UN Gaza Investigator Francesca Albanese on US Sanctions Against Her; Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions on Trump's Pressure on Brazil, Sam Harris, Bill Ackman, and More
Glenn Greenwald interviews UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese about the US sanctions against her and her latest findings about how Western companies enable Israel's atrocities in Gaza. Plus: Glenn answers audience questions about Trump's tariffs on Brazil, Bill Ackman's pathetic tennis tournament, and Sam Harris. ------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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, it's very well documented on this show and elsewhere that critics of Israel are not only smeared and maligned, but are often officially punished by the U.S. government and other Western nations.
Few people have endured more such attacks than our guest tonight, the Italian specialist in human rights law and the UN rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese.
Her job with the UN requires her to document human rights abuses in Palestine, just as other similar jobs as rapporteur with the UN require similar documentation for abuses in all sorts of other countries, Afghanistan, Belarus, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and many others.
And for doing her job and doing it well, Albanese has now not only widely been branded an anti-Semite, of course, but is also being punished by multiple Western governments as well as Israel in all sorts of ways.
Those reprisals against her, again, for the crime of documenting Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, her job, severely escalated this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the imposition of American sanctions against her personally, against her finances, her travel, and other abilities in her life.
His announcement, not coincidentally, came just days after the UN's publication of her report about the role of American big tech companies, including Google, Amazon, and Palantir, in working with the IDF and profiting off of the destruction of Gaza.
She'll join us tonight to talk about her work and the ongoing attacks against her, specifically culminating in American sanctions announced by the State Department this week.
Then, as you likely know, every Friday night we try and reserve all of our show or a significant part of our show for a Q ⁇ A session with the members of our local community where we take questions throughout the week from members of our local community and we do a Q ⁇ A on the live show every Friday night.
As usual, we have a wide range of questions, some involving the new tariffs on Brazil, a remarkable clip from Sam Harris and his subordination of what he calls his other principles to Zionism, questions about Israel and of course the noble sport of lawn tennis as well.
We will have something involving Bill Ackman and a couple of other interesting ancillary events related to that sport.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The attacks on free speech and free expression from various governments, especially the U.S. government and Western governments, has of course been a major topic of our program for as long as this exists and a major topic of my journalism for as long as I've been doing it.
In the last 18 months or so, we have focused, because the U.S. government has focused, on the punishments doled out to critics of Israel and specifically the Israeli war in Gaza, which is really the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the genocide in Gaza.
We've had all sorts of instances of U.S. college students being arrested, of legal residents being deported even though they broke no law, used no violence, disrupted nothing, as much as just writing an op-ed, criticizing Israel can have you deported even if you're in the U.S. on a student visa, on a work visa, on a green card.
Throughout the West, all kinds of actual criminal prosecutions, including two British rock brands, Bob Villen and Nekap, for the crime of chanting about Israel, singing about Israel in a way the UK government deems to be over a criminal line, bans on pro-Palestinian protests, et cetera, et cetera.
But really, few people have been the target of more official and aggressive punishments than our guest tonight, the UN Rapporteur for Palestine, Francisca Albanese.
And really, in a lot of ways, it is a tribute to the remarkable courage and relentless investigative work and the refusal to back down when documenting Israeli war crimes in Palestine by the Israelis.
And of course, people always accuse her and the UN generally of obsessing on Israel.
It's absolutely not true.
There are UN rapporteurs for human rights abuses in countless other countries.
I just named some of them, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia, Burundi, Iran, and many others as well.
The idea that the UN focuses only on Israel or that she somehow says on Israel is laughable.
It's so blatantly untrue.
But her job in particular is to document as the rapporteur, which is a legal position where international human rights lawyers volunteer their time pro bono to work on matters documenting human rights abuses in various areas for the UN.
And her role is to do so against the Palestinians or documenting the abuses of the Palestinians by the Israeli government, paid for and armed by the U.S. and other Western governments.
And that's the work she's been doing.
But she has also been involved Throughout her life, on all kinds of other human rights abuses throughout the world that have nothing to do with Israel.
In fact, she's traveling this week in Bosnia, where she's commemorating the massacres against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s.
She has been involved in refugee crises, and migrant abuses, and abuses in Afghanistan.
This is just part of her work, but it's the part of her work that, unlike all the other things she's done, have actually provoked retaliation because in the U.S. and the West, it's increasingly viewed as not just immoral, but criminal to criticize Israel.
You need no further proof than that than the announcement this week by the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, not the Secretary of State for Israel, announcing punishments on her.
And this is what he said on July 10th.
He posted on X, quote, today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt international criminal court action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.
Albanese campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated.
We will always stand by our partners and their right to self-defense.
The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare and protect our sovereignty and that of our allies.
Notice what Secretary Ruby did not accuse her of doing.
He did not accuse her of lying or publishing fabrications or manipulating evidence or spreading disinformation.
The anger is over the accuracy of her work.
And it's not a coincidence that the day before Secretary Rubio announced those sanctions, the Washington Post documented a report that the UN issues that was authored and overseen by Francesca Albanese that was specifically designed to demonstrate how major big tech companies, including Google, along with Talentir, Amazon, and others, are providing weapons.
And by weapons, I mean tech weapons, surveillance weapons, military weapons to Israel, to the IDF to profit off of these companies, their destruction, their ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
And in many ways, U.S. big tech companies are more powerful than the U.S. government.
They're absolutely central to the U.S. military-industrial complex.
They all have massive contracts with the U.S. intelligence agency.
But knowing exactly that, she decided that it was important to document the role of industrial forces in what is happening in the IDF.
And for that, she got denounced as, you'll never guess, anti-Semitic by the co-founder of Google, Sergei Bren, who is a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States, a U.S. citizen, co-founder of Google, multi-billionaire, one of the world's 10 richest people.
And the Washington Post got a hold of internal dialogue from internal chats from Google, where he made it clear to Google employees that they should never even be discussed because the UN itself is transparently anti-Semitic.
Here's the headline.
Google co-founder Sergei Brin calls UN transparently anti-Semitic after a report on tech firms and Gaza.
His comment came on an internal company forum in response to a UN report alleging that Google profited from Israel's, quote, genocide screenshots.
And his argument was that the use of genocide, not to talk about what was done to Jews 80 years ago, but to talk about what's being done by Israel today, is inherently anti-Semitic.
Genocide is a term you can apply to every country on the planet except Israel, according to the multi-multi-billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergei Brin.
And that shows you, again, there was nothing in the report that he said was false.
They're not angry that she published false information designed to malign the reputation of Google.
They're angry that she published true information about Google's role in the IDF.
And for all the conservative claims about how much they hate big tech, they're completely in bed with big tech, the U.S. military industrial complex is, the intelligence community is.
We've documented that many times before.
We did a whole show on the role of Palantir.
And for as much retaliation as you will suffer if you criticize Israel, documenting the role of America's largest tech companies in its partnership with the IDF and its profiteering off of the destruction of Gaza is a red alert, red line that apparently Marco Rubio decided merit sanctions.
That was the camel that broke the, the straw that broke the camel's back.
I'm sure there were other, there have been calls for her sanctioning or other punishment, of course, calling her an anti-Semite, the way everyone who criticizes Israel is called an anti-Semite.
Everybody knows that formula by now.
But sanctioning her, the American government sanctioning her because of its criticism of Israel, and obviously she's documenting as well the vital role the U.S. and Europeans are playing in arming and financing that war.
All things, again, that's her job to do.
Nobody's contesting the veracity of it.
They're now going to block her finances, prevent her from using credit cards and bank accounts, whatever they can do with these sanctions.
Now, again, this has been going on for quite a long time, all the way back in February 2024, just four or five months after the Israeli destruction of Gaza began in response to the October 7th attacks, which in turn was in response to all sorts of Israeli killing of civilians and children in Gaza, including in 2023, before October 7th.
Not like that was a peaceful situation.
The Israelis had bombed the West Bank, had bombed Gaza for many, many years, but also in 2023, killing innocents and children, as usual, before October 7th, just in 2023 alone.
You can't isolate when this conflict began with October 7th.
There was a lot of killing by Israel taking place prior to that.
And she started documenting, because again, it's her job.
And this was not a role created for the response to October 7th that has existed for many years because the Palestinians, according to international law, in the view of almost every government on the planet, is an occupying force in the West Bank and effectively in Gaza because of the blockade it imposes on it.
And occupied populations have rights under UN law.
And again, there are many rapporteurs from many different countries.
Hers happens to be the occupied territories of Palestine.
And so that's where she focuses by mandate.
And yet, here's the Times of Israel.
Israel bans the UN rapporteur, looks to boot UNRWA from buildings on state lands.
Quote, visa ban comes after Francisca Albanese, denies October 7th.
Terrorists were motivated by hatred for Jews, and instead blames, quote, Israeli oppression.
Refugee agency rejects calls to step down.
I mean, does anyone actually think that Hamas has grievances against Israel and just went looking for Jews on October 7th?
They killed many non-Jews.
They kidnapped people who were workers from Thailand, from Russia, from other places who were not Jewish.
Basically, it was an attack on Israel in response to Israel's bombardment, blockade, starvation, killing in Gaza.
The CIA has a term for that, which is blowback.
That if you go to some other country and kill their people, kill their innocent people, deny them human rights, occupy them, destabilize them, they're going to try and do things back to you.
You can hate Hamas, you can say it's a terrorist group, whatever you want to call it, that Israeli violence against Gaza is noble and legitimate or whatever.
Well, Gazans' attacks against Israel, their violent resistance against occupation is terrorism.
You can call it whatever you want.
But the idea that it's motivated by a desire to kill Jews as opposed to a resistance against what they regard as Israeli aggression is ridiculous.
And her pointing out that, no, this wasn't an attack because there were Jews in Israel.
It was an attack because of the actions of the Israeli government.
You can debate that if you want.
But of course, you don't.
People who raise criticism of Israel aren't debated.
They're not engaged.
Like I said, nobody's ever accused her of saying anything false.
You just get punished, smeared, and they try and destroy you, not just through random tweets online, but through official government sanctions.
So one of the impressive things about Francesca Albanese, many things, is that she doesn't speak from a place of ideology.
She doesn't speak from a place of political bias.
She's an international human rights lawyer and an academic who is actually best known for her role as the United States Special Rapporteur for the situation on human rights in the Palestine Occupy Territories.
But she was only appointed to that position in 2022.
She has done lots of other work throughout her life.
She's a scholar at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration.
She has been in the news recently because of Gaza and this reprisals against her.
But as I said, she's done human rights advocacy and work with respect to migrants, with respect to Bosnian Muslims, with respect to Afghanistan, with respect to a whole variety of other issues as well, immigrants.
And she's never suffered reprisal for it until her work, starting in 2022, focused on the attack by the IDF against the people of Gaza, which even Israeli genocide experts who have stood up and defended her say is a genocide.
So the fact that she's done this work, knowing the attacks she's going to get, the fact that she's unbothered by these attacks, that she continues to be one of the most informed and eloquent and courageous spokespersons objecting to what I do think is the atrocity of our time, which is the Israeli destruction of Gaza, makes her, in my view, extremely admirable and worthy of respect, but also somebody very worth listening to.
There are a few people who know more about the situation than she.
It's our pleasure to welcome her to the show this evening.
Ms. Albanese, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We are very interested in your case.
And I want to begin with a common criticism that I hear frequently of people like yourself who focus a lot on the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing taking place there, the genocide, which is, oh, you seem very obsessed with Israel.
You don't really seem to care much about other human rights violations.
Now, in your case, you're the UN rapporteur for the occupied territories of Palestine.
It's kind of your job to focus on this conflict.
But you do have a very rich background in human rights and law and violations and the like, and we've focused on many other things.
So I know one of the things you're doing now is traveling.
It's just hard.
We had a little bit of a hard time scheduling.
Where is it that you're traveling today and for what purpose?
I just arrived to Sarajevo from Sabrenica.
I've been invited to speak after Slovenia, after London, after Madrid, to speak to the people here about what's going on in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in Gaza.
And I was honored to accept the invitation in this context where the genocide survivors are hosting a space to talk about all genocides.
And today I went to Sebrinica to pay tribute to the survivors and the victims.
It was very heavy and there is so much that I'm still processing of this, but something that really touched me was the nerve of some Western officials who, on the one hand, said, oh, we have always been with you and we will be with you forever.
No, no, there was no NATO when the Bosnian people were slaughtered and especially those in Sebrinica.
The people in Sebrinica who were not even all force from Sbrinica gathered because there was a safe area under UN supervision and the UN itself didn't protect the people.
And 30 years later, these people have the nerve to come or deliver messages from afar.
And the population is so still, so devastated that you cannot even take a shout to them and say, well, I will not let you write.
Yeah, I just thought, I mean, it's important in and of itself to talk about that massacre in Bosnia, but also to underscore how universalized your human rights focus has been.
It's not like you just focus on Israel and Palestine other than the job that you have.
But let me ask you about the specific job that you have, because I think a lot of people don't understand the function generally of UN rapporteurs, but also the specific function that you serve as the UN rapporteur for Palestine, for the occupied territories of Palestine.
So can you talk about what it is that your job at the UN as an official is intended to be, both generally but specifically with your case?
United Nations Special Rapporteurs are independent experts of the United Nations appointed by the Human Rights Councils to serve for a term in my case, documenting and reporting given human rights situations.
It can be thematic issues like reporting on the state of the right to food, the prevention of torture, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression.
And there are also a number of mandates that have a country focus.
For example, Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and occupied Palestinian territory.
So my responsibility as per the resolution that created this mandate is to document and report, investigate and report on the human violations of international law committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Is it an obsession to focus on Israel?
No, really, because when the mandate was created, the Palestinian authorities or whatever people think that the Palestinians have were not even in existence.
And so Israel was and still remain the occupying power ruling through a brutal regime of oppression and apartheid over the Palestinians.
And this is why this mandate is still in function.
I would be the happiest to be the last special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory and see the end of the forever occupation, apartheid, and justice for the genocide that is still ongoing.
One of the reasons why you're even more in the news than you often are this week is because the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that there were going to be a whole variety of sanctions directed at you for your criticisms, essentially, of Israel, which is your job at the UN.
And I want to get into a lot of the other reprisals that you face, but I want to just focus on this for the moment because it's new.
It struck me, and I'm wondering whether it also struck you as important, that the last thing you did as rapporteur before being sanctioned was the publication of this report detailing the role that key U.S. tech companies such as Google and Amazon and others play in providing the IDF with technology, with intelligence, with all kinds of instruments and weapons that they use in their destruction of Gaza.
It was on the front page of the Washington Post and elsewhere, and that was followed then by the announcement of these sanctions.
Can you talk a little bit about what this report was and whether you think that it was the proximate cause or the last straw, as it were, before sanctions were imposed on you?
Yes.
My last report is the outcome of an investigation that has started about eight months ago and has led me to collect information through various sources, missions, investigative journalists,
forensic experts, economists, civil society, scholars, really lawyers, about 1,000 entities that operate in the occupied Palestinian territory as private sector,
which includes a broad range of entities from arms manufacturers, tech companies, construction machinery related companies, like producing anything from bulldozers,
buses or anything to build infrastructure from water grids to roads and rails, until banks, pension funds, supply chain companies and universities.
Now, I've realized that by looking at this puzzle and organizing all the elements, Israel has maintained what had already been called by many economists and scholars an economy of the occupation,
where I have realized each sector and various companies per sectors advancing the displacement and replacement of the Palestinians.
For example, to take control of their land and emptying it of Palestinians, Israel has used weapons, bulldozers and other machinery.
It has used surveillance technology to segregate the Palestinians and make sure that their life would grow increasingly constrained to the benefit of the expansion of the colonies,
in which, meanwhile, there would be the realization of the second pillar of the Israeli economy, the replacement of the Palestinians through the construction on their land of colonies, water grid, electricity grid and rails,
roads, and then the selection of companies to produce and sell goods from dates to wines to beauty products from the Dead Sea, etc.
And then there would be a network to sell this product.
But all of these would have not been possible without the enablers.
Banks, pension funds and other providers of financial resources and universities and other institutions, charities lending legitimacy to Israel.
Israel's economy is inseparable from that of the occupation.
So we need, my report says first and foremost, we need to stop this fiction of there is a good Israel within the green line and a bad Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Because when everything is so ingrained, all the more now that there are proceedings against Israel for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
And in the last 20 months, and this is the last point that my mortal makes when it comes to the facts without bothering the legal framework, is that while the Israeli economy was nosediving, in many respects, in free fall and Israelis were losing jobs and livelihoods,
the Israeli stock exchange kept on rising, amassing $220 billion, which means a growth, an increase of 170 plus percent.
How it's possible?
Because there have been companies that have profiteered from the escalation of violence and the genocidal violence in Gaza.
For example, tech companies in particular and arms manufacturers.
Israel has sophisticated, perfected, even changed and made it more lethal weapons that have been provided through these companies or directly or through member states like the United States, Germany and others.
But also Israel wouldn't have been able to do that without the banks that at the moment of great crisis, increased deficit and a fall of the credit rating, like credit trust.
In that case, it's been the banks and other financial institutions intervening to supply Israel with all the resources it needed.
And meanwhile, all the other companies, which should have disengaged decades ago, have continued to stay engaged and provide tools that have allowed not just Israel to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank, but that have contributed to the extrajudicial killing and geek killings and other genocidal acts, including the pulverization of Gaza.
Yeah, and I should note that it has been often the case that these kinds of in storing sustained occupations and massacres have often used the nation's industries as a tool for doing so.
Obviously, Nazi Germany relied on it to a great extent, but many others as well.
But I guess one of the things I'm trying to get at is in the United States government's mind, these companies, Apple or Google and Amazon and Palantir and others, are really kind of the crowning jewel of American power.
They're very integrated into the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community.
They provide a lot of money to a lot of politicians at Washington.
And you have been the target of extreme criticism from the Trump administration, even before that from the Biden administration.
And it seems like these sanctions came right as your report was issued implicating these companies in this ethnic cleansing and genocide.
And I'm wondering if you think that was what provoked these sanctions.
Look, first, let me tell to the benefit of your audience that all these companies, and by no means I would like people to think that this is an exhausting list.
My report contains reference to 48 entities, 60 if we consider also the parents, subsidiaries, franchisees and licensees.
But this is not a list.
This is just a set of cases which are illustrative of an overall criminal endeavor.
And all these companies have been put on notice.
I gave them time to check the facts that they were contesting.
I have prepared a tailored legal analysis per each company, telling them all the violations they were taking part of by the very fact, according to international law, of engaging in a situation which is as unlawful as the one that Israel maintains in the occupied Palestinian territory,
that the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to dismantle, totally and unconditionally, dismantle the settlements, withdraw the troops and stop exploiting Palestinian natural resources, stop practicing racial discrimination and apartheid.
This is the decision of the SDJ.
In the face of this, in the face of criminal proceedings, in the face of proceedings for genocide, companies, entities that have stayed engaged have at least contributed not just to the violation of the self-determination of the Palestinian people and the perpetual occupation that Israel maintains on their land, but also other ancillary violations by being directly linked, contributing to, and even in certain cases, causing the human rights violation.
Some of these violations, like extracting from the quarries in the West Bank, as a German Heidelberg company has done, can amount to pillage.
So I've put everyone on notice from booking.com, Google, Amazon, etc., Palantir, Elbit.
they could have responded.
Some of them have, a small number, 18, and the others have completely ignored my facts, but all of my facts and legal analysis.
But the thing is that you see, Glenn, my report has not been challenged substantively.
It has given rise to a hurricane of violence, agnated aggravated violence against me, which is not new.
I'm not new to this constant smear, defamation, reputational damage from the United States, which is unacceptable because I'm just a legal expert serving pro bono the United Nations.
And the US, as a member of the United Nations, should respect my work, should engage with my work instead of engaging in senseless, senseless attacks.
But all the more, it's clear what is happening here.
I've touched a nerve, a nerve that resonates with the Palestinians, that alerts consumers, that may ignite litigation, civil suits and other criminal proceedings against these companies.
But besides this, people understand that there is a direct link between the laboratory that Palestine has become at the end of decades of experimentation of all sorts of military and surveillance and other techniques by Israel that then have been marketed handsomely again for decades and sold to all dictatorships first and foremost and many states as we speak.
But also people make a link between the profits that companies like Amazon or Airbnb make, including in the context of a genocide, and the profits that these companies make in our own system in Europe and elsewhere.
So these companies have become rights holders without corresponding obligation.
Is the usual operating outside the law for those who detain power, where multinationals today hold more power than states and therefore more power than us?
I understand why Glenn University have cracked down so harshly on students because the students have been the one exposing their complicity with the military industry, their complicity with Israeli apartheid.
And this university realized, like the Technical University of Munich, that probably losing this partnership will cause a bankruptcy.
So it was better to go harsh on the students.
And this is what has led probably the United States administration to conclude that I'm a threat to a global economy because I'm provoking an awakening that has not been there before through the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I should note, first of all, I mean, so often the worst attacks on someone comes not when they lie, but when they tell the truth, the truth that people want most to hide.
And I think that's happened repeatedly in your case.
And I do think it's worth noting that there are very few people who have been the target of just a more systemic, organized, official smear campaign over the last almost two years now than you have been.
I don't mean mean comments online.
I mean very coordinated attacks from multiple governments led by Israel, led by the United States.
And now you have these sanctions.
I don't know if you're under legal constraints in terms of what you can say about them, but can you talk to whatever extent you can about the effects that these sanctions are likely to have on you, your life, your finances, your travel, anything else?
Wilen, honestly, it's not even about legal restraints, is that, believe it or not, I've had very brief conversations both with my family and my legal advisors because I've been busy traveling across Slovenia and now Bosnia.
I need to pause and look at this.
I need to let it sink in because my reflex as a lawyer is the 1946 Convention on Privileges and Immunities prohibits the United States from doing what it's doing and would make total sense for me to start advocating.
So a member state, any member states, take the United States before the International Court of Justice because enough with these mafia style intimidation techniques.
This is unsustainable, not just for me, but for the system.
We need to protect the multilateral arena.
We will miss human rights very much when we don't have them anymore.
However, I've not done it again, probably because I'm really coming to terms with this, which is huge.
But also, I don't want to distract anyone from member states to civil society from our priority, which is to stop the genocide in Gaza.
I mean, yesterday, yes, I woke up to the news of the sanctions.
I mean, I had heard about that and then I read the night before, and then I needed to get some time to realize what it was.
But then I had my cup of tea, I had my shower, I spoke with my kids and went on with my life.
While again, dozens and dozens of Palestinians were killed yesterday alone.
And this is every day in Gaza.
People are being starved.
I'm so exhausted to see the bodies of dying kids, starving kids in the hands or in the arms of their moms.
It's something that we cannot tolerate.
We cannot.
And I don't know what kind of monstrosity has infected all of us because right now, Glenn, what member states should be doing, especially those in the Mediterranean area, should send their navies with doctors, nurses, and real humanitarian aid, food, baby formula, medicines, everything that is needed for the Palestinians to overcome the current difficulty.
It's a tragedy and that thing that people call the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a death trap and I do see the criminality in it.
It looks like a joint criminal enterprise and this must be stopped.
So this is my priority and this is why, no, I'm not even thinking of the sanctions and impact that they will have on me.
This is the state I am in right now.
I think a lot of people share your horror and almost the inability to express it at this point anymore in words, not just what's happening there, but the way in which the world is not just standing by, but much of the Western world is funding and arming and enabling it.
I just have a last question out of respect for your time.
I know you have limited time because you're traveling.
I do think it's so important that you mention that your background is in human rights law.
That's what everything is steeped in.
You're not talking out of ideology or politics, let alone anti-Semitism or anything else that you're accused of.
And you use two words to describe Israel and what's happening, which is apartheid and genocide.
And you're by far not the only person to use those words.
High-level Israeli officials have called what the Israeli treatment of Palestinians are as apartheid.
Huge numbers of Israeli genocide experts have used genocide as the word.
But with somebody with the legal background and the human law and international law background that you have, how do you understand those two terms briefly and why do you think they apply to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, apartheid and genocide?
Look, Palestine for me has been such a learning environment also to connect the dots and break the walls or the silos that contain the legal knowledge.
Because you know in our field you have specialized human rights lawyers or international humanitarian law experts or genocide experts.
Well, Palestine allows you in real time to understand it all.
Taking the land and the resources from people forcibly displace them.
This is the essence of settler colonialism.
And Israel has used as other settler colonial endeavors, think of South Africa, but also think of Algeria, think of other places where colonialism has been accompanied by the transfer of civilians from the metropolis from another place.
By apartheid, apartheid is an institutionalized system of racial segregation entailing inhumane acts.
And we cannot claim that we have had a system in history of settler colonialism that was not apartheid.
South Africa has given us the term apartheid, but apartheid is everywhere.
There is like a legal dualism that then reflects in policies and practices in a given country, place, state among citizens, distinguishing them and separating them according to racial lines.
And Israel does it.
It does it inside Israel because Palestinians have Israeli citizenship but they have less rights.
But it does so, especially in the occupied Palestinian territory, where Israeli settlers are under Israeli civil law and Palestinians are under Israeli military rule, military orders, draconian military orders written by soldiers, enforced by soldiers and reviewed in military courts, including for children by soldiers.
And the thing is that genocide I've realized throughout history, genocide is the intentional destruction of a group as such in its essence and can take place through acts of killing, but not exclusively.
There are genocides that have been committed exclusively through creating the conditions of life calculated to destroy and also the separation of children, but also another act of genocide is the in severe bodily and mental harm.
And I really would like to see who today can keep on claiming, I mean anyone with a grain of decency, that what happens is not a genocide.
However, settler colonialism carries inside it the dormant gene of genocide in its legal sense, which is a very restrictive sense, because genocide, as it has been conceived, also includes cultural elements which are not protected under the definition of the crime.
And look, eventually, you know, from Sebrenica and from Sarajevo, I can tell you, it takes time.
There will be one day where everyone, as an illustrious Palestinian writer has said, everyone will have been against it.
Tonight, it's very heavy to carry this responsibility together with many others, like Amnesty International, the Palestinians, first and foremost, Israeli scholars who have denounced the genocide.
It's very heavy to carry this responsibility of chroniclers of genocide who are also trying to stop it with all their might.
And here we are, facing sanctions because of this.
Yeah, well, I have the opportunity to tell you privately, personally, I'm going to tell you again that I think the work you're doing is incredibly courageous.
It merits immense amounts of respect and admiration.
I know you're not doing it for that reason, but the fact that you're facing so many reprisals and attacks, I think, is a testament to the efficacy of your work.
And I don't even need to say I hope you keep going because I know you will.
And we will certainly continue to follow anything that's being done to you, but also the work that you're doing.
And we hope to talk to you again.
Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
Thank you.
Glenn, may I add something?
Because I would not be me if I didn't do that.
It's true that these sanctions hit hard, but I would also spend one second to reflect on and to thank all those who have stood against this, spoken against this from special procedures inside the UN, UN officials and the European Union and so many others, so many scholars, organizations.
This is incredible.
And so it seems that while yes, there are chosen victims of constant attacks and defamation, there is also a society that through this constant victimization, which is first and foremost of the Palestinians are not myself, but are waking up.
And they hope that this awakening will soon allow us to stand together and united against the monstrosity of our time.
Thank you very much for having me and the respect and admiration is absolutely mutual, Glenn.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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you We are always excited to do the Q ⁇ A session where we get questions from our locals members that we do our best to answer in depth and as many as we can on our Friday night Q ⁇ A show.
As usual, there's a wide range of questions that have been asked, always quite probing, and we're going to get to as many of them as we can, starting with Esta Marpet, who asks, quote, I am curious where Brazilian public opinion is trending following Trump's tariff announcements, directly connected to Bolsonaro's upcoming trial.
Is there really a sense of, quote, rallying around the flag?
Is there increased nationalism?
We did a whole show on Trump's condemnation of Brazil for its attacks on free speech, which we have repeatedly documented, as well as what he regards as this persecution of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces multiple criminal charges, had already been declared ineligible to run in 2026 and in 2030.
And there is a criminal charge against him for planning or conspiring to implement a coup to prevent Ula from returning to power after he won the 22-22 election.
It was a coup plan that never was actually done, but they claim that he participated in conspiring and plotting that.
And it's before the Supreme Court, a five-judge panel on the Supreme Court, and his conviction is basically inevitable, given who the judges are, including Alexander Dumurais, who made it his personal mission in life to destroy the Bolsonaro movement through censorship and imprisonment,
political convictions, as well as Lua's personal attorney who defended Lua when he was facing corruption charges, who then Lua put on the Supreme Court, and also Lua's justice minister, who was very loyal to Lua, and Lua also put on the Supreme Court.
So there's three judges right there who it's almost impossible to imagine what happened in the trial that they would ever exonerate Bolsonaro.
And he's likely to face prison time as a result of his conviction.
Lua himself, of course, was in prison for one year and eight months for an 11-year corruption conviction that he received that was nullified to allow him to run in 2022 with the reporting we did about the corruption of the anti-corruption probe as the pretext.
But it was really because the Supreme Court wanted him released so that they could think knowing that he was the only person who could beat Bolsonaro when he ran for a re-election.
And Mula did win that election by a tiny minority, a tiny margin.
And Trump first issued a statement condemning Brazil for its persecution of Bolsonaro, for its attacks on free speech.
And then Mula, who was hosting the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, which seems to be what really caught Trump's attention on Brazil, focused his attention on Brazil as he hates BRICS.
He regards it as what it is, which is an anti-American competitor.
I don't mean anti-American in a militia sense.
I just mean they're there to form an alternative alliance to American hegemony.
He said it's anti-American, that it needs to be attacked, that any country associated with it will be subject to sanctions.
And Lua then basically came out and said, this is beneath the dignity of any world leader to threaten countries on social media.
It really doesn't deserve a reply.
But he basically waved the flag of sovereignty saying Trump needs to realize the world has changed.
We don't want an emperor.
We don't have emperors anymore.
And then in response, Trump the next day went and announced 50% tariff on Brazil, Higher than on any country thus far, which he justified based on both an appeal to individual rights and Bolsonaro's political rights, but also a claim that Brazil has been practicing unfair trade practices, even though the U.S. has a multi-billion dollar surplus with Brazil.
The U.S. doesn't have a trade deficit with Brazil, but a multi-billion dollar surplus.
But Trump has to invoke that rationale as well to justify the tariffs.
And Lula immediately and I think predictably seized on this announcement in order to wave the banner of sovereignty to say the only people who should decide Brazil's eternal affairs are Brazilians.
We're a sovereign country.
We're not going to be threatened or dictated to by some other country.
There's some lingering resentment about the role the United States has played in Brazil as the massive superpower in the region.
Brazil is the second largest country in South and North America after the United States.
It's the largest country, the second largest country in the hemisphere.
Brazil has always been very important.
In 1964, the CIA perceived that the elected government of Brazil was leaning a little bit too far to the left.
And this is the Cold War, where any left-wing policies were viewed as aligning with Moscow and communists.
The Kennedy administration warned the Brazilian government, the elected Brazilian president, that things like rent control or land distribution were unacceptable to Washington.
And when he continued, based on sovereignty arguments, to pursue those policies anyway, on which he ran.
Then the Johnson administration came in, made similar threats, and when those were ignored, they worked with, the CIA did, with right-wing generals in Brazil to engineer a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a military dictatorship that governed Brazil with an iron fist for the next 21 years.
And so anything about U.S. interference in Brazil still resonates with huge numbers of people, but just in general, just leave the U.S.-Brazil part of the equation out of it.
Any country that sees that some other country is trying to dictate to it what it can and can't do, imposing punishments on it that are going to cause serious economic suffering, and the U.S. is a crucial commercial trading partner with Brazil.
The U.S. does sell a lot to Brazil, but Brazil sells a huge amount to the U.S., second only to China in the amount of their exports.
They have commodities like coffee, they have equipment for aviation, they have a lot of oil, they have other things that the U.S. can't produce.
And the U.S. has been buying it in very large amounts, and obviously 50% tariffs are going to make it much more difficult to sell in the U.S. market.
You can just buy those same products from some other country that's not subject to 50% tariffs.
And there's a lot of belief and concern inside Brazil that it's going to impose economic suffering on Brazilians, which it likely will.
And there's a big part of the media that hates Bolsonaro.
And obviously, Lua and the government want to blame this on Bolsonaro.
And they have a reasonable foundation to blame Bolsonaro for this, which is that Bolsonaro's allies, including Jair Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's a member of Congress, an elected member of Congress, actually got elected with one of the largest vote totals in Brazilian history.
Eduardo Bolsonaro a few months ago announced a leave of absence from the Brazilian Congress, and he's in the United States where he's been working with members of Congress and the executive branch.
What they really wanted were sanctions imposed on the notorious member of the Supreme Court, Alexander de Maraj, who's been overseeing the censorship scheme, and the argument is they're censoring not just Brazilian companies, but American companies.
Rumble's not allowed in Brazil because the refusal to accept censorship orders.
X was banned from Brazil for more than a month.
When X didn't have the money, didn't have assets in Brazil to pay the fines.
Maraj just ordered that assets from Starlink, a completely different company that does have operation in Brazil, that money be seized from Starlink's accounts to pay for X's fines on the grounds that they're both associated with Elon Musk, even though they're totally differently formed corporations.
So there have been a lot of abuses.
And he's also now overseeing the trial.
He's overseeing the investigation and then the trial of Bolsonaro and many Bolsonaro officials and associates as well.
He wants to imprison them.
And they were hoping to get sanctions, personal sanctions imposed on Muraish and others on the Supreme Court and others in the government.
And all these sanctions were approved by all the relevant agencies, including the State Department, by Marco Rubio.
And instead, Trump at the last minute decided he wanted to kind of have a more flamboyant gesture, something he thought was even more punishing than sanctions, which was a 50% tariff on Brazil.
And the problem is, unlike sanctions, which is very targeted against very specific officials, that can really make their life difficult.
I mean, it affects, as we discussed with Francesca Albanese and the sanctions on her, it can affect their use of credit cards, their bank accounts, their ability to transfer assets.
It's all based on the dollar as the reserve currency.
It's one reason why BRICS and a lot of other countries, including Brazil, are working hard to overthrow the dollar as the reserve currency because of the massive power it gives the United States to do things like sanctioning people they dislike who defy it, countries they dislike and defy it.
And instead, and that would have only hurt the officials.
No one would have really cared.
They would have still waved the sovereignty banner, but since most people aren't affected by it, it wouldn't have had much political weight.
They weren't really asking for tariffs.
That's what Trump decided to do.
And Bolsonaro and associates can't really object or criticize Trump, since that was Trump's intervention nominally on behalf of Bolsonaro.
I really think Trump was more motivated by a desire to punish Brazil for bricks, but he did it under the banner of defending Bolsonaro's political rights from persecution, defending free speech in Brazil that has been largely directed at Bolsonaro.
So there was no way for Bolsonaristas for Bolsonaro's movement to object to what Trump did.
They couldn't denounce Trump.
He's one of their most important allies.
But it's not really what they wanted precisely because there's now a good argument to make that because of Bolsonaro's activism, asking Trump to punish Brazil on his behalf, whatever economic suffering accrues in Brazil now will be the fault of Bolsonaro and his movement.
And you have the massive media organizations by corporations like Globo and other massive organizations.
They've always been dominant in Brazil.
They were allies of the dictatorship for a long time.
They're wherever power is.
They've become less powerful because of the internet, which is why there's so much focus in Brazil on censoring the internet.
Globo itself is a big supporter of that.
But they're still, they wield a lot of influence, and they've been just non-stop bombarding the airwaves about Trump's attack on Brazil, his invasion of their sovereignty, how Brazilians have to unify under the Brazilian flag in the name of Brazilian sovereignty.
And that is a powerful, it's a human instinct to defend your tribe.
It's the same way that if a country gets attacked by an external force, no matter how much they hate the government, no matter how much anger they have toward the government, they're going to unify in the name of their tribe, in the name of their country.
We saw that in Iran, where a lot of people who had been vehement opponents of the Iranian government suddenly lined up behind it against Israel because Israel was bombarding their country.
We saw it after 9-11 when 50% of the country hated George W. Bush, thought he stole the 2000 election.
And after 9-11, his approval rating skyrocketed to 90%.
Stayed at 80, 70% for at least several years.
When a country is attacked by an external power, nothing unifies the people behind the government more.
And Lua has become quite unpopular.
His government is quite unpopular.
He's now in his third term, not consecutive, but third term, running for a fourth term.
He'll be 80 next year when he runs for re-election.
So asking the people to make him president until he's 84 years old.
And he's definitely a very vulnerable incumbent.
And they believe, and I think most politicians would believe, that this can be employed against not just Trump, but his allies, the Bolsonaro movement, who they're going to claim engineered this, in order to convince people that they should unite behind Lulua, who's defending Brazilian sovereignty, the right of Brazil to terminate its own affairs.
Now, that is the conventionalism in Brazil, that this has helped Lua, that this will harm Bolsonaro.
I'm not so sure.
Maybe right now that is the theme, but if people really start feeling the effects of these tariffs, if the dollar starts to devalue the real even more so than it's been doing, if the Brazilian stock market starts crashing, if it makes it more difficult to sell agricultural and industrial goods to a very important to Brazil-U.S.
market, if people start losing their jobs as a result, if economic deprivation and suffering start happening, and Brazil is already a country with massive wealth inequality and all sorts of economic problems, there's sort of an iron law of politics that if people are dissatisfied with their economic progress, they blame the incumbent government.
They blame the incumbent leader.
I mean, it's just, it's how politics works for obvious reasons.
The government in power is the one there with the duty to make sure your material life improves.
And if it doesn't, if your material life worsens under their governance, you're going to blame them and be more inclined to vote them out.
Now, what the Brazilian government seems to be banging on, and its allies in the media, of which there are many, is that, well, no, in this case, it won't be Lulua who will be blamed for the economic suffering that results from these tariffs, but they'll be able to successfully blame it on Bolsonaro and his movement for having induced it, asked Trump for it, etc.
I'm not convinced of that at all.
I mean, I get that that's the overwhelming media narrative now and might be for the next couple of weeks, but economic deprivation over the next, say, 14 months until the 2026 election, 15 months, is going to be much more diffuse than that.
It's not going to have this proximity to this story.
And there's already a pretty widespread unpopularity about Tordolua for a whole bunch of reasons, including economic suffering.
And I guess it remains to be seen what political effects this will have.
I do think there's a lot of other things worth asking here about why the United States and Trump, why it's their place to dictate to other countries what kind of human rights or freedom of expression protections they're supposed to have.
Can't help but notice that Trump loves a lot of countries, far more dictatorial than the Brazilian government, no matter how authoritarian you think Brazil has become.
And I think it's become quite authoritarian.
It's kind of difficult to watch Trump go herald the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, and then suddenly be like, oh, we're punishing Brazil because we're so offended by their welfare and their attacks on free speech when you're in bed with and love some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet that has been U.S. foreign policy forever.
There's a lot of stuff like that, to say nothing of Trump's own free speech attacks on people who criticize Israel and the like.
But as far as the political question is concerned, I'm sure there's going to be a rallying around the flag effect.
There is already.
I think you can see that, at least at the elite level, kind of among the middle class.
But that's a lot different than saying that 15 months from now, people are massively out of jobs or paying higher prices, suffering inflation.
That they're still going to remember to try and somehow blame Bolsonaro for that, who hasn't been in power for four years, might even be in prison by then, as opposed to blaming Louis' government.
I think they're being a little too clever.
I certainly know people here in Brazil who are very smart, who believe, no, it's going to help Lewis' government, not just now, but for the long term.
I guess we'll see.
With these kind of things, Political effects of things.
I think it's always very difficult to predict with precision.
You have to understand how people are thinking, what information they're consuming.
I think we've seen on a lot of democracies, certainly including the U.S., that elite opinion no longer dictates the opinion of the masses.
And I think similar dynamics are at play in Brazil.
That's how Bolsonaro got elected in the first place and almost re-elected, despite pretty much the entire establishment being arrayed against him.
All right.
Next question is, Bucci, did you catch Bill Ackman's tennis match?
And where will Bill Ackman rank in the ATP this year?
Okay, so I don't know if we have the video, some of the video, maybe we can get that from Bill Ackman.
So on the one hand, I know there are people who think this is not a very important story.
Maybe I think it's a more important story because as I think most of you know, I follow tennis very closely.
I always have.
I play a lot of tennis.
You know, it's sort of a sport that I value, that I have respect for.
But I also think even if that's not the case, we don't care about tennis, which is fine.
A lot of people don't, it's still an interesting story about how the billionaire mind works and how billionaire power is exerted.
So the gist of the story is this.
Bill Ackman is this multi-billionaire vulture finance person who does things like talks down American stocks and then short sells them.
He's made billions of dollars, not by producing anything of value, just by manipulating numbers like Wall Street does.
Oftentimes harming the country is where his wealth comes from.
He's not Jeff Bezos, who at least produced Amazon.
And for all the criticism of him, he actually produced something that people use.
That's not Bill Ackman.
But Bill Ackman is not only a multi-billionaire, he's become particularly more prominent in the last couple of years because he's a fanatical supporter of Israel.
He led the campaign to make lists of students at colleges, I'm talking about undergraduates, 18 to 22 year olds, who signed petitions or letters condemning Israel for their war on Gaza.
And he organized a blacklist of major finance firms and venture capital firms and Wall Street banks and major law firms to agree that they would refuse to hire anyone who is on these lists, trying to make them jobless, basically, for the crime of criticizing a foreign country for which he has great affection, to put it generously, toward which he has supreme loyalty, I think to put it more accurately.
And he actually is a tennis fan.
He plays a lot of tennis as well.
He follows tennis.
He actually pours money into tennis, into professional tennis.
And he goes to a lot of tournaments.
It's just one of the things he likes to do as a billionaire.
But he went far beyond that.
This week, there was an actual professional tournament.
It wasn't a pro-am, where amateurs come and get to play with pros the way they have in golf sometimes.
It was an actual ATP tournament where professional tennis players go.
And to make matters worse, it's held at the tennis Hall of Fame.
It's supposed to be like sacred ground.
The Hall of Fame is there to kind of preserve the most sacred moments in tennis to honor the people who have achieved the most by admitting them into the Hall of Fame, kind of like baseball is the sacred hollow to ground for baseball.
And they have one tournament every year that's a professional ATP level tournament, but right before that, and it's in Rhode Island, in Newport, they have an APT Challenger event, which is kind of like the minor league, sort of like analogous to AAA and baseball, where it's the kind of up-and-coming players.
They're not among the 100 best, but they're kind of in the top two or 300.
Extremely good.
I mean, if you're the 200th best tennis player on the planet, you're extremely good.
It's what you do for your work.
But a lot of these are younger players.
They come from poor countries.
They have trouble sustaining themselves economically.
And these kind of tournaments are what they play in to earn some money, but also to make their way up the rankings.
It's a serious tennis, professional tennis tournament with a lot at stake for a lot of people.
And somehow, Bill Ackman wormed his way into having the tournament accept his entry to play as though he's a professional tennis player.
It was doubles.
He was playing with a doubles partner.
And this doubles partner used to be a big tennis star, Jack Sock.
He hasn't actually played.
He retired from tennis.
He now plays pickleball.
But he's very good.
He's a great doubles player.
He's won Grand Slam titles and doubles.
And I'm sure he was paid.
He didn't just show up for the out of benevolence.
And nobody knows what exactly the arrangement was that induced this tournament to degrade itself by allowing Bill Ackman at the age of 59 to play.
But they did.
And it was a professional doubles match.
And Bill Ackman's like a decent player.
You know, he is somebody who plays at a tennis club.
I'm sure he's taken lessons from some of the best pros.
When you have unlimited money, I'm sure that's what he's done, probably puts a lot of...
He's the universe is away from being at the pro level, to say nothing of the fact that he's 59 years old.
These are all 23-year-olds, 26-year-olds, like the most precisely trained athletes on the planet.
And there was Blackman on a court taking somebody else's position.
And his level of play was so abysmal, so pathetic.
I mean, just like taking balls that are so easy to return and just smacking them like into the net or well out of the court, many, many feet out of the court, constantly double faulting, couldn't even get a serve in, that for whatever reasons, and I think it's interesting to ask why, the three other players on the court who are professionals started to like baby him.
Like they were kind of just like hitting the softest balls possible directly to him to try and like help him avoid embarrassment, to stroke his ego.
I don't know what their motives were.
I don't know why they didn't just say, you know, if he wants to play, let him play and we'll smash balls at his face the way they would do To anybody else.
So the whole thing ended up being a complete joke.
I mean, it just made a complete mockery, a farce out of a professional tennis match.
And again, if you don't care about tennis, maybe that doesn't bother you.
Everybody who does care about tennis was disgusted by this, was horrified by it.
It would kind of be like if the AAA team of the Seattle Mariners, which is the minor league team right below the major leagues where people who are about to get into the major leagues are trying to show their skills to get into the major leagues of baseball, people who have spent their whole lives playing baseball, learning baseball, training baseball to get to that professional level.
It'd be like if the Seattle Mariners announced, oh, we're going to have one of our starting pitchers be Bill Gates at the age of 63 because he loves baseball, never played professionally, just kind of likes to throw the ball around.
And they just put Bill Gates on the mound in the middle of like a real sanctioned major league baseball game, just because he's a billionaire and greased whatever wheels he greased.
And then he just kind of got up there, plodded up there, couldn't throw the ball to the catcher.
You know, it was just a, like, made everything a joke.
And obviously the fact that Bill Ackman is a billionaire makes it all the more tawdry because obviously there's a lot to do with his vast wealth and the power that comes with it that he exploited to put himself into that position.
Just imagine the narcissism and need for ego gratification that you have to have to subject yourself to that.
So here's some video of Bill Ackman, I guess you could call it playing.
He's the one dressed in all white.
So you can recognize him and just like a series of, not just errors, everybody makes errors when they play tennis, even like Roger Federer and Novak Jokovich or whatever, Sherena Williams, but just like the kind of errors that no pro would ever make.
Just not even one of them, let alone all of them.
*applauds* *outro
music* you You see the players were laughing in his face.
I'm not sure who actually produced this.
Our old colleague, Harry Berger, was the one who posted it.
It might have been him.
I'm not sure if he just found it and posted it or if he was the one who actually produced it with the Kirby Enthusiasm music.
But having watched a good part of this match, I can tell you this was not cherry-picked.
This was very illustrative.
It was shocking to watch.
As I said, everyone in tennis, former players, current players, tennis writers, tennis journalists, were, I mean, just column after column expressing sickness and disgust and rage.
And leave the tennis part aside, you know, we talked about this on the last show, actually, when somebody asked about Peter Thiel's interview with Roth Dufau, where Peter Thiel basically said, when asked if he believes in the continuation of or survival of humanity, he had a great deal of difficulty answering yes and kind of resorted to this like deranged transhumanistic vision at most that he was willing to say yes, I think humanity should survive, but in like radically altered form.
And we talked then about the mentality of billionaires and I've never had anything to do with billionaires until maybe, I don't know, a decade ago, a little bit more.
My first real experience was when I founded The Intercept with Pierre Omidiar, the multi-billionaire founder of PayPal and eBay rather, that ended up buying PayPal.
And honestly, Pierre Omidiar, as billionaires go, is as good as it gets in terms of he kind of withdrew from Silicon Valley, moved his family away from Silicon Valley to like isolated place in Hawaii just so his kids would grow up more normally.
He did have like a few years where he was a little bit in the spotlight because he was funding media outlets like The Intercept and other groups, but he's kind of retreated since.
And he tries to be as humble as possible, but I noticed from the beginning, we purposely formed The Intercept with people who were as anti-authoritarian as possible, who were as undeferential to prestige and position as power.
And just automatically he would walk in the room and just like kind of the power and wealth that he has, not just wealth, it's wealth that is larger than what small nations have.
And the amount of power that comes with that, I just watched people naturally become almost sycophantic around him.
And like always the center of attention.
And of course he comes with a big team of yes men and sycophants who are just constantly flattering and bolstering everything that he has.
Like I said, he's as good as it gets.
He tries to like create a more normal, natural environment, but it's impossible.
And you have that level of wealth, multiple, you know, 747 jets that you and your family constantly fly on, and just, you know, buying whatever you want and influencing nations because of your wealth, it does distort the human mind.
It makes you, and that's, if you listen to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, and to some extent Elon Musk, they talk about themselves as kind of like the ubermenschin, to use a Nietzschean term, like this kind of species of humans that have evolved beyond normal humanity, almost to like a deity type figure.
That's how they see themselves.
That's how other people see them.
And so every idea that enters their head, every thought that emanates from their mouth is constantly subject to reinforcement and flattery.
And they believe in their own genius.
They believe in their own power to do essentially everything.
Even though so many of them, as I described before, I've gotten to know many more than Pierre, are mediocrities.
Or like at best, they have an idio savant skill, you know, some coding thing that they were able to create something and they created it at the right time.
They might even get like managers of a business, you know, driven or whatever.
But none of that remotely means they have wisdom or insight about philosophy or science or political issues the way they attribute to themselves.
They really believe they're kind of just all floating.
Uber mentioned this is the best way I can describe it.
And to put yourself in such an embarrassing position where you become the focus of attention in the most negative way possible, where at the age of almost 60, you, who never even got close to a level of professional tennis,
you decide that you're going to insinuate yourself into a professional match, take someone else's position that, like I said, that could have had that position to earn money and rankings who needs it, and just believe that you deserve to be on that court, that you belong on that court.
The hubris of it, and like, I don't know if you ever noticed, but every time Bill Ackman posts a tweet, it can't be just a tweet.
It's like a proclamation, like a dissertation, like extremely edited, and it has the language of decree.
And that's the byproduct of self-importance that comes from being a billionaire.
He really believes every utterance, every desire has to be immediately kind of honored.
That's how billionaires are typically treated.
It's not just a multi-millionaire, like a kind of wealth where, you know, you're worth $10 million, you have financial security, you can retire, but you can't go around influencing countries.
You can't finance entire parties or campaigns in your image.
That's what billionaires, multi-billionaires can do.
And it's kind of like people who get massive fame and wealth at a very young age, child stars and the like, or heirs to fortunes.
Almost always, it is extremely corrupting of mental health, of the ability to understand and relate to the world, to think of yourself in some kind of like remotely humble way.
And watching Bill Ackman just try and glorify himself as a professional tennis player, like just, you know, I have this fantasy of myself.
I'm going to use my wealth now to make it a reality in front of everybody.
He did have to write a tweet where he kind of swallowed, you know, a lot of the criticism.
Had to eat Crowe was very humble.
He said, oh, I'm so much better player than this usually, but I just couldn't.
I was too nervous.
My arm didn't work.
I couldn't breathe.
You know, I was suffused with anxiety and neurosis.
But even if he had been at his best, it would have been the same thing.
It just wasn't something that should have happened.
The fact that they did just shows you, if you're a billionaire, you'll think about yourself in any way, and you can also make it happen.
There's a real professional tournament they should have said no.
I mean, they want to build tennis as a real sport.
It's the fourth largest sport in the world.
And again, it would be like Bill Gates stumbling onto the field and being like, yeah, I want to be the quarterback for a quarter in an NFL game.
It's like, the NFL would never allow that.
No one would, I mean, it would be the most pathetic thing to watch.
That's what this was.
And again, even if I don't care about tennis, I think billionaire wealth and the billionaire mindset is really worth understanding.
And this gives a pretty vibrant look inside that very, very toxic swamp.
Speaking of toxic swamps, do we have a question from Quill Dagger?
He's not the toxic swamp.
It's a question about Sam Harris.
And it reads this, quote, your tweet about Sam Harris and his, quote, exception was really something.
Could you elaborate on his whole shtick?
It seems like this isn't just a post-October 7th thing.
All right, so some of you may remember this, some of you may not know, but when I was at The Guardian, and this was April 2013, it was like three months before the Snowden reporting began.
That began in June.
This was actually two months before that reporting began.
I wrote an article on Sam Harris because this is when like the new atheist movement was kind of at its peak.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
Atheism is not anything that's ever bothered me.
I used to identify as an atheist when I was young.
I only don't now because I believe in not some religious, organized religious concept of a God, like a Christian God or a Muslim God or a Jewish God or whatever, but just in forces larger than ourselves that play a role in how the universe unfolds.
But it became a very popular, especially online, but even offline, very, very popular movement, had a huge following.
They called themselves the Four Horsemen, the four leaders of this movement, which were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and I forgot the person's other name, David something.
What?
Daniel Dennett.
Daniel Dennett, exactly.
And they had a gigantic following.
And in Sam Harris's case, it wasn't just an expression of religious conviction or atheistic advocacy.
He commandeered it for blatantly political ends.
Sam Harris is Jewish, and he, you think as an atheist, would have contempt for all religions equally.
And he very conspicuously had contempt for one religion in particular, never guess which one, Islam.
He also had harsh criticisms for Christianity, like Christopher Hitchens did and Richard Dawkins did.
And he had very, very, very, very conspicuously little criticisms of Israel, of the Judaism rather.
But also, it just so happened that all of his political views perfectly aligned with the kind of views someone would have if you were devoted to Israel.
Namely, he was a big supporter of the war on terror.
He used to write articles in like the Huffington Post, like, are there good justifications for torture?
Clearly, clearly intending to remove the taboo for torture.
But since he never came out and said, I'm pro-torture, just saying, here's all the reasons why torture might be justified, if he said, oh, he wrote a pro-torture article, he'd say, how dare you distort what I said.
But everything about U.S. foreign policy from a neocon perspective, Sam Harris was commandeering his supposed new atheism in order to fuel.
And he did it from this position like, I'm a liberal.
My new atheism comes from my liberalism.
I hate Islam because it doesn't respect women's rights and gay rights and et cetera, et cetera.
And it commandeered a lot of liberals Into this political agenda under the like the atheism was kind of like the candy offered at the playground, but the politics were what happens once you lure the kid into the car.
And so many liberals thought they were being taught this like very rational, untribalistic or anti-tribalistic philosophy, when in fact, at least from Tam Harris' perspective, nothing could have been more tribalistic.
And he had a podcast about why I don't criticize Israel.
He's like, what a coincidence.
Here you have a state explicitly constructed around religious identity, the Jewish state, or ethnic tribes that are adjacent to religious identity, Judaism.
Like the living embodiment of what you're supposed to be against if you take anything that what you're saying seriously.
And he'd always talk about the IDF as the most moral army in the world.
He talked about why he doesn't criticize Israel.
And he would somehow try and reconcile his support for Israel, again, an ethno-religious state based on the supremacy of one particular faction, sectarian faction, Jews, with his posturing as someone who's so rising above it, just a vessel of objectivity, no allegiance to tribe or religious identity or identity politics.
He hates all that, and yet noticeably not only would refrain from criticizing Judaism and Israel, even if he was bashing particularly Islam, but Christianity as well.
But every other view that he had about bombing, about enemies, it all aligned with what you would expect a standard neocon to believe in and to disseminate and defend.
And for writing this article where I kind of dissected what were the obvious inconsistencies in the new APS movement as expressed at least by Sam Harris, and for suggesting that what he was saying was his worldview was not in fact his worldview, that it was a facade in disguise to mask what the real worldview was that was actually the exact opposite of what he was claiming he was.
Sam Harris went on a jihad against me that lasted years.
Actually, to this day, if my name comes up, he'll just explode.
And I'm the worst person ever to exist in media.
I mean, he pretty much has that with every single person that disagrees with him.
He once went on Ezra Klein's podcast, like the most, Ezra Klein, the most anodyne, you know, restrained person in media, practically.
Tries very hard never to engage in vituperative exchanges or harsh criticism, unlike myself.
And he came out of that same thing, accusing Ezra Klein of criticizing him in bad faith, distorting all his words.
And he used to have a very large following.
He would just immediately go after anybody that he pointed them toward.
And, you know, this went on for years with him just because of that one article.
And obviously, I repeatedly defended my views of Sam Harris, but at some point I just decided he really wasn't worth it any longer.
I said what I had to say, and he just continued to go on.
So many shows, you can find him talking about me for years and years and years for that.
So Sam Harris has lost a lot of his following, but not all of it.
He mostly became this sort of, like the, he became obsessively anti-Trump and obsessively pro-establishment, which didn't surprise me in the least.
He was contemptuous of anybody questioning any of the orthodoxies around COVID.
He despises Trump.
He turned against all the Silicon Valley friends that he used to have, including Elon, as well as people like Joe Rogan, because they were questioning establishment dogma or not seeing Trump as Hitler the way he saw them.
He had one very notorious clip in 2020 after it became obvious that the media had lied by saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
And he basically said, I consider Trump so blatantly evil and so inferior morally and ethically to Democrats that the most important thing is to stop him.
And if that means that somebody lied to do it, I really am not bothered by it.
I think it's justifiable.
The means justify the end of destroying Trump.
Of course, he denies that's what he said.
Everybody can listen to the video.
That's exactly what he said.
And as a result, he's lost a big part of his following that he used to have, because even though he claimed to be a liberal, a lot of them were right-wing.
A lot of them were just mostly motivated by his contempt for Islam.
At one point he said on Bill Maher's show, actually, no, somewhere else he went on Bill Mars to defend it.
He was on McBen Affleck, who attacked him quite eloquently, actually, but Sam Islam said something like, Islam is the motherlord of bad ideas.
She's supposed to be an atheist, supposed to have contempt for all religions, but no, Islam, by huge coincidence, happened to be the one that Sam Harris hated most.
A lot of people who were anti-Muslim more than they were anything else found him very appealing.
Uncoincidentally, he comes from an extremely wealthy family.
His mother was the creator and showrunner and screenwriter of multiple successful shows, including The Golden Girls and Soap.
And by the way, Soap was actually a very risque, but I thought very good show in the late 1970s, early 1980s, way ahead of its time.
But it discovered Bill Crystal.
Anyway, he comes from a very wealthy, prominent family as well.
He kind of has that mindset of it.
And the last thing I'll say before showing you this video, which kind of is him finally confessing who he really is in a way that was just so satisfied to watch him do, is that somehow he's also like in the intervals where he's not like screaming at everybody and expressing grievances toward everybody and accusing everybody of being a bad faith attacker of him and spewing contempt for everybody and being filled with resentment and grievance, he somehow also presents himself as a meditation guru.
And he does these like videos where he teaches people how to like breathe and relax and expel tension and stay in the present.
And I'm a big believer in meditation and yoga.
I believe it, but I've never honestly heard anything less relaxing in my life than Sam Harris's voice.
Like even when he's telling you, sit back, close your eyes, sit on the floor, release all tension, breathe in and out, focus on your breathing, his voice still Sounds so filled with hatred and resentment and anger and grievance that I can't imagine anyone like relaxing in any way by closing your eyes and listening to Sam Harris's voice.
I mean, I don't know.
I'd rather listen to Laura Loomer talking about Israel and Palestine to relax than listen to Sam Harris telling me how to breathe.
But anyway, there are a lot of people who listen to his meditation videos as well.
So here's a YouTube show called Jewish Uncensored, which appears on YouTube.
It's hosted by an Orthodox Jew who's extreme supporter of Israel as well.
And he basically says, hey guys, I want to show you Sam Harris talking about Israel and Zionism because it's remarkable to hear him saying what he says here.
Listen to this.
Sam Harris is saying that he is now a Zionist, that after October 7th, he recognizes the importance of a Jewish state.
Check it out.
A little bit of a personal question, but I mean, you are an atheist and Jewish.
Can you tell us how that balance changed or shifted for you after October 7th?
If it did shift?
Well, I think it would have been true to say before October 7th that I was, I'm still an atheist, I'm still a secularist, I still think that we're paying an intolerable price for the religious balkanization of our world.
So I'm not a fan of sectarianism in any form.
And I think before October 7th, you could have said that I was not a Zionist, right?
Or I certainly wouldn't.
Utter bullshit.
You could not say that before October 7th, he was not a Zionist.
He never once expressed opposition to Zionism.
And in fact, he realizes that that claim was totally baseless.
And he goes on to describe what he actually said and thought about Israel and Zionism prior to October 7th.
Remember, he just said, I think one of the biggest plagues of the world is sectarianism.
Israel is nothing but, whether you love it or not, a sectarian state.
It's called the Jewish state.
That's what Zionism is.
It guarantees the supremacy of Jews within the state.
Obviously, you cannot reconcile love of Israel and support for Zionism on the one hand with your view that sectarianism is the greatest evil.
On the other, they're completely antithetical.
He's basically saying, I believe sectarianism is the greatest evil, except I have exceptions for my principles as called Israel and Zionism.
Shockingly, that just so happens to be my own group for which I've made an exception, but it's totally coincidental.
I'm extremely objective.
I rise above tribalism.
It's pure coincidence.
But here's what he then goes on to say.
I certainly would be willing to call into question the legitimacy of organizing a state around a religion or a religiously identified ethnicity, Judaism in this case.
I mean, I think I released a podcast some years ago titled, Why Don't I Criticize Israel question mark?
10 years ago?
Yeah, and there I gave a fairly equivocal and frustrating defense of Israel, but I mean, I was...
So you see how he shifted?
He's like, I wasn't a Zionist prior to October 7th.
And then like a minute later, he's like, yeah, I did a podcast called Why Don't I Criticize Israel, in which I offered a defense of Israel.
He was frustrated, though.
It was like reluctant.
So internally, he was just like, not sure if this is totally valid given all the other things I pretend to be.
But I'm going to explain to you why I never criticized Israel, in fact, why I defended it.
Well before October 7th.
He's now trying to suggest, oh, I was an anti-Zionist before October 7th, October 7th, showed me the verse.
He was always a Zionist.
And he even says it right there.
He just claims, like, but back then I was kind of reluctant.
Like, I hesitated and I realized that it was a complete contradiction of everything I pretended to believe in, but I nevertheless defended it, but with reluctance.
I was troubled by, you know, as someone who believes that we are paying this intolerable price for sectarianism, I was troubled by the seeming contradiction in defending the Jewish state.
And for me, it...
On the one hand, to go around accusing everybody of destroying humanity because of sectarian allegiances, and then at the same time defending a state of Israel based on a philosophy, a new philosophy called Zionism, that's nothing other than a country formed based on sectarian identity and sectarian allegiance and sectarian superiority.
It may seem like there's a contradiction there to you idiots, even though I think in a much more, in a much deeper way.
So I understand why it's not a contradiction.
And then he goes on for this.
Just nets out to the only real defense is the ambient level of genocidal intolerance that's directed at Jews, right?
I mean, just the, and yet before October 7th, even there, I felt like I was paying lip service to the legacy of the Holocaust without really having, my heart was really not quite in it because it still seemed kind of hypothetical to me.
I mean, because in my life, anti-Semitism has not seemed like a real variable at all.
And apart from the Islamist version of it, it seemed to have been more or less fully defanged the world over.
But given October 7th and given the response to it in the West, both on the left and on the right politically, but even most especially on the left, I mean, that was the most surprising.
Yeah, I am really just kind of an unapologetic Zionist at this point.
Who can be counted upon to defend the Jews but the Jews?
I think that's a question for which you have to err on the side of the most cynical and depressing answer, which is only the Jews can, at the end of the day, be counted upon to defend themselves.
And I think they should have the right to do that.
And having a Jewish state seems like certainly at the moment, the only rational backstop to that project.
Now, watch the approval that this provokes in this Orthodox Jewish gentleman who reveres Israel.
Notice that a guy like Sam Harris isn't exactly a proud Jew.
He's not exactly the type of person where you're like, yeah, that guy represents Judaism.
I wouldn't say that.
I think you might be able to say that about Sam Harris, but I get the point.
Here's more Yarmulka.
He doesn't explicitly claim that his identity is based on his Judaism, even though it is.
So I understand the point.
And yet even he is like waking up, like, wow, what's going on?
This guy hates Jews.
That guy, everybody hates us.
Like, the fact that somebody who is an atheist, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't really believe in God, but still recognizes the level of Jew hatred that is just swirling all around and is like, yeah, we sort of need a state.
You know, for a long time, in conservative discourse, even in more centrist discourse, there grew a lot of frustration and ultimately contempt for victimhood narratives.
Black people saying we've been uniquely victimized, so we deserve these special protections.
Latinos saying we're uniquely victimized, we have to migrate, we deserve these special protections.
Women saying they've been uniquely victimized throughout the ages and they deserve special protections.
Gay people, trans people, Muslims, all of whom have a version of history based in some truth that they faced extreme amounts of discrimination and oppression and other forms of bigotry and therefore merit special protection.
And we seem to have arrived at this consensus, especially after the excesses of Me Too and the Black Lives Matter movement, that, you know, we've gone way too far in that direction.
A lot of these historic bigotries and repression aren't nearly as strong as they've been.
We've made a lot of progress from them.
There's still lingering effects of them, but we've made a lot of progress.
And maybe the best way to move forward isn't to keep reinforcing them by dividing everybody up into groups and treating them differently based on their race or gender, sexual identity, but instead, or religion, or instead to say, you know what, we're all actually the same.
And we're going to work to make sure the treatment of everybody is the same, but not endlessly treat people differently by emphasizing their divisions based on these demographic characteristics.
That was certainly a unifying view of the right, without doubt.
And yet, there's so many people who claim that.
Sam Harris is one of them.
We're like, you know what?
There's one group and only one group that has a meritorious claim to that self-victimhood defense.
And that just so happens to be Jews, which a lot of people creating that exception happen to be, coincidentally.
Like, hey, you know what?
I can't stand victimhood narratives from any other group.
It's totally whiny and snowflake behavior, all fabricated.
Time to buckle up and stop being so frightened and demanding safety with your little blankets and your therapy dogs.
But my group, that's the real one that's discriminated against.
That's what you heard the host of the show say.
It's like, yeah, Sam Harris is finally realizing, like, everybody hates us.
That guy hates us.
That guy hates us.
Anti-Semitism is everywhere.
And we alone are entitled to form sectarian allegiances based on our sectarian religious identity.
But nobody else is, but we are.
And Sam Harris is Jewish.
He was raised Jewish.
And he wants you to believe it's a coincidence that he's finally at the point in middle age where he's willing to admit every principle that I've said that I have, every principle on which I built my career, every principle that supposedly defined my brand, that made me rich, that created a huge volume for me, I want you to know I subordinate all these principles.
I have a huge exception to all of them called Israel and Zionism.
Now, you know what?
I'll tell you one of the things I hate most about Sam Harris, the reason why I believe he deserves a particular level of disgust.
I can have a certain baseline respect for people who have whatever views they have, even if I find them repellent, who are honest about those views, who don't hide them, who don't pretend that they have an agenda that's different from their actual agenda, whose expressed values and beliefs are actually their values and beliefs, and they're willing to stand up and defend it.
Sam Harris is one of the most blatant brazen frauds ever to present himself as a public intellectual.
I mean, as I said, 12 years ago, I wrote that article based on exposing this entire sham that what Sam Harris was claiming his driving force was had nothing to do with his actual agenda or his set of belief.
And it was the fact that he would deny that, and not just deny it, but like accuse anybody who saw it of being a liar, a bad faith, fabulist, someone deliberately distorting such clear words.
Because what he feared the most was having people understand what his real agenda was.
He's just a standard Jewish neocon who loves Israel and forms his worldview based on that.
Which is fine.
You know, there are a lot of people in every group who do that.
There are people who are black who form their worldview based on their membership as a black person who see the world through the historical victimhood of black people, or women who do that, or gay people who do that, or Muslim people.
That's fine.
That's in every group.
But it was his constant, endless insistence that there's no tribalism to him, there's no sectarianism to him.
He hates those things.
He rises above it.
He's just an objective atheist.
That lured so many people into his little web.
And then once they got there, they were fed something completely different than what had been promised.
And here he is finally admitting it.
And of course he's pretending that it all changed after October 7th.
That now he really believes in victimhood narrative and identity politics and group-based sectarianism and identifying along religious lines only for his group but for no other.
This was always his worldview and so many people saw it.
Unfortunately so many people didn't.
And I really think that the person that you should be most wary of is not a person with one particular ideology or the other.
Obviously there are a lot of people who are honest about their views and I find those views repellent.
But the person I find meriting the most amount of legitimate contempt and disrespect and discredit are those who are too cowardly to admit what they really think or too conniving and manipulative to admit it.
And Sam Harris is the vintage case of somebody who's all of those things.
And to watch him just so casually admit that everything he's been saying for his whole life is a huge fraud because he has a gigantic experience.
exception to all of it based on special prerogatives and rights that extend to his group but to no other as discussing it it is kind of cathartic as well to have forever Sam Harris's agenda laid bare for all the world to see in his own words.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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