Deceitful Hysteria over Tucker's Speech on Kirk; IDF Funder Larry Ellison to Take Over CBS, Paramount, and now TikTok; U.S. Embraces Leading Al-Qaeda Terrorist
Pro-Israel fanatics twist Tucker Carlson's speech from Charlie Kirk's memorial service in a desperate attempt to smear him. Then: journalist Jack Poulson discusses a revealing leak of documents exposing Israeli efforts to sabotage critics of Israel in the United States. Finally: Syria's new leader, formerly a top al-Qaeda terrorist, gets a warm welcome from U.S. officials. ------------------------------------- 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.
Thank you for Lee Fong for sitting in and doing a great job for me last week.
As I was traveling in Malaysia, where I attended a conference, gave a speech on the state of free speech and civil liberties and privacy in the Western world.
At some point, I'll share some reflections on you.
Malaysia is a fascinating country.
It's Muslim majority.
It defies a lot of expectations of what people in the West are taught to think about what life in such countries is like.
But I'll save my photo album for my trip another time.
There's a lot going on and a lot to get to, but very happy to be back in the studio.
First tonight, tens of thousands of people attended the memorial service for Charlie Kirk yesterday in Arizona, while millions more watched online, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Almost all of the top officials of the U.S. government attended and spoke, including President Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance.
Among many speakers was Tucker Carlson, a longtime friend of Charlie Kirk's and a supporter in many different ways of talking points USA.
Comments that Tucker made at the memorial service and funeral about his own Christian views, Tucker's, and his understanding about the death of Jesus and lessons to be learned from that were immediately seized on by many Israeli loyalists long eager to destroy Tucker's reputation and eject him from right-wing discourse, due obviously to his very critical views of U.S. financing of Israel.
Now, as Israel supporters always do when engaged in such efforts, they condemn Tucker, not on the basis for what he said, but instead by screaming all sorts of names at him, accusing him of bigotry, he's a virulent anti-Semite, even a Nazi, one pronounced him the single most dangerous anti-Semite in the history of the United States.
We'll examine what sparked and motivated all of this reaction and the implications of all of this, as well as the ongoing fallout from Kirk's assassination.
Then one of the most significant events of the Trump administration is also among the most overlooked, in part because it's really picked up seam in the last couple of weeks and has been drowned out by news of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
After Donald Trump ignored the bipartisan bill at the start of his administration, one that was signed into law by Joe Biden and supported by both parties to ban TikTok or at least to force its sale within 90 days.
Trump finally engineered a deal, one that would put the extremely influential social media app, both in terms of its functionality and its data, in the hands of Oracle and its founder and multi-billionaire Larry Ellison.
This all comes, this takeover of TikTok by Ellison and others, as Ellison, who has given millions of dollars of his personal funds, even though he's an American citizen, directly to a foreign military named the IDF.
He has also just bought Paramount and CBS and is on the verge of buying CNN.
That's an immense amount of media influence consolidated under the hands of this one individual.
The implications of this are truly hard to overstate, and we will delve deeply into all of it, including by interviewing the great independent journalist Jack Poulson, who has been reporting on a very much underdiscussed leaked email archive that was hacked and then published that came from the in mail box the email inbox of top Israeli official Benny Gance.
There are tens of thousands of emails from that hack, and they include key information among other things about the Ellison family now poised to assume unparalleled influence over American media, over America's social media, and all of the political discourse that accompanies it.
And then finally, for 20 years, the United States has fought multiple wars and dismantled basic civil liberties at home in the name of fighting the so-called war on terror, all of which was ostensibly designed to destroy Al-Qaeda.
Remember them?
After it is said that that group attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
Why is it then that the United States and key officials such as Marco Rubio and former General David Petraeus are now welcoming with open arms and heaping praise on?
What about Qaeda's most notorious and vicious leaders?
All taking place on American soil.
We'll tell you the latest about this bizarre skeptical spectacle.
Now, before we get to all of that, a couple of program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
As it's been true almost since the day President Trump was inaugurated, every week is an extremely fast and event and consequence filled news cycle.
There's barely any such thing as a slow news cycle anymore, and that's particularly been true over the past couple of weeks, ever since what has become the truly earth-shattering and transformative event of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
We still don't know as much as we hopefully will and should about the shooter and the motive, so we certainly know some, at least in terms of the person being accused of having carried out that assassination.
But the implications are multifold, and so much happened just in the last week alone in terms of the Trump administration's reaction, in terms of the transformation of the political discourse in terms of all sorts of media events and consolidation of power, some of which Lee Fong very adeptly covered, some of which he just didn't have time to because of how many there were.
So we hope to be able to get to as many of them both tonight and over the pat over the next week as possible.
I think this really is one of those moments that is transforming American political history in ways that will endure certainly for years, if not decades and longer, and we want to try and provide as comprehensive coverage as we can.
Now, along the lines, one of the main controversies today, as part of the fallout of that memorial service that took place in Arizona, that for a lot of people, including ones who didn't even like Charlie Kirk or perhaps even strongly disagreed with him, definitely had parts of it that were emotional and uplifting and inspiring.
I think many people found at least parts of Erica Kirk's speech to be remarkably brave and uh inspiring, uh, showing a lot of internal strength, including what I think was the indescribably difficult uh choice on her part, following what she believes are the mandates of her faith to express forgiveness for the person who took her husband's life.
Um it's hard to imagine how difficult that is.
But one of the speeches that I think is gaining the most attention, perhaps the most attention, was the one that was given by Tucker Carlson.
And I think there's a couple of things to note, and I should say here that we were hoping to have Tucker on our show this evening to talk about this.
The logistics made that impossible.
We're working very hard to secure that for tomorrow night, so hopefully he'll be here himself so he can speak for himself.
But I do want to go over some of what he said and what is being done in response to those comments.
So, first of all, let me show you the comments that Tucker made.
And I should note here that unlike a lot of people, it's really amazing.
Soon as Tuck uh Charlie Kirk was killed.
I mean, huge numbers of Republican politicians and people in media came forward to pronounce Charlie was their closest friend, was such a close friend.
And he was a person who was very gregarious, very outgoing.
He was always very friendly to me, very generous in his work.
But I think there were a lot of politicians trying to latch on to Charlie Kirk and claim a degree of friendship with him that they did not in fact possess.
Almost mathematically, it would be impossible for that to be otherwise.
But there were people in media, including friends of mine in the conservative movement who were genuinely very close friends with him.
And so a lot of them are very emotionally affected by not having a close friend die, but watching him be murdered in about as brutal of a way as possible.
And one of those people among many is Tucker Carlson, who befriended Charlie Kirk very early on in his emergence into Conservative media.
I've heard Tucker talk publicly, but also privately to me about Charlie, and he had always expressed nothing but unadorned and gushing admiration for Charlie Kirk.
And that is something that I think a lot of people, especially on the right, shared almost in a unique way.
There's probably no figure who could have been assassinated who was more unifying among all the different, varying often warring factions among the right than Charlie Kirk.
But I know Tucker felt this very personally, and has been affected by it a great deal, and has spent two weeks pretty much every day talking about it going on Charlie Kirk's show, which they are continuing and often having friends of his come on.
And Tucker's message, pretty much for the last two weeks, from the time that Charlie Kirk died, has been very consistent.
Which is that he believes that Charlie Kirk, above all else, was defined not as a Republican or a conservative or a podcaster or an activist or a supporter of Donald Trump, but instead the overarching attribute of Charlie Kirk's life, and he himself has said this many times, as is his wife, is his Christianity, his faith in Jesus.
He always centered that in everything that he did.
Doesn't mean you have to like it or not.
I'm just saying that that clearly was the animating defining force for Charlie Kirk.
And Tucker is somebody, I think, especially later in life, for whom that has become equally true.
Tucker speaks with much greater religiosity than he previously did.
I certainly think it's something as central to his life as it had been for Charlie's, and he went to the immemorial service with the intention not to make political points, not to make partisan points, the way a couple of the speakers have done, the way certainly a lot of people have done in Charlie's name since he's killed, but instead to talk about Charlie's life and the values that he represented in Tucker's relationship to them, beginning with his Christianity.
And that is what Tucker believes above all else is what caused the death of or the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Not that he was a conservative, there's lots of conservatives, not that he was conservative on social issues, but that he primarily was evangelizing both his religion and his politics through this prism of Christianity.
And Tucker has talked often about how much violence that has provoked in history, how many people have been martyred, professing their faith in Jesus Christ or evangelizing for Jesus.
And so this is a very consistent theme that Tucker didn't just invent over the last couple of weeks or for yesterday.
And he tried to make the center of his speech a focus on this.
And the one thing I will add before I show you the clip is that Tucker is one of those people, and you can watch him in any context, and you'll see this, who does not prepare his speeches in advance.
Doesn't matter how important the occasion is.
At the Republican National Committee uh convention, for example, and this is true of the Democratic National Convention as well, they're extremely rigorous about the kind of messaging they permit or don't permit to be aired because there's a lot invested in how the party is defined in the electorate right before the election, which often takes place at the convention, and they require every speaker to submit in advance an exact script of what they're going to say.
But Tucker, being Tucker, had the ability to refuse.
He spoke off the cuff at the RNC.
I'm not saying he doesn't think before a little bit about what his themes are, but he doesn't script it at all.
He doesn't write it down, and he, and I share this as well.
I don't ever like to speak from a script.
I like to speak spontaneously to kind of have a general idea of what I might say, but really feel the energy of the crowd, connect to the crowd, and have things be organic in the way that you're communicating, which a script often impedes.
And Tucker very much feels like he can be his truest and most effective self if he's speaking spontaneously.
Now, one of the risks of doing that is that you can express yourself imperfectly, as compared to, say, if you labor over every word and you're very police and controlled about everything you're gonna say.
But Tucker's a very skilled communicator.
I think his enemies will acknowledge that.
He has a lot of confidence and trust in his ability to speak without notes, and I think there's good reason for that.
And I just say that as the context.
This was not some scripted speech, he wasn't reading from a teleprompter, the phraseology wasn't constructed in advance.
It was very much spontaneously delivered.
And here is part of what Tucker said, the part that has caused so much coordinated, high level in terms of the Israeli government and US government and their uh loyalists, very coordinated, very intense Reaction and seizing on this passage to try and depict Tucker as an anti-Semite, as a Nazi, as someone who doesn't belong in decent company.
This is what he said.
Ultimately, he was a Christian evangelist.
And it actually reminds me of my favorite story ever.
So it's about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power.
And he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it.
And they just go bonkers.
They hate it.
And they become obsessed with making him stop.
This guy's got to stop talking.
We've got to shut this guy up.
And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around and eating hummus, thinking about what do we do about this guy telling the truth about us.
We must make him stop talking.
And there's always one guy with the bright idea, and I could just hear him say, I've got an idea, why don't we just kill him?
That'll shut him up.
That'll fix the problem.
It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
Everything is inverted.
No, I watched this live.
I was on an airplane traveling for 24 hours.
I said I was in Malaysia, I was traveling back home.
And I didn't think anything of that passage.
It was very consistent with what I anticipated Tucker would say with what he has been saying, and I understood it to be the following.
Pretty simple point.
It's basic Christian theology, basic biblical history.
You read the Bible, and there's no doubt that Jesus' death was preceded by a lot of guardians of mainstream Jewish thought who viewed Jesus rightly as a subversive, as a revolutionary, as somebody who was preaching a gospel and a religion that was directly at odds with the religion that prevailed at the time.
That was the religion of the dominant Jewish leaders.
I mean, obviously, that's what Jesus was, is he overthrew the prior order and the prior thinking and created a new gospel as in the views of Christians, the Son of God.
And he was creating a lot of agitation.
He was Jewish himself.
His disciples were Jewish.
And the Jewish leaders at the time viewed him the way they view many revolutionaries, including Christian evangelists, as very threatening to their prerogatives, as very heretical.
And as Tucker said, they decided the only way they could really deal with him because he was becoming so effective.
So many people were following him and being converted and moving away from their control that they decided their only solution was to kill him in the hopes that it would put an end to his teachings into this new religion.
And these specific Jewish leaders, not the Jews, but the Jews at the time, went to the Romans to Pontius Pilate and said, this is becoming a problem with us.
We would like to execute him.
They couldn't have done it without the Romans' approval.
They got the Romans' approval and then they crucified him.
And that's how Jesus died on the cross.
This is, I mean, so basic.
I mean, I learned I I didn't even grow up in a Christian upbringing, and I learned that by the time I was, I don't know, ten.
I mean, that's you I I'd never heard of any other version of that.
Now, of course, I understand that this can be a sensitive topic for Jews because this did get distorted into a claim throughout the next centuries, many centuries, that it wasn't just those Jewish leaders who conspired to kill Christ and who organized and arranged for his death,
but Jewish people as a whole, and there were references to the blood, his blood shall be on us and our future generations, and it was used to persecute Jews horrifically throughout the Middle Ages, and that became the blood libel.
And so, of course, there is this sensitivity given history about saying, oh, the Jews killed Jesus, but Tucker didn't even mention the Jews.
That wasn't the point of his story.
He wasn't there to say the Jews killed Jesus.
He wasn't even remotely talking about Israel or the Jews.
He was there at a memorial service to memorialize his friend and to talk about the Christian connection.
He was trying to say that Christians throughout time have been martyred for their faith, beginning with Jesus.
And he was essentially trying to say that Charlie Kirk was similarly martyred, the way he's been saying for weeks, because his predominant characteristic, even though he was a conservative and pro-life and uh opposed to a lot of the move the agenda of the trans movement and DEI, it was all presented as I'm a Christian man with a Christian faith, my husband, my husband, I'm a father, I'm a Christian man.
And he talked about that being his priority scheme.
And Tucker was simply trying to say that he believes that Charlie's the primary cause of Charlie's assassination was his Christianity, just like that's what led to Jesus' death.
That was it.
I found it so benign.
And I did find this reference to hummus strange.
I I just I don't know.
I didn't know.
I thought, I didn't know, was hummus really a common food at the time in that epic, in that in that era, was it something that Jews were associated with?
I think in common American parlance, hummus is very much a food associated with the Arab world.
If you go to the Middle East, you eat hummus all the time.
I actually had a lot of hummus in Malaysia, even though it's not part of the Arab world.
And I think Tupper was just trying to create an image of what these people were doing, how these kind of establishment people were behaving as they sat over these lamps.
And it was just the image that popped into his mind because he was talking about the Middle East and he just picked hummus.
And for some reason, all of this got interpreted as Tucker blaming the Jews for Charlie Kirk's for Jesus' death.
His reference to hummus was some sort of dog whistle about Jews, even though I don't know anybody who has ever associated hummus with Jews before.
If anything, it was just kind of an off the cuff reference where he couldn't think of something else more expressive about what he was describing, so he just grabbed hummus because he associates that with the Middle East, which he visits a lot and eats hummus there, and then went on to say that the main point, which is that when you try and murder somebody and assassinate them as a means of shutting them up, as a means of destroying their message.
Obviously, he cackled because he said the people who thought they were doing that when it came to Jesus spectacularly misfired.
They couldn't have miscalculated worse.
It was the killing of Jesus that spun Christianity as the major religion, as a massive religion that ended up gaining billions of followers over the next 2,000 years to this very day.
And he was laughing at the mismatch between them thinking they could kill him and silence him versus the reality.
And he was making the analogy to Charlie Kirk, saying, look, people thought they could probably silence Charlie Kirk, and that we're in a stadium full of 65,000 people filled to the brim with huge numbers of people around the world being more inspired and emboldened by Charlie Kirk's message than ever before, and that's clearly the case.
Charlie Kirk has become much bigger in death and in martyrdom and in assassination than he ever was in his life.
And that was the really the only point I think Tucker was making.
And yet, all throughout the day, I don't mean at all from people on social media who are just randoms or people who are just of insignificant influence.
I mean there was clearly a coordinated campaign on the part of the Israeli government, Israeli officials, opinion makers in the United States who have long tried to destroy Tucker, not because they're upset about funeral protocol.
It was a very politicized memorial service, as it should be.
Charlie Kirk was a political person.
But it wasn't that they were angry about his breach of protocol at a funeral.
They also are not upset about anti-Semitism.
They're more than happy, the Israeli government and its loyalists in the West are, to embrace anti-Semites as long as they're supportive of Israel.
There's a big strain of anti-Semitism in this dispensationalist evangelical movement, the most extreme version of it, that has become fanatically pro-Israel, even though they believe the Jews are damned, because they reject Christ and they're going to hell for eternity.
I mean, it's kind of an anti-Semitic theory at its core, in a way.
I mean, you could make an argument why it's not, but it's certainly not an argument friendly to the Jews, but Israel doesn't care that they're going to hell.
They love John Hagee.
They love those leaders who believe Jews are damned to go to hell.
Because they support Israel.
That's what they care about.
You can be as anti-Semitic as you want, but as long as you support Israel, you're fine.
And Tucker's sin is not anti-Semitism.
It's not even close.
He's not anti-Semitic.
Nothing he said is remotely anti-Semitic.
His sin is that he has one of the most influential platforms, especially among conservatives and young conservatives, where support for Israel for decades has been locked down completely.
And he has become one of the several very influential people.
And Charlie Kirk was starting to stick his feet in that pond to start questioning the U.S. relationship to Israel.
Why are we funding Israel?
Why are leaders going there all the time?
Why are we sending billions of dollars over there?
Why are we sacrificing so much for this foreign country?
And the ability to destroy Tucker is crucial to what has become this panic among Israeli leaders and among their loyalists in the US that public opinion in favor of Israel is collapsing.
It's unraveling.
And there's all sorts of things from takeover of social media, as we'll get to, to buying up media outlets to censorship laws on campuses to try and basically destroy any ability to continue to have people here criticism of Israel.
And destroying Tucker is vital to that.
The ADL, Anti-Defamation League, has been trying to get Tucker off the air for a long time, back in 2021, before Tucker was even talking about Israel, but was starting to espouse a foreign policy of America first and anti-interventionism, that really makes them uncomfortable.
They wrote a letter to Fox News to the Murdoch family, condemning Tucker Carlson's impassioned defense of the quote, race replacement theory and demanding that he be fired.
They demanded that the Murdoch family fire Tucker Carlson in 2021.
They said he, quote, disgustingly gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist great replacement theory, which was not true.
Said this is, quote, not legitimate political discourse.
And then they concluded, given his long record of race beating, we believe it is time for Carlson to go.
So they wanted the ADL did Tucker Carlson off the air in 2021, when he was at the 8 o'clock hour in Fox News and was the most popular cable host in the history of the medium.
People saw Tucker Carlson as a threat to this agenda for a long time, even before he started talking overtly about Israel.
And just like Benjamin Netanyahu saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a very valuable opportunistic opening to go all over media and say, I know you're grieving Charlie Kirk, we are too.
He was the greatest friend that Israel ever had to try and redirect emotion from Charlie Kirk to make him seem like his primary cause was supporting Israel, even though he talked openly about the pressures he was under for not being as steadfast or obedient to Israel and the anger he felt over getting attacked by donors and others.
They tried to rewrite history instantly.
They're now seeing this opportunity as a way to finally destroy Tucker based on what you could argue at worst was some awkward or ill-thought-through phraseology.
I don't even think it is that, but I'm being generous to his critics.
But they unleashed a full-on campaign of reputation destruction, of course, based on the standard liberal tactic of just screaming racist everybody.
Here are the time of times of Israel.
Tucker Carlson appears to blame Jews for killing Charlie Kirk with his story on Jesus' death.
I mean, Tucker Carlson didn't even blame Jews for killing Jesus.
He didn't mention Jews, let alone try and blame the Jews for killing Charlie Kirk.
Tucker Carlson didn't even remotely suggest that, but this was the all-out opportunity to distort everything that he was saying.
Here's the New York Post, which has typically refrained from attacking Tucker Carlson, though has long been in New York City a bastion of pro-Israel support.
Their headline was Tucker Carlson accused of stroke of stoking an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk's murder at his memorial service.
What conspiracy theory was that?
Here is Tablet Magazine, which tends to be a kind of more moderate but very pro-Israel Jewish journal.
They issued an editorial, which was like a decree, and this is their order to Americans.
Quote, cut Tucker loose.
That was the headline.
Cut Tucker loose.
The former Fox host escalating attacks on Jews, evangelicals, and Trump's foreign policy are fracturing the right.
It's time for his friends in the administration to show him the door.
What's actually fracturing right wing discourse is the fact that huge numbers of particularly on conservatives are finally waking up and saying, wait a minute, we were promised America first.
We were promised no more wars.
Why are we sending billions to Israel?
That doesn't sound like America first.
Why are we constantly getting involved in wars for Israel?
Why are our leaders always in Israel instead of tending to their own constituents in the neighborhoods of the United States and the lives of Americans?
Why are we being censored over Israel?
Polling data shows support for Israel unraveling, and that's why they're so desperate to eject the most influential people in the discourse who are talking to young conservatives and getting them to think about an issue which for so long was closed off from debate.
One of the ironies of all of this is that a lot of these Israel supporters were attacking Charlie Kirk less than a month ago in vicious ways.
Because of what he was doing.
He invited Dave Smith to have a debate about Israel at talking points.
He invited uh turning point, he invited Tucker Carlson there, even though Tucker was already a hated figure among Israel loyalists.
He just platformed them all and said, no, Israel needs to be debated.
He can he assembled a group of young conservatives to talk about it.
And they're all now trying to say, no, Charlie Kirk was ours.
He was a steadfast Israel loyalist, including some of the people attacking him very recently.
Here's a Mike Cernovich tweet who, you know, we've criticized some of Mike's views before, but he's very insightful, I would say, and very independent.
And one of the things he said about yesterday after watching the memorial service was this: quote, thunderous applause as Tucker Carlson has announced at the memorial service, standing in stark contrast to the astroturfed hate campaign being run against him in some circles, completely rejected by the people.
And there is very much reserved at the elite level this hatred for Tucker, this attempt to depict him as a bigot and the hatred, a hater of Jews.
If you go anywhere, Tucker gets mobbed at every conservative event by people who love him.
And he continues to be one of the most watched and respected names in conservative media.
That's what's causing the panic.
Laura Loomer, speaking of fanatics of Israel and loyalists to Israel, replied to Mike Chernovich's observation this way: quote, there were also a lot of people who didn't stand for Tucker.
I am here on the floor at Charlie Kirk's memorial, and I certainly didn't stand for Tucker.
And a lot of other people didn't stand as well.
We can honor Charlie Kirk's legacy without following Tucker and his Qatari masters.
We will stand for Charlie, not Tucker.
That's the beauty of it all.
We can have differences in opinion and not blindly follow safe self-appointed, quote, leaders of the GOP like Tucker Carlson.
No, Tucker doesn't speak for all people.
No, not everyone here stood for him.
The truth will set us free, and the truth will come out, quote, hummus.
We all see through you, Tucker.
You just can't help yourself.
Here's Elon Levy, who is a very kind of promoted young spokesperson for the Israeli government, an official spokesperson, who said this today, quote, complete with a laugh like a cartoon villain, Tucker Carlson uses Charlie Kirk's funeral to spread in the anti-Semitic blood libel.
These people are insane.
This bears no relationship to anything he said not yesterday or ever.
Mark Levin, who I think is pretty much open at this point, that Israel is his primary priority, tweeted a statement from someone named Sid Rosenberg, who said this, quote, I have to get out all my negative thoughts and anger so I can head into the Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, with a clear and optimistic mind.
So as we get set to sit down for Russ Hashanah dinner momentarily, I just want to send a hearty quote, fuck you, to Tucker Carlson, Candace, and all the Jew haters masquerading as righteous people.
Now I can enjoy my holiday.
And Mark Levin above it wrote, Well said.
Melody Phillips, who's a far-right Jewish uh fanatic of Israel in the UK, said this, quote, from the oldest libel against the Jews to the latest iteration, redounded uh rounded off with a demonic cackle, all brazenly in front of the president of the United States and thousands of mortars.
This chilled the blood.
The battle now underway for the Republican Party is a battle For the soul of America.
By which she means that the battle of America is whether to get conservatives to worship, revere, and support Israel with all the loyalty and passion that she does.
Matthew Schmidt, who is an editor of Compact Magazine, said this: quote, once again, Tucker Carlson finds a way to insinuate that Charlie Kirk's murder had something to do with the Jews.
No, he didn't.
No matter what happens, someone else will find a way to blame it on the Jews, the poor Jews, the Jews who have a country that is funded and armed and diplomatically supported and military supported by the greatest military power in the richest country on the planet, the United States, totally captive to it, but they're always the victim.
Mark Dubowitz of the Supremely Neocon Foundation for Defending America of Democracies that has always wanted war with Russia, with Iran, regime change in Iran, led by the United States as their primary goal for Israel, said Tucker Carlson used the memorial for Charlie Kirk, a passionate friend of Israel and the Jewish people.
There's that propaganda they always insert, to spread anti-Semitic blood libels.
I knew his father, Richard Carlson, vice chair at FDD, who strongly supported Jews in Israel.
I can't fathom what happened to Tucker.
Here's Laura Loomer.
This is in July of 2025, two months ago.
Everyone now pretends that Charlie Kirk was completely on their side, that they love Charlie Kirk, that he was the avatar of pro-Israel movement, getting American conservatives to love Israel as much as he did.
This is what she wrote just two months ago, and it was very common.
She deleted this image, I believe.
This was after Turning Point hosted both a debate with Dave Smith on Israel, who's very critical of Israel, and Tucker Carlson's speech, who talked about Epstein being tied to the Mossad.
She said, quote, I don't ever want to hear Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again after this week, and I'd say he has revealed himself as a political opportunist.
And I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.
Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.
Turning point was only able to thrive thanks to the generosity of President Trump on the one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt on Trump's life.
Charlie hosted Dave Smith at Talking Points conference, where Dave Smith was able to speak to a bunch of conservative youth at an organization that claims to be pro-Trump.
Three weeks ago, Dave Smith called for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office over his decisions to blow up Iran's nuclear facilities.
He also called for that impeachment because he perceived Donald Trump as covering up the Epstein files.
Remember those?
She goes on.
Charlie played both sides of the Iran issue on his show, as we all saw, because he wants to play both sides of the aisle.
The honorable thing to do is to have a position and actually defend it to the death instead of flip-flopping.
Smith said of all mo that all Maggals should quote turn on Trump and abandon him.
He said this three weeks ago.
See the clip below.
Turning point is definitely not pro-Trump.
If they were, they certainly aren't anymore.
Can you imagine the audacity of these people attacking Charlie Kirk publicly and privately, threatening him, putting immense amounts of pressure on him for even just hosting debates on Israel, even though young conservatives poll show are wildly split on that topic of not moving away from Israel.
And yet each of them immediately in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination and the emotions it produced.
Like just little weasels decided, oh, you know what, we need to forget about all those criticisms of Charlie Kirk from a month ago, delete them.
We need to now pretend that Charlie Kirk was the greatest friend that Israel has ever had.
So that people wanting to emulate Charlie Kirk, people wanting to create movements in the wake of Charlie Kirk have to understand that his devotion to Israel was central to his political movement and cause.
It was America and Christianity that were central to Charlie Kirk's movement and cause, and he did have a history of supporting Israel, and lately, over the past six months, starting with his vehement speaking out against what he called the war machine and the neocons trying to get the U.S. to bomb Iran for Israel, followed by his recent platforming of people Charlie Kirk was very kind to some of the most vocal Israel critics, including Dave Smith, including Tucker Carlson, including Candace Owens, including myself.
I haven't talked much about my interactions with Charlie Kirk.
I even wanted to center myself in those.
I'm not going to pretend he was a close friend, but he was extremely supportive of my work, publicly so.
In fact, at some of the most the hardest times possible.
And obviously, I've been known for a long time as a vehement critic of Israel, to put that mildly.
He was very open to the need to have that debate and was facilitating that debate more and more at the most important venues, and was under threat for it and suffering for it.
And I don't mean at all that that's what led to his death.
But the exploitation of Charlie Kirk's death, especially by Netanyahu, immediately seized on it and Israel supporters in general, but now the attempt to try and use Charlie Kirk's funeral to get rid of one of their most feared adversaries, Tucker Carlson, even though he was close friends with Charlie Kirk, even though Charlie Kirk considered him a crucial part of the conservative movement, platformed him.
Tucker Carlson will be speaking at the Talking Points Tour, was on Charlie Kirk's show.
You have to realize what's going on here.
Mourn Charlie Kirk, it's a horrific thing that we all witness.
Feel free to criticize his record, but be very aware of how deceitful these people are in trying to salvage what they see is an unraveling effort, which is to keep Americans conservative and liberal, left and right in the thrall to the state of Israel that they love by rewriting history of Charlie Kirk, using it to expel people who question Israel, and hopefully we'll have on Tucker tomorrow night to talk about a bunch of things, not just this.
I don't think he has to defend himself at all on this.
I want to talk to Tucker Tucker about many things I wanted to beforehand.
But if we have him on tomorrow night, which we hope we will, we'll certainly, at least in passing, talk about what his point was there, which I think was self-evident, and the reaction to it.
Thank you.
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All right, in just a second, we're gonna have one of those independent journalists I admire most who spends a lot of his time, not with a lot of corporate media attention, oftentimes in obscurity, working on some of the most important stories, the kind that takes the hardest core work of digging through leaked archives of tens of thousands of documents, doing Shoulase reporting.
His name is Jack Paulson, he's been on our show before.
And before I welcome here, I just want to give you the very brief context, which is that, as I said, I think one of the most significant events of the Trump administration that has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves, is the fact that there was a very concerted effort on the part of people who are petrified by these polls showing a collapse, especially among young people in support for Israel in the United States, to identify the venues where that anti-Israel activism is taking place.
One has been and continues to be on American college campuses, which is why you saw such a crackdown in so many ways on what can be taught, on who can teach, on what students can say, on expanding hate speech codes, to get people fired if they speak about Israel in all sorts of ways that previously had been acceptable.
This is the administration who came in promising to restore free speech and battle censorship, Instead imposing some of the most repressive speech codes governing not protests, not behavior, not foreign students, but the speech of American students and American faculty.
And then the other venue that was identified as a reason why young people have been abandoning support for Israel, which decades was a lockdown bipartisan position, is because they believed that TikTok was allowing too much speech critical of Israel, too much pro-Palatinian speech.
And because it was owned by foreign owners, the US government couldn't control that platform.
The way, as you know from the Twitter files and elsewhere, it can control Google and Facebook and other platforms as well.
And so the US Congress, not because of the threat of China, that was the pretext for the TikTok ban, that never got enough votes.
It only got enough votes after October 7th.
Because Democrats became convinced, and they said this, and the ADL said this, and the Bill's sponsor said this, the reason we finally got enough votes in Congress and both parties to pass the TikTok ban or the forced sale was because they perceived it was the reason so many young Americans were hearing too much criticism of Israel.
And the ADL went to Israel and said TikTok is one of our biggest problems.
We have to get that under control.
And the ADL called on TikTok to be banned.
And President Trump didn't want to ban it.
He under it, he understood the importance of TikTok, but what he determined to do is to get it out of the hands of people the US government and the deep state can't control and put it into the hands of people very close to the deep state.
American billionaires who serve the interests of the CIA and the NSA and the foreign policy apparatus rather than are independent from it to get it in line and prevent it from being a realm of dissent, especially on Israel, but other issues as well.
And Trump just engineered a deal, and it's still not entirely clear, it hasn't been fully released, but one of the things it's going to result in is that Larry Ellison, who just passed Elon Musk for the world's richest man, 300, 400 billion dollars in net worth,
who's the founder of Oracle, is not only going to have a controlling interest in TikTok, but also Oracle is going to store all of the data that they were so worried the Chinese were collecting on users who use TikTok.
That's now going to be in the hands of Oracle run by Larry Ellison.
And Larry Ellison is such a fanatical supporter, not of America, but of the state of Israel, that he has donated personally millions and millions of dollars more than anybody else, directly to the foreign military, to the IDF.
I don't even know why that's illegal for American citizens to fund a foreign military, but of course the rules with Israel don't apply.
He's going to control TikTok, its content and its data.
And with his son, he just purchased CBS and Paramount, very, very influential entertainment media properties, and he wants to put Barry Weiss, whose views on Israel everyone knows, in control of the editorial output.
And he's also thinking about buying CNN.
So at the time you see this unraveling of support for Israel, you have this extremely fanatically pro-Israel billionaire, Larry Ellison, using his vast, almost unlimited wealth to buy up some of the most influential properties, including TikTok, with the very clear intention of imposing all sorts of restraints on the kind of speech that can be heard there.
We just recently saw an IDF, an announcement by TikTok that they were hiring a former IDF soldier, an American who went to the fight in the IDF in Israel, who's now in charge of content moderation, meaning censorship for all matters of Israel and anti-Semitism.
You see the crackdown very transparently.
It's very sinister, and it's very extreme.
And Jack Paulson has been doing some outstanding work and going through some massive leaks of emails on the part of high-level Israeli officials, including Benny Gantz, that contain some really important information relevant to the Ellisons and to all of this.
It's been an email hack and release that very few other journalists have had access to or reported on, but he is one who has.
He's an independent journalist who writes on technology and national security.
He publishes all sorts of intelligence on Substack, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
That's where he just published two of the most recent articles, one today on this topic.
And he's also the founder and executive director of Tech Inquiry, a nonprofit that examines corporate influence on media and public life.
Jack, congratulations on this reporting.
It is great to have you back on our show.
We're looking forward to talking to you.
Thank you so much, Glenn, and uh also for the extremely kind introduction.
Absolutely, it's well deserved.
So uh let's begin with this.
You know, I'm somebody who follows these issues very closely.
Obviously, my career has been very inextricably linked with mass digital lakes.
And I have to say it wasn't until recently that I even heard that there was this massive leak of the email inbox of Benny Gantz and maybe even a couple of other equally influential Israeli officials.
So can you tell us exactly what it is that is this leak, how it happened, and what your access to it has been.
Sure.
So in terms of context, the leaks were originally leased by a hacktivist group calling itself Handela.
And it's been widely reported, believed, you know, conjecture that this group is related to Iranian intelligence.
It's very transparently pro-Palestinian.
One of its major hacks recently was on sort of pro-Western Iranian media outlet called Iran International.
And it's also claimed to have uh released a number of very, you know, um uh sensitive documents relating to a front company operated by Israel's equivalent of the US National Security Agency, which is called Unit 8200.
And so these emails were really first reported on in August 27th by a journalist named Matthew Petty from Reason Magazine.
And the first scoop that came out of them, which was actually simultaneous to the release of the documents by an American transparency nonprofit named Distributed Denial of Secrets, was on emails in the hacked from former prime minister Ihad Barak that related to his discussion with Jeffrey Epstein and in particular discussion regarding investments in this company that's now known as Carbine.
At the time it was known as Reporty, was kind of roughly an analog of the security application people may know in the United States called Citizen.
And it also detailed uh a potential investment that Barak was going to make uh alongside potentially Epstein in a company known as Fifth Dimension, which was really geared up to be an Israeli competitor to Palantir.
And in fact, this isn't reported, but in a lot of the internal documents, it was a very explicit strategy uh by the team at Fifth Dimension to use the Snowden leaks as a way for Israel to you know surpass uh Palantir and US national security companies in their international sales.
Um but in the case of the reporting that I did, um for other important contexts, these leaks, for example, from Gantz, you can think circa 2015 to 2017.
And so at first glance, this may not seem particularly relevant to ongoing activities, but what's actually shockingly provided in the Gantz emails, who, by the way, Benjamin Gantz had just come out of his term as the chief of the general staff, uh, which is really the commander-in-chief of the Israeli military, something like the chairman of the joint chiefs, you know, in the United States.
Um, he moved into the private sector for about five years, 2015 to 2020.
In fact, for three of those years, he was chairman of this company I just mentioned, Fifth Dimension, which was competing with Palantir.
But most notably, he is revealed through these leaks to have initiated a program, which he initially called 12 tribes, and it was designed to task uh 12 Jewish philanthropists from around the world to commit one million dollars each over five years to counter the BDS or the boycott divestment sanctions movement,
um, opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and apartheid, uh using what he called uh cyber technology.
And this included discussions with the uh controversial private intelligence firm Black Cube, and it also included conversations with David Ellison.
Now, I will say the way that this ties in uh to, for example, what I discussed on your show last time, which was this uh propaganda initiative Voices of Israel, is that other emails in the Gantz archive revealed that 12 tribes actually became a program that is very widely known in you know uh journalism in terms of opposition of BDS that was known as Israel Cyber Shield.
And so while there's, you know, really the Challenge here isn't even always just finding these documents.
It's kind of fitting them together and into a bigger picture because so many of these programs changed names, not just for obscurity reasons, but for bureaucratic reasons.
And so effectively what seems to have happened is this 12 tribes initiative, um, which again had pulled in David Ellison at a very early stage, kind of had a bureaucratic knife fight with the director general of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which was uh a woman named Seema Vaknan Gill, who's still quite prominent to this day.
Um, and the 12 tribes initiative was absorbed into what is now known as Voices of Israel and is part of the cyber intelligence arm that uh has been referred to as Israel Cyber Shield, Ceshet David, and then also its legal American name, innovative collaboration strategies.
And so, you know, that's maybe a mouthful to have laid out, but the context really is that these leaks provide the origin story, so to speak, of a program that still exists to this day and has been very relevant to the Israeli response to uh October 7th.
Involving the Ellison family, who is about to has already taken steps to and is about to even further consolidate their control over some of the most influential news and entertainment platforms in the US as well as TikTok.
Now, but look before I I want to delve a little bit more into the details, and I just have to say before I do, it is kind of amazing how with the news cycle being as kind of rapid as it is, and that's especially been the case uh over the last two weeks, so many vital stories get raised and then just get forgotten about,
including the fact that Ehud Baruch, who was the former defense minister and then the prime minister of Israel, and somebody who even once he left office has been central to all sorts of spying technology and Israeli uh entrepreneurship, really was close friends.
You could say best friends with Jeffrey Epstein long after he was convicted that first time.
And there's very little interest at this point any longer in even getting answers from the Trump administration about what the relationship was between Israeli government officials and the Mossad on the one hand and Jeffrey Epstein on the other, even though it's something so glaring as this,
uh, to say nothing of that uh accused uh Israeli pedophile who met all week with the NSA and the FBI in Las Vegas, got caught up in a kind of trap, uh pedophile lure trap, and for some reason was able to just go back to uh Israel never to return, at least as of yet, even though he's charged with crimes that put people in prison for a long time.
So it's just so much going on that I think um is is important, and yet it's very hard, even for those of those of us who do this as full-time work to keep track of it.
Now, before I get in a little bit deeper into these revelations, and I'm particularly interested in the part that includes Larry Ellison and his his son David Delison, given what they're about to do.
I just want to ask you about the leak itself, because I think maybe sometimes people hear, oh, this was engineered by Iranian intelligence or you know, uh groups that seem to have sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
And I know from the past, although I think people have learned the lesson that a lot of times people question the value of documents.
It's if it's obtained by people who may not have the best of motives.
That was, of course, what Democrats tried to do with the Hillary Clinton and the DNC mails to WikiLeaks was to say, oh, this was hacked by the Russians, which, even if true, didn't in any way impugn the uh value or or lessen the relevance of of what those emails that they obtained and released, if they did, revealed.
So in this case with Iranian intelligence or Iranian link groups, perhaps being the hackers who got these emails, have there been any legitimate questions raised about the authenticity of what's in them?
I mean, of course, that's you know, the initial question a journalist should ask.
And I should say that this tranche of emails has a precedent, which was the anonymous for justice leaks of, for example, the Israeli Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defense, and then the IDF emails uh over the past you know year or so.
And I spent an extreme amount of time going through those emails and just trying to pick holes and find information that might not be authentic.
At one point, I literally got the Israeli army to confirm that an obscure broadcast that was mentioned In one of these leaks that wasn't on the website to actually dig through their archives and find that yes, indeed, that that broadcast even existed.
So, you know, of course, there's a fear in the back of your mind as a journalist, you know, is this generated by a chat GPT or something like that to be very, you know, to look authentic.
But I will say that so far, not only has you know everything that I've been able to chase down turned out to be true, not a single um, you know, uh entity that I've reached out to for comment has actually denied the validity either.
And Israel is treating these these leaks, you know, very seriously.
And for example, the anonymous for justice leaks, uh, there was just a blanket um censorship of any reporting on them in Israel.
And so, in terms of maybe the ethics of dealing with leaked documents, like, look, I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I view a core trait of journalism is extracting signal from potential noise.
Like anybody can go read the New York Times and just cite, you know, the most prestigious outlet.
And there's gonna be, you know, things that are lost there.
But really, the skill of a journalist is to take potentially dubious sources and just you know, bubble up to the top or pan for gold, so to speak.
And so what I found that digging through these massive archives over the last few years, is that one, you learn a lot digging through them, and two, everything seems to check out and help you understand things more deeply.
And so, yes, I would say it's fair to have skepticism, but um I'm far from the only journalist reporting on these leaks.
Um, I I think we're gonna see more and more reporting on it.
Uh, as I mentioned earlier, Reason magazine uh reported on some of the Epstein leaks.
Intelligence Online, which is a very respected French outlet, has done a series of reports on, for example, the Barack Leaks and the Anonymous for Justice Leaks have been covered very heavily.
Uh, and then the Israeli press has been very heavily covering the uh the leaks from Handela.
I mean, if if anything, their argument has been that the information released by Handela is too accurate and too comprehensive, not that it's phony.
Right.
You know, it's interesting.
Uh obviously I've I've been somebody in my career who has worked on the unauthorized release or leak of massive digital archives in in several cases.
And for me, this is what Julian Assange, above all else, really pioneered and deserves immense credit for.
And I think in a lot of ways is why I consider him a genius, was that he was the one who, before anybody else, anticipated that in a digital world, this was going to be one of the main vulnerabilities of large power centers for how we could actually find out what they're doing in the dark, is through the ease of leaking huge amounts of digital information.
I always tell the story, I remember hearing it from Dan Ellsberg himself that when he wanted to release the Pentagon papers, leak the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, which showed that the US government was systematically lying to the American population about the Vietnam War.
One of his big difficulties was just like logistics.
Like, how do you copy, you know, how do you pilfer and and copy a volume of you know, 40,000 pages at the time, nothing was digital.
You had he literally went to the drugstore with a big bag of dimes and started Xeroxing, you know, pages of it, which is not good to do if you're trying to make sure you don't get caught.
And what WikiLeaks realized is the ease of transferring this data would be a key source for journalism, and many of the biggest stories have been that.
And along the way, we've developed mechanisms for how we can verify their authenticity in a way that people like me and you are willing to stake your professional reputation on by by reporting on them, because you you can confirm their authenticity.
I I remember that's how I felt very comfortable about confirming the authenticity of the Hunter Biden archive, when almost every media outlet, uh, except a few on the right was saying, oh, this seems fake, this is Russian disinformation.
You could, there are ways that you can immediately verify it.
Um, so the reason why I want to focus so much on what it reveals about the Ellison family, and this goes back, you know, not in the last couple of years, but even to 2015, is because we do have a lot of billionaires, including very pro-Israel billionaires who are very well known, especially if they become politically active, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, um and uh Bill Ackman and even P.O. Midiar and uh Sergei Brin, the co-founder of of Google, like there are a lot of billionaires who are pretty well known.
The Ellison family, despite Larry Ellison's insane amounts of of not just wealth, but power in terms of the data, has pretty much flown under the weather, uh under the radar.
And now we have this very family, him and his son at a crucial time buying up some of the most influential media outlets, not just CBS, but especially TikTok, which you can't deny the importance of, in a way that clearly seems designed to respond to their concerns about unraveling support for Israel in the in the United States in terms of public opinion.
So what is it that you can tell us?
Because I think a lot of people really assume that these efforts on the part of Israel to interfere in the United States politics and media started after October 7th.
But in the in reality, it's a long time in the making.
This is, I remember when we did the Snowden reporting, the NSA identified our great ally Israel as the single greatest and most effective threat for spying on the United States with their technology.
You know, we give them billions of dollars and yet they spy on us more effectively and intrusively than anybody.
What has what have these documents shown in general about Israeli influence campaigns over American public opinion about the involvement of David Ellison and the Ellisons in particular?
So it's two asides there.
One of the things that's fascinating in these leaks is that as you recall, I'm sure during the Snowden leaks, one of the major leaks was that the NSA had actually been spying on the Israeli Air Force's um cockpit feeds from its aircraft.
Um so you can actually see in some of these emails that news, you know, breaking to Israeli officials.
Um the other thing I would say about you know the sort of intellectual credit that that's owed to Assange, I would say yes, the I think the concept of scientific journalism is something that he was very big on.
And, you know, I think when WikiLeaks first started to compile a much larger historical archive of released diplomatic cables, much beyond cable gate, you know, for example, the the Kissinger cables, the, you know, et cetera, they really got a lot of heat from journalists who were saying, oh, well, do not do uh leaked materials anymore.
Are you just now kind of doing non-secretive things?
And and the response from Assange was really like, look, the point of this is just to understand things better, and to, you know, the fact that it's leaked isn't the point.
And so I think there's a lot of intellectual credit there in terms of the just the project of continually compiling more and more extensive archives of information that is, you know, shockingly not that widespread, um, even to this day.
Now, in terms of Ellison, yes, you're you're 100% right.
Um, of course, the the prehistory in terms of where a lot of the um the investigative journalism was much before October 7th was the you know boycott investment and sanctions movement.
And the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which had really led a lot of these sabotage campaigns.
And so what's shown in these emails um is that, for example, in 2015, David Ellison was really approached by Gantz through, you know, it's part of trying really to reach out to Larry Ellison.
And there's actually a lot of conversation with uh Safra Katz as well.
In fact, as a short aside, there's uh a TV show that she helped produce called The Women of the IDF, which is talked about a lot in these emails that recently finally published a decade later, and I bought a copy of the first episode, um, which was explicitly meant to be propaganda, which you see in the emails.
But Ellison himself was uh set in these emails to be explicitly interested in supporting the um the BDS movement and specifically Gantt's name the 12 Tribes Initiative is one of the things that that Ellison was interested in.
So as of December 2015, through his Sky Dance email with you know the logo and everything, Ellison responds to Gantz of yes, let's meet next year.
Now, I I can't tell you what happened after that email.
Um, but the fact that these conversations are taking place through the official corporate email addresses About a campaign that is known to have involved, you know, sabotage against uh the BDS movement, like spying on behalf of the Israeli government, you know, collaboration with Black Cube.
This is not, you know, just uh, you know, some tweets to put it that way.
Um, and it um I would say the the the broader context here is that the one of the things that's gone under the radar is that the initial funders that agreed were actually not American, and I think have received far too little scrutiny, which is the um Heather Reiseman, who's the CEO of Indigo Books in Canada.
She's a billionaire alongside her husband, Gerald Schwartz, who's the CEO of uh a private equity firm based out of Toronto named Onyx Corporation.
And that pair has was immensely close to Benigant's.
In fact, Gerald Schwartz was even on his list of seven, you know, personal references.
Um Gantz is shown in these emails to have consulted through one of the portfolio companies of Onyx Corporation, which is a Swiss packaging company that used to own what's now you know the SIG Sour brand of handguns and machine guns.
Um then the other very influential donor was uh Frank Lowy, who is the um, you know, a billionaire that's very famous in Australia for his kind of real estate empire, Westfield, but maybe more to this crowd, he's also the chairman, very longtime chairman of the Tel Aviv-based think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies, uh, which you know, uh a former head of Israeli intelligence was the executive director of for about a decade.
Um, and the the Institute for National Security Studies is shown in these emails to have been at the very core of this uh counter BDS program known as 12 tribes, which again to anybody who's sort of known this story for you know years would would know it probably by the name Israel Cyber Shield.
But the the other really shocking thing about these emails is that the founder of it is actually an Israeli journalist, uh, one of the the co-founders.
This is kind of what shocked me the most.
Uh it's a still prominent to this day, Israeli national security journalist known as Yoav, or his name is Yoev Limore.
Um, and just as you mentioned Epstein being you know extremely close friends with Barak, Lee-More seems to basically be like on the level of family uh with Gantz in these emails.
And I I would say that that was actually kind of the scariest thing to report on the other side of the case.
Which is so ironically because you know, one of the main Israeli arguments and justifications for murdering whatever journalists it feels like murdering in Gaza and elsewhere, is that these journalists aren't really journalists, they're working hand in hand with the ruling entity of Hamas.
And here you have in these emails all kinds of evidence of people who are presented as journalists from mainstream uh Israeli organizations who of course are working hand in hand directly with the Israeli government in a way that even for the United States would be extremely embarrassing, if not worse, to reveal.
Um Jack, I I need people to go in and read these these three articles on your Substack because there's so much detail.
Um, but I want to ask you about one in particular, kind of a uh more of a theory than a specific revelation, though there's a lot in here to support it.
So the the first article that you wrote uh from this archive, and again, this is a massive archive of leaked emails from the inbox of Benny Gance, a Israeli politician who has been up and all through the top echelon of the Israeli government, and still is.
And the title of this first article on September 11th that your Substack was exclusive, the new owner of CBS, meaning David Ellison, coordinated with former Israeli military chief to counter the country's critics according to leaked emails.
And then you follow that up with one on September 17th.
I think we have the title on the screen, which was Leak Indicates the Billionaire Funders of Israeli cyber campaign targeting anti-apartheid activists.
Now, this is a I've tried them at this before, and it's a little bit convoluted and difficult to express, but I think it's nonetheless so critical that I'm not I'm gonna always keep going back to it, which is in the wake of 2020 in George Floyd and even in the Me Too movement, we had this kind of very effective political movement inside American politics, but also American media that positions itself as opposed to this new form of wokism.
And there are a lot of people who branded themselves and built media outlets on the basis of this and became very wealthy, you know, saying our free speech is under attack, these people are forcing ideas on us, these are totalitarian.
I'm talking about people like Ben Shapiro and Barry Weiss and a lot of others, including myself, I was quite critical of this wokism and the effect it had on American discourse.
But one of the things that happened, if you go back and notice this, is that there are a lot of people for whom Israel had always been their primary political cause, certainly true of Ben Shapiro, Barry Weiss, going all the way back to her college days of Columbia, was obsessed with professors who she thought were too anti-Israel.
And these this anti-woe punditry and these new media outlets position themselves against wokism, were very focused on American college campuses.
And I always used to hear the critique, and I even kind of shared it myself: like, why are these adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s so obsessed with what 18 and 19 and 20-year-old, you know, freshmen and sophomore and juniors are doing on American college campuses in terms of their uh expression and their argument was look, we think that this is a very un-American sort of movement.
We're concerned this is going to spill over into once they get out of college, they're gonna go to workplace and it's and then politics, and this is the lead, and this is a very kind of oppressive movement, and we as classical liberals might be very weiss and Ben Shapiro, we love Americans, so we want to make sure to smash these this college activism.
This is before October 7th.
And of course, after October 7th, it became very overt that if you loved Israel, if your cause was Israel, your main focus became college campuses.
You wanted those people crushed and smashed.
You wanted them expelled and deported.
You wanted new uh hate speech laws imposed on college campuses, you wanted college professors of Ivy League schools fired a huge showing of power in the name of stopping anti-Israel protests.
And I always go back to, and these emails from 2015, people in Israel were for a long time very afraid of what was happening on American college campuses because they believed that this movement to boycott Israel,
which had its you know, ground zero uh centerpiece on American college campuses, the epicenter, was very similar to the boycott movement of South Africa that also grew out of college campus activism that took down the apart-time regime regime of South Africa, very close to Israeli ally in the 1980s, and they were petrified that this boycott movement was growing and would be a threat to Israel.
And they got Europe to implement laws basically criminalizing advocacy of boycotts of Israel in the US, it was a little harder.
Lots of laws got passed saying if you want a job with the government, you have to pledge you'll never boycott Israel.
This is all before October 7th, and especially billions of dollars being devoted to combating what they called radicalism on campus, meaning anti-Israeli speech on campus.
Have you been able to see both in general with these these email archives, but also with the Ellison, uh David Ellison's involvement specifically in 2015, this kind of recognition that they need to spend a lot more money and become a lot more organized to control American public opinion about Israel in general, but also college campus descent in particular.
Yeah, so the the notion of campuses being a central battleground was explicit in these uh these Gance emails in at least one place.
I don't think I could quote the specific email offhand, but but yeah, I mean, that's not particularly controversial that the BDS movement, you know, from Israel's perspective, was about combating college campuses.
But one maybe provocative, and I'm a little hesitant because I don't like to give too much weight to provocative statements, but I was reporting in person at a conference last year in DC, it's called the Special Competitive Studies Project.
And it was the biggest gathering of technology companies in DC ever at the time, according to the organizers, hosted by former Google CEO and you know, DECA billion Eric Schmidt.
And Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, was one of the speakers.
And he explicitly addressed the question You're referring to.
And you know, I'm paraphrasing here, of course, because this is offhand, but he said that, you know, people think that the US campuses, what's going on there with respect to the encampments, you know, protesting the Israeli occupation, that this is a side show.
And he said, no, this is the show.
And his argument was that if the US government can't suppress the moral protests, the anti-apartheid anti-genocide protests on college campuses, that then the US government will not be able to, in practice, deploy US troops in a war where there is loss of life.
So basically, the winning that campus war is actually necessary to win, you know, for the for the sort of uh freedom of action, so to speak, of the commander-in-chief of the US government.
So, you know, sitting next to him was a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
And so, you know, this was not uh a particularly you know controversial statement, let's say.
Um, I think it was kind of saying the quiet part out loud that, you know, in a country where there is democracy to suppress a sufficient amount of campus activism is actually seen as uh something that's required for the US military to be effective if that protest is contrary to US foreign policy goals.
Um in terms of a maybe a more substantive um response.
I actually think one of the more interesting topics here is the kind of complex relationship that's existed between the so-called network contagion research institute and then the uh foundation for individual uh rights and expression or fire, who, you know, in full disclosure is actually uh defended me in a lawsuit quite successfully in California.
Um and I bring it up because NCRI, you know, network contagion research institute is a very, you know, right-leaning uh very close with US police, especially the NYPD, uh, with US intelligence, very close with uh the Israeli government.
And in fact, with Seema Vaknan Gill, who I mentioned earlier is you know, former director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, and yet it's sort of been right in the world of of the uh the freedom of speech uh community.
And in fact, this really core report, which I think I even alluded to when I came on the show last, was um I think it was called the corruption of the American mind.
And it was cited multiple times in Congress, and its co-authors came from this institute for um uh, you know, it is GAP for the study of global anti-Semitism and policy, but it had co-authors both from NCRI and from fire, which was quite interesting to me.
And so there's certainly been a lot of like rubber meets the road here, but I I don't think we have the full picture of how some of that response has been as to sort of the squaring of freedom of speech with um, you know, Zionism to put a word on it.
Well, Jack, um, this is definitely a topic that we're going to follow, not just uh your reporting specifically, but also I think the Ellison family needs immense more attention, as do these deals that are going to consolidate control over some of our most influential media outlets in the hands of people who clearly have at least as much loyalty, if I would say more, to a foreign country than to our own.
And I know for a fact, and it's a lot of my most important reporting has come from digging through the side the kind of archives that you're digging through, that's often very thankless work.
It's very, very difficult work.
Um, and yet I think there's no more important work because that often is where the truth lies when powerful people are speaking in a way they think will never be heard or or made public.
Um, and I also know that a lot of your work has provoked threats and lawsuits, as you alluded to and and still do, uh, from a lot of the powerful people who you're exposing.
So I really want to encourage people to go to your Substack uh and follow your work and support it how you can, uh how they can.
We would love to have you back on the show, especially as these deals become more known and and the Ellison family's machinations become uh more transparent.
I hope you will keep up the great work and uh whatever you need.
Uh just let us know anytime, because I know your work is is producing a lot of anger, and thanks for taking the time To come on.
It's my pleasure and uh thank you so much, Glenn.
Absolutely have a good evening.
All right, so we just want to quickly talk about one additional news item that happened today that is just actually unbelievable if you really think about it.
And it's something we've covered before quite in depth, so I don't want to go too completely in depth, but I will just say that the defining political event of your lifetime, if you're above the age of 30 or 35,
and even if you're not, arguably still, because you were born into a world transformed by this event, was not just the attack on September 11th, but the very bizarre type of quote unquote war that was declared in its wake.
It wasn't a war against foreign countries, or it wasn't a war against particular uh uh parts of a country like a rebel group that had been attacking us.
It was a war against not just particular organizations, but really an idea.
It was a war against terrorism, like the concept of terrorism, which by the way is an extremely ill-defined idea.
I've been arguing that for decades, it really doesn't have any meaning.
It's basically means whatever the wielder of the term means, and and that's particularly disturbing because it's such a central part that term is of our uh laws and our political culture, and especially the power that the federal government has acquired.
And after 9-11, the idea was very clear, very simple, which was we were attacked, told the set told uh uh we were told by our government by a very specific terrorist group called Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, and military force was needed, and Congress authorized military force to go and wage war on Al-Qaeda and any groups that were associated with it.
And that gave George Bush the authority to go bomb the Taliban in order to find Osama bin Laden and find and bomb the uh Al-Qaeda anywhere else where it might be found.
And as these things tend to do over 20 years, the mission radically expanded.
Somehow that authorization to use military force, basically a declaration of endless war that got passed in the weeks following, uh, September 11th, only one person in Congress stood up and voted no, Sheila Jackson Lee, who was very brave and I think proved to be Prussian.
It became kind of an all-purpose, all-out license, blank check on the part of the US government to to go to war.
We ended up going to war and bombing groups that didn't even exist on 9-11.
Like various offshoots in Somalia, but also ASIS that didn't even exist.
And even now, President Trump in his ongoing bombing of I don't know, whatever small boats there are off the coast of uh Venezuela that he claims are drug boats, but no evidence is presented.
Who knows?
His argument for why he gets to do that, even though Congress didn't authorize it, is he declared these groups terrorist organizations and under this original UAMF authorization military force that kicked off the war on terror, he's entitled to wage war on terrorist groups, even though obviously nobody envisioned in 2001 it would be used against small speed boats in off the coast of Venezuela 24 years later.
The point is that our entire country transformed.
We went to war in multiple countries over the course of three successive administrations.
We dismantled so many of our core civil liberties, introduced radical legislation, like the Patriot Act that still exists and NSA warrantless eavesdropping on Americans that still exist, and the right of Guantanamo to us to hold people indefinitely in cages with no trial, which still exists in torture and CIA black sites and just the entire culture of authoritarianism at airports and in speech and on and on.
And the whole point of this was Al-Qaeda is this unique evil that we cannot survive as a country or live safely as a country until we eradicate Al-Qaeda.
This has been the propaganda for the last 25 years, as far as why we need to be a country endlessly at war, why the Pentagon's budget exploded, why the power of the U.S. deep state expanded in ways previously thought to be unthinkable.
Al-Qaeda was this the singular evil.
There's nobody that compared to Al-Qaeda in terms of their monstrous radical uh hatred for the United States and their willingness to carry out violence in the name of jihad.
Remember all that?
I'm sure you do.
Now, what is bizarre about that is that that war still hasn't ended.
We still bomb places like Somalia and Yemen, and oftentimes in the name of killing ISIS or killing terrorists or killing Al-Qaeda.
And yet today, the United States, after a few months of laying the groundwork for this, welcomed onto American soil.
We invited onto American soil, someone long considered to be one of the most savage and brutal and notorious Al-Qaeda operatives.
He was the head of Al-Qaeda in Syria, accused of all sorts of unspeakable crimes.
And he was also accused by the U.S. government of having ties to ISIS.
The group, after a decade when Al-Qaeda was no longer scary, we were told was the new Al-Qaeda, worse than Al-Qaeda.
He was in at the center of all of this.
To the point that as recently as December of 2024, not even a year ago, just nine months ago.
This is what the US government had on its website.
On the Justice Department website, as of December 2024, here you see the picture.
And at the top, it says, Stop this terrorist, Muhammad Al-Jawani was the name that he was known by then.
He has a totally different cleaned-up name now.
It said reward for justice, up to 10 million dollar reward for anyone helping the United States to locate him.
It says Muhammad al-Jalani, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, was known in a different name is the senior leader, is the senior leader.
So this is 10 months ago of the terrorist organization, the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, a senior leader of Al-Qaeda in Syria in December 2024.
Under his leadership, ANF has carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.
The U.S. government is offering a reward of up to 10 million dollars for information about Al-Jalani.
Absolute confidentiality is assured, and relocation may be available if you have information.
Please contact us.
So this was not even a year ago.
He was considered one of the worst Al-Qaeda fugitives, one of the worst terrorist monsters, even with ties to ISIS.
Now, one of the things that made U.S. policy in Syria, starting with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's campaign and its obsession with funding a CIA dirty war to change the regime in Syria to dislodge the Assad regime, was that Assad was not a radical Muslim government.
In fact, it protected religious minorities.
It considered itself at war with the same terrorist groups that we did with Al-Qaeda and with ISIS.
It was very threatened by those groups.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS hated the Assad regime precisely because they were Alawites and Christians and closely linked to that community and were not running Syria as any sort of under Sharia or Muslim state.
And in fact, we would oftentimes the United States would pick up people we suspected of terrorism or radical preaching in Europe under a kidnapping program.
We'd kidnap people off the streets of Milan and elsewhere, and we would send them to our ally, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who also hated Islamic jihad, jihad and al-Qaeda radicals and terrorists, and they would brutally interrogate them, meaning torture them on our behalf, both Egypt and Syria.
We worked with Syria to do that in the war on terror.
We use his monstrous tactics.
He was somebody who also supported the destruction of Al-Qaeda.
And that was what was always so strange about the Obama administration's obsession with removing Bashar al-Assad, given that we were in the middle of the war on terror, and if anything, he was an ally of it, certainly not a supporter of these terrorist groups.
What Bashar al-Assad was was an ally of Iran, and he helped this kind of network that Fed Hezbollah, so he was a threat or an enemy to Israel.
That's why Netanyahu had always been obsessed with getting rid of Assad, like he did Saddam Hussein and the leadership of Iran and Gaddafi, all of which we got rid of for him.
But it never made sense exactly why Obama unleashed a billion-dollar a year dirty war, CIA war that destroyed Syria just enough to destroy the country, but never enough to really get rid of Assad.
And one of the bizarre parts of this war, remember, this is 2012, so just a decade after 9-11, was that in Syria we were fighting alongside our allies Al-Qaeda and even ISIS, both of whom were trying to achieve what we were trying to achieve, which was remove Assad for their own reasons.
And we would send huge amounts of weapons to the rebels, the moderate rebels, because we wanted to arm the Syrian opposition to Assad, and huge amounts of it would fall into the hands of Al Qaeda.
We were arming Al Qaeda in Syria, which was supposed to be the grand, the great worst enemy we ever had, that we had to re restructure our country to defeat.
And here's an email, a State Department email that ended up being leaked as part of Chelsea Manning's leaking of State Department documents and other documents to WikiLeaks, which they published, which was an email written by Jake Sullivan, who became Joe Biden's national security advisor, really ran the U.S. government foreign policy for Joe Biden when he was mentally incapacitated along with Anthony Blinken.
But at the time he was a close Hillary Clinton aide and he worked at the State Department.
And he wrote a memo to Hillary Clinton about Syria that was leaked.
And here you see it's a kind of notorious email where he said, hey, by the way, see the last item.
Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.
So in the middle of this supposedly existential war to destroy Al Qaeda, we went off on this multi-billion dollar, extremely bloody and expensive covert CIA tangent war to remove Assad from power in a way that never made sense, certainly from the propaganda we bring fed.
In fact, we were allies with Al Qaeda now in that effort.
And then finally, this effort paid off for a lot of different reasons.
Last year, when Jelani led his militants and swept through Syria and eventually drove Assad out of power to Russia in the dream of getting rid of Assad, the Israeli American dream and the Turkish dream of getting rid of Assad finally came to fruition at the same time.
Somebody that we considered to be one of the most monstrous terrorists, Al Qaeda terrorist operatives on the planet, emerged and seized control of this incredibly important country in the middle of the Middle East, Syria.
And you would think, based on everything we heard, that the United States and Israel would be alarmed or panicked by this.
Al Qaeda was now in charge of Syria, but that isn't what happened.
Netanyahu boasted of the crucial role Israel played in getting rid of Assad and bringing what was then Al Jalani, the terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head to power.
And the United States started to do the same.
The West started to do the same.
Macron welcomed him.
He got a change of closing away from his Islamic warrior clothes.
They put him in Armani suits.
They changed his name.
They got rid of Al Jalani.
Al Jalani doesn't exist anymore.
He now has a name that's much more amenable to Western audiences, and they began to treat him as a statesman within a very short period of time.
This is why the word terrorism has no meaning.
It just changes from one day to the next.
Here was the U.S. Department of State in August of 2025.
so this was just about a couple weeks ago Trump administration reaffirms its commitment to not reward terrorism and to revoke the visas of Palestinian officials ahead of the UNGA So the Trump administration was saying, like, look, we're as devoted to the war on terrorism as ever.
By that we don't mean, though, that we're gonna punish Al Qaeda.
Remember the country that attacked us, that we were told wanted to destruction.
What it means is we're gonna prevent Palestinians from entering our country to come to the UN as countries around the world recognize Palestine as a state.
They're barred because they're the terrorists, the Palestinians, the people who are fighting against Israel.
But Al Qaeda, they're more than welcome.
And this Al-Qaeda leader is now on American soil.
Imagine being a young American who was told that you had to go to war overseas and risk your life and watch thousands of your fellow service member die, die because you had to defeat Al-Qaeda.
We had to invade Iraq for that.
We were told Iraq wasn't in bed with Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, all throughout the Middle East.
It was all about destroying Al-Qaeda.
And yet here today, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, September 22nd, which is today, 10 months after the Justiment still said this is one of the worst terrorists in the world, announced this quote, I met with Syrian President Al-Shara, that's his new name.
He has that new Amarni suit, about our shared goals for a stable and sovereign Syria and ongoing efforts to bring security and prosperity to all Syrians.
We also discussed implementing President Trump's historic announcement on sanctions relief and the importance of Israel-Syria relations.
So Ribio is saying, like, look, one of the main reasons we're so happy that Al-Qaeda took over Syria is because we can basically bribe them, Al-Qaeda, to no longer be a threat to Israel the way Assad was.
That's what this is about.
One of the main generals who led the war on terror, especially under Obama, Obama loved this general.
This is David Petraeus.
He has a PhD from Princeton.
He was one of these cerebral generals, loves covert operations, wrote about counter-insurgency, the kind of general that Obama loves.
And he was in charge of the war on terror under Obama and talking about the evils of Al Qaeda, and yet he himself personally welcomed Al Jalani, whose name is Ahmad al-Shara, president of Syria, the honorable president of Syria.
You had a U.S. general leading the war on terror, welcoming with open arms and heaping praise on American soil at one of these like prestigious think tank conferences.
Not to confront him about his past, not to ask him whether or not there's still massive sectarian violence in Syria under Al-Qaeda and these more extreme militants who don't tolerate religious diversity, slaughtered Alawites and others in Syria.
Not to confront him about that, but to basically just embrace him as like one of our closest friends.
Again, this isn't like 20 years ago, if he were a terrorist, and then he like got older and you know renounced his ways.
This was something that, as recently as 10 months ago, the US government said was one of the worst human beings on the planet, a monster, a terrorist.
And here's David Petraeus with Ahmad Al-Shara, the president of Syria.
And I should say again, this is not somebody who just like emerged as president of Syria.
Now we have to deal with him.
We played a critical role in helping him get there and installing him.
We knew what we were doing in Syria was in an alliance with Al-Qaeda.
And now Al-Qaeda runs Syria.
And here is part of the video with David Petraeus, five-star general, who, by the way, had to resign in disgrace.
You may remember, he leaked some of the most sensitive documents inside the government of the highest levels of top secrecy to his mistress.
He was married, but he had a mistress who was writing a higiography on her, on him, and he gave her the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has so she could write a book praising him more.
Got a little slap on the wrist.
He's not an exile like Snowden.
He didn't stay in prison like Assange.
These were the most sensitive secrets leaked for the most selfish reasons, not to help Americans understand the truth or to blow the whistle, but just to be self-serving.
He's back in power, back in good standing in Washington, no big deal, and here he is, warmly greeting the Syrian president.
Salam alaykum say it right.
Alhan Wasalin.
Uh and Sharuf Nasidi.
As you know, Mr. President, I spent over thirty-free.
Imagine going back five years in time or ten years in time and saying in just a few years, David Petraeus is going to welcome it with open arms on American soil, one of the most brutal and savage leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria and say Salamalakum, and then proceed to say this.
I was 37 years in the U.S. Army, and I was a soldier, not a diplomat.
So I hope you'll forgive me if I speak with the directness of the old soldier that I am, as I get the first question out of the way.
Because the fact is that we were on different sides when I was commanding the surge in Iraq.
You were, of course, uh detained by U.S. forces for some five years, including again when I was the four-star there.
And here you are now as the president of Syria, which your forces liberated from the murderous Bashar al-Assad regime to participate in your first UN General Assembly as the president of your country.
Earlier this year, you met the president of the United States among many other world leaders.
Please help us understand how you got from Al-Qaeda and Iraq 20 years ago to where you are today, Syria's head of state on stage in New York City.
He wasn't Al-Qaeda 20 years ago.
He was Al-Qaeda according to the US government 10 months ago.
That's what I mean.
I mean, people change.
Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist, used violence, wasn't prison, and then he came out and became a man of great peace, preaching reconciliation and forgiveness.
That took many, many years.
The US government called this guy a savage Islamic Al-Qaeda terrorist linked to ISIS just 10 months ago.
And nothing changed other than he's now our puppet and Israel's puppet in Syria.
I don't just welcome you.
Oh, we didn't uh feel about the same.
We were in the combat, and then we now move to the discourse.
We moved from war to discourse.
Uh mental.
Yes, sir.
Someone who went through war is one who knows most the importance of the world.
First, the past has its rules when it comes down to traditions And uh rule and uh traditions and the customs of that phase.
When we want to uh subject it uh bothering the Mayor that when we want to judge it, we have to judge it based on these phases of the Kwanian.
We cannot judge the past based on the rules of today and cannot judge uh today based on the rules of the past today.
Okay, that's all very convenient.
So everything's just forgiven.
By the way, since he has assumed the presidency, Israel has relentless bombed Syria, basically destroyed his entire military, has stolen land from Syria, just taken it, and he hasn't uttered a peep in protest.
And when asked about that, are you okay with what Israel is doing?
He keeps saying, my focus isn't Israel, those aren't our enemies.
So we took a country that had been aligned with Iran, was very hostile to Israel, even though it protected religious minorities in Syria, was our partner in in fighting Al-Qaeda, and we replaced him with someone who until very recently was considered to be a savage uh Al-Qaeda terrorist because he promised that he would cease all hostility toward Israel and would serve American interests in Syria, a crucial geopolitical uh place in that region.
He's now even talking about joining the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel.
Here's part of what uh David Petraya said to him as well.
We're nationalists, certainly.
Yes, a degree of political Islam.
Uh, but but frankly, what you have done uh since toppling the Bijfar al-Assad regime has validated uh what it is that I assessed it, and I was criticized by the way, quite considerably.
I just want you to tell you, really, on behalf of all the people who are here, uh, that this conversation has truly filled me with enormous hope.
Uh it has been very, very heartening and illuminating.
Um, your vision is is powerful and clear.
Uh your demeanor itself is is very impressive as well.
And so, again, on behalf of all here and all those that are watching virtually and so forth, we thank you for sharing your vision today.
We wish you strength and wisdom in the difficult work ahead.
We obviously hope for your success, inshallah, because at the end of the day, your success is our success.
Thank you very much, Mr. President.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And then finally, just here, just to end it on a very inspirational note.
Here's David Petrayus expressing deep personal concern about how Al Jalani, I'm sorry, President Al Shrah is doing.
So this next one is about you personally.
Um, how are you holding up under all this pressure?
Um to do some thinking.
Uh are you getting enough sleep at night?
Uh again, I've been there.
Uh, and it is so very, very hard.
And are you taking your vitamins?
Um, are you getting massages?
Do you need some uh wellness care, some self-care?
Are you taking time off for self-care to make sure that there's some time for Al-Shara too, for President Al-Shara, and for Al Julani?
Are you making sure that you're getting this is somebody that we had accused of the most horrific and savage crimes committed not back at 20 years ago, but over the course of the last 20 years since he's uh ascended to power.
There has been, of course, some stabilization of Syria with our help and Israel help, but also immense amount of massacre and slaughter of exactly the time that you would expect for militants like this, Al Qaeda, to carry out in a country where there had been for a long time a lot of Nos Muslim communities that had been protected and had thrived.
And you can justify all you want, the kind of real politic here, like, okay, well, you know, as Kissinger used to say, he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard, which is pretty much the essence of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, meaning we installed the most savage and brutal dictators if they serve our interests.
I don't think that's served us very well.
I also think that only Americans have been subject to the propaganda that we fight for freedom and democracy and oppose tyranny when in fact we love tyrannical leaders, the more savage the better, as long as they carry out our wishes.
Maybe you can justify that and say, yeah, we should be doing that.
We should be calculatingly exploiting people who will serve our interests.
But I also hope that it will get you to realize that although this term terrorist packs an extremely powerful emotional punch, it's a conversation stopper.
And worse than that, it gets people to acquiesce to whatever power the government wants.
Trump blows something up and says, oh, yeah, those are just terrorists, and everyone just tears and nods, like, yeah, of course, we want to kill terrorists.
That word, the ability to apply that word, is incredibly powerful.
It's gotten us to give up so many of our rights.
Hey, we do have to spy on you without warrants.
Don't worry, we're not interested in you.
We're just trying to stop the terrorists.
But of course, you know, the terrorists of the 1990s and 2000s in Afghanistan, the Mujadin and Al Sama bin Qa Osama bin Laden and that whole predecessor, were invited over the United States in the 1980s and heralded as freedom fighters because we were arming them and their Islamic radicalism was devoted toward repelling the invader of the Soviet Union Afghanistan, and we love them, and then they became terrorists when they turned it against us using the same tactics.
And there's so many other examples of that, where the terrorist of today becomes our freedom fighter tomorrow, and vice versa.
And what I hope you take from all this, aside from the disgrace of all the people who died and fought and then believed in the cause of destroying Al-Qaeda, only to see Al-Qaeda now march onto American soil and be embraced and praised by the people who led the troops who lost their lives in this war on terror, to the point where he's asking if he's getting enough sleep and a comfortable bed.
Aside from that, I hope that you will just understand that the word terrorist is far from a word of precision.
It is a term of propaganda utterly drained of all objective meaning, which is what makes it so powerful.
The more malleable a term is in the government's hand, the more powerful it is as a tool to get them to induce people to think what they want just by applying this term or withdrawing it at will and watching one of the most notorious Al-Qaeda leaders, who had a $10 million bounty on his head as recently as 10 months ago, now being heralded as some sort of Nelson Mandela type or model of good governance.
Vividly illustrates the fraud at the heart of American foreign policy and domestic policy and discourse for the last 25 years, more than all the articles and speeches I've given and talks I've given on this topic.
And so I really think it's worth watching as more and more of these types of people are integrated into American political life as no longer our mortal enemies who are subhuman, but as critical allies of ours carrying out agendas, not just for the United States, but especially for Israel in the Middle East.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, we're hoping to get Tucker Carlson on our show tomorrow night.
We are working hard to finalize that.
We've made some progress.
Hopefully, we'll have those logistics figured out.
We can have months to talk about a wide range of issues not just the Charlie Kirk Memorial but all sorts of other things pertaining to it the fallout of it free speech foreign policy a whole bunch of other things as well always great to talk to Tucker and we needless to say uh want to just let you know that system update is available in podcast form as well you can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify Apple and all of the major podcasting platforms where if you rate review and follow our program it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
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