System Update - Glenn Greenwald - Stephen Miller's False Denials About Trump's Campus "Hate Speech" Codes; Sohrab Ahmari on the MAGA Splits Over Antitrust, Foreign Wars, and More

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July 30, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:24:14

Stephen Miller's False Denials About Trump's Campus "Hate Speech" Codes; Sohrab Ahmari on the MAGA Splits Over Antitrust, Foreign Wars, and More

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	Good evening, it's Wednesday, July 30th.
	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, one of President Trump's most powerful advisors, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called, quote, patently false statements about Trump administration policy.
	Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out and documented, as I've done many times, that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded hate speech code that outlaws a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals.
	And even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded hate speech code on campuses in order to restrict the free speech rights not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators, and American students.
	It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses.
	I also pointed out, as I have covered here many times, that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel.
	All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true.
	Yet after I pointed them out yesterday and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them in order to convince them that my claims weren't true.
	Yet when that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials, Stephen Miller, to label my claims, quote, patently false.
	The policies in question adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities.
	And the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated.
	So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight.
	Then the emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party.
	All of that in turn led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as all new voices and perspectives.
	One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight.
	He's Sorabamari, who is one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now is the U.S. editor for the online journal Unheard.
	He has a new article out today on the victory of corporatists inside the Trump Justice Department over reformers and populists who believe in antitrust enforcement as a way to protect American consumers.
	And we'll talk to him about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more.
	Before we get to all of that, a couple of programming notes.
	First of all, System Update is also available in podcast form.
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	Just click the join button and it will take you to that community.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right after this short message from our sponsor.
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	Sometimes government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents.
	sometimes legal documents that have a great deal of complexity to them.
	And oftentimes when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try and confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing is untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevancies or false claims.
	And then a lot of people don't know what to make of it.
	They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that.
	And especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, oh, that's a lie.
	Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that.
	That's not actually what we're doing.
	And yet, when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth.
	And that is what happened last night.
	I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes.
	Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses.
	They condemned it as censorship.
	They said it's designed to suppress ideas.
	Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence.
	And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think probably a consensus close to unanimity.
	We were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want.
	And if they're controversial, if they're offensive, if they're disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas.
	And that is a critique I vehemently have agreed with.
	And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse.
	Free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee, and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think about how debate should unfold.
	We don't trust central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't.
	Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and hear and make up their own mind.
	And that's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing.
	What they said they believed in, Donald Trump and his inauguration and other times said he wanted to restore free speech.
	Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views.
	And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing.
	So I want to make clear, I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel.
	That's a separate issue.
	That's part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary.
	I've covered that many times.
	That is not what I'm discussing.
	What I'm talking about is the formal investigations by the Trump administration into most of our leading universities, threats or carrying through on those threats to deny them federal funds and then only restore it if they meet a whole wide variety of demands.
	One of those leading demands being that you are now forced to expand hate speech codes, not to eliminate them, not to reduce them, but to expand hate speech codes, particularly when it comes to Israel and Jewish people, in order to add to the list of ideas and opinions and viewpoints that you cannot express on college campuses if you're an American student, if you're an American professor, if you're an American administrator that cannot be in the curriculum without being punished.
	It's pure censorship in service of a foreign country and a minority group in the United States that happens to be in favor with the White House, just like other minority groups were in favor with prior Democratic administrations.
	And they too then got the benefit, if you want to call it that, of having views that offend them or that they dislike being censored.
	And that's exactly what the Trump administration is doing.
	And I've been documenting it for a long time.
	It specifically centers around this new definition of anti-Semitism that Israel promulgated.
	It got Europe to adopt it formally into law.
	It makes it a crime in many instances to advocate a boycott of Israel, a crime in Europe to advocate a boycott of Israel, but also to say all sorts of things about Israel that are commonly expressed criticisms of Israel, which we will show you.
	But the Trump administration is now hell-bent on making sure that Americans leading colleges have that hate speech code expanded to increase the list of ideas about Israel that you cannot express without being punished.
	Not for foreign students, but for all students, all faculty, all administrators, including American students and American faculty.
	And when I pointed it out yesterday and it began to spread, including to a lot of Trump supporters and MAGA influencers who expressed concern about this policy, the White House went into action to try and convince people that what I was saying was untrue, even though what I'm saying is easily documented and proven and absolutely and indisputably true, as I'm about to show you.
	So the tweet that really catalyzed this whole dispute that culminated in Stephen Miller going on to social media and proclaiming my claims to be, quote, patently false, was this one that I posted sometime in the middle of the day.
	It was in response to a tweet that somebody had posted, someone by the name of Majid Hosseini, where I posted the IIHRA definition, showed how the Trump administration is increasingly demanding schools accept it and how it amounts to censorship, very severe censorship when it comes to discussing Israel, the U.S. relationship to Israel, particular Jewish individuals.
	And Majid Husseini said this, quote, and criticizing America is tolerated and accepted, but criticizing Israel isn't.
	Had those students replaced the word Israel with America and everything they said and wrote them, there would be zero punishment for them.
	And in response to that tweet on top of it, I wrote this, quote, exactly.
	No foreign students are being deported by the Trump State Department and ICE for criticizing the U.S., only for criticizing Israel.
	Just like the hate speech codes Trump demanded U.S. colleges adopt allow students to call the U.S. a racist endeavor, but not to call Israel that.
	So there are two issues there.
	One is the deportation of students in the United States legally for the crime of criticizing Israel.
	That's one issue.
	Leave that aside because that involves foreigners.
	We've covered that many times.
	The other issue is, in my view, even more serious, which is this censorship code, these censorship codes that came from Israel and that the Trump administration are now forcing our leading universities like Harvard and Columbia, which have already done so and others as well, Brown, to adopt these expanded hate speech codes.
	Think about that.
	The Trump administration wants to expand hate speech codes on campuses after pretending for so long to find them offensive.
	And it's being done under this new definition of anti-Semitism called the IHRA definition.
	It stands for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
	And just to underscore the point and to document that what I was saying was true, in the next tweet I wrote this, quote, these are the examples of forbidden ideas under the new IHRA hate speech codes Trump forced Harvard, Columbia, and others to censor the speech of American faculty members and students.
	Remember, these are ideas that are in the definition itself.
	The definition gives a definition of what is hate speech, and then it says, here are illustrative examples that are incorporated into the definition of things you may not say without being guilty of anti-Semitism.
	And there are a bunch of ideas about Israel and Jews.
	You're allowed to say these things about any other country in the world, including the United States, just not Israel.
	You're allowed to say these things about any other group, just not Jews.
	So here are just a few of the examples.
	You are not allowed to, under this definition, Trump and the Trump administration is forcing American universities to adopt.
	You are not allowed to deny the Jewish people their right to discrimination by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor.
	You're not allowed to say Israel is a racist endeavor, even though the idea of Zionism is that it's based on Jewish supremacy, rule of Jews over non-Jews.
	That is inherent in the definition of Zionism.
	You're not allowed to claim that that's a racist endeavor, even if you think it is, on college campuses or under this, wherever this definition prevails.
	You are allowed to say the United States is a racist endeavor, and of course a lot of people do say that.
	That's totally fine.
	You're not going to be punished in any way for saying that.
	You can be an American student, American professor, call the United States racist every day.
	You're totally fine.
	Call China racist, or Iran racist, or Russia a racist endeavor, or the UK a racist endeavor, anything you want.
	All 192 countries call them racist endeavors.
	Just do not say that about Israel, or you will be punished.
	And this is not examples that I created.
	These are examples in the definition.
	You may not deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
	This is a banned, prohibited idea Under the definition of under the hate speech codes that Trump, the Trump administration adopted and is now forcing American colleges to adopt as well.
	Another thing you're not allowed to do is to apply double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
	So if you criticize Israel, you better be prepared to show that you apply those same standards to other democratic nations.
	If you want to criticize the United States, you don't have that burden.
	You don't have to, it's totally fine to apply a double standard when criticizing the United States.
	You don't have to prove that, oh, I also criticize France for this and Norway and Uruguay and Korea, South Korea.
	No, you don't have that burden.
	You don't have that burden for any other country.
	But if you criticize Israel, you better be sure you're not applying double standards or you will be guilty of anti-Semitism.
	You're also not allowed to use the quote symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism.
	For example, claiming that Jews killed Jesus.
	Now, anybody who has read the New Testament and the account of Jesus being sentenced to death knows that both Romans and Jews played a role in it.
	The Romans were the governing party, but the Jews looked at Jesus as a huge threat to their religion because he was a Jew but preaching a different religion.
	And they went to the Romans and expressed their desire for Jesus to be killed.
	Some Christians don't believe that.
	Some Christians believe that.
	There's biblical support in the text for it.
	Sometimes it's exaggerated.
	Sometimes it's not.
	You should be free to debate that like any other idea, but no, you're not allowed to debate that.
	If you are a Christian and your religion and your reading of the Bible teaches you historically that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus, you're not allowed to say that that's anti-Semitism.
	Here, right here, e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus.
	Here's another thing you're not allowed to do.
	You're not allowed to draw comparisons of contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis.
	So if you look at the policy of the Israeli government to block food, and by the way, let me just emphasize here, none of this has to do with Israel.
	It doesn't matter what your views are of Israel.
	You can hate Israel.
	You can love Israel.
	I'm not talking about, this is not what I'm talking about.
	I'm talking about free speech in the United States.
	The ability to debate views and ideas and opinions and to express them without being punished.
	That is the right guaranteed by the Constitution, according to American founding by God, that the Trump administration is attacking and eroding, not for foreign students, but for American students, faculty, and administrators on our leading college campuses and in agencies as well.
	You cannot compare the Israeli government's actions, say, if you think the Israelis are blockading food and purposely starving Gazans to death, as many people do, and say, oh, this is something the Nazis did as well in various ghettos or in concentration camps.
	This is a prohibited idea.
	You can be punished for that.
	You can be sanctioned, expelled.
	If you work in a government agency, you can be punished as well.
	It's a prohibited idea to compare the actions of the current day Israeli government to Nazis.
	You are perfectly permitted, if you're an American citizen on American soil, an American university, to compare the American government to Nazis.
	It was done all the time.
	George Bush was constantly compared to Adolf Hitler.
	Donald Trump is constantly compared to Adolf Hitler.
	The Iraq War has often been compared to German aggression, Nazi aggression.
	So was the Vietnam War.
	That's all fine.
	Say that as much as you want every day.
	You have nothing to worry about.
	What you cannot do is say it about Israel.
	You cannot compare Israeli policy to Nazis.
	You're absolutely free to do that for any other country.
	Here are just a few more just to illustrate how severe this censorship is.
	You are not allowed to accuse Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide.
	You can't say they're more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nations.
	So if you hear Ben Shapiro's speech and afterward you say, well, I listen to Ben Shapiro speak and it seems to me like he has more loyalty to Israel than he does to the United States.
	Sorry, that's banned.
	That's a banned idea.
	You can be punished for that.
	Found guilty of anti-Semitism.
	Even if Ben Shapiro says it, even if Barry Weiss says it, even if I say a Christian Zionist comes to your school or you hear a speech or you read a text and they say, I love my country, the United States, but I believe God has compelled me to be devoted to the state of Israel.
	That's my priority scheme.
	And then you observe that, oh, this person, oh, I guess you're actually, you know what, you're allowed to say it.
	You're allowed to accuse Christian Zionists of being more loyal to Israel than to the United States.
	It only applies to Jewish citizens.
	You're not just, the prohibition is just, you can't say that about Jewish citizens.
	You can say Irish Catholics are more devoted to the Vatican or to Ireland than to the United States.
	You can say Italian Americans are more devoted to Italy.
	You can say Argentine Americans seem more devoted to Argentina.
	They care more about Argentina.
	Totally fine.
	Just you cannot say that about Jewish individuals vis-a-vis Israel.
	That is a banned idea on American campus under the hate speech code that the Trump administration first adopted for itself and is now imposing on our leading universities.
	Now, when I posted this, as I mentioned before, there had been several leading MA influencers like Mike Cernovich above what I wrote there.
	He said, quote, troubling.
	This is troubling, meaning what the Trump administration is doing.
	And then moments later, Mike Cernovich went to a White House official and I said, what's up with this?
	And he posted this, again, above my tweet, quote, White House official announced for a comment, quote, this wasn't in the deal, and the White House is opposed to so-called hate speech rules.
	Colombia may have adopted the rules independently of the settlement, which is a different issue.
	To call that a lie, that the Trump administration is opposed to hate speech rules, is to be way too generous to the Trump administration.
	They have been demanding and pressuring and forcing American colleges to do exactly that, to adopt this expanded, they're not doing it on their own.
	They're doing it because the Trump administration is demanding it.
	And in response to Mike Cernovich saying, oh, the White House told me that, I said, this, this person is deceiving you.
	You can see for yourself.
	Here's a March 13th letter sent by Trump officials to Colombia with the Trump administration's demands to restore funding.
	They explicitly require implementation of an expanded hate speech code like the IHRA that Trump adopted.
	Here is from the letter that the Trump administration sent to Columbia that ultimately led to the first agreement.
	They just reached a second agreement.
	And here's what they said.
	One of the things we demand, that you must formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of anti-Semitism.
	And then they said President Trump's executive order was the IHRA definition.
	So they're saying, We want a new definition of anti-Semitism, an expanded one, and as an example of one thing that would be acceptable to us, you can use the IHRA definition that Trump in an executive order adopted for the U.S. government, which is the one that I just read you, the one that contains all sorts of prohibited and outlawed ideas that, of course, ought to be permissible to express, to be expressed.
	Some people try to claim that the next sentence, you also must anti-Zionist discrimination against Jews in areas unrelated to Israel or the Middle East must be addressed.
	That's a separate requirement.
	That's just saying anti-Zionist discrimination.
	What does that even mean?
	You're allowed to oppose the ideology of Zionism.
	It's a new ideology.
	It emerged only in the very late 19th century, early 20th century.
	It wasn't accepted until 1948 when the Jews got their own state.
	Many, many Jews opposed it.
	Many Jews still oppose it.
	To be anti-Zionist is not bigoted, but if the Trump administration is saying that it is, they're saying you must address anti-Zionist discrimination, not in Israel, but in the U.S.
	But that is totally separate from this demand.
	Formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of anti-Semitism, such as the IHRA definition, which President Trump adopted for himself.
	And then Columbia went on to do exactly that as part of a deal.
	Again, there are two stages to this deal.
	There's one that just happened recently, the one prior to that with one where Columbia said we're adopting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
	Here's the three Trump officials who signed the letter.
	Josh Gruenbaum of the General Services Administration, Thomas Wheeler of the Department of Education, and Sean Keviny of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
	Now, when that didn't work, when they couldn't convince MAGA influencers to say, you know what, this team is false because it's not false.
	It's absolutely 100% true.
	I'm about to show you a lot more evidence for it as well beyond what I just showed.
	It's not even in dispute.
	The Trump administration has been demanding this over and over.
	It's such a lie to say that they don't like or they're opposed to hate speech codes.
	They have demand, I just showed you, they said to Columbia, this is one of the things you must do, adopt an anti-definition Semitism along the lines of what Trump adopted, like the IHRA.
	I mean, that's right in the letter.
	So after that didn't work, they sent Stephen Miller out, who, as I said, is popular among a lot of Trump supporters.
	People just blindly believe what he says.
	He didn't present any evidence or documents.
	He just confused things, as I said at the start, is one of the things you can do if you're a government official trying to get the people who support you to kind of not be sure or at least doubt or walk away from it saying, I'm not really sure.
	I trust Stephen Miller.
	He says it's not true.
	I don't care how much evidence I see.
	I'm going to decide this is too unclear.
	I'm going to trust Stephen Miller.
	Here's what he said above my tweet.
	Quote, this is just patently false.
	We have officials working continuously to identify, revoke, or deny foreigners visas who espouse hatred for America or its people.
	This is a top priority.
	College students who witness such contact can use the ICE tip line.
	So that's about whether they're deporting students who criticize Israel.
	And I'll get to that, but that's the thing I'm leaving aside.
	As for the issue about restricting the speech of American students and professors on campuses, he says, also, there is no, quote, speech code of any kind in the Columbia deal.
	There is an ironclad requirement with enforcement mechanisms to admit students based on actual merit and not illegal racial quotas set aside or preferences.
	Yes, that is in the deal.
	But the Trump administration also cajoled and coerced Columbia to adopt the IHRA definition, which severely attacks the free speech rights of American students at Columbia and professors by outlawing that long list of views I just showed you.
	One of the things they're doing is they're pretending that the deal they just signed with Columbia is the only deal.
	It's actually the second deal.
	Here's the president of Columbia University, Claire Shipman.
	And in July of 2025, she unveiled this resolution of an agreement between the United States of America and Columbia.
	And if you read that, there's no hate speech code in there.
	But in the first agreement that they announced, which was March of 2025, following that letter I just showed you, here's the same Claire Shipman, the president of Columbia University, in March of 2025, with the title, Advancing Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Anti-Semitism at Columbia.
	And the text is, Addressing Discrimination and Harassment, Implementation of Effective Anti-Discrimination Policies.
	The new Office of Institutional Equity substantially revised the university's anti-discrimination and discriminatory harassment policies for students and groups, including the ability to sanction groups.
	The university's approach and relevant policies will incorporate the definition of anti-Semitism recommended by Columbia's anti-Semitism task force in August of 2024.
	And then here's the task force report from August of 2024, Columbia University student experiences of anti-Semitism.
	And this was the definition that they were going to adopt in 2024 before the Trump administration took over.
	Quote, the task force recommends the following working definition of anti-Semitism for pedagogy and training purposes only.
	It is not intended to be used in disciplinary procedures.
	Anti-Semitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis.
	Anti-Semitism can manifest in a range of ways, including ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures, stereotypes, anti-Semitic tropes and symbols, Holocaust denial, targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them, exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry, or real or perceived ties to Israel and certain double standards applied to Israel.
	So it took some from the IHRA definition, but it wasn't the IHRA definition.
	But once the Trump administration sent its letter to Columbia University, we showed you the March 13th letter where they specifically said we want you to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism similar to the one that Trump adopted, which is the IHRA one.
	And here is the working definition of anti-Semitism from the IHRA.
	And those have the examples that I showed you.
	Then here is the statement from Claire Shipman, July 15, 2025, our additional commitments to combating anti-Semitism.
	As part of our March 21st commitments, Columbia announced we would incorporate the definition of anti-Semitism as recommended by our anti-Semitism task force in August 2024 into our anti-discrimination policies.
	We felt then, as we do now, that it is important to use a definition of anti-Semitism that reflects the experiences of many within Columbia's Jewish community.
	Our task force had recommended that definition for use in education and pedagogy while remain committed to that carefully constructed definition, meaning we still think we should be able to use that more limited definition.
	Now that the Trump administration has demanded we expand the definition of hate speech for anti-Semitism and specifically said, pointed to the IHRA definition, we are today also formally incorporating the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
	So in 2024, under pressure, they were going to adopt an anti-Semitism definition that was much narrower than this IHRA one, which bans a whole wide range of ideas about Israel and Jewish people.
	The Trump administration then takes away their funding and writes them a letter saying, if you want to get funding back, here are the things you must do, one of which is to implement a new definition of anti-Semitism like the HRA one that Trump adopted for the government.
	And then a month later, she says, I still think, the President of Columbia, that that definition we already adopted last year is sufficient, but given all the pressure, we're now going to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
	And this has happened over and over at so many other different schools, including Harvard and Brown and many other places.
	is the Trump administration's tactic all right so I don't understand how Stephen Miller can look at any of Trump supporters with a straight face and say you know No, we hate hate speech codes.
	We've been telling you we hate hate speech codes forever.
	We think they're censorship and we still do.
	What?
	You've been writing letters to our leading universities threatening them to take away their funding unless they adopt expanded hate speech codes.
	And then they've been doing it in response to your demands and then you restore the funding.
	If you hate hate speech codes, why aren't you condemning Columbia and Harvard for expanding their hate speech codes to prevent a whole wide range of views about Israel?
	It's because you've been demanding it.
	You want them to do it.
	That's why you're not condemning them for it.
	You're praising them for it.
	You're giving them their funding back as a reward for having done it.
	Just to give you a sense for how incredibly repressive this is, what a censorship climate this is producing.
	And again, this is not for foreign students, it's for American students and American professors.
	Here's an article from Associated Press July 25th, which is right after Columbia, under pressure from the Trump administration, announced the implementation of this hate speech code.
	The title was, A Columbia Genocide Scholar Says She Now May Leave Columbia over the university's new definition of anti-Semitism.
	This is a Jewish professor named Marianne Hirsch, who's one of the nation's leading genocide scholars.
	And this is what the text says: quote, for years, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at Columbia University, has used Hannah Aran's book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil, one of the most famous World War II Holocaust books written by Hannah Arant, to spark discussion among her students about the Holocaust and its lingering traumas.
	But after Columbia's recent adoption of a new definition of anti-Semitism, which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech, Professor Hirsch fears she may face official sanction for even mentioning the landmark text by Arant, A philosopher who criticized Israel's founding.
	Hannah Arendt was a Jewish woman, one of the leading French intellectuals in philosophy, who wrote about the Nuremberg trials and coined the phrase beneath of evil.
	And she was a Jewish woman who opposed Zionism.
	And her books contain opposition to Zionism as racist and other things.
	And this scholar is now saying, because of this definition of anti-Semitism and these lists of prohibited ideas that the Trump administration forced the university to implement, I don't even think I can recommend or teach Hannah Arant's book anymore because she condemns Zionism as a racist ideology, which is one of the banned ideas.
	The article goes on, quote, for the first time since she started teaching five decades ago, Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
	Quote, a university that treats criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry, she told the Associated Press.
	I just don't see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.
	Hirsch is not alone.
	At universities across the country, academics have raised alarm about growing efforts to define anti-Semitism on terms pushed by the Trump administration, often under the threat of federal cuts.
	So I just, please look at this.
	Stephen Miller had the audacity, this is how little he thinks of MAGA supporters, to go and say, my reporting, my claims are patently false.
	They're not trying to advocate for expanded definitions of hate speech and anti-Semitism.
	They actually oppose that.
	And every single one of these administrations will tell you that the only reason they ended up adopting these far broader hate speech definitions that ban a whole wide range of criticism of Israel and Jews is because of the Trump administration's pushing this on them under threat of removing federal funding.
	This is the Trump administration demanding universities censor the speech of American citizens and American universities about Israel and about Jews.
	And Stephen Miller knows that if he just goes and says, ah, that's a lie, it's blatantly false, we wouldn't do that.
	We hate hate speech.
	Enough people are going to be like, ah, and I saw enough people saying, yeah, this is wrong.
	Glenn Greenhold's lying.
	This is just about foreigners.
	Like, just idiot stuff.
	But I really don't blame them because people do put trust and faith in government leaders like Stephen Miller.
	And when he comes out and says it's patently false, even though it's patently true, enough people are going to be confused by it or misled by it.
	And a lot of people want to be misled by it.
	And somehow these people started thinking, even though these are hate speech codes that apply to all students and faculty at American colleges, that somehow it only applies to foreign students, they conflated it with the issue of deporting foreign students.
	And here's the AP reporting.
	It's what you can get from talking to any one of these administrations.
	We're just looking at the Trump administration's letters and demands themselves that this is all coming from the Trump administration.
	The article concludes, quote, for Professor Hirsch, the restrictions on drawing comparisons to the Holocaust and questioning Israel's founding amount to, quote, clear censorship, which she fears will chill discussion in the classroom and open her and other faculty up to spurious lawsuits.
	Quote, we learned by making analogies, Hirsch said.
	Now the university is saying that's off limits.
	How can you have a university course where ideas are not up for discussion or interpretation?
	January 22nd from the Jewish Chronicle, Harvard also adopts the IHRA definition after settling anti-Semitism lawsuits.
	From the JNS, April of 2025, Yale quietly adds IHRA definition of Jew hatred to anti-bias policies.
	Trump gets in, and all these schools suddenly start imposing massive censorship on what American students and faculty can say about Israel.
	Jeopardizing basic texts like Hannah Arendt because she believed Zionism was racism, which is one of the prohibited ideas, or professors who compare what the Nazis did to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
	You don't have to agree with that.
	The point is it's being banned.
	It's being censored by government pressure.
	And it's, by the way, the Guardian today, July 30th, anti-Semitism training designed by pro-Israel groups is now becoming compulsory at American colleges, what's in it.
	Pro-Israel groups are creating indoctrination classes, like struggle sessions, as conservatives used to call them when this was done for anti-black racism or other forms of bigotry.
	And now every American student on American campuses has to go through these courses as a mandatory course designed by pro-Israel groups that want people to be indoctrinated about what anti-Semitism is.
	And of course, the ideas are things you might say about Israel are anti-Semitic.
	Our guest is ready.
	I just want to point to this one last thing.
	This is from the Knight First Amendment Institute, which is one of the leading free speech academic entities in the country.
	It's led by Jamil Jaffer, who I know very well.
	He was an ACLU lawyer, but one of the true ACLU lawyers who defended everybody's free speech.
	And they issued a statement on July 16th, just last month.
	The Knight Institute sounds alarm over new restrictions on campus speech.
	And this is what Jamil Jaffer said, quote, it's disappointing that some of the nation's leading institutions of higher education are agreeing to curtail and punish criticism of Israel in the name of fighting discrimination.
	As major free speech groups have recognized using the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to delineate the outer boundaries of free speech will have the effect of prescribing or deterring legitimate political speech and scholarship.
	The lawyer who drafted the IHRA definition has himself raised similar concerns.
	Plainly, universities should address all forms of discrimination on campus, including by even-handedly enforcing the rules against harassment and threats.
	But by restricting criticism of Israel and its policies, including by faculty and students directly affected by those policies, universities compromise the values they should be defending, free speech, free inquiry, and equity as well.
	And just to illustrate how bipartisan it is, here's the Times of Israel, November of 2024.
	Chuck Schumer also was pushing to codify a IHRA anti-Semitism definition on campuses.
	So Schumer and Trump and all these people are, as usual, joined at the hip in doing this.
	So my message to Stephen Miller is this.
	If you want to use your position in the White House and the influence you have with Donald Trump to impose censorship on American college campuses and American students and American professors to bar them and punish them if they criticize the foreign country that you love and worship and have for life.
	And if you want to expand hate speech codes as you're doing to bar ideas that are offensive to the group to which you happen to belong, at least be honest about it.
	Just say that you're doing that and defend it.
	Stop lying about it.
	Don't call my reporting patently false when I can spend the next three hours documenting even more exactly what the Trump administration has been doing, the key role they've been playing in forcing these universities to adopt the hate speech codes that Stephen Miller last night had the audacity to pretend that he dislikes and hates when he's the one.
	And the Trump administration are the ones that are attacking the free speech rights of Americans in very fundamental ways at the academic institutions that are supposed to be the...
	the pinnacle of free speech, where you can question all taboos and all orthodoxies without fear of being punishment.
	That's exactly the place where they're imposing their censorship more and more by expanding the list of ideas and views and opinions about a foreign country and about one particular minority group that's favored by the White House where you will be punished if you express any of those ideas.
	That is a pure censorship regime and that's exactly what the Trump administration is doing and Stephen Miller's denial of that is nothing but a blatant lie are privacy concerns keeping you up at night?
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	Saurabh Amari has become one of the more interesting and heterodox and I would say newer voices in American conservatism emerging out of the space that was created by the Trump campaign and the MAGA movement that introduced a whole wide range of dissent and debate on issues that the Republican Party had previously been unified on.
	He's the U.S. editor currently of Unheard, the heteroxy journal, and he is also a co-founder of Compact magazine.
	He's a former opinion editor at the New York Post and a columnist at the Wall Street Journal.
	His latest book is Tyranny Inc., How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What We Can Do About It, where he argues that corporate power and not just government overreach is the primary threat to American freedom.
	And that is a perfect segue to a lot of the topics that we want to talk with him about tonight.
	I've long been a fan of his work and I am thrilled to have him here.
	Saurabh, it's great to see you.
	Good evening.
	Thanks so much for joining us.
	Glenn, honor is mine.
	Thanks for having me.
	Yeah, of course.
	So I want to start with this article that you published today in Unheard, which deals with what could be considered a kind of esoteric antitrust case, but I think the foundations of it are manageable and important to master.
	And the title of the article is The Antitrust War Inside MAGA, MAGA's Powerful, The Antitrust War Inside MAGA.
	Powerful lobbyists are battling populist reformers.
	And it's about a $14 billion deal involving Hewitt Packard and their attempt to acquire one of their largest competitors.
	And we've had Matt Stoller on the show a lot to talk about the importance of antitrust law and the kind of bipartisan consensus that seems to have emerged where the Biden and the Trump administration agreed on certain enforcement action.
	And yet now it seems to be, at least in this case and others, in jeopardy.
	So before we delve into that, can you just describe what this merger and acquisition is and what the Trump administration's, how the Trump administration has navigated it?
	Sure, yeah.
	And I just preface this by saying, as you said, antitrust law can be incredibly arcane and technical.
	But at the heart of it is whether or not we're able to have choice in the marketplace.
	Because if there's monopolies or very powerful oligopolies, that means a market that's dominated by one or a very few actors, then they can just impose whatever price and other terms on the rest of us.
	And the whole idea of the free market breaks down because you can't get a better deal elsewhere.
	So anything from groceries to concert tickets, everything can be touched by antitrust law.
	So it's technical and boring and very, very important.
	So Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the wing of Hewlett Packard that deals with Wi-Fi and connectivity solutions for big institutions like workplaces, state and local agencies, sports stadiums, colleges and universities.
	And it proposed to buy one of its largest competitors, Juniper.
	And the Biden administration began briefing against this internally in the office of the assistant attorney general for antitrust.
	Then when the Trump people came in for the second Trump administration, they took those recommendations and decided to challenge this lawsuit in court.
	And they did.
	And then settlement negotiations began.
	And it's fine.
	Not every antitrust suit needs to go to a lawsuit.
	Sometimes the government can say, okay, well, if you do X, Y, and Z to protect the market and so on, we will let this merger proceed.
	And that's what the track that this particular merger was on.
	The problem is that the assistant attorney general for antitrust division, her name is Gail Slater, and she's one of the real reformers, the real economic reformers in the Trump movement, former Senate staffer for Vice President JD Vance, like really believes that the Republican Party should serve workers and consumers at least as much as it serves businesses and employers.
	She really believes that.
	So she thought that the terms that were being emerging for the settlement were not good enough.
	And so what happened was HP then retained a bunch of very powerful MAGA lobbyists who basically went around her and had literally like boozy backroom meetings with the higher up principals.
	And they forced the assistant attorney general, Gail Slater, to accept the deal.
	They pushed it through over her objections.
	And then they fired two of her senior staffers because of the, you know, over the turmoil or the friction that emerged as a result.
	And I'll wrap up quickly, but why this is a bad thing is because many other respects, the second Trump administration has been a huge disappointment for those of us who wanted to see the GOP actually serve its new working class base.
	They destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was a good thing.
	It was not doing debanking.
	It actually was trying to combat debanking, but they sided with Silicon Valley and they destroyed that.
	You know, their union policies are as bad or no better than the typical Bush-Romney Republicans.
	But at least you had antitrust as this one area where there was this bipartisan consensus that monopoly is bad for the American worker and consumer.
	And now we're seeing kind of swampy MA elements that are swampier than the Democrats they were supposed to displace.
	So let's talk about that, that division.
	When people think of the Trump candidacy in 2016, they typically remember Trump's denouncement of standard Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy, which Trump kind of had to do because his primary opponent in the establishment-backed preference was Jeb Bush.
	And so he had to talk about the Iraq War as being this dumb evil and against neocons.
	And people remember that.
	But he also talked about the economic orthodoxies as illustrated by the Reagan era, that they were archaic, that they served massive corporations, that they ran over the working person, the forgotten man, as he called them in his 2017 inauguration.
	And there was a huge component of economic populism that at least formed part of the Trump rhetoric in Trump campaign in 2016, denouncing this kind of standard Republican orthodoxy of cutting taxes for the rich and serving corporations and not caring about the worker, empowering them to merge and acquire their competitors, leaving no consumer choice.
	And just to illustrate how genuine this division was, I think, you had Lena Khan, who in the Biden administration was kind of the representative of this movement to have rigorous anti-trust enforcement.
	And although she was hated by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Mitch McConnell and the kind of corporatist element in both parties, among her biggest fans were crucial MAGA figures like JD Vance and Josh Hawley and Matt Gates, who loved Lena Khan.
	In fact, I think it was Matt Gates who said, I'm a Lena conservative, using her name as in order to identify because antitrust enforcement is designed to say we're not going to just serve big multinational corporations.
	We're going to make sure we protect the American worker.
	And there was always this tension between Republican, old-style Republican corporatism and this newer economic populism, just like there's a tension between old style Republican warmongering and this new anti-interventionism among parts of the right.
	On the question of that economic division, you seem to have suggested in your answer and in your article that you think that the corporatists, the kind of old school Mitch McConnell types, Paul Ryan types, are winning out.
	Is that what you think generally?
	And if so, why do you think that's happening?
	Yeah, I do think that.
	And I should say, I started warning about this during the campaign in 2024.
	I think it was important, for example, that Sean O'Brien, the president of the Teamster, spoke at the Republican National Convention, something that hadn't happened before, like a Republican audience hearing why we need labor unions in the private economy.
	And, you know, like they were like uncomfortable with what he was saying, but they were hearing a message that many GO peers had not heard before.
	So, and then you also think about the fact that in the election, Trump did win households earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year.
	That's like a, we don't classify people like class in the United States, but that's about as good a proxy as you can get for a working class person in that income category.
	And the quintile of US counties that shifted most sharply to the right in 2024 were also the ones that are most reliant on public welfare, things like Medicaid and other entitlement programs.
	So with all that in mind, things were set up to be promising, but there were troubling signs.
	I have to say, there was one moment where Trump got on the X space with Elon and was like, wow, you like to fire him when they speak up, addressing his workers and kind of patting him.
	They mutually patted each other on the back and how anti-worker they can be.
	And I warned that MAGA will have to choose between these two because if they came in, right, and they really went for real economic populism, serious antitrust, reach out to workers,
	try to push for a minimum wage increase, fix entitlements, which doesn't require such a, it doesn't require, especially Social Security, the relatively easy fix, and a reasonable solution on immigration where you cut off kind of exploitative means by which business undercuts the wages of native workers in a systematic way.
	If you did those things, you would have a Republican ascendancy for two decades.
	You would kind of outflank the Democrats on their own issues.
	But they didn't do that.
	I mean, you know, I can point to many things.
	The National Labor Relations Board basically was, first of all, initially crippled by the administration.
	And I think what they're going to do is just turn it into signs are to turn it into a typical Republican, where it's a vehicle for employers to use against, largely to use against labor unions.
	They cut Medicaid, right?
	Their big, the big legislative accomplishment was cuts to Medicaid to fund state and local tax deductions and just tax cuts for people where I live, like in Midtown East Manhattan.
	And with ruinous effect potentially for rural healthcare, right?
	Because especially with a lot of rural hospitals now owned by private equity, if they feel like they're not getting what they think they should get out of Medicaid reimbursements and so on, they'll just close the hospital.
	So you're going to lose hospitals in rural areas.
	Like literally the kind of people who vote for Trump.
	I could go on and on, but I just think, I don't know, the Republican Party and Trump himself, I should say, their muscle memory, just like they're like, well, we need to pass the legislation.
	What should we do?
	Well, tax cuts and cut Medicaid for the poor.
	Like that's their domestic after all that's changed.
	Right.
	Right.
	And bomb Iran, of course, and back Israel to the hills.
	So like, I don't know.
	It's just the party is irreformable.
	And I say this as someone who's of the right, but was seeing promise, you know, over the past few years on a number of fronts.
	And to be honest, like, I think I came on like a year ago and said the same thing, but I just think, especially now, it feels like a lot of fake populism then.
	Like it's just sort of like, it's the same old stuff, but now clothed in more like edgy and mean and kind of quasi-racist rhetoric sometimes.
	But it's the same old policies, right?
	And I was listening to your segment on free speech as well.
	Like, I don't think the people who voted for Trump voted for draconian.
	You know, they were for free speech on campus, not to create a new protected group.
	Right.
	So let me just drill down on this a little bit because a lot of times the two sides, let's say left and right, just very crudely speaking, have these caricatures of the other side, that they don't really believe in anything, that if they do have rhetoric that's populist or pro-worker, it's just all deceitful and empty.
	They don't really mean any of it.
	And that's why I said there's clearly some authenticity.
	You even see with Josh Hawley now, you know, every week he like summons corporate CEOs before the Senate and just bashes the crap out of them, not just about their executive pay, but about hidden fees and unfair consumer practices.
	He obviously is extremely upset about these cuts to Medicare, even though he voted for the ultimate package because there was a lot of stuff in there for Missouri.
	He's now trying to undo that part of it.
	You know, you have JD Vance, who was a big antitrust enforcer and a fan of Lena Khan.
	And you clearly have that.
	By the way, I think Hawley's the real deal.
	Yeah, I think Hawley's the real deal.
	I don't want to generalize completely.
	Yeah, I agree.
	But at the same time, Trump came out and attacked Josh Hawley today.
	I don't know if you saw it, but he called him like a second-rate senator from a great state and really condemned Josh Hawley.
	That was for the attempt to ban stock trading among members of Congress that he joined the Democrats in order to vote for.
	But in any event, all I'm saying is you have, I think, on both sides, you know, like there are Democrats as well who want to return the party to their kind of working class roots.
	And when you look at the Democratic Party, I think the reason why they don't do it, even though they know it would be politically beneficial, is because their donor base just won't allow it.
	You know, their donor base is filled with people who are not union rank and file or, you know, people who want economic populism.
	They're big Wall Street donors, big Silicon Valley donors, and they want corporatist policies.
	And so the party stays within their donor preferences, even at the expense of their own political future.
	Is that what you think is happening in the Republican Party?
	Like, has Donald Trump reverted to just sort of his billionaire status where the only people he's talking to and listening to are extremely wealthy billionaires and hardcore capitalists who don't care about workers, don't care about the working class, and only want all of these policies that you just mentioned that would fit in perfectly well, not just with Reagan, but with George Bush and Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
	Like nothing changed about the Republican Party.
	Do you think that's the reason?
	It's part of it.
	I mean, another part of it is the fact that this kind of realignment-minded realignment, meaning that the two parties have switched bases.
	And it really is true.
	Maybe in 2016, it was questionable.
	Maybe in 2020, it was only provisional.
	But in 2024, the two parties really have switched bases.
	But like, the staff needed to promote that kind of a worldview where you don't just think about corporate bottom lines.
	You don't just think about any deal as a good deal, but really, is this good for the consumer?
	Is this good for the worker?
	Et cetera.
	Like the personnel isn't there in the Republican Party.
	And it's still like, you know, for the most part, there's this muscle memory so that you have, you know, a very outrageous example to me, just to make it concrete, is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created.
	One of Liz Warren, perhaps Liz Warren's great achievement, is this agency created after the financial crisis to protect especially low-income customers on the lower rungs of the credit market from financial scams, from different forms of nowadays, like surveillance that credit card companies and stuff can do could like modify your algorithmically modify your interest rate, all this sort of sinister stuff.
	And under the Biden administration, it even did this.
	Under the Biden administration, the CFPB released a rule and Rohit Chopra, the CFPB director, gave his last interview on record before leaving office to me and to promote this program, which was basically preventing debanking.
	Right.
	Largely had targeted people on the right, you know, using, you know, people who had fundraised for January 6th defendants, got debanked, and people in Europe too, very aggressive use of it against populist right type figures.
	The Bidenites came up with this rule, and in the most sinister way, these like tech oligarchs started to campaign, including Elon himself, who said delete CFPB.
	Um, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan, started campaigning against Mark Andreessen as well.
	Well, Mark Andreessen said they're the ones who made debanking a big deal, like by saying, Hey, conservatives are getting kicked out of the financial system.
	And they had the nerve to blame the Consumer Protection Bureau, which in fact was doing what they could to stop debanking.
	And they pretended that that was the agency responsible for the debanking.
	Yes.
	So here's what Trump has done since coming into office: dropped, you know, forced the CFPB to drop lawsuits against the banking association over this issue of debanking, right?
	Even as they claim to defend people against debanking, they are stopping, they stopped the CFPB from proceeding on this.
	You know, legislatively, they basically have put a stop to the anti-debanking efforts.
	And, you know, like a particularly outrageous moment early on that I remember is, you know, they put in charge of the CFPB as acting director, the guy who runs the Office of Management and Budget.
	I forget his name now, but he's like a hardcore old school, like pro-business Republican.
	And they released the White House press release saying one of the reasons we're targeting the CFPB as a bad agency is that it's interfering with people's checking accounts, interfering, which sounds so bad.
	Like a government agency is interfering with people's checking accounts.
	But if you read into the details, what they mean is the CFPB had promulgated a rule to stop this kind of back-to-back to back overdraft fees that low-income customers often get charged.
	I remember when I first started earning and I had all sorts of debts like 20 years ago when I just out of college, I did get hit by those, like where it's like, suddenly I'm in debt with Bank of America for $700 of all overdraft fees.
	That was, you know, like reined in or tried to be reined in by the Biden administration.
	And in the most cynical way, the new Trump administration framed efforts to combat overdraft fees, which really hit low-income people, people who just start out in the job market, as like we are liberating, you know, you from the government interfering in your checking account.
	It's such like, it's precisely, it's the use of that kind of like populist, you know, rhetoric to like help Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
	I laugh, but it's actually really grim.
	Yeah, I mean, the pioneer of that was Ronald Reagan, you know, basically saying we're going to keep hands off corporations.
	And he sold that as we're going to keep government out of your lives.
	When in fact, what he meant was we're going to stop limiting what governments can do to abuse you and exploit you.
	And of course, what corporations rather can do to limit it to exploit you.
	And corporations went wild.
	And that was when you started seeing the decline of the middle class and the working class.
	I don't want to put it all on Reagan, but that then became the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton as well.
	Let me just ask you one more question about this article and this Hewlett-Packard deal, because one of the things you said in your first answer was that it was all sort of swampy.
	And I think it's very difficult to say what the primary reason was to explain Trump's very surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
	Like there's a lot of factors for sure.
	But if I were forced to pick one, I would probably select not some ideological position Trump took, left versus right, or even on immigration.
	I think it was more this idea that he's going to go in and drain the swamp.
	There was this very real sense, I think very valid sense on the part of the public, that more than being too much left or too much right or whatever, the government was just corrupt.
	It was like oozing corruption.
	Very rich people, you know, hired lobbyists and they got their will.
	And you know, you look at the 2008 financial crisis, you look at going back to the war in terror and the war in Iraq.
	I mean, there's no way to conclude anything but that.
	And Trump, you know, his central promise was, I'm going to just clean out the dirt and swamp of both parties.
	And that to me was his most compelling and I think most electorally potent promise.
	And yet, in this transaction, and I want you to describe why, it seems to me like this is the epitome of swamp politics, what happened here with this transaction.
	Can you talk about specifically, just to illustrate the point, what you meant when you said there was a lot of swampiness driving this?
	Yep.
	So basically, as I said, the negotiations, when they hit a wall over what the terms of the settlement are that would say, okay, you can merge HPE and Juniper, or you should do X, Y, and Z.
	What happened was then the representatives, the lobbyists who are, actually, there's two figures, a guy named Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz, who are kind of big time MAGA figures who are retained by HPE.
	They went around, they basically went up to the, they went past Gail Slater, assisted attorney general, Senate confirmed figure who is in charge as an expert on antitrust.
	And they went to higher ups like Pam Bondi's chief of staff, a guy named Chad Meisel, and they had meetings and so on where they basically hashed out the deal and went forward.
	And then it was sort of imposed on the office of Gail Slater, this reforming assistant attorney general.
	That's what I mean by that.
	And the deals, I mean, according to my sources, including a former official, the meetings took place in this kind of backroom martini cocktail way.
	And the interesting thing was that, you know, they fired these two officials.
	Both of those two officials had given public speeches while they were still in their roles where they said, hey, we are not going to do deals over martinis.
	You know, like they said that explicitly or that kind of thing.
	We're not going to listen to this kind of lobbyist pressure.
	Antitrust law should be like immured from this kind of lobbyist pressure.
	And, you know, they're gone, right?
	So, and, and, and when they were saying this stuff about martini deals, they were describing something that was already actually happening.
	Um, so it's very troubling.
	And I will add, you'll like this, Gwen.
	Now that sort of after-the-fact justification for the deal is that it was necessary for national security, right?
	So that was, you know, Huawei is the major competitor to this stuff.
	And we need a big company on our side to be able to compete with Huawei.
	And, you know, the defenders of the deal will say, look, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper aren't really doing consumer-facing stuff where you would really have concerns about consumer welfare and price.
	It's all about like foreign militaries buying these kind of technology.
	It's simply, first of all, it's not true.
	Like they are big domestic providers of wireless and other connectivity solutions.
	If you go to a major stadium to watch a sports game and they have like a Wi-Fi option so you can like follow the game on your phone and do interactive stuff, chances are it's one of those two providers.
	So if those costs go up because there's no competition, the price that you pay for those services will also go up in tandem.
	So it will get passed down to the consumer.
	But it's just really rich that they suddenly made it about national security when in none of their actual legal filings they brought anything about national security.
	And when they do this kind of settlement, they have to do what's called a tonne act disclosure.
	It comes from a Nixon era where the Nixon administration tried to push through a very corrupt antitrust deal and with ITT at the time.
	So Congress passed this law that says you have to disclose every communication you have with any U.S. official, oral or written, about the settlement.
	And none of the U.S. officials listed by HPE in its Toney Act disclosures are related to the National Security Council.
	There's nothing about the CIA.
	There's nothing about the Pentagon.
	So there's no, how would the national security agencies know that they should even be involved in this deal?
	I think it's BS, right?
	And I just will say that if this precedent gets set that you can defend any merger on national security grounds, like competition with China or Russia or whatever, you can just push through anything.
	Well, groceries, well, that's a food security issue.
	Got to let grocery mergers push.
	Anything can be framed as a national security issue.
	Yeah, we've done reporting on this before where when there were attempts to break up some of the big tech companies based on antitrust concerns, and I think even the Trump people still have antitrust concerns about big tech.
	There's a lot of big tech lobbying too, but I think that's still there.
	The people who often come out and defend big tech and the need to keep them giants and not break them up are the kind of John Brennans, people from the national security world, the intelligence world, who make exactly that argument that having these big tech giants is crucial to American national security.
	It's how we exert influence in the world.
	And so it's justified in that same way.
	Let me just ask a couple more questions.
	I think you've long been interested in one of the things I've been interested in, which is this notion that populism, political populism, economic populism, foreign policy populism has a way of uniting the left and the right in a way that traditional dogma hasn't been able to do.
	And we've seen a lot of data that people who still view the world left versus right can understand.
	The fact that millions of people twice voted for President Obama in 2008, 2012, and then voted for President Trump, right?
	That makes no sense from a left-right perspective.
	But if you look at both of them as anti-establishment figures vowing to radically change the establishment, it does.
	In 2016, lots of people said their two favorite candidates were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
	Again, it doesn't make sense from a left-right perspective, but from an anti-establishment perspective, it does.
	I don't know if you saw this, but there was polling out today.
	The Reform Party, the Nigel Farage far-right populist anti-immigration party in the UK, has become the most popular party, pretty much by a good distance.
	If you had a national election today, Nigel Farage would win, might even become the prime minister, which is extraordinary, given that the Tories and the Labor Party have dominated that country for many decades.
	So they polled Reform Party supporters and they said, what do you think of Jeremy Corbyn?
	What do you think of Sir Keir Starmer?
	Sir Keir Starmer being the establishment labor candidate who's the prime minister.
	Jeremy Corbyn, of course, being this anti-establishment left-wing figure who got kicked out of the Labor Party.
	And overwhelmingly, Reform Party voters have a lot of respect for Jeremy Corbyn.
	They think he's honest.
	They think he means what he says.
	They think he's ideologically consistent, that he's incorruptible, that he wants radical change.
	And they despise Keir Starmer, even though Keir Starmer, if you look at a left-right perspective, is much closer to the Reform Party than the far left, Jeremy Corbyn.
	Do you still think that there's this viable left-right coalition when it comes to political populism?
	Is that something that you still harbor hope can happen?
	I do.
	I do.
	I mean, I think that it's just in the American context.
	I don't know about the UK context, although I lived there for four years, but in the American context, I think it has to happen in Congress.
	I've lost hope about the president, whether it's Democrat or a Republican.
	It has to happen at the level of the Hawleys and the Sanders, which is very old.
	I think building something durable and governing again, Congress governing and actually passing meaningful legislation again.
	I think that's what's really missing.
	You know, populism has its downsides.
	And some of the things that we're seeing now with Trump, you could see early proto-versions of them in Andrew Jackson in the sense that Andrew Jackson came in kind of promising to drain the swamp, the kind of Northeast banking establishment personified in the Second Bank of the United States, which was, on the one hand, it was an effective institution.
	And on the other hand, it was a vehicle for elites that kept down farmers in the South and the West and workers in the Northeast.
	And that was the base of the Democratic Party.
	Andrew Jackson founded with Martin Van Buren, the Democratic Party.
	It's actually one of the most continuously existing political parties in the world.
	It's older than the Republican Party, which in its most recent iteration is, you know, starts with Lincoln.
	So, you know, but however, what the Jacksonians did was they smashed, they smashed the Second Bank of the United States, which was seen as this, you know, corrupt, you know, too powerful institution.
	But because American populism in particular has this kind of aversion to actually then governing for the common good, what filled the vacuum were lots of like smaller wildcat banks and a kind of just financial mess where you had much more financial turmoil in 19th century America than you had in comparable industrial states like England and France through the 19th century, which had like more centralized banking systems.
	And then the U.S. system stabilized once we established the Federal Reserve.
	So it's like that's the part that's missing from at least the right-wing version of populism is this on the this, you know, they recognize the swamp and they recognize the corruption and the power of corporate America to sort of, you know, smash the American people in the mouth all the time to their advantage.
	But then like there's that kind of libertarian mentality that's also baked into the American right, which prevents them from like them seeking to govern.
	And then new elites take over.
	And corporate America is very good at like shifting with the cultural winds.
	When it was good for them in 2020, like Amazon and Twitter and all these firms were super woke.
	And now when it's they're like, you know, turning anti-woke, all these firms, but this fundamental power imbalance between, on the one hand, the asset-rich few and the asset-less majority remains the same.
	The movie Eddington, I don't know if you watched it, Glenn, is actually a really good commentary on this.
	I won't spoil the details, but the upshot is that you have this American town being targeted by a big tech company that wants to build a data center that's exploitative in various ways and whatever.
	And you have the wokey managerial left leadership of the city, which cooperates with the big tech company.
	And then there's a kind of populist Trumpy uprising.
	And then it's the kind of lunatic right people who take over who also, you know, they also equally cooperate with the big tech company.
	I just think it's a really fascinating conversation.
	Yeah, totally.
	I mean, I think that happens a lot where maybe like on some level, it's more like of a dialectic where there's some extreme that emerges and then the counter extreme.
	And it's not that you want either one of those extremes to prevail without limits, but kind of to push back against it.
	So if you think there's too much elite domination, too much establishment domination, you want this very anti-establishment force, not to get their way on everything, but to at least balance it.
	All right, let me ask you this last question.
	Maybe we can have an optimistic note.
	I'm not sure.
	You know, like you said before, there are people in Congress who seem pretty sincere.
	Like for me, this left-right populist alliance was probably best illustrated when Josh Hawley stood next to Bernie Sanders.
	And they, in 2020, and they filibustered this COVID relief bill that was going to send huge amounts of money to big corporations because they demanded direct payments to American citizens and they got $600 and then Trump vetoed it and said, that's not enough.
	I want 2,000.
	And that was a clear left-right alliance around populism.
	If you were to ask me, like, who is the purest, most genuine representation of MAGA ideology in the Congress?
	Like, everybody claims to be MAGA in the Congress, even people who plainly aren't.
	Like Tom Clotton says he's MAGA, because that's what you have to pretend to be in order to have influence and be popular.
	But for me, the purest representative is probably Marjorie Taylor Greene, like somebody who just never was a politician, really got convinced by Trump's 2016 campaign, got engaged by it, excited by it, really believes in it, is a true believer in what she thought was the ideology.
	And what you're seeing from her is a great deal of grievance that similar to what you're outlining, really, that, hey, I thought we believed in all these things, like anti-interventionism and anti-censorship and, you know, going to bat for the working class and things like that.
	Do you think that this kind of augers a much greater willingness on the part of the MAGA base to clash with the Trump administration when it abandoned his ideology, or do you see her as like an aberration?
	No, I see it in the area of foreign policy.
	I see both durable resistance from the MAGA base to the Trump administration and a willingness to not back down in interesting ways.
	You saw that during the attack on Iran where all these, you know, people like me, I mean, I'm like kind of like a, you know, like an editor, it's different, but like the real MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and of course Tucker Carlson and others came out against the war and Marjorie Taylor Green.
	And I should say Josh Hawley as well was opposed to U.S. intervention.
	And they didn't back down, you know, as it became clear that it was going to happen.
	They only became more strident.
	I mean, maybe not Jack Kirk, but the rest of them, for sure.
	Yes, I think Charlie Kirk came under, you know, was brought to heel, but the others did not.
	And I think, you know, again, you saw that when Israel shelled this Catholic church, the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, you saw this, you know, uproar of, you know, traditional Catholic and conservative, you know, Christians who were outraged and wanted answers.
	Now, you know, like you might say, well, why did they speak up when many thousands more Gaza and Muslims were dying?
	I think that's a fair point, but the point is that that then became an opening for lots of MAGA people to be like, hey, what is happening in Gaza?
	We're sort of disturbed by some of this stuff.
	And it's an area where I think you could have real left-right hybridity and cooperation.
	I think I will say, I don't agree with many things that Zoharan Mamdani says, like the defund the police stuff.
	I live in New York City.
	I know that he now has moved away from it.
	I have real policy and rhetorical disagreements with them.
	However, I will say that moment when he was asked, you know, the mayoral candidates were asked, you know, which country would you visit first?
	And all the other Democratic nominees raced to say Israel, you know.
	And he was like, you know, I'm just going to stick around here and talk to my local Jewish community through synagogues and focus on the city that I'm supposed to represent, not a foreign country.
	That's not the way I pray.
	You know, I'm running for eighth grade class president, and my first trip after winning will be to our Jewish Democrat.
	Like, why do we have to say that?
	That's bizarre.
	That's really weird.
	And so, you know, I think like you saw that Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene praised him for that.
	Yeah, I think a lot of conservatives are like looked at that and said, yeah, I mean, that's America First, right?
	He was like, I'm not really thinking about going to pay homage to foreign countries.
	I'm thinking about taking care of the residents of New York City, like all the different residents of New York City.
	You're like, that's America First and his purest expression.
	It's a local role.
	Like, why does it have to have a geopolitical dimension at all?
	And I think that was kind of refreshing.
	So, anyway, to end on an optimistic note, I think that that's the area where I see the greatest hope for both, again, mega resistance to when Trump betrays his promises, but also left-right kind of hybrid crossover.
	Yeah, I totally agree.
	There's, I think, a lot of interesting things along those lines.
	Maybe I've been hoping and waiting for those things for so long that I'm still looking for signs that it's finally going to happen.
	Though I do think you see some promising developments, even if it's not as much as I would wish.
	All right.
	It's always great to talk to you.
	It's always great to follow your work.
	I learned a lot.
	I always, it's very thought-provoking.
	I hope people will follow your work as well.
	We'll put your Twitter account up and your most recent article on Unheard.
	And we, of course, hope to have you back on again to continue these discussions.
	Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
	Love to, Green.
	Thank you.

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