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June 28, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:12:58
Locals Mailbag: Glenn Answers Questions on Panic Over Zohran, SCOTUS Rulings, Israel/Iran War, & More

Glenn answers questions from our Locals community about the anti-Muslim attacks against Zohran Mamdani, the latest SCOTUS rulings, the Israel/Iran war, and more. --------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening, it's Friday, June 27th.
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, as we try to do every Friday night news permitting, we will devote the entire show tonight to a Q ⁇ A session where we take questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our locals community and then answer as many of them as we can.
As is typically the case for my audience, and I say this with no small amount of pride, the questions tonight, as usual, are wide-ranging, thoughtful, informed, and provocative on a very diverse range of issues.
Among other things, we'll cover the GOP's reaction to the victory of Zoran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor.
We covered the Democrats' reaction to him early this week.
We'll cover this morning's Supreme Court decision that limits the reach of injunctions issued by federal district court judges, a major win for the Trump administration.
We'll examine ongoing questions surrounding President Trump's foreign policy, including the recently concluded, one hopes, Israel-U.S.
war with Iran, nuclear weapons, and more.
Before we get to all that, a couple of programming notes.
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Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that platform.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, I want to get right into the questions because we want to get to as many of them as we can.
And the questions typically are, and we don't really even self-select all that much.
The questions typically are the topics we probably would want to cover on our own.
Some of them, though, are often ones that we likely wouldn't have.
So it's always good to have that mix.
And that's what we have tonight.
The first question is from Maul Girl 5.
Maul Girl 5.
So it's not Maul Girl 6 or 4, as I know a lot of you might be confused.
It's Maul Girl 5.
And she says this, quote, am I the only one noticing the explicit racism against Mongdani?
I'm not, quote, woke or anything, but this is crazy.
I think anyone who's watching my show, followed my reporting or commentary over the years, understands that I am not one to call things racist or bigoted or all those other synonyms very casually or even very easily.
If anything, maybe there's more reluctance than I should have to doing so sometimes.
But in this case, it's hard to, I don't know if racism is the right word.
I think more it's more about anti-Muslim bigotry, meaning not just animosity toward Muslims as a whole, but extremely irrational animosity.
Things that are getting said about Zoran that just so plainly don't apply to him.
That's why I was talking the other night about how Democrats tried for 10 years to depict Trump as this white nationalist, fascist, Hitler-like figure.
And it just never worked because Trump didn't read that way to people.
He didn't code that way to people.
Even people who have a lot of reservations or even opposition to things he says and does just don't feel threatened that way.
And that is true, notwithstanding what I believe have been a lot of authoritarian measures that have been implemented this year that are cutting against key constitutional liberties.
And we've talked about those a lot, specifically free speech and free press and due process.
But there's still a massive gap between that and being a white supremacist fascist and Hitler type figure, which is what they tried to depict him as, especially as they got desperate in the last weeks of this campaign, 2024.
And it just didn't work because people could look with their own eyes and what they were seeing wasn't Hitler.
I think it's very similar to what's going on with Zoran.
They want to turn him into this like Osama bin Laden figure.
But you just look at Zoran.
You see how he lives his life.
You see how he speaks, what he says.
You see his wife.
You see his background.
And just there's nothing in that background that suggests any of this has any basis in reality.
So it's very mean-spirited.
I think a lot of people enjoy this kind of mob sort of hatefulness.
It feels good.
Obviously, there's a lot of real reasons, ideological reasons, political reasons, why a lot of people are very uncomfortable with Zoran Mandani.
He absolutely is of the left and has left-wing economic views for sure.
And if that's an ideology that you reject, that you are opposed to, I have zero problem with any kind of vehement opposition.
That's what politics is about.
But the stuff we're about to show you has nothing to do with any of that.
It's so clearly designed to trigger the worst impulses in people.
And again, if it had some basis in reality, if he had been a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda, then I could understand it.
Although even there, the president of Syria was that until about seven seconds ago.
And the West loves him as president of Syria.
There's reports that he's about to normalize relations with Israel.
Israel was free to fly over Syrian skies when it was attacking Iran.
So even if he had been some sort of ISIS or al-Qaeda supporter in the past, That wouldn't even be disqualifying in our politics, but he was never anything remotely like that.
Here's a congressman.
I'm not even sure I've heard of him before, to be honest.
And obviously, I do this for a living.
So sometimes these members of Congress are so obscure they are desperate for attention.
His name is Andy Ogles.
He's a Republican congressman from Tennessee.
And this is what he went on to X yesterday and said after Mandani won overwhelmingly the New York City Democratic primary to be mayor.
Quote, Zoran Little Mohammed Mandani, like, what does that mean, little Mohammed?
What is that design to evoke?
Zoran Little Mohamed Mandani is an anti-Semitic socialist communist who will destroy the great city of New York.
He needs to be deported, which is why I'm calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings.
This went mega viral, as did all the other stuff that he started posting along this vein once he realized that it was getting him attention for once.
He's now writing on this, creating cartoons about it, retweeting every article that talks about it.
Here's the letter that he wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday.
I write to request the Department of Justice open an investigation into whether Zoran Kwame Mandani, currently a candidate for mayor of New York City, should be subject to denaturalization proceedings under 8 U.S.C.
1451A on the grounds that he may have procured U.S. citizenship through willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism.
According to public reports, including a June 21st, 2025 New York Post article, Mr. Mandani expressed open solidarity with individuals convicted of terrorism-related citizen offenses prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.
Specifically, he rapped, quote, free the Holy Land Five, my guys.
The Holy Land Five Foundation was convicted in 2008 for providing material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Publicly praising the foundation's convicted leadership as, quote, my guys raises serious concerns about whether Mr. Mandani held affiliations or sympathies he failed to disclose during the naturalization process.
Okay, let me just stop there for a second and say the following.
First of all, Mandani tried to be a rapper and produced songs when he was in his early 20s.
Talking about, he's still quite young.
He's 33.
So we're talking about a decade ago.
When he was like 22, 23.
Are we really supposed to go back in time and see what somebody said in their early 20s, what they sung, what music they were creating, what they were saying in his songs, in order to now deport them after they just won a major election where huge numbers of people in New York City want him to be their mayor?
On top of that, the Holy Land Foundation was one of the most controversial prosecutions of the entire war on terror.
I reported on it frequently at the time.
I regard it as a completely horrific and unjust miscarriage of justice that was done in hysteria after 9/11 where any person,
And they would send it to Gaza, they would send it to the West Bank, and the U.S. government invented a claim that some of the money they were sending ended up in the hands of Gaza, which Gaza is the government of, Hamas is the, it ended up in the hands of Hamas, which is the government of Gaza.
So if you send money to a hospital in Gaza, you send money to a first aid station, you send money to some fund that helps distribute food, at some point you're going to come into contact with Hamas since that's the government of Gaza.
It doesn't remotely suggest that in any way you support Hamas, you support terrorism, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's what all this trial did, but in the hysteria of post-9-11 America, they were able to extract convictions against people who, I mean, if you want, you can go back and read my reporting or other reporting, but I'm here to say that I believe the Holy Land Foundation prosecutions were a miscarriage of justice.
The people in prison under them were wrongfully prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, wrongfully imprisoned.
Am I not allowed to say that as an American?
Is that somehow a crime now to believe that people who were convicted of a crime were wrongfully convicted?
It's kind of foundational to our entire society.
And he then goes on, quote, while I understand that some may raise First Amendment concerns about taking legal action based on expressive conduct such as rap lyrics.
Oh, you think some might raise First Amendment concerns that you want to deport the person who was just elected to represent the Democratic Party by an overwhelming majority of voters in New York City because of what he rapped when he was 22 and 23 years old?
You think that might raise First Amendment issues?
Quote, speech alone does not preclude accountability where it reasonably suggests underlying conduct relevant to eligibility for naturalization.
If an individual publicly glorifies a group convicted of financing terrorism, it is entirely appropriate for federal authorities to inquire whether that individual engaged in non-public forms of support such as organizational affiliation, fundraising, or advocacy that it would require disclosure on Form N400 or during a naturalization interview.
The naturalization process depends on the good faith disclosure of any affiliation with or support for groups that threaten U.S. national security.
If Mr. Mandani concealed relevant associations, that concealment may constitute a material misrepresentation sufficient to support denaturalization under federal law.
The federal government must uphold public trust by ensuring that citizenship is not granted under false pretenses.
I respectfully urge the Department of Justice to determine whether Mr. Mandani's conduct prior to naturalization warrants formal review under applicable law.
I'm going to address that, but just to underscore one point here.
John Mandani has lived in the United States since he was seven years old.
He came here when he was seven years old to the United States.
And that means he has lived in the United States for almost the vast majority of his life, all of his adult life.
He's never once been arrested, let alone convicted of a crime, charged with a crime, convicted of a crime.
What he's done is ran on a political platform and won first a seat to the New York City legislature and then as a Democratic nominee for mayor based on a political ideology that a lot of conservatives like this dislike.
That's it.
I mean, if he's like organizing for Hamas or raising money and sending it to terrorist groups or engaging in terrorism, why would that not have been known now?
Why suddenly would it be that he, right when he wins a major election, suddenly now we're supposed to investigate this, even though it's based on nothing?
Also, I keep hearing from conservatives that if Democrats keep electing people like him or AOC or whoever, that strain of Democrat, they're going to destroy their party.
They're going to prevent the Democratic Party from winning forever.
Well, it doesn't seem like a lot of people who say that really believe that.
Why would you want to deport Zaron Mandani if you think that the Democrats electing him will destroy the Democratic Party forever?
This is not the behavior of people who think that Zoran Mandani is going to explode the Republican Party and lead to 100 years of glorious Republican reign and rule.
This seems like the behavior of people who are very afraid of what he just did, which is energize huge numbers of people who don't typically vote.
The same thing that President Obama was uniquely able to do, the same thing that President Trump has been uniquely able to do, that's political gold.
That's real political power.
If you just turn out the people who vote Republican and Democrat every year no matter what, and political junkies and like off-ER elections, anyone can do that.
By definition, they just are partisan hacks.
They just go into the polls and they vote no matter what for Republican or Democrat.
People who can inspire others who don't typically vote, who don't believe in the political process to go to the polls when they don't usually do that because they're so energized by a particular politician, that is real political strength.
He has obvious political charisma, a personal charm.
That's just undeniable, however much you might hate him.
And this is the language of fear, not the language of glee that, oh, good, go ahead and elect him, please, because it's going to help us forever.
Here's libs of TikTok.
Holy schlit.
U.S. Republican Andy Ogles just sent a letter to A.G. Pambondi calling for the denaturalization and deportation of New York Democratic Marioro Mayor Zaran Mandani.
Representative Andy Ogles cites that Mandani may have concealed, quote, material support for terrorism when he obtained U.S. citizenship.
Like the original tweet from Congressman Ogles, this went mega viral, the 10,000 people at least, maybe more retweeting it, 25,000 or so liking it as of whenever I last looked.
Just to give you a sense, there's not some isolated statements.
This is resonating with a lot of people.
Here's Congressman Ogles going back onto X to get another hit of that dopamine that he got for being noticed for the first time.
And he has this little cartoon that my guess is his office made or someone made of him with his hand up saying deport.
And then there's Zoran looking like some angry terrorist, which he doesn't ever look like.
Maybe if he is protesting or something, and he's holding two books with the hammer and sickle to show he's a communist as well, dressed as, not as he dresses in a suit, but in traditional Muslim garb that is common to see in Afghanistan and other places throughout the Middle East.
And the text that he wrote above this cartoon is, bye-bye, little Muhammad.
If you lied on your N-400 naturalization form, you're going home.
And notably, they want to deport him back to Uganda, they emphasize.
So I want to just make a couple of observations here.
First of all, I have been hearing from conservatives for many years now expressing what I regard as a very valid grievance when I've expressed myself about the evils of lawfare against political opponents, but also about this anti-democratic trend that we've seen in so many countries, including the United States, that when you can't beat a politician whose views you dislike, you try and prevent him from appearing on the ballot at all.
That was Democrats' main strategy in 2024 was to get President Trump convicted.
They even got Colorado Supreme Court by a 4-3 ruling to throw him off the ballot, prevent him from running on the grounds that he's an insurrectionist, even though he wasn't charged with that, let alone convicted of it.
They did everything possible to put him in prison, to make him ineligible to run.
It's been done in Brazil where Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, as Lula gets more unpopular, he becomes more viable as a candidate to win in 2026, but they've made him ineligible.
And it's not because of allegations that he participated in a coup.
He's now on trial for that, and the decision will be out later this year.
It's because of a variety of other smaller cases.
And they just said, yeah, you can't run for the next eight years.
You're also ineligible, even though you remain very popular among the Brazilian people who want you to be their president, tens of millions.
They did it in Romania just recently, where there was an election in the end of 2024, where the candidate favored by the EU lost, and the candidate that was supposedly pro-Russian, but he was also a populist member of the right, won.
And they're just like, yeah, we're invalidating this election.
We think the Russians did too much.
And so this election is, we're going to start over.
And then when they tried to have a new election and did a do-over, the candidate that won was leading by a lot more even now in the polls because he was more known.
People were resentful of this invalidation of the election because it didn't go the way they want.
And they just banned him from running.
And they did end up electing, or they did end up allowing to run a supposedly similar candidate from the popularist right, but he was nowhere near as charismatic.
And most importantly, he supported the EU-NATO U.S. support of the war in Ukraine while the first one didn't.
And then, of course, in France, a very frivolous criminal conviction of Marine Le Pen is now rendering her ineligible to run, even though many people believe that she would be able to finally win the French presidency.
Lots of people were afraid of that.
And so they just said, you know what, why risk it?
Why let voters decide?
I've done shows with that theme about how anti-democratic that is.
Doing all this in the name of democracy, while what you're really doing is whenever somebody who's your political opponent gets too popular, you want to find a way to get them banned or imprisoned.
That's exactly what this is.
Oh yeah, he just woke up, Andy Ogles did, sees that Zarman Mandani is inspiring huge numbers of young men, which the Democratic Party has had problems with.
He won with men, which is not common for left-wing candidates or Democratic candidates, to inspire people, young people, to give a new face to the Democratic Party.
Suddenly he woke up and decided that he has to be deported, that he's a criminal, that he's a terrorist.
And huge numbers of conservatives are cheering along with that.
Not to mention that it's the same conservative movement.
Again, I joined in with this with years of grievance about attacks on the First Amendment and free speech and censorship.
Donald Trump gets into office.
One of the first things he does is go on a hunt for people who criticize Israel or protests against Israel, even though they're in the country legally with green cards and student visas to deport them.
They never committed any crimes.
They haven't been arrested.
They haven't been charged.
And now we're going to take a candidate and decide that he has to be deported because he's a little too critical of Israel.
And it's being done by the political movement that claims it believes so fervently in upholding free speech, except when it comes to the need to shield this foreign country from criticism and then it's all free speech concepts out the window based on a rap that he did when he was 22, echoing a very common sentiment that this was a miscarriage of justice to convict these people, something I fully affirm and have affirmed many times.
It doesn't make me a terrorist supporter.
Anyone who is comfortable with any of this, anybody who is supportive of this, just please, please don't ever, ever again come with this grievance about how repressive globalists in the world ban people from ballots when they get too popular so they can't, the voters don't have a choice, or come with grievances about censorship and attacks on free speech, just don't do that.
If you want to support this, find other ways to do that.
But the hypocrisy, the deceit of what many on the right, not all people, many don't like this, but many do, but many on the right who have spent years waving the flag of democracy and free speech and now suddenly supporting this.
Oh yeah, let's deport this guy who just had a major victory and is exciting voters, not just in New York, but across the country.
Let's just deport him by fabricating a claim that he's been like organizing with terrorists, something that nobody ever minimally even whispered or suggested before.
He's a person who's lived in the United States for 25 years, not even arrested or charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one, and now suddenly he needs to be deported.
I mean, is there anyone who wants to pretend they don't know what's going on here?
Next question.
Stephen P.W. asks this.
Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its most recent rulings, has communicated to recalcitrant lower court judges that sweeping preliminary injunctions over unconstitutional overreach into the executive branch authorities, especially regarding immigration, will no longer be tolerated by the court.
Do you agree with this?
All right, so let's first of all just make clear what it is that the court decided.
I think we have...
There's some reference to court decisions, and there's a lot of different decisions on the question of immigration.
Some have gone in one direction, some have gone in the other, and reconciling them would take a lot of time, but it's not necessary for this narrow question that you referenced, that the article member referenced, which is the idea of telling federal court judges that they don't have the power to issue injunctions that go beyond the case before them, that are nationwide injunctions.
So let me just explain what they're saying here.
So let's say you are a lawyer, you represent six people who are in the country illegally, and the Trump administration wants to deport them, not back to their home country, but to El Salvador for a prison or to South Sudan, which is now where they're sending people in the country illegally.
And they're just picking like the most war-turned, torn, dangerous, poor places.
And they're saying, we're not going to send you back to your country.
We're going to send you to the South Sudan or Libya.
And you rush into court, and you have to, there's three levels of the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court, then there's appellate courts, and then underneath that are individual federal district courts.
And you go into, you have to start in the federal court except in the rarest of circumstances, but any lawsuit has to go to an individual federal court judge first, and only if you lose, do you go to the appeals court, and then to the Supreme Court if they accept it.
And the judge says it's unconstitutional to take these six individual plaintiffs who are in the country illegally and who are the government wants to deport to South Sudan.
It's unconstitutional to deport them to some third country.
It's unconstitutional to do so without due process.
So those six people are now subject to an injunction.
The court says the government is hereby barred from sending the six people who brought this lawsuit to me To this third country that the government, well, U.S. government wants to send it to.
That would be uncontroversial.
I mean, it might be controversial on the merits, but nobody would doubt the federal court has the power to do that.
Even if the decision is wrong, that's something to fix on appeal.
What federal court judges have been doing, and they've done it long before Trump, but they've done it far more regularly and frequently in the last five months than they have in the last, I don't know, 60 years combined.
It's become very, very accelerated, is when they issue these injunctions, they're not just saying it's unconstitutional and therefore you're prohibited from deporting these six people who brought this lawsuit to me.
I'm ruling in their favor, and you can't deport these six people to the South Sudan without a more extensive due process requirement, because under the Constitution they have constitutional rights.
We've been over many times why people who are non-citizens, including people in the country, illegally, still have rights under the Constitution.
That Supreme Court has recognized that for 100 years.
It's not radical.
It's not new.
It's not left-wing.
It's just how the Constitution works.
You don't have to like it, but it's just what the Supreme Court has regularly ruled.
But what they're doing, instead of saying, you're enjoined from removing these six people, is they're saying the government as a whole, not just in this case, but every case, is enjoined from deporting anybody to the South Sudan or El Salvador without these kinds of hearings necessary.
In other words, they're not just issuing an injunction for the people before them in court, they're issuing an injunction for the entire nation.
For every citizen, every person who's not a citizen, every person in the United States, illegally, they're reporting to describe rules and orders that are binding on the government for everyone they might want to deport.
Now, as I've said before, this has never been uncommon.
During the Biden years, for example, Joe Biden wanted to forgive student loan debt.
The position of Democrats always was, when Nancy Bosey was asked, why he hasn't done it, she always said, well, it needs an act of Congress.
But then Biden finally needed a way to satisfy his base.
It was a promise that he had made.
So we just unilaterally, through executive order, canceled student loan debt.
Conservative groups went into a federal court representing various plaintiffs and asked for not just respect of those plaintiffs, but for the entire student loan program to be declared illegal and for its implementation to be enjoined.
And they won.
And in federal district court, the judge issued a nationwide injunction.
And that has happened in every administration.
It was never particularly that controversial because it happened with a lot of restraint, rarely.
But because of the frequency with which federal district judges have been doing it since Trump was elected back in January, and you can argue about why, by their own admission, the Trump administration's own admission, they're testing a lot of previously untested, relatively radical powers in a lot of different areas.
But there certainly are political motives, I'm sure, too.
You have a whole bunch of federal court judges just enjoining these policies nationwide.
It's been a main grievance of the Trump administration.
And as you likely know, the position of the Trump administration is that birthright citizenship violates the Constitution.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says that if you are born in the United States, you automatically become a citizen.
Most legal scholars, constitutional scholars, disagree.
That's the merits of the case.
So in the context of the Trump administration wanting to deport people who were born in the United States, and the Trump administration is making the argument they're not citizens, even though they were born here.
So the question is, does birthright citizenship actually exist in the Constitution?
The federal district court judge rejected the Trump administration's argument, said no, birthright citizenship is absolutely guaranteed by the Constitution, and enjoined not just those plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit who were going to get deported, but the government as a whole from deporting anybody who has citizenship based on the fact that they were born in the United States.
That case was then appealed to the appellate court by the government.
The appellate court affirmed the district court's ruling, said birthright citizenship is absolutely in the Constitution, and therefore affirmed it and said, no, you cannot deport anybody born in the United States.
The Trump administration then appealed that to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court issued a ruling today.
In that case, it did not decide the merits of birthright citizenship.
It did not make a ruling on whether birthright citizenship is based on the Constitution or not.
They are going to decide that at some point, presumably later.
The only question they decided is the following.
Do federal courts have the power to issue not just injunctions enjoining government conduct for the people as it applies to the people who brought the case, the ones who are before them, but for an entire nation?
And with an important caveat that I'll get to at the end, just because it's kind of a detail for the most part, but maybe an important one, but maybe not.
But what the Supreme Court said by a six to three ruling, and it broke down exactly along conservative and liberal lines, the three judges in dissent were sort of Maior Kagan and Donnie Brown Jackson.
And Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion with John Roberts, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
So that's six conservative judges.
And the court ruled that the district court judges do not, again, with a caveat, do not have the power to issue nationwide universal injunctions.
They only have the power to enjoin government action as it pertains to the people in front of them.
And it was a pretty scathing dissent and an even more scathing ruling issued by, that was written by Amy Coney Barrett.
Let me just, this is from the opinion of the court.
I think we can put this on the screen.
It was Trump versus Caza Inc.
is the name of the case.
Donald Trump was sued, but His name comes first because he lost in the appellate court and the district court, so he's now appealing.
And this section says, some say that the universal injunction, quote, gives the judiciary a powerful tool to check the executive branch.
And they're quoting there Clarence Thomas, who in a concurring opinion wrote that, that he was more or less Clarence Thomas was, saying that it's important that the judiciary have this check on the executive branch.
But Amy Coney Barrett's opinion says, quote, but federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the executive branch.
They resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them.
When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power to.
And there was another section there where she was quoting Katanji Brown Jackson, and Katanji Brown Jackson's view was, if courts can't do this, we're going to have an imperial judiciary.
And Amy Coney Barrett really didn't even engage her arguments, just said it's so obviously contrary to not just 200 years of precedent, but also the Constitution.
But she did say, it's kind of ironic that Judge Brown Jackson warns of the dangers of an imperial presidency when she is obviously eager to create an imperial judiciary.
So that's meaning an imperial judiciary that doesn't have its power just limited to the case before them.
Now, I want to just, I think a lot of people have trouble understanding what the power of federal courts are in the Constitution.
And one of the things that I love most about the Constitution is that a lot of it was written to deliberately be a little bit ambiguous, to avoid being very unambiguous or specific or dogmatic about certain crucial questions, in part because they needed to be able to attract enough votes to ratify the Constitution.
And there were people who had lots of disagreements about what the role of the courts should be, what the role of the president should be, what the role of the Congress should be.
So they kind of said, in part they left it vague because that was a way they could get votes, but also the whole idea of the Constitution is checks and balances.
And the whole point of checks and balances is that the three branches are always going to be fighting for power.
The president will want more power, the Congress will want more power, the courts will want more power.
And through that struggle, no one branch will get too powerful.
Everyone is checked by every other branch.
You can't be a federal judge without the president nominating you and then having the Senate approve you.
And even once you're approved, you can be impeached by the Congress, by the Senate.
So every branch has checks from every other branch.
And through this constant struggle for more and more power, there will be a balance of power, which is what they were obsessed with, preventing a king, essentially, from re-emerging, since they had just fought a bloody war to emancipate themselves from that kind of rule.
One of the concerns about the Congress is that they have just washed their hands of their power.
President Trump decides, okay, I'm going to get involved in this new war with Israel.
I'm going to go bomb Iran.
And even though the Constitution says it's Congress that has the power to declare war, and you can read Federalist papers saying the gravest decision a country can make is to go to war, and we should not be able to go to war unless the people through their representatives in Congress approve of it since they're going to be the ones bearing the burden of that war, fighting it, paying for it.
But Congress doesn't want to vote on wars because those are hard votes.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq and it basically prevented her from getting the nomination twice.
John Kerry did.
It made his campaign in 2004 impossible.
But had the Iraq war gone really well and they voted no, that too would have been an albatross around their neck.
So they're very content, members of Congress, who just want to run for re-election, get higher office, not to have to vote on these things.
They've given up that power.
And that's really dangerous because if Congress isn't fighting for its power, and it typically isn't, that's what creates this imbalance.
But I just want to explain, I think people understand the power of the Congress and the power of the presidency, the executive, in Article 1, Congress, Article II, the executive.
Article 3 is where the judicial power is outlined.
And a lot of these things are intended to be obscure, and a lot of them are complex, especially since they required 200 years of judicial interpretation to create these precedents that govern today.
And people go to law school and study Article 3 for a year, a year and a half in order to fully understand it.
So it's understandable that people don't have a clear sense of it.
So I just want to walk you through the basics because I think it's so crucial to everything that's being debated now about these injunctions and what the Supreme Court decided today.
So the way the key phrase for understanding the judicial power in the United States as defined and formed by Article 3 is what's called the case or controversy clause of the of the court, which is Section 2, Article 3, which defines how, to what extent the judicial power extends.
And before I show you this language, I just want to give you the kind of overview.
Courts cannot and do not go around just opining on various questions.
Like some laws passed by Congress, signed into law by the president, people say, I think it's unconstitutional, and then the court just comes along and says, oh, you know what, let me resolve this.
I'll be the one to decide if it's constitutional or not.
Just like courts don't go around without being asked to judge whether people who are charged with crimes are guilty.
They have to have the case brought to them by the prosecutor.
The person has to be charged, brought to court, and you have two sides that are in dispute, the prosecution and the defendant, the person charged.
Same with civil cases.
That person cheats me out of a million dollars in a business deal.
The court just doesn't issue an opinion.
I have to go to the court, sue the person, create a controversy, a case or controversy, and then bring it to the court.
And the court's power Is to resolve the case in front of it, the case or controversy.
That's what the case or controversy clause of Article 3, Section 2 means.
Courts don't get to just go around opining and resolving things because they think it's important or saying laws are unconstitutional.
If you believe a law is unconstitutional and you want a court to decide, that's not enough.
You can't just go into a court and say, hey, Congress has passed this law and I don't like it.
I think it's unconstitutional.
I'd like you to decide.
Court can't do that.
You have to prove that you have standing to raise it, that you're being specifically and directly harmed by this law in order to let you sue the government because otherwise you're just asking the court to opine in the abstract and that's not what they do.
Their judicial power is limited to cases and controversies before them.
They don't opine on precedent.
They don't create precedent on their own.
They don't make legal rulings.
All they're supposed to do is rule on the case before them.
They have to have a fully formed case.
One side sues someone, one side charges someone criminally, one side sues the government, and then the other side comes in, and now you have a case or controversy.
That's what courts are for.
When someone sues somebody else, when you sue the government, when you charge someone with a crime.
That's the only time judicial power is activated is when someone brings a case before them.
And the controversy that's taking place here is that when a federal district court judge issues a ruling that extends beyond the people before them, as I said, six people about to be deported, run into court and sue the government saying, hey, what the government's trying to do to me is unconstitutional.
The court absolutely has the power to decide for those six people whether their rights are being violated and to issue an injunction if necessary to protect them that applies to those six people.
What courts have been doing over the 20th century, and especially since Trump was re-elected, is basically saying, my order doesn't just apply to the people before me.
It applies to the entire country.
It applies just to restrain the government everywhere it wants to go, way out of my district, way out of my state, way out of my circuit.
And that's what has become controversial because then you put a federal district court judge, a single judge at the lowest level in charge of basically imposing his ruling or her ruling on the entire country.
Here's section two that defines the judicial power.
Article three is the judicial power, the judiciary.
Section two is the specific clause that defines it, and it says this, quote, the judicial power shall extend to all cases.
So this is the key clause, the key idea already starting.
It extends to all cases in law and equity that either arise under the Constitution.
So you claim what the court government is doing to you is unconstitutional.
Hey, they put me in jail for a speech I gave.
They're violating my First Amendment rights.
And then the court has to decide, should this person be released from jail?
Have their Constitutional rights been violated.
It also extends to cases involving the laws of the United States, treaties made or which shall be made, to all cases affecting ambassadors or other public ministers and consul, to all cases of admiralty and maritime,
and then to controversies, this is the case and controversy clause, to controversies to which the United States shall be a party between two or more states, between a state and a citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants, and between a state or citizenship thereof and foreign citizens or subjects.
So it very much says you have to have a case or controversy involving these parties.
So let me just give you one example of how this limits what a federal court can do.
It says the Judicial Power Act shall extend to controversies between citizens of different states.
Between citizens of different states.
So if I live in Alabama and somebody lives in Idaho and we have a business dispute, I don't have to bring it to the state courts of Alabama or the state courts of Idaho.
I can bring it to a federal court because now it's between different states.
And the only time citizens of the same state can sue each other is under when claiming lands under grants of different states.
Very rare case.
So in general, if you have a civil case where you're suing somebody, you have to be of different states in order to get into a federal court.
That's one way to get into a federal court because the federal judicial power only extends there.
And then Congress made it so that you have to have a certain amount at stake.
So it's not like a small claims court.
Hey, that guy owes me $10 and he didn't pay me.
So now I'm in a federal court.
I think the minimum amount that you have to allege is $75,000 to get into a federal court.
Might have increased it.
It's been a while since I practiced law, but that's the idea.
So the federal court's power is limited to certain kinds of cases.
People in the same state can sue one another if, and here's where this says it, it involves the laws of the United States.
So if I sue somebody for breach of contract, that's not a federal law.
That's not a law of the United States is involved.
If I sue somebody for defamation, same thing.
But if I sue them under a federal statute, a law of the United States, rather than a law of Alabama or Idaho, say there's a Civil Rights Act that is a federal law.
It's a law of the United States, and I'm suing a restaurant saying it violated my civil rights under the Civil Rights Act by not letting me enter or by kicking me out or whatever.
Even if you're in the same state, you can enter the federal courts because you're suing under the laws of the United States.
All of which really goes to underscore the primary point here.
You don't have to know all these different circumstances in which a federal court has power, but it is important to recognize that the judicial power of the United States federal courts is limited by the Constitution, by the Article III that defines the judicial power.
And this idea of a case or controversies, which is exactly what the way that the power is defined.
It extends to all cases and then has a bunch of cases or to controversies and then defines all the different kind of controversies, case or controversy.
That is the linchpin of when a court has the power to rule.
And what the court does, and the Supreme Court does this too.
The Supreme Court sets precedent automatically when it rules because it issues principles that the lower courts are bound to follow.
They don't have the right to discard them.
But even the Supreme Court can't just rule in the abstract on whether a law is constitutional or not.
They have to have a case or controversy brought to them as well.
It has to involve two sides suing each other or charging one another with a crime in order to get to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court is there only to resolve the case, just like the federal court does, just like the district court judge, just like the circuit court judge does.
But obviously in the course of resolving the dispute, they issue principles, they affirm principles, which then become binding on everybody else's precedent.
But the district court judge doesn't get to do that.
A district court judge issues a ruling and a district court judge in that same district, let alone somebody in another state or another circuit, is not in any way bound by that district court ruling.
So you have a district court judge over here in Oregon issuing a nationwide injunction and then you have a district court judge over here in Georgia saying, no, the rights of the plaintiffs are not being violated, but somehow the injunction that was issued by this one judge whose power is supposed to be confined to the case before them suddenly becomes binding on the entire nation.
That's where the problem comes in.
Obviously, Supreme Court rulings are binding on the entire nation because they are the Supreme Court.
And this is where federal district judges have really, in a way, harmed their own power by making it far, far more frequent, far more extreme, far more kind of normalized than ever that these individual,
one judge in some federal district court building, and there's all over the country they have these, gets to decide not just for the people who brought the case before them, but for the entire country, what the government, the executive branch, the Congress is or is not permitted to do.
That's when it starts to feel like and even become judicial overreach.
Now, there are instances, and this is the caveat I said before, where the only way you can give relief to the people in front of you is by issuing a nationwide injunction.
So you have a class of people, hundreds or thousands who are affected by a government policy.
They all join together to sue, which happens as long as they have enough common interests.
You can sue as a class.
And the only way to give them relief is you can't just say, oh, it applies to these 3,000 people.
You have to give them the relief for the entire country.
There's other examples like that.
And so the Supreme Court said, all federal district court judges can do is issue rulings necessary to give relief to the people before them.
It may be that there are times when a nationwide injunction is necessary to give relief to the plaintiffs, but in general, as it was true in this case, when you have six people in the country illegally suing not to be deported because they're, or six citizens who are here because of birthright citizenship, the only way, you don't need a nationwide injunction to give them complete relief.
You just rule that the government can't deport those six people.
But the next 12 people who are going to be deported have to separately sue in another district or another judge.
And so they're confining the power of federal district court judges to what the Article 3, Section 2 definition of case or controversy had in mind.
I'm not fully convinced of the majority ruling just because I read most of it, but not all of it.
It was only issued this morning, and we're taping the show early today.
So, and I haven't read all of the dissenting opinion, though I've read a lot of both to have a very good idea.
So I don't want to just hear and like say, oh yeah, this is right.
But I do actually think that there is a serious problem of judicial overreach when you have federal district court judges routinely now applying their rulings, which are only supposed to apply to the people in front of them, not even be binding on other district court judges, saying this applies to what the U.S. government can do in the entire country.
You have, it's one thing if the Supreme Court says that, and you have the Supreme Court, the executive Congress, but for a simple, single federal court judge to override the executive branch of the Congress for the entire country, I think constitutionally, the language that I just showed you of case and controversy limits the judge's power and just kind of the equities of how our government is supposed to work do too.
And that's what Amy Coney Barrett said today.
It doesn't matter really all these arguments about why it's good or bad that Katanji Brown Jackson is raising.
You don't even need to indulge them because what she's saying is just contrary to, you know, 250 years of judicial president about the power of the judiciary plus the Constitution itself.
And that's why I said the only thing Amy Coney Barrett wrote to even address Katanji Brown Jackson's long sort of non-legal warnings about how the president is going to be now unconstrained and worrying about the imperial executive, the imperial presidency, is to say like, ironically, you're so worried about imperial presidency, but you're actually embracing an imperial judiciary.
And one of the reasons why I think Amy Coney Barrett is arguably the best judge on the court, even though conservatives get angry with her sometimes because she doesn't vote the party line, is precisely because she doesn't vote the party line.
She follows legal principles.
She's very studious about it.
She takes it very seriously.
It was so ironic because when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, the liberals went ballistic and said she's a religious fanatic.
She's just going to automatically vote in favor of Donald Trump.
They even claimed there was a quid pro quo that he nominated her in exchange for her promise to invalidate the results of the 2024, the 2020 election, if he lost.
And of course he did lose that election and Amy Coney Barrett nor anyone on the Supreme Court even remotely intervened to try and reverse the certified results of that election.
Obviously none of them apologized to her, but I think six years, seven years later we have a very clear understanding with her.
She joins with the conservatives when she believes it like she did on overturning Roe versus Wade.
And in this case as well, a very crucial case of the Trump administration, but she's not just a party line judge.
She really does look at constitutional principles and really doesn't care about the political or partisan outcome that everyone pretends that they want from a judge, sort of like everyone pretends that that's what they want from a journalist.
Just do your profession, follow your principles, follow the mores of the work without regard any favor to one side or another.
But oftentimes when people do that, they get attacked by both sides for not being loyal to either.
But that's what I think makes her such a good judge.
All right.
Jake Harp, 1965, asked the following, quote, I am curious about your thoughts on Donald Trump and how he is navigating the Israel-Iran conflict and the political landscape within the Republican Party.
It seems to me he is trying to please everyone in the party.
He bombs Iran to mollify the neocons and warhawks and then calls an immediate ceasefire to mollify the folks of Forever War who are questioning Trump's pledge not to start any new ones.
In the end, neither is happy or satisfied and the situation has become more messy.
It doesn't appear to be a winning strategy with any consistency.
It's kind of a subjective question there about Trump's foreign policy, but also a political one about the efficacy of it.
I'm not sure I agree on the political ground.
Sometimes when you feed all your factions that you need just enough to keep them from revolting, even if they're not all totally in love with you, but still think they've gotten some things from you, that can be a politically beneficial strategy.
I think that's well said, and I think it's pretty accurate too.
He was pressured by neocons and warhawks, obviously donors, of whom he has many big donors who are highly loyal to Israel to join the Israeli war against Iran to bomb their nuclear facilities.
And he went and did that, and that obviously made anti-interventionists in his party angry and feel the trade.
It obviously made neocons be very happy.
But then he also ended the war 12 days after it started, didn't, at least for now, cause regime change, didn't assassinate the Ayatollah Khomeini, didn't allow Israel or the United States to just carpet bomb all government institutions that could have just collapsed the government and created chaos like what was done in Syria.
And so a lot of anti-interventionists were able to say, okay, I don't like the fact that we joined this war, but at least we didn't get dragged into an endless conflict.
And then at the same time, it made the neocons and the warmongers and the Israel loyalists kind of upset.
Like Mark Levin thought he got everything he wanted.
Now he's like, this is outrageous.
Why aren't we finishing the job?
So nobody's really happy, but nobody's completely betrayed either.
And I don't know, politically, that might be a good strategy.
Now, as far, I don't think usually in those terms, but that would be my analysis.
Just it seems like his supporters are just happy that's all over and now get to move on to other things where they're more united, like immigration or the Supreme Court ruling today, things like that, or mocking Zaran Mandani as some sort of al-Qaeda agent, sleeper cell.
But on the merits, this is, let's just remember how many wars Israel has started.
And yes, when you bomb another country, it's an act of war.
It absolutely means you're at war with the country.
I know in the United States, we bomb so many countries that for us, a war has to be something way more.
Like, no one thinks like we're at war in 18 different countries at once just because we go around bombing whoever we want.
But those are acts of war.
And there's no other country on the planet that would say like, yeah, let's go bomb that country, but let's not have a war with them.
If you're bombing a country, you're at war with them.
Even if it lasts a week, it's still a war.
You're sending military fighter jets or bombers over a country to blow things up inside that country without their consent.
That's a war.
And the Israelis over the last year and a half, with American support, American approval, American financing, American arms, and American diplomatic protection, both under Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have bombed Gaza.
They bombed the West Bank.
They bombed Lebanon.
They bombed Syria.
They bombed Yemen.
And now they bombed Iran.
That's six countries in the region.
I'm sure they bombed Iraq too.
Pretty sure.
But I'll lead them out.
So that's six countries that the Israel.
Oh, and they bombed Syria as well.
Did I mention Syria?
Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.
Not really six countries.
The West Bank and Gaza aren't six countries, but six different places, four different sovereign countries.
They took land in both Lebanon and Syria as part of it, so they conquered land as part of that.
And the U.S. is along the ride the whole way, involved in all these new Mideast wars.
And President Trump did restart the bombing campaign of Joe Biden in Yemen.
He escalated that.
But again, there, he started it.
They envisioned it.
They wanted it to go on for nine months to a year.
And President Trump saw how expensive it was, how much it was depleting our missiles, how it wasn't actually weakening the Houthis, as everyone said, a lot of people said before him, wouldn't happen.
And he ended it after a month.
So on the one hand, you're angry that, if you have an anti-interventionist view like I do, you're angry that he bombed Yemen, but kind of happy that he realized apparently that it was at least a bad policy, if not a mistake, and ended it after 30 days.
Obviously, I think bombing Iran for Israel is a horrific mistake.
And even though this part, this phase of the war only lasted 12 days, I absolutely don't believe the conflict is over.
I believe the Americans and Israelis And lots of other people are doing all sorts of things to destabilize the Iranian government, to back dissident factions, to arm them, to fund them, operating all kinds of operatives within Iran.
Israel is already speaking about how they reserve the right to bomb Iran anytime if they see they're trying to build ballistic missiles.
It's not even about nuclear weapons.
So Israel has violated every ceasefire.
There's a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Israel just bombs it whenever they want.
When there was a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel frequently attacked Gaza.
So there's a ceasefire between the Israelis and Iranians.
Anyone who thinks that's going to hold if the Israelis don't want it to, I think, is being very naive.
And so there has been a lot of instability and tension with still the possibility for greater escalation that would drag the United States that didn't exist before three weeks ago when President Trump started a new war in the Middle East despite all his promises not to.
But then you have the other side that he stopped it quickly, clearly didn't want to get dragged into a war.
So I think politically that is what he's doing.
But I also think he's very genuine when he says, I believe he understands that getting dragged into an endless conflict in the Middle East will destroy his presidency.
But also he remembers he's gone around saying for a decade that is incredibly stupid, that's incredibly counterproductive.
We have to put America first and understands that's not anything consistent with what he has been saying.
And so I think there's a big part in the back of his mind that is very hesitant to get the U.S. involved in a protracted war.
And that's better than not having that hesitation, is what I guess I would say.
All right.
Katzam327.
I am curious, do you have any concerns about Iran developing nuclear weapons?
We are clear about what you think about everything Israel does, but do you have any concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons capability and what that capability does to our security, given the Ayatollah's multi-decade declaration of death to America and behavior toward the U.S.?
Or what an Iranian nuclear weapon does to Israel's security?
I don't disagree with your assessment that Israel has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy, but it is possible you have blind spots when it comes to Israel that may prohibit you from offering more objective analysis of Israel.
Your analysis of the NATO meeting is profoundly negative.
Anything positive or report?
I don't think we did a show last night where Michael Tracy went to the NATO meeting and interviewed multiple leaders.
I saw some of the clips of that interview.
I didn't see the full show, so I don't associate or disassociate myself with Michael Tracy, except I do insist that everyone recognize that I am not Michael Tracy, that he is a very different and separate person from I. So beyond that, I don't think I talked about the NATO Summit, but on the question of Iran,
just let me say, first of all, that I did a debate maybe, I think it recorded on Monday, and it was released on Wednesday with Konstantin Kizen and his partner Francis, who is co-host, on the trigonometry podcast that's quite popular.
It's on YouTube.
It's about an hour long.
And this was the question debated.
Was President Trump right to bomb the nuclear facility?
Should we consider Iran a threat?
So I don't necessarily want to give a long, detailed answer.
I've talked many times about this before as well.
We actually showed a video clip as well on Monday night of Noam Chomsky being asked this exact question.
There was a Jewish student where he went to speak, and she said, how can you minimize so much the danger of Iran when they chant death to America, death to Israel?
What about if they get a nuclear weapon?
And we showed his answer that I definitely associate myself with.
So let me just say a couple things.
First of all, when people chant death to America, death to Israel, that's a chant.
It's an expression of anger.
And of course, Iran has anger toward the United States because we overthrew their democratic-left government in 1953 and imposed on them a brutal, savage dictator, the Shah Viran, who was an American and U.S. puppet, an Israeli U.S. puppet, served Israel and the U.S.'s interests and cracked down on religious freedom, on all sorts of dissent.
And it didn't end until 1979.
That's 25 years later.
And you can say, oh, that's a long time ago.
That's not a long time ago.
Some big portion of the population lived through that.
Lived through the Shah, lived under the Shah, understood it was the United States imposing a dictatorship on their country.
And a lot of anti-American sentiment comes from there.
And then you, obviously, even people who didn't live through it study that, understand that history.
In Brazil, they did the same thing in 1964, so a decade later, imposed a military junta on the country that was repressive and savage.
Same thing, not quite as brutal as a Shah, but brutal enough.
And they toppled Brazilian democracy and propped up a dictator who ran the country the way the United States wanted.
Basically lasted 21 years, 24 years, depending on how you count.
And obviously a lot of people in Brazil remember that, lived through it, have a lot of negativity toward the United States because of it.
Who wouldn't?
So it's one thing to chant.
It's another thing to have the capability or the willingness.
What does that mean?
Death to America, death to Israel?
Iran didn't start that war.
Israel started the war with the United States.
It's not Iran that has bombed six different places, four different sovereign countries in the region in the last two years.
That's Israel and the United States who have done that.
Iran hasn't started a war in like 200 years.
That's what Professor Mearsheimer was saying.
The United States has started many, many, many, so is Israel in that time.
And the key point, I think, is that this idea that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, they're going to use them against Israel, which is a major nuclear state, has had nuclear weapons for several decades, has a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, has second-strike capability, to say nothing of the United States, which after Russia is the second largest nuclear power in the world, but probably with the more sophisticated second strike capability.
That means that if Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon, which again, there is, even the U.S. Intelligence Committee said, no evidence that they were, they enriched 60%, but no decision was made to weaponize the nuclear weapon.
I've gone over all these things, so I don't want to repeat the in-depth point.
But I think the bigger issue is, even if they got nuclear weapons, and in general, I think it's better to have fewer countries with nuclear weapons than more, in general, as a principle.
But I'm way more worried about Israel's nuclear weapons than I am about Iran's, because Israel actually has them.
Israel has proven that they act with no limits.
They're operating through a fanaticism that's partly religious and partly nationalistic.
And I could see Israel using nuclear weapons before I could see Iran using nuclear weapons.
If you believe Iran is going to use nuclear weapons against Israel and the United States, you believe that then that the leaders of Iran are willing to commit instant suicide, not just for themselves, not just for the millions of people, the 92 million people who live in their country.
If Ted Cruz is watching, it's 92 million people, but for just the extermination of Iran as an entity, as a place, as a nation.
And I don't see anything that Iranian leaders have ever done that suggests they're suicidal in that manner.
That's why nuclear weapon proliferation has not resulted in nuclear war.
And I do not believe that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, they would use it to commit suicide and destroy their entire country.
They just have proven over and over.
They entered a deal where they gave up nuclear weapons voluntarily in 2015.
They had inspectors all over the place.
They allowed surveillance and monitoring and cameras all on this site in order to prove to the world they didn't want nuclear weapons.
They weren't going to get nuclear weapons.
They wanted to be reintegrated into the international community.
They have sanctions lifted.
How can you say that the Iranians are some fanatical, unhinged, insane country hell-bent on not just getting nuclear weapons, but using them, even though it means their complete destruction, when they just proved this decade that they would enter into an agreement, they were ready to again?
It wasn't Iran that withdrew from that deal.
It was the United States under Donald Trump.
And nobody thinks the Iranians were violating that deal.
Trump just promised to do it in 2016 as a campaign promise to attract pro-Israel voters and money.
And he won, and he felt the need to make good on that plan.
And the argument of his from the beginning was not Iran is violating it and enriching to try and get nukes.
The argument was the deal is somehow one-sided or not good enough, and he wanted to get a better deal.
But Iran proved they'll enter into a deal.
But even if they got nuclear weapons, what makes anyone think that they would attack Israel and the United States knowing it would mean their instant annihilation?
I know where the propaganda is, oh, this is an apocalyptic end-time religion.
Nothing they've done remotely substantiates that, including what they just did in this war.
To say nothing over the last few years, when they offered a very, very restrained response to Israel after Israel blew up their consulate, they launched symbolic retaliation that they knew would be intercepted.
And whenever I used to say that, people would say, oh, you think they did less than they really could do?
That's all they could do.
And they just proved, no, they can do a lot more.
President Trump himself said Israel got battered, hit very hard.
There was military censorship in Iran, in Israel.
And journalists explained that they were not allowed to show any damage done to military or government installations, even though it was extensive.
The only things that journalists were allowed to show was damage when a civilian building got hit to create the false impression that Iran was targeting civilian structures.
And that no defense spaces, no intelligence spaces, no government buildings in Israel were exposed.
Iran always had the capability to inflict more damage than they did last year in that retaliation.
They disproved it, and I believe they could have inflicted a lot more, too.
But they were pragmatic and careful and restrained and rational, as they always are, not to spiral up the escalatory ladder, precisely because they're not suicidal.
And even though I say in general, I think it's better for fewer countries to have nuclear weapons than more because of how destructive and reckless and dangerous those are, not just to a particular group of people, but to humanity, I am accepted the argument I've heard Professor Mir Sheimer make that perhaps Iran having a nuclear weapon would actually create more stability in the region because right now Israel just goes around doing whatever it wants,
taking whatever land it wants, bombing whoever it wants, killing whoever it wants, because their nuclear weapons make them the bully of the neighborhood.
But if there was a balance of power, a kind of forced respect, the way we saw with India and Pakistan, given that both of them have nuclear weapons when war broke out, but not for very long, and everybody was very careful, everyone was very careful with North Korea and China and the United States and Russia,
if there were that kind of fear on the part of the Israelis rather than this belief that we can just fight whoever they want, there's a good likelihood, a very good argument to make that there'd actually be fewer wars, less conflict, and more stability in that region.
All right, so I think we're going to leave it there.
We have a couple of more questions that I think would be very good to answer, but I don't think we should go a lot more.
We've gone over an hour, and I try and keep these tight and brief on Friday night.
So actually, for those who want to see, there's the trigonometry debate, debate, was Trump right to bomb Iran?
The ability to enrich at low levels consistent with nuclear energy.
Greenwald, I'm hearing myself in my...
So this is the debate I did with Konstin and Francis of the trigonometry podcast.
It was an hour and a half long.
There you see, an hour and 20 odd minutes.
So if you want to delve further into my views about Iran and nuclear weapons and Israel and the war that Trump joined, we covered all of that.
They obviously were, I don't know about obviously, but if you know them, they were most definitely on the other side, believe Trump should have bombed Iran, that Iran is this grave enemy, et cetera, et cetera.
We had very opposite views, but it was a very contentious but very civil debate too.
Very, very unfailingly civil.
No ad hominems, no yelling, no screaming.
It wasn't like a Piers Morgan panel, so I really enjoyed it.
So if you want to hear more, I encourage you to go watch that.
All right.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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You can listen to every episode 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble, and you can listen on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
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All you have to do is click join right below the video player on the Rumble page.
That gives you access to a wide variety of benefits, interactive features where we communicate with you throughout the week.
We do a lot of early streaming there.
We put, for example, the packet of Michael's Tracy's interviews with NATO leaders on the locals platform the day before it aired last night because we weren't sure we were going to do that last night given potential with news and we decided we're going to put that there but that was exclusively put on locals we put a lot of video content there sometimes if the show goes too long we stream exclusively there as well for our local viewers and of course the Q ⁇ A session is to take questions exclusively from our from our locals members but and there are other benefits as well but
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