System Update - Glenn Greenwald - Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tucker/Candace v. Nick Fuentes, the Unabomber Manifesto, Independent Media, and More

Aug. 9, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:48:19

Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tucker/Candace v. Nick Fuentes, the Unabomber Manifesto, Independent Media, and More

Glenn answers audience questions in an extended Q&A as System Update celebrates the 500 episode milestone. Thank you for listening and supporting our independent journalism! ---------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook

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	Good evening.
	It's Friday, August 8th.
	Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2023, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair and we have done a program for you.
	Today is number 500.
	System Update, of course, is 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.
	For our 500th episode, we're going to have a special after-show where for our locals community, for our locals members, we're going to have sort of an old style after show where our show's director Victor Pougie and I sit down.
	We have some responses to some things that are on your mind, plus some reflections on the show, what it says about independent media, some thoughts about broader politics and journalism, as well.
	So definitely tune in for that as a couple of other reminders.
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	We take every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, questions solely from our locals members, which when we do our Friday night show, typically we try and answer as many of those as we can.
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	In order to commemorate 500 years, in order to join, you just simply click the join button, the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that platform.
	You may have noticed as well that inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black.
	No, everything is gold.
	We went all out for tonight.
	So I really hope you enjoy it.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	As is typically the case, we are very proud of the members of locals that we have.
	There's always very high-level, provocative conversations that take place there, things that give us a lot of content.
	A lot of times, actually, things that we do on this show, segments we do, people we interview, people we ask to be interviewed, come from, our locals members.
	It's not just a service that we provide, but it's really an invaluable asset for us.
	And then every Friday night we have these Q ⁇ A show that only works because of how wide-ranging and thoughtful and informed these questions are.
	We try and pick some that are about things that we've done and said previously that people have questions about, but we also answer questions about topics that we have not covered.
	And we're going to get through as many of them tonight as we can.
	The first of which is from Alan Smithy.
	And he asked this, Glenn, what are your thoughts on the Tucker-Nick Fuentes feud?
	As a fan of all the principles, which also includes, I presume, Candace Owens, who was part of this three-way argument, conflict feud, I'd like to believe that this is just a continuation of COINTELPRO meant to sow division amongst the anti-war crowd.
	But I have to admit that Nick's rebuttal was pretty damning and more substantive than the name-calling that preceded it.
	All right, so one of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker's.
	I used to be on his show, I think, more than anybody else when he was on Fox News and now on his podcast.
	I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well.
	I'm not really sure.
	It's not competition.
	I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency.
	And he's been on our show before, so I definitely consider him a friend of mine.
	Candace, I have a good relationship.
	I would describe it as friendly.
	I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction.
	So when I will confess, someone is your Friend, and I had this issue with Matt Taibbi a lot.
	I was recently on Breonna Joy Gray's show, but also, no, it might have even been a different show where people were trying to ask, someone was trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of their criticism of him.
	You know, it's very difficult when you are friends with somebody to what's that?
	Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism.
	And I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them.
	It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington, politicians, major journalists.
	I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes.
	I don't owe any social niceties to them.
	I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions.
	I don't feel the obligation.
	I take the obligation of friendship seriously.
	Like if you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty.
	And part of that loyalty is if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately.
	It would take a lot for me to get to publicly criticize or denounce someone I consider my friend.
	I'm just being honest about that.
	Maybe that's not even the right thing to do.
	I'm not praising myself.
	I'm just telling you how I feel personally.
	But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it.
	They're always talking to each other, for each other.
	In order to be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome.
	Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma.
	And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them.
	Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident who then end up in positions of power.
	Tulsi Gabbard is a good example.
	I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of national intelligence and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi.
	And I'm also, you know, going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted.
	So sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, that there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique.
	But I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes.
	I don't feel like any of them is a government official.
	Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways.
	So I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted.
	But it is an extremely important conversation.
	So I also don't want to avoid it entirely because for one thing, these are three people.
	And obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are.
	They're, you know, arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists slash pundits, influencers.
	Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger.
	I mean, Tucker hosted the most watch show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox, and he's been on TV for 25 years before that.
	And Candace is just a powerhouse.
	She's a force of nature.
	Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you think of her Israel stuff, whatever.
	I'm leaving that on the side.
	I'm just saying, the fact of the matter is that when Candace left the Daily Wire, which of course is founded and run by Ben Shapiro, after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time were very mild.
	You know, she was basically saying, I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.
	That was pretty much the extent of it that caused this massive upheaval.
	A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do?
	Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson were going to do.
	And they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential.
	I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news.
	And he's completely liberated of those constraints.
	No, I mean, completely, completely.
	He's financially set.
	Fox is still paying this gigantic contract.
	He also now has a very successful platform.
	I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants.
	And I feel like he feels like, I know he feels like he said this before publicly, not just in our conversations, that there was a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets.
	Just being part of Washington Group think he was raised there.
	I mean, he wasn't raised technically physically in Washington, but he eventually went there.
	But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, we could call it, ties to the CIA.
	He ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very intricate into that world.
	He grew up with a lot of wealth and privilege, as he will tell you.
	And so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just in the middle of immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe, but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that he you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say.
	And unlike a lot of people who were guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq War, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy.
	And I think it's often overlooked.
	Everyone sees his heteroxy and foreign policy.
	Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Solomoni, saying, This is not in our interest.
	This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel.
	But why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?
	He was saying things like that even on Fox.
	Obviously, he probably was the single most influential figure that took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine by every night.
	You know, I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, oh, now our lives are going to be much more easier.
	We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.
	And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it.
	And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind.
	He moved out of Washington.
	He used to live in the middle of Georgetown around, you know, Vicki Newell, Victoria Newland, lived on, I think, down the street or the other street.
	I mean, that's where they all lived.
	And, you know, he now lives in rural Maine.
	He also lives in an island off Florida.
	And he purposely took himself to places that are very isolated, that are completely detached from that world for the same reason as I was just describing.
	Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly.
	Because you don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink.
	And so you're able to analyze things from a distance.
	You know, it's sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective or at least maybe not even better but different.
	And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington, when you move out of New York and you purposely stay away from it.
	You start to see things in my view more clearly because you're not immersed in it.
	And I do find that extremely valuable, what he's done.
	I find that trajectory very, very positive.
	It's one of the reasons why, despite how much, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused the left to turn, much of the left to turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Thrushergate, but number two, my association with Tucker.
	But I saw early on that there was a real movement on parts of the populist right that you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism.
	And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean, Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party.
	So I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real.
	I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying.
	And I know that I can't, you never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart.
	You can't know for certain.
	You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts, even the person, people you're closest to, your friends.
	But I feel like I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying.
	I think his trajectory is continuing.
	I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be.
	And I think it's been very positive on almost every level.
	So that's Tucker over here.
	And then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position.
	I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing.
	But clearly, two years ago, Candace worked at the Delawire.
	Four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's movement of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States.
	And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel.
	In fact, the opposite was true.
	But I do believe that she too, you know, and in her case, I mean, she's a lot younger than Tucker.
	She's only been around for not all that long.
	And I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things.
	That is healthy and normal.
	And I do believe that her views that she most passionately expresses to which she pays the most attention are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all, they're all positive.
	I'm simply saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying.
	I don't think it's calculated.
	I don't think it's about grifting.
	If it were, she could have stayed at the Daily Wire.
	There's a lot easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does.
	She defends Harvey Weinstein.
	She took up that case.
	There hardly was a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated.
	The Macrone stuff, all the stuff with Israel, you know, she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits.
	She's obviously very talented like Tucker is as a communicator.
	And she chose a much harder path.
	And I think that was through genuine conviction.
	So those two you can kind of, there's a lot of differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together.
	And then in this conflict, you have Nick Fuentes.
	And just for those of you who don't know, what basically the short version of this, for those who haven't seen it, is that Nick Fuentes, I'm just going to give you the summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years, but Nick Fuentes is very critical often of people who seem like they're closest to him politically.
	So he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk.
	I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes.
	But Charlie Kirk on the surface could be.
	He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh.
	And he has also, you know, hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owen and Tucker Carlson.
	And in response, Candace Owen invited him for the first time on her podcast.
	And although I do think they have far more views and commonality than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile.
	And I would say it's in part because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because, and she played some of these clips.
	I mean, Nick Fentes, Fuentes had, you know, very harshly attacked her and criticized her, you know, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing.
	And, you know, if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you at the same time.
	And so this was really the triggering event.
	She invited him on her podcast.
	Obviously, he got a huge audience between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online.
	I don't think, well, I'll get to that in a second.
	But in some ways, you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which, you know, again, generationally, that's natural.
	But that, because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflict, and then it kind of spilled over into line online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of carpet, of sandbagging him in the interview and the like.
	And then they had a big fight online.
	And then before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come on his podcast.
	She's talking about now, Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a Ticanic interview.
	And both of them, I don't know if they planned it beforehand, but both of them talked about Nick Funtes in an extremely derogatory way, extremely derogatory.
	I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that what you cannot deny, you know, I tell people who are friends on the left or liberals or even people more centrist to you are extremely uncomfortable with Nick Funtes.
	It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny.
	For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true.
	I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart.
	I think Dick Cheney is very smart.
	I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart.
	Just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well.
	You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise.
	Those are not inconsistent.
	So Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Funtes is spectacularly talented.
	I mean, he's like, like, you know, a very rare, like, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention, be charismatic.
	But he's not like a ranter and a raver.
	Nick Funtes is very well read, very, very informed.
	There aren't a lot of people who know more about Nick Funtes, who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Funtes.
	It's very impressive.
	And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation.
	It's a very potent combination.
	And that's the reason why he's becoming so, so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore.
	And they talked about Nick Funtes as though he were just sort of some loser.
	You know, like Tucker was saying, like, how did he become so influential?
	He was just this like gay kid living in his mother's basement from Chicago.
	And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off.
	And they also both kind of agree that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a fed working for the CIA.
	And that led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests he was basically arguing, how can you possibly call me this psyop or this operative or this person who works for the CIA when you spent your whole life inside these circles.
	Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro and Duck Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch making millions.
	Nick Funtes wasn't.
	And Nick's basic point was like, you're all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States.
	You know, you've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years.
	And this is what I think is at the heart of the matter, which is that there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time.
	Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did.
	One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote that book called The Israel Lobby.
	First it was an essay in the London Review of Books and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book, footnoted to the Hilt, because they're scholars and they wrote the book that way.
	And at the time, nobody in the mainstream was willing to say that.
	It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it.
	And so at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left.
	So I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because the political camp that people perceived that I was in, and I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp.
	But in both of those camps, it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them.
	So I wasn't taking any, I've taken a risk in my career, but I don't consider that one that.
	But Nick Funtes was, when he started doing it, was 18 years old.
	And he had this very promising future inside conservative media.
	At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent.
	He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media.
	And at the time, people forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel.
	At the time, there was basically none.
	Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel.
	You had Pat Buchanan who did it for a long time, going back to the 80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite.
	You had Ron Paul who did it, same thing.
	You raised Ron Paul, you raised Pat Buchanan, anti-Semites, because they were talking this way.
	But it was very rare, very few and far between.
	And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Funtes started really looking into it.
	And he described on Kansas's show and he described four how he's going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all this has evolved.
	Not just for them, but for the broader discourse.
	And he started off, you know, in conservative politics.
	He at first, you know, was thinking Israel is our greatest ally.
	We have to support them.
	All the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades.
	But then the more he started looking, the more he started questioning it.
	And the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it.
	And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world that he obviously had a very bright future in.
	And rather than shutting up as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't.
	He just doesn't have that personality type.
	And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it.
	And to say that Nick Funtes paid a price for that is an understatement.
	Nick Funtes got excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident, far-right ones.
	Talking about mainstream ones.
	He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's Turning Points USA and lots of other conferences like that.
	He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop.
	He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people in the conservative movement.
	And then beyond that, it escalated from there.
	He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is.
	But basically, the only platform where he could be was on Telegram.
	And now he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform.
	And he has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week and has found a good-sized audience.
	But really, on Twitter is where he gets his most attention.
	And that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era.
	But it wasn't just that.
	He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media, but he was also debanked.
	I mean, he just had bank accounts closed because of his political views by major banks in the United States.
	He would get rejected for banking applications.
	He was put on a no-fly list, which is the first time I really talked to Nick, spoke about Nick when I raised serious concerns about no-fly lists being used in this way.
	And his career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about black people or immigrants.
	Tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles.
	The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel.
	It just wasn't said.
	It was just a taboo.
	It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it.
	And he was doing it at a time.
	Now a lot of people talk about it.
	It's become almost mainstream.
	But back then when he was doing it, especially on the right, almost nobody was.
	And he paid a huge price personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts.
	The government even put him on no fly list.
	And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try and murder him, who did actually shoot two of his neighbors and kill them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon.
	And he eventually ended up being killed by the police.
	And another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman who he had to pepper spray.
	So he's paid a lot of price for this.
	And I think, I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset.
	I've had it too sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it, and very few other people are willing to join you, and then at some point it becomes a little safer to do, I'm not saying it's still safe.
	Tucker has also paid a price for it.
	I mean, half his audience has turned on him.
	He's widely now attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, Candace as well.
	So it's not cost-free at all.
	Tucker didn't have to do it.
	He could have just ignored it.
	So he's paid a price too, but Nick Flint has paid.
	You know, there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multi-multi-multi-million dollar year contract with Fox News coming from the family that he came from versus, you know, Nick Flint as a 20-year-old and a 22-year-old enduring all of that.
	And with, you know, he comes from no wealth, no privilege.
	And I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these, you know, arrows and punishments.
	And then in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way.
	And it is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7th, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable.
	They could have both ignored it.
	They could have both just spouted a few light lip service to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do.
	It was not in their interest to do as well.
	But they did do it.
	But I think he feels like I'm the one who actually paid the price for this.
	I was the one who was doing this earlier than the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer.
	And also, you're more protected because of your platform and standing and wealth.
	And you want to basically throw me in the garbage, like declare me off limits, like be the gatekeeper that says you can go up to this point where Candace and I are, or you know, where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Funtes.
	He's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever.
	And he feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price, and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like.
	I'm not saying that's what I think.
	I'm saying that's what he thinks.
	I identify with that view.
	I think there's definitely some valid basis to why he thinks that.
	And sometimes that does happen.
	I mean, sometimes, you know, there are people who are willing to do it when it's extremely thankless to do.
	The no-benefits, all penalty.
	And then other people kind of come when it's still not safe.
	Like I said, it wasn't safe for Tucker and Candace to do.
	They're paying prices as well in lots of different ways, but not nearly as much as Nick.
	And I think he would be fine if they would get there and say, you know, Nick Fluentis was one of the first people doing this.
	Let's welcome him on our show.
	But the fact that he still excluded the fact that they called him a gay loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably Tor to destroy the right.
	I think that's what made him start being resentful.
	And also, there is this class issue here, which is very real, which is, you know, it's not his fault, but Tucker, you know, Tucker's stepmother, who Tucker's mother left them when he was very young, she went off to Europe, never really had any relationship with her.
	And then his father married a heiress from the Swanson fortune.
	And although that didn't make that fortune his, it wasn't his mother, it was his stepmother.
	You know, obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship.
	She was very good to him.
	And, you know, he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age.
	First of great wealth and privilege and then some amount of fame and then more fame and then more wealth.
	And that's, you know, more or less has been his life.
	Candace, I'm not sure about her, where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy and then she went to work for the Delaware, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty.
	I don't know if he is, maybe he is.
	I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy.
	And I think there's a class issue there too, which is like you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which is kind of disaffected working class white people.
	And Nick's saying, I actually came from there.
	And now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong, or at least in Candace's case, years-long financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser.
	And yeah, I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States.
	And that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.
	So I thought it was very telling.
	I do think, if I'm being totally honest, it's more personal than substantive.
	I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated.
	I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went.
	And one of the people who has a big influential audience among especially young conservatives have kind of gone to war with them.
	So I think There's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you're on the plank first.
	And I think Nick feels like that's being done to him.
	And I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this that is very much a part of the conservative world.
	I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working class for disaffected white people in the United States, you know, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power.
	And obviously a lot of compromises are required to do that.
	And Nick's not willing to make them and a lot of them are.
	And that is a substantive issue as well.
	Now, Tucker and Candace, I do think they don't get very many invites to those circles.
	Tucker more than Candace.
	Tucker because he's been around for so long.
	He's good friends with people in the Trump administration.
	He campaigned for Trump.
	Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran.
	But these are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personal driven.
	We're human beings.
	We all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments.
	It's a Herculean effort to try and exclude those as much as possible.
	We all have to try.
	Some of us do better than others.
	But none of us is immune from that.
	So I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character follow.
	I'm just saying I do think that's part of it.
	But I also think at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues, who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it.
	And then the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of, you know, what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes.
	Nick Funtes, I mean, Nick Funtes had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following.
	It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people.
	They called themselves the Groipers.
	They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Funtes wasn't invited on anywhere into those more mainstream circles or even less mainstream far-right circles.
	He kind of built his entire world himself.
	And because of a combination of his undeniable talent and charisma, and I want to stress again, I think Nick Funtes is of all the kind of, there's tons of successful podcowers and influencers who really don't have an original thought.
	They know what they have to get up and say to like validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle.
	They may even have some talent in terms of like rhetoric and communication, some online, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded.
	They don't do a lot of reading.
	I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the most podcasts or the biggest audiences, even on issues that they cover a lot and you listen to them and you're just like, how are you so ignorant?
	How do you think these things?
	Like, do you ever stop and breathe and like reflect or read anything, like read anything substantive around a Wikipedia page?
	So there's a lot of that.
	And obviously there's a ton of that in corporate media too.
	But Nick Fontes is, go listen to him if you haven't and if you have preconceptions about what he is.
	I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately across, he crosses lines on purpose sometimes when he doesn't need to, just to cross them, though I do think it's often purposeful.
	It's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct.
	So there are definitely things he said that are offensive, genuinely so.
	And not like offensive in that, oh my God, you've offended me, but like things that I think he would even acknowledge he did.
	He often says he doesn't really mean it.
	He is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence.
	But everything that he talks about, everything that he talks about are things that he is extremely knowledgeable of and well-versed in.
	And most of all, I think Nick Fuentes just, sometimes people just find success because they've done the right thing at the right time.
	And I think there is a huge awakening after October 7th because although Nick was talking about it before that, and a lot of people other were, a lot of other people were too, Israel really hasn't been on the front runner of American political discourse for quite some time.
	You have to go maybe back to 2018 when people in Gaza decided they were going to engage in nonviolent symbolic protest of doing a peaceful, nonviolent march to the border wall with Israel to demonstrate that they are basically living in a prison and can't get out.
	And despite the fact that it was fully nonviolent, the IDF came and just started murdering them with snipers, just blowing their heads off, shooting them in the chest, shooting teenagers in the chest.
	And there was some attention paid to that.
	Really, the last time, every year, every year, including 2023 before October 7th, as we covered last night, Israel goes in, kills random people in Gaza and the West Bank, bombs them, shoots at them, murders them.
	But the last time they really did it on a scale, I don't want to say like they're doing now because nothing is like now, but on a real major scale sustained bombing was in 2014 when Obama was president.
	That was the last time when Israel really was at the front burner.
	So it's a long time, 10 years, 11 years.
	You have a lot of people who, you know, if they're in their 20s, were nowhere near enough to have been at the age where they would pay attention to that, the way they would care about that.
	Even into your 30s, I mean, there's a lot of people who only got politicized in the last, you know, since Trump.
	And they just, this is the first look they're getting at Israel and the true face of it, but also more importantly to a lot of people, the real relationship between the United States and Israel and Israel's ability to exert almost unparalleled power inside the United States, to censor, to punish, to destroy reputations, to destroy politicians who don't serve Israel.
	And that has opened up a huge, I mean, I was on Matt Gates' show last night, and I had Matt Gates on my show before.
	He wasn't talking critically about Israel, but he had me on and we spent the first, I don't know, 30, 35, 40 minutes talking about the evils of Israel, of APAC, of Israeli influence in Congress.
	He told stories about when he was in Congress of things he saw.
	This was Donald Trump's pick to be the Attorney General just six months ago.
	So you see how much, and that Marjorie Taylor Green is way out there now on AIPAC, to her credit.
	And so you can see how this is really opened up.
	And when that happens, whoever's there first and doing it at a time before it opens up, before it's safe, before it's easy, is going to have a lot of credibility on that topic because they were doing it before everybody else was.
	And that also is kind of what has made this Nick Fuentes' moment.
	And I don't care how excluded he is, how banned he is, especially among young conservatives, probably overwhelmingly young conservative men, though I don't know exactly what his demographic is, but I imagine that that's an important demographic.
	It's a big influential demographic.
	He is, I would say, for conservatives under, I don't know, 30, 35, 30, arguably the single most influential and admired conservative influencer, far-right, right-wing, far-right influencer, whatever you want to call him.
	And people are going to have to accept that.
	People are going to have to grapple with that.
	People are going to have to confront that because that is a reality.
	And I think people who are worried about it, who think it's dangerous, whatever, really have no one to blame but themselves.
	How long do we have to learn the lesson that if you try and suppress things and ideas and people through censorship, through punishment, through silencing, through exclusion, you're just going to make them stronger?
	You can kill them, you can imprison them.
	But short of that, at some point people are going to say, wait a minute, why is this so taboo?
	Who declared this all off limits?
	Who declared this so dangerous that we're not allowed to even hear from it?
	Especially in the United States where we're inculcated with this kind of anti-authoritarian sentiment that whoever tells you what you can and can't say, that there's certain things you can't hear, you know, there's kind of a defiant attitude that almost emerges instinctively, at least among healthy people.
	It does.
	There's a lot of Americans, you know, pounded into submission, into accepting whatever.
	But I'm saying there's still that American spirit that I think is one of the great things about the United States, just kind of like, no, you're not going to decide what we think and what we can listen to and what we can hear.
	And when you have someone like Nick Fuentes, who they've tried to do everything to destroy and crush and silence because it was used on this one issue, who now breaks through because of a free internet, because Eglon put him back on X, because he has Rumble where he can do his show, you don't need much more than that.
	And, you know, Fox News is like all cable networks dying.
	They have a lot of 70-year-old people watching it pretty much exclusively.
	And it's not exactly a novel observation that people now get their views and ideas and the people they listen to and trust from the internet, from social media, from podcasts, from shows.
	And he is one of the most influential and formidable figures in conservative discourse.
	And people can deny that.
	I'm sure there are a lot of people wanting to, but that's just the reality.
	And I think it's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because of all the reasons I've said.
	So I think a lot of this conflict between Tucker and Kansas on the one hand, Nick Funtes on the other.
	You can put Charlie Kirk, who's had wars with Nick Fuentes, Matt Walsh.
	A lot of it is because of these more substantive, interesting dynamics that I think merit a lot of thought in terms of conservative influencing, conservative discourse, but also our broader discourse as well about what had always been over a line and what is no longer over the red line because people are starting to get resentful at the people who drew the red lines.
	And you have more credibility if you're over that red line than if you're too scared to cross it.
	And whatever you want to say about Nick Fuentes, he's crossed those red lines many times without much fear.
	And that's given him a great deal of credibility among increasingly large numbers of people.
	All right.
	Next question is from Ed Donk77, who says this, quote, I remember you once said that you agreed with parts of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, the Umar Bomber Manifesto.
	Would you care to elaborate on what you found persuasive about it, particularly in the current era of AI, social media, and fentanyl addiction?
	While I completely disagree with the use of terrorism for political ends, I too found the core ideas extremely persuasive and also depressing, namely that technology can gradually and imperceptibly make life less fulfilling and miserable in ways that are impossible to predict.
	While I consider myself part of the left politically, I also found the criticism of leftism somewhat prophetic with the left's current aggressive focus on identity politics, kind regards Martin.
	All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story, just for anyone who doesn't know.
	Out of nowhere in the 90s in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes and people opened it and they were pretty sophisticated bombs and they injured and even killed people and it was taking place across the country and they had no idea who was doing it.
	The FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno.
	And the person who was doing it wrote a letter, believe to the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.
	And obviously the instinct of the government is to say, I'm not going to give in to your terrorist tactics, which, you know, in classic terrorism is kind of what it was.
	It was violence directed at civilians in order to induce political and social change.
	But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have the first lead, the first clue about who was doing this.
	It was like really the perfect crime, that they agreed, you know what, I think we should publish this essay because doing so is maybe the way that we can find out who's actually doing this.
	Maybe someone will recognize the writing or the form of writing or the ideas and help us find the person.
	And so the Washington Post, I believe, is who did it.
	The Washington Post, maybe the New York Times too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski.
	And the reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would lead to someone coming forward and helping identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was so kind of just such lunacy, such like madness that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention.
	And also, you know, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, these terrorist bombs to people and killing civilians or injuring civilians, that they just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say.
	And on one of those views, on one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right because publishing this essay caused eventually his brother, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, I think this was my, this thing is my brother, his writing seems familiar, his ideas are familiar.
	And that's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down.
	And just the quick background, Ted Kaczynski, he was a prodigy recognized by everybody as being brilliant, graduated high school as the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics.
	He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, but at top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley.
	And he was one of the, he was on the path to being the youngest ever tenured professors.
	So nobody, I mean, he was a genuinely brilliant person.
	Not like brilliant in the sense that, you know, like David Frum gets called brilliant or Ann Albaum or whatever, like genuinely brilliant.
	And so they were right about that.
	They did it.
	That did end up helping them find him.
	But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay.
	Nobody would connect to any of his ideas.
	They were lunatic.
	It was rambling.
	It was radical.
	It was way out there.
	And that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, the ideas would make people, you know, I'm not going to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously.
	And at first, that was true.
	But over time, when people started taking more and more look at what Ted Kaczynski has written and this essay that was published, people started turning to it and saying, you know what, this seems like actually quite important.
	There's a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and that seem like they explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.
	I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay.
	It's very complex.
	It's highly worth reading.
	You can find it free online.
	It actually ended up, the essay ended up being published in a longer form book format.
	So you can read the essay or its long form or the book.
	But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives.
	And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution.
	But then how technology has advanced more and more.
	And it is true, like just to take the Industrial Revolution before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns and villages in nature, like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities.
	They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family.
	And they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years.
	we're political and social animals.
	We need connection.
	Connection.
	Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy.
	And the Industrial Revolution made it so that people had to start to move to these gigantic cities.
	Eventually we got to the point where Charles Dickens was talking about the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as a factory worker, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay.
	It was breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally.
	And that is definitely one of the costs as we've even gone further down this road is, you know, huge numbers of people go to work in these gigantic buildings.
	I mean, I love New York, but if you go to New York, I'll actually be there next week.
	I'm doing a debate on Tuesday night that we'll post information about about President Trump's deportation policies.
	I'm doing a debate in New York City.
	So I'll be there in a little bit, but I lived in New York for a long time.
	I loved it.
	But if you go to New York City and you walk on the street, it does feel dehumanizing.
	These buildings are, you know, 120 stories or 90 stories.
	And they feel as though they're not quite on a human dimension.
	You know, you go to European cities where there's still all that zoning that keeps buildings less than five stories.
	You know, you go to Paris, you go to Amsterdam, you go to Florence, and especially in the center part of the town of the city, to this day, even though it would be very profitable to tear these buildings down and build gigantic skyscrapers, everything is at a very human dimension like they were in the 18th century.
	Nothing taller than four stories, which feels like something human beings should live in.
	But a metal skyscraper, a glass skyscraper that's 1,4 floors, it just doesn't, you feel so like it's kind of dystopic society where your humanity is almost being lost.
	And as we turn more and more into a society less dependent on physical labor and more and more on paper shifting and informational and digital eras, people go to work in their big, gigantic office buildings and they sit in their cubicles or their small offices and they just stare at a computer screen all day.
	And then they go back to their apartment or back to their suburban home and there's very little community, there's very little connection, people don't have churches anymore, they don't have, and obviously a lot of people do, but huge numbers of people don't.
	They don't have community, they don't have labor unions or labor halls, they don't have any of the kind of people barely know their neighbors, if they know them at all.
	And you look at the West and all the data, all the indicia say that people are becoming much less happy and much more mentally unwell and maladjusted.
	Higher suicide, addiction, you know, all the data.
	And depression of all kinds, mental illness is skyrocketing.
	And then along with it, physical ailments that probably come from this sort of mental depression.
	And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we become, the less human, the less fulfilled our human, natural human needs are.
	And what it means to be human will basically be consumed by technology and will just be turned into, even more so, exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as human and arrange our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is deprived from us.
	It's taken away.
	And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary.
	I've mentioned this before called Happiness, which is a documentary designed to ask what is human happiness?
	How does it, how do humans acquire happiness?
	What is necessary for it?
	What isn't?
	And what they found is a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than much wealthier Western countries.
	Those Western countries are secular.
	They have two people in a marriage working careers and prioritizing careers.
	They don't even get married until their 30s.
	They may have one kid, two kids, but they're always off at their jobs.
	Everybody's going in separate directions.
	Your parents get old.
	You don't keep them in your house and care for them.
	You send them off to some institution.
	You have a baby, you send it off to some daycare to be taken care of because that's what modern society demands.
	Whereas in poorer places and less technologically advanced places, people are having large numbers of children.
	They spend a lot more time with their family.
	They live in small villages where there's connection.
	I don't want to romanticize poverty, but I'm saying this is what comes from a less technologically dominated place.
	And this documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why oftentimes technological expansion, wealth expansion undermines human happiness.
	And at the end of the day, what is more important than human fulfillment, human happiness, human spiritual fulfillment?
	Like giving human beings what they're constructed to crave in order to be fulfilled and happy and lead happy and fulfilled lives.
	Really nothing.
	These should be, everything we do should be means to that end.
	And what Ted Kaczynski was warning about was that as technology evolved further and further, our societies will be less human, less humane, less fulfilling, less connected.
	And clearly, all that is true.
	That is exactly what has happened.
	I'm not saying we need to be Luddite about it and dismantle it, but he actually lived those words.
	He dropped out of the whole matrix basically when he was, I think, 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thought.
	And the more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability for humans to be free and happy.
	And of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy.
	And all the things he was describing as to why and the role technology plays in that would we're obviously exacerbating all that.
	Remember, this is 1995.
	This was before the real emergency.
	I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere as dominant in our lives.
	And obviously with the internet, so often instead of meeting in person, we talk to people on phones or in screens.
	We have our phones everywhere.
	So a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones.
	You go to dinner, you go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the world now in the Western world.
	And you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little and they both pull out their phones and before you know it, they're both staring at their phones.
	And especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and far worse.
	And all the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly in a very dangerous way.
	I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection.
	Obviously, there are benefits from technology.
	We have cures of diseases that otherwise we would die from.
	The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, et cetera, et cetera.
	There's a lot of benefits.
	But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you derive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least that offsets it and keeps it in balance.
	Whatever, fame, wealth, career success, it all comes with a cost.
	And I definitely think that's the case with technology.
	And Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out.
	So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what?
	I think there's a lot of validity here.
	Now, you might ask, like, why did he go to Need to kill people.
	He had an academic pedigree.
	He probably could have gotten this published.
	I don't really know.
	I haven't paid much attention lately to that whole, you know, this whole episode.
	So I forget what the rationale was for that.
	But in any event, you know, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself.
	That probably was true.
	But that sometimes being mentally imbalanced is, in a way, or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights.
	Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly.
	I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself from the grid completely.
	Now, one of the things the question asks about is left-wing politics.
	And, you know, the person said who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but I have to admit, a lot of his critiques of what left-wing politics is about and the flaws in it, I have to admit, have validity.
	And basically what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that nothing, the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable.
	So nobody blamed it.
	Nobody wants to undermine it.
	Nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us.
	We're all propagandized to revere it, to believe it's all good, to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it.
	And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of like culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality, nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.
	Compact Magazine, which is, I think, a really interesting magazine.
	It kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism, had an article in June of 2023, June 16, 2023, which I really recommend.
	The headline of it was, Ted Kaczynski, anti-left leftist, anti-left leftist.
	I mean, obviously, this vision he's presenting in some way is left-wing.
	It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the industrial revolution, technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure.
	But he was also scornful of modern-day leftist political expression.
	And this is what he said.
	This is how Compact Magazine describes his view.
	And it's about a different essay called The Systems Need As Tricks.
	And it says, quote, in an essay collected in the Technological Society titled The Systems Need As Trick, Ted Kaczynski observed that there's widespread frustration in society, and many have an impulse to rebel against the conditions and constraints they are forced to operate in.
	However, they don't know exactly who or what they should be fighting to solve their malaise.
	The system, the Unabama argued, that was his nickname, the Unabomber, is able to fulfill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotype grievances in the name of which they should rebel.
	Racism, homophobia, women's issues, poverty, sweatshop, the whole laundry bag of, quote, activist issues.
	Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait.
	In embracing these causes, activists end up working to entrench and reinforce the system, even while they mistakenly view their behaviors and commitments as dangerous and subversive.
	In the past, Kaczynski wrote, quote, the system was not yet committed to equality for black people, women, and homosexuals.
	So that action in favor of these causes really was a form of rebellion.
	This makes it possible to conceptualize anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism as, quote, radical, despite the reality that the Pentagon, the CIA, multinational corporations, and almost all prominent cultural and knowledge-producing institutions aggressively embrace those causes today.
	I forget who said it.
	Actually, it was Ryan Grimm who said it.
	He was when he was on a show a week or two ago.
	And we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Barry Weiss and the free press, how they're supposedly heterodox and dissident, when in reality, like, you know, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement.
	And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're actually not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power.
	It's like catnap.
	They're happy to have you fight about racism.
	Yeah, they love racism.
	They love feminism.
	Remember, the CIA did that whole video, super woke video.
	They centered like a, what was she?
	She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had some sort of neurodivergence.
	And, you know, she was just like, I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically as a Latino, non-binary immigrant woman, whatever.
	They're so happy to have that.
	Hey, look at our black generals.
	We're going to celebrate our, you know, black military officials.
	We're the Pentagon.
	Hey, we're the FBI.
	Look at all our cool badass women agents.
	Or fighter pilots.
	Look, they're women now.
	It's like, oh, wow, that's so awesome.
	We've done so much to change society.
	It's that famous cartoon where people in Yemen, like a Muslim family, are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.
	Because just, you know, it's like, here's Hillary Clinton.
	She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she.
	So you vote for her, you feel like you're doing something really, really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere because she presents this illusion that you've done something, you know, historic or subversive when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against.
	Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well.
	There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over.
	There's a lot more to the essay.
	I obviously can't do that justice in the time we have, or even though I took another hour.
	So I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly, highly encourage you to go find the essay.
	Just start with the essay.
	And I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the unabomber, all that.
	Just read it as kind of, and remember, it was written in the early to mid-1990s.
	And so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing that's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution.
	There's not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking than to go read that essay.
	All right.
	Here's a few questions on Gaza.
	First from Katrika.
	Hi, Glenn.
	Congratulations on your 500 show.
	We are so thankful for you.
	Yay, 500 show.
	Thank you.
	My question is, how big a deal is the Friedrich Mertz decision, that's the Chancellor of Germany, to halt the export of military equipment to Israel, which could be used in the Gaza Strip?
	I think it's awesome.
	Late winds 2028, is there any constructive action you would actually recommend to the American citizenry regarding Gaza?
	Also, much congratulations to 500.
	That's incredible.
	It actually is incredible that I come here and sat here every night and done this show more or less every night 500 times.
	I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.
	And then from John McRae, I live in Utah.
	All of the national and state leaders appear to be totally committed to Israel.
	What action might I take to advocate stopping the genocide in Gaza?
	What charities can now get food to the starving in Gaza?
	You know, I will confess that like what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months, and it's not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world.
	It is absolutely a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I ever witnessed in my life.
	Now, obviously, you go back to World War II where human beings were, I mean, just capable of anything without limits.
	And after World War II, we all came together as a planet and said, we need to do everything possible to prevent that from happening again because the next time that happens, especially with advanced technology, remember it ended with the first use of nuclear weapons that the world hadn't previously known about.
	Anything like that again, we're going to destroy ourselves, you know, destroy the species, destroy the planet.
	World War II wasn't considered something positive that should be replicated.
	It was considered something heinous and unspeakably evil that any decent person would do everything possible to avoid the repetition of.
	And obviously I didn't wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say in my lifetime.
	But when you do something like announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control.
	And yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it, besides the Egyptian government, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and funded and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel.
	But when you take an enclave, a concentrated open-air prison enclave where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering the Gaza Strip, even though we don't know how many people live there now, 2.2 when it started, 2.2 million, probably down to 1.8, 1.9 million with the number of people who have died, who have been killed, who have left.
	And half of them are children, and then you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering.
	On top of what they're already experiencing, with endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed.
	The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines.
	They don't have antibiotics.
	They don't have feeding formula for babies.
	They don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off or have to operate on them.
	Just the absolute worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period of time.
	And then on top of that, you start starving them to death.
	And then instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experiencing it, that actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you totally control that's American military contractors there for profit doing the bidding of the IDF, protected by the bidding of the IDF.
	It's purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food.
	And then it's basically a death trap.
	So you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly.
	And not just on a weekly basis, but a daily basis.
	That is a new kind of evil.
	Starving people to death and then saying, hey, here's some grains of flour.
	Come here and get them.
	And then you murder them when they do.
	Or you purposely set up the center so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes.
	They get noticed right before.
	They have to trek very dangerously miles to get there.
	They're not allowed to stay there waiting for the next time to open.
	They have to go back.
	They're killed on the way there.
	And then once they get there, they're regularly killed as well.
	So they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowingly risk their lives and their teenage sons' lives to go there and try and get food knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered.
	That is a sick new kind of evil.
	And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we've had to watch it.
	And we know it's been live streamed every day through the world.
	And we've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable.
	Like a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of.
	And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill.
	I don't care how many babies there are killed.
	A lot of them stay outright.
	The babies are terrorists.
	They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care how to kill them.
	And the point of the war is that these are evils that are difficult to endure.
	Even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you have to report on them.
	Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express.
	And it is, I know so many people, and I definitely put myself in coding in this, that you feel so impotent.
	So your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care.
	It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed.
	Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover?
	And then, of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and radical that they don't care either.
	And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do.
	There definitely has been serious, measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Gaza, of Israel.
	That's not going away.
	That's a big, big problem for Israel.
	A big problem for Israel.
	Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it.
	And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly.
	I hope I'm one of them.
	I certainly do what I can to do that.
	But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war.
	And even in Europe, where, you know, there's a lot of kind of, it's just such classic Europeans.
	I really despise Western European, the Western European elite political media class.
	They're utterly supportive of Israel.
	They are loyal to Israel.
	They arm Israel, you know, fund them.
	Not as much as the United States, but to a great degree.
	A lot of that historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits.
	Not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Europeans, Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it.
	So you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, a not unimportant, but still symbolic step.
	Keir Starmer, just, like, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid, belief-free politician.
	He's despised in his own country.
	Despised.
	You know, he didn't even go that far.
	He said, we are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.
	And so, like, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to.
	It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in.
	And now you see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying we're going to cut off arms.
	We'll see how long any of that lasts.
	I'm not...
	If you...
	The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs and convictions and values are Western European political elites.
	They're pathetic.
	Pathetic.
	Obviously, some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic.
	pathetic I used to think the British are were the worst the British elite class was the worst elite class everywhere on the planet and while I still think they are definitely in the running I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening I mean the Germans are also fanatics about the war in Ukraine fanatics like, you put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia.
	It's really a bizarre, repetitive pattern.
	So I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution.
	I do give as much money as I can to their, you know, you can find Palestinian aid and Gazan aid organizations.
	There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories.
	And obviously you have to be a little careful not to, you know, give to fraudulent ones, but there's easy ways to verify those, look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that.
	You know, you can donate to that, even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15, you know, everything is so high price in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can't afford it.
	And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight.
	I also, earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Green has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC.
	And that APAC is now on the march against her.
	And they're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians that they're now doing to Thomas Massey as well, which is try and find some like fraudulent politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that APAC paid for their political career, paid for their seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal.
	One of the worst examples, I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him.
	They wanted to get Corey Bush out of Congress.
	If you're conservative and you dislike Corey Bush, APAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her for.
	They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling who don't have health care, don't have access to education, have no public safety.
	Why are we giving all this money to Israel?
	Why is APAC forcing us to do that?
	And they were so determined to take Corey Bush out because of our Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course.
	You have to get a liberal, you have to get a Democrat, probably have to get a black politician.
	And his name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million, $15 million for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis in order to replace Corey Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an APAC loyalist.
	And you just see him on social media and speeches, standing up for Israel, and you know exactly why.
	$15 million was his price tag.
	And he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same.
	And they're going to do the same with Tommy.
	They're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massey.
	They're going to try and do the same with Marjorie Taylor Green.
	They're not always successful.
	They've tried it many times with Ilean Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even to a smaller extent AOC.
	They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilean Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work.
	Not the last election cycle in 2024, but in 2022, Ilyan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary.
	I think she won by a few points.
	So she's not invulnerable.
	And they never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Corey Bush or remove Jamal Bowman, but they have a long history of doing this.
	And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massey.
	If you look at the three top billionaires donating to the PAC to remove Thomas Massey, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel.
	That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports.
	And I think one thing you can do is just look at who APAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them.
	Because even if you're conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you.
	There's no difference except that that person is going to be a bought and paid for AIPAC agent who's going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel.
	That's the only difference.
	AIPAC's not taking Corey Bush out of Congress or Jamal Bowman because they're too left-wing.
	They don't give anything.
	The only thing they care about is the person devoted to Israel.
	And same with Tommy Masse, Tom Massey, and Marjorie Taylor Green.
	If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides.
	If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massey, obviously, but the people who are going to come in their place are not going to be people you agree with politically anymore.
	The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters like many the Republican Party instead of being among the few to question them.
	So that is another way I think you could work.
	And then, you know, I know this is thankless work.
	It's not, there's no immediate gratification, but it does work.
	Public opinion changes.
	It really does.
	And especially with independent media, with a free internet, with the deconcentration of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook with the same interests, but now, you know, huge, gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma.
	That is also a big reason for optimism.
	And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that.
	You don't have to have a gigantic platform.
	You know, I remember one time when blogs first started emerging, and one of the big liberal bloggers at the time was someone who wrote under the pen name Atreus.
	His name is Duncan Black.
	He's an economist.
	And he was one of the biggest bloggers.
	I think, you know, he'd have like 200,000, 300,000 people reading whatever his posts were.
	And one time he saw someone complaining about his big audience saying he didn't deserve it.
	And this person only had like 2,000 people reading their blog.
	And he made the point.
	He's like, if you're waking up every day and 2,000 people are going to read what you say, that's not trivial influence.
	It's like 2,000 people.
	It's not gigantic, but it's not zero either.
	And I think a lot of time people who have like small YouTube channels that get like 10,000 views or 20,000 views think, oh, I'm not really reaching any people that make it.
	No, that's a lot of people.
	20,000 people is a lot of people.
	And all of that, I believe this dam is breaking.
	I think it's now clearly leaking.
	And once the dam breaks, it's all going to, the water is going to drown the Israel lobby.
	And whoever's pushing against that dam, put more holes in it, to weaken it, to make that wall less stable, to compromise it, are people who are achieving things.
	And I wish I had a quick, simple, easy way to end the war in Gaza.
	It's not even a war in Gaza.
	It's a genocide in Gaza.
	It's a massacre in Gaza.
	It's not their cleansing in Gaza.
	I wish I had a way to end that.
	I wish we had a way to end U.S. support for it, U.S. financing of it, U.S. arming of it.
	We don't have a quick way to do that.
	You have Trump and Netanyahu.
	They don't care.
	They're not backing down.
	They're going to continue this policy to the end.
	And there's not a lot you can do in the face of those things, but there's not nothing either.
	There's things you can do that are meaningful that even if they're over longer periods of time will eventually prevent the repetition of these sorts of things, will end U.S. observance to Israel.
	And in the meantime, you can do whatever you can to help the people of Gaza.
	There's a lot of different ways.
	There's organizations, as I said, there's individuals.
	And I get frustrated sometimes when I'm reduced to doing that.
	You know, like sending $100 to some family by GoFundMe or whatever.
	Chuffed is a popular fundraising platform for people in Gaza.
	Or, you know, donating whatever, $500 to this aid group, this group that's trying to feed people in Gaza.
	It is frustrating.
	But it's kind of like, you know, I care a lot about animals.
	Animals are important to me.
	Sometimes I look at the billions and millions of animals that are tortured every day for years in factory farms and just are bred to live lives of absolute torture and suffering and deprivation and misery.
	I'm talking about smart, emotionally complex animals who are just brutalized every day.
	And like, you know, whatever I'm doing, it doesn't really matter.
	But, you know, there have been like reforms to this.
	There's now laws and regulations require them to give more space to pigs so that they're not stuffed in those tiny cages where they can't even turn around.
	You know, sometimes incremental, marginal steps to reduce suffering is all you can do, but it doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
	It's concrete, it's real, and it's definitely something worth it.
	All right.
	Last question.
	This is from Cold Hot Dog.
	And then just as a reminder, we're going to, once we're done with this show, we're going to have the kind of after-show we used to do regularly with myself and our show's director, Victor Pougie.
	We're going to talk about some things.
	We're also going to have, we have three dogs here.
	So I know a lot of times people complain that they miss our dogs.
	We used to always have different dogs on those after shows.
	So people got to know the dogs.
	We have three of them here.
	I don't even think I chose them knowing I was going to do that, but it's Kira, Toby, and Bobbi, all of whom have made appearances before.
	So if you want to see the after-show, you can, if you're a member, you just stay on the local platform.
	If you want to join, you know how to do that.
	Just click that join button on the on the right below the video player on the homepage, and you can do it there.
	All right, last question.
	Cold hot dog, how do you balance condemning Brazil's Alexandria Maj for violating free speech without supporting the U.S. as infringing on other countries' sovereignty?
	Don't you fear that your advocacy ends up bolstering U.S. intervention abroad?
	How do you compare denouncing Maish's authoritarianism with denouncing Iranian Moloch's authoritarianism or Putin's, which you have been reluctant to do to avoid being co-opted by the U.S. State Department's aims?
	You also constantly say correctly that the U.S. doesn't care about human rights or freedom in the world, so I'm sure they're not doing this.
	I'm sure they're not going on this war with Brazil because of the real problems with Maish.
	What could be behind this?
	All right.
	So the provision basically is the U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them.
	Not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, namely because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit.
	The opposite is true.
	The United States has a significant surplus, trade surplus with Brazil.
	There's not a trade deficit.
	So the tariffs are more, and it was kind of explicit, used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation of due process, their persecution of political opponents.
	And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal.
	I wrote an article about this in Folio where you were reporting into a colonist in Brazil.
	And it basically said, okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy.
	I mean, it was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
	Heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time.
	And while I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Mauraij is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happened in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
	It's not even close.
	So any country that's heaping praise on and embracing and hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Qatar or the Egyptians, or Jordanians, or the Bahrainis, or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries, obviously.
	The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression.
	That's the pretext.
	They love dictators as long as the dictators are pro-American.
	They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America.
	Like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China.
	And then you hear, oh my God, we're the United States.
	We go and fight for democracies.
	That's why we have to protect Ukraine.
	Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia.
	So whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy.
	It's not a contempt for an erosion of liberty.
	It's not a defense of free speech.
	Obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that.
	So when Trump says, oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become oppressive, it's attacked free speech, it's obviously not the reason.
	So then the question that our locals member is raising, which is a good one, is, well, why do you support that when generally you think the United States has no business interfering in these other countries because what their real interest is, is in changing other countries, interfering in their politics for their own interests, not to improve life for any of the people there.
	And it's true.
	I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba that is now 70 years old, 65 years old.
	The idea of that was it was going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people.
	Obviously, it has not done that.
	The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population.
	Same with Venezuela.
	Same with the sanctions on Iran.
	So I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try and change other governments, even if they're pretending they're changing them out of concern about their oppression, when obviously that's not the real reason.
	The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States.
	And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech.
	I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded.
	So the question then becomes like, well, what is the real reason?
	And I want to say, while I view Alexander Demaraij as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because he's not that power, that's not, Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up.
	I do think he's a genuinely evil figure.
	Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here.
	My family is Brazilian.
	My kids are Brazilian.
	So it's something I care about for that reason.
	And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil.
	Lula is the president, and he was a leftist in his earlier life.
	He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost.
	And then finally in 2002, he was sick of losing.
	And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate.
	I have to get along with financial centers.
	It's important for the prosperity.
	He basically promised not to follow a left-wing dogma to be much more moderate.
	And then to prove it as vice president, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat.
	And he's definitely center-left, but he's like center-left in like the way Obama is or maybe like some Scandinavian leaders are.
	Like if you ask him, as I did in interviews, people think you're like Maduro or Castro or Chavez or other these left-wing governments in South America, he gets angry.
	And he says, no, we have good relations with some of them, but we're absolutely completely different.
	We don't believe in what they believe in.
	We believe in pluralism and the right of democratic elections, free and fair elections.
	I lost three times, and I accepted it.
	And that's what I believe in.
	So, and you know, and Willow's party, the person he chose to be his successor who won two elections in 2010 and 2014, Dilma Rustaf, she was impeached in 2016 by the Congress and then upheld by the Supreme Court.
	And the left didn't, you know, use violence or go into a revolution.
	They were enraged by it.
	They didn't think it was legitimate.
	They called the government a coup government, but they left power peacefully.
	And so, and on top of that, especially now, you know, a president can be very weak, even though they're supposedly the leader of the country.
	His party can't get anything done in Congress.
	Brazil is always dominated by this faction called the centrist faction that has no ideology.
	They're purely transactional.
	They're super corrupt, a lot of them are.
	They just want their appointments to ministries that they can benefit from.
	They just want, you know, their legislation passed, and then they're willing to give their support for everybody.
	And you can't get through Congress without them.
	Bolsonaro faction also has a big presence in the Congress.
	Lua is a very weak figure.
	He doesn't run Brazil.
	It's really that center-right party that runs Brazil.
	His vice president is somebody who ran against for president, who's a long leader of the center-right, kind of like a Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan figure.
	The people who run the Supreme Court, including Maraj, are both from that center-right faction.
	They're not leftists at all.
	But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees Lua as like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that.
	And I'm not suggesting they're conservative right-wing, they're not, but they're not communists or even socialists.
	And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy, let's punish them.
	But to the extent I think it, if I had to find a justification, I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it, but if I had to find a justification, I would say that what really started to, I keep seeing this gold here, which again was inspired by Trump, Trump Tower, all of that.
	It's a special commemorative edition for our 500 show.
	Just got distracted from that for a second, by that second.
	Anyway, I felt like it was a Mar-a-Lago.
	The real only justification for any of this is the fact that Maraesh and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just American social media companies.
	Remember, they banned X from Brazil for a month, more than a month, because it refused to abide by secret due process-free censorship orders, including banning elected officials.
	But then Maraj also took money out of Starlink's account to pay the fines he imposed on X because X had no bank accounts or no presence in Brazil.
	It's a complete violation of all international financial norms.
	You can't just take money from a completely separate company because the person you're angry at is associated with both companies.
	They're separate corporate entities with different shareholders and different purposes.
	But in any event, he's now started ordering Rumble, which still is banned from Brazil because unlike X, it refused to comply with censorship orders, to ban American citizens living in the United States, which makes no sense because Rumble is already banned in Brazil.
	So why would he order Rumble to ban specific accounts when those people cannot be heard in Brazil at all?
	But they have Rumble accounts because they're still heard by people outside Brazil, including a big diaspora of Brazilians around the world.
	And people in Brazil who use VPNs can also access them.
	But he doesn't have the right to order American social media companies with no presence in Brazil that he's bought from Brazil to close and ban the accounts of American citizens living in the U.S. as he reported to do, or to order the American media companies to turn personal data over to Maraesh about an American citizen living in the United States, not with any judicial order, just a judicial process the way you normally would have to if you want to get information from another country, but just by ordering it and threatening them with fines.
	So this is reaching into the United States, threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally Residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies.
	And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens.
	I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty bound to draw a very firm line and say, no, you're not going to cross that line.
	And if you cross that line, we're going to take action against you.
	That's the only justification I can think of.
	So I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Barais or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil.
	I basically have been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely like mentally unstable and just authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexander Madais.
	And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil.
	Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro.
	He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes, as do I, that he himself is the victim of that.
	And he sees, when he looks at Bolsonaro, a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro.
	And I think he feels personally angry by that.
	So I think there's some complex motives as well.
	But other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S. use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollar as a reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally.
	It's obviously a fraud and a pretext to say we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever.
	But, you know, I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate.
	And, you know, I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexander Madaish is a completely out of control monster.
	And no one in Brazil is, everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so.
	And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil.
	And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously.
	And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it.
	So from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.
	And remember, we still are doing this after show pretty much right now, right when we're about to have the show, the 500th show, to commemorate that.
	We're going to have a sit-down like we always used to in the same format with our members of locals who really are the people who enable us to do this show, who have many of whom have been supportive of us from the beginning.
	As independent media, you know, you don't have big corporations behind you, and so you have to rely upon support from your members.
	I mean, we obviously have advertisers who sponsor the show, and that helps.
	But far and away, the most support comes from the members of our locals community, and we really are grateful to them.
	And on occasions like this, the 500 show, we become particularly thankful because we know we were able to do this solely because of how many people have been willing to join locals and end up helping the independent journalism that we do here every night.
	So for those of you who are there, stay tuned.
	For people who aren't yet members of locals, it's a great opportunity to do that.
	We're going to talk about not just the show, but kind of the role of independent media, thoughts behind what we've been trying to do, what we want to continue to do, what independent media is capable of doing, a couple of substantive issues as well.
	So I think you'll, if you're a viewer of the show, you'll enjoy that.
	We're going to stream it exclusively on locals.
	And obviously, for those of you who have been watching this show, we are very, very appreciative.
	Many of you have been watching from the very beginning, the launch in December of 2023.
	Others of you have been, are newer to the show.
	And we are really appreciative people, any people who watch our show.
	We've always want to thank you for that.
	And we hope that you will come back on Monday night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m. Eastern Live, exclusively here on Rumble.

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