Journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's New Domestic Terrorism Memo; Glenn Takes Your Questions on Bari Weiss's CBS Role, His Interview with Nick Fuentes, and More
Journalist Ken Klippenstein discusses Trump's new domestic terrorism memo and how it could threaten civil liberties and expand the powers of the national security state. Plus: Glenn answers your questions about his interview with Nick Fuentes, Bari Weiss's new CBS role, and more. ---------------------------------------- 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.
As we do every Friday night, we intend to devote this evening show to our mailbag where we get all sorts of questions throughout the week on a wide-ranging uh variety of topics from our locals' members, and then we try and get to as many as we can in the interest of candor.
We are taping the show a little bit early today simply because of uh family obligation.
I'm going away for the weekend with my kids.
I want to get out uh before huge amounts of traffic starts.
So this is not uh actually a live transmission, but it is taped just a little bit ago on Friday, so it's a facsimile of a live show.
And as I said, uh the Friday night is for locals members to submit questions, and we get always way more than we're able to answer uh that we wish we could answer, and we're gonna try and get through as many of them as we can before we get to that.
Uh and I should also note uh in connection with one of the questions, we may have a guest, I wouldn't say a special guest, but maybe like a moderately special guest uh that we're still trying to work on in connection with one of those questions.
So we'll see.
But before we get to all of that, just a quick couple quick uh programming notes.
First of all, system update is also 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.
Wherever you rate, review, and follow our show, it'll really help spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, as independent journalists, independent media, we do rely on the support of our viewers and members, which you can help provide by joining our locals' community where you get a wide range of exclusive benefits, exclusive content.
We stream there exclusively sometimes.
We have written transcripts of every show that we publish the next day of each show that we do here tonight, but most of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that platform.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
System Update All right, so we've been doing these Friday night shows for I think three months now, and I used to have to explain at the beginning what exactly it is because it was a new sort of format.
And then after a while, I realized it was getting repetitive.
Like, why do I need to keep explaining?
It's a very simple concept, like question and answer.
We get questions for the local members.
We then answer, and then I started determining, you know what, I'm not gonna keep giving prefaces to each show because you already know what they are.
Then I started realizing like I was explaining that I'm not gonna give prefaces to each show, and in the process would end up actually giving a preface.
So I'm dispensing with all of this, and I'm gonna dive right into the first question.
No more time wasting.
And this is from KCM 71.
And the question is, what is your view on the NSPM?
According to someone named Ken Klippenstein, the Democrat, I I'm sorry, I put that in there.
It's actually says, according to Ken Klippenstein, the Democratic leadership has said little, as has the mainstream media, and reading the document, it certainly appears to be something that should concern not just the left, but anyone who believes in a liberal democracy.
Now, I think it's really important question.
I'm glad that this topic has been raised.
Um Ken has done a great job of uh highlighting it and kind of banging the the table with his silverware as he learned to do as a child and continues to do effectively as an adult.
And before we uh get into that, I just want to uh allude to a scene from the 1977 film Annie Hall, which I'm far too young to have seen uh when it came out.
I wasn't even alive when it came out.
Um, but I did go back and watch it.
It's a great film.
It's a very uh well-regarded film, and there's a scene in there that is very relevant to what we're about to do.
So let me just show you the scene.
The essential setup is that uh the character played by Woody Allen and and Diane Keaton are waiting in a movie line and there's somebody in front of them who's pontificating in a very pompous way on the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and it kind of starts driving the character played by Woody Allen crazy, and then this is what happens.
Influence of television.
Now, Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being uh a high uh high intensity.
You want to stay at a hot medium.
What I want to give for a large sock as a horse manure, which it is essentially.
What do you do when you get stuck on a movie line with a guy like this behind you?
Wait a minute, what can we happen?
It's a free country.
He can give you have to give it so loud.
I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that?
Then and the funny part of it is Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work.
Really, I happen to teach a class in Columbia called TV, media and culture.
So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan will have a great deal of validity.
Oh do you?
Yeah that's funny because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.
So yeah, just let me no let me come over here.
Second.
Oh I heard what you're saying.
You you know nothing of my work.
You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.
How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
Boy, if life were only like this.
You know, life actually can be like this.
And tonight it is because the first question, we had a several questions actually about Clenn Klippenstein's very kind of relentless banging on the table about uh this executive order that does seem to be very disturbing it just so happens that I have with me tonight as a again I wouldn't say special guest like moderately special guest, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Ken, uh hello uh I'm gonna I admit it already we're not live so I will say good evening just because it's a Friday night show, but really good afternoon.
How are you?
Hey good to be back.
Uh thank you for letting me bang on your table as well.
Yeah absolutely my table is always here for your for your uh banging now let me ask you uh before we get into this actually I just wanted to note because this is something of which I was previously unaware I don't know how it escaped me that you actually have a theme song for your work um that was created by others and I I don't know it's been pinned to the top of your Twitter page for so long and yet sometime somehow it eluded me so I assume it did others.
so just because of an introduction is some mood music, I want to play a little bit of Ken Klippenstein's theme music.
This fucking leaked NYPD memo that Meryl mentioned briefly.
Yes, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein, he obtained a report...
Hold on, hold on!
Ken Klippenstein, that's an L rap name.
Hold on!
Ken Klipp, yo, big Ken Klipp, yo.
Ba-pow, Ken Klipp, nigga, what's up?
Yo.
So fired in.
ran upon him in the street couldn't reach his clip in time I had to leak it to the press like my name was Clippers on the mark all right there it is I think it's impossible to bring about I did want you to know however that you're not the only investigative journalist with your own theme music I too have had theme music created about me I'm just a little bit more humble and not quite as self-promoting so I don't have it pinned the top of my Twitter page but this is made by a Brazilian musician uh back in 2020.
I just want to play a little bit of it.
Oh we don't have it here yet I thought we did but as I said I'm not quite as self-promoting but I'm gonna play it for you before you leave just so you know that you're not the only one who has theme music.
Um kind of music was it?
What's that?
What genre of music was it?
It's actually rock and roll it's not rap.
Um so you may think like you're a little cooler in that regard but I mean this is hardcore hardcore uh rock and it wasn't like extemporaneously done it was like a prepared song as well so a lot a lot more work went into it uh than went into yours but I like yours as well.
Anyway, let's get into this document that I am so glad you have highlighted in the way you have because it is incredibly disturbing.
You know, it's interesting that kind of, I remember in the war on terror, during the war on terror, when I first, you know, started doing journalism in large part because of that reason, oftentimes there were so many different assaults at the same time on court of civil liberties in the ways that had been previously unthinkable that even though I was
working, you know, all day, every day, which I really was, to try and keep up with and inform people about all the different assaults, there were just too many of them and some just kind of slipped through the cracks even though they, they deserved you know massive amounts of attention I have uh I feel the same way with regard to to what's happening with the Trump administration on so many different fronts so before we get into a few of the aspects of it just tell us about uh what this document is and and why you're so concerned about it.
Yeah so NSPM7 stands for National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
The seven refers to the fact that it's only the seventh of its kind something that's frustrated me has been to the extent that media has paid any attention to this memorandum at all It is misreported and mischaracterized it as an executive order, which it's not.
And I think that's part of the reason that it's not getting attention, is that it's seen as one of, you know, Trump's over 200 executive orders.
And when you look at the EOs, many of them are kind of, you know, day-to-day operations, uh, maybe symbolic, not as significant as a presidential memorandum.
In the case of presidential memoranda, um, they're often classified, NSPM six is.
Um, and this is kind of the point of one of these sorts of orders is like a big picture strategic articulation to the entirety of federal government and the national security state.
This is what we're going to be focused on for the next um three years.
And so what it tells the government to focus on is essentially uh counter-terrorism as defined by a set of indicators that it includes.
And I was alarmed by how broad these indicators are.
Um, the indicators that they list, because remember, when you're adopting a counter-terrorism approach, one of the problematic aspects of that is that you need to preempt crime rather than ordinary crime fighting, where you have found a crime and then you collect evidence to try to make the case that this person committed that crime in counterterrorism, you are engaging in pre-crime.
And this is not unique to the Trump administration.
This goes all the way back to um at least 9-11 in terms of the the government giving primacy to this um approach to to crime fighting.
And so when you preempt things, well, how do you prosecute a crime that hasn't happened yet?
Well, you've got to look at what are uh going to be portents or uh predictors of what's gonna happen.
And that's that's where these that's where these um indicators come in.
And so they list like a dozen indicators, just to give you several examples.
One was anti-Christianity, another one was anti-traditional family values, another one was um anti-I think it was like anti-government.
And it's like this has got to describe anti-Americanism, anti-Americanism, like extremism on gender views, like basically the whole panoply of of ideological opinions the Trump administration regards as most anathema to its agenda.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, when it comes to some of them, like uh extremism on immigration, that sounds pretty qualitative.
Like I could talk to two different people who would probably point at each other and say, oh, that guy's an extremist on immigration.
So it's like, even just internally, I don't understand how they're gonna.
So the reason this matters is that um these priorities are being expressed to federal law enforcement agencies from the FBI to federal protective service.
I mean, everything you can imagine.
And this basically establishes um, take say the FBI in the different field offices that exist um in every state in the country.
This is telling them you're gonna get promoted, you're gonna get resources if you can make cases along these, uh along this priority set.
And so um, not only does this go to the FBI, but there's an already existing since 9-11 massive system of what's called joint terrorism task forces.
Uh, this numbers like I think over 4,000 people.
This is uh FBI agents, but also local law enforcement that have been deputized into this system.
And so the Trump administration can task or uh the federal government generally can task these JTTFs to go places and do things that the federal um that the uh National Guard that's been deployed cannot because of Posikamatis, they are restricted in engaging in um domestic law enforcement on US soil.
And I think a lot of the press reporting, I've said this, it's been sort of sensational and overstated about the guard deployments.
That's not to say that um, you know, you can't question them and that there aren't things worthy of criticism, but they're really limited in what they can do.
And that's why you see them kind of ambling around, picking up trash things, because they're just really restricted by that posic comitatis.
These JTTFs, the joint terrorism task forces, they are not restricted by that.
So this is a um much more powerful tool that the federal government has to respond to all of the indicators that we were just describing before.
You know, Ken, it's it's really interesting um that I remember back in the day of the of the war on terror as this infrastructure was being created.
The idea that basically the president has unlimited power under Article 2 in order to keep Americans safe with what regard to whatever he thinks that that might mean, that of course the argument was made, and I was making it and others are making it.
And it's the same argument you make when censorship is being implemented or other types of authoritarian measures, which is look, you may like it in this particular case, or you may be sufficiently scared by the threat being invoked, but at some point, this is going to become part of our permanent Infrastructure and it's going to be used in ways, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now by by other politicians who are completely different than the one that you're envisioning will wield this power.
And it's kind of the ultimate vindication because the whole framework of the war on terror, which was never dismantled, you know, all these like uh authorization to use military forces, uh, authorizations in Congress were never uh withdrawn.
And so as a result, when you see Donald Trump doing things like just randomly blowing up uh boats in in in off the coast of Venezuela and then claiming their their drug boats and the uh, you know, with no evidence.
And the argument is like, well, even if they are drug boats, like where did this authority come from that we get to just zap people out of out of existence because we think there's drugs on their boat?
And and the argument is, well, because we've designated, you know, Trendaraguan and these other drug trafficking gangs as a terrorist group, and that authority to use military force against terrorist organizations is the ones they're citing as the reason why they get to go and do that.
And now we have the same thing here on the domestic front.
You know, of course, the Patriot Act being the ultimate example at the time, it was, oh, this is so radical, everybody recognizes that, but don't worry, it's going to be temporary.
Here we are 20, you know, five years later, nobody thinks about the Patriot Act anymore, no one talks about repealing it or even limiting it.
It's just part of the framework.
And so, as you said, there are serious restrictions on the ability for the executive branch to use the police for or the military rather for law enforcement purposes on American trail, but because of the war on terror, if they cite the need to combat terrorist organizations, then really a lot of those limits just kind of disappear.
And you just use a different agency, Homeland Security or whatever, as opposed to the military.
So, in terms of the definition that is being used for what constitutes domestic terrorist organizations, what are the parameters for, I mean, you went through some of the indicators, but what is it that you have to do in order under the this this decree to be qualified as a domestic terrorist organization that would basically allow the FBI and all these other groups to treat you as though crimes had been committed.
Well, this is another aspect that has been, I think, grievously misreported, which has been there's been this kind of hall monitor tendency by the media to be like, oh, you can only designate foreign terrorist organizations via the State Department.
You can't do that domestically.
And that's narrowly true for charges.
So, like you need to have an FTO designation to charge someone with a with with a FT with foreign terror uh engaging in foreign terror, um, some some nexus to to a foreign group, for instance.
But the FBI does and has had domestic terrorist uh watch lists, for instance, and investigated domestic terrorism for decades, even if you can't charge them with that in the court of law.
And the evidence that they rely on their own definition of domestic terrorism to investigate can end up bringing them to evidence that they can charge for unrelated reasons.
So that's the concern here.
I don't want to, you know, be sensational and say that they're black helicopters coming there and kick down your door and arrest you.
It doesn't work that way.
The the point that we're at now, there's two major concerns.
Um I did a story a couple of days ago on um a number of respected law firms in Washington that are now advising clients to uh particularly nonprofits and NGOs to adopt different policies in response to this order and change how it is that they talk so they don't run afoul of the administration on this memorandum.
So we're already seeing people speaking, speech changing as a result of this.
And, you know, uh, I guess civil libertarians would call that a chilling effect.
It's not like you're explicitly being censored, but you're gonna self-censor more because you're nervous that um, you know, I worked at the Intercept.
One of the reasons I left was because of how um officious I thought the general counsel was in um inserting himself in stories and not wanting to report things.
I mean, this is going to be the worst thing for that type of person to just say, oh, we've got to worry about this.
Let maybe we shouldn't say this thing that we were gonna say.
So that's that's one uh concern set that we're already seeing the ramifications of um uh from these law firms that are advising their clients.
The second order question is they're using these predicates to open investigations and uh predicating investigation is a very serious thing for the FBI because it's a very aggressive organization with very powerful tools to be able to spy on people and collect evidence.
So there's a completely separate civil liberties question of should they even have the power to do that absent in a absent in actual crime that they can charge someone with.
And then uh moreover, once they're looking, say at your taxes, and I'm not just making this up, it's uh in the memorandum, it meant it directs the Treasury Department to start making suspicious activities reports about organizations, entities, and even individuals, which is an interesting word, um, that that events the the kind of behaviors that were described before from the indicators.
It tells it tells the Treasury Department to start looking at cash flow, money flow.
So they start looking at your taxes.
The point is they could find any number of things that don't rise to the like the idea that just because you didn't commit terrorism means that they're not going to be able to find something.
That's not the case.
And so that's the concern set that I'm looking at.
Yeah, and you know, this this is last as the last question, Ken on this.
Um, you know, this gets back to one of the points I've been trying to make for a long time.
And it's been a kind of thinkless task, which is this attempt to kind of isolate Donald Trump as this unique aberrational figure who just emerged out of nowhere as a complete deviation from American tradition, has not only driven me crazy just on factual grounds, but also in terms of minimizing all of the already extant dangers that we have embedded within our government as a result of administrations that came before him, obviously the Bush and Cheney administration laid the groundwork for this war on terror.
But also, under you know, Joe Biden, um they were very intent on, for example, criminalizing the Trump movement, even before January 6th.
The FBI was saying the greatest threat to our national security is not foreign terrorist organizations, it's domestic extremism.
There were attempts to try and put people who were associated with January 6th on things like the no-fly list.
Um, and then, you know, ultimately the student protests that erupted on college campuses became something that the Biden administration saw as this grave threat that needed to be investigated as a coordinated terrorist organization.
And when you start building that mindset of the domestic threat within, that's what then just sort of lets any new president, including Donald Trump, to then start extending it to places it hadn't previously gone, but not because he's a deviation from tradition, but just an extension of it.
And one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, you know, uh it's really interesting.
If you go back and look at 9-11, most people responded to 9-11 is as, you know, understandably so, as this kind of like, wow, this came out of nowhere.
This is really horrifying.
We have to go and crush the people who did this and anyone associated with it.
That was something, something that is someone not really paying a lot of attention to journalism politics.
I I kind of had as my reaction as well.
It's like a gut reaction.
You know, I'm living in Manhattan, it just seems like this, you know, incredibly cataclysmic attack, and you're angry about it and you want vengeance for it.
And then there were people who have been around a lot longer who'd been paying attention all longer, like Noam Chomsky, who, you know, on September 12th said every authoritarian measure that governments have ever wanted to implement are now going to be implemented in its name.
That's going to be essentially the main effect is it's going to erode whatever freedoms we had, because the emotions that were provoked by it will now get exploited.
I felt very similar to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, uh, you know, especially because of the very brutal way that that not just that it happened, but that we watched it happen.
I mean, just the graphic nature of all those videos made it very clear it was going to produce a kind of emotion.
And immediately there was going to be an attempt to sweep in and exploit those emotions.
And I think you saw a lot of Trump officials almost instantaneously saying this demonstrates that we have to crack down, not on, you know, the specific people who did this or people who participated in it or were planning similar attacks, but on the ideology that motivated it.
And the ideology was defined basically as kind of a left-wing ideology.
There were even people blaming liberals or the Democratic Party.
And it laid the foundation for what became this rhetorical uh framework for saying, okay, we're going to now start using law enforcement against these broad swaths of political groups that are opposed to Donald Trump and his agenda and his ideology in a way that is something we're not accustomed to happening in the United States.
Do you think that a lot of this is an outgrowth of the way Charlie Kirk's assassination has unfolded and the emotions have been exploited surrounding it?
Absolutely.
That's an important point.
I've tried to stress that the gruesome nature of Kirk's murder.
I mean, you know, it's the kind of thing you can't get out of your head.
And unfortunately, I was exposed to just scrolling Twitter.
Um like a 9-11 type event for for the Trump administration.
That's been one of the most interesting parts of reporting on this, was seeing the humanity in uh as was described to me by third parties familiar uh with them.
Um, they understandably have an emotional reaction to that.
So that's certainly um part of this, just like anybody would if their friend was not only killed, but in you know, a really grotesque uh fashion, and in a way that was kind of this weird, you know, hyper-mediated thing that everyone saw instantly.
Um, but so that's absolutely true.
But at the same time, your earlier point is also true that the national security state runs on a sort of autopilot that almost doesn't matter who's in the White House.
I did a story on the run-up to the designation of these cartels as a foreign terrorist organization and found that actually the Biden administration had laid a lot of the groundwork um for that, making moves towards uh sanctioning them via treasury, and there was a different type of designation that they give them.
I can't remember the exact term.
But the point is that um, you know, there are both human actors who reside in the White House, and they tend to receive the most attention because it's just, you know, I don't know if it's like media loves drama and just faces and personalities, but the bureaucracy receives a lot less attention.
And that's what's really troubling here because the moment we find ourselves in, what's called the global war on terror, guat as government people often call it, um, has drawn to a close.
Uh, it's not that we're not fighting ISIS in Al-Qaeda at all anymore.
We still are, but it's not the um overarching strategic focus of the federal government.
So that's app that apparatus, as you say, still exists, and they're in search of a mission.
And my concern now is that the mission they have settled on, not just with Trump, but you mentioned January 6th and the ridiculous characterization of anything more than a small number of people as like some kind of militant coup that posed a serious threat to the uh federal government.
Uh, that's happening again now with basically the same rubric, but the names are swapped out.
Now it's the left.
And my concern with this is exactly what you say that this apparatus now is going to turn itself within rather than, I mean, it was bad enough.
Um, you know, what happened in the Middle East.
Um, but if this becomes their reason for existence and they're in search of a reason so they can go to the appropriators in Congress and say, we need money.
I mean, I just did a story on how the shutdown uh somehow has not affected anyone in the FBI, even support staff, they're completely exempt.
The national security state is in a privileged category of its own.
And so for that reason, they don't face the same, oh, you're not doing anything.
All right, we're gonna cut your agency, that other uh agencies do.
And the question is, how will they define their mission going forward?
And it looks like they're deciding on looking at Americans.
And that's, I think that's really troubling.
Yeah, you know, a lot of the alarm I've tried to been sound about what's going on in Brazil, obviously is not in defense of the Bolsonaro movement or Jair Bolsonaro or anything like that, but the idea that once you start creating a politics where the idea is that you want to criminalize an entire political movement or support for a political leader and actually turn the monopolization of violence that the state possesses on your own citizens in the name of protecting national security, it's extremely dangerous because it's going to continue and escalate.
I have no doubt that had we been in a second Kamala Harris term, Joe Biden term, that they would be putting Donald Trump in prison and accelerating the crackdowns on what they came to regard or pretended to regard as an insurrectionary movement, which is basically their political opposition.
And I think you're seeing now the Trump administration, in large part driven by the fact that they feel like they were subjected to it, now kind of want to get some degree of vengeance, which is the problem here, um, doing it as well.
And and you know, one of the reasons we didn't cover the the memo, this memo is because we were covering Trump's speech, where you know, kind of extemporaneously he said we're gonna send the police or the military rather into the cities and we want you to, you know, use these cities as a training ground for the military.
And that's what I mean.
It's hard to keep up sometimes with the gravity of a lot of these assaults because they come so fast and furious, seemingly out of nowhere, but ultimately they're part of the same piece.
Well, congratulations on uh, I mean, you really did single-handedly kind of force the political and media class to take a look at this.
Rokanda gave you credit for that, others have as well.
And that's always um gratifying, I know, to use your platform in that way.
Before I let you go, though, I am going to insist that you listen to just a little bit of my theme music so that you can admit that mine, as good as yours is, is at least as good and probably even a little bit better.
It's by a beloved Brazilian artist.
So let's go ahead and play that, please.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My name is My So and I do want to point out that's just the chorus.
There's a whole bridge and there's a whole there's two or three different passages that are in Portuguese, but uh but are really quite as catchy.
And I need you to admit that it's at least in the same category of quality as yours.
Can you at least acknowledge that?
There's definitely more planning that went into it.
Although I was impressed that this rapper was able to just go off the dome like that.
Like that doesn't seem easy.
So I really don't have to meet.
Yeah, when I watched that, I found myself very uh kind of envious because the ability to just like so extemporaneously say, Yeah, I didn't read for my clip in time.
I decided to leak to the media and therefore called clipping stuff.
I mean, that is an incredible.
And then he threw it to his friend.
And then he threw it to his friend who finished the like so rhythmically and so perfectly.
I know.
I was just like, it's so aggravating that people have that particular talent.
I w I wish I did, but uh, that's I guess why we're not in music and why we do what we do.
Yeah, all right.
Well, congratulations on the whole thing, the theme song, the recognition, the work.
Uh always good to see you, Ken, and we'll talk to you soon.
All right, thanks, Glenn.
Good, have a good day.
Bye.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams, the WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind the scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Woman 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 in iHeart Woman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
All right, let's move to uh the next question.
Wow, that was quite a lot of fanfare, uh, even though uh there was a lot of substance there as well.
Okay.
Nelson Baboon.
Um I'm gonna skip over any analysis to what that name I mean and go to the text, which is quote, I like the fact that you appear with people on the right, but I am somewhat troubled by the fact that you seem to back off and let them slide when you obviously have the debating skills to dig deeper.
I'm referring to the interview you did with Nick Fuentes.
You gently prodded him on his admitted hypocrisy.
Namely that he outright said that while he supported freedom of speech, he was in favor of the cancellation of those who celebrated Kirk's murder simply because the left had also cancelled people.
But you seem more interested in being pals with him.
Sometimes I think freedom of speech isn't the only issue, and it is intertwined with other important issues.
I was quite disappointed in the segment.
All right.
Fair enough.
And I will say, you know, that's not uh this is not, you're not the only person who has expressed that.
Um I've talked, let me let me say a couple things about the Nick Fuentes uh interview.
Uh and this is something I've talked about before, and I think uh I haven't quite figured it out, and maybe I'll never figure it out.
Um, and it is a source of a little bit of frustration to me, I acknowledge, which is I've engaged in a lot of political debates uh over the 20 years that I've been doing journalism, that's you know, many of which have gotten a lot of attention.
And uh I try and be unfailingly civil, meaning I don't, you know, lose my temper or scream and yell.
I try to avoid personal insults, at least, you know, gratuitous ones.
I try to conduct myself professionally, but also, you know, very aggressively.
There's a lot of issues about which I feel very, very strongly.
And when I'm involved in a debate, I want to make as manifest as possible, not only the strong support for the view I'm advancing, but for the deceit and kind of fallacies and lack of evidence at the heart of the view that my opponent is advancing.
And I've done a few uh over the last couple of years since I've had this show.
I did one with Alan Jershewitz in in New York about bombing Iran.
I did a couple with Destiny on the magnitude of January 6th.
I've done others as well on various shows.
I did one about Ukraine with Dan Crunshaw on Piers Morgan.
I've I've debated Israel as well on Piers Morgan and other shows.
And there I feel no compunction about just being as aggressive as possible in terms of a debate and being as kind of uh, you know, I'm there to debate, and I'm there to advocate a particular way of understanding things, a particular set of facts, and I have no compunction about being unrestrained about it.
But I've talked before about the fact that when you're not, you know, but those are all debates where somebody else is mediating, someone else is the host.
There's no neutrality expected of you.
You're there as a participant in the debate.
And so you have no obligation.
There's no part of your role where you're supposed to make sure there's a fair debate, where you're supposed to make sure that the person is being treated fairly or getting enough time to speak.
And it's a very different role when you invite somebody onto your show, and you are not only at least at some point, oppositional to what the person is saying, and that was the case for several of the lines of questioning that I asked Nick about,
including his advocacy of censorship, despite being a victim of censorship himself, uh, where you feel as though you're not just you're not only there to debate, but you're also there to kind of provide a platform.
You've invited this person on your show, after all, and as a result of their acceptance, you owe to them a certain level of I guess deference is the right word.
And I don't mean by deference the fact that I shouldn't be asking them difficult questions or confronting them with contradictions or or things of that nature.
I feel like the obligation comes from the fact that you just have to comport yourself in a certain way, both as the kind of host, moderator, questioner, and less as a debater.
And you know, it it it is different when you have, say, like a politician on your show and you're doing like an eight-minute hit and you're there, you have a set of three or four questions that you want to challenge the person on and follow up.
Um I have had ones like that.
I've had RFK Jr. on the show where we were in agreement with a lot of things, but the Israel section was a little bit feisty at the time he was running for president, so I felt a lot more, you know, unrestrained in my ability to press him and to insist on answers and press him on inconsistencies.
But when I invite somebody on the show, especially somebody who's controversial or who has different views than I, and I've invited, you know, people on the show who have defended Israel's uh war in Gaza multiple times.
And and I feel like I conducted myself the same way, much differently than I would if I were debating them with a moderator, which is you ask them the questions that you think they ought to answer.
You kind of insist on the an answer if they don't actually answer it.
There's You can follow up, you can say, look, no, the question was this, you didn't really answer.
But at the end of the day, I don't feel like I'm here to debate the person.
I don't feel like I'm here to prove the person wrong.
I feel like the purpose of it is to allow the person to come and express their views and have to answer hard questions.
And I do feel like I press Nick on multiple uh areas, not just the censorship issue, but also the kind of theoretical foundation for his views on race, um why modern-day immigration is different than immigration from the past.
I kind of insisted on specificity about what his political project is to not allow him to kind of resort to trolling or to uh a sort of rhetoric that winks and nods, like I really wanted to understand what his ultimate political project would look like.
Because at the end of the day, I see it differently.
I don't see myself in that kind of role when I'm doing that as trying to persuade you that my view is correct.
What I really want instead is to invite somebody on the show who I think has both influence, which he undoubtedly does, and a unique perspective.
You know, it's why like I really I guess like you could say every member of Congress has a certain degree of influence, but I would be uninterested in speaking to 90% of members of Congress because they're completely confined to predictable partisan talking points that they're never gonna deviate from.
They're not allowed to, they're incapable of it.
So it's not just influence that's a prerequisite for my wanting to talk to somebody, but also somebody who has the ability to think independently and and and to be an interesting person because they're able to think independently.
And what I try and do in those cases is press them to explain themselves in a way they might not want to or have to if they're speaking alone or to somebody who isn't pressing them enough, but to really ultimately leave it up to you to hear their worldview in as honest and and and candid and specific a manner as possible so that you ultimately make up your own mind.
You know, I got I I got and let me just say one thing about this too, which is uh I was talking to some people on my uh who I work with, some of my colleagues earlier this week, a couple of whom were were really bothered by the Nick Funtis interview, who I wouldn't I wouldn't say argued that we shouldn't have had them on the show.
People understand that we know we're pretty much willing to talk to anybody.
I think everybody here kind of agrees that's a journalistic function, we're just kind of bothered by him and his views, you know, very like disturbed by it.
And there is a a kind of uh component that I think I want to be candid about, which is, and I haven't really quite articulated this way before, um, which is that there's a certain set of political values and views and journalistic pursuits that I obviously believe very, very passionately about, very strongly in.
That's what shapes a lot of the reporting I do, the analysis I do, the commentary I do, the advocacy I do.
And I think I'm very upfront and clear about what those things are.
But then there's also a component that I want to talk to people I think are interesting, independent of my views of their political product or their ideology.
Because I think that it is rare in our political discourse, in the punditry class, in politics in general, to find somebody who really is able not only to think independently and think uh in a very kind of fearlessly heterodox manner,
but also somebody who actually is capable of forming coherent ideas, both because they possess the intellect to do it, and as importantly, the willingness to really read and learn and understand and master facts.
There's huge numbers of people making a ton of money on on the internet through political commentary who just rant and rave and maybe they're they have a talent for humor, they're kind of charismatic in front of the camera, they're willing to be transgressive, but their knowledge of things is is inch deep if that.
Like they're just not, I don't consider them thinkers, I consider them entertainers.
And I don't really have much of an interest in those kind of people.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm immune to being entertained, but I don't want to talk to people like that.
But there are people who, even if I consider a lot of their views pernicious, and you know, certainly I don't see the world at all through a racial prism, let alone the racial prism that forms a significant part of Nick Funtus's worldview.
So I don't think I even need to say that register my objections to that.
I think anyone who understands my worldview understands that without having to say it.
But I had I I had this interview that I did once uh with Alex Jones, maybe four years ago or something like that, and it was in Austin, Texas, and the occasion was there was a documentary film that had been released about Alex Jones, and the filmmaker was somebody who I really liked.
She was uh she had uh directed and produced a film called T FW N-O-G-F, The Feeling When No Girlfriend, which is a Reddit meme that incels and in cell adjacent communities had adopted.
And the film, in lieu of kind of the liberal narrative on incels, which is, oh, these people are right-wing fanatical haters, they're misogynists, they're violent, they want to murder women, they think women are their possessions, and because they can't get women, they want to lash out at women, which you know is a uh uh was a prevailing narrative about this group of people.
Instead, just did a very objective look at, you know, like five or six of them and showed the socioeconomic influences, didn't make excuses for them at all, didn't deny that misogyny was a part of what ultimately becomes the worldview, but also looked at it in just a more complex, three-dimensional, less dogmatic fashion.
And there were some left-wing journals like uh Jacobin and others that praised the film because it tried to understand the socioeconomic uh influences, this kind of nihilism that arises out of economic deprivation and hopelessness about the future.
And then there were a bunch of like liberal feminist uh sites like Jezebel and others who thought the film was hideous because it, you know, ran cover or made excuses or whatever.
So I found the film fantastic.
I highly recommend it.
And so she had a film about uh Alex Jones that was intended to be a documentary, and invited me to come in, I guess speak about the film.
I was the host of the debut of the film.
It was the debut of the film, it was in Austin, and I hosted the show, and then also interviewed Alex as part of the the event.
And the film itself covered very comprehensively all of Alex's worst controversies, including probably half the film on the Sandy Hook stuff.
And he cried on film, he apologized, he talked about why he did what he did, he acknowledged the harm that he caused to the parents.
So in the interview that I conducted with him right after, in front of an audience that had just screened this film that for the first time it was the debut.
I didn't sit there and you know badger him on Sandy Hook because we had just watched this, and everybody has heard people badger Alex Jones on Sandy Hook.
I think Alex Jones is a very interesting uh presence in in our political culture.
And his trajectory interests me.
Um, you know, obviously he's prone to a lot of conspiracies in the case of Sandy Hook and a couple of other cases, you know, it was really quite destructive.
And other cases, however, he was incredibly prescient about seeing uh political trends and political developments and understanding the complexities of how American power functions, way before anybody else did.
Um I was also I was just interested in how Alex Jones became Alex Jones.
So I didn't sit there and batter him and call him names and scream at him and yell at him.
I really asked him the questions that I was interested in hearing the answers to.
I wasn't performing for an audience.
And I got lambassed in pretty much like every liberal journal, supposedly for conducting like uh, you know, softball or whatever interview of of Alex Jones.
And I obviously knew what I could have done that would have made people applaud.
I could have gone and said, like, what about the parents?
You know, I I could have performed that way.
Um, but like I said, I've heard Alex Alex Jones' answers on that, including the film that we had just watched.
So I treated it as an interview with somebody I found interesting.
Nick Fuentes, um, you know, I think it's worth remembering that he's 27 years old.
He's been around for a while, so you can easily forget that, which means that you know, you can find clips of him from like three or four years ago when he was like 22 and 23, which is unbelievably young.
You know, I've I've always said to my friends, and I really mean this, the thing for which I'm most grateful in the world, is that I don't, that there was no internet to record every single one of my thoughts when I was 18 and 20 or 22, because who knows what I would have been saying.
I'm sure, you know, when you're that age, you're saying things on purpose to be provocative.
You don't take things very seriously.
Everything is kind of a game to you.
There's things that you say that you may not even mean because you know you're not supposed to say them, you find humor in it.
And then as you get older, you know, you start to look at things in a in a in it in a different way.
And one thing that I think you cannot say about Nick Flutis is that he speaks about things, he speaks on topics of which he's ignorant.
I talked about this before.
If you listen to Nick Funtis talk about Israel and the United States or Middle East power dynamics, or how the government works, or how you know funding works, there's no denying that he has a seriously sophisticated understanding of the geopolitics of it, of the domestic politics of it.
This is not somebody who's just ranting and raving in front of a camera.
And he definitely has views that, you know, if you listen to them in in isolation, you would have every right to be offended by it.
I I you know could get offended by them as well if I wanted.
Um the the other reality, which is undeniable, is that Nick Fuentes has developed a significantly large audience.
He is very influential and very uh well liked among not just a large but a rapidly growing sector of American politics that is very important, which is young conservatives and young men in particular, and not even young conservative men necessarily, just young disaffected men who are looking for a way to kind of understand their world and why the frustrations that they face have been created in large part by the political class in both political parties.
And he's somebody who provides a very coherent, compelling explanation.
He's obviously charismatic on camera.
He's very funny in a way that people have trouble admitting that Donald Trump is.
Um, and so he's just a person who is interesting to me, and I think is highly relevant in our political discourse and will continue to be increasingly relevant for years to come.
And that's really how I approach the interview was okay, there's probably a large part of my audience who has heard of Nick Fuentes and perhaps has heard things, snippets of things that he has to say that create an impression that isn't really who he is.
And it was my way of saying, okay, you probably have heard of this person, he has a lot of influence.
Let's spend an hour digging deep and really trying to understand what exactly he's up to, like what exactly he thinks.
And the best way to do that is often not by being super aggressive and adversarial.
Um I just don't feel a need to demonstrate to the public and to the world that I find his racist statements not just offensive, but not the to my own worldview.
It's like I don't feel I just don't in these kind of conversations feel a need to prove anything to anybody.
Um maybe I would have 10, 15 years ago, but I feel like you know, there's a body of work that I have that makes clear my own perspectives, what I believe in, what I don't.
Um so that is often how I approach these questions.
And I also think one last thing, which is I do think there's a difference between interviewing, say, like a government official or a member of Congress, where it doesn't really matter if they're interesting or not.
I mean, there you have to really, you're really there to hold them accountable.
That's the job of any citizen, certainly of any journalist.
When it's somebody who's more kind of a figure in our politics slash culture, I think you have a little bit more license to try and just expand the type of conversation that you're having.
And oftentimes, if you if you let somebody be a little bit less off guard, it's not about being pals with somebody.
If I wanted to be pals with Nick Fuentes, I would do that off-camera.
It's not um anything that I have enough pals, I'm not looking for more friends, my personal life is very fulfilled.
That's not why I do this show or why I invite people on the show.
Um it's that if you can get people a little bit less off guard, a little bit less defensive, oftentimes they open up and they say things that they may not want to say because they're not feel they're not, they don't feel a need to be quite as guarded and controlled about every word that they're uttering because you're gonna immediately jump on it and cascate them for it.
And I think oftentimes, you know, and it's kind of interview by interview, sometimes I just sort of see how it goes and I react in the moment.
But it is true.
Sometimes I invite people on the show simply because I think they're interesting or have interesting things to say.
That's typically, if I invite somebody on the show, it's typically Because I find that person interesting.
I promise you, every night we could have a different member of the Republican House Caucus on the show.
We get, you know, people emailing us asking to come on the show.
You know, just like random members of Congress or whomever.
These are this is not an these are not interesting things to do.
These are not interesting people talking.
They may be interesting people, but in the capacity that they want to appear as members of Congress, they're very constrained and very guarded.
They just want to come on, get some FaceTime, have people know who they are, and they're but they're limited in the type of thing that they can say.
I don't find that interesting.
I've done enough of those interviews to know that they're ungratifying.
So if somebody wants to say I should have been more, I should have denounced Nick Fuentes more.
I should have like been more aggressive in uh, I don't know, like making manifest the horrors and flaws of some of his views.
I'm not gonna say that's an invalid critique.
That is one way I could have conducted the interview.
I did press him on things.
I made very clear how, you know, kind of not just disappointed, but um destructive I thought it was that he suddenly now is a person advocating censorship after everything that was done for him, and not just people who celebrated Charlie Kirk's uh assassination, but he specifically named Hassan Piker as somebody who should be uh censored from the internet, banned from social media platforms, even though Hassan not only didn't celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination, but condemned those who were celebrating it.
Um so I think there was I I purposely pursued a lot of those those areas where there was some disagreement and tension.
I thought his views were ones that needed a lot more explaining and defending.
Um but if someone wants to say that I could have adopted a different style or should have, I take that criticism, but I'm just kind of explaining why that's not the approach I used.
Had it been Glenn Greenwald versus Nick Fuentes on race or whatever other, you know, Trump's crackdown on immigration or things like that, and there was a mediator, I would have been as aggressive in that debate as I am in any other debate, but I just continue to find a little bit of difficulty with meshing the role of being a debater or debating somebody with at the same time inviting them onto your show where you're kind of obliged,
if you ask them a question, to give them the time they need to elaborate on their views and to treat them with a degree of civility and deference, as I said, that may not be appropriate if you're actually debating them directly.
All right, uh, it probably doesn't satisfy everybody.
Um, you know, no matter how I conducted an interview like that, it wouldn't satisfy everybody.
And like I said, uh you're not the only one who who expressed that uh critique.
Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?
I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.
Obviously, the goal is a championship.
That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.
We want to win a championship.
I'm Christina Williams, host of the podcast.
In case you missed it with Christina Williams.
The WNBA playoffs are here, and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind-the-scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.
It's really, really hard to be the champions, but we have to remember how it feels and embrace the new challenge that we have.
For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.
So to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted.
But we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make it run.
So listen to In Case You Missed It with Christina Williams in iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 in iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
All right.
Next question, the millman.
At my public high school, I remember getting the impression that A, the Holocaust was a unique genocide, the only genocide about which I can recall learning, deserving of an entire year of history class, and that B, feudalism and communism are generally bad while global capitalism, despite its faults, is the way of progress in the world.
I don't recall being asked to write an essay, Morning Hiroshima, while I remember writing several of the Nazi Holocaust, and we never learned of the Nakba or of the shorelines of developing nations where we went, where we in the West export our consumer electronic waste.
Uh questions.
One, why, while the Nazi Holocaust was awful beyond words, and feudalism and communism have major faults.
How much of this curriculum was propaganda and supported the US war machine, Israel and global capitalism?
Number two, can you remember things you were taught in school that appeared to have served the prevailing order?
Yeah, it's such a it's such an interesting question.
I have uh I'll not say on this.
I'll try and pick a few things just to be more concise.
I could probably answer this question for a full hour.
I had this memory uh when I was, I think, five or six years old in kindergarten or first grade, and there was a special program for kids who I don't know, got identified that earlier as whatever, gifted or whatever.
And it was called Special Project.
And you would go into this class, and it was taught by this woman who at the time was quite old.
So we're talking about the 1970s.
So my guess is she was 60 or 70, born at the beginning of the century, lived through the 20th century, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War.
And I just recall her being quite a conservative woman in her like dress and her demeanor and her comportment.
And I recall her always talking about how lucky we should consider ourselves to be to have born be born in the United States as opposed to basically any other country in the world, and especially in the Soviet Union.
And she would often explain to us that in the Soviet Union, people are repressed, they're miserable, they have no creativity, they have no freedom, they have no rights, they're put in jail for their political opinions.
While here in the United States, we enjoy all these freedoms.
And it I later on, um, when I thought back on that, the reason why it began to bother me was not because of w of whether it's true or not, but because at that age you have no capacity to critically evaluate anything that you're being told.
And so why am I going to school in order to have inculcated into my brain political opinions and ideological views, which are not just debatable but debated all over the world in a way that's not intended to encourage me to question it, but is intended to mold my thinking, presumably for life.
I mean, that becomes part of your your framework, part of your, you know, kind of embedded way of filtering everything, a prism through which you see the entire world.
And I I you know, in in a way it might have been benign, she might not have even been realizing why she's doing that.
That might have been to her for her so not an opinion at all, not an ideological view at all, but such a basic fact of the world that it's the same as teaching mathematical equations.
But obviously, there was a very strong political and ideological component of it that ends up propagandizing everything that you think.
And then, you know, as you kind of get older, the propaganda becomes more sophisticated.
And so many of the things that I know that I continue to think to this very day, are a byproduct of the very, very subjective set of information and values to which I was exposed as somebody who was an American citizen born in the United States growing up in in the United States and the region of the country where I grew up.
And the I I I definitely did not know what the Nakba was until, you know, I don't know, until well into my adulthood, even though I I grew up Jewish and and had, you know, I wasn't, I didn't go to synagogue regularly.
I didn't uh I it wasn't even Bart Mitzfood.
Um, but you know, I I I went to summer camp every summer, and it was a Jewish summer camp, and so we were, you know, Israel and the Holocaust, these were things, you know, pummeled into our brain.
But the way that Israel was created, the reason why there are Palestinians and people in the Arab world that harbored so much hostility and anger toward Israel, so much resentment about how the state of Israel was formed, how that land was taken, what was done in order to, these are things that were deliberately kept from me.
I mean, these are things, and not just for me, but from all of us.
And this is, you know, this actually relates to the last question that I was talking about with uh Nick Funtes, but even just people around the world.
I think if you go back and look at a lot of my early writing when I started doing journalism, there was always embedded within it a very sharp acerbic hostility to people who see the world or who saw the world differently than the way I see it on the issues about which I cared the most.
I mean, it's clearly like I saw them as enemies, people I just wanted to like heap unlimited amounts of scorn upon.
And then at some point I started realizing that all of us are really and will always be, no matter how often, no matter how hard we try to go back and retrospectively expunge it, we are all the byproducts of very subjective influences from our parents, our schools, our communities, our countries, the media to which we're exposed.
And there's no one doing that.
And so, you know, you can get to the point in life where you think, like, wow, I really strongly believe this.
And yet this person over here, you know, strongly believes the exact opposite.
And so one thing you can include is like they just must be a really bad person.
They must just be a person who's like a sociopath of completely warped and distorted values.
And sometimes that is true.
Sometimes they are that and and merit that kind of scorn.
But even there, generally, if they are like that, they're like that because of their set of experiences that has created them that way, has left them that way.
And it doesn't mean that I don't believe in things very strongly and don't harbor anger and dislike and even scorn for people who think differently than me on issues about which I care the most, especially if I do think it's the byproduct of a demented set of values.
There are a lot of cases like that.
But I do think a certain amount of humility is required in terms of how you assess both yourself if you think you have a really righteous set of beliefs, and how you assess other people, because just like you can go back and identify the ways in which you were propagandized, the ways in which certain information was shoved down your throat and other information hidden from you.
And all media continues to this very day to do that.
I mean, I had Ken Klippenstein on to talk about the dangers of this memo, but I didn't have a member of the Trump administration or somebody in MAGA to come on in and defend it.
And that of course is an editorial choice.
Every single news article that you read centers and highlights certain facts, gives voice to certain experts, marginalizes and relegates to the fringes, other people, or just makes them invisible at all.
This is all about creating a world for how you think about events around you.
And oftentimes it's subconscious.
The people who are doing that will tell you they're it's probably like my elementary school teacher, who, you know, if I could go back and tell her what she did, she would be shocked.
I didn't propagandize you, I just told you the facts that we're free and they're not.
And it's better to be to live here than that to her was not an opinion.
And of course she thought that because of the whole series of subjective influences that that shaped how she thinks.
And I would say that over the last 20 years, my main intellectual project, and I don't want to sound like pompous about this, but I'm just describing it in as best I can.
I don't want to sound like it's, you know, has this like grandeur to it that it doesn't.
But basically, I remember when I started being able to write and think about politics exclusively, and I wasn't, you know, consumed with building my law practice Or litigating cases, but instead was doing journalism full time.
So I had the luxury during the day of going and reading a bunch of documents that I would have other relied, otherwise relied in the New York Times to tell me about or not even known about because they wouldn't have told me about it.
And I started realizing, you know, exposing myself to different thinkers and different ideologies and perspectives.
And I started realizing, wow, there's so many things that I had ingested uncritically that form a crucial part of my worldview that I never decided to embrace or believe, that I never weighed the truth of and decided to believe it.
It was just things I absorbed by osmosis through the culture through the influences that I had.
And I almost felt like there was this monster with inside me, like this alien being that had taken control of my brain.
Once I started looking and saying, wait, I believed X, and now I'm seeing X is completely false.
Or I didn't even know there was an alternative way to understand X. I thought X was a fact.
And yet now I'm hearing from all these people, I'm seeing all this evidence to suggest that X is something that is very dubious, if not outright fault.
I felt like there were all these things implanted within me that I didn't choose to put there that weren't part of my own autonomy or my own intellectual agency.
And I felt like, you know, I have to kind of erase as much of that as possible and start from zero and rebuild it based on my own uh attempt to think critically about things.
And I felt like I that was my project.
I still think that's my project, but I also understand that I will always be limited in my ability to do that.
Because we are entirely subjective beings, and there's no undoing all these influences that have shaped who you are.
Like why are you that way?
Why am I this way?
Why is that person this way?
Those things, some of them can be uprooted.
Many, probably most of them can't be.
And so all we can do is, you know, make sure that we always have our critical thinking skills as activated as possible.
And just as a parent, you know, I think all parents kind of look at their kids and think, what did I wish that I had that I was told that I knew, that I understood, that I was able to do as a kid, that nobody ever bothered to tell me or that I didn't understand could be done.
And when I look at my kids, for me, the most important thing I try and teach them is no matter what you hear, no matter who it's from, no matter how authoritative it seems, from me, from your teachers, from media outlets, whatever, don't assume it's true.
Like don't let your brain absorb ideas that you yourself haven't put there.
You know, like deconstruct it, decide whether or not you really think it's true.
Take the time to go and research it, to think about it, and if you can't kind of put it to the side, don't just critically ingest it.
It's a lot harder said than done.
Because uh it's a lot easier said than done because we are political animals and social animals, and that is how our brains form and how our personas develop.
It's just it's it's just embedded within us.
We can't avoid that anymore than we can avoid breathing or or or eating.
But the effort to make sure that we're being as critically minded as possible, that one that is one that that can really pay dividends.
We can at least move in the direction of thinking more critically than not.
So, yeah, there's all those examples in the question, and there's a zillion more that form the basis for why we think we do, why our value system is what we think it is, what how we react to things that we're told that are just there and probably impossible ever to uproot, and in some cases even to realize have been put there.
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 chairmanship.
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 iHeart Woman Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 in iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Alright, last question.
Uh this comes from somebody who decided to name themselves Glenn ain't vegan, to which I say, how dare you.
Um I very much am vegan.
I have all the proof.
Uh a huge dossiers full of it, witnesses, everything else at some point.
I'll I'll talk more about that uh at another time.
But the question from this uh offensive, though I'm sure well-intentioned screen name is this.
Uh hello system update.
What do we think of the newly announced CBS editor-in-chief, Barry Weiss, and what does it mean for people like me, people who see it as a win for anti-establishment voices, recapturing lost left learn leaning institutions.
Well, I think the least offensive part of that question is probably the the false denial that I'm a vegan, um, because it's bizarre to see Barry Weiss as anything remotely resembling anti-establishment.
So for those of you who haven't heard, we've we've talked about this before, but it's essentially more or less confirmed.
It's expected that on Monday, this new entity controlled by Larry Ellison's family and his son David Ellison, who are Larry Ellison is is the largest single private donor to the IDF in all of history.
I I don't understand why it's legal to be an American citizen and to reap all the benefits of the United States and then donate your wealth to a foreign military.
But apparently it is, and he's taken advantage of that by donating many millions of dollars to the IDF.
And he and his family are now taking over multiple media outlets.
I've talked about this many times before, including last night.
That includes Paramount and all of its entertainment properties, includes CBS and its entertainment properties, it includes CBS News, and that means the CBS Morning Show, the Nightly News, 60 Minutes, every news program on CBS.
He's in the process of trying to buy the company that is the parent company of CNN.
And he also now has basically closed the deal with President Trump's help to become one of the most influential of not the single most influential owners of TikTok.
So you can dismiss CBS News and CNN as kind of old diner stores that don't matter.
And it's true, nobody watches them, but they still do affect the culture.
But TikTok undoubtedly is an extremely influential platform.
There's no denying that.
That's the reason why Congress was so determined to take it out of the hands of the people who previously had it and put it into the hands of the people who would control it much, much more in alignment with the power centers of the United States and their agenda, beginning with not allowing as much Israel criticism that's already happening.
So David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the heir to this fortune.
I from the beginning it was reported that he was trying to buy Barry Weiss's uh website, the free press for 150 million dollars.
I think a lot of people are very surprised by that valuation because it's a good substack.
It's become a successful substack.
It's attracted investors, very wealthy investors who share Barry Weiss's worldview on Israel.
And I I suppose other issues, if if there are other ones she cares about.
Um business model, but it's not like the free press.
It didn't even rise anywhere near, say, the level of the Daily Wire at its peak or other really successful independent media, like, say, Tucker Carlson's show or Megan Kelly's or Joe Rogan's or any of those.
Its footprint is actually quite light.
So 150 million dollars, I think, to a lot of people felt like this is a radical overvaluation.
But I think the much more important thing were these reports that CBS News didn't, in its new, under its new extremely pro-Israel ownership, didn't just want to buy the free press and integrate it into CBS, but also make Barry Weiss personally elevate her to some extremely important role,
overseeing the editorial content of CBS News, almost being like an ombudsman like figure, although an umbudsman it over understates the role because an ombuds is the person who, after the fact in a newspaper, criticizes what a newspaper did.
Most have eliminated that, but the New York Times, the Washington Post used to have ombudsman, and every Sunday they would say, oh, this big article ran it created controversy, and they would be free to criticize the paper.
That's what an umbudsman is.
She's something much, much more influential, and the role seems to be that she's going to be called editor in chief of CBS News, which is quite a wealthy title.
But even more significant, uh reflective of her power is that she's not even going to report to the president of CBS, which wouldn't be the normal reporting line.
She's going to skip over everybody and report directly to David Ellison, who's the owner of this company, and that now controls these media properties.
And, you know, on the one hand, I understand people wanted to pick this as some sort of triumph of new media.
You know, to pick Barry Weiss as this kind of brilliant entrepreneur.
And I I guess on some level, you can justify that credit, that praise.
I mean, it is true that five years ago she was working for the New York Times as, you know, kind of in the op-ed section, not running the op-ed section and left under very kind of flamboyant circumstances, denouncing the New York Times on the way out.
That's what led to a big part of the success of the free press initially.
But I've always considered Barry Weiss a very shrewd operator.
Um I've mentioned this before when she went to the New York Times, she was hired with Brett Stevens.
No one really knew who she was, and all the liberals were angry about Brett Stevens because he was a climate change denier and he's pro-life, and they were, you know, how dare you sully and be fouled the sacred page of the New York Times with this conservative.
And I would Brett Stevens to me was just a non-entity, like a totally standard neocon.
I knew Barry Weiss, which was the most more much more significant hire.
I could see what she was doing at the Wall Street Journal in how she was kind of tapping into this seemingly heterodox new media vibe.
And she ended up coining the term the intellectual dark web for a bunch of people who are the opposite of dissident thinkers, people like Sam Harris and like Richard Dawkins and you know, people of this nature, uh Jordan Peterson.
And Barry Weiss herself I I've asked before, like somebody tell me a single anti-establishment view that Barry Weiss has.
Barry Weiss to me is composed of two different views that have become the branding of her journalism career.
One is anti-wokism, and she did speak out against some of the excesses of wokism and kind of like as a younger person, and not as the only as a younger person, but as a lesbian who had gone to a Ivy League school, who like had a very kind of East Coast vibe, not the sort of icon of a young conservative operative who would denounce wokeism.
She kind of made it cool to denounce wokeism.
Like she kind of convinced parents who, and it was Ryan Grimm who once explained this on my show this way, and I thought it was very good, very, very, very astute, that she's someone who kind of gave permission to parents to believe that their purple-haired kids coming home from college, denouncing them as transphobes and colonialists or whatever, and racist, that that they were wrong and the parents were right.
That's kind of the role she played.
So she came at the right time in terms of wokeism at the peak of wokeism and the backlash against it with Black Lives Matter and that whole George Floyd uh protest movement and everything that accompanied it, that's when she left the New York Times.
She really chose the right moment when there was a big market for somebody saying, I'm this young, you know, liberal lesbian, um, coming from the New York Times, but am leaving because of the woke repression there, I mean, it was like crack, you know, to people who were wanting to believe that there were that there was a way out of this wokeism, like kind of validating the anti-woke agenda.
But anti-wokism, I mean, wokeism is is dead.
You know, it's it's like opposing wokeism, it's it's it's so irrelevant and trivial.
Who doesn't?
You know, there's like wokeism is alive like in blue sky and like in some sectors of like DSA, but you know, the entire federal government is at war with wokeism.
So if you're one of your defining views is you're opposed to wokeism, that doesn't make you an anti-establishment contrarian dissident or whatever words are being applied to her.
That just makes you an agent of establishment orthodoxy.
I mean, everyone in power basically is an opponent of wokeism.
And then her second cause, the overarching one, the cause of her life, is devotion to the state of Israel, support for Israel, demonizing its enemies.
And obviously, that has long been the consensus view of the bipartisan class of the corporate world, of the media world of Hollywood, and certainly now it is the predominant view of the Trump administration in the US government.
So this idea that Barry Weiss is some sort of countercultural dissident figure who somehow does expresses views that are disturbing to the powers that be, it's like the opposite of the truth.
And this is the reason why she got investments from like Mark Andreessen and Jerry Seinfeld and you know, all sorts of other oligarchs and billionaires.
If you're a threat to the power structure, you're not getting investments from those people.
And maybe in a world that's kind of strange, where you know, those people end up feeling like they're on the outside, you can get investments from very rich people and at the same time be a dissident.
I can imagine a world in which that's the case, but that's not the case for Barry Weiss.
And that's why it's the opposite of surprise.
Sound like, oh my god, it's so shocking.
I never imagined the day when somebody with Barry Weiss's political views and ideology could possibly arise within CBS News.
And what are we supposed to believe?
That corporate media until now has been extremely hostile to those who support Israel.
Is that like that the idea like, oh, finally, finally there's going to be a little bit of space after decades of hoping, feudally, that finally there's going to be some space within large media corporations for somebody who supports Israel.
I mean, come on.
And the same thing is like, oh, finally, somebody who opposes the most extreme and now discredited parts of like the left-wing culture war agenda.
Finally, someone like that is going to have a voice in mainstream media and corporate media and in power centers around the country.
Barry Weiss is being elevated to exactly the point where she ought to be, where who she is, who she is is aligning perfectly with this new position.
Who she is is somebody who gives a kind of new media kind of edgy uh posture or or vibe or brand to an extremely archaic and old and pro-establishment set of values.
You know, it's it's like when the CIA started touting their non-binary, neurodivergent Latina operatives, or when the FBI has like LGBT Day or Women's Day and they they hype all their female you know agents or whatever.
It's putting this like very superficial, seemingly new and progressive branding on what underneath is a completely unchanged, ossified, and extremely familiar pro-establishment agenda and dogma.
That's what Barry Weiss is, that's what she's going to CBS to do To create an illusion of something a little bit buzzier and innovative, when in reality it's it's if anything, it's doubling down on political agendas that the two parties have long elevated, in large part because they see that polling is unraveling, particularly support for support for Israel in the United States.
And so if you're the world's richest person or second richest person in the world, like Larry Ellison is, and you're 81 years old, and your primary political cause in life is supporting Israel to the point where you are the largest single donor to the IDF, and you see this polling unraveling for support for Israel, especially among young people.
What do you want to spend your unlimited wealth on?
Buying up all the media companies and the social media platforms that shape how young people think, and putting people like Barry Weiss, who are just, you know, slightly updated vessels for your agenda as the face of it to make it seem less stodgy and more interesting.
And that's exactly what Larry Ellison is doing.
And although it's very transparent and very banal, it doesn't make it any less unimportant.
I think it's by far the most important media story in the world that Israeli officials are talking openly about how social media and public opinion are weapons of war in the Israeli arsenal, as important as the bums and drones they use against Hezbollah and Hamas.
And are now proceeding, after saying it openly, to go about capturing for themselves, for the state of Israel, the most important means of communication that influence how Americans think that we are being essentially taken over by a foreign influence operation led by the Ellison family and using Barry Weiss as one of their many arms.
And I think there is no way to understand all of these transactions and Barry Weiss's elevation without understanding that core mission that they're not really even hiding or being subtle about, but are being very explicit about out of desperation to just try and salvage some public opinion that has almost entirely evaporated among everyone under 50 when it comes to a willingness to continue to have the United States finance an arm and go to war for and die and give up our rights in the United States for
the state of Israel.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, system update is also 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 other major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, or follow our show, it really does help spread the visibility of the program.
So please go do that if you have a few seconds.
And then finally, as independent media and independent journalists, we really do rely on your support, support of our viewers and members.
And the way that we have to provide that is by joining our locals community, where you have a wide array of exclusive features and content and interactive uh features.
Obviously, Friday night, we take the questions solely from our locals members.
Um, but we try and use it as a venue to provide as many exclusive benefits as we can.
But most of all, it is really the community on which we, like all independent journalists, do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
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 those of you watching this show, we are needless to say very appreciative, and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m. Eastern Live, exclusively here on Rumble.
Have a great evening and a great weekend, everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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.
