Trump Declares Cities as the Enemies Within; Reagan Appointed Judge Slams Trump Over Speech Crackdowns; American ER Doctor on Gaza Atrocities
Trump sends the National Guard to American cities, raising serious concerns over civil liberties. Then: a Reagan-appointed judge slams the Trump administration for its unconstitutional speech crackdowns. Finally: Dr. Masood Ranginwala discusses the atrocities he saw volunteering in Gaza. --------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Trump appeared at a gathering of senior U.S. military officials and commanders gathered from all over the world, summoned by his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, where Trump spoke openly of his intent to unleash the U.S. military on American cities, explicitly saying that such cities should be used as, quote, a training ground for domestic military operations.
We'll examine what Trump really meant by that and what the implications of it might be.
Then a federal district court judge in Massachusetts appointed by one Ronald Reagan, so no left-wing activist he, issued one of the most scathing free speech rulings I think I've ever read in my life when holding that the Trump administration is conducted what the court called a full frontal assault on free speech rights by deporting or otherwise punishing non-citizens legally in the United States for the crime of criticizing Israel, a topic that we've reported on at length.
Though the judicial decision employs somewhat, I guess, unjudicial rhetoric, the holding of the decision is absolutely correct and more vital than ever.
And then finally, one of the most important sources of information that we have about the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza, aside from the Gazan journalists whom the IDF has been systematically eradicating, are Western medical workers who have been volunteering there.
Masood Rangiwale is an emergency physician who just last month returned from a two-week mission in Gaza.
He's one of those many medical workers, physicians, and nurses who have gone to Gaza and then comes back and describes what they've seen.
And he'll be with us tonight to describe in his own words as a first-hand witness, exactly what he's been seeing in Gaza during his time there.
Before we get to all that, a couple of quick program notes.
First of all, System Update is available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms, which if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of our show.
Finally, as independent journalists, independent media, we do rely upon the support of our viewers and members, which you can participate in by joining our locals community where you get a wide array of exclusive benefits.
All you have to do is click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Before I get into the show tonight, I just want to note at the top that I was on Megyn Kelly's program earlier today for a full two hours.
And when I say a full two hours, I mean two hours with my ass in the seat for two whole, full hours.
And I'm on Megan's show quite a bit.
Typically, we cover a wide range of political and sometimes cultural topics that are the type of topics she often covers.
Invasion Within rhetoric00:15:36
Today, though, was a little different.
It was a little less predictable, a little bit less concrete, and a kind of more roving and organic conversation for whatever reason.
It covered a lot of different issues that aren't typically covered, including spiritual maladies in the West and the nature of connection in the digital age, as well as the need for certain kinds of political dialogue.
So those interested can go to YouTube or any other platform and watch Megan's show, and you'll be able to watch the two full hours or parts of it, whatever most interests you that I contributed earlier today.
All right, Donald Trump was in Quantico, Virginia.
There was a very mysterious ethos to this gathering because it was reported that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, had ordered senior military commanders from all over the world to travel to Quantico in order to gather for what was an unspecified reason.
And of course, led a lot of people to wonder whether the U.S. has some planned military operation that it needed to brief its senior commanders on, or what was the purpose.
The purpose was kind of kept under wraps.
Pete Hegseth ended up speaking to those military commanders, made a lot of statements, a lot of decrees, including chiding various people who are senior in the military for being overweight, for being slovenly in their appearance.
He talked about what he called, quote, dudes in dresses and said all of that ends, kind of essentially announcing a restoration of what had been standard military expectations for many decades, I guess, until a new sort of philosophy ended up shaping the American military in recent years.
And one can debate whether those old standards of fitness and ideology and presentation.
He also talked about the male standards of fitness were actually appropriate when there was a certain kind of warfighting and may not be as appropriate now, where a lot is done by things like drones or technology or other kinds of support roles, or whether or not the military can only function, a good military can only function if it has discipline, and that discipline can be reflected by those personal traits.
In general, I do think it's actually quite disturbing when our culture is told that being overweight is somehow not just acceptable, but even as good as the alternative.
I think there's a lot of reasons to tell people that although they shouldn't be ashamed of it, there certainly should be a clear consensus, as exists in medicine, that being in shape, being fit is something that is very good for you, not just physically, but also mentally, the need for physical exercise.
I don't have a problem with that.
So at some point, maybe we'll discuss the Pete Hegseth part of that discussion, but I want to focus on what President Trump said, because he essentially came with a prepared speech that he was reading off of a teleprompter.
And as often happens, he gets very bored when he's just reading from a teleprompter.
It's not his skill.
It's not what has driven his political success.
Instead, he started talking about a bunch of, I think, extremely relevant and potentially consequential issues, kind of off the cuff.
So part of this is from the teleprompter script.
And then part of these comments are things that he spontaneously or contemporaneously just kind of decided to say.
I think the set here was very deliberately a replica of a famous set that was used by General Patton, I believe in the film actually, where General Patton gave one of his most famous military addresses.
But in any event, here's what President Trump said at this gathering.
That's what it is.
Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.
We're under invasion from within.
No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms.
At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out.
These people don't have uniforms.
But we are under invasion from within.
We're stopping it very quickly.
Now, the first part of that statement references what has become, in my view, a very valid critique of American foreign policy, which is the idea that we are responsible for policing every part of the world, that we go to Somalia and we bomb whoever we decide needs to be bombed, or we try and change the government of this country and that country.
And while this has been a common critique of President Trump, it's not really consistent with how he has presided over the executive branch, either in the first term or now in the second.
The United States military has frequently, for example, bombed Somalia under President Trump's presidency.
We bombed lots of different places that seem quite remote in terms of American interests.
And of course, we are very much in the process, and at some point we'll delve into this a little bit further, of launching what clearly seems to be an effort to at least destabilize, if not bring about regime change, in Venezuela.
And of course, it's being presented as an attempt to protect American communities from drug smuggling, but for so many reasons, that rationale crumbles upon the slightest bit of real scrutiny, including the fact that if you look at government reports about where drugs that are entering the United States are coming from, Venezuela barely rates, and yet we've been killing all sorts of people in various boats without any evidence presented by our government that they're drug traffickers.
Those people aren't wearing uniforms.
And yet, as President Trump said, it's very difficult to kill people when they're not wearing uniforms.
That was the lesson of the war on terror.
You end up killing huge numbers of innocent civilians.
So there was that critique that President Trump often expresses, like why are we continuing to be involved in so many wars around the world?
President Trump just announced, his administration did, that we're going to increase certain parts of our support, including intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians on how better to target bombing inside of Russia.
And there's a lot of those kinds of policies that seem quite inconsistent with this rhetoric about how we have to use our force and our military to protect our borders.
But then there's the other side of that equation, which is that President Trump says we are being attacked from within, that we have an enemy within, basically a domestic enemy.
And the Constitution does envision the fact that there may be not just foreign enemies, but domestic enemies and threats that emanate from foreign countries, but also threats that emanate from within.
And if President Trump means by this that there's a threat from within in the form of people pouring over the border illegally, I think a lot of people would be okay with that, that view, as evidenced by the fact that President Trump ran three times with that view as a centerpiece of his political campaign, winning twice and almost winning a third time.
So clearly that has been, if that's what he meant, a view that is very consistent with how President Trump has conceived of the world and convinced Americans to see it as well.
I don't think that's what he means though, for a lot of different reasons, including the fact that there's no one that can doubt that the policies that have been implemented by the Trump administration since the inauguration have all but stopped completely the flow of people across the border and the southern part of the United States where they had been pouring over by the millions under the Biden administration.
And we kept hearing from Democrats that President Biden was powerless to stop this, that it required bipartisan legislative solutions, that Trump had sabotaged.
They were trying to blame Trump for it.
And as it turned out, without any immigration legislation, the Trump administration has succeeded, whatever you think of the methods, in putting a stop to the huge number of people pouring over the borders.
That's clearly not what he means when he's talking about an invasion from within or an enemy within.
And another reason that you know that's not what he means is that he is describing the intention that President Trump has to deploy U.S. National Guard and other types of reserves or even the U.S. military onto the streets of American cities.
And the pretext or the justification for his doing so has nothing to do with immigration.
It has to do with what he perceives as rampant law and order problems, as happened in Washington, where there were violent crimes that provoked him to deploy the National Guard and other federal troops and law enforcement into Washington, D.C.
He also wanted to do that and did do that in California.
He's now thinking about or wanting to do it in Oregon, including in states where the governor has, including California and Oregon, where the governor has made clear they don't think that deployment is necessary and they don't actually want federal troops being deployed, which creates a huge legal and constitutional barrier for this type of deployment to take place.
Now, as I said, it is not inconceivable, it is not alien to the concept of our Constitution that threats might come both from foreign and domestic sources.
But whenever the president starts talking about the enemy within or the threat within, unless he's being very specific about exactly which threat he's talking about, that rhetoric always has the potential to become quite dangerous because that is the path down which things like suppression of political dissent resides or using the military for political purposes.
I'm not suggesting that President Trump intends that or that he is guilty of that.
I'm simply suggesting that when we get to the point where politicians start talking about using the U.S. military or using extra police force in order to deploy on domestic soil for whatever kinds of ends, including fighting the enemy within, that that is rhetoric that has often led to some of the worst abuses in American history and that that ought to increase our alert level whenever the president starts speaking that way.
And we do have in our tradition, as we'll get to in just a second, a variety of laws that reflect this ethos that the federal government was never supposed to have this standing police force.
This whole idea of the law enforcement branch of the executive of the United States government overseen by the executive branch to have these standing armies of armed law enforcement agents of the DEA or the Bureau that oversees guns and alcohol and tobacco or all these different branches of the FBI or Homeland Security.
That is very foreign to the idea of the founders.
In fact, the founders, the idea of the founders was we wouldn't even have a standing military at all.
That only in times of war would the executive be empowered to assemble a well-regulated militia that would then end up turning into a military.
The president would then become the commander of chief.
But we weren't supposed to have just a standing army, a country always at war or ready to go to war or in a war posture.
And so much of this amassing of federal power and federal paramilitarized power or just overtly militarized power is something that is very distant from the vision that not just the founders had, but that the people in the United States had for the first hundred years or so.
This kind of unimagined police force of sprawling paramilitary, paramilitarized power is something that they couldn't even conceive of.
And when we start talking about employing that or unleashing it on our own citizens in our own cities, I would submit that that is something that requires a great deal of concern.
And there's legal frameworks like the Posse Comitatus Act, which I'm not suggesting yet is directly in violation of what Trump intends to do, but it's certainly reflective of this understanding that deploying the military on American soil is something that except in the most extreme circumstances, we ought to insist be avoided.
Now here's the rest of what Trump said, where again, he kind of went off script.
This is not part of his prepared remarks in the teleprompter, but this is Trump just sort of musing about the problem that he raised in that prior clip.
Very important mission.
And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.
Because we're going into Chicago very, that's a big city with an incompetent governor.
Stupid governor, stupid.
They threw him out of his family business.
He was so stupid.
I know the family.
He becomes governor.
He's got money.
Not money that he made.
But he ran for governor one, and now he criticizes us all the time.
Last week they had 11 people murdered, 44 people shot.
The week before that, they had five people murdered, 28 people shot.
Every weekend, they lose five, six.
If they lose five, they're considering it a great week.
They shouldn't lose any.
So what he's talking about there clearly are standard police functions that are typically left to American municipalities.
In almost every city, cities are patrolled by the police department that is under the control of the mayor.
And then you have the National Guard that is under the control of the governor.
And you have a Democrat running the city of Chicago.
And you have, in Randolph Johnson, you have a Democratic governor who Trump was referring to there, Governor Pritzker, who's also a Democrat.
Neither of them have asked for, and both of them have made clear they do not want the intervention of the U.S. military or the National Guard under the command of President Trump in American cities.
And it's certainly true that the crime rate in Chicago is more than what most people think it ought to be.
And I suppose there might be some people who just like immediately react and say, well, look, wherever there's crime, just send in the military and they'll take care of the problem.
That comes with immense cost once you start becoming a country that's policed and governed by the U.S. military, controlled by politicians that don't know these cities in Washington, D.C., or controlled by the president who has conflict with the Democratic politicians running these places.
It is a recipe for a lot of instability and for much worse as well.
And I understand how President Trump works.
I understand that he floats ideas in order to kind of test what it is that he can do, test the limits of what he can do, or just kind of express dissatisfaction through threatening these kind of policies.
I'm not trying to sound an alarm that is premature.
I'm simply saying that once we get into rhetoric that's about the deployment of the National Guard, or worse, the military, on American soil, we ought to be very concerned, particularly when it's not for warding off invasion or some kind of an insurrection, which he's not even reporting that it is.
The justification, which is just street crime, is not what the U.S. military or the National Guard is intended to combat.
And this has been something that has been on Trump's mind for quite a while.
He first did implement it when it came to the District of Columbia, which is sort of its own creature because it's not a state.
It's under home rule.
And therefore, the federal government does have a lot of authority when it comes to the District of Columbia.
National Guard in Cities00:09:28
And this is what the White House did in August on August 25th, which is issue this presidential action, the title of which was Additional Measures to Address the Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia.
And part of the text read this, quote, the Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each state's Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resource trained, organized, and available to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.
In coordination with the respective adjunct general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes.
In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resource trained and available for rapid nationwide deployment.
And one of the things you did see was a very visible presence of military and National Guard all throughout Washington, although it seemed like they weren't really doing much.
They were often doing things like trash collection or just standing around.
There were a lot of videos where residents of Washington were saying, why are you here?
And they would kind of respond and say, I don't really know.
So it can be kind of just a symbolic assertion of force, or it can be something much more sinister.
It can be an attempt by the executive branch, by the president, to control domestic activity, domestic civil activity, domestic civic activity, surveillance, and even domestic political activity.
Because obviously deploying the National Guard or the military under the command of the president in American cities is something that has obvious potential for extreme amounts of abuse.
And that's the reason why it's not really within the American tradition to do so, except in the most extreme circumstances.
This is rhetoric that Trump has been playing with for quite a while.
Here in Madison Square Garden, where he held one of his last large rallies before the 2024 election, this is part of what he said.
A massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today's Democrat Party.
They're just vessels.
In fact, they're perfect vessels because they'll never give them a hard time.
They'll do whatever they want.
I know many of them.
It's just this amorphous group of people.
But they're smart and they're vicious.
And we have to defeat them.
And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound of hoe.
How can he say, you know, they've done very bad things to this country?
They are indeed the enemy from within.
So he makes clear that's what his rhetoric is.
When he says the enemy within, that's from within.
That's what I was saying.
It's not about people coming across the border illegally or staying in the United States illegally.
It's about what he considers to be a left-wing machine, a left-wing political machine that's obviously his political opponents.
And there definitely have been aspects of civic disorder that have come from various left-wing elements over the past five years.
Certainly the George Floyd, the summer of the George Floyd protest entailed a decent amount of that.
There are pockets of places like in Portland or Seattle where at times the authorities seem either unwilling or incapable of asserting any authority in small parts of cities.
But the idea that there's some sort of massive insurrectionary force taking over the United States is exactly the kind of extremely exaggerated threat assertions that we ought to be very guarded against because that's the kind of thing that leads to authoritarian power.
Here was Donald Trump with Mark Levin on Fox News in September.
And here he's giving a little bit more specificity about what he means by the enemy within.
We have the enemy outside, which would be the very standard countries, and we have the enemy from within.
We have some very sick people from within.
I think that the people that go around indicting their political opponent, especially when their political opponent didn't want to do it to them, I could have done it so easy.
Now, part of what I will say here is that I understand President Trump and where he's coming from, given what he endured over the last eight years. he did face an entire massive institutional and authoritarian force united against him for political reasons that attempted to corrupt and in fact did in many ways politically corrupt some of our most crucial institutions.
They spent eight years trying to put him and his family and his closest associates in prison for what turned out to be extremely dubious at best allegations of Russia Gate or the Stormy Daniels case or the speech that he gave on January 6th and the alleged attempt to incite an insurrection or the taking of classified documents that he could have easily disclassified.
There was a clear attempt to imprison Donald Trump and many of his closest associates for political reasons in a way that I understand how he can view American institutions that becoming utterly corrupted in a way that is quite dangerous and that is a threat that emanated from within.
So it's not that the rhetoric itself concerns me.
I understand where he's coming from.
I share a lot of his views about institutional corruption in the United States.
I've spent years denouncing that.
But the idea that we're going to take the American military and unleash it or talk about using American cities as training grounds for how our military might restore order on domestic soil is definitely something that I think raises a lot of alarms.
I've been talking about this for quite a while as well.
I just want to give you an example here, which is this is an article I wrote in Celebr when I was at Ceylon.
This is back in 2008.
So this was the end of the Bush 43 administration.
And the title of it is Why is a U.S. Army Brigade Being Assigned to the quote homeland?
For the first time in 100 years, and contrary to long-standing legal prohibition, an active duty military unit is permanently assigned inside the United States.
And the article went on to talk about the posse comitatus legal framework that is designed to prohibit the deployment of U.S. military force inside the United States on domestic soil, except in the most extreme circumstances.
And the times that we've seen National Guard deployed for law enforcement or to combat political disorder has often ended quite poorly.
One of the most notorious examples was in 1970 when President Nixon ordered the National Guard deployed against student protests.
And I should say that the student protest that he was dealing with, President Nixon, against the Vietnam War, was infinitely more rampunctious and destabilizing and extreme than any of the student protests that we saw aimed at Israel, even though the solutions that we ended up imposing were far more severe this time than back then.
But one of the incidents that the unleashing of the National Guard led to was four students at Kent State University exercising the First Amendment rights, participating in the protest against the Vietnam War, actually ended up being killed, murdered by National Guard troops.
So you had American soldiers and American National Guard troops deployed to kill fellow American citizens who were engaged in political protest against the Vietnam War.
That's not the kind of thing we want our military for or our National Guard for.
The perhaps most justifiable deployment of National Guard for purposes of law and order that people certainly objected to, but a lot of people defended, was when Bush 41 deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles after the acquittal of the people who had been charged with attacking Rodney King and beating Rodney King.
They were acquitted and there was an immense amount of civic unrest in Los Angeles, people protesting.
That jury verdict that went on for many days entailed all sorts of huge amounts of property damage and all kinds of instability.
And the Los Angeles Police Department seemed incapable of quelling that disturbance.
And so President Bush ordered the National Guard onto the streets of Los Angeles where they helped quell those kinds of that level of civil disobedience and even violence and rioting.
And we don't really have anything similar to that, no matter how bad you think the crime rate is or anything else like that.
And so, as I said, if somebody can present to me a very concrete case for how instability in American cities are rising to the level of insurrection or some other form of extraordinary instability that only the U.S. military can address, I'm open to hearing it, but I've heard nothing even close to that.
CBD for Pain Relief00:02:58
And it's very important to keep in mind, even if that seems tempting to you, to remember how dangerous it is to have a president be able to unleash the military, not anywhere he wants throughout the world, which is already bad enough, but within American cities against what he calls the enemy within, by which he means people he perceives as political enemies.
The dangers and potential for abuse of that, let alone the precedent that it sets, ought to be so self-evident that everybody ought to be instinctively alarmed whenever a president starts speaking that way.
Do you know those nights when you just don't sleep?
I actually had one of those nights within the last week, they're miserable, and then the next day you're dragging and you're exhausted, everything just feels heavier and harder.
That's where CBD from CB Distillery can really make a big difference.
It's not just sleep though.
CB Distillery has all kinds of organic solutions that work with your body to help do things like reduce stress or alleviate pain after exercise or even improve your mood and focus.
And it's all made with the highest quality, clean ingredients.
No fillers, just premium CBD.
So imagine waking up rested or enjoying your day without those nagging aches and pains.
That's the real win of CB Distillery solutions.
That's why over 2 million people trust CB Distillery.
It's why I've used it for all sorts of just little nagging injuries that I get.
I'm an extremely good tennis player at a very, very high level.
I could easily be Bill Ackman.
And yet, sometimes when I play, I still get pains despite how fit my body is and agile and flexible.
And when I have these kind of pains, just like in my wrist or other ligaments or whatever, I do use CBD.
They have this like little painstick and you rub it on and you feel it.
I'm not kidding, just try it.
I'm serious.
I know it sounds like it's the sort of thing you say when you're doing an ad, but it really does work and you should try it yourself.
So if you're ready for better sleep or less stress or feeling good in your own skin again, try CBD from CB Distillery.
And right now, you can save 25% off your entire purchase.
Visit CB Distillery and use the promo code Glenn, that's cbdistillary.com, promo code GLEN.
cbdistillery.com's specific product availability depends on individual state regulations.
One of the topics we have most covered throughout this year has been what has become the very systematic crackdown on free speech in the name of protecting this foreign country called Israel.
We've seen all sorts of different ways that the Trump administration immediately got into office with a plan under the guise of combating racism, meaning anti-Semitism, to punish and restrict and limit in all sorts of ways the ability of people to protest Israel, to speak critically of Israel, to speak in defense of the pro-Palestinian cause.
Ruling Against Trump's Deportation Policies00:15:34
This is something that President Trump clearly promised a lot of his most significant donors, many of whom like Miriam Adelson have made very clear that they have one cause and one cause only, and that's not the United States, but Israel.
This is something that President Trump promised to do and has really kept his promise, even more than he actually expressed it explicitly, in ways that I think have surprised a lot of even his most ardent supporters.
And they include things like requiring all sorts of loyalty pledges in order to be eligible for federal benefits.
He has required all sorts of universities and colleges to implement wildly expanded hate speech codes, something that conservatives had always claimed to hate, hate speech codes, that restrict the kinds of things that you're allowed to say about Israel or about Jews.
Nothing to do with protesting, nothing to do with conduct, simply the kinds of views that you can express.
And then one of the first and most controversial aspects of this crackdown on free speech in the name of Israel was the fact that they were targeting people totally in the United States, totally legally in the United States, people who are PhDs or PhD students or professors at colleges or graduate students,
people with green cards married to American citizens on their path to citizenship, who would be snatched up by ICE, not any allegation that they engage in disruption, let alone commit any crimes.
Sometimes simply because they protested against Israel, but other times for even less than that, for things like writing up eds or posting social media postings that were critical of Israel.
And then Mark Arubio would just say, you've criticized Israel.
That means that you are a threat to our foreign policy.
And that means you have to leave.
And so the Trump administration came in promising mass deportations for violent people inside the United States illegally and then ultimately mass deportations and instead prioritized deporting people legally in the United States, producing benefits for our country and our society, excelling academically, being members of the academic community of which they were members, but whose crime in the eyes of the Trump administration was not that they were here legally or not even that they were here as non-citizens,
but that they were here as non-citizens expressing the one view the Trump administration wants to punish and that is criticism of Israel.
And there have been a lot of different lawsuits, a lot of different litigations challenging this practice, many of which have decided against the Trump administration and in favor of the First Amendment.
But there was a ruling issued this week by a federal district court judge in Massachusetts.
And this is somebody who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
And it was really the Reagan administration where we first saw this extremely rigorous ideological vetting of federal judges.
This is when the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation really perfected their ability to vet judges for ideological purity.
And it basically meant that only right-wing and conservative judges were getting through and being appointed by the Reagan administration.
It was one of the highest priorities.
Now I know for a lot of people here in the Reagan administration, it seems like it was, you know, 100 years ago, and how old must somebody be if they were appointed by Ronald Reagan?
And this judge is 84 years old, but he is known for having an extremely heavy work output and an extremely heavy docket, despite that age.
He's also known as being a longtime conservative judge.
And I would remind anybody wanting to dismiss what he does and says on the basis of his age, that he's only four years older than President Trump, five years older than President Trump.
And he's somebody whose competence or mental agility nobody has ever questioned.
And he issued this ruling that was extremely scathing.
I have to say, it was unusual in several ways.
One was just how aggressive the judicial condemnation was of what they described as the Trump administration's full frontal assault on First Amendment rights based on what we've gone over many times before is the indisputable fact that anybody in the United States on U.S. soil legally or even illegally enjoys the protections of the Constitution because the Constitution is a doctrine that limits what the U.S. government can do to people within its reach.
It's not a list of rights that only a small group of privileged people called American citizens receive.
And this is not some new left-wing doctrine that got invented over the last 30 years.
This is something that has been recognized for at least 150 years inside the United States and has been tested in all sorts of ways by upheld by every different kind of court with every different kind of composition.
So it was a very scathing judicial ruling.
It was also, I will confess, a ruling that had some intemperate language, some non-judicial rhetoric that I think unfortunately undermined the importance of the ruling and allowed it to be attacked.
But nonetheless, the holding itself was of the greatest importance.
One of the odd parts of the ruling was that it began, and we can put it up on the screen, the judge had, once this ruling was pending, and he had issued another ruling in a different setting that was contrary to the Trump administration ruling.
The Trump administration had violated the Constitution.
He got an anonymous note, the court did, which said, Trump has pardons and tanks.
What do you have?
Obviously, you know, a kind of threatening message like, hey, you're just a judge.
Nothing that you do matters.
Trump can just send tanks to your chambers and nobody is going to ever stop him from doing so.
And in response, the judge wrote this at the very top of the ruling.
Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, alone I have nothing.
Maybe we can put that back up on the screen.
Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.
Together, we the people of the United States, you and me, have our magnificent Constitution.
Here's how that works out in a specific case.
And so then the court went on and at great length, but also with extreme amount of clarity, made clear why punishing people or deporting people who are illegal in the United States, not for their conduct, but for their speech, not for their speech about the United States government, but about a foreign government, is as direct assault on the First Amendment as you can imagine.
Here's just a little bit of what the court said.
I think it's really worth hearing.
Quote, the great paradox of this case is that the government witnesses to a person are decent, credible, dedicated, nonpartisan professionals, true patriots who, in order to do their duty, have been weaponized by their highest superiors to reach foregone conclusions for the most ignoble ends.
There was no ideological deportation policy.
It was never the Secretary's immediate intention to deport all pro-Palestinian non-citizens for that obvious First Amendment violation that could have raised an outcry.
Rather, the intent of the Secretary was far more invidious to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act in ways that had never before been used to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen and other pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.
The secretaries, by which he means Marco Rubio at state and Christy Noam at Homeland Security, have succeeded apparently well beyond their immediate intentions.
And then he had a footnote that he included that made clear that this was not just about enforcement of immigration law against non-citizens.
Instead, the court said, quote, this, of course, is a gambit that has been accompanied by the Trump administration's full-throated assault on the First Amendment across the board under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of anti-Semitism.
And this is, of course, something that we have covered many times, that the Trump administration wildly expanded the definition of anti-Semitism to align with a definition that was created by Israel that has been implemented in the criminal law of the EU that makes it a prohibited,
that list of wide variety of prohibited opinions, the expression of which means you're guilty of anti-Semitism, which in the context of an academic institution means you can be expelled or fired, or that your views are simply can be banned.
And they include things like comparing the government of Israel to Nazi Germany, even though you're allowed to compare the United States or any other country to Nazi Germany.
You just can't compare Israel to Nazi Germany.
You're not allowed to say that Israel is an inherently racist endeavor, even though you can say that about any other government.
You're not allowed to say that any Jewish individual like Barry Weiss or Ben Shapiro seems to have greater loyalty to Israel than they do to the United States because that's considered anti-Semitism and on and on and on and on.
A whole list of views that are now barred officially by this radically expanded definition of hate speech that the Trump administration has forced colleges to accept.
And as the court said, as part of a broader effort to crack down on free speech in the name of protecting Israel.
And then finally, the court said this, quote, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.
And what he's essentially saying is that the idea wasn't let's root out every single student or non-citizen who has spoken ill of Israel.
Instead, let's create a climate where people understand, not just non-citizens, but citizens as well, that the federal government regards any criticism of Israel or protesting against Israel as something that is a threat to its policy interests.
And therefore, you better think twice or three times or a lot longer if you want to participate in anti-Israel activism or pro-Palestinian activism because the power of the federal government can come crashing down upon you.
That was, said the court, the ultimate goal of these individual policies.
And I don't see how you can listen to any Trump official talk about what the crusade against anti-Semitism really means and how it's understood and reach any other conclusion.
And just to give you a little bit more sense of who this judge is, here you see his official biography.
He's William Young of the Federal Digital Center.
And the official biography, he says he's a judge with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
And it says he was nominated by Ronald Reagan on March 8th, 1985 to a new seat authorized by 98 Statute 333, confirmed by the Senate on April 3rd, 1985, and received his commission on April 4th, 1985.
So he's, and then he served as the chief judge until 2005, assumed senior status in 2021.
As I said, no one has ever suggested or implied or hinted that he's in any way cognitively impaired.
There are members of Congress and the Senate who both Republicans and Democrats really like, whose work they cheer, who are as old, if not older than he.
And that is a type of attack on this opinion that I think is not going to get very far because it so clearly seems to be untrue.
All right.
Are we ready for?
Okay.
So I just want to go through a couple of the other types of judicial decisions that have been issued in order to just give you a sense that this is not operational at all, but this is part of a broader understanding on the part of our federal judiciary that this type of crackdown is something that is starting to really erode core First Amendment rights.
Here from Politico, April 30th of 2025, I don't know if we can put this up on the screen here or not.
Maybe not.
But there it is on the screen for you where the article reads, Judge Free's Columbia student activist whom the Trump administration wants to deport.
This is the Mahmoud Khalil case where the judge said that there is enough of a First Amendment claim on the part of Mahmoud Khalil that he can be released.
But this one was a similar case involving Mashuad Madawi, who also was arrested as part of the crackdown on pro-Palestinian students who were legally studying in the United States and he too was released.
So you have different courts saying that there's a clear First Amendment violation, at the very least, a very plausible First Amendment violation, that these students have their absolute right to pursue and there's no reason to keep them imprisoned in an ICE facility while they're pursuing and these cases are making their way through the court system.
Here is the Mahmoum Khalil case.
And this is from ABC News in April of 2025 when the government was ordered to show its evidence that justified Marco Rubio's assertion that Mahmoud Khalil had to be deported because in some way he was a threat or danger to the United States and the court found the evidence presented to be quite lacking and ultimately Mahmoud Khalil has been ordered released as well and they're trying now again to deport him.
But this is all part of these different judicial understandings that these present serious First Amendment violations here.
There's the case of the Tuft student who has was arrested simply for writing an op-ed regarding Israel, a very mild op-ed and her Tufts student newspaper, she too was then detained and arrested by plainclothes ICE agents who detached, who detained her off the street, and she too is now out.
And I do think that this has been, had it been confined just to non-students, we would have to spend a lot of time debating whether or not non-students enjoy all of the same constitutional rights as Americans, even though, as I said, there's more than a century of judicial precedent.
The fact that this is part of a broader crackdown, where the Trump administration is really essentially telling Americans, you are going to have to accept a diminution of the free speech rights of the First Amendment rights that you enjoy in the name of protecting Israel from criticism and protest,
and that we're going to use the pretext that we're fighting racism as a reason we need censorship, which is so ironic to hear the Trump administration saying the fact that this is all part and parcel of a broader effort is exactly why the federal court, as it said, issued such a long and emphatic ruling that this really is one of the most severe crackdowns on the First Amendment that we've seen.
And unlike the Biden administration's crackdowns in the First Amendment, where they ordered big tech to remove all kinds of dissent.
This is being done not in ostensibly in order to protect American citizens or the American government, but instead a foreign government.
And that is what makes it even more offensive than the standard kind of attack on the First Amendment is free speech guarantee that our government has previously engaged in.
So I always have known, I mean, pretty much since birth, maybe even as a fetus, I've always known that we all have two ages.
Field of Greens: Slowing Biological Aging00:02:23
One is our actual age, and then the other is our body's internal biological age.
I mean, that's so obvious.
But what I didn't know is that I've actually lowered my biological age, sometimes without even knowing I was doing it.
Here's the thing, because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruits and vegetables, many, perhaps most people, are 10 plus years older on the inside than their actual age.
Think how disgusting that is.
You have the capacity to be younger on the inside, and yet so many people through their food diet or their other practices are actually older on the inside than their actual age.
Essentially, people like that are ticking time bombs.
I say that not as an insult, but as a warning.
A major university study suggests how to slow aging and diffuse that biological time bomb.
Participants slowed their aging by drinking Field of Greens.
That's all.
They didn't change their eating, drinking, or exercise, just consuming Field of Greens.
And I know, maybe it's even psychological.
I know it's physical as well, but I think there's a psychological element that when I drink Field of Greens, I know that I'm ingesting all sorts of fruits and vegetables that my body needs, even on those days that I don't have time to actually plant it out and be really intentional and conscious about it.
Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was doctor selected for a very specific health benefit.
So you have some that are there for cellular health, others for your heart or lung or kidney systems, other for your metabolism, even for healthy weight.
I feel great knowing that Field of Greens can't slow how quickly I'm aging.
And I really encourage you to join me.
Swap your untested fruit, vegetable, or green drink for Field of Greens while there's time.
Check out the university study and get 20% off when you use the promo code GLEN at fieldofcreens.com.
That's fieldofgreens.com, promo code GLEN.
Masoud Rangiawala is an emergency physician who just last month returned from a two-week mission in Gaza.
There he served alongside other medical volunteers in the emergency wards of both Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and one in Deira al-Bala.
Gaza's Unyielding Resilience00:15:20
He's now back in New Jersey where he has practiced medicine for over 20 years and he joins us tonight to discuss what he witnessed in the very besieged Gaza Strip, to put that mildly.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
I really, really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
So before we get into the things that you witnessed, and we've had people on our show before who have been to Gaza and although the atrocities are well known, I think they're important to keep hearing about because sometimes they worsen, sometimes they change and mutate, but the fact that they're ongoing is all the reason to keep attention on them.
Can you just describe a little bit exactly the nature of the work that you were doing in Gaza?
How is it that you came to be part of a group of Western medical workers who went to Gaza and what was your role there?
So I was part of a group of physicists.
I went with PAB, Palestinian American Bridge, and there was other physicians alongside with me, with other organizations, but we were really the same goal to go into Gaza underserved areas and try to help the people there in any capacity.
Obviously, the medical landscape is devastated there and from all different levels.
The blockade is doing horrific effects on the whole system to the point where it's very difficult to deliver any type of medical care.
However, so we went there into Gaza to do what we could do as physicians, as surgeons, medical workers, what have you.
One of the things that I think has been most horrifying to hear about from the beginning, and this is something we've been hearing about from the beginning, is obviously in any war, you have civilians who are mauled or maimed or wounded or killed in the most horrific ways.
In a whatever you want to call this, I think most people are now calling it a genocide quite rightly, but many people who may not accept that term, this is a, you know, a devastation unlike anything we've seen in the 21st century.
We've heard about, you know, and the world has seen all kinds of horrific images, almost on a daily basis, of children being blown up, of people having their limbs blown apart, you know, all the horrors.
And yet, I think one of the things that has really been most horrifying to people is the lack of an infrastructure to provide medical care for people who are wounded.
And we've heard stories of children having to have limbs amputated with no anesthesia, basic antibiotics, all kinds of diseases that are very treatable, being untreatable because of the lack of supplies.
Can you describe what is the nature of the medical system to the extent it exists and what kinds of deprivations it entails?
I mean, right now, the fact that the blockade has such, you know, such a horrible impact on medical care, there's practically little or no follow-up care.
I mean, as you go through the wards, I've gone through the wards, you're basically going across young teenagers, young adults who have chest tubes, who have ORIFs from fractures, amputations, patients with significant abdominal injuries, who, and the rate of infection, for example, is just so high, almost like as quoted by one of my colleagues, close to 100%.
So these patients, the follow-up care is really almost not even there.
And many of these patients end up staying in the hospital because of that.
I mean, due to, and many of these patients are, basically they're amputees there.
They're made, they have like, you know, you know, like, they have these injuries.
And that's, many of them also suffer from PTSD, but there's no avenues for them to get that help.
That's one thing I wanted to ask you about.
I've actually been thinking about this from the very beginning.
I mean, Gaza is a place that I focused on long before October 7th, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general.
And if you think about what it's like in Western life, we have a huge amount of empathy for somebody who loses a loved one in their family.
We understand the grief that they go through.
We express all kinds of desires to support them and help them.
And we're talking here about just one death, you know, over that could take place in somebody's life.
The people in Gaza have been essentially surrounded by mass death and the risk of death.
They go to sleep every night with a very real chance of never waking up, not just for themselves, but for their children.
You hear bombs constantly and all sorts of military aircraft and devices constantly flying over your head.
And I always have wondered, you know, if this atrocity finally comes to an end in terms of the killing and slaughtering of people in Gaza, having gone through this for two years, especially kids whose childhood is obviously going to be shaped by the complete destruction of society around them, I mean, what is the nature of people's psyches there?
Is there any sense of resilience and like this understanding that we're still fighting a just cause and for that reason we can't give up?
Or is the devastation not just physical and medical and everything else, but also psychological and spiritual?
That's a very, very important question.
And this is one thing where, you know, like being with the Gazan people, everyone has a story.
Everyone has lost someone.
Some have lost everyone.
Most are living out of tents.
Death has become a, you know, daily, daily thing for the Gazan people to the point where, I mean, this also shows the great resilience of them.
You know, they're talking about who they lost.
I mean, I've talked to people who've lost, you know, their brother or their family members a week ago, and you cannot even tell on their faces.
They're even smiling sometimes.
And this just points to the resilience of the Gazan people that they have come above and beyond to the point where they're accepting death and literally they're living for the next day.
The first day I met this grandmother who's taking care of a three-year-old with a big fracture.
And apparently a week ago, a week prior, the whole bomb, the family was bombed and their home destroyed by a kamikaze drone.
And literally, you can't see any sort of grief on this grandmother who's the sole provider, take care, caretaker of her grandchild, who's lost everything.
And similarly, I came across a nurse at the bird's room with a limp, and he mentions to me, oh, this is my prosthetic leg.
Oh, yes, and actually I lost my wife, my kids, a living out of a tent.
But you cannot see that from when he's working.
This is part of the Gazan people.
And one of the beautiful things I've also noticed is that as they come in, you know, having lost, everyone's lost someone.
Homes, they're obviously in a state of starvation.
I've never once heard them curse the source, the oppressor.
And the smiles are there.
Yes, many of them are not smiling, but they're not tears as well.
So this just points to the resilience of the Gazan people.
Yes, unfortunately, many of the kids have some PTSD.
I mean, they're chilling.
I mean, many times they don't know how to internalize what's going on.
But above and beyond, the resilience of the Ghazna people, the bravery of the Ghazna people, their strength is just, you know, unfathomable.
One of the things that I'm interested in is, you know, as a journalist who's had to cover all of this, like most people, it's been utterly horrifying to have to pay attention to.
There are times you just want to turn away, and I'm obviously not there.
I'm not witnessing firsthand.
I'm observing it the way most other people are.
And one of the things you're trying to do is keep your emotions in check, and yet it's extremely difficult to suppress the disgust and the outrage and the anger that you feel, not just toward the Israelis and the military who are doing it, but towards the part of the world, including the United States, that are arming it and supporting it and paying for it and enabling it.
And sometimes I confess that the rage gets very consuming, like very intense.
It's hard sometimes to liberate yourself from that.
I can only imagine what it must be like if you're living in a society that day after day after day for two full years is under this kind of bombardment, this kind of attack, this kind of blockade, the cruelty, the sadism, the suffering, just must seem never ending and bottomless.
Is there a lot of, because at the end of the day, no matter how this ends, we're going to have 2 million people or maybe 1.8 million or however many human beings who have gone through this and they have to have some kind of anger and a desire to avenge what has been done to them.
It's only natural.
They wouldn't be human if they didn't have that.
What is the sense of that you were able to see when you were there?
I didn't sense that.
I didn't sense anger.
I mean, if there was, it was over the lost, you know, what they're suffering.
Obviously, they're suffering.
They're human beings.
Much of the starvation has caused them to go through these aid sites to try to get aid off the trucks which are trying to roll, trickle in.
Typically what I get or gather from the Gazan people is they want the war to end.
They want to resume their lives.
They all have hopes.
But right now, it's only a matter of living to the next day.
And that's basically the goal right now.
I mean, they can't focus on anything else right now.
It's just basically living to the next day.
And I didn't really sense that anger.
I mean, that anger, because I know a little bit of Arabic.
I mean, I didn't hear the cursing once, not even once.
And again, this is just point to the resilience of the Gazan people.
And I asked, you know, why?
And one person just said, this is not how we were raised.
So many people, I mean, the positive qualities of the Ghazan people are there.
Obviously, they've been suffering even before this recent war, but they're hurting.
And by the same time, they're going on.
And they just want the war to end.
They want to regain control of their lives.
They want to go back to where they were, you know.
And, you know, right now it's just living to the next day.
And they're all ready to face death because it's surrounding them.
Yeah, I guess you have to accept that reality.
There's probably no choice.
In terms of resumption of life, it seems pretty clear, and it has for some time, and sometimes Israeli officials have even said this explicitly, that part of the goal of what they're doing is to make life uninhabitable for the people of Gaza.
They want to drive them out.
They want to take that over for themselves.
They want to force them into small, highly controlled camps, which might be called concentration camps, which I guess you would have to call concentration camps.
And it seems like part of the goal is to make it uninhabitable, to make it impossible to resume life even once the war itself ends.
What have you been able to see or what is your understanding of the potential to any time in the future replicate any sort of natural civilian infrastructure and society in Gaza?
I mean, as I was going through into Gaza, I mean, it was very emotional.
I mean, it's devastation on a skill.
I never, even through the images, the pictures don't do justice to what's happening.
I mean, you know, to raise Gaza City as what's happening right now, I mean, I don't imagine how you could, you know, collapse it or destroy it any further.
It's so destroyed.
I mean, 70, 80% people are living out of hollowed out buildings.
This is the life that they have.
But even then, you want to take that away from them and make them homeless.
The roads aren't even there.
There's one road basically towards the beach from Gaza City on the way south.
And I mean, even to go and swim out, there are restrictions.
You can't even go sail like a few feet from the ocean, from the shoreline.
I mean, the suffocation, you know, it's, I mean, I don't have any words to describe what's happening.
I mean, if this is not ethnic cleansing, what is?
I mean, you know, but again, to destroy Gaza City to the point where it's rubble, I mean, that seems to be the goal right now, just like what happened to Rafa.
You know, it's interesting, whenever anyone I know has a loved one who ends up with a sickness or having to spend a lot of time in the hospital, those people come away with a huge amount of admiration for medical workers, especially like nurses and doctors.
You know, there's like a, obviously there's frustration with the healthcare system that people have and a lot of the insurance aspects and some of the, obviously in any group of people, you get some bad doctors, nurses, but the profession itself like is a, has a very noble ethos.
Like the idea is you want to go and help people, people in their most vulnerable state, which is when they're sick.
But what you've done is something well beyond that, which is, you know, leaving what is a relatively very safe existence and life that you have in New Jersey and going to the most dangerous place on earth.
What was your thought process in kind of getting yourself to go and do that?
It's a good question.
Obviously, it was a well-thought-up decision.
Actually, the catalyst for this, I would have to be my wife, actually, interestingly enough.
And I mean, being a worker in the physician ED physician, and we all, as physicians, we pride ourselves on helping.
But are we really?
I mean, you know, so this is where I had to reflect.
And the fact that there was also other colleagues who went to Gaza as well, a couple of times, they also gave me encouragement to do this.
And again, I don't really consider having done much.
I mean, when I came out of Gaza, I really didn't feel like I did much at all.
Maybe help someone for a moment of time.
And that's the situation there.
And the people, the real heroes are really the people of Gaza.
I mean, those who are working day and night, who get maybe $100 a month in the emergency room, the nurses, despite, you know, it's really, I mean, the ones who are also the first responders as well.
Gazans Treated for Wounds00:03:55
They're the ones who are at those areas of explosions and the casual team is who are picking up in the face of death.
Yeah, I mean, my imagining, and I've heard this from Palestinians we've interviewed who are there or who have relatives there, that even just kind of the recognition that there are people from the outside who are concerned enough about their plight to go there, I think is probably something that is of great value to them.
But for me, kind of as a journalist, as somebody who's very interested in this, when you think about the fact that Israel from the start has banned all international media from entering, and as a result, we've had to rely on Gazan journalists who also have done an incredibly courageous job.
The problem, of course, is that there's a deliberate amount of skepticism bred about their reliability, and they've also been systematically eradicated one after the next by the IDF to the point that we don't even have that many Gazan journalists left.
I think one of the biggest benefits of Western military, of Western medical workers and aid workers going there and then coming back is kind of being the world's eyes and ears to describe in terms of the limited amount that you've seen exactly what it is that the world ought to know.
So just having been there, you know, in terms of, in your own words, like what should the world know about what is taking place in Gaza and what Gaza is like?
I mean, the images and what's out there meaning doesn't compare to what's happening in the reality.
Everyone's suffering, everyone, and it's irrespective of social class.
There's a state of starvation where the general Gazan is severely malnourished.
I mean, the Tipu Ghazan, there's no fruit.
There's no meat.
They have basically at most rice, bread, lentils.
That's all they really have.
Vegetables are super expensive.
I mean, like the colleague who I was working with in Aqsa Hospital, the doctor, he's living out our tent.
He's wearing bloody scrubs because that's all he has.
And this is the day of the Gaza.
They have practically nothing.
And it's unfortunate.
It's obviously definitely a genocide for the fact that, I mean, walking through the streets of Gaza city with colleagues, I did not see any combatant.
You know, I did not see anyone from Hamas.
These are all citizens.
These are all women, children, civilians.
And they're the ones who are coming to the emergency room to be treated for wounds, for explosions, devastating injuries, horrific injuries.
And in the Gaza hospital, there's no beds.
The patients who have these gunshot wounds are being treated.
Those with gunshot wounds to the head, we can't really do much for them because there's no CAT scans.
And often if their consciousness is low or nil, we're basically left literally to die.
We're treated those who can have some, you know, who have injuries, who have open fractures, to try to salvage whatever you can.
Patients with chest tubes are being getting procedures with unsterile instruments.
I was literally using Kelly clamps, which were caked in blood, because that's all they had.
So these are situations.
I mean, operating rooms have flies in them.
And after that, I mean, the rate of infection is super high.
I mean, close to 90 to 100%.
I mean, and it's really a horrific state right now, the Ghaza.
Appreciating Noble Acts00:00:22
Yeah, I have no doubt.
Well, thank you for going there.
And I'm sure it wasn't easy to make that decision or to be there or probably to even come back and remember everything.
But I think what you've done is incredibly noble.
And I appreciate that.
And I appreciate your taking the time to come on and talk to us about it as well.