Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
Glenn answers your questions on censorship, Whitney Webb, Brazil's President Lula da Silva, and more. PLUS: reporter Dave Weigel reports from the DNC summer meeting where Democrats are scrambling to rebuild after their 2024 loss. ---------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, we're not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but there are some reporters who actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do.
One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semaphore.
He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel, even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan.
We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote, as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sickly party, including for 2028.
Now, before we get to that, we are also going to take ongoing questions from our Q ⁇ A that we were going to do on Friday night that we didn't get a chance to do.
And so we said we're going to get to as many of your questions throughout the week.
We take questions exclusively from members of our locals community.
So we're going to start off taking a few.
Once Dave gets here, we'll talk to him about everything he's been seeing at this annual DNC meeting and what it bodes for the party.
And then we'll get back to more of your questions.
As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police things of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas where that Israeli accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk.
There's questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't that I am.
anxious to address.
So we're going to do the Q ⁇ A as many as we can before Dave gets here.
And then once he's here, we'll talk to him and then go back to as many questions of yours as we can.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q ⁇ A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us onto topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from.
I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also I think it's important to have interactive features with your members and this is the way that we provide them.
So we're going to try and do more of these as well.
So if you are a member of the local ROLCS community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can all right the first one so we don't waste more time with my babbling about what this is i think you all understand it by now is from diego garcia That's an interesting name.
A lot of interesting names chosen.
And it's this.
Do you think the First Amendment goes far enough to protect meaningful freedom of expression in society that it's more of a negative liberty, namely freedom from interference and not a positive liberty, freedom to fully express and be heard?
Since so much censorship often happens outside government, can and should there be legislation to deal with censorship beyond it?
It is an interesting question.
I mean, as a someone who began by studying the constitution and becoming constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing a lot on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights,
which essentially, and we've talked about this before when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggests, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever.
What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil.
I was just thinking about this the other day, the ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any.
We've shown you before, even Antony and Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.
The reason for that is because it's a restriction on what the government can do.
It's not a privilege that is given to you.
So exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say.
that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else.
If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting and he can attract a thousand people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense there's not equal speech because the reach is much different.
And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did, bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially, obviously., he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Allison did.
There's obviously different levels of reach that people have.
Some people have big platforms, some people have small platforms.
And as a result, obviously there's differing impact to the speech.
I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views.
That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally.
And that is an extremely important part of this picture.
Now, the argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you have more charisma, if you have more charm,
if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, The amount of reach that your speech will have will be far, far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't have as much skill or doesn't have as much ability to have others find them interesting.
And so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next.
And so you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views and people who are working class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this
I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard.
I've done that in the context of campaign finance before and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United.
which was issued in 2009, it was a five to four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions on the grounds that they violate the First Amendment.
It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit had paid for a film that exposed what they believe were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election.
And the FEC tried to intervene and say, no, this violates federal spending and you cannot disseminate this film.
And the Supreme Court said, this is classic censorship.
If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for.
about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.
And a lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money.
I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections.
We have billions of dollars being spent in our politics.
You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign are basically funded by, you could call it 10 billionaires, maybe add to that.
I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires.
So you're talking about a tiny handful of people.
who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate.
And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here.
You have major massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try and remove somebody from the Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel.
And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech.
It's a nice sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money.
or as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find find a big platform.
You're still not going to have as big a platform though as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly.
And I always thought the problem with that was exactly what.
Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to trying either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging.
And you get into the whole question of, is money speech?
And that was wildly misunderstood.
Of course, It's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views.
If you want to pay for flyers that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, we're barring you from doing that.
And then if you go to court and say, my First Amendment rights are being objected, the government says, no, no, this isn't about speech.
This is about how they're spending their money.
They paid for these fires.
So we have the right to stop it.
Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fires or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering.
And all nine members of the Supreme Court agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left.
Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech.
That's not really what was at stake in that case.
So I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it, will automatically result in abuses.
They'll crack down on speech they dislike.
They'll ignore or promote speech they like.
And then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating speech, which to me is always the greatest danger.
In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between say the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing say working class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billion billionaire donors but the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard it's to boost the ability
of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns And that, I think, presents far less problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity.
But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard, although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.
So I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field.
As opposed to even 10 years ago when you needed a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press or for a television network or cable network, you now no longer need that and so that disparity is automatically working itself out but outside of the campaign context I can't think of a way for the government to address that even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem the founders of the United States were all capitalists they were all quite wealthy they were all landowners aristocrats
for the most part and the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob.
That's what they were worried about.
They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, we pass a law, 70% of people, to take away big farms and distribute them to workers.
And that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law.
Or they were worried that 80% of people would say, we don't like this political view.
We want to ban it.
We want to ban this religion.
And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion or ban a certain view or ban a media outlet.
Even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to.
So it was a very, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document.
It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that.
So they were definitely capitalists, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, but even some of the debates in the Federalist papers, some writing in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme it will spill over into the political realm which is supposed to be equal in capitalism you have financial inequality but in a system governed by rules and constitutions you're supposed to have political equality between citizens and they were very well aware that if the financial and
economic inequality becomes too severe it will contaminate the political realm and that same inequality will be reflected in the political realm, rendering all these nice sounding concepts written on parchment illusory.
And they were concerned about that.
And you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point.
And I do think that is a huge problem.
The amount of money in politics, the ability of the extreme.
the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties.
I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interest.
The question though becomes, what is the more dangerous path?
Is it to permit this inequality of reach, of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or how much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity?
And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way.
They would just try and level the playing field.
But typically that's not the kind of government we have.
And we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government.
We always have to assume the opposite, that the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws.
And so to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, of addressing this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue.
I think we have time for one more before our guest is here.
Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct.
I was correct.
I was just vindicated in my speculation.
by people in the know.
So let's do one more question before we talk.
Dave, this comes from Nelson Baboon.
As I said, people choose very interesting names.
So welcome, Nelson Baboon, to the show.
And your question is, what do you think about entrapment arrests, for example, terrorist stings or more recently, pedophile stings?
I am extremely uncomfortable when they're when these lead to ask to arrest a people when they have not actually committed a crime and no one is hurt.
The only person I've seen address this is Michael Tracy.
Everyone else just seems to accept this.
So on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyber warfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada where he was charged.
And yet he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country.
that he has no ties to and going back to Israel.
And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do.
And so Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which was my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances.
Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies.
And when they're caught, they just say, all right, here's $10,000 in bail.
Now I'm out.
I have no ties to your country, I'm going back to my country where I'll never have any Michael was raising the question of whether these kind of sting operations are justified at all because the way the sting operation worked here and they caught eight people was that there was no proof any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet.
They used an app, a sex app or a dating or hookup app for straight people.
None of them were gay, all of them are straight.
They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them.
And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police create profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl or a 14-year-old girl or a 16-year-old girl.
And then they initiate a conversation with their target.
and say, hey, I'm 15 and here's some pictures.
And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, hey, do you want to meet?
I find you hot.
And the person says, like, yeah, let, you know, yeah, that'd be great.
Let's meet.
The police can swoop in and arrest them.
And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime?
Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them?
Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody?
by kind of luring them into committing a crime.
And I definitely see both sides of that.
I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding responsible mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl, we should meet, your immediate answer ought to be, no, I'm not interested in that and block them and move on.
But at the same time, so I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for.
But on the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to.
That's what entrapment is.
And that's obviously a defense that people would raise is the police entrapped me.
I would never have committed this crime of my own.
I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in.
And I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument and Michael doesn't care about this is because the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles.
And as soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants.
Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation.
Michael Tracy happens to be one of them for very Michael Tracy reasons that I think are commendable.
I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gates on due process grounds alone.
I just said, look, he hasn'tt been convicted of anything.
He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman, 17-year-old girl called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions, in a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.
And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty.
That's what basic due process means.
And I got widely called a pedophile.
Why are you defending Matt Gates?
He must be a pedophile.
So I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate.
So let's take it out of the pedophilia debate.
And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years.
You can find articles of mine with titles like the FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.
And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the war on terror.
The whole war on terror and the massive budgets that were issued and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat.
And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway.
So they would go and manufacture them similar to these kind of stings.
And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there.
A lot of times these guys were scumbags they were using as their agent provocatorateurs, they were people who were already convicted on financial crimes, trying to get out of prison, agreeing to work for the FBI in order to get benefits for themselves.
And they would go to mosques and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who is financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired.
And they would create a terrorist plot.
The FBI would, and they would pay for it.
They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, "Hey, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque "who's from a very poor family, or as I said, "has mental or intellectual impairments, hey,
And then the minute he finally says yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit terrorism act.
A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terry Hot, Indiana or even Florence.
Supermax in Colorado where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane because they were charged with terrorism offenses after 9-11 where all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons.
And in most of these cases, the FBI created their own crime.
These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot.
They didn't have the ability to.
They didn't have the thought in their head to.
Sometimes they would hear of like a 20-year-old or 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kind of people.
you know, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot.
So I am deeply uncomfortable with all these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals, their own, they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation.
And that's what entrapment.
Now, ultimately, the question of entrapment is, would this person have committed this crime absent the police undercover police sting?
Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime?
And the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen.
And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities.
They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up.
And so often they were plots that the FBI created.
So I think there is a lot of reason to be concerned.
I'm glad Michael Tracy is out there doing his Michael Tracy thing.
of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him.
I don't agree with everything he says.
We argue about it in private.
But I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, I don't care what you call me.
I'm going to stand up and question these.
these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.
And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context where I criticized harshly every one of these cases where I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment.
It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it for the reason I said, but it's extremely important too because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well where you take law-abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own.
I have no idea if that's the case.
Obviously, with this Israeli cyber warfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity, that after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do.
And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him.
So I have no view of his guilt or innocence.
I don't know the details of what the police did there.
But in the abstract, I think there's a lot of reason to be extremely skeptical and always questioning these kind of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so.
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Dave Leigle covers American politics for Semaphore, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless.
reporting on our political scene.
I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave or whenever I read one of his articles, I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton where he's going to be in a conference room for three days drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there.
That's what he's currently doing today.
He's in Minneapolis.
I have no idea if that mental image is true or not.
I'm going to ask him.
I bet it is.
But he's at the annual DNC meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today.
I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about.
Dave, it's great to see you.
Welcome to your, what is weirdly your debut episode, your appearance on System Update.
I appreciate the time.
It's good to be here and you called it.
This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher range Hilton.
So I see there's a mid-range Hilton photo behind you.
This is exactly how I picture you.
I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise I'm confident.
I got a window seat.
Thank you for checking.
Good, good, good.
I'm glad about that.
I feel a lot better now.
All right.
So let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting?
I mean, what is it designed to do?
And what are the proceedings about?
Well, this is their summer meeting.
It happens every year, as you might guess.
Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta.
Republicans these days do not let press cover much of their business.
Press was allowed in.
I wasn't at that, despite everything.
Press wasn't allowed anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirm that Joe Gruders would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice.
Democrats opened this up to the press.
And I do thank them for that, because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can.
We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party.
They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling.
This is not something they deny.
Ken Martin, the chair of the party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here.
And his pitch is, yeah, it's tough.
I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go.
This is going to take years to build back from.
Yeah.
So that's what I want to ask you.
I mean, if I had to hypothesize, my guess is the Republicans feel very sturdy in their messaging and their identity and their purpose.
They're the party in power.
Whereas I think the Democrats are very much, my perception is that they are still very much at a loss to understand what really caused this defeat that they suffered in 2024 at the hands of someone they believe they should never lose to.
And more broadly, why it is that their party has fallen into such disrepute in polling, even though a lot of that is Democrats themselves being dissatisfied with the party for not fighting enough against Trump or for other things.
Clearly, this is a party that is struggling to figure out what issues they can grab onto that will excite.
people and define them in a positive way.
That's my perception of the Democratic Party.
Having been there in this time that you've been there, is that perception correct in terms of what they think of themselves too?
It's correct.
And the big issue, we'll probably get into this, that divides party activists, divide them over how they can respond, what kind of party they'd be, depending on how they respond, is Gaza, is Israel.
But it runs through everything because I've covered the Democratic Party rebuilding from disaster and Republicans when they've lost to Democrats.
I've covered both versions.
They're always gloomy the first year, they try to win some special elections and prove that they're alive.
That's been happening for Democrats.
They've won some special.
They could win more before the year is over.
But this time, compared to other times I've seen the parties lose, Democrats really wonder if existencially they can't come back and govern the country like they did in the past, that some of what they were used to under even Republican presidents, like for example NPR and PBS being funded by the government, can they ever build that back?
And they're very comfortable calling Trump a fascist.
That was Tim Walls at the meeting, the open meeting yesterday.
calling Trump a fascist, Ken Martin calls him a fascist, calls him that orange bastard.
But they're they're they're discussing the political scene in America right now as if Donald Trump is taking power and may never give it up.
That is a very popular opinion in the one section of the base, the more elite college educated base of the party.
I hear that all the time.
I was at progressive events over the course of the year.
That is the worry.
Maybe there'll be some election that Democrats can win again, but they're not going to be allowed to govern.
And maybe they'll get more votes and they won't be allowed to win.
That is the worry.
Now the self-analysis, what did they do wrong?
That has not been much of a reckoning.
The party is doing this autopsy about why it lost the last election.
They wanted to put it out at this meeting.
It's not ready yet.
They're going to put it out later.
Everyone who's reporting on this, we get the sense it'll be the party has too many consultants and outside groups and it should consolidate more inside the party.
It's not going to be we got these issues wrong.
Joe Biden's policies are wrong.
It's going to be about tactics and about party building.
So if you think, oh, I didn't vote for the party because they screwed up X or Y or Z, they have not had much of a conversation about that.
That's interesting because I've always questioned, well, I mean, even before the 2024 election, they sort of settled on calling Trump a fascist.
Kamala Harris, you know, in the last couple months of the.
campaign made clear she thought Trump was a fascist.
She was asked directly And she said, absolutely.
They were relying on stories that he admired Hitler, kind of equating him to Nazism.
And they've been doing that for eight years.
There's been no lack of a willingness to demonize Trump.
And I think for a long time that was what they were counting on.
And I've always questioned the extent to which they believe it to be true.
And my perception is yours that the sort of more elite members of the party really do believe that.
So let me begin.
There's a lot there, but let me begin by asking you.
I'll just analogize it to Brazil for a second.
When Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, he had a long history of, you know, he came from the military, had a long history of saying things, oh, if I were a president, I would the first day I would close the Congress and his son talked about like, oh, the Supreme Court rules against us.
We'll just send two tanks there.
Who's going to go to the streets for the Supreme Court?
You know, like extremely aggressively anti-democracy statements.
And there was obviously concern among the elites that, oh, if he gets into power, there's no more elections.
It's going to be a dictatorship.
And it turned out there was this Brazilian establishment, you know, the democratic institution.
So people wondered, we're not nearly as strong as they are in the US because our democracy is only 35 years.
And yet they turned out to be infinitely stronger than Bolsonaro.
He was very boxed in.
He was a weak president.
Nothing that he did, you know, subverted Brazilian democracy.
There was an election.
He left power much the same way that Trump did.
Do you think these concerns are genuinely felt among the party?
And if so, do you think there's validity or a basis to them?
The concerns about what, well, yeah, like that we've had our last election.
Oh, no, I understand the question.
I was going to say, some of this, this got more intense after January 6th and the aftermath of Bolsonaro's election, American Democrats saw that and said, oh my God, this is spreading around the world.
The right is never going to concede an election ever again.
But you're right, they took power.
They governed for four years.
Their problems, a lot of them stem from how they governed.
And that's the issue.
They have not had Democrats a failed president in quite some time.
You can say in many ways, you can say, how did Barack Obama fail the country?
How did Bill Clinton fail the country?
They left office with most voters saying they did a good job.
They tried to.
Their approval ratings were pretty high.
People still show up and see them when they speak.
With Joe Biden, who did a lot of what Democrats wanted him to do, elements of the Green New Deal through the Infrastructure Act, the stimulus checks that they ran on in 2020, labor policies they wanted, their crisis has been, he did a lot of what he tried to do.
Yes, he was old, he couldn't articulate it, but no matter what they did, working class voters kept moving to the Republican Party.
And that's some of the worry when they talk about fascism.
They're really getting into the history books and saying, there is a record here of conservative parties becoming more appealing to the working class, being socially conservative, but pursuing pro worker policies, cutting their taxes, putting tariffs on companies and taking, we saw recently stake in companies like Intel.
They look at their own policies and say, we weren't bold enough as a center-left social democratic party.
Biden could have done more.
more aggressively and he could have won those voters, but wait a second, he tried everything he could and those voters kept drifting.
So I was talking to labor officials who joined the party, been added to the membership and leadership at the convention this week.
And that's one of their takes is, yeah, Biden did a lot of what labor wanted and they just didn't take it seriously because they won, thought labor, it's a union workers, they looked at Trump's record and said he's going to do that for us too.
And they associated Democrats with some environmental and cultural behaviors that they don't like.
And that's that's part of the crisis here is Democrats said we are they still are the party they brand themselves the partyty of the working class.
Ken Martin talks about being a card carrying union member, which he is.
And part of this is this belief that they've watched a party become a lot more like the vision of Patty Buchanan, like the vision of more paleoconservatives, a populist right wing party that is pro worker, pro labor in America, pro tariff.
They do not know how to compete against that.
They have never had to do that before.
Okay, well, that's really like the heart.
When I think about the Democratic Party and the problem they have, this gets to the heart of it.
I mean, I think this has been decades in the making.
I remember, you know, in the eighties people talked about Reagan Democrats.
These were largely disaffected union households who had become alienated from their perception that the Democratic Party was too far to the left on a bunch of issues, primarily cultural ones.
AND RONALD REAGAN WAS ABLE TO CONVINCE THEM THAT HIS ECONOMIC POLICIES WOULD BE GOOD FOR THEM, DESPITE NOT BEING AT ALL POPULIST IN ANY WAY, BUT HE WAS ABLE WITH THIS COMMUNICATION TO CONVINCE THEM OF THAT.
BUT YOU DO SEE, I mean, Josh Hawley, you know, pretty much spent his entire career in the Senate hauling, you know, CEOs of corporations before his committees and just bashing the crap out of them all day about consumer fees that are hidden and executive compensation that's massive and, you know, abusive of the public and all these sorts of consumer deceits.
And, you know, you have Tucker Carlson who goes around the country talking about the evils of young people not being able to buy homes and being swamped by credit card debt.
And that is the question is, you know, leave like have that cultural debate?
Did the party go too far to the left on trans issues or whatever?
Was that really the important thing?
But on the stuff that people have always said matters the most, which is economic policy and the appeal to economics, They could not see that populist space to the right.
My perception is the reason they keep doing that is because their party donor base is corporatist and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and doesn't permit them even to run on a kind of populist message.
They seem always trapped between this political imperative on the one hand and the demands of their donor base on the other.
Do you think that that is a problem they have?
There are lots of elements that are affecting what the party does right now that you've just pointed to.
This shift in the donor base, that started in the late 80s.
Malter Mondale lost with a, frankly, a more union-focused Democratic Party.
And Michael Dukakis was the first campaign that was reaching out to Silicon Valley, California, not the first, but really changing policies to match what those donors wanted.
And that's one of the debates they have right now is Biden appointed a more populous regulatory apparatus, FTC, SEC, very anti-crypto.
What did they get for that?
What did they get for rhetorically being against Silicon Valley, not creating a regulatory structure for crypto?
Well, they got a lot of donors angry at them joining Trump.
They didn't really win any votes for it.
That's one of their concerns.
But a lot of the donors shift has also been small donors and.
who's more who was more important in the party 20 years ago the uh college town donor who has lots of money to spend and gives $100 or $200 to every candidate who has a good ad on MSNBC or the or labor.
Well, labor was and that has changed just the way that campaign finance law has been changed largely by the Supreme Court.
There's more outreach to small donors and small donors have driven the party culturally to the left.
Those donors are less comfortable, not with labor, but less comfortable with some of these cultural conservative beliefs.
Even I've seen this as a reporter.
I've seen less liberalism about immigration in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas with Latinos than I have in liberal communities like Tacoma Park, Maryland or Berkeley, California, those sorts of places.
Yeah, the party has gotten more liberal in a couple of different ways.
So it's not just donors said you can't move in this direction.
They both were pushing some donors away with populist policies that didn't win them votes and pulling some donors in with more socially liberal, more liberal period policies, losing the populist, the working class vote.
Yeah, they all these mistakes, they really I went through a period when Barack Obama won when he got re-elected where they thought this would hang together.
This is a new demographic coalition.
And what blew it up was Trump saying, I'm never going to touch social security, never going to touch Medicare.
I'm going to renegotiate NAFTA.
I'm going to put tariffs on people.
No Republican had offered that before.
And they do, not to repeat myself too much, they're not quite sure what to do in that situation, while they still have a party with a lot of progressive support that's furious about them on foreign policy, furious with them on foreign policy.
Yeah.
I mean, Trump campaign in 2016 is architected by Steve Bannon.
It was also, we're going to raise taxes on the wealthy.
We're going to do a big infrastructure bill that's bipartisan to put people back to work.
None of which happened.
But that was very much the appeal.
And I want to get into the Gaza vote.
But I need to just ask you one more question on these more general themes, which is I always felt like Trump's superpower was his utter and complete disregard for the conventional rules of political elections and political discourse.
I'll never forget when that time in 2015 he made those comments about John McCain.
He wasn't really a hero because he got captured and his plane crashed and the Washington press that worshipped McCain freaked out.
I remember an article in the Washington Post when I think you were still there by Dan Balz, kind of the dean of political journalism, saying, that's it.
Trump's over.
It's done.
You're going to see a collapse in the poll.
You do not.
criticize John McCain.
Obviously, nobody cared.
And it was just sort of this, you know, people weren't always comfortable with what he was saying, but there was that perception that we can't stand these politicians at both parties who just,
Dave, like what Kamala's campaign was promising, even though I follow it as closely as almost anyone, maybe not as closely as you, but, you know, in the definitely top point.01 bracket it would be very hard for me to say like what did kamala represent what was she saying she wanted to do is that something democrats recognize and and do they feel like they need to fix it beyond just these superficial things like they need to curse more and like use the word bastard or you know have a more disruptive like it's something more substantive that they're willing to embrace without fear of who it
might alienate so that they stand for something Yes, they are the end of respectability politics and the way they talk.
That is pretty intentional.
They have decided that you can say things and take risks and offend people and maybe it works.
Are they good at it in the way way that Trump is?
No, Trump sometimes puts a foot wrong on that stuff.
But generally, Trump is willing to pick fights with people that Democrats think it is rude to pick fights with, or you might need them later, or it's just, that's not how politics should work.
There still is in the Democratic Party a sense of tradition, a sense of the dignity of the president.
You hear the word dignity thrown around a lot.
Because yes, you mentioned that moment for the Trump campaign.
I was at the Post at the time, and I went to Iowa for Trump's first rally after he made that McCain comment.
I think Matt Taibbi was covering the same rally, and we had the same impression.
His voters love that.
And so the way I have seen this manifest for Democrats recently is I was talking to them this week before the convention, talking to people who'd worked for progressive campaigns and asked them, look, if you had run on brow beating corporations in public and saying you want a stake in them or that you're going to tariff them if they if they if they mistreat you or you're going to intervene with like a company like Cracker Barrel and say you need to change this brand, Democrats did some of that.
They would criticize brands for being not diverse forward enough.
Yeah, they all agreed.
Oh no, we would get shredded.
The Wall Street Journal would get shredded in the media.
We'd get shredded in the media.
We'd look, people would call, accuse us of being communists.
They're very worried about using political power in the way that Trump does.
And they are getting a little bit bolder in thinking, how would we do that?
The model they have in the last couple of weeks is Gavin Newsom is okay, we've not had a Democrat who is willing to say, I'm going to go to the voters and get more seats for my party because I hate Republican or not trying to, I hate what Republicans are doing.
He does hate some Republicans.
Newsom is getting a lot of applause at this meeting, not in the sense we're ready to coronate him as our nominee, but, oh God, finally, one of us figured out that you can be really rude and you can blow up the norms.
and maybe it'll work.
That's what they're starting to learn from Trump after two elections where Hillary and Biden both ran as this is not how presidents should be.
Presidents should be dignified.
Surely voters will see that and reject them.
They just don't think that anymore.
Yeah, I think the Newsom love is so indicative of a sort of desperation because it was just two months ago when he started his podcast and he invited on Charlie Kirk and a bunch of other people on the right and had very like, you know, touchy, feeling conversations with them.
He tried to find middle ground on the trans stuff, saying, yeah, trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in sports.
And, you know, every liberal that I knew, let alone the left, was like, this is what is killing us, you know, screw Gavin Newsom.
And, you know, just two months later, the m memory is so short.
There's such cheap dates at this point that any kind of flamboyant statements are, you know, it's like a drop of water in the desert to them.
All right, let's talk about Israel.
You, you, because there was a big vote on it today, and I saw your reporting on it, and I wanted to speak to you about it.
And before we get into the particulars, you had alluded to this view a couple of answers ago, where you basically said, like, Israel is a big problem for what is tearing the party apart.
And there's an adjacent view to that that believes that one of the reasons Biden struggled and then Kamal lost was because they stayed so steadfast in their 100% support for what Israel was doing in Gaza, providing weapons, providing weapons, providing arms, refusing to even say they would condition it, those arms, that they didn't even give anything to the base of the party, the young people, Muslims in key states that indicated that they even cared at all.
And, you know, if you had told me even five years ago that a major presidential election would be decided on foreign policy and specifically Israel, I would have, you know, thought you were crazy, though I would have been very happy to have learned that.
I'm wondering, do you think that was a big issue in the 2024 election, the fact that there was such a lack of enthusiasm or even anger and apathy on the part of voters that the Democrats crucially need because of Biden and Kamala's steadfast support for Israel?
Yeah, in a couple of ways.
One of them is that Trump has latched onto this better than any Democrat has.
There's frustration in America with the aftermath of the Iraq War and the idea that America has let its children die for people in other countries, spent money on it, spent lives on it, ruined lives over it, and gotten nothing for it.
And that is Trump has been consistent in all his three races for president in opposing that.
I think he got more effective as the candidate after that first term.
And the voter who might have thought Trump is going to let nukes off without because we'll get angry, I think Hillary said he'll be baited by a twe a tweet.
Once that didn't happen, that was more credible.
That's part of it.
I think the second part when it comes to Israel in particular, by bowing this up with Ukraine, frankly, it looked like Joe Biden, the defender of the status quo and foreign policy, the restorer of that after Donald Trump left office, the guy who was rebuilding our alliances, that he was getting rolled.
both Vladimir Putin was pursuing his work against Ukraine while Biden was building that alliance, but also he kept trying to negotiate with Netanyahu and getting nothing for it.
Now, has Trump done better?
with Netanyahu?
He hasn't, but his approach has been more antagonistic, more like a partner.
The Biden approach was very weak and voters were not dreaming and thinking of Israel every single day and making that their top issue.
They looked at Biden and said, what do you get from this style of foreign policy?
I imagine the voter here, I'm tired of hearing about this war.
I'm tired of spending money on it.
I'm tired of looking at images of people being blown up by bombs I paid for.
What's his plan?
It looks like he's getting rolled.
Whereas Trump is getting gifts in office from Netanyahu.
Now, if you want the war over, that's not much better.
You're not getting the result, but Biden looked much weaker.
But that was the first part of it., I think is important, that just Democrats becoming the party that was defending elements of this Bush era status quo that was accepting endorsements from people like Liz Cheney.
They were not saying, elect us or we're going to start a bunch of regime change wars, but it looked like they couldn't end them.
And that was almost as bad for voters.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Alright, so you I'll just, I know you know them, and I'll just, but viewers know them as well.
We've gone over them before, where you see in pretty much every demographic group in the United States, with the exception of old conservatives, like people who have been watching Sean Hannity for 30 years, but other than old conservatives, every.
Every demographic group in the country is on a steep decline in terms of their support and approval for Israel.
It's especially true for young Democratic voters, including young Jewish Democratic voters who now overwhelmingly have an extremely unfavorable view of Israel, don't want the United States funding and arming this country, particularly while this genocide is ongoing.
afterward, I think it's going to permanently change how Israel is seen and talked about in the political business course.
So you have this massive change in the base of the Democratic Party voter and in voters generally, even conservatives under 50 have a majority of them now see Israel disfavorably.
And yet you have almost zero movement, like imperceptible movement on the part of the actual office holders in the Democratic Party and its leaders in terms of how they speak about Israel.
A few, you know.
being willing to do some, I guess, symbolic things, even like Adam Smith, who's, you know, the congressman for Boeing, a big supporter of Israel, came out today and said maybe we should condition some.
So there are some symbolic things finally now.
But for the most part, there's this huge gap between what's going on in terms of political perceptions about Israel and Gaza on the one hand and what the Democratic Party and its elected leaders are doing and saying on the other.
And I guess part of what happened today was an attempt to bridge that through some resolutions that would have staked out a formal position of the Democratic Party with respect to Israel, arms that we send, money we send, and Gaza.
Tell us what happened with those.
The breakdown of what was happening today was that Ken Martin, the chair of the party, had a resolution that recommended Democrats to a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza, but did not make many specific points.
It was restating, I would say, the Kamala Harris position, but a little bit tougher in saying that Democrats want to bring this war to an end.
They want a two-state solution.
There was another resolution introduced by a young DNC member from Florida that it was much briefer and more and direct and it just said we commit the party to supporting an arms embargo we urge our Democrats in Congress to support a Palestinian state.
Now what happened in the meeting over the resolutions is that the Ken Martin resolution passed easily, almost no debate about it.
The second resolution, there was an attempt to amend it and say, well, we were for an arms embargo on offensive weapons, not everything.
To weaken it.
That didn't succeed.
That was an attempt to weaken it.
To weaken it.
Yes.
And that didn't succeed.
So the members of this committee, the resolution commit was voted down.
There was a debate over it, which James Zogbee, one of the former DNC member, pointed out to me.
That was the first time there's been an open debate about Israel in the DNC meeting since 1988.
And when he was part of that debate in 1988, he was briefly kicked out of the party or kicked out of the official party.
And so that happens.
It's over.
Ken Martin walks across the room to this Florida DNC member, has a conversation that the press can watch but not hear it.
And what they end up deciding is that they're going to, Ken Martin is going to retract the resolution that passed.
There's going to be no official Democratic position.
He's going to create a task force membership deadline TBD, and that task force is going to work towards the party's position on Israel.
Now, that sounds like a dodge.
It is a dodge.
It's punting the issue to later.
I did for the people who wanted that resolution.
I heard both, one of the second tougher resolution.
I heard both, this is a way for the party to dodge this so that nobody can bring this up at the open meeting tomorrow where the press is going to be, or Chris Murphy is actually going to be there.
He's also one of the Democrats who's evolved on this.
But it is the first time they've debated this, and it keeps the issue alive, and it's a recognition because the Democratic majority for Israel, APAC, et cetera, they wanted just the first resolution to pass and the party to stop talking about it.
This is Martin trying to deal with the realities of the party that you were just talking about.
Is it in a decisive way?
It's not.
His view of himself as party leader is that he needs to keep not unanimity, but unity.
The party needs to stay together and hash this stuff out.
That is an evolution.
It's not the most exciting, bold evolution of what the party did, but it was a partial victory for the people who wanted that.
It's not getting treated, I've seen online, as a partial victory for anything.
It's getting treated like the Democrats do a classic Democratic thing.
But that's not, if you could, if you're a APAC leader and he wanted to determine what the party was going to do today, it wouldn't have been that.
It would have been just pass the resolution with some fairly toothless language and say, all right, issue settled.
And that's not what happened.
I get that.
I mean, it's very hard to make APAC completely happy.
On the other hand, I wouldn't think they were enraged, right?
Like there wasn't an actual position taken, certainly not one that would have opposed arms sales or U.S. support for Israel either generally or with respect to Gaza.
As you said, they kind of withdrew it and said, well, we'll throw it to a task force.
Do you think this is one of those issues that we talked about earlier more broadly where the Democrats can see this political opportunity, which I think very much exists in both parties.
I think there's going to be a very strong presidential primary candidate in 2028 for the Republicans saying we need to cut off all aid for real, stop financing foreign wars, including Israel, because there's so much sense on that now in all, as I said, in all demographic groups.
And I think there's that space in the Democratic Party too as well.
And even it's an opportunity for Democrats to gain some advantage over Republicans by being more out front on that.
It seems to me, again, the problem is, is that the Democratic donor base, much of which is apathetic on Israel, but a large part of which is extremely passionate in being pro-Israel, they're stuck again between this political position they could take, that they may want to take, that their party members certainly support, and their necessity to placate these donors.
Is that the conflict or is it deeper than that?
The donors and also some voters.
This is a faction of the party that party gets a majority of the Jewish American vote.
You pointed to the polling that younger Jewish voters, especially, are not reflexibly, unquestionably pro-Israel anymore.
But there are a lot of older Democrats who do threaten to leave the party if it is not fully supportive of Israel at this moment.
And I'm not going to read all the talking points, but you know them.
It's in a rough neighborhood.
It absorbed the most devastating attack in its history, more devastating than I, et cetera.
That's not insincere.
There are a lot of people in the Democratic coalition who want to support Israel in that way.
The majority opinion at this point, I'd say, is a mixture of cut off all support.
Israel shouldn't exist.
And the position that you've seen those Democrats you mentioned, who some of them were endorsed by APAC in the past, it's basically, we can support Israel, but we can put conditions on this because frankly, do they, do they need this money?
Do they need to continue this war?
Are there military objectives that we support?
No.
Can we criticize them the way that we would criticize, frankly, other allies?
There are other allies that get military aid from the United States and where we have a tougher hand on the reins.
They're frankly in the 80s, and you know about this, there were times when Republican administrations took a tougher hand on Israel, when Israel was in many ways more vulnerable than it is right now.
And so I'd say, add to this.
The strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities that Trump approved, there was no political bounce for that in the polling.
It's almost completely forgotten in this country.
That's another example, I think, of how the mood in the country.
has moved to why do we need to do this?
Why can't, why does America need to fund all these conflicts?
It feels like they might be able to figure it out on their own.
That is not, it's hard to classify that as an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel position.
That's a position that says, if we pull out, Israel's going to, it's not like South Vietnam in 1973, Israel's going to continue to prosper.
Israel boasts about how good it is.
Netanyahu's even written about, I think, the Munich effect that when people think of Israel, they think, oh, the country that wins wars and hunts its enemies down to the end of the earth, do they really need our money?
That's becoming the majority position.
And you characterize it, I think, well, yes, the defenders of the status quo, when they say anything less than full support is pro-Hamas, that's just very hard to sell outside of some rooms of donors.
I have a ton more questions for you about the Democratic Party, but just out of respect for your time and you've given a lot, I'm just going to ask one or two narrow questions if you don't mind, and then we'll let you go.
There was another vote that I think relates to AIPAC as well that I saw your talk about talking about a couple other people, which is there's this trend now where major super PACs, primarily APAC, but others as well, enter Democratic primaries.
They did it with Corey Bush.
They did it with Jamal Bowman.
They spent, you know, in both cases, APAC and the Israeli lobby spent something like $15 million to get George Latimer and Wesley Bell in place of those two incumbents who were insufficiently supportive of Israel.
And my understanding of this resolution would be, and maybe I'm wrong, but you tell me that in some way it would limit the ability of super PACs to interfere in Democratic Party primaries.
Was that really anything meaningful that they did or was it just kind of a symbolic resolution?
It was somewhat symbolic.
Now, it was something that Bernie delegates in 2016 wanted to have happened.
They pushed for years when that, it was like, I think the fourth resolution today, when it passed, Jane Klebb, who is a pro-Bernie, she's the chair of the Democratic Party Nebraska, said 10 years in the making.
She was cheering for this.
What it says is that the dmc committee on reforms is going to study steps that it can take to eliminate corporate and dark money in the primary in 2028 and it's going to endorse things that democrats in congress should do and the trap there not to get you just forgive me kind of a high sign not to get the entire history of campaign finance law but the trap and the problem is the supreme court is not about to rule against more money in politics how can democrats limitit it in their own primary?
So they don't have an answer yet.
It's a little symbolic, but the idea is they come up with something before 2028 that says, All right, you are a candidate.
A super PAC is spending on your behalf.
You're going to be punished in some capacity and some delegate.
I don't want to make it up on the fly.
But it's positioning the party to say, we were going to discourage dark money groups and PACs from intervening in our primaries.
It's going to be the candidates.
They raise the money.
You can go to the FAC and see who donated them.
We're going to try to figure that out in our party.
And if we ever take power again, we're going to try to legislate that or get judges who do that.
A long term idea.
It is something from the sincere Bernie campaign of 2016.
He's asked for that.
His whole career.
I don't know if he endorsed this today, but he's been endorsing this resolution.
That's what it is.
And if you're cynical and say, how can they enforce that?
Yeah, they really can't.
But they can't enforce it because of the campaign funding system.
What would happen if, let's say, it's 2028 and there's a super PAC that spends $100 million on Pete Buttigieg, how can they punish him?
That's very TBD, but they're talking about it.
And they want a little bit of credit for saying, we would like to roll this system back so that there's less big money influence in politics to the extent we can.
There was one, it wasn't much of a debate.
One DNC member said, we want to make clear we're not doing this in a general election.
We don't want to defang ourselves if Elon Musk comes back and spends $250 million.
But can our party at least be the party that doesn't want unlimited money in the primaries?
It was, again, I've used the word sincere a couple times, but it came from Bernie people who've wanted this for a long time.
And they are trying to fix that.
All right, credit for effort.
All right, one last question I just got to ask you before I let you go.
This is such a weird thing and yet such a Democratic party thing.
So as you of course know, the DNC when they elect Ken Martin had an election for vice chair as well they elected two vice chairs one was malcolm kenyatta who's this pennsylvania state legislator he's black and gay which is relevant for my question the other one was david hogg david hogg became who's white and straight i believe but also young which was you know a coveted demographic um and david hogg became controversial because he began talking about funding on his own primary challenges to members of congress who he thought were too old and
safe districts and instead of just getting rid of david hogg on that basis like you can't be dmc chair vice chair and you know talk about financing primary challenges to members of the democratic party they instead had this fear this theory that the election was just all invalidated and needed to be undone because it violated the gender and race quota rules of the party, kind of like a cartoon caricature of what people think the Democratic Party is.
And they redid it and they got rid of, I think, both of them, or they definitely got rid of David Hogg.
Did they get rid of both of them?
Anyway, you can say answer.
But my question is, like, that to me seems just such like a major event.
It's just like feeding into the sense that, you know, in 2016 they cheated with Hillary and Bernie in 2020, they had Obama kind of manipulate the outcome for Biden.
And they just undo an election.
Like, is there lingering resentment over this or is that kind of just the pages turned and they're moving on from that?
There's not lingering resentment over the hog.
You characterized it right.
The vote was to vacate this election because I was at the meeting.
It was February 1st, very late in the day.
There's five candidates for two jobs.
They shortened the vote.
And one of the candidates who lost said, hey, if you had that for a third ballot, a woman might have beaten David Hogg.
And our gender rules say that we should have had that extra vote.
So that is what happened.
And it is a legacy of 2016, just like the dark money fight is a legacy of 2016, the Super PAC fight.
This is what Martin was trying to do was say, no one who's elected in the DNC can intervene in party primaries.
And oops, David Hogg is doing that.
He was gotten rid of because of that.
quirk in the voting system.
He was replaced by Shasti Conrad, who's South Asian, who's the chair of the Washington Democratic Party.
And it's funny, I ran to her and she said, yeah, I was getting a lot of reporters calling the David Hogg fight.
Nobody's called me since then.
Nobody's calling me for my takes in the Democratic Party.
But they all got wrapped up in these fights that have been going on for at this point a decade.
And the Martin view of things is not, hooray, I beat David Hogg.
He was taped in one call saying he almost thought about quitting the party over this Hogg situation.
Politico got leaked that tape.
It helped beat Hogg because everyone said, where did that tape come from?
But his theory was, we need to be credible to those people who have bailed on the party because they think we rigged the elections.
We need to be credible to the people who think big money buys our elections.
Has he answered the other questions people have?
It's that they think that the party's bought by APAC, et cetera, or that it's too, it's, he is not.
But Martin is trying to solve this, this whack-a-mole parade of problems that have come up for the party's brand while the Democrats, sorry, while the Republicans have just consolidated under Donald Trump.
So they're at a total disadvantage.
But that's another cause that it started as a good faith effort to say the party can't intervene in primaries and it ended in this huge mess.
But the legacy of that is, thank God we're done.
I mean, that's the mood of the convention.
There was a reception for the new vice chairs last night and they were not beating up a Davy Hogg piñata or anything, but they're very happy that it's over.
Well, congratulations to the South Asian community in the Democratic Party for having one of two vice chairs in this newly done election.
I'm very happy for them.
And I hope you enjoy your time at the Hilton.
I really appreciate your work.
I appreciate your taking the time as well while you're on the road to come and fill us in on everything that's happening there and keep up the great work.
It was great to see you.
That's mutual, Glenn.
Thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Have a good evening.
All right, so I know there's, you know, Dave Wightwell has been around for a long time.
There's definitely criticisms of him, things that I've disagreed with him over the years as well.
I'm sure some of you have those.
But what I appreciate about him most is that he really does do what we just talked about, which is, you know, he just goes to these places.
It's not a fun job.
It's often not a glamorous job.
But if you're going to be a political reporter, for me, this is a lot more valuable, going to these kinds of places where most people don't want to be, sort of sitting in these meetings where a lot of votes take place that are consequential and are two major political parties and reporting on them.
And for me, that's what a political reporter should be doing.
And I think he does a commendable job for it.
All right.
I think we have a couple more questions we're going to get to.
But I don't see them.
So maybe we can pull those up where we left off.
I'll get to a couple more.
I think we have like three or four that are really good that we picked up out.
All right, I think we can do two here.
So let's try and do that.
All right, this next one is from Sir Din Pati.
Sir Din Pati.
Oh, Sardine Pate.
When it puts all together, it's very difficult to say.
Plus, it's not spelled PATTE.
And there's no accent mark over the E, but whatever.
Sardine Pate.
Thank you, Control Room, for correcting me on that.
The question is, what was the turning point?
For Lula, I was excited about him in 2022, especially with his background, but I've been out of the loop.
It's been really disappointing because he seemed like a formidable leader considering his history.
Yeah, I've talked about Lula many times before.
I know there's a perception in the United States that he's this like left-wing leader.
A lot of people on the left think that of him.
And then a lot of people on the right always think anyone like in some, you know, the people who think like Joe Biden's a communist or Nancy Pelosi's a communist, you know, like anyone in the center left is like a radical communist.
So a lot of people think that about Lula.
And Lula might have been that.
You know, he got his start in a really interesting way, like one of the great political biographies, one of the truly charismatic political presence and political talents of the 21st century.
You know, he grew up very poor, one of many children, ended up working in a factory, lost his finger in a factory, joined a union, was very much involved as a union leader.
Very charismatic, very innate political talent, and he emerged on the national political Brazilian scene as a women.
And so he ran for president three times under this kind of left-wing persona, generated a lot of support, but couldn't win in a country that, And so in 2002, he was running for the fourth time, and he knew he had to really moderate his image.
And so he wrote a letter, famous letter, called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically promised that he was more moderate, that he would work as a coalition builder, that he wouldn't just be an ideologue, that he would take into account the interests of people who hadn't traditionally supported him.
He also picked as his vice president an extremely wealthy business type who the political establishment and financial community really trusted and he won in 2002 and From 2002 to 2010, he was a very popular president.
He left office with like an 85% approval rating in 2010.
He won in 2002, ran for re-election in 2006, won in 2006, and so he was term limited out of office in 2010, but he left so popular among, again, like 80, 85% of Brazilians approved of him.
and that's just historically true, that he was able to pluck a woman in his party from obscurity named Dilma Rousseff, who is, unlike him, not a political talent.
She doesn't really have a lot of charisma.
She's more of like a technocrat.
She kind of had this history where she was a radical when she was young.
She actually picked up arms.
She was a guerrilla fighter against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil as a result of the CIA at the coup in 1964.
But she became more of like a financial technocrat.
He's currently the head of the Bricks Bank.
bank But he wanted to use his big influence and approval rating to have show that he could elect not just a woman who wasn't particularly politically charismatic.
It didn't have a major base, but also was the first female president in a country that, like a lot of Latin American countries, like the United States, still hasn't had a female president, very patriarchal in its culture.
And he did.
She won in 2010 largely, almost entirely based on his support.
And then she was re-elected in 2014.
And the reason he was so popular is because Brazil's economy grew massively from 2002 to 2010.
You had this emergence of a middle class.
He did like very innovative projects for helping the poorest people in the country.
Brazil's plague has always been brutal, violent economic inequality where the poorest of the poor, which constitute a large percent of the country, have a standard of living unimaginable even for American poverty.
Actually, American poverty is getting closer and closer to that, but what has always been meant by American poverty.
And there was always no middle class.
And a middle class emerged.
The economy grew.
became the sixth largest economy in the world that surpassed the United Kingdom.
Well, you know, you can debate, was that because Was it because of commodity prices?
There's always a bunch of elements, including Locke, that determine that.
But the reality is the economy did well, and he also introduced these innovative social programs that even neoliberal outlets like the economyist praise where he implemented something called Bolsa Familia, which is a family purse, basically, where very poor families get a monthly income that sustains them, that lets them buy groceries and medicines.
But in exchange, it's not just a free handout.
Typically, the mother, the head of the family, has to demonstrate that her children have been vaccinated, that they're attending school regularly.
So there's responsibilities that they have to fulfill and demonstrate in order to get the money to create this kind of social contract.
It wasn't just a traditional left-wing handout program.
And it became, whether by evolution or by necessity, a much more kind of center-left figure.
I remember I interviewed him in 2016 and I asked him about the perception in the West that he was the same kind of politician as at the time it was Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro and some of these more hardcore left-wing parties in Venezuela and Bolivia and Ecuador and Cuba.
And he was adamant.
He said, absolutely not.
Don't compare us to them.
You know, I have good relations with them.
They're our allies in some things, but we are not like the left-wing parties of Cuba or Venezuela.
We believe in political pluralism.
We believe in difference of opinion.
We have a wide range of views of economics.
So he became this political figure that purposely distanced himself from this hard left caricature that he had been and couldn't win as.
And I think ultimately he abandoned that.
So as probably you know, the quick history in 2018 when he was getting ready to run again, his successor, Dilma Rousseff, won re-election in 2014, but she was impeached.
So in 2018, for the first time, his party was not governing the country since 2002.
He was going to run again.
That was when he was charged with corruption charges and put into prison and was banned from running.
And he wasn't able to run.
And that's the election Bolsonaro won in 2018.
And ultimately, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction charges because of the reporting that we were able to do showing corruption in the trial and among the prosecutors and the judges.
And he got out of jail and he ran again in 2022.
And he very narrowly defeated Bolsonaro and became president.
And since this term, this third term in 2022, he's not only older, but he's He doesn't really exert a lot of power.
It's just the nature of the reality in the Brazilian Congress.
You have this gigantic, corrupt, centrist faction.
It's just very transactional.
You know, they'll go wherever greases their wheels, they trade political favors, they have no real ideology, they buy votes, they even to get elected, but it's a big, huge force, they can't overcome that.
The Supreme Court has gotten extremely powerful as well.
In order to win, he had to name as his vice president this center-right party that had always been his main political adversary.
So he's not, his stature has been reduced, but on the national stage, which is where I think he has always excelled most, you know, there's an outspoken defender of Julian Assange and the need to release Julian Assange.
He was a very vocal supporter of Edward Snowden when we were doing the reporting, part of why I was so comfortable in Berlin.
in Brazil was because the government, which was still under his party with Dilma Rousseff, was very protective of the reporting we were doing.
They considered it very important reporting that ought to be protected.
They were very pro-Snowden.
He's been outspoken from the start about Zaynab.
He's refused to provide any military assistance to Ukraine to support the West War.
He's been extremely critical of Israel, refusing to not only give them aid, but really almost have relations with them.
He just got attacked again by the Israeli government because he's been calling it a genocide.
So I think he's still an important figure and a positive figure on the international stage.
Obviously, I've been extremely critical of their current government and its censorship regime, which he does support, and I hold that very strongly against him.
It's just not really coming from him.
He's a beneficiary of it.
He supports it for sure.
He sees it as being in his political interests, but it's really coming from this kind of more centrist party.
So I think, you know, who is going to be, I think he's going to be 80 next year when he, by all accounts, intends to run for re-election for a fourth term in 2026.
Bolsonaro is banned from running, so I very much doubt Bolsonaro will be his opponent.
Bolsonaro will likely be in prison.
They have this kind of figure who is associated with the Bolsonaro movement, but really, I think, more a kind of establishment center-right figure, who's the governor of Sao Paulo, who's almost likely to be, very likely to be Lula's primary opponent.
He's young.
politically talented.
The establishment loves him.
They're likely to align behind him.
He'll separate himself from the Bolsonaro movement just enough to get the establishment support, but not so much that the Bolsonaroistas won't support him.
So it's going to be a difficult re-election.
But, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, it's sort of like you have to, whatever you think of Bill Clinton, whatever you think of Barack Obama, whatever you think of Donald Trump, you have to acknowledge these are people who kind of broke the political mold, who have, you know, generational political talent.
There's no question that, IT MIGHT BE ONE OF THE MOST I remember the first time I met him, I sat down for an interview with him and within five minutes, even though I told myself you have to guard against this, I was almost mesmerized by how he was speaking.
He just has that innate ability.
I have enormous criticism of him.
I just went over some of them.
or by far not all of them.
But as kind of a...
And a lot of the caricature in the American right, even in American politics generally, even on the American left, that he's some sort of leftist figure.
He might be in his ethos, he might be in his origins, but that's by no means how he's governed.
Again, whether that's because he's evolved or by necessity, that's just not the reality of Lula's government.
And my primary focus has been the censorship regime and the other forms of tyranny that have benefited him that he supported.
But like I said, I don't fully hold him accountable for that since I don't really think it's coming from him because like Bolsonaro I think he's more a weak president than anything else.
All right.
Last question from Carl Malone who is a regular question asker and a longtime member of our local community for which we thank you.
Can you please clarify your view of Whitney Webb's work?
Are you of the opinion that she is a misguided honest broker of journalism or she is malicious and the errors you claim are quote unhinged?
I've looked closely at everything cited by you and Tracy as errors and found the claims to have been as much merit as Mehdi Hassan battering Taibbi for having misspoke.
Do you just not like her as a person?
I have followed her for seven years or so after I heard her on Tim Dylan's old podcast and I found her to be genuine in her beliefs.
So there have been times I've listened to Whitney Webb.
She's clearly a very smart person.
She's very well spoken.
I think she's very diligent.
She doesn't just speak off the cup.
I think she really does a lot of work on the areas that she covers.
My problem with Whitney Webb is, and I think this is understandable, is You have this experience where you can read or assess media reports and feel like this seems propagandistic, I can identify errors here or deceitful passages, and you're kind of pretty sure that that's the case, but you're not 100% sure.
But then there are times when you're in the news and when people are writing about you, and so you have firsthand knowledge of what is actually happening.
So if somebody's writing things about you and what you've done and what's being done that you know is false, you don't have any doubts about the fact that what's being written is false.
And there were a lot of articles, a lot of articles that she wrote when we first created the Intercept in our reporting on the Snowden archive that were just simply fabricated and made up and false, just insanely conspiratorial.
I mean, she believed and often asserted that Pierre Mityar paid us $250 million because he was tied to the deep state and he was trying to privatize the Snowden archive in order to prevent it from being disclosed further.
This was so moronic for so many reasons.
Pierre Mityar didn't invest $250 million in the Intercept.
He invested that in his big, broad media company of which the Intercept was a small part.
Even when we went to the Intercept, there were only two people on the planet who had control of the full archive, myself and Laura Poitras.
So nobody could decide what could and couldn't be disclosed.
He had no way to try and suppress things from that he and his CIA friends wanted suppressed.
I knew this for a fact.
He never even attempted to exert the slightest amount of influence in the reporting that we were doing about anything, let alone the Snowden reporting.
Never once any attempt by him or anyone associated with him to influence it, let alone pay money to hide documents that were incriminating, as though we would do that to Snowden, as though Snowden would know that that was happening and not object, even though he gave up his life.
The whole thing was so idiotic, but the kind of conspiracy theory that if you don't know anything, it seems, you know, like maybe you should believe it.
Like, hey, there's this billionaire here and he does have ties to, you know, defense contractors like almost every billionaire does.
And why did he invest all this money in a media outlet?
Probably because he wants to buy the Snowden archive for himself, have it as his private property, and then prevent it from being disclosed.
None of that happened.
It just didn't happen.
And it didn't matter how often I demonstrated that, how often I said it.
You can find so many.
So for me, The first encounter that I had with her, and obviously this is going to shape your perception, is not that she just once made a mistake or once wrote an articles based on assertions of conspiracy theories that I knew firsthand and know to this day firsthand are just made up like untrue demonstrably false and obviously if you're at the if you're the subject of those kind of articles by one particular person again many over the course of several years you're
going to end up being quite skeptical of the rest of the work that they've done it doesn't mean that i discount the the rest of what she's done i have nothing against her personally i don't know her personally i don't i never really had any personal interactions with her maybe once i did that was initiated by me saying something negative about her work and it might have been acrimonious.
I don't even remember if that's true.
I honestly don't have anything personal against her.
But it did sour me to the rest of what she's done, even though, as I've said, I've read things that she's written over the years.
I've heard her on other shows and interviews.
I've often found her, you know, like a diligent analyst, like a very smart and insightful journalist.
So it doesn't mean that everything she does is contaminated by these falsehoods that she created.
you know, what is it now, 10 years ago, nine years ago?
But obviously it's going to affect how I see her and it's going to color how I view the things she says and how I assess them.
As far as this, I really haven't commented on what you have.
Other than that, I really don't go around like impugning her work.
Michael Tracy just wrote a long article because Michael's, you know, at war with everybody who thinks the Epstein case is anything more than one guy who might have done a few bad things with a few underage girls.
I don't want to characterize what Michael's view are, but that's how I understand it, that he thinks this whole broader conspiracy is completely made up and sensationalized and fabulous.
And she's one of the people who've been pushing what he considers the more sensationalist part of that story, including his connection to Israeli intelligence, including who was involved in the spot.
And so he wrote a long article purporting to debunk what she said.
I read the article.
I found some of what Michael wrote persuasive.
The thing that disappointed me the most was that she kept saying, and her fans kept saying, she'll debate anybody, but Michael kept asking her to debate, and she said, no, maybe she has personal issues, maybe she doesn't regard Michael as a good faith actor.
I don't know.
So I don't want to be lumped in with Michael or be treated as some like Whitney Webb hater.
I'm not.
My only view of Whitney Webb is based on the firsthand knowledge that I had from her.
I kind of just moved away from Mint Press and from her writing in the years that followed.
And like I said, I've seen her write things on Israel and the U.S. relationship with Israel, the war in Gaza, the Democratic Party, various policies of Trump that I agree with, that I think have been persuasive, that have added positive things to the discourse and conversation.
But I don't know that I'll ever be able to find her to be...
It was assertions of fact that were completely fabricated and made up.
And I just gave you one of the examples.
There are many others as well.
So I really don't have strong feelings about her.
I'm willing to listen to that.
I sometimes see things that she's written and I'll read them and I don't read them like with anger or with animosity.
So I don't know, the question sort of suggests that I'm like on some war path against Whitney Webb.
Absolutely not.
I think Michael is.
And if you're interested, you should, you know, I don't agree with a lot of what he said.
There's parts I agree with, but some parts that I disagree with.
I don't really want to have Monta fight about it because we've spent so much time arguing about it already and I don't want to pour fuel on the fire where he's sort of standing alone.
The entire world has caught him calling him a pedophile or whatever.
But I do encourage you, if you're interested in that, to go read what he writes.
Because like Whitney Webb, like what I just said about Whitney Webb, what Michael writes is very thoughtful.
It's contemplative.
It's researched.
It's reasoned.
And instead of just clinging to whatever predetermined beliefs you have about Epstein, if you're interested in reevaluating them or diving into this debate, go read what Michael has been writing.
He has multiple articles on Substack.
And like I always think just in general, even if I don't agree with the person doing it, it's always good to have at least one person, even if they're standing alone, you know, saying like, wait, like let's evaluate this again and see if there's truth here, if this is a mob getting carried away.
Even if they're wrong, even if what they're standing opposed to is true, I think it's very healthy to have people willing to do that in our discourse.
Not for the sake of being contrarian because that's just dull and reactionary, but people who genuinely believe that the majority is wrong.
I think that's very healthy and it takes a lot of courage and a willingness to be attacked to play that role.
I think Whitney Webb has done that.
I think Michael has done that as well.
And so if you're really interested in figuring out who's right and wrong, you should definitely go read what Michael has been writing and what Whitney Webb has been writing as well if you want.
But my view of her is very much colored by what I described.
All right.
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