
It's a mixed record, right?
At the end of the day, the Trump administration on a month-to-month basis has deported less than the Biden administration to compare last year.
There are some different variables here.
There are less border crossings this year than last.
You can also compare this year between This year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations.
Again, there's some different variables there.
There's more police-ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year.
There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025.
So it's perhaps not possible.
So it's hard to compare.
If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against on speech, on going after Legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel and focusing on them to deport them, that's clearly absurd.
The Seacott prison is absurd.
I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix.
There's some good and bad.
And, you know, I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet.
The deportation numbers are actually quite low.
Yeah, they've relied on these kind of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength, you know, we're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan, things like that.
But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations, as promised by the Trump campaign.
They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead going after, almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, We're here with green cards or student visas for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel.
And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism.
And people have really not noticed, given all these kind of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador.
The deportation numbers are actually quite low.
All right, Lee, thank you so much.
It was great to see you.
As always, I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon.
I hope you have a good evening.
Thanks, Glenn.
Have a good weekend.
Bye, Leap.
*Music*
If your dog is constantly itching and scratching or dealing with hot spots, you know how bad hot spots are for dogs, you've got to check out Co-defense.
It's an all-natural solution that's been helping so many dogs.
And here's why it's caught my attention.
I've seen firsthand, I have a shelter where we take care of abandoned animals.
I have 25 or 26 rescue dogs at home.
So I work with dogs all the time, and I really do see how often I've seen over the years how they develop these yeast infections, especially in their paws and ears and skinfold.
It's not fatal, usually, but it can make a dog's life really miserable, and it's much more common than people realize.
But the usual treatments, things like steroids and antibiotics and Apoquil and Acetopoint, they might cover up the symptoms for a while, but they don't really fix the root cause.
And in some cases, they actually make things worse over time.
Code Defense is different.
Their daily preventative power works as a dry shampoo, odor eliminator, and anti-itch powder.
But what makes it particularly unique is that it eliminates yeast naturally by changing the terrain on your dog's skin so that yeast and bacteria can no longer survive.
There's no toxic chemicals, no synthetic junk, just safe natural ingredients.
They also make an aloe-based sensitive skin shampoo that calms irritated skin, preserves the natural oils and microbiome, and it's totally free of parabens, sulfates, and anything artificial.
If I ever take an ad or accept a sponsor, especially relating to dogs, I kick the tires very hard on that.
I don't want to recommend anything for anyone's dog that isn't genuinely helpful, let alone harmful.
And what makes the most important thing to me is when I talk to the people who founded the company, they're often Dedicated animal lovers.
And that's the case for the people who founded this company.
And I've been really surprised reading the testimonials and seeing their products firsthand.
I've heard from so many people that this is the only thing that's worked after years of frustration with dogs finding itch-free and healthy again.
And that's why I'm so happy to partner with Code Defense.
So if your dog has been struggling and nothing else has helped, go to CodeDefense.com and use Code Glenn for 15% off your first order.
That's codedefense.com, code Glenn.
Music.
All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience.
And the reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most, most importance.
I have always hated the model of journalism.
That's monologue in form, where some journalist just sits on a mountaintop and bequeaths.
To people, the truth, I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact.
We do that throughout the week on Locals.
But Friday night is the time when we take questions from our Locals members.
So let's get into them.
We have a lot of good ones tonight.
I want to try and get to as many as possible.
The first one is from Christina K., who says, quote, I would love to hear your thoughts on the cancellation of the International Student Visa Program at Harvard University.
Thank you.
All right.
Now, I talked a little bit with Lee about this, and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life, especially over the last, you know, say, 10 years.
Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech that I dislike.
It's often ideologically homogenous.
It's become just this kind of closed circle of very kind of specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish, left-wing, culture war, homogeny.
And there's a lot wrong with academia in general.
All that said, I find academia to be extremely important.
I think it's a vital part of society.
And if you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, every one of those Enlightenment thinkers or the leading ones were academics often.
They talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you can challenge.
There are no taboos.
There are no pieties.
Having an institution, a society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned, everything is poked at, is vital.
And I liked going to college.
I liked going to law school, and that was a big part of my experience.
I was able to do that all the time, and I found it so refreshing.
It helped me learn a lot.
It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties.
Essentially, you were free to express the things that you wanted to express.
And I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.
Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success Economically, technologically, politically, socially, militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions.
I mean, everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe.
Here in Brazil, if somebody went to go and study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, "Oh, I studied at Harvard," it imparts them with immense credibility.
And that's how It's looked at around the world.
I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness.
It's been a college, a leading college for, you know, 500 years now, 450 years.
And same of Yale and Brown and Princeton.
But Harvard, you know, especially globally, is at the top.
And so I think if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try and destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions.
It's kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way.
I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening.
In general, academic institutions, the leading ones, and the government have had extremely close partnerships.
The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale and all sorts of other schools is not because the government is being benevolent.
It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program.
Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government wants undertaken.
It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the Internet in the United States and American dominance over the Internet for all those years.
It came right out of federal funding of academic institutions.
Cures and medical treatments, scientific advances, technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use.
And when you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world.
and that only fortifies the institution.
Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for, And on top of that, it's the question of why are these institutions being attacked?
And in the case of Harvard and Columbia and Yale and Brown and Princeton and all the others the Trump administration has targeted, there's been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been this discrimination in the admissions process.
For a long time it was considered affirmative action where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group.
And part of that was to correct historical injustices.
Other parts of it was to have a more diverse campus.
And I think There was a time when you could make that argument that that was necessary, and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary, that it's actually a form of racism in its own way.
And courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them.
So I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason And for many years, you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014, all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was,
based on this boycott, divestment, and sanctions model.
That helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work on American campuses.
And they knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses.
And they set out this whole anti-woke thing.
If you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it in part because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism.
And the Trump administration is saying that, that you have allowed too much anti-Semitism, meaning Israel criticism, on your campus.
They're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs.
Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult Academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials.
But that's what the Trump administration is doing, and it's all because of Israel.
To some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution.
They want to attack it, but they've already denied funding to these schools here from AP.
On April 15, Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard due to campus activism.
And we know what that means.
Campus activism means the Israel protests that you allowed.
And then when Harvard, unlike Columbia and other universities that accepted all these extremes or crony and controls by the government, yes, you can control our curriculum.
You can supervise our hiring and our admissions process.
And Harvard said, look, you've gone too far.
We've made a lot of concessions.
But we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far.
We're going to sue instead.
And they sued.
That's when the government went ballistic.
And today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future.
So only 25% of Harvard has international students.
It's a way that, you know, The United States spreads pro-American sentiment.
People want to come to the United States.
They want to study in the United States.
They get integrated into American culture.
It has great benefits for the United States.
As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to.
Or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever.
And we're waiting for one of our most valuable and Credible institutions, despite all the flaws that I know it has.
And we're doing it not because we think that the schools aren't doing their job.
We're doing it because they allow too much criticism of Israel.
And the idea that Harvard, of all places, its current president is Jewish.
Most of its past presidents are close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years have been Jewish.
Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest.
Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish.
Jews do very, very well at Harvard.
The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of anti-Semitism is laughable.
But, as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed anti-Semitic, and that's what's driving the Trump administration.
And so now you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent Years pursuing PhD programs.
A lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members of American society.
And even if they don't, even if they go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States.
And now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told your visa is revoked.
And you can try and get into another school.
We'll extend your visa then.
But if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more We're revoking them all and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future.
And this is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment.
And as Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund.
So I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money Destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs and then disallowing any international student will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness and a symbol of it and a crucial tool in soft power.
And this is yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, Was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel.
I think it's incredibly dangerous.
What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter or to study or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel or that you at least agree that you'll refrain from ever criticizing it.
And we're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country.
All right, let's look at this next question.
I think there's a second question before this one, isn't there?
Is this the next question?
Okay, this is from Kurt Malone, who asked the following, quote, I'm curious about your views on the, quote, fence sitter, pundits, fence sitters, pundits who sit on the fence, who are making a little more noise regarding Israel in the past month as their public opinion has finally taken a turn.
I understand the conservative pundits employed by the Daily Wire not stepping into a degree, but I'm absolutely lost by a very few, one really springs to mind, independent journalists who have made censorship on all things freedom of speech their entire revenue now turn a blind eye.
Now, this has been a controversy taking place among various journalists.
I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have Very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who, in fact, are really just Israel loyalists who are doing this in order to attack college campuses and who have turned around and now you're looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care,
barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they did or oftentimes even supporting it at Barry Weiss yesterday in response to these.
The murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways or its supporters have blood on their hands.
So there's a lot of people who have built a large audience mostly of conservatives or right-wing people or MAGA people by championing free speech because over the past 10 years conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship.
And so these people who have independent media outlets who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media, as I've talked about before, it's a big problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money.
And I've talked about before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic.
After October 7th, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't.
We still lose subscribers over that.
But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience where they look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear, but you're always going to at least hear the honest Perspective and an argument behind it.
Then you build an audience of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation, which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have.
So there has been some disputes.
One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine.
So I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him.
You can go see these arguments.
And I will say You know, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting.
It is difficult if you end up immersed in a social circle and you end up being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to or other journalists who you're supposed to be criticizing.
Because there is a sort of ethical, I think, principle that is valid that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean an acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you just say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with to turn around and denounce them publicly.
And so for the most part that's why I avoid That social circle.
I see it all the time.
You see Jake Tapper on this book with all these journalists going around, and they're all talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever.
And so when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to.
They believed them.
They didn't want to criticize these people.
That's what being friends can do to journalists or to— And I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics.
They all live in the same neighborhoods.
They all socialize with each other.
They're all intermarried, the media and the political class.
And so they're anything but adversarial to each other.
But I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it.
It's too complicated.
It's just not an issue I want to talk about.
And then there's a resulting critique.
No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don't want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in the name of it because then you wouldn't.
Be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in, but you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe.
So let me just say quickly a few things about this because it is a growing controversy.
One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that There's nobody who can be an expert in everything.
There's no person who has expert level or specialized knowledge in every debate that people are talking about.
And it's always been so important to me never to report on or comment on or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention.
And I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time.
That I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in or some unique perspective that's informed that I can, you know, basically place a claim on my audience time if I want to write about something or talk about something.
And you're basically saying, look, I'm placing a claim on your time.
I have something valuable to hear.
And I take that responsibility seriously.
So I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there's something that you don't, haven't covered, it's best as not to talk about it.
I didn't talk about the House bill, for example.
That just passed the big beautiful bill because there's so many issues in there from tax policy to spending programs that I'm not an economist.
I don't have a very developed understanding of economics and so that's an issue that I've always tried to avoid.
That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant and maybe Tariffs is an example, which is Trump's tariff policy, which is something I ordinarily would not talk about, since I'm the last person who can give you a good micro-economic assessment of tariffs and the like.
But I can talk about other aspects related to it.
I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I've asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore.
And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war, And arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen.
Even an Israeli former prime minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.
Two million people being starved to death.
It's one of the worst things we've ever seen, and our government's paying for it, and at the same time.
There are major implications in the United States on Americans and our basic constitutional rights.
It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, yeah, I don't understand that.
I think I'm going to avoid that.
I'm not saying you have to cover it every day.
I'm not saying you have to have super didactic opinions about it.
But I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about The most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in.
And again, I think there's a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates who have now abandoned that because their real loyalty was to Israel.
And then there's some people who just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media.
It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it or you're just an integrity-free, you know, greedy money-sucking pig.
There's a lot of nuance and there's a big spectrum between those two things.
But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible.
And maybe it's still going to be lingering in your mind.
We're not all immune to it, but you do everything possible to ensure.
That you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers even short term or maybe even long term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.
All right, next question from Teardrinker, who says, "Hey, Glenn, I watched Wednesday's show.
The segment about Brazil bothered me a bit, and I wanted to let you know why and ask you a few questions about it." So just for those of you who didn't see it, I think we did it yesterday.
Yeah, maybe we did it the day before.
But anyway, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil.
Brazil, under this very unpopular president in 2017, legalized Gambling basically overnight.
And as a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games.
And huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have They've become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phone.
And the minute they get government assistance that's supposed to feed their family or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account.
They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty.
And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction.
And a major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers Show people the super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle.
Here's my private jet.
Here's my $30,000 bag.
That whole Instagram decadent culture.
And people follow them and revere them because that's the life they want.
And these betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, "Oh, you should go bet." Use this betting app.
You can make so much money.
And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake.
And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting, but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app.
And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this.
And so here's this question, quote, That segment just left me with a lot more questions and answers.
Oh, and why do you hate the word gaslighting?
Okay.
It's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues.
My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else.
By that I mean like really like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently.
I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills.
I mean really direct harm.
I believe that about pretty much everything.
What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether What kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually.
My view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent.
And it's nobody's business to stop them.
You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction.
I'm all for that.
So you give people information.
But I don't believe in intervening.
And I think the choices that they make, they are responsible for that.
I have begun to We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there's parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor.
And you have things now like, for example, we talked about this before.
We'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it.
But you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant.
And there's nobody who's compatible who will give them a kidney.
So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that are, you know, people barely at its assistance level.
And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 to donate a kidney.
I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business?
You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children?
Or is there something incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual?
I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements.
You have very wealthy couples.
Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples.
Most of them are straight couples.
Contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples.
Although the amount of gay couples doing it as well have increased.
And they want a baby.
They can't produce a baby for whatever reason.
Gay couples can't procreate.
A lot of straight couples can't either.
Sometimes they don't want to.
The woman doesn't want to carry a baby.
So they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby.
With an agreement that the minute the baby's born, the mother, the biological mother, just hands over the baby, has no rights to it.
And probably if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, yeah, that's their own choice.
Who is the state or anyone to intervene in that transaction?
But the harm that comes to a woman from carrying a baby full term and then simply because of money having to hand over that baby to some other people who are going to just take it and raise it as their own and the mother's never going to.
And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become More and more commonplace.
What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process and so they go to Africa or they go to Asia to extremely poor countries and they pay some family.
They say, "Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant or a six-month infant or a two-year-old.
We want one of those.
If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?" I mean, that's the same thing, right?
That's very consensual.
It's transactional.
But is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that?
So if somebody is extremely poor, desperately poor, I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what desperate poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists.
What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe.
But what is considered poverty in the United States, Is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world.
There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything.
And the internet is everywhere.
And people are influenced.
That's why they're called influencers.
And the reason they can influence is because they're lying to people and they're saying, if you start gambling, you could have the like that I have.
Look at me.
And they film some fake scene of them gambling and winning and they're all excited and it goes bing and the money comes.
And obviously a lot of people are going to start doing that.
And especially if these people who they worship and revere and follow and whose lives they want to have and who they want to be like are telling them and encouraging them to do it, exploiting their poverty or their youth.
In order to get them to do this, and these machines are designed to be addictive.
You know, it's like social media.
They've created it to be addictive.
There was an article in the New York Times, I think maybe like five years ago, where they interviewed a bunch of parents in Silicon Valley who work for social media companies who say there's no chance I would ever allow my kids to use these products because like cigarettes, they're built to be addictive.
I mean, they do studies on how the brain works.
The kind of endorphins and dopamine that gets released and the way it creates an addiction for more to keep people glued to their screens.
And that's the same with gambling.
So I'm not saying that the people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility.
Of course, they have some.
Nobody forced them to do it.
I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I don't think that these economically exploitative factors in, say, going and buying somebody's kidney or paying for some couple to give away their kid because they have eight other kids and they can't feed them without it.
I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual.
Again, I'm not saying it should be banned.
I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either.
Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering.
I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation.
As for this word gaslighting, I just in general hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos.
And especially gaslighting was used mostly by a kind of Me Too movement.
It was part of that Me Too lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well documented.
I oppose them from the beginning.
I hate mob justice.
I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence.
I don't trust any human being, men, women, anybody, with that level of power to say, oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.
And that's where gaslighting came.
Very like kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was quote unquote toxic.
I understand what it means.
Literally what it means is I think there was a film actually where a husband was turning up the gas stove every day.
What?
Oh, the gas light.
Right, the gas light.
The gas light?
What is a gaslight?
Okay, so they were turning the, but why, who cares if you turn up the gaslight?
Anyway, okay, so the husband was manipulating her and turning up the gaslight, and then when she was noticing, he would say, what?
That's not happening.
And basically, she would try and get her to think she's crazy by telling her that something's not happening that actually is.
I just hate the way it's been used.
I hate the way it emerged.
I hate the lack of precision to the term.
It just took on this very, like, culture war meaning.
I don't know.
We can't love all words.
All right.
Next question.
Kay Katwas asks, it seemed obvious at this point that the pro-Israel PR machine is cynically weaponizing the murder of these Israeli embassy staffers to A, silence critics, and B, win back public sympathy and support.
Do you think this will ultimately end up working?
It's funny, I was going to ask the question very similar.
I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel.
Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a pariah state.
The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing.
That Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months as we've all watched it live every day.
And that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps or driven out of their land.
And imagine the level of violence that's going to cause.
They are announcing that they're entering Gaza.
They're going to take it all.
They're going to bomb whatever's left.
They're going to force Palestinians to leave.
The ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps.
A little walled off, fenced off.
Areas that they get to stay in, get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF where they'll be sort of fed.
These are concentration camps.
It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948.
And they know that.
Polling data shows it.
You see.
Countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons like Canada and the U.K. and France jointly issuing a statement vehemently condemning Israel, not mealy-mouth condemnation.
Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been indicted officially by the International Criminal Court as war criminals.
They have to avoid certain countries.
IDF soldiers are afraid to go to There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country that happened in Brazil.
We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that force them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes.
One almost got arrested in Brazil.
He got snuck out at the last second.
And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility, and it has made Israel a pariah state.
And I think that's why there's been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel.
these are acts of desperation.
And yeah, I don't think that the murder of...
I think it's going to be a speed bump.
Obviously, Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed given...
All of them saying, "Gazan babies are our enemies.
There's no innocent Gazan babies.
They grew up to be terrorists.
Really sick, sick stuff that I don't think the world was going But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time.
They have all kinds of internal dissent.
Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power.
They almost were in a civil war before October 7th over the Supreme Court and whether Orthodox They have a lot of internal tension.
People are fleeing the country.
So, no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived.
All right, The Far Side asks, I don't understand what Trump is looking to accomplish by using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people rather than through the standard immigration process.
If he really wants to deport millions of people that are here illegally, then Obama has shown him the way.
Obama was able to be the deporter-in-chief without anyone particularly even noticing.
Trump's AEA strategy has two massive problems.
One, it faces intense legal challenges, which he's likely to lose.
And two, it's not likely to succeed in deporting more than a few hundred people here or there.
What gives?
This just seems like high risk with little I've been saying this from the beginning.
You know, every time there's a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, the Anonymous Act, where they're required to give the new process, now a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA.
It's only for wartime.
And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, but what do you mean?
We voted for mass deportation.
Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?
And I've always tried to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just from me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws.
It's very easy.
You just deport.
You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country.
The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that.
He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act.
Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, War of 1812, World War I, World War II, because it gives Trump immense power.
Far more power than he has otherwise.
For one thing, he's declared war.
So automatically the president's powers increase in times of war.
The deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime automatically increases.
So by declaring war, Trump's already consolidating more power.
And then the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy.
He can just put them in camps.
Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo.
And that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps.
And you don't have to send them back to their home country that way.
You can just send them to El Salvador.
A country they've never been to, have nothing to do with, and put them into prison.
You can send them to Libya.
You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing.
And the Trump administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because the first term, the Trump first term, was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority.
Trump was boxed in all the time.
He was sabotaged.
And they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state.
And so they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints.
And the Alien Enemies Act was part of that.
And the problem is that it is a very severe law that is only intended for wartime.
And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, People suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported.
And all of these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation themselves.
They're about the AEA, which Trump invoked because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him.
All right, I think this is the last question.
It's from 65. And it is, what is your opinion of the idea of an ancestral, ethnic, or racial claim to a geographical region that because my, quote, people once lived in a particular area, I have some sort of claim to that area?
Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period of time.
It all depends, too, on How long people have been there?
I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, treated as history as documented, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations.
There's indigenous people in Brazil that came way before Portuguese colonization.
Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world.
It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil where they've been for who knows how long.
Same with Africa.
But if you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, "Oh, my people have a right to this land." It's really that God gave.
My people this land.
It's not, oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore we should have it.
It's that God said this is ours.
And I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places is a valid claim for that land.
We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, and the world recognizes And the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time it didn't look like this would.
Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians.
And most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank and Gaza, annex it against all international law, and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that.
And I think that's a much different question.
It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology.
Is it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy?
That, at least with inside Israel, Jews will always be supreme.
And I don't think that's an ideology that leads to anywhere good.
One last thing I wanted to note.
Our friend Ken Klippenstein, who was also my colleague at The Intercept, who left The Intercept wisely and now is at Substack, published before anyone else did.
The manifesto of the shooter who went and killed the two Israeli staffers in Washington on Wednesday night.
And he was the first to publish it.
And he's done that before.
He got a hold of what was called the Vance Dossier, which was an opposition document that the Trump administration put together about J.D. Vance, and he published it.
There wasn't much there.
Banned from X for a while because Elon Musk interpreted that as doxing.
And there was some pages there that had things like J.D. Vance's home address that I thought should have been redacted.
I told Ken that.
He eventually did upload it with the redactions.
But he got a visit by the FBI from that.
The FBI came to his house and said, we want to talk to you about how you got this dossier.
It's like, the FBI doesn't come and interview journalists about how you get documents.
So as Ken wrote, last night, FBI visits me over a manifesto.
The FBI came to Ken Klippenstein's house asking about how he got this manifesto.
They basically were implying that he was somehow in cahoots with the shooter because he probably got the manifesto prior to the shooting, that he was working in conjunction with him, which, you know, I would have an extremely hard time believing.
But this is the second time now that Ken Klippenstein, a journalist, has gotten a visit, a knock on his door by FBI, and he said this time they were quite aggressive.
And he told them, talk to my lawyer.
The FBI called his lawyer, said, we were at Ken Klippenstein's house.
We have 11 questions for you that we want him to answer, and we're going to send them to you, but we would like you to keep them confidential.
And obviously, Ken's not going to do that.
He doesn't have any obligation to keep it confidential.
And so he published the 11 questions on his blog today.
And, you know, I do think it's disturbing if the FBI is going to start knocking on the doors of your home at night.
There's all kinds of ways to interview a journalist if you want.
You can give them notice.
You can ask them to come down to the FBI.
This is deliberately being as intimidating as possible.
They bang on your door.
They show up with their guns.
They're in your house.
They're asking about your journalism.
And just as a journalist and somebody who believes in the vital functioning of journalism, I think this is something that ought to be monitored very closely and considered.
Quite dangerous, especially if it continues to escalate.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
As another reminder, I will be traveling all next week in South of the United States.
As I said at the top, I'll be in places like Scottsdale, Arizona, New York, Portland, Maine, and Seattle.
In Seattle, I'm doing a public event.
The rest are podcast interviews, which is sponsored by NPR.
I'll have more details about that, but the event is Saturday night in Seattle.
I think it's the next Saturday.
I think it's the 31st.
Yeah, it's the 31st.
So over next week, we will have guest hosts.
We have other things planned for you, so there will be a full week of programming.
And I may try, time permitting, I will try and do at least one show while I'm on the road.
For those who have been watching this show, we are, of course, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble.
