Glenn reacts to Netanyahu's UN speech, the Tom Homan investigation, Trump's comments about Israel annexing the West Bank, and more. -------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Friday, September 26th. | |
| 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. | |
| As we do every Friday night, we are going to devote our program this evening to a QA session where we take questions from that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our locals community and then answer them. | |
| We, as always, have a wider range of topics to cover. | |
| We're going to try and get to as many of them as we can with the sole provisor that I do have to end the show a little bit earlier than normal, maybe a few minutes before the hour, because I'm going to appear on Jesse Waters' Fox program at 8 o'clock p.m. near the top of the show, I think, to talk about the indictment of Jim Comey. | |
| So we'll try and speed things up as much as we can. | |
| Quick couple of reminders. | |
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| For now, welcome to another episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| you All right, so every time we do a QA session, I used to always explain what it was for the first few weeks when people didn't understand it, and then I started realizing people understood it. | |
| For some reason I kept giving this like long preface. | |
| And then I started to say, you know what? | |
| We don't really need a preface. | |
| Let's just dive right into the questions. | |
| So even though I just gave a little bit of a preface, I want to congratulate myself for keeping it very short, and we're gonna just dive right in to the questions, especially since time is a little bit limited tonight for the reason I just explained. | |
| The first question is from Kat Rika, who asked the following quote, why did Donald Trump vow to prevent Israel from annexing the West Bank? | |
| He couldn't care less about Palestinians, so why the pledge? | |
| And how impressive was that Netanyahu's speech at the UN in terms of the walkout, which we'll get to in a minute. | |
| All right, so for those of you who didn't see it, Trump was in the Oval Office and was asked whether he would allow or support the Israelis to annex the West Bank, which is an explicit goal of the Israeli government. | |
| It's not just to destroy all of Gaza and drive the Palestinians out so they can take Gaza for themselves, but at least as much, probably even more so. | |
| They believe that the what the rest of the entire world calls the West Bank and what they and my kuckabi call uh uh Judean Samaria are the God-given, is the God-given land to Israel, even though it was always intended to be part of the two-state solution, part of Palestine. | |
| It has become impossible, essentially, for there to be a two-state solution because the Israelis have not only permitted but encouraged so much Israeli settlement in the West Bank that those settlers would never leave, even if the Israeli government ordered them to. | |
| When the Israelis wanted to leave Gaza in 2005, there were settlements, Israeli settlers in Gaza who used violence and had to be forcibly removed. | |
| They didn't leave Gaza, they blockaded Gaza, they controlled Gaza, but they wanted to physically remove it. | |
| That would be the same thing would happen in the West Bank, but to a far greater extent. | |
| So even if the Israeli government ever wanted to remove those settlers, they wouldn't be able to do so. | |
| And there's no doubt the current government has no intention of doing so. | |
| In fact, they want to take over the entire West Bank and formally annex it. | |
| And actually, some Trump officials earlier this year had said, including my cockabee, that they believed, they don't even use the term what the West Bank. | |
| They call it Judea and Samari, like the religious fanatics in Israel who believe God gave them that land, that that land belongs to Israel. | |
| A complete reversal of decades of foreign policy consensus in the West and in the United States for both parties, that not only does the West Bank belong to the Palestinians, not only is it a crucial component in the two-state solution, but that the Israelis are harming American interests the more they settle the West Bank because it makes a two-state solution impossible, which keeps anti-Americanism, uh anti-American sentiment in the region high. | |
| So Net Yao has been very clear that he intends to take over the West Bank, as have his most extremist ministers, but even the ones not considered as extreme are pretty clear on that as well. | |
| And while the world has rightly paid attention to Gaza, there has been increasing efforts to steal land from the Palestinians. | |
| They're constantly injecting people from their homes, just stealing their homes, they're ejecting them from entire villages and stealing those. | |
| It's backed up by the IDF, which kills Palestinians who are in the West Bank, who have lived there for a long time, some of whom had to flee there when Israel was formed in 1948. | |
| And it's clearly a key objective of the Israeli government, arguably the key objective, which is to annex the West Bank and officially make it part of Israel. | |
| Trump was asked about that in the Oval Office, and with I think some vehemence that surprised some people. | |
| It didn't surprise me for reasons I'll explain in a second, but I think it surprised some people. | |
| He not only said that the United States government opposes annexation of the West Bank by Israel. | |
| He said, I won't allow it. | |
| He said, I'm not going to allow it. | |
| So it wasn't even he said, my position is or the government's position is we don't think Israel should do it. | |
| Trump personally invested himself in this issue by saying, I won't allow it, and made clear that the boss and the relationship, at least in terms of how Trump described this particular issue, not saying this is the reality, but Trump wanted it to be known that the ultimate decision maker, the boss, is Trump and not Netanyahu. | |
| That was clearly very important to him. | |
| I think he obviously hears the criticism a lot that he does Israel's bidding, which is a very valid criticism of Donald Trump, as it was of Joe Biden and most other presidents, going back at least to Bill Clinton. | |
| And I think he's self-conscious about that. | |
| But also in general, he wants to kind of always show the dominant role as occupied by himself in all international relations. | |
| And he understands that the Israelis are dependent on the United States, and so part of it came from that. | |
| And I think the surprise, the surprising aspect of it was by putting it that way, it was pretty much of an uh an embarrassment of a humiliation of sorts to not just the Israeli government, but Netanyahu specifically, because Trump specifically said, I'm not going to allow it, meaning it can't happen unless I say so, and I'm not going to allow it. | |
| So a lot of people were surprised because Trump has been extraordinarily subservient to the desires and agenda of Netanyahu and the Israeli government. | |
| He promised in the 2024 campaign that he would be. | |
| One of his biggest donors was Miriam Adelson, who Trump himself says has only one issue she ever talks about or cares about, which is Israel. | |
| He promised in a couple of speeches, he said, we're going to make America great again and we're going to make Israel great again. | |
| It's not like he hit it during the election, but I think some of his supporters ended up being quite surprised by how captive he ended up being and continues to be to the Israeli agenda. | |
| So this is a chance for Trump to say, this is not something I'm allowing. | |
| And I think a lot of people, as expressed in this question, had confusion because clearly Trump doesn't care about the Palestinian people or the right of self-determination. | |
| He's talking about building, you know, resorts with Netanyahu in Gaza on the beachfront property that will be owned by Jared Kushner. | |
| Clearly, he's not, doesn't stay up at night worrying about the sovereignty or the rights of self-determination for Palestinians. | |
| So why is he so vehemently opposed to Israeli annexation of the West Bank to the point where he would, again, not just say, oh, this is our policy, which means it's subject to change, but would say it in such a personalized way. | |
| Like, I, Donald Trump will not allow that, which means if it happens, his word in that regard, in terms of a personal guarantee that this will never happen because I won't let it, will be worthless. | |
| And I don't think Trump takes his word very seriously when he says things like we're gonna get a deal done with Russia, with Iran, so we don't have to bomb them. | |
| I don't think he takes that seriously. | |
| But when he makes it personal, like I, Donald Trump, I'm the boss, and I'm not gonna allow it. | |
| I think he would have to be pushed pretty hard and pretty far to be willing to abandon that. | |
| And that did leave the question. | |
| Why was he so invested in this? | |
| Why is he so vehemently opposed to annexation of the West Bank? | |
| I think the answer is I don't want to say self-evident or clear, but I think once you think about it and view it from this perspective, it becomes fairly clear, which is that Donald Trump does live his love Israel, but he also really loves rich Arabs in that region, with whom he and his family and the United States in general can do business. | |
| He's very open about his extreme affection for the Saudi royal family, for the thugs and tyrants who run the United Arab Emirates, for the ruling families of Qatar. | |
| He is pursuing a lot of business there, both on behalf of the United States and his family and himself. | |
| And he has heaped lavish praise on them. | |
| His daughter, Tiffany Trump just married one of those kinds of people from that region, namely a capitalist from Lebanon. | |
| He's Arab, and he is a Lebanese Christian, but he is from a family of business people. | |
| And Trump talks probably about his son-in-law, he likes Arabs from that region who aren't the kind who, in his mind, want to create conflict or pursue war or terrorism. | |
| I'm talking about Trump's worldview here, but instead just want to do business. | |
| Want to sell lots of oil, want to use their sovereign funds to invest in crypto, want to grow the economy. | |
| You know, these are people who are unbelievably wealthy and exert essentially absolutist power within their own countries, and Trump really admires that. | |
| So he cares about the views of the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, to some extent the Jordanians, and maybe the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainians, but principally those three Persian Gulf states. | |
| And he also cares a great deal in terms of his legacy about the Abraham Accords, which he talks about frequently in terms of being one of the signature foreign policy successes in his mind of his first term, where those countries got on a path toward normalizing relations with Israel, and whether you're for them or against them, whether you think it's a good or bad thing, there is no doubt that having the Saudis and Emiratis and Qataris and followed by the Jordanians and the rest of them normalize relations with Israel would be transformative for the region. | |
| I'm not saying it would be good or bad, but it would certainly be a significant historical event. | |
| Trump understands that he very much wants to preserve those Abraham Accords. | |
| He wants to expand them, in fact, to include the new leader of Al-Qaeda, the old leader of Al-Qaeda, who's now the president of Syria, who is welcome onto American soil, in part because Trump wants him to normalize relations with Israel on behalf of Syria to expand the Abraham Accords. | |
| And the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Qataris are very emphatic. | |
| And I don't think they're just emphatic publicly, but I see they from everything I know understanding and know they're very emphatic privately, meaning for real, that any annexation of the West Bank by Israel would cause them to terminate all relations with Israel, | |
| including rescinding the Abraham Accords and utterly renouncing any attempts to normalize relations with the Israelis in the future, whether it's because they truly are offended at the idea that Israel would expand its territory by annexing the West Bank, forever putting to uh rest any hope for a two-state solution. | |
| I mean, there is no hope for a two-state solution really, but that would make it official. | |
| Or whether more likely it's because they are afraid, even though they're totalitarian rulers, even the most entrenched totalitarian rulers are vulnerable to popular uprising. | |
| I mean, you just look at history over and over and you see that. | |
| And the idea that they could maintain relations with Israel while Israel did something as extreme as annex the West Bank and take it for itself. | |
| I think it's something that they're genuinely afraid of, that they don't think their populations would tolerate that. | |
| That would put their countries at the risk of instability, could even put their entrenched rule and power at risk because that instability can spread. | |
| They suppress a lot of that dissatisfaction with how close these countries are to the United States, despite the United States support for Israel. | |
| But that would be a bridge too far. | |
| And I think Trump takes very seriously when the leaders of the Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the United Arab Emirates pick up the phone and call him and say, this is our red line. | |
| You cannot let the Israelis cross this line or everything will be undone. | |
| And like I said, I think he not only sees the preservation of those relationships to be important geo strategically, but also financially and economically for the United States, for himself, for his family, for his friends who do a lot of business, a lot of business in those regions. | |
| Jared Kushner has massive venture capital funds and investment funds and hedge funds in which the Saudis and the Emiratis invest their sovereign wealth. | |
| There are all kinds of deals with the Trump organization. | |
| There's money flying around cryptocurrencies and crypto funds, in which Trump and a lot of his friends and associates have a great deal of interest. | |
| He cares about those relationships for whatever reasons. | |
| And those relations would absolutely be jeopardized if the Israelis are permitted to annex the West Bank. | |
| Now, how important that is that Israel formally annexes the West Bank, you can actually debate that because the reality is the Israelis are annexing it. | |
| They're in the process of annexing it. | |
| They already have annexed effectively large parts of it. | |
| They control the entire West Bank through military occupation that's brutal and savage. | |
| And annexation almost at this point is kind of like a on the one hand, it's just a symbolic formality. | |
| But the Israelis care about it because they want that land formally to be part of Israel. | |
| And that region cares about it because that is a line that signals that Israel has no more limits, that they are not just an aggressive power, but an expansionist power, and that there's not even any pretense any longer that anyone's working toward sovereignty of a for for the Palestinians. | |
| I think Trump understands that because he's been hearing from those people who he cares about, and that's why he made that such an emphatic statement. | |
| That's my view very strongly about why that happened. | |
| Now, as far as Benjamin who's speaking at Benjamin Netanyahu speaking today at the UN General Assembly, as probably most of you have heard, but maybe some of you haven't, Benjamin Netanyahu, who went and spoke there today, as several world leaders have been giving speeches over the course of this week. | |
| He was the first scheduled speaker in the morning. | |
| So as a result, because he was the first speaker in the morning, some delegations hadn't yet arrived. | |
| Others just boycotted and said in advance were boycotting and just didn't attend. | |
| And then a lot of countries, talking about dozens, waited for him to start, waiting for waiting for him to ascend to the podium, and then very deliberately to make a point dramatically, all got up together and walked out. | |
| A lot of them. | |
| And here's the video of that. | |
| The podium, getting ready to speak, and you just start seeing droves of diplomats and UN representatives and countries and delegations by the dozens. | |
| getting up and leaving you hear some boos and whistles and they just keep streaming out one after the next and you see the presiding officer of the general assembly trying to take get order So many of them were walking out that it was kind of like a line formed that took a while for them to exit. | |
| And the whole time Trump is uh Natya was up at the podium, you know, speaking to an increasingly emptying chamber. | |
| Um, because there aren't many many people left after all of these countries uh had their delegations walk out to protest, what they all consider to be like most genocide experts in the West and human rights organizations considered to be Israel's genocide in Gaza. | |
| This is what they're protesting. | |
| And so you see here, if you can see it on the screen, the UN General Assembly is I wouldn't say entirely empty, but largely empty and obviously uncomfortable, and Rattle Netanyahu stood up at the podium and waited for that to end. | |
| And by the time he was done speaking, there weren't that many countries in the in the in the uh chamber. | |
| Now, that was a pretty significant protest. | |
| It wasn't just a few countries. | |
| And I saw some Israeli officials trying to provoke Americans into thinking that this was some hostile act by saying these were only Arab and African countries. | |
| And there were a lot of countries from Africa and a lot of countries, Arab countries that did walk out on him, including countries that the United States is either allied with or has interest in or wants to improve relations with or is competing with China over. | |
| But there were also significant countries outside of the Arab world in the uh and Africa, including many Latin American countries, including the largest Latin American country, which is Brazil, many other countries in Latin America as well. | |
| So the idea that this is confined to some small part of the world, which is how it was propagandized by the Israelis and their loyalists and US media is a transparent joke. | |
| The large part of the world, the large majority of the world is opposed to the Israeli destruction of Gaza and increasingly to Israel itself. | |
| And you can see that in General Assembly votes, it's overwhelming when it comes to Israel. | |
| You basically have the United States and Israel that vote no on these resolutions that pass overwhelmingly. | |
| And they have a couple of allies that vote with them, like Argentina because Malay worships Israel. | |
| And then Hungary sometimes votes with them. | |
| And then that's pretty much it. | |
| You have all those tiny little islands like the Marshall Islands that were all part of the coalition of the willing in 2002 and three that George Bush and Dick Cheney bullied or bribed into joining the coalition, and they just vote with the U.S. and in return get whatever benefits they get, like the Marshall Islands and Paulu and those kind of Pacific Islands. | |
| But it's basically like 10, 11 votes at this point, it's reduced to. | |
| Led by Israel and the United States, which are rogue nations compared to the rest of the world, opposed to this. | |
| Speaking of attempts to propagandize what happened here in the most brazen and transparent way imaginable. | |
| I'm going to show you what the network, the news network that I'm about to appear on in about 35 minutes, tried to do today. | |
| So one of the things that it was a very defiant speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, very typical, you know, basically saying, we don't care, screw you. | |
| We're not going to allow you to force us to live with terrorism, whatever. | |
| But he was speaking to a largely empty chamber. | |
| And yet there was a passage in his speech that Netanyahu loves to talk about, where he loves to make jokes about pagers, the pagers that were sent into Lebanon that exploded. | |
| We were told it killed only Hezbollah terrorists. | |
| In fact, it killed a huge numbers of innocent people, maimed a lot of children. | |
| But it's something that Israel supporters in the West got so excited about, you know, just like melodramatized. | |
| Like, look at how how conniving and cunning Israeli intelligence is. | |
| No one can do this like Israel. | |
| And it kind of had this like James Bond feel to it, and they got all excited and watching the limbs of kids be blown off as something that Israel loyalists have demonstrated they don't care at all about. | |
| So Ben Netanyahu had this very smug passage where he made reference to the pager, and Fox News described it this way: quote, new. | |
| This is Fox News Suite, new cheers erupt at the UN as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recalls the country's pager operation against Hezbollah, quote, remember those beepers? | |
| The pagers, we paged Hezbollah, and believe me, they got the message. | |
| So if you aren't watching this, and you are foolishly relying on Fox News to tell you the truth about Israel, which you should never do, you would have thought that there's this huge chamber of countries, the countries of the world gathered and assembled at the UN, and they all just kind of like erupted in uncontrolled applause. | |
| This very raucous celebration when Netanyahu mentioned these pagers, when in fact he was speaking to a largely empty chamber, and you can hear on the audio, which we're about to, we're up to show the video, and you can hear in the audio, you hear like scattered clapping. | |
| It sounds like about eight people are clapping in total. | |
| And then the camera zooms in on the Israeli delegation that's trying to make as much noise as possible by all clapping because they're basically the only ones that are doing that. | |
| I'm sure the Trump officials there were also screaming and cheering for Netanyahu because that's what Trump officials do while in the presence of the Israeli leader, it's what Biden officials did as well. | |
| But other than that, there's basically nobody cheering it. | |
| I just want you to, I want to show you the reality of what happened, and then contrast it with how Fox described it. | |
| You remember those beepers? | |
| The pagers? | |
| We paged Kuzbala. | |
| And believe me, they got the message. | |
| And thousands of terrorists. | |
| Thousands of terrorists. | |
| So there you see about one, two, three, four, five, six men from the Israeli delegation who are trying to clap as loudly as possible. | |
| And then you hear like a couple of people doing that woo sound. | |
| You know, like when you try and make it seem like the audience is dizzy and disoriented with glee over what the speaker is saying, and that's pretty much it. | |
| It's like very scattered. | |
| And Fox News says, cheers erupt at the UN. | |
| I mean, I guess technically, cheers did erupt. | |
| They erupted from like the six guys who are part of the Israeli delegation and probably the six people who are part of the American delegation. | |
| And that was pretty much it. | |
| Um, here's just the end of that, just to show you the last part of it. | |
| Drop to the ground. | |
| So there you have it. | |
| I mean, yeah, I think you can see what the vast majority of the world actually thinks about Israel and how it contrasts with the description by Fox News. | |
| Now, just one last point, which is, you know, it's always so interesting. | |
| Uh, and this is something that I've been bothered by and have noticed for a long time is that people talk about the UN as though it's like the so it's just like some separate entity. | |
| And so it's kind of just like this left-wing NGO, and therefore we don't care what what it thinks because it's just some weird irrelevant organization run by like funded by George Soros and dominated by a bunch of leftists. | |
| In reality, the UN is nothing other than a gathering, an assembly of all the countries on earth and the governments that rule them, that govern them. | |
| That's what the UN is. | |
| If they gather, that's what the General Assembly in particular is. | |
| It's all the countries in the world, they get together, they send their representatives. | |
| Those representatives are chosen by the leaders of the country in the case of democracies, the elected leaders, in the case of non-democracies, whatever kind of government they have. | |
| And so it's just it's not some exotic alternative universe of institutional power. | |
| It's just the countries of the world and their governments. | |
| That's what it represents, world opinion. | |
| Or the opinion of all the countries and their governments in the world. | |
| And as governments change, the UN changes as well. | |
| And I've never understood why people talk about the UN, like, oh, the UN is just this warp crazy institution. | |
| It it's really nothing other than all the governments and countries in the world. | |
| And you can take the view for sure, oh, we're gonna defend Israel. | |
| We don't care how much it cost us in terms of our standing in the world, our soft power, how we're perceived, our popularity, our ability to do business, the ability of China to make headway into these countries that are increasingly becoming anti-American. | |
| You can for sure take that view and just say, we don't care. | |
| Israel is the most important thing. | |
| We're gonna stand by Israel, even if every country in the world becomes hostile toward it or toward us as a result. | |
| But at least admit that's what you're advocating. | |
| It's not like the UN is anything other than that. | |
| That's what it is. | |
| It's all the governments and countries in the world coming together to try and reach consensus, to try and express viewpoints, to try and agree on frameworks. | |
| And it's always bizarre to listen to how people talk about the UN, especially when they want to oppose whatever it's doing, and they talk about it like it's something else, like it's this thing that just permanently floats. | |
| And it's made up of like bureaucrats and and people who are just leftists or have otherwise some weird ideology. | |
| And that's not what it is. | |
| And even if it's not at the UN, the reality is that much of the world has turned against Israel, and therefore the United States for standing by Israel for financing Israel for arming Israel, and it costs us a huge amount, not just in terms of the billions of dollars we send, not just Israel, but to Egypt and Jordan to keep them in line, | |
| to keep that region in in in check for Israel, or the military deployments we make to protect Israel, or the diplomatic protection we give, or putting our own service members in harm's way, but it also costs us a great deal in terms of our standing in the world. | |
| And the UN is just a symbol or a manifestation expressing that reality. | |
| All right, we're gonna get to some more questions. | |
| We just need to quickly take a break and a word from one of our sponsors. | |
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| Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year? | |
| I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day. | |
| Obviously, the goal is a championship. | |
| That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal. | |
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| In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else. | |
| It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have. | |
| For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars. | |
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| All right, continuing with our mailbag without any kind of preface preface needed for me, explaining what we're doing. | |
| The question comes from Electra Weeds 7, not Electro Weeds 6 or 8. | |
| A lot of people get confused. | |
| It's Electra Weeds 7. | |
| And the question is this quote I have a question about free speech and its limits, especially in the context of what's happening in Palestine. | |
| You often emphasize ideological consistency and first principles, and you've also spoken powerfully about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. | |
| Given that, how do you think decades of dehumanizing rhetoric and normalized hate speech against Palestinians have helped create the conditions in which this violence is not only tolerated, but in many ways enabled, both by global leaders And by the broader public, to what extent has the unchecked spread of certain ideas and narratives, | |
| even under the banner of free speech, laid the psychological groundwork for this genocide, not just among the Israeli leadership, but also among parts of the global public who still view this either as fake news or as a justified campaign to quote eliminate Hamas. | |
| I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we reconcile the principal defense of free speech with the undeniable power of language to do real harm. | |
| And we are seeing now, as we are seeing now and repeatedly have seen throughout history. | |
| So it is a very good question. | |
| I want to, there's actually a point I wanted to make over the last couple of days, because there were a lot of Charlie Kirk quotes going around after he was murdered that were designed to cast him in a critical light, which I personally see nothing wrong with. | |
| I talked about how morally repulsive I think it is and corrosive with assault to celebrate any human being's death. | |
| So I'm separating that from somebody becomes this very important figure in our discourse and culture, and there's one side kind of trying to glorify them and turn them into a symbol of a political movement, is perfectly acceptable to speak critically of that person as well. | |
| He's part of our politics, he was part of our politics, he is part of our politics, and you don't, it's not a religion. | |
| You don't have to submit to anyone's hagiography. | |
| So I have no objection to people saying, you know what, actually, I thought some of what Charlie Kirk said or did was not was actually not worthy of praise, but was actually quite harmful. | |
| That's very legitimate. | |
| And one of the ways that's being done by the people who are doing that is circulating various quotes of Charlie Kirk to try and show, oh, look, these are the things that he thought. | |
| And one of the quotes that began circulating almost from the day that he was murdered, but I continue to see to this day, is the one where he basically was asked, okay, you believe in the Second Amendment. | |
| Doesn't that mean if we have no gun control, if guns are everywhere, that there are going to be certain gun deaths that could be avoided. | |
| Maybe there'll be kids who find guns and pick them up and end up accidentally shooting themselves or somebody else, which has happened. | |
| Maybe it'll mean that some crazy people will be more readily able to get guns and will kill people, as certainly has happened, a whole variety of ways that a permissive interpretation of the Second Amendment might generate more deaths by guns. | |
| And being intellectually honest, Charlie Kirk said, yes, I think that's probably true, but it's worth it to protect the Second Amendment. | |
| Some deaths are worth it to protect the Second Amendment. | |
| And that quote was being circulated to try and cast Charlie Kirk as some sort of extremist, that, oh, look, he's willing to tolerate gun deaths in order to protect the second amendment. | |
| That's what an extremist is, and also to imply that there was something ironic or even some kind of karmic justice about what happened to him, given that he was saying he's willing to tolerate deaths by gun violence in order to protect the second amendment. | |
| It turns out that his life was taken by by gun violence. | |
| And as I said, while I don't mind criticism of Charlie Kirk, I find the attempt to use that quote against him to be so distorted and twisted in a very important and central way that relates directly to the question that I was asked, which is why he raised it, which is that I think it's so important to emphasize and to understand, because it's not immediately obvious, it's almost counterintuitive, but it's nonetheless true. | |
| We have these Bill of Rights that most Americans affirm a belief in often insist upon their preservation. | |
| First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the right of search and seizure, to not be searched without a search warrant, to have your papers and your person search and seized through home, due process rights, all the rights that attend to criminal prosecution, the right to remain silent, the right to confront witnesses and cross-examination, the right to an attorney, the right to have a jury of your peers, determine your guilt or innocence, all of these due process guarantees and all the other rights of the Constitution as well. | |
| And every single one of them have significant costs to them, including the risk of death. | |
| If you allowed police carte blanche to just enter whatever houses they want, as happens in many countries, there's some murder or a serial murder or some serial rapists or pedophiles or terrorists or whatever, and the government wants the police to find them and tells the police, do whatever you have to do to find them. | |
| And if the police are able to just enter whatever homes they want and ransack them or search whoever they want, it's gonna be easier for them to find those criminals, including violent criminals who are on the loose. | |
| But if you put barriers in the place of the police, like the Bill of Rights does, if you say, no, you can't just go and search whatever homes you want. | |
| You first have to go to a court and persuade a judge that there's probable cause to believe that there's some information relevant to a crime, and only then can you enter somebody's home. | |
| If you don't have a warrant, says the Constitution, the police, the homeowner can refuse your right to enter, and you can't enter that home. | |
| And if you do enter and you search it anyway without a warrant, whatever you find won't be usable in a court of law. | |
| And obviously, not just that, that right means that the police are going to be impeded in catching violent criminals. | |
| It had definitely means that some violent criminals who the police may have been able to catch, had they been unconstrained in their searching power, instead are going to end up escaping the police and stay on the loose and maybe even kill again. | |
| Same thing with the privacy rights in terms of that we impose on the NSA or the FBI in terms of spying on Americans, if they could just spy on everybody, they would definitely be able to catch people more easily and solve crimes more easily. | |
| But because we tell them that you can't spy on us without warrants, we make it more difficult for them to catch violent criminals and to stop violence from happening in the future. | |
| And there's no doubt that people have died as a result of those barriers that the Bill of Rights puts in front of the police. | |
| And the same is definitely true of due process rights. | |
| I mean, both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin said that they think it would be better to have, in the case of Jefferson, he said, I'd rather have 10 guilty people go free than have one innocent person punished. | |
| Benjamin Franklin said, I would rather have a hundred guilty people go free than have even one innocent person unjustly imprisoned. | |
| And this came from British law and British legal thinking. | |
| And this is central to our Bill of Rights. | |
| The idea is that we do want to put barriers in front of the state to be able to put people in prison. | |
| All those rights that I just mentioned. | |
| The right against self-incrimination, to remain silent, the right to an attorney, the right to confront witnesses, to have a jury of your peers, all these rights that are guaranteed to you if you're charged with a crime make it much more difficult for the state to imprison you or to convict you of a crime. | |
| Even though the founders knew and we all know, that means that in certain cases, guilty people like OJ Simpson are gonna walk free. | |
| And we've decided that it's worth it. | |
| We're willing to have violent criminals walk free and not be convicted and not end up in prison to kill again in order to make sure that we have these due process rights. | |
| So each and so each of these rights, the second amendment, the fourth amendment, all the rights of the Fifth Amendment of due process and all the other accompanying rights relating to criminal trials and the like, they all result in death. | |
| They all result in increased violence, they all make it more difficult for the government to do things we might want the government to do. | |
| But we've decided it's worth it, which is what Charlie Kirk was saying. | |
| Yes, uh, he all concede, he said, that by insisting on the Second Amendment and by preventing certain kinds of gun control, there probably will be more deaths by gun violence, including types of deaths from gun violence that we wish we could prevent, but that's the cost of living in a free society. | |
| And that's all he was saying. | |
| And I think it's very important to understand that. | |
| Now, the reason I say it's relevant to the question is because the question was does allowing free speech entail dehumanizing other people to the point where even genocide against them ends up being tolerable by allowing free speech and Israel supporters to demonize Palestinians for decades to deprive them of their humanity, | |
| to spread propaganda on behalf of Israel to the point where the world was even willing to sit by and allow a genocide to take place, isn't that a gigantic harm from free speech? | |
| And the answer is yes. | |
| There's no question that protecting free speech often will entail not just problems, but serious harm to other people and probably even death, in exactly the same way that all those other constitutional rights engender those kind of risks and damages. | |
| But we have decided as a people, as a country, uh as a culture, that the dangers of eliminating those rights, allowing the government to censor, allowing the government to take away people's guns, allowing the government to walk into homes whenever they want, just on mere suspicion or or a guesswork or a whim, or just convicting people that we know are guilty without bothering to go through the protections of the trial. | |
| We've decided that it's more dangerous to abolish those rights than it is to live with the cost of insisting on them, even though the cost are very real. | |
| And so, yes, of course, free speech means that certain people are going to get dehumanized. | |
| It means certain words are going to be justified based on lies. | |
| It means a whole wide range of bad things are gonna happen and that that people are gonna be convinced of all sorts of things we wish they weren't convinced of. | |
| But to me, the obvious solution is not to say, okay, US government, we're gonna trust you now with the power to censor because we're gonna hope that you will censor speech that dehumanizes Palestinians. | |
| Do you think the US government in its current constitution? | |
| I don't just mean the Trump administration, I mean all the presidencies before that, would use its censorship power to protect Palestinians. | |
| What we've seen is the exact opposite. | |
| Censorship is being used to silence critics of Israel. | |
| And that's true for each of one of these rights. | |
| And I think it's just, I think it's important to be honest, the way Charlie Kirk is being with his defense of the second amendment, which is to say, yeah, these rights do have costs. | |
| And sometimes those costs are even violence or the death of other people. | |
| But it's worth it because the alternative is living in a totalitarian state or an autocratic state or a repressive state rather than a free society, and that is the price you pay. | |
| That's one of the things I've learned in life is that there's nothing free. | |
| I think balance is the overarching law of the universe. | |
| Every time you gain something, there's a cost that's extracted. | |
| And every time there's a cost that's extracted, there's a value also received. | |
| And it's the same with political rights. | |
| There are benefits from having political rights, but they're also costs. | |
| I think that's what Charlie Kirk was saying. | |
| I think it's important for free speech advocates to acknowledge that as well. | |
| All right, Will Nunn says, quote, what's your take on the bribery scandal involving borders are Tom Homan? | |
| Is the reason Supreme Court decision redefining what constitutes bribery going to make it harder to prosecute corruption going forward? | |
| Does it even matter? | |
| I think the problem with this Tom Holman case is we know very little about it. | |
| And just for those of you who haven't heard, there was reporting in the New York Times and then confirmed by a lot of other outlets, it's not like it's a New York Times, that the New York Times is exclusively reporting it. | |
| The Trump administration even answered in a way that validated what the New York Times was reporting. | |
| That in the first Trump administration, Tom Holman, who's currently the essentially the czar of deportation and immigration policy in the Trump administration, had a position in immigration, and the FBI caught him with a receiving a bag of cash of I think $50,000. | |
| And there was a great deal of suspicion in the FBI that he had received some kind of bribe. | |
| Because why else would government officials be given $50,000 in cash in a paper bag? | |
| And the investigation was started during the Trump administration, the first Trump administration. | |
| It apparently picked up a lot of steam and was underway into the Biden administration, although charges were never brought. | |
| And then the Trump administration, once it got back into office, killed the investigation, closed the investigation. | |
| And as a result, the investigation, there's no there's no investigation. | |
| There's just this kind of reporting about what happened. | |
| There were definitely suspicions of Tom Holman. | |
| And Tom Holman has become one of the most important people and one of the most popular people in the Trump administration among MAGA supporters. | |
| It's very kind of like no nonsense, tough talking Guy, I don't even think it's an act. | |
| I think that's pretty much who he is. | |
| And he doesn't paper over his beliefs in order to make them soft sounding or pleasant sounding for an illiberal audience. | |
| It's it's very aggressive, very direct in terms of their intention to deport everybody in the United States illegally. | |
| It's kind of become like a folkure figure on the right. | |
| It's one of the issues that unifies the right, the Trump right is deporting people in the country illegally. | |
| Obviously, that was a major issue that elected Donald Trump in 2016 and then again in 2024. | |
| And he's extremely popular. | |
| And so the implication of the reporting is that they closed the investigation in order to protect one of the people that matters most to them politically. | |
| And uh Trump administration in response to this reporting said essentially that we looked into this these allegations, found them utterly lacking in evidence and the essentially nothing there in terms of guilt. | |
| So we closed the investigation for that reason. | |
| That's what the FBI said, that's what the Justice Department said. | |
| No, you should obviously only take that so far. | |
| The whole point of the story, at least as it's alleged, is that the DOJ and the FBI closed the investigation to protect a political ally. | |
| And so their argument is no, we didn't do it for that reason. | |
| We did it because there was evidence lacking. | |
| It's just very it's almost impossible to assess because I don't have any of the evidence before me about whether Tom Holman got a bag of $50,000, what the reason might have been, what the investigators found. | |
| It's impossible to to say. | |
| I did find it disturbing that there were several prominent conservatives who essentially said, look, we love Tom Homan, so we don't care whether or not these allegations are true. | |
| You don't want to enter a realm where as long as you like government officials, that kind of brazen corruption and and and bribery. | |
| I'm not saying he did it, but I'm saying if he did, if he if there was a case, so you don't want to say, oh, well, even if he did that, who cares? | |
| He's too important. | |
| You definitely don't want to create a society like that. | |
| Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year? | |
| I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day. | |
| Obviously, the goal is a championship. | |
| That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal. | |
| We want to win a championship. | |
| I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast. | |
| In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else. | |
| It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have. | |
| For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars. | |
| So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted. | |
| But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run. | |
| So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeartWoman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. | |
| Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year? | |
| I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day. | |
| Obviously, the goal is a championship. | |
| That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal. | |
| We want to win a championship. | |
| I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast. | |
| In case you missed it with Christina Williams. | |
| The WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind-the-scenes moments you won't find anywhere else. | |
| It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have. | |
| For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars. | |
| So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted. | |
| But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make a run. | |
| So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams and iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. | |
| As far as whether these bribery uh cases from the Supreme Court would make it more difficult again, it all depends on what the circumstances are, but even the most generous Supreme Court cases that have narrowed what pri what bribery is in the context of political corruption, has not excluded things like taking 50,000 in cash in a paperback in exchange for giving Some favor or overlooking some law or whatever else is alleged. | |
| So I don't think that would actually mean anything, but I think uh once this kind of allegation is out, I think it's worth it to demand transparency. | |
| Um so all right. | |
| So those are uh all the questions that we were able to get to, uh, because it's uh 10 it's uh 10 before eight in just water's program on Fox starts at 8, and I'm near the top of the show, if not at the top of the show. | |
| Uh so have to be ready for that. | |
| You can watch me there. | |
| I'm talking about the Jim Comey indictment and all the various implications from that. | |
| Uh so we really want to thank all of the locals members who have submitted questions throughout the week. | |
| It really makes this Friday night QA something that not just we enjoy doing, which I do, but also, you know, always very valuable. | |
| People really like these shows. | |
| It enables us to cover a wide range of topics, including some we wouldn't otherwise cover. | |
| So thank you to all the people who submitted questions. | |
| We always try to get to as many of them as we can. | |
| If we have them on the list and we didn't get to them for the show, we keep them on the list and and uh keep them in the uh uh in the pot for for next week as well. | |
| Uh so please keep submitting those questions. | |
| And uh that will conclude our show for this evening. | |
| Uh, just as a quick reminder, system update is also available in podcast form. | |
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| For those of you watching this show every Monday through Friday, we really, really appreciate it. | |
| Needless to say, we're grateful for your uh for your uh attendance here and your watching. | |
| And we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, live exclusively here on Rumble. | |
| Have a great evening and a great weekend, everybody. | |
| Have a great evening. | |
| is on has a chance to win a championship. | |
| I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast. | |
| In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else. | |
| It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have. |