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Sept. 30, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:25:38
Nick Fuentes On Censorship, Charlie Kirk's Assassination, Trump's Foreign Policy, Israel/Gaza, the Future of the GOP, and More

Glenn and Nick Fuentes discuss Charlie Kirk assassination fallout, divisions within the Republican party, Israel's influence on U.S. politics, immigration, 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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Time Text
Why Platform Glenn? 00:12:20
Good evening.
It's Monday, September 29th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, starting promptly at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, we devote the show to a discussion with someone who may be, at least for some, an unexpected guest or even an unwanted guest.
That person is Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old host of the undeniably popular and getting more popular America First Show, which appears here on Rumble and whose influence, especially young Americans, especially young conservative men, has been growing exponentially.
In 2022, Fuentes joined Kanye West in dining with President Trump at Bar-a-Lago.
And since then, his influence and relevance to the discourse, whether you like him or not, has only expanded.
Now, I'm not going to spend much of any time justifying why we asked him on.
My view since the very start of my career in journalism has been extremely consistent.
I think a journalist has not only the right, but the obligation to speak with anyone and everyone who wields some significant amount of influence over our politics and how Americans and others are receiving their news.
And whatever else one might want to say about Nick Fuentes, that's certainly true of him.
Understanding what explains his rapid growth despite all sorts of barriers put in the way of that and what he hopes or intends to do with that public platform is such a matter of obvious public interest that any debates over whether to speak with him seem to me at least barely worth having.
The justification is self-evident.
We've been working on scheduling this for a couple of months and the logistical stars have finally aligned.
And so he'll be here tonight to talk about a wide range of relevant topics, both profound ones that have been enduring for multiple years and will into the future, as well as recent newsworthy event as well.
As a couple of quick reminders, System Update is also available on podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our show, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, as independent media, we do rely on the support of our viewers and our members, which you can provide by joining our locals community where you get a wide array of exclusive benefits.
And most of all, it's the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now all right so our guest tonight is ready I did want to just give a couple of very quick preamble remarks.
As I said, I don't intend to justify why we invited this guest or any other guests.
As I said, my views are quite known.
I did, though, want to say in response to a bunch of comments I heard earlier today when we announced the show, why are you platforming this person?
That's something that I hear said about other shows that invite me on.
Just like it's a curmudgeonly linguistic matter, I really hate the word platform when used as a verb.
Platform is a noun.
It's a thing.
I don't know when we decided that platforming is a verb, like why did you platform that person?
But so often it's used for people who already have a platform.
It isn't as though if Nick Fuentes or other guests that I've had on my show who people have asked, why are you platforming, wouldn't have an audience, wouldn't have a significant platform if they did not come on my show.
In fact, they already have a significant platform, which is why I think it's important to talk to them.
And I see the same thing all the time.
Megan Kelly just talked about how she's under all this pressure to start de-platforming both Tucker Carlson and myself due to our views on Israel as though Tucker Carlson needs to go on Megan Kelly's show or I need to go on Megan Kelly's show in order to have reach or an influence or an audience, something we both have had long before the Megan Kelly show existed.
So it's just so often this bizarre dynamic that insists that we in a childlike way pretend that people we wish didn't exist actually don't exist.
And as I think we all as adults learn, it's kind of by definition something you earn.
The fact that things you may not like, you pretend that they don't exist doesn't actually mean they go away.
And then the final thing I'll note quickly about that before we get to Nick is this is a standard that's only applied, it seems, to people who are outside of mainstream or establishment realms of acceptability.
I could think of offhand 50 people who have done whatever you think, even if your views of Nick Fluentes are as negative as they get, who have done infinitely more damage in the world, have caused actual death and violence and wars than him.
And yet if I invited those people on because of their status and standing in mainstream circles, wouldn't even cause a ripple.
I could have Jake Sullivan on.
I could invite Joe Biden on.
I can invite any Barack Obama official.
I could invite John Bolton on.
He goes on CNN constantly.
And nobody would ever say, why are you platforming these people, even though they have immense amounts of blood on their hands?
And it really is a standard that gets created only to start to marginalize and exclude people who have an anti-establishment view.
And that's another reason, among many more that I could list, for why I have so much hostility toward this argument.
All right, so enough of that.
As I said, I don't want to be defensive.
I'm actually excited to welcome to the show Nick Flentes.
Nick, it's great to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
Great to be with you.
Absolutely.
So ordinarily, I say, welcome to your debut appearance on System Update.
But in this case, it doesn't really apply because you did come on once, although it was when I was traveling and Michael Tracy was here.
I mean, Michael Tracy, it doesn't really count.
It's kind of like the JV or warm-up appearance to come on our show.
But I think what a lot of people don't know is that you and I did cross paths once before.
And as a matter of discretion, I never talked about it, but you actually decided to talk about it on your show.
And I just wanted to play that clip briefly of where you described our interaction.
Do we have that clip?
Glenn Greenwald.
Hey, Glenn Greenwald.
Excuse me, bra.
You're excuse.
You're excused.
Glenn Greenwald passes by me.
This is a gay club, by the way.
Don't ask me why I'm there.
This is a gay club because Glenn Greenwald's here.
Don't ask me why I'm there.
I'm dirty killer.
I'm kidding, kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm getting, kidding, getting, get it.
kidding it's a joke whoops so you did request several times Don't ask me why I was there.
I've always deferred to that since you're our guest tonight.
I'm going to continue that policy of not asking you why you were there.
But let me start by asking you a question that I do feel comfortable asking you.
And I want to spend the bulk of our time about your views and your political project as you understand it.
But I do want to spend a little bit of time first on what seems to me to be the radically transformed trajectory of you as a person in our political discourse and our media ecosystem.
And I'll just share with you an anecdote.
I don't know if I ever told you this before, but I think the first time when I really paid attention to you, I think the first time when I really talked about you, it was like 2020.
You had tried to board a plane and found that you had been placed without any due process, any kind of notice on a government no-fly list.
And I was somebody who had spent, you know, many years in the war on terror denouncing the no-fly list for all of its authoritarian practices.
And they manifested publicly, you know, about why is it, why is Nick Fuentes with no charges, no process, prohibited from flying?
He's an American citizen.
What justified that?
And I'm not kidding.
I was deluged with people in email and DM, even phone calls, like major conservative figures.
And not even like the super pro-establishment ones, even people who are kind of on the fringes of the more anti-saying, look, I'm warning you, don't have anything to do with Nick Fuentes.
He's bad news.
Don't talk about him.
Don't believe him.
There was really a very strong effort in the conservative movement to just make you disappear.
I was really surprised.
I don't think I ever got pushback like that before.
And yet here we are, you know, I guess just a few years later, and you have people who arguably are the most influential people in conservative politics, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, feeling compelled to get together and talk about you quite negatively.
And then you just receive the kind of imprimatur, the ultimate imprimatur of mainstream relevance, which was a New York Times profile, not a particularly flattering one, but a nonetheless big New York Times profile that clearly indicates you have arrived at a kind of station that previously you weren't close to.
And I'm just wondering what you make of this transformation and your trajectory, this rapid rise over the course of such a small amount of time.
Well, it's pretty remarkable.
I mean, you know, when you talk about back in 2021, when I was on the no-fly list and had my bank accounts frozen, I mean, that I would consider even pretty late in the game.
I remember back in 2017, 2018, that's when I really got started and I was utterly canceled, completely radioactive, untouchable.
And that's, you know, that was a long time ago.
It was about nine, eight, nine years ago at this point.
And it's really only been in the past one or two years that all of this has sort of subsided.
And what do I make of it?
It's sort of a puzzle to me.
I don't quite understand why.
I would attribute it to the liberalization of the social platforms.
I think it has a lot to do with Elon's acquisition of Twitter, of course, Rumble, because a big part of it was the censorship.
There was sort of this handshake between the GOP establishment and big tech.
And in many ways, that handshake was a monetary handshake.
You know, Silicon Valley gave a lot of backing to some of these elements in the right wing, but it was also an ideological handshake that served to kind of buttress and fortify the establishment conservative position.
They didn't want to hear criticisms of Israel.
They didn't want to hear criticisms of legal immigration.
They didn't want to hear pushback from kind of a more ornery religious base, which, you know, the GOP, I think is uncomfortable at the fact that they're a little more radical than the mainstream GOP.
And so ultimately, it all kind of came tumbling down when the censorship abated.
And it basically became unignorable that there was this very lively, very energetic, very radical element on the right wing that, and I like what you said in your intro, you could pretend that you're not giving those people a voice or a platform.
You could pretend they don't exist, but they do exist and they're still out there.
And when you take away their voice, they just get angry, you know, and we kind of saw that at January 6th.
So as far as, you know, why that has happened, why has the conversation opened up?
I mean, that's kind of a tricky question, but I would attribute it to the censorship going away and the war in Gaza, which has made a lot of the, you know, the most taboo opinion that I had that I got canceled for is that I was so vocally against Israel on the right wing as a young guy when that was completely unacceptable.
Like I said, the timeline was roughly 2017, 2018.
And so it's really the confluence of those things, opening up the conversation in terms of the medium, which is social media.
But then also kind of a thawing on that topic, suddenly it became undeniable.
Everybody, I think, has had a shift at the minimum on this issue.
Maybe they're not as far as me, but definitely people are more comfortable asking certain questions.
And I've kind of been rightly placed.
Everybody knows I was the one talking about this.
I was sort of the martyr.
I paid a heavy price for saying it early.
And so I think now everybody's sort of playing catch up.
And as far as what I make of it personally, I never thought I'd see it.
On some level, I was confident that something like this would happen, you know, that people would eventually see what's going on.
Championship Feels Strange 00:02:59
But it's pretty remarkable to actually see it.
I'm sure, you know, you have been talking about similar issues.
I'm sure you can relate to that.
It's pretty remarkable seeing how far everybody has come in such a rapid and short amount of time.
It's a little bit discombobulating.
It's a little striking.
So those are kind of my feelings about it.
It's sort of strange, but it's great to be with you.
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.
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 iHeartWomen's 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 it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams and iHeartWomen's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, I think, you know, anyone who does what we do has kind of a implicit, even if we don't want to acknowledge it, optimism about the fact that maybe the work that we're doing can one day have the kind of impact we hope it has, even though we understand the challenges and reservations.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have the motive to wake up and go do it.
You would go do a million other things.
Age And Responsibility 00:05:12
I don't mean this to be condescending, but I do want to ask you about the age factor because it is kind of remarkable.
You're only 27.
I think you just turned 26.
So when I talk about things like five years ago, this happened.
You know, we're talking about when you were 20, 21 years old.
As you'll see as you get older, I don't know this personally because I'm not, but I hear from other people who are that, you know, five years isn't a big deal.
If you're 43 and then you're 48, that's not really a big deal.
But the difference between being 21 or 20 and 25 and 26 is pretty significant.
And so I'm just wondering whether you also attribute this greater success you've had in penetrating circles that used to be inaccessible to you, whether you find yourself thinking a little bit more strategically.
And by that, I just mean like, I have always said that the thing for which I'm most grateful in my life is the fact that there was no internet when I was 18, 19, and 20 to record every thought that entered my head and that I wanted to express.
Because of course, you do things just for the transgressive nature of them, right?
You're playing with a lot of ideas that you know you're not supposed to be, and those can follow you around forever.
So I'm just wondering, do you consciously think, look, in order for me to expand my influence, which I need to do if I want to be more effective in the causes I most care about, I have to kind of be a little bit more shrewd, a little bit longer term thinking about the way I speak about things?
I try.
I try to be.
I really, as I get older, I feel like an obligation to be more responsible in that way.
And I try to be more disciplined, but and I think that I have become a lot more mature.
It's unavoidable.
I started my show when I was 18.
And I could tell you that I definitely feel the difference being in my mid to late 20s.
There is a cognitive difference.
My state of mind is a lot different.
You're a lot less impulsive, a lot less emotional.
Anybody that's grown up understands that.
I have to say, though, it's just hard to resist my tendencies.
I have an edgy sense of humor and I'm bombastic, not just my personality.
And, you know, people for many years would say I'm a shock shock, I'm a troll, and they would say that to mean that I'm insincere.
I was never insincere.
And I don't think I was ever deliberately trying to do anything other than tell the truth.
It's just that I just find a lot of things kind of funny.
And, you know, I can't help it if other people don't see the sense of humor or the irony in the things I say or do.
So I try.
It's difficult.
At this stage in the game, I would frame it as I just try not to be self-indulgent.
I recognize that some things are, there's really no purpose for it other than maybe I get some sick pleasure out of it or some sick, you know, again, I have a sense of humor about it.
So as I grow bigger, as I have a larger audience, you know, for example, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I realized I was going to have a massive audience that night.
And I do represent, not to kind of forcibly change the conversation, but it's relevant, you know, I do represent a more radical faction.
And in that moment, I felt for the first time, maybe the burden on some level, a higher political burden to deliver the right message for the right time.
You know, when you're 18 and you're having fun, you don't have a big audience, you can kind of goof around.
But in a momentous moment like that, it seems like what you say, it might actually have real world implication and might actually affect people's lives.
And so I would say it's not so much my age, but maybe having a bigger audience, like you say, maybe having the impact that you think you're going to make when you wake up every day, maybe finally realizing that you start to take it a bit more seriously.
And you have an obligation, even as much as you want to be funny and you want to do things that you like to do and you kind of have an artist sensibility about it.
You have a duty to do it for the sake of your cause.
So I definitely do see that as I get older and bigger.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that and I still do, which I'll get to in just a second.
I've been watching your work for some time and you definitely had a kind of gravity and even like a gravitas about the Charlie Kirk assassination and what how you had to figure out how to talk about it afterwards, even taking a night off to kind of reflect on it that I hadn't quite seen from you before.
And I want to get into a little bit about why that was.
Before we do, just on this topic of the trajectory and what may be the evolution, you know, obviously you know that if I have you on my show or if anyone has you on their show, they're going to hear, you know, kind of the highlights or the lowlights, as it might be of Nick Funtes.
Like, here's what he said about black people and here's what he said about Jews and here's what he said about this group and that group and this group.
And because you're on the air a lot and because some of it is kind of an ironic humor that you have with your audience, which I think most people in real life is how they speak.
And part of the appeal, if you're doing well on the internet, is the fact that you are being a real person.
You're not presenting one fake artificial public face with a different private character.
And I think that's given people, in one way, that's been very good for you.
Demographic Shifts and Political Realities 00:15:25
It's been part of your appeal, but another way it's given people a very easy way to demonize and attack you by taking these quotes that can sound not just very racist, but very almost like Nazi-like and a kind of an extermination rhetoric.
And so let me just ask you, let's envision a world in which you have, let's say, quasi-dictatorial powers, which I think a lot of your followers ironically hope you have and some non-ironically hope that you have.
What does that world look like in terms of, I don't mean people who are here illegally or even recent immigrants, you've been very clear about your advocacy of mass deportation, which is a mainstream conservative view.
It's what Trump ran on one on.
But what about minorities who have been in this country for decades or centuries, generations, black Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, gay people?
Like what is the ideal vision of America that Nick Funtes would shape in terms of how those groups would be treated?
Well, I think that for people that have been here for generations, you got to recognize there's always been non-white groups that have lived in a sort of regional basis across the country, whether it's Asians living in California, Hispanics living in the Southwest, blacks living in the South because of slavery.
You know, I think that they should have the same rights and dignity as every other American.
My only concern, and where it's born out of the kind of nativist rhetoric or even to that extent, you know, white nationalist or white identitarian rhetoric is the idea that the white American experience is going away.
It's going extinct.
You know, you recognize that because of the demographic change in America, you have these ethnic enclaves from Latin America, from Asia, from Africa that are being set up all across the country.
And it almost feels like those places are, they sort of give, they're more of a true representation of their home country than America is of what America used to be.
In other words, it feels like going into certain neighborhoods in Minneapolis or in Ohio, that feels like a truer representation of Haiti or Somalia than most of America is to what America used to be 30 years ago.
And so there does need to be something done with respect to that.
And I think that what you might call that is something like voluntary segregation.
People call it free association.
People have talked about reversing the Civil Rights Act.
My concern is not necessarily because we don't really live in America in a sense.
We live in our neighborhood.
America is a big country.
It's always been a big country.
The question is, can there be neighborhoods or cities or states where it still feels like America, where there's still mostly white people, still mostly Christians, still bear some passing resemblance to what European civilization looked like for the past 1,000 years?
That's sort of what I'm preoccupied with.
And so I'm less concerned about, you know, in the past, people have talked about an ethno-state or these kinds of things.
The demographic change is baked in at this point.
There's millions upon millions of people that are not white that have been here for many years.
If I could go in a time machine, I would undo this demographic change.
We can't do that.
I don't think it's practical or I don't even think it'd be humane to try to reverse that at this point.
On some level, America has to see itself no longer as a homogeneous republic, self-governing and more like a true empire, more like a federalized system with a stark degree of multiracialism, you know, ethnic and racial diversity.
And I think we have to have that reflected in how the country's governed, how we manage relations between the races.
I think that's something the government needs to undertake is sort of an active management of the diversity.
Singapore does this.
Ethiopia does this.
Many countries do it.
You know, America's not the same country as it was 100 years ago.
We have to change to sort of reflect that fundamental change in the population.
So that's sort of where I'm, I don't know if that's a great answer, but that's sort of how I think about it when I think about how we could all get along as a diverse nation.
I guess my question about that is, and you know this very well, if you go back and look over the last hundred years, which we can romanticize and idealize as this much greater time and better time of harmony and cultural cohesion, there was a big influx of all sorts of immigrants.
I mean, people looked at Italians and people looked at Irish and people looked at Jews and Jewish immigrants and people looked at, you know, pretty much every single one of these groups as distinctly un-American, as a completely foreign influence, importing very un-American ideas, loyalties to their foreign country.
You know, when even John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic president, there was this sense of, oh, he's not really American.
His principal allegiance is the Vatican.
A lot of the rhetoric about the newest immigrants was very much similar to the ones about the ones from 100 years ago.
I grew up in South Florida.
There was this huge Cuban immigrant community and a lot of the first generation immigrants were completely unassimilated.
You know, they never even learned English.
To this day, you can go to the Miami airport and have a hard time finding someone who speaks English.
But their kids, you know, Marco Rubio and those types, Ted Cruz, to some extent at least, you know, you can argue in those cases, to which extent, but to a lot of them, they became super assimilated, super American.
I think you see that with a lot of Indian immigrants, a lot of Muslim immigrants.
These people start going to college.
They become doctors and lawyers.
A lot of them are secular.
They seem American in terms of how they speak and how they behave.
What to you is the difference, other than just numbers maybe, between immigrants of 100 years ago and the immigrants of now?
Well, difference is race.
The immigrants of 100 years ago were racially European.
And, you know, there's sub-races in Europe.
People get at that.
They talk about how the WASP natives of America didn't take a shine to the Italians, Irish, Jews, Slavs, et cetera, that came in, with the exception of Jews.
I don't consider Jewsness.
They're sort of a distinct group.
But they were all white.
Italians are white.
Irish are white.
And that's why it was easy for them to assimilate.
You know, my ancestors, most of them were white.
I have one grandfather who's Mexican.
The rest of my grandparents are Irish and Italian.
They look like the native people.
They practice Christianity, a different flavor of it.
They come from the same continent.
They're racially white.
And I do believe that our race is a part of our distinct identity.
And the people that are coming in now, they're Indian, they're Chinese, they're Hispanic.
They're racially different.
And I think people have, rightfully so, a lot of reservations about America going from a white country to a not white country, a country that was 90% white to a country that may be 70% not white.
It won't look the same.
It won't feel the same.
It won't be the same.
You know, these are people with a completely different heritage, different religion, language.
They look different.
They just are different.
And I don't have a problem with them in themselves.
I'm Catholic.
So, you know, we believe that every human being is created by God.
We do believe there's a universal community of human beings, but you still have China.
You still have India.
You still have the Middle East in Africa.
If America becomes a not white country, it's almost like we lose what's ours.
And moreover, we're also losing it in Europe too.
The European countries, they're undergoing the same transformation.
And so.
You know, there's this idea that we're going to be a post-racial country and live in a post-racial world, but it feels like white people are the ones that are going to be erased.
There's still going to be Indians, Africans, Chinese, Peruvians in a post-racial world, but there won't be any white people.
There won't be any white nations.
White people won't have power.
And that's disconcerting for white people.
I'm white.
I feel white.
I look white.
I want to be around people that look like me.
That makes me comfortable.
That makes me feel at home.
And I think there's something tragic and there's something lost if, you know, our homes are being erased.
Neighborhoods are no longer filled with the same people, no longer the same heritage, culture, customs.
It's sort of like our race and our countries are going extinct.
And that is the part that really makes it different than 100 years ago.
Yeah, I get that.
At the same time, even going back to like the 70s and 80s into the 90s, there was this liberal utopian dream that the way that liberals were going to exercise political power for eternity, essentially, is they were going to import enough immigrants from enough different countries and in Latin America and elsewhere.
And these people, by their very culture, by their very nature, were going to be more attracted to liberal politics than to conservative politics, which was hostile to them.
And that it would essentially deliver to the Democratic Party and American liberalism kind of a permanent majority.
And as you know, it turns out that a lot of these immigrants shocked a lot of these Democratic strategists because they're increasingly migrating to American conservatism.
Huge amounts of supporters like them got behind President Trump, not Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama.
Increasingly, they feel alienated by this kind of left-wing multiculturalism and much more in line with what people might call American conservative values.
Has that surprised you?
And it does in any way undermine these assumptions you have about the ability of different races to come in and really assimilate into the American ideal?
It has been surprising.
It has.
I would say, though, I think you might be overstating it a little bit or other people might be overstating it.
Really, the demographic that's come far in that regard is Hispanics.
I don't know the numbers on Asians in 24, but it's not happening with African Americans, you know, black Americans as opposed to Africans from Africa.
It's not, I don't believe it's really happening with East Asians or Asians.
It's really only happening with Hispanics.
And I think that Hispanics, unlike Asians and Africans, I'm not just saying this because I'm ethnically Mexican also, but Hispanics, people say there is some proximity with white people.
You know, a lot of Hispanics have a kind of white phenotype and many of them see themselves as white.
You know, some people say that's me, but I would say that's a lot of Hispanics.
They maybe identify as white in a certain way.
And maybe that explains why they were able to vote for the deporter in chief, Donald Trump in 2024.
I will say, though, it is a bit surprising.
That was a big part of the thinking 10 years ago is that, like you say, they're going to come here.
They're going to vote Democrat forever and the Democrats are going to increase the open borders.
And, you know, it's a sort of compounding effect, always more immigration.
And so that's been a little bit surprising.
But I would say that when you look at Trump's governance, now that he is really fulfilling or by appearances, fulfilling mass deportations, the Hispanics are turning on him.
And so the Hispanics that turned out a record numbers for a Republican president in 24, if you look at the available polling, now that there's this media perception that Trump is enforcing deportations and going door to door, I discount the extent of this, but that's the perception.
Now Hispanics are turning on Trump and many of the attitudes on immigration are changing.
And I would say beyond that, I don't know that the immigrants ever fully and really assimilate.
You know, you look at black Americans, for example, they've been here for 400 years.
Are African Americans assimilated?
I would argue that they really represent a kind of distinct identity from white America.
There's white America, there's black America.
Those are two completely different worlds.
They talk differently, they act differently, different culture, vote differently.
And you could argue, have they even assimilated?
It's been 400 years.
Obviously, they have a unique experience, but I think that politics.
But Nick, just on that, I just want to interject that there were several years, and you may even think this, but certainly for several years, you were a very vocal and unirotic advocate of the view that the political savior for the United States was not Donald Trump or any other white politician, but was Kanye West, who emerges very much out of black culture, is an icon of black musical culture and just kind of black iconography in general.
And this was the person who you believe, he became a very close friend of yours, still might be.
You have a great deal of admiration for him.
And not just admiration personally, but you really believe that politically he was the most promising agent for the kind of political and social change that you crave.
Is that just aberrational or does that say something about the integration of black Americans into American culture after so many centuries?
Well, I think that there can be cooperation, but I would say that Ye, who's that's his name changed now, he really is distinct.
You know, he does look at white people differently, I think, than black people.
I think that his politics were distinct because he is black.
Now, we happen to come into an alliance because of our agreement about confronting the Jewish media, about confronting Israel, and even upsetting the apple cart for Trump and the GOP.
I think we both recognized that that would be useful as Native born Americans.
But just because we could come together on a political basis, I don't think it discounts that there's still a heavy, like there is still a bridge.
You know, or you could say there needs to be a bridge built between us because we come from such different worlds.
We're both from Chicago.
He's from Hyde Park.
I'm from LaGrange Park.
Different worlds, different politics.
And we probably agree, him and I, maybe on 50% of the issues.
And one of them is a very unique issue.
So I don't know that that's really a contradiction in terms.
I think it just speaks to the fact that he is a unique individual.
You know, I don't think anyone would disagree with that in general.
But I don't think that changes the fact that people of different races have very different politics in America.
And I think that proceeds from their race.
Well, but conversely, just like sinking to that point, but looking at it from the other direction, there has been this kind of, I would almost say consensus among people on the right, certainly among your precinct of the right, but even a little bit, ones a little bit closer to the mainstream.
You heard JD Vance talking about this, that on some level, the kind of bugaboo right now of American politics are highly educated, metropolitan, liberal white women who are just kind of the bane of everybody's existence, who are the plight and plague on American politics.
These are the people responsible for so many of the worst political trends over the last 10 years, not just in terms of the ideas, but also how they're expressed, how the dialogue and discourse evolves.
And I know that's something that you've talked about.
I've heard you talk about white women in quite acrimonious ways to be generous in terms of describing that.
So what about that?
What does that reflect?
I mean, these are white women, like hardcore white women, probably with a long history of white ancestry in the United States.
Carrying White Genes 00:01:41
And yet for you and so many other people who think like you, these are like the embodiment of the threats to the American way of life.
What's the explanation for that?
Well, I think in general, you're sort of conflating what is abstract versus what is real.
White women have liberal ideas, but they carry white genes.
And so white women have eggs that when fertilized by white men are going to create white babies.
And white men and white women have been doing this for thousands of years.
And they continue producing a race and ethnic group of people that look a certain way, act a certain way, speak a certain way.
And, you know, maybe this generation or a previous generation or, you know, some other generation might have had the wrong idea or an idea that is contrary to my ideas, but they still carry those genes.
They're still that distinct group of people.
I'm not going to say that I'm in favor of America becoming minority white because one black man has the right politics and most white women have the wrong politics in the current year in 2025.
Because, you know, all things being equal and kind of left in isolation in 100 years, those white women are going to ensure the continuation of people that look like me.
And those black people are going to have generation after generation of people that seem to be sort of set against us in a certain way.
Instincts And Shifts 00:03:35
There seems to always be they're advocating on behalf of their group insofar as they're a minority.
And we as whites are in a sense doing that also, implicitly or explicitly.
So I think maybe that's the conflation.
There might be liberal white women, but they're still white.
And I still think that white people should exist, even if there are a lot of liberal white people right now.
Because, you know, I'm white.
So that's maybe, because I was a libertarian for many years.
And to me, that was kind of the big, that was the big inflection point for me is realizing that I'm part of a group that is going extinct and I don't want to go extinct.
You know, I want to thrive.
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.
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 and iHeartWomen's 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.
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 iHeartWomen's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Yeah, that's probably a universal human instinct.
All right, let me shift gears a little bit and ask about Charlie Kirk specifically.
Like I said, I noticed your reaction to Charlie Kirk, and it is definitely true, and you've talked about this, you haven't denied this, that Charlie Kirk, you know, in terms of the people you've been directly criticizing, was probably at least in the top five of the people that you've criticized for reasons.
I think I understand well, and we can get into that.
I mean, this is somebody who you clearly understood to be a kind of agent of Zionism, a kind of, I don't know if you would call him a plant or somebody who has cultivated, but certainly a tool and arm and an instrument of Zionist influence inside the United States.
End of Day Differences 00:09:44
Netanyahu considered him this huge ally.
I don't know if you saw it, but there was a lot of debate about the letter he supposedly sent to Netanyahu.
People like Candace Owens were saying it was distorted.
They released the full letter today.
And there wasn't really much in that letter that supports the idea that he was some kind of dissident to Israel.
It was more of like, Prime Minister Netanyahu, I love you so much.
I love Israel so much.
And my concern is that you're losing the war of PR.
And here are all the things I hope you can do to get young conservatives back on your side.
It was kind of like a dear friend, you're losing.
And here are the things I hope you'll do to start winning again.
And that was very much part of your critique was that he was kind of a strong influence with a huge amount of money behind him institutionally and personally to influence young Americans into a set of ideas, one of which was continuing to honor and revere and even encourage more Israeli influence inside our country and inside our government.
And yet the reaction that you had to his death was so emotional, like so raw, so, you know, like you were personally devastated.
And I don't see an inconsistency between opposing somebody's political views and abhorring their assassination.
Those two things to me combine perfectly well.
But it seemed to hit you hard in a way that I have not seen anything else, at least in the public sphere, hit you quite as hard.
Why was that?
Well, because it was horrific.
And I really identify with him in many ways.
Obviously, we share different politics, but we're very similar.
We both came from Chicago.
We're roughly the same age.
And we sort of known each other for so long.
He was my nemesis and kind of a staple in all of our lives.
If you're in, maybe not so much you, but in conservative politics, especially youth politics.
All my fans are very young and high school or college-aged.
He was ubiquitous, especially in the past couple of years, but really for the past five or six years.
Huge campus organization on TikTok.
And he was just this towering figure.
And I said it on my show, for better or for worse.
He was an iconic figure.
And to see him struck down like that in such a vicious and graphic way, it was really, it did affect me deeply.
And I think it shows kind of where we are in the country.
It's just been so much violence and so much hatred.
And I know maybe it sounds ironic coming from me, but at the end of the day, I am a Catholic.
I'm not advocating for violence or cruelty or inhumanity.
On the contrary, I want dialogue.
I choose to engage with the political system.
And so, you know, this is part of what we've been seeing for the past couple of years between the wars, these shootings at churches that we're seeing every day.
And then to see somebody that was literally like my evil twin, let's say, and I don't mean it like he's an evil guy, but he's sort of the mirror image of me to see him get taken out like that in front of thousands of young people excited, wearing their MAGA hats.
It was absolutely horrifying.
So that was a moment when I think a lot of people, a lot of people are furious and other people are saying it's time to step back from the brink and choose Christ instead of polemics, instead of even politics for that matter, violence.
It's time to kind of find that rock, find what we're grounded in, which is, do we have a love for people?
Do we have a love for humanity?
Are we all now just going to chop each other's heads off?
I think everybody was kind of peering over the edge of the cliff and into the abyss and seeing kind of where we're headed, which is a race war, a political war, world war.
And it's a terrifying prospect.
In that moment, you know, all these things that have been bubbling beneath the surface, the nihilism, the kind of weird internet stuff that's schizophrenic, it became very real in that moment.
So I guess that's why it affected me so deeply.
And like you said, there was no love lost.
I wasn't a personal fan, political fan.
I really did not like the guy when he was alive.
But at the same time, as a basic, as a Christian, as a human being, I would never wish death on him like that.
And it kind of reminds you maybe what we should have in common versus the political disagreements we have.
So there's this political tendency on the left that people complain about a lot of time that you'll see.
And I think you're much more attuned to the differences among the left and establishment liberals than most people on the right are to most people on the right.
Like Nancy Pelosi is the same as AOC, who's the same as Hassan Piker, who's the same as Chuck Schumer.
It's kind of very similar to how people, a lot of people, liberals see everybody on the right as this monolith and don't understand these very virulent differences.
And one of the critiques is there's a huge number of people on the left who spend more time attacking AOC and Bernie Sanders for their failures than they do attacking, you know, who knows, Joe Manchin or even people further to the right like Donald Trump.
And I've always understood the reason why, but I've heard that critique made of you.
I think it was one of the reasons Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens felt a need to kind of criticize you in a way that clearly reflected some personal anger, which is like, look, we're kind of on his side.
We've made some personal risks to go way out there on his main topic, which is Israeli influence, the influence of the Jewish lobby inside the United States.
And yet he's done nothing but, you know, kind of made us public enemy number one.
And then you have these other people like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh who on first glance seem to have a lot more in common politically with you than differences.
And those two have become your main focal points of criticism.
Now, like I said, I understand the reason for this.
I'm somebody who also does that.
But I want to understand your reasons for that.
Like, why is it that you spend more time attacking and critiquing and kind of trying to get people to see the flaws in people who at first glance seem closer to you on the political spectrum than further away?
Well, I would say that, you know, when we're talking to the right wing, they already know that the left, they know why the left is bad.
They know the problems with the left, why we disagree with the left.
But what we see with our own side, the Republican side, is that they're not really delivering for the actual constituents, for their actual base of supporters.
And so it's sort of like we know that we need to take on the left.
The question is who is going to take on the left and how and what they're going to do with it.
And my entire life and what I've seen even throughout the Trump movement is that the base is very clear about what we want.
We really want fewer immigrants.
We want to deport illegal immigrants.
We want manufacturing in the country.
That was obviously a big part of Trump's appeal.
We don't want these wars.
Although I think many people, and I'm sure you know this, maybe overstate the Republican side's antipathy towards war.
Because whenever Trump bombs a foreign country, people like Tucker come out and you think, oh, the base is going to be furious.
It's like, no, the Republican base every time supports the interventions when Trump does them.
That's really besides the point.
But it's really a question for we're grappling with a different faction of the right wing for control of the right wing for kind of like the license or the opportunity to take on the left and then therefore to rule, whether it's being the president or, you know, control of the media or the institutions of the right wing.
You know, one of my favorite adages on my show is that when I see myself, I don't see myself as a Republican.
I see myself as part of a socioeconomic class, as part of an ethnic class, as part of a social class.
I was born, you know, as Tucker famously said, in Chicago.
My parents are working class.
I'm an American ethnic.
I'm not white in a sense.
I'm Italian, Mexican, and Irish.
And, you know, as someone with kind of all these priors, I look at the GOP and say, well, I'm not a Republican.
I have all these interests.
What does the GOP actually do for me?
Because when I look at, at the end of the day, what they are versus what I am, I see altogether different people, different religious beliefs, different socioeconomic class, different interests.
And so my favorite adage on my show is I want to take my own side.
I don't want to take the side of Republicans, whoever they may be or whatever they are.
I don't know what a Republican is.
I want to take my own side as a Zoomer white guy from the Midwest that has very distinct interests.
And when you elect the GOP and you want industrial policy and deportations and they give you H2B or H-2A visas and corporate tax cuts, you're like, wait a second, you know, we are really winning.
Republicans are winning, but we are not.
And so that's really from the very beginning, I sort of recognize that's what Trump did.
Trump raised a challenge first against the GOP establishment in the primary, then representing the opposition took the fight to the left.
And I said, that kind of the model, because what we got before that and really what we've gotten since then, it's not actually good for the Republican base and constituency.
And I know a lot of people on the left, it's like a mirror image with progressives and, you know, Bernie Sanders and AOC rallying against we're going to have a Democratic revolution in the Democratic Party.
Censored and Held Accountable 00:11:12
And then they get in, they become Democratic Party hacks who spend all their time on Trump in a way that, you know, any standard Democratic politician could.
Let me ask you a couple of issues about, you know, I feel like I have a good sense for your worldview.
I have, I think, a pretty good idea generally of where you're going to come down on an issue.
Things that you say rarely surprise me because I think they come from a coherent worldview that I understand.
I have to say, though, in the past month or so, there have been some things you've said that have really confounded me and surprised me.
And so I want to ask you about those.
You had referenced earlier the fact that you essentially are one of the most censored people on the internet over the last, you know, decade, starting when you, from a very young kid, like you were just banished, banished from every platform, YouTube and Facebook and Instagram.
And, you know, you were finally restored by Elon on X. Fortunately, Rumble is a platform that I think is one of the truly genuine defenders of free speech on the internet that has enabled you to have a show on there.
I don't think you'll ever be canceled there.
But by and large, you suffered this extreme amount of big tech censorship based on a theory that said that your views were so dangerous that you were essentially provoking, if not implicitly or explicitly encouraging violence against various minority groups.
Whether that's true or not, that was the theory used to justify your censorship.
And yet after Charlie Kirk's assassination, you yourself started to sound a lot to me like those very people who demanded your censorship.
You put up one tweet.
I think we have it here about Hassan Piker.
I just want to get the exact language.
Do we have this tweet?
Yeah, you said, we don't know the whole story.
I don't think this is the tweet.
I think it's the one about Hassan Piker, where you basically called for Hassan.
Yeah, you said.
Yeah, it was very direct.
You said, quote, Hassan Piker should be banned on Twitch and then deported back to Turkey.
And before our side starts to cry about hypocrisy, remember that you can't say the word retard on the platform, but you can openly incite murder against conservatives.
Enough is enough.
And then you'd also said, we don't really put that other tweet back on.
You said, we don't really know much about who the shooter is and what the official story is, but we know that tens of thousands of leftists celebrated his public execution for expressing basic conservative opinions.
They must be held accountable regardless.
So my questions are, have you changed your mind about censorship or have you always been of the view that it's only wrong against conservatives, but okay against the left?
And what did you mean when you said the people who celebrated Charlie Kirk's deaths have to be held accountable?
And what kind of accountability were you talking about?
Well, my views on censorship are that I guess I just don't buy this idea that if we are in principle against censorship, you know, then we can avoid these slippery slopes and everybody is able to participate in this public space.
But that's not in effect actually how it works.
I remain censored.
And when the left was in power, they used that power to censor me.
I believe that if the left gets power again, they're going to censor again.
And what's really sort of incumbent there is that the right wing needs to win.
So somebody like Hassan Piker, for example, he thinks I'm a Nazi.
He basically is antagonizing or instigating his followers all the time.
When they say things like punch Nazis, you're a Nazi.
This is in effect greenlighting violence.
And we do see this all the time.
I mean, you have left-wing people that are going around shooting up churches, assassinating figures like Charlie Kirk, shooting at somebody like Donald Trump.
Hassan Piker didn't even talk about me for many years because he said, you know, we don't platform Nazis.
He got me banned on Twitch.
It was after I won a debate with him in 2019, I think it was, that him and Destiny ran it up the flagpole and got me kicked off the platform because I won the debate.
And so, you know, I just don't subscribe to the idea that when the right wing is in power, we're going to protect the rights of the left.
Then we're going to wait for the left to get power and they're going to crush us.
They're going to get us censored.
They're going to get us deported, all those things.
So if I were dictator of America, I would have free speech forever.
But unfortunately, we are in this like competition.
I don't support hate speech legislation, but I do think that when the right is in power, we should take these opportunities to disempower the people that would try to suppress us in the future.
I think that's just unfortunately the reality of power in politics.
And then people who said, I'm glad to see Charlie Kirk dead because I think the world is better off without such a malicious or destructive voice.
When you said they ought to be held accountable, what kind of accountability were you hoping for?
That they get fired from their jobs.
I think that, and I'll say there's another dimension to this too.
We clearly do have a problem with political violence.
Like there's polls out there that say 30% of liberals in Generation Z believe that political violence is legitimate.
When Luigi Mangion assassinated that CEO, he was lionized as like a sexual icon and like a hero.
Thomas Crook shot Trump and they said he should get better aim.
Charlie Kirk was murdered.
And you have thousands of liberals actually publicly celebrating it because they think that his views are so radical, like he signed his own death warrant.
They believe that he forfeited his life.
And I think that on some level, if you want to have free speech, you really can't tolerate that.
And I don't think they should be penalized in any way because they hated Charlie Kirk or they disagreed with him.
I disagreed with him.
I didn't like him.
But if you're celebrating political violence, especially in a very sensitive moment like that, it's not forever.
It's not in a year, five years, whatever.
But if the country's sort of on the brink of a breakdown, clearly there is this problem.
I don't actually think it could be tolerated.
And by that, I mean that I think that society has to make it clear that that's not acceptable.
If you think it's acceptable to shoot people in the face because you disagree with them, you're not welcome in society, which means you don't, you're not going to be employed.
You're not going to be allowed to attend a university.
I think that's a reasonable place to draw the line because otherwise I think you spiral into total chaos.
I know I would feel the same way about you.
You have advocated views that not just people on the left and not just liberals, but people in Republican circles and conservative circles have also regarded as so pernicious and so odious that they ought not to be even permitted into society.
And that is what has led to you being put on the no-fly list and being debanked and being censored and suppressed in all sorts of ways.
Now, I understand the tendency to say, look, if that happened to me, now that I'm in power and I can do it to the people who did it to me, I want to do it back to them.
Maybe this is the constitutional lawyer in me that is just, you know, kind of living in these abstract clouds.
But I know personally, I've been able to represent, you know, neo-Nazis and people on the far right in their free speech rights and win by citing the cases from the 1950s that defended the free speech rights of communists.
And I've been able to do the same for the left by citing these precedents on the right in a way that holding these principles is actually ending up in a way that benefits everybody.
But let me just press a little bit on this violence issue because I'll tell you the very first time that I encountered this theory that political rhetoric can generate violence in a way that ought to be held accountable was there was this spate of abortion doctors in the 1990s.
I know we're roughly the same age.
I don't remember it because I was too young either.
Maybe you don't either.
But there was like four or five abortion doctors who were killed in a very short period of time, one of whom was constantly profiled on Bill O'Reilly's show as a particularly pernicious practitioner of abortion, somebody who would just do huge numbers of baby killings, including later term ones, even though they were illegal, he thought they were immoral.
People watched that show.
They went and they murdered abortion doctors.
People tried to blame that on Bill O'Reilly, so that his language was so incendiary that he was actually inspiring violence.
And then it happened even more recently.
You had this spate of massacres, this white supremacist massacre, the one in Buffalo at the supermarket where they went and murdered a bunch of black people, the Dylan Roof one in Charleston.
There was a guy who went and killed a bunch of Latinos in an El Paso Walmart.
And there was a very concerted liberal media Democratic Party effort to say the Tucker Carlsons and the anti-immigrants and the people with racist rhetoric like yourself have blood on your hands because even though you don't advocate violence, the kind of rhetoric you're using is enough to provoke it and inspire it.
Aren't you a little bit concerned that if you attach yourself to that theory when you can and can be effective in persecuting those on the other side, that you're strengthening those weapons to be used against you as well?
No, because I don't think it's a question of whether we can draw lines.
It's just where do we draw those lines.
And I think this is pretty explicit and clear, you know, where this is actually inciting.
Again, it's not saying that if you oppose a certain figure or if you disagree with a certain figure, a very high-profile figure was murdered probably by an ideological partisan.
And the same day that it happened, people are publicly celebrating in the mainstream media.
They're downplaying it.
To me, that's such a particular set of circumstances.
I just think it's a no-brainer.
And I think society sort of agreed, even though society is pretty liberal and the institutions are pretty liberal.
I think even there was a sort of mea culpa on the side of left-wing people that said, yeah, this is a little out of control.
This is clearly a problem.
This is kind of like a clear and present imminent danger because we're not saying it's rhetoric.
We're saying you're literally celebrating and justifying murder.
And I think that it'd be much more clear-cut.
Let's say, for example, after Dylan Roof shot up a church full of black people, if a bunch of like normie Republicans were on TikTok saying, let's go, that's awesome.
We need more of that.
You would rightfully say this is kind of dangerous.
You know, the right wing never, you know, normies, and I don't even think the fringe is the right, never did anything like that.
Because there have been instances of legitimate far-right political violence.
And it is almost universally always condemned with the exception of extremely marginal, anonymous elements that are few in number on the internet.
This was like mainstream normies and with the backing of the institutions that were saying more murder, more assassinations, take more shots at right-wing people.
That's as clear as it gets.
So I guess the disagreement is I don't think there's any problem with drawing lines.
It's just where do you draw the lines?
And this is a pretty clear-cut case where you say, and by the way, I'm not even saying there should be government censorship.
Rejecting Nihilistic Threats 00:03:37
I'm saying that as a society, individuals need to, and institutions need to reject this for the sake of society, for the sake of the whole, because, you know, obviously people could see where this is headed.
I mean, you encourage that, you insexualize it in some ways.
Every schizophrenic is watching the reaction that Luigi Mangion and all these others got, and they're making plans.
And that's sort of sick.
We kind of all need to hold the line against like demonic, nihilistic evil 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.
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 in iHeartWomen's 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.
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 this 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 and iHeartWomen's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Right.
I should just quickly say that Hassan Piker was somebody who was watching the assassination of Charlie Kirk in real time and actually chided his chat for expressing these views that it was a positive thing.
And I think that was self-interested because Hassan Piker makes a lot of public appearances, was actually scheduled to debate Charlie Kirk the next month at Dartmouth.
And I think felt almost maybe like you did that, that this was the sort of thing that can threaten anybody, any of us who express views that make other people angry, who appear in public in order to do it.
But he wasn't somebody celebrating the death.
It's amazing that we've spoken for almost an hour without talking about the issue on which you spend most of your time and these days on which I spend most of mine.
So I do want to make sure that we spend some time on this before we end.
You know, you talked about a lot of the areas of agreement that you have with people like Matt Walsh and people even like Charlie Kirk, you know, all the kind of standard right-wing items of like immigration and closed borders and the necessity to protect religious values and the war against it and all of that.
Turning Point's Alignment Question Mark 00:15:05
And obviously one of the reasons you were hostile to people like Charlie Kirk and to some extent Matt Walsh and others is because of the issue that you emphasize, I think quite persuasively, is more important than all of those without which nothing can be changed, which is the stranglehold that Israel and its loyalists inside the United States through what John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called the Israel lobby has on American politics.
Why is it that you consider that issue to be maybe not paramount, but like a first order importance that has to be fixed before anything else is possible?
Well, because on some level, if I represent nativism, nationalism, we're against immigration, we're in favor of all these things, it really comes down to sovereignty.
I mean, the fundamental question behind all of the issues that I would say at the center of it is whether America is an independent nation, whether its politics are free from foreign influence, whether it's real Americans making the decisions.
You know, the whole premise of the government, of our government, is of buying for the American people.
And so if there is this giant foreign influence lobby with its allies in America that is at the center, preventing the people from having sovereignty, having independence, from self-representation and self-governance, it's sort of a contradiction in terms.
That's sort of like the ever-present political reality is that before our government, which is theoretically supposed to represent us, before the government can move or make decisions, it first must consult a foreign nation or satisfy the demands of a foreign nation.
That is then the preeminent issue.
That's kind of the roadblock that's standing between everything that we're doing.
And the disagreement between somebody like myself and Matt Walsh, or even for that matter, somebody like Jared Taylor, or for that matter, V Dare, many of the immigration restrictionists on the white nationalist side, the more pro-white side of the right wing, they believe that we can have sort of like a grand bargain, that they take sort of an accommodationist position.
There are, of course, you know, the pro-Israel side is very in tune with the far right in Europe, the far right in America.
In many ways, they fund and produce the far right in America.
And so there's this viewpoint that if we don't upset the apple cart with Israeli influence in America, the Israelis that control our country will let us have immigration restriction.
And I guess my chief disagreement is it's up to us what our decisions are.
It shouldn't be up to them to grant these concessions or grant better living conditions.
In a sense, I'm kind of saying the original message, which is give me freedom or give me death.
I will actually trade a worse quality of life or even my political enemies having control as long as they're native, as long as they're coming from America, rather than being influenced by a foreign country.
And that comes from a disagreement in principle.
So to me, it all comes back to independence and sovereignty.
For them, it comes back to some like, you know, vague Christian values, whatever, ideological conservatism.
So to me, that's the big disagreement.
That's why I think it's the preeminent issue.
One of the things you see, and you saw this a little bit before Charlie Kirk's assassination, but I think you really see it after was, and you alluded to it too, but I don't think it's going to last very long with you.
I see it already eroding.
It was kind of the sense of like, okay, look, we have these very significant, sometimes very incendiary conflicts among people who should be allies on the right.
And maybe we used to be at each other's throat, but it's kind of time to unite.
And Matt Walsh, who has been, you know, viciously attacked and the whole Daily Wire crowd that has been seriously undermined ever since Israel got put on the front border again, was very much a leader in this.
Like, I'm giving amnesty to all the people with whom I was disagreeing on the right.
It's time to come together and kind of forget these differences.
Obviously, meaning Israel.
And there's, you know, certain things that they try and do, like they try and pretend that like somehow it's Qatari money that's really the primary nefarious influence in our country, even though I don't see our political leaders going to make pilgrimage to Qatar every month or sending billions to Qatar, fighting wars for Qatar.
Like when that starts to happen, I'll believe that.
And a big part of it is, and we even saw Matt Walsh doing it today.
And I think when you were on Pat Patrick Davis, so last week, he tried doing this with you as well, is trying to get you to assert that the real problem in terms of foreign influence in the United States is not Israel and the Jewish lobby, but instead, by huge coincidence, the big problem that America has are the very people who are Israel's biggest enemy, which are American Muslims.
And therefore, essentially, we in Israel are on the same side in fighting against the true evil, which is Islam.
Why do you consider Israeli influence and the influence of the Jewish lobby so much more of a problem than these other kinds of sort of distractions that people on the right are trying to sell to people to make them forget about Israel?
Because they have so much more power.
You know, whenever we hear about Sharia law and Muslims invading America, we forget that they have basically no institutional power.
Muslims have power in Dearborn, Michigan, in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, but elsewhere in the country, they're basically sparse.
There's not a lot of them.
And where they are, they don't control institutions.
When you look at Israel or even the Jewish community at large, their influence over America, it proceeds from their deep and entrenched and systematic influence over the elite institutions of America, like the Ivy League universities, like the major financial institutions like BlackRock, like the major talent agencies or Hollywood studios, like AIPAC in government, everywhere where you find power.
Like the media.
Exactly.
Everywhere.
And all these powerful, the media too, and all these powerful institutions, there they are.
And there they are advocating on behalf of an alien interest, whether that's the interest of Israel or Jews as a transnational community.
And so, you know, I love your tweet earlier today.
It's kind of ironic because you're Jewish.
I'm the so-called anti-Semite.
We're totally in agreement.
Matt Walsh is calling out the Muslim sheriff of like Dearborn, Michigan.
It's like, hey, how about calling out like the Jewish leaders of everything, the Jewish leaders of Harvard, of BlackRock, of Blackstone, of this, that, and the other.
And they're just unwilling to do that.
And we all know why they're unwilling to do that.
And it's sort of like that omission speaks for itself.
I mean, it's not just what's said, but what's not said.
And that's kind of where they're holding back the nativist cause.
You know, who is getting in the way of these conversations about free speech?
It's the ADL.
Foreign wars, it's the Israel lobby.
In politics, it's APAC.
It's, you know, all the various different groups.
And so, you know, somebody like Matt Walsh, when he says, let's all unite, I'm interested actually to see if he means that.
He's a goy.
But Josh Hammer and Mark Levin, they took a very different tone.
They said, when Charlie Kirk is dead, anti-Semitic filth like Nick Fuentes are going to fill the void.
It's like, so clearly that that is something that the white Gentiles are saying, talking about unity.
The hardcore pro-Israel Jews, they have a very different take on this.
So, you know, when Matt Walsh says unity, I'm kind of looking for when are you going to meet us halfway then?
Are you going to take the same track as Josh Hammer?
Are you going to kind of stand up for yourself as a Catholic white American?
That's what I'm waiting to see is if there's any, if there's any give on his part, because I'm willing to unite.
It's them that don't want to unite with us.
Yeah, and I think it might have been you that has pointed out maybe once, maybe twice that Matt Walsh works for Ben Shapiro.
And so obviously that constrains in a lot of ways, as Candace Owens found out, what it is that you can say if you want to stay at the Daily Wire.
A couple things just on this quickly.
One of the things that I find such an eye-opening kind of mass dropping moment is what happened with TikTok.
And I saw you mention this too.
I've been covering this from the start.
I knew this was going to happen.
A lot, you know, when the ban on TikTok was first announced, the rationale was we can't have the Chinese controlling the algorithm that shaped the views of young Americans.
And that went nowhere in Washington.
That was 2020.
It didn't get anywhere near the approval it needed in Congress.
The Biden administration abandoned it.
Nobody cared.
It was only after October 7th when Democratic members of Congress became convinced that it was because of TikTok that the young generation was turning against Israel, that they suddenly decide, oh my God, we have to do something about TikTok.
And the ADL came out and said, we must ban this or we must capture it.
And the ADL even went to Israel, Jonathan Greenbott, and said, capturing TikTok is at least as important as capturing the land dominated by Hezbollah and Hamas.
And then, of course, a month later, Congress does ban TikTok on those orders.
And then suddenly, after nine months, Trump finds a way to sell it, not just to Trump allies, but to the largest single donor to the IDF, which is Larry Ellison, whose only cause in life is Israel.
And so it seems clear to me that you don't need much conspiratorial thinking to see that each one of these issues is ultimately driven by that same topic, despite the effort to say, oh, you're obsessed with Israel.
When I see members of Congress going every week to Israel and passing resolutions every week for Israel and giving all American money to Israel and fighting wars for Israel and giving TikTok to Israeli interests, I don't think it's me who's obsessed with Israel.
I think it's the people in power.
And along those lines, I wanted to ask you about Turning Point, which is obviously a very well-funded and now more powerful than ever organization in American politics, especially among American youth, given the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk and everything else.
And it is obviously now a question of like, who's going to run Turning Point?
And, you know, if you go back a month ago before Charlie Kirk was killed, you saw a lot of these Israel fanatics like Laura Loomer.
I'm not sure if Ben Shapiro said anything, but his crowd, a lot of them were, you know, trying to eject Charlie Kirk from good standing because he had a debate on Israel with Dave Smith, and then he invited Tucker to speak, knowing Tucker was going to bash Israel.
And Tucker spent half a speech talking about Epstein as a Mossad agent and how the government is trying to cover that up.
And people were infuriated with him and felt like Turning Point was in danger for the agenda for which it was set up, which is to serve Israel.
And now you see Ben Shapiro suddenly appearing on the Charlie Kirk show and announcing millions of dollars in donation to Turning Point.
As you pointed out, Erica Kirk, despite knowing not much about her, is assuming this leadership role.
And the kind of question is, who is she and what are her influences?
What do you see as going on now with the attempt to, now that Charlie Kirk is in running Turning Point, to make sure that Turning Point stays in the hands of a very reliable person or group of people who are loyal to the Israel agenda that its funders demand?
Well, they're already swarming.
Like you said, I mean, Bill Ackman came in right away after Charlie died with a million bucks as a reward for information about the killer.
Sean Maguire from Sequoia came in and said Charlie Kirk's family is set for life.
Andrew Colvett, who is this PR guy at Turning Point, he's sort of been the spokesman.
He was the producer on the show.
He's got a very interesting background.
He comes from this PR company and he was working with Marissa Strait, who's the Unit 8200 officer that's running Brager University.
So clearly there is, everybody recognizes that a power vacuum has just opened up.
Charlie Kirk, as we said earlier, is this towering figure.
And now that he's gone, there is this huge black hole in the center of Turning Point.
And so question one is, who's in charge?
Erica Kirk.
And, you know, who is she?
We don't know.
Is she going to be a force in and of herself?
And what are her values and what's her alignment?
Or will she kind of be somebody who's going to be directed by the board?
And then who's going to be the board?
Who's going to be the money behind Turning Point?
One interesting thing is they talked about this Jewish donor, one of their bigger donors who gave them $2 million, rescinded the donation.
And then when Charlie died, sent the donation back in.
You wonder where assurance is made?
Is there sort of some renewed confidence?
Maybe that was out of some sort of sympathy for the organization.
But to me, it's a big question, Mark.
But I think, of course, these forces are going to race in.
And I mentioned a moment ago, Josh Hammer talked with Mark Levin the other day on the show about this.
And Josh Hammer and Mark Levin have emerged as some of the loudest and most vocal pro-Israel voices, both Jewish, both super Zionist.
Josh Hammer was tight with Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk told him on a phone call, apparently the week that he died, that if anybody asks about Israel, he's just going to show Josh Hammer's book.
And so these are the kinds of people that are going to race in, and I think quite successfully to try to then gatekeep that conversation.
The question then, I suppose, is what role will Tucker play in the future?
He's already lined up to have an event at Indiana, one of those campuses in the coming months as part of the tour.
But I think that is going to remain a battle just like it was three weeks ago.
You know, I think that battle is going to keep being fought.
So I think it's a question mark, but the Zionists are definitely going to have an opportunity here to come in and, you know, I think erase any doubt as to the alignment of turning point with Israel.
Last question for you.
It's kind of ironic that right before we had you on the show, right before you were scheduled, this kind of very, I wouldn't say super pervasive, but not trivial either, accusation started being launched against you that you seem to have become captive to the state of Israel and his interests by virtue of the rejection that you've expressed of the view that Israel was behind Charlie Kirk's killing.
Like, oh, look, Nick Funtes is now running cover for Israel.
He's clearly part of the Mossad.
And I know that you talked about how frustrating that was.
You just don't see the evidence for this conspiracy and you're saying that.
And on the other hand, people are so quick to say, oh, look, Israel must have some role in these machinations.
And you talked about almost like a sort of pride that you felt, kind of a happiness in seeing that the discourse has gone so far that if you don't immediately assert Israel is behind something, it creates a lot of suspicion on the part of huge numbers of people.
And that clearly is a massive sea change.
Let Israel Handle? 00:05:13
You see that sea change too in poll after poll after poll where young people have completely abandoned Israel.
And it's clear that, and this happens in every instance where an establishment faction or a power center feels threatened, they start getting increasingly desperate.
What do you think is the likelihood, given that this has now all been so unleashed, you know, unleashed in a way that just seems to build on itself, that Israel and its oilists, with all their institutional power and all their money and all their willingness to go so far without limits, will be able to stem the tide and reverse the tide and make Americans, especially younger Americans, get on board again with the pro-Israel train?
I think they have recognized that they've lost the public.
And I think they recognize they're not going to get the public back the way that it used to be.
I think they recognize, especially on the right wing, that nobody's going to go back to cheerleading the way that they used to be, at least for the most part.
So I think their strategy is something like complacency and indifference.
And I've noticed that on the right wing, what you see, for example, with somebody like Matt Walsh, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, he says, well, listen, I'm an American, so I don't really care that much about Palestine and Israel.
Don't talk to me about that.
I don't know anything about that.
I only care about America.
And to me, that is such like a deliberate, they're trying to come across as indifferent to Israel.
They're trying to come across, people say this line on Twitter.
They say, just let them kill each other.
Who cares?
Just let Israel and Palestine kill each other.
And by all appearances, that looks like sort of a happy medium where you're not super pro-Israel.
You're not psycho-anti-Israel.
You're just really focused on America.
But that belies the truth that, of course, the institutions, there's a major war being waged.
Barry Weiss is going to be running CBS.
Harvard now has a Jewish president.
Like the war, they're in it to win it.
They're taking hits, but they're still pushing and they're still moving up the battlefield here.
And when people say things like, well, we just need to ignore that, they're basically telling Americans to recuse themselves from that conversation and saying we're only going to let the pro-Israel side fight these battles and advocate for their cause.
And Americans are just going to kind of say, that doesn't matter.
During the Iran war, Charlie Kirk himself said, everybody just turn your phones off.
The world is so crazy.
Everybody just pretend this isn't happening.
I saw other people say, you know, realistically, I think Oron McIntyre in his show with Tucker said, we really need to just focus on parochial concerns like the school board and things that actually affect our real lives.
We don't need to concern ourselves with politics.
And so if you're really being perceptive about this, the message, they know they've lost the left.
Although maybe they're trying to recapture people like Barry Weiss.
But on the right, their message that they're pushing is this very calculated. indifferentist position to just sort of say, let Israel handle everything.
Let the Jewish Silicon Valley types, let them be the technocrats.
They can supply the drones and the satellites and the AI and all this.
You just don't concern yourselves with that.
You concern yourselves with this parochial stuff and culture war issues.
And that's where it's our job to agitate and say, this matters to you.
You have a say in how your government operates.
This is the American empire.
We're citizens of it.
We should wield it and control it.
We should take an interest in it.
So to me, that's sort of the next phase.
That's going to be the toughest battle.
It's not people saying you need to be a cheerleader for Israel.
It's people telling you, who cares about Israel?
You're the crazy one.
Like you talked about that gaslighting, saying we're obsessed with Israel.
We need to push back and say, no, it is our concern.
It's our empire.
It's our country.
And actually, it does matter for our daily lives.
To me, that's the next step in the battle.
Yeah, and it's so deceitful, that kind of like pseudo-abdication, because the reality is it isn't just, you know, money being sent for foreign wars.
It's that every one of our institutions is undergoing massive radical limitations on the ability of people to express themselves freely, including at our universities that have nothing to do with protests, but what can be taught.
You know, all these hate speech codes that conservatives claim to be so opposed to and infuriated by are being expanded radically in order to protect not just Jewish people, but Israel from a wide range of critiques.
So this idea of people on the right saying, I'm not on board with Israel either.
I just don't care, is so deceitful because it obscures the fact that our politics are being radically changed underneath our noses by this Israel lobby and by its loyalists in the United States that the Matt Walsh's of the world are encouraging to ignore because he wants to just somehow find this sweet middle ground where he's neither an Israel shill nor somebody who's going against Ben Shapiro and the interests that fund him.
And I do think it's vital to make manifest how deceitful and false that is.
Appreciating Nick's Insight 00:01:45
All right, Nick, well, I always think it's very important, especially when people talk a lot about someone, to invite people instead to hear directly from them.
So that was my main motivation in wanting to have you on, as well as mocking you at the beginning for all the different things that we've had in terms of our encounters.
But I hope people continue to watch your show, even if they don't agree with you.
I think it's, as I said a few weeks ago, gotten a lot of trouble for saying it.
You don't spout off like as a sensationalist shock dock.
You, I think, are extremely well read in the areas on which you focus.
And that alone makes your commentary very worthwhile.
So I really appreciate your coming on.
It was great talking to you.
And I hope we do it again.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate the conversation.
Absolutely.
Have a good evening.
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