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Oct. 18, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:08:47
Glenn Takes Your Questions on Major Saudi Arabia Celeb Controversies, Zohran Mamdani and the NYC Debate, Anti-ICE Protests, and More

Glenn answers your questions about Zohran Mamdani and the NYC mayoral debate, anti-ICE protests and Antifa, U.S. military action against Venezuela, and more. Plus: Glenn breaks down the controversies over athletes and celebrities traveling to Saudi Arabia for events and lucrative gigs.  --------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening.
It's Friday, October 17th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern on the dot, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
And to the people in the chat, yes, I know I look very good tonight.
You don't have to keep saying it over and over and over.
Please focus on the substance of our program and not in the words of many of you, my stunning physical appearance.
It's really important.
We prepare a lot on the show, and that should be the focus of your conversations.
All right, so for tonight, it's Friday night, so we do our QA session where we take questions that were submitted throughout the week by our locals members and we answer them.
And as usual, there is a wide range of topics raised by these questions that we hope to get to as many as possible.
Before we do that, we're going to do the segment that we intended to do last night but didn't have time, which is the issue of the moral indignation that happens every time celebrities or athletes or in the case of a couple weeks ago comedians go to Saudi Arabia to pick up millions of dollars in in cash and all this indignation about how they can do that when Saudi Arabia is such a horrible country, which want to talk a little bit about that.
There were a couple questions about it as well.
Before we get to that, a few quick programming notes.
First of all, a week from tonight, Friday night in San Antonio, a week from tonight, next Friday night at 7:30 p.m.
I'm gonna be appearing with Megan Kelly and Emily Jashinski at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio.
We're gonna have a wide-ranging discussion.
Uh a whole bunch of things planned for that evening.
If you haven't gotten your tickets, there are very few left, but you can go online and just search that event and you'll find the ticket uh dispensers.
We would love to see you there.
I'm looking forward to going to San Antonio.
I've been there several times.
I always love that city.
Couple other quick program notes.
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One more programming note right after the show at around uh 8.15 Eastern or so.
We're gonna end the show because I'll be appearing on Scott Horton Show with Daryl Cooper and a couple other people, so you can look for that as well if that interests you.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, so before we get into the questions, and there are a lot of really good ones, and I have to end the show at around 8.15 because as I said, I'm doing a Scott and Horton show.
I just said that a minute ago.
Did you not hear that?
How did you forget that already?
I'm gonna try and get to as many as I can, but I just want to do this quick segment that we had planned for last night about people running to Saudi Arabia to pick up a bunch of cash, comedians, athletes, other celebrities, because it's often the source of all sorts of discourse and moral indignation.
And I think it's really worth examining.
So as you probably know, about two weeks ago there was a big controversy in this regard because some of the country's most famous and oddly wealthiest comedians, people like uh Kevin Hart and uh Louis C.K. and Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle went to what was called the Riyadh Comedy Festival of 2025.
And it was publicly disclosed that they all went and the bigger names got massive paychecks, talking about a million and a half, two million dollars just to go and do a comedy show for an evening.
And they were barred in their contracts from talking about the Saudi royal family or Saudi Arabia or Islam and any sort of a derogatory way.
So they accepted pretty significant censorship to go to that country, accept a huge paycheck.
And then some of them even came back, Bill Burr being the oddest example, and we're just ranting and raving about how great Saudi Arabia was.
That he was there like 72 hours.
He guess he saw a Kentucky fried chicken.
He was super impressed by that.
And like he got off the plane and they didn't cut his head off.
And he was like, wow, they're just like us.
I mean, just really cheap and unsophisticated propaganda.
It was kind of embarrassing.
Like, if we're gonna do that, go do it discreetly.
Don't come back and start, you know, heaping praise on the Saudis.
It just makes you look really pathetic.
We were gonna talk about it then, but it actually, my decision to talk about this was prompted by the fact that right now there is a big tennis special in Riyadh and involves the world's uh top male tennis players, including Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic and Yannick Sinner, and it's called the Six Kings Slam.
Basically features six of the top tennis players in the world.
It's the second consecutive year that they have had this uh event.
And each person who goes, each of these six tennis players is guaranteed a minimum of 1.5 million dollars simply to appear.
And it's a tournament, so they participate in in uh an elimination tournament.
Some of them go and play one match.
In fact, half of them play go and play one match and get eliminated immediately in a maybe 50-minute match, an hour minute mat an hour match, and they make 1.5 million dollars for that.
And then whoever wins gets six million dollars, which is a bigger payday than any other major tennis tournament bigger than the US Open or Wimbledon.
So you're talking about massive amounts of money, and they go just for a few days.
It's obviously intended to whitewash or sports wash the crimes of Saudi Arabia.
They're pouring huge amounts of money into entertainment and comedy and uh obviously sports as well.
And every time this happens, there's all sorts of uh moral outrage here from Vox is just one example.
From October 10th, this is about the Rio Comedy Festival.
Saudi Arabia's comedy festival is no laughing matter.
No laughing matter, said Vox.
Saudi Arabia's festival is uh comedy festival is no laughing matter.
Comedians went to Saudi Arabia and faced blowback in America.
Early this month, comedians include, including Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, and Bill Burr flew to Saudi Arabia to perform there.
The organizers claimed it was the largest comedy festival in the world with over 50 international comedians performing stand-up sketch and improv.
It was put on and paid for by the Saudi government as part of their effort to increase investment in the local economy and also to improve their global image.
The Saudi regime's human rights record is why other performers such as Mark Macron, David Cross, and Atsuka Akasuka have strongly criticized the comedians who attended.
They have accused their peers of helping to quote put a fun face on their Saudi Arabia crime on Saudi Arabia's crimes against humanity.
Tim Dylan, uh, who originally accepted a deal to go and said he got paid $375,000 for doing so.
I think he got half of that up front.
About $170,000, something like that, $175,000.
He then went on and made comments on his podcast before going, where he basically said, Oh, yes, so they have slave labor and they, you know, kill dissidents.
I'm being paid to look the other way, and I'm willing to do that.
And as a result, his can't his contract was canceled just to indicate how much censorship these people accepted in order to go in and do this.
These people who are comedians and love to herald themselves as the frontline fighters for for free speech, accepted very heavy censorship uh provisions for a very large paycheck in in Saudi Arabia.
You know, you've kept people like Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and you'd question why they this would be worth it to them.
But in any event, uh apparently it was, and there was a lot of discourse uh created by that, and the same is now happening with this uh tennis tournament.
Here BBC asks, what is the lucrative Six Kings Slam?
And who is paying?
And it says five of the world's top ten men's players will compete at a lucrative exhibition this uh in Saudi Arabia this week.
This is a there's a reported five $4.5 million in prize money on offer, with some players also likely to have been paid seven figure sums to appear.
Report say the winner could take home up to six million dollars.
That's what happened last year.
The same group of people with a couple of exceptions went, Yannick Center won, he beat Carlos Aparaz in the final, he got six million dollars.
I think Alcaraz got something like four and a half million.
These are people who make tens of million dollars a year as Well, so there's always this kind of moral outrage in sports discourse right now and in the whole world of comedy.
You know, how can you go and associate yourself with such a repressive, brutal, savage regime, one that represses women and kills dissidents and engages in essentially all kinds of deprivation of basic liberties, to say nothing of the violence and the wars and everything else for which Saudi Arabia is responsible.
And it is true that Saudi Arabia is likely one of the worst regimes on the planet.
And so when people, individual celebrities or athletes go, it creates all this sort of backlash.
Here was a very popular TikTok video by Zach Woods, who's a pretty well-known comedic actor, I believe he was on the office and a couple other shows.
And this is very tongue-in-cheek, him purporting to defend these comedians who went to Saudi Arabia while obviously intending to harshly criticize them.
Here's what he said.
Guys, it's that special time of year.
It's the Riyad Comedy Festival.
And all of your favorite comedians are performing at the pleasure of Turkey Al-Sheikh.
And he is the head of the entertainment authority over there.
And he has so many people thrown in prison because they tweeted stuff he didn't like about the soccer team or whatever, that there's a wing of a prison nicknamed after him, where they hang people by their heels from the ceiling.
Now there's a lot of drips, killjoys, and we bazoids who are saying, oh, we they shouldn't do comedy over there because it's uh whitewashing a regime that just in June killed a journalist and killed Jamal Koshogi and uh played a big role in 9-11.
Shut up.
Name one comedian who hasn't hoarded themselves out to a dictator.
Sinbad uh in the 80s would go perform for dying Nazis hidden out in Argentina.
Mr. Bean would do private shows for Edi Amin.
Me and Bibi Netanyahu have collaborated.
I I pitched him a prank show called The West Bank, where um it's hilarious.
Like people in masks show up and eject people from their homes, and they're terrified.
They just traumatize these families, and then they can never come home.
Um it's been going on for years, but this season has been like action-packed.
And it's friendship, but there's also a true crime element because it violates international law and people have been killed a lot.
Let's not get our, you know, moral panties yanked up, wedged wedged high in our uh in our rumps.
Human rights watch has been begging um the comedians not to participate in the whitewashing of the uh horrors that are ongoing in Saudi Arabia.
Ugh, what a cock block.
Human rights watch is for comedy.
Let's have some fun, let's have some yucks, and let's not look too closely at anything.
I'm a hypocrite too.
I think it's very well done and think it's funny.
Uh, but what bothers me about this discourse every time is this idea that somehow Saudi Arabia is supposed to be this place that's off limits, like a bridge too far for any Westerner.
Like you you just don't associate yourself with the regime that dark and brutal and savage.
And the reason why, and this happens all the time in the UK, I listen to a tennis podcast that's British, and they all, for the second year in a row, they all get these on these synctimonious high horses, and they're like, hey, if Saudi Arabia isn't the line for you, what mind do you have?
And you know, they just they get so carried away with their self-righteousness about it.
And what drives me insane about this every time is that the reason there is a Saudi regime, the parties that are closest to the Saudi regime that keep the Saudi regime in power, that give it the funds and the weapons and the technology that it needs and the surveillance instruments that it uses to track dissidents and punish them and kill them.
The entities that do that most are called the British government and the United States government.
Here from the official UK government site, February 5th, 2004, a key step for UK Saudi defense relationship.
Ministers progress talks on a new strategic partnership during meetings at the World Defense Show in Riyadh, quote, decades-long depth relationship between the UK and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is to deepen following bilateral meetings.
Ministers agree to continue working toward building a partnership to explore development of advanced new weapon systems, including precision guided missiles and armored vehicles.
Here from May of this year, from Algiers, US and Saudi Arabia agree to 142 billion dollar weapon sale during Trump's visit.
The White House has an agreement with Saudi Arabia, includes investments in weapons and technology totaling $600 billion.
I could spend all night showing you partnerships between Saudi Arabia and the United States government, partnerships between the Saudis and the UK government, other Western governments as well.
And it just strikes me as a very strange burden to place on like individual citizens or even just celebrities or athletes.
You cannot go to this place because it is so evil.
You cannot profit from there.
While our governments have a very deep and long-standing multi-tiered relationship with the Saudi tyrants, with the Saudi dictators.
They're among the closest allies we have.
Trump was just there three months ago, along with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where he couldn't have been more explicit and genuine and the praise he was heaping on them as very close American allies.
So if you're some British person or American person, you want to express this self-righteous anger that Louis C.K. or Dave Chappelle or Carlos Acaraz or Novak Jokovic or whatever went to Saudi Arabia for three days and played tennis or told some jokes and get get and got a bunch of money.
I I understand the argument.
But when it's your government, not just with one party, not just with Trump or not just with the Tories, but the bipartisan policy of both governments for forever is to make sure the Saudi tyrants stay in place, to give them the money they need, the weapons they need, the technology they need, the surveillance instruments they need, to stay in power all these decades, and to have very deep multi-bilateral relationships with them where both sides profit, we sell them weapons, we take their money, they take our money.
It just seems like a very cheap way to express moral indignation.
If you're really that upset about the Saudi tyrants, if you're really interested in having them isolated or weakened, you should be out protesting or demanding that your own government sever ties with them, not that Dave Chappelle or Carlos Alcaraz do so.
I just think it's something that is so the reason I thought it was worth discussing is because I think that all these people who understand that we are in bed with the Saudis or the worst most savage regimes in the world and have been for decades, somehow block that out or compartmentalize it and just don't accept it or embrace it or acknowledge it.
And instead, deep down believe that we really are a country or a group of people in the West which abhors dictatorships, opposes it.
And so, how can these comedians or these golfers or these tennis players go to Saudi Arabia and take money from a regime that we hate so much, but we don't hate that regime.
Our governments are the reason why they remain in power, and it's just this cognitive dissonance that lies at the heart of this discourse that always bothers me.
All right, let's get to the questions right after this short break.
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Music.
Music.
you Lots of good questions tonight.
Let's dive right in, starting with Carl Malone, who asked this quote Hello, Glenn Greenwald.
Hello, Carl Malone.
Did you follow the neoconservative patriots David Frum and Douglas Murray having quietly worked as speechwriters for the Israeli ambassador story?
I was hoping you could comment on the less secretive moves being made this year and the small corner of culture war nonsense and the more quote backroom deals that are coming to light.
Love the show curl.
Thank you, Carl.
I did not actually see that specific story.
But we after I saw this question, we just grabbed a couple news reports on it.
So here's one from drop site news, and this is October 7th, 2025, the very solemn two-year anniversary of the start of the Israeli attack on Gaza and the October 7th attack in Israel, the headline of which is David From Douglas Murray secretly secretly drafted speeches for the Israeli ambassador.
Quote, leaked emails from former Israeli, from former Israeli UN ambassador Ron Prazer showed David Frum, Douglas Murray offering to write his speeches, and a CNN producer fundraising for Israel's Iron Dome during Israel's 2014 war.
You know, I one of the things that I find so interesting, I saw this a lot.
I've I've talked about this before, I've shown this before in the in the reaction to the news that Larry Ellison, the single largest private donor in the history of the world to the IDF, and his son David Ellison, two fanatical Zionist and Israel supporters,
were buying a bunch of media properties, including CBS, CBS News, Paramount, trying to buy discover uh Warner Brothers and CNN just took a major controlling interest in TikTok, put Barry Weiss in charge of CBS News.
In response to a lot of that, people are saying, oh, good.
Well, at least we're finally gonna have some diversity in our media, as though somehow the media in the United States, the corporate media, has been hostile to Israel supporters or Jewish supporters of Israel.
Just today, Dana Bash, who after October 7th used her platform on CNN to say a prayer for Israel and for Israelis, a Jewish prayer for Israel and Israelis on air, castigated a bunch of Hollywood actors today for trying to urge a boycott of Israeli companies, Israeli uh events as pressure to have them end the war in Gaza and to end the apartheid treatment of the West Bank and Gaza as well.
She was very angry about this.
She pointed out, oh, they don't seem to care if Hamas kills Palestinians.
The same kind of argument that sometimes conservatives make about black people.
Oh, there's a lot of uproar when white police officers kill black people, but not when other black people kill black people.
This is Dana Bash, who is a very sort of run-of-the-mill CNN anchor, and she and Jake Tapper, these are all very pro-Israel anchors.
And it's all embedded throughout the media.
I mean, David Ellison buying CBS News and putting Barry Weiss in charge is a very brazen, transparent expression of this trend that has been going on for a long, long time.
And learning that David Frum and Douglas Murray want to work for foreign officials in Israel is the least surprising thing I've ever heard, especially when they're offering to write their propaganda speeches to help them convince Americans or British people or Westerners generally to return, return to the pro-Israel train that most people have left in the last two years.
Or that a CNN producer is trying to raise funds for Israel's Iron Dome.
I just, you know, if we're being honest at all, and I mean the problem with dishonesty is sometimes honesty aligns with or collides with uncomfortable stereotypes that people are very afraid of getting near.
And for good reason, these stereotypes have been used harmfully, but they can't be used to suppress what is true.
And the truth is that American political and media elites across the political spectrum, not on the right, not on the left, and not Republican, not Democrat, not on Fox, but On CNN and every other outlet, overwhelmingly are extremely pro-Israel.
The American elite political and media class is extremely pro-Israel.
That is why the United States has given more aid to Israel by far than any other country over the last four or five decades.
Why we pay for the military, why we, every time they go to war, deploy our military.
I mean, the proof is in the pudding.
Members of Congress don't go to Qatar and don Muslim clothing and go into sacred mosques.
They do that in Israel.
They go where Yarmakas, they kiss the wall, they make pilgrimage to Israel every year, they come back, they visit synagogues, they go to APAC conferences, they pledge their love of and support for Israel.
I mean, any honest discussion requires an acknowledgement of just how pervasive our elite class is, is pro-Israel sentiment is in our league classes.
And I think it's the opposite of surprising to learn that David From Douglas Murray are secretly offering to write speeches for the Israeli ambassador.
For whatever reason, even though if you're an American or a British citizen, you're supposed to have loyalty to your country, there's always an Israel exception for everything.
I was genuinely surprised when I learned that Larry Allison has donated millions and millions of dollars to the IDF.
I didn't think it was legal for an American to donate their private funds to a foreign military.
But there are so many Americans who don't serve in the American military but go serve in the Israeli military.
They're American citizens with all the benefits of American citizenship.
And they decide instead they're not going to fight in their own country's military, but in this foreign military.
And that includes the person who TikTok appointed to be the content moderator for all matters relating to anti-Semitism and Israel.
She's an American citizen, she went to fight in the IDF.
And now she's running, she's, you know, 27, she was imposed on TikTok by the ADL.
And now she's monitoring and censoring political discourse on TikTok in service to the foreign country, to which she's obviously loyal.
I mean, it's not controversial to say she's loyal to Israel.
If she actually went and fought in its military, fought in its wars.
That's the definition of loyalty.
And it's just, I think it's crucial that we break the taboo against people being afraid to talk about it that way.
Because the fear of talking about it that way obscures the truth.
Though I do think, and the question sort of suggests this, and we've hinted at it, we've we've talked about this before, we've alluded to it before, not hinted at it.
We even said it uh explicitly, that the desperation of the pro-Israel lobby of the pro-Israel political and media class watching support for Israel unravel so rapidly across the political spectrum and demographic categories has engendered them a kind of panic that has made them engage in behavior far more brazen and transparent and obvious than ever before.
They used to kind of like to be very much under the radar.
This influence was best expressed in a very subtle and indetectable way, but they don't have the benefit of that anymore.
As Professor Mirzheimer says, they now have to engage in spat mouse smash mouth politics.
And that has forced them to come out into the open.
I think the more they come out into the open, the more people understand the true nature of our political climate and our political discourse and understand the extreme and very damaging influence of this foreign country and the way people can just be openly loyal to a foreign country over their own and what it's doing to our country.
And so all of this, the more that it happens, in a way, the better it is, because it's not as though when it was invisible it wasn't happening, it was.
It just wasn't visible.
The more visible it becomes, the better.
All right.
Go birds asked, hi Glenn, did you watch the New York City mayoral debate?
What are your thoughts?
I find like the debate, I feel like the debate, as usual, focused too much on Israel-related issues that are outside the control of the New York City mayor and would like to hear what you think.
So I did watch a good amount of the debate, and I, you know, I'd not that engage in this election, and I'm not that invested in it for a couple of reasons.
One is I think the chances are overwhelming that Zara Mandani is going to win and become the next New York City mayor.
I mean, I'm not, you know, a polling guru for saying that.
It doesn't take that.
You just look at the polls, and his lead is large, it's not shrunk.
If anything, it's gotten larger.
He's actually nearing 50%, so that even if the Republican candidate Curtis Lewood did drop out in favor of Andrew Kormon, I'm not even sure it could get off the ballot at this point.
The election's pretty close.
I think like in two weeks, two and a half weeks.
I think Zorron's victory is virtually assured.
And although I was interested in Zoran when he became the Democratic Party nominee, kind of out of nowhere, the Democratic establishment was very uncomfortable with him.
They're not anymore.
The two people who are running Zoran's campaign who are kind of shepherding him around, who are massaging his messaging, is a former Obama operative and a former Clinton finance operative, Hillary Clinton finance operative.
He's completely embraced the Democratic Party, their messaging, their tactics, obviously still catered to New York City and to the more left liberal audience or uh voter base that's there.
But he's utterly under control.
He's walked back many of his statements that have been most controversial.
He's going to continue to do that.
He obviously has to placate all sorts of power centers from the police to the real estate lobby to Wall Street, if he wants to have any hope of not having his mayoralship, uh, his mayorality completely wrecked.
And he's basically morphed into AOC and Bernie.
And I just, it's been a long time since I found them even remotely interesting, either of them.
So I did watch it, but I didn't watch it so intensely.
But what and but I did think that the most notable part was the part that the question raises, which is it is amazing that if you run for New York City, you're gonna spend a huge amount of your time talking about Israel.
Andrew Cuomo based his entire primary campaign.
Not entire primary campaign, but certainly one of the issues he centered, one of the issues on which he which he most emphasized was his unyielding, undying proven support for the state of Israel.
And it's true, he's very, very pro-Israel and always has been.
When he was governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo actually threatened that anybody who advocates a boycott of Israel will be cut off and barred from having contracts with the state.
And it's not because Andrew Cuomo doesn't like boycotts.
Andrew Cuomo actually imposed boycotts on other American states.
He ordered a boycott of Indiana in protest to their bathroom bill, their transbathrough.
He ordered a protest, a boycott of North Carolina for the same reason.
So he's more than willing to boycott his fellow American citizens and fellow American states.
But if you boycott Israel, he said, New York State is gonna boycott you.
So he's all that was when he was governor.
He's very, very pro-Israel.
He centered that in his campaign.
And I found the one most single most interesting moment of this entire race for New York City mayor to be in the Democratic primary when you had eight or nine candidates, one of whom was Zoran, the other of whom was uh Andrew Cuomo.
And the journalists asked the question what will be the first foreign country you will visit upon being elected as New York City's mayor.
And they all just went down the line walked for the next saying, Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel, the holy land, the holy land, Israel.
And uh one of them said, Israel and then Ukraine.
I'll make my seventh trip to Israel and then my fifth trip to Ukraine, you know, just trying to cater to the liberal audience, the liberal uh vote voting base that they were trying to uh have vote for them.
And then Zoran said, I don't really plan to take foreign trips.
I'm running for New York mayor.
I'm gonna focus on the people who live in New York City and the municipality in the city of New York City, including Jews, but not the ones in Israel, but the ones in New York City.
And this was pretty scandalous.
Like, how do you run for New York City mayor and not promise that your first foreign trip is going to be to Israel?
And Zoran had basically a kind of America first or New York first posture, which is I'm not focused on foreign countries.
I'm focused on affordability in New York.
And even a lot of people on the right who obviously have no support or connect for connection to Zoran's ideology, expressed respect for the fact that he was willing to answer that way.
But this is a new Zoran Mandani, and he walked back a lot of the things that he had said, including recently.
He just gave a recent interview that they asked him, should Hamas lay down arms a week ago, and he said, I don't really have opinions on that.
I'm not looking to govern Gaza, which was a perfectly legitimate answer.
I'm looking to govern New York City.
And then last night, Andrew Cuomo started attacking him for that, immediately walked back and said, Of course I think Hamal should lay down their arms.
It's a ceasefire.
I think both sides should.
You know, it's just if he he he he's he's kind of become that more that more smarmy Bill Clinton like, he's a great communicator.
Uh sort of a mix of Bill Clinton and and and and Barack Obama in terms of his skills.
He's underlying his political talent.
But his ambition clearly overrides his convictions, and you can say, oh, he just wants to win.
He's had a huge lead in the polls.
There was no need to walk these things back.
If he's already walking back views out of fear of getting accused of being called this name or that name, then his victory is going to have a very limited utility or impact.
But in any event, there was this part of the debate that attracted a lot of criticism for Zoran, a lot of upset, especially among the pro-Israel wings of the Democratic and Republican parties.
And it was when he voiced this criticism of Andrew Cuomo.
Do we have this video?
All right, we don't have the video.
But there's a tweet that says it quotes Mandami as saying it took Andrew Cuomo being beaten by a Muslim candidate for him to set foot in a mosque.
And then Cuomo says that's totally false, and Zohan started demanding that he name the mosques he visited while he was New York governor because apparently he hadn't visited any mosques.
And there's a big Muslim population in New York City, and so Zorron's trying to indicate to them that he, by becoming a hardcore pro-Israel fanatic.
That translated into ignoring the Muslim population of New York State in order not to offend his pro-Israel and Zionist funders.
And that was the essential critique of Andrew Cuomo was that he was that unlike Zoran, who just got done visiting synagogues, he visited an Orthodox synagogue, a more reformed synagogue in Brooklyn, that unlike his visits to synagogues, Andrew Cuomo never visited a mosque.
And there were a bunch of Israel fanatics on Twitter, don't live in New York City, but really upset by this.
One of them was Will Chamberlain, who said, quote, no American candidate for elected office should ever feel like he has to step inside a mosque to win.
What's next?
They have to have a prayer bump on their forehead.
And I really, I couldn't believe the reaction.
I mean, like Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro, all these people like, why should you have to visit a mosque?
Why should you have to show any kind of accommodation to Muslims in order to run for New York City?
And it's like, are you kidding?
It's been a requirement, not just being New York City mayor, but pretty much any high-level political office in the United States to demonstrate all sorts of loyalty to and support for Israel.
Every major American politician makes that pilgrimage to Jerusalem, puts a Yarmika on their head, and practically makes out with the wall in Jerusalem.
And they come back and they go to AIPAC conferences.
They do a lot more than just showing a prayer bump or a visit to a synagogue or to a mosque.
And that was what I said in response.
I wrote, quote, this is getting so extreme.
This requirement that people visit mosques that one day it might even be that American politicians feel like they need to make pilgrimage to Israel and put on the armica and kiss a wall and then go back to the U.S. and visit synagogues and eight-pack conferences to praise Israel.
Could you imagine?
So please spare me this notion that somehow it's so offensive that if you're in New York City with a large Muslim population that you should probably visit people in their religious houses of worship.
Every single major candidate for New York mayor has gone to synagogues, has gone to Jewish community centers, has gone to Israel.
As I said, they all vowed and promised the first country they would visit upon being elected is the holy land in Israel.
This is a requirement of American politicians so much more overwhelmingly this influence, this dominant strain in American politics than any sort of requirement that you nod to Muslims or talk about the mosque that you visited.
And it was just amazing to watch the people who are the most fanatically pro-Israel, the most loyal to Israel, spend the day expressing upset and indignation that if you want to run for New York City mayor, you should have to show that you've visited Muslims in their house of worship, given how many rituals American politicians are required to engage in over and over and over in order to have any chance of being elected to high office when it comes to synagogues and Jews and Israel.
All right, next question from Somni 451.
Some have suggested that the reason Trump is sending IC into cities is to provoke attacks so that he can send in the military.
There is evidently a legal distinction between when you can use which kind of force and with the Trump administration trying to voice terrorism charges on ICE protesters, are protesters just playing into the administration's hands.
So there's a lot going on here, and we talked about this before.
I've talked about in particular what I regard as the genuine dangers that exist any time one of two things happening, both of which are happening now.
One, when the president starts talking about deploying the National Guard and the military onto the streets of American cities.
In general, I dislike the deployment of federal law enforcement in American cities.
That should be a function carried out by state and city police under governors and elected mayors and governors.
And I think the founders' concerns about a standing army, a standard, a standing armed force under the federal government was a very valid one.
And this was a right-wing cause in the 1990s where there was all these sorts of backlashes against the very Bureau of Tobacco and firearms and the FBI and the NSA that came out of Waco and the Randy Weaver shooting, and this idea that the federal government has become kind of this Gestapo force.
But that was just those domestic agencies, Homeland Security then was created in 2002 in the wake of the war on terror.
And that brought a whole new bureaucracy with a whole new set of armed agents of the state, including ICE.
And I do think there are genuine concerns when you start deploying the military onto American streets.
And I also think there's a huge danger when presidents start talking about categorizing or classifying political movements inside the United States as terrorist organizations that should be treated the same as we treat foreign terrorist organizations, namely with no mercy, with no due process.
This is a concern I had when the Biden administration started talking about MAGA as an insurrectionary movement, as a terrorist organization.
Democrats on the January 6th Committee were calling for people who were at the Capitol, whether they use violence or not, to be put on the no fly list, which is a remnant of the war on terror.
You're talking about American citizens being put on no fly lists.
They were surveilling them, using that as an excuse to use the police power, and now it's equally a concern when you're talking about the Trump administration that really was it escalated after the Charlie Kirk assassination, which in one on one side I understand empathetically that that was an absolutely horrific thing to watch.
A lot of people in government actually know Charlie, knew Charlie Kirk, know his family.
It was very emotionally affecting for them to watch that, and they were angry about it and wanted to crack down the people they felt responsible were responsible.
And I understood that reaction.
But the people who are responsible are the people who planned and participated in that shooting, not people who advocate a certain political ideology.
Because if you are going to start characterizing terrorism or criminality based on the ideology that somebody advocates and the fact that somebody goes commits violence in the name of that ideology, everybody is vulnerable to being classified that way.
There's violence carried out in the name of every political agenda, in the name of every ideology.
And that is something that gets very disturbing to me.
Now, I don't think at all that people who are exercising their constitutional right to protest ICE, leave aside for the moment whether you think what ICE is doing is on the whole good, on the whole, bad, entirely good, every single thing they're doing is good, every single thing they're doing is bad.
Just leave aside the question of, for the moment, of what you think about ICE and how it's being utilized in the United States.
American citizens, people in the country legally have a right to protest what ICE is doing.
It's a constitutional right.
You have you have the right to assemble, you have the right to protest.
And I don't think people should relinquish their right to protest because that's quote playing into the hands of the government, that the government will use those protests in order to enhance their power.
And I do think that's part of what's happening.
Now, having said that, there is a very kind of fringe element of the left that sometimes calls itself Antifa or just general anarchist groups on the left.
And by the way, if you're somebody who wants to defend Antifa, just defend Antifa based on whatever argument you want, except for the argument that they must be good because they literally call themselves Antifa, which means anti-fascists.
And if they call themselves anti-fascists, they must be good because all they're doing is opposing fascism.
It's like saying, how can you possibly be against the Patriot Act?
It's literally called the Patriot Act.
It's it's called the Patriot Act.
It's an act that promotes patriotism.
The only way you could be against it is if you hate patriotism.
That argument is just as sound, just as coherent as saying, how can you criticize Antifa?
They're literally called anti-fascists.
The only way you could be against Antifa is if you love fascism.
Stop with that argument.
That's an idiotic, semantic argument that is utterly devoid of any substance.
It's insulting.
But I do think Antifa is a very fringe group.
A small number of people belong to the wing of Antifa that uses violence to as Molotov cocktails, attacks journalists.
They are there.
They just are.
They're in places like Portland, they're in places like Seattle in larger numbers than other places.
But it's not like the country is being in any way paralyzed or consumed by these kinds of left-ling fanatics any more than it was Trump supporters who were willing to use violence of the kind that happened on January 6th.
These are very isolated fringe groups.
The United States is not threatened by it.
The United States government is not at risk from it.
We don't need terrorist powers used against them.
If there are laws that are being broken, there are police there to arrest them.
And if the police aren't doing their job, they should be.
That's the police's job is to keep order and to make sure that people who visit that city or live there are being peaceful.
You don't need the deployment of federal troops or federal military forces, let alone all kinds of radical civil liberties assaulting theories about domestic terrorists.
And on some level, yes, the two extremes, the extreme in the Trump White House that wants this broader political crackdown, and the extremists who give them the excuse to do it.
Mostly morons who just engage in nihilistic violence, they are kind of feeding on one another.
But you can solve the problem of people using violence as part of political movements without introducing theories and that are designed to crack down or define fellow citizens or people with different ideologies as terrorist organizations or insurrectionary movements, and you can also do so without deploying the military to these places, or even worse, federalizing the National Guard.
It is a tradition in the United States, a very important one, that the federal government cannot send National Guard troops to a state if the governor doesn't ask for them.
the fact that the government explicitly objects.
And that is a practice that the Trump administration has run roughshod over.
The governor of Oregon doesn't want National Guard troops there.
The governor of Illinois doesn't want National Guard troops there.
The governor of California doesn't want National Guard troops there.
And yet Trump is sending National Guard soldiers from Texas and other places to those states.
And it it's a very incendiary combination.
You have state and federal local governments instructing the police forces that are duty bound to follow their orders not to cooperate.
You have federal troops who then are coming in under the command of the president.
You have local police forces talking about disobeying the orders of the city or the state because they don't agree with them and aligning instead of federal law enforcement agents.
These are all recipes for things that nobody should want.
And the magnitude of the problem is nowhere near enough to justify it.
Any authoritarian Attempt by the government to acquire more power is always, always justified by wildly exaggerating the nature of the threat.
Doesn't mean the threat's not there.
It doesn't mean that you can't find videos of leftists or anarchists or whatever being violent.
But you have to keep that in the context, sort of like the terrorist threat.
That was wildly exaggerated, justify the 20 years of endless war in the war on terror.
Same thing that's happening now, same thing that happened in the Biden administration with the threat of right wing extremists or white supremacist extremists or insurrectionary insurrectionary insurrectionists who are pro-Trump.
It's always threat inflation, the exaggeration of dangers that ushers in these sorts of erosions of core civil liberties.
All right, next question is from B. R. Duffy, who says this.
Hi Glenn, the situation in Venezuela.
I remember you implying that the excuses administration is using for military action there is disingenuous.
In fact, I not only implied that, I actually said that in a show we devoted to this very topic, I think two or three days ago, this week, about the obvious dangers of engineering regime change in Venezuela, which clearly is the purpose of what we're doing there.
The question goes on quote, if drugs are not the issue, and we just turned down an agreement with them for a large stake in their oil, mineral, and gold rights, along with them cutting ties with China and Russia, then what is going on?
Do I have this right?
Why are we in a military conflict with Venezuela?
It's a good question.
First of all, I would be skeptical about these reports, and they're emanating directly from Trump as well.
That Maduro basically said, Oh, anything you want, we'll give you to stay in power.
Have all our oil, have all the minerals, whatever you want, just leave us alone.
And Trump today, and I'm quoting him, he used a profanity to say it, said, Maduro gave us everything, he offered everything because, quote, he doesn't want to fuck with the United States.
But Trump strongly implied that he rejected all those offers and he wants to take out Maduro, which was the policy of the first Trump administration, they just couldn't get it done.
That was what led to the exit of John Bolton, was he promised Trump it could be done with relative ease and it didn't happen, and Trump lost faith in Bolton.
And now it's we're right back to that.
I saw the leader of the Venezuelan opposition who she just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
She said a couple things today.
One is she called Benjamin Netanyahu to make clear that she is a strong close friend of ally, an ally of Israel, which is what you would expect.
This is a neoconservative policy to topple regimes we don't like, under the guise of spreading democracy and freedom, liberating the people of other countries, all the things that I thought the American First Movement was anathema to doing.
So she said that, but then she also said if you bring democracy and freedom back to Venezuela, you're not going to just bring it back to Venezuela, you're going to bring it back to the whole region.
You'll topple the regimes of Cuba and other oppressive regimes in the Caribbean and Central America and South America and freedom and democracy will spread everywhere throughout the region, which is exactly what Neocons, of course, said in the build-up to the Iraq War, 2002,
2003, that if, and this is something Benjamin Netanyahu said, this is his main argument for trying to get the Congress to invade Iraq, which is he said, I can guarantee you that if you take out Saddam and a democracy forges there, it will spread democracy will to every country in the region.
Obviously, that never happened.
None of that came close to happening.
The opposite happened.
The United States has been trying to overthrow the government of Cuba for almost 70 years now.
Our obsession with Cuba is what led to the Bay of Pigs disaster.
It's what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis that came close to ending humanity as a species on this planet through nuclear apocalypse.
This obsession with Cuba, why?
It's a tiny little island.
It's not a threat to the United States.
Huge numbers of people came from Cuba to the United States.
They exercise a lot of political power.
They live in Miami.
Marco Rubio's family is among them.
And because they came from Cuba, they've always focused on Cuba.
Even though they're supposedly living in the United States as Citizens of the United States.
I grew up there.
I grew up around them.
I grew up in Miami in South Florida.
I know the Cuban community very well.
In fact, a lot of them would come to the United States and live their whole lives here and they would never learn English because they always thought they were just temporary, temporarily here until they were waiting for the United States to overthrow Castro and then they're going to go back to Cuba.
So they didn't, why would they need to learn English?
And the second, third generation Cubans have become more Americanized.
They're sort of like Marc Rubio, they're higher, you know, they go to college, they learn English, they become more Americanized.
But still, their interest remains very much focused on the Caribbean, Central America, South America, they hate, hated Hugo Chavez as an ally of.
They don't just hate the communist government of Cuba, they hate whoever is an ally of his.
And Marco Rubio is somebody who, although he was born in the United States, his parents are immigrants who came from Cuba.
They didn't flee Castro, by the way.
They fled the U.S.-supported government of Batista, who Castro overthrew.
That story has gotten a little bit blurred over the years.
I believe that's true about Rubio.
I might be thinking about Ted Cruz, but I'm pretty sure it's true of Marco Rubio.
And a lot of people, it's just like Israel, a lot of people who are raised in the United States, but told to love Israel, to think about Israel, want to use the United States government and their U.S. citizenship to serve the interests of this foreign country that they've been taught to love.
And the same is true for a lot of people who come from Cuba, who come from Venezuela, who come from Latin America.
There's a huge Venezuelan and Cuban voting bloc in Florida now.
And a lot of those people, it's just like those Iraqi exiles who were so eager to overthrow, have the U.S. overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime, so they could feel like they and people aligned with them, got back into power in Iraq.
They used the United States as their private militia.
You can find all sorts of Iranian dissidents or exiles or immigrants who think the United States should overthrow the current government of Iran and reinstall the Shah and the Shah's son, the Shah, the Pahlavi family, the royal family of Iran.
There's all kinds of people with interest in other parts of the world, with other countries, who come to the United States and want to use the United States to advance the interest of these other countries.
And, of course, they can talk reasons why it's somehow in the interest of the United States to do so.
The reason that I say drugs are a pretext is because we've gone over these government reports several times now about where drugs come from that are entering the United States.
And for many of the drugs that have been the topic of the most amount of concern and focus that are killing the most Americans, like fentanyl or opioids in general, they don't come from Venezuela.
Venezuela has basically no role in the flow of fentanyl or other opioids into the United States, heroin.
And even with the drug that they're most associated with, which is cocaine, very few drugs emanate from Venezuela.
Very few drugs that come to the United States emanate from Venezuela.
It comes from Colombia, it comes from Mexico, it comes from China.
And even if you decided, oh, we have to start interdicting drugs from Venezuela, why do you have to blow up boats?
Just yesterday we blew up a boat, another boat.
I think it was the sixth boat in the last six weeks.
Then we were told it has drugs on it and drug traffickers on it.
There have been families, including Trinidadian families, who have come and said, my son was on one of these boats, he was nothing but a fisherman.
And you can say, well, am I supposed to blindly believe that person or their family?
No, but you're going to blindly believe the government when they say the people they're blowing up are drug traffickers coming to the United States with no evidence?
But yesterday we blew on up and apparently not everybody aboard was killed.
There were two or three survivors and American helicopters swept down and picked them up and now have them in custody.
So why can't we just do that?
Why can't we just interdict boats that we claim are coming to the United States to smuggle drugs, charge them with crimes, put them on trial in a court, show the evidence that they're guilty and then imprison them?
That's how civilized countries punish drug trafficking, punish crimes.
You don't just go around blowing boats up.
And you can say, oh, well, it's expensive to put people on trial.
Do you know how much more expensive it is to do what we're doing in Venezuela?
We have this gigantic military deployment.
All kinds of aircraft carriers and submarines and drones, etc.
I mean, just the entire array of American military assets surrounding Venezuela, deployed in the Caribbean.
And we have a covert CIA program operating in Venezuela to destabilize and then overthrow the Maduro government, which is obviously very, very expensive as well.
I'm sure we're throwing cash around that country of a hundred million dollars or something reward for the capture of Maduro.
And then once, if we do succeed in installing this woman as the president of Venezuela and her faction, we're gonna fund them, we're gonna give her all sorts of weapons, give her the guns to fight the people in Venezuela who are stay who are still loyal to Maduro.
And then whatever instability is going to occur, and of course there's gonna be instability from a regime change war.
We're gonna pay for all that as well.
So whatever costs come from interdicting these boats and picking these people up and prosecuting them and putting them in prison is a tiny minute fraction of whatever we're gonna spend and already spending on what is obviously a regime change war.
And the question is why?
Why do people in Ohio, why do people in Arizona, why do people in Ohio Idaho?
How is their lives, how are their lives bettered by changing the government of Venezuela or the government of Cuba?
How are people in in Missouri or in Georgia harmed by having this government instead of that one in Havana or Caracas or other places in in the Caribbean or in Central America?
Their lives are as affected by that as they are affected by who runs various provinces of Eastern Ukraine, which is to say not at all.
This is pure neoconservative policy being pushed by people who are both neocons like Marco Rubio, but also people who have a lot of loyalty and ancestry based in that region.
They want Maduro gone for their own reasons, they want Castragon for their own reasons or Castro's uh descendants.
And they use the United States to do it.
And it's really I, you know, I I I find it, I guess, astonishing, even though maybe I shouldn't.
But I've watched Americans now for two and a half decades say, and not just leftists or liberals, but conservatives, MAGA, America First, all these political movements converging on this understanding that we have to stop fighting these endless wars.
We have to stop pouring our resources into regime change operations in other countries and focus on our own country and our own communities and the people who live in them.
Remember all that?
And you look at the priorities of the Trump administration.
Bombing Yemen, bombing Iran, feeding Israel weapons and arms, threatening Hamas, we're gonna go in and if they don't stop this or they don't stop that.
Obsessed with the war in Ukraine and Russia.
President Trump spoke with President Putin yesterday, met with President Zelensky today.
Credit to him for trying to end the war.
I believe he's trying to do that, but look at all the priorities.
Now we're engaged in a major regime change operation in Venezuela.
For what?
Why?
How does this align with any of the interests of the American people that Donald Trump and his supporters have vowed they're gonna dedicate themselves to?
There are agendas served by that.
None involving the forgotten man, as Donald Trump called the people he claimed to want to represent.
And all of that is true if this operation goes as perfectly as it could possibly go.
Hello.
But as Tulsey Gabbard told Fox News in 2019 when condemning the first Trump administration's desire to regime change Venezuela, it rarely, if ever, does go according to plan, and you end up producing all sorts of consequences you don't want and don't anticipate, getting dragged in in so many other ways.
And that's almost certainly what's gonna happen here.
All right, last question from uh Hi mom, which is uh a person who asks questions quite a bit, I think.
Uh, can we say the person's name?
Yeah, it's Daniel McGuinness.
Uh so thank you for all your great questions.
I haven't seen this one yet, so I'm assuming it's great as well.
We'll see in just a second.
Hi, Glenn.
I enjoyed your interview with Nick Fuentes and was surprised by the audience pushback.
My first exposure came to him came through the Michael Tracy interview.
I guess that's Michael Tracy interviewed him about a year ago when he was guest hosting my show.
And since the quote 12-day War, I'd become a regular viewer of America first.
And while in that time I've heard him say racist things, it's mostly along the lines of what you'd hear from a boomer relative at Thanksgiving.
Am I missing something, or has the rhetoric around him backfired in the sense that it creates such extreme expectations that he seems moderate compared to his reputation?
Yeah, so I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on talking about the Nick Fundes interview again, because we did the interview, it got a lot of uh viewership.
And I would say the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
But then also on a QA show, maybe last week or the week before, I addressed a question that suggested I hadn't pushed back on him enough.
And I talked about at a fair amount of length, maybe 15 minutes or so, my view of that interview, how I approached it, why I thought it was worth doing, why I still think it's worth doing.
So I don't want to repeat all that, I don't want to go into all that, but I will say this about Nick Fuentes.
And it actually relates to this controversy over these chats from the Republican National The Republican Republican College Republicans, that a RNC or Republican uh college Republican who's part of the Trump administration, I think, didn't some mid-level State Department position.
I think his name is Gavin Wax.
He leaked these chats to the politico because he felt like they contained too much anti-Semitism and too much anti-Israel sentiment.
I think Gavin Wax is a pro-Israel loyalist, and so he wanted to expose the people in the conservative movement who are saying disparaging things in secret in these chats about Jews or about Israel making off-color jokes or anti-Semitic jokes.
There are a lot of jokes about black people and women, rape jokes, and uh racist commentary, you can call them jokes, whatever.
They're they're chats among people in private.
And a lot of the comments, you know, are just offensive when they're dragged out into the light for sure.
And I think a lot of them would be offensive if someone just said it to you in private.
And unlike what J.D. Vance tried to suggest in dismissing the importance of it.
Oh, these are a bunch of kids.
A lot of them aren't kids.
They're like Republican college officials.
Some of them are in their late 20s, early 30s, some of them have positions inside the Trump administration.
Not little children.
They're not like college freshmen.
But be that as it may, I'm not worked up or particularly worked over that because I do think that far more damaging than offensive things people say in private, and a lot of times people say offensive things in private just to say it.
There's like a value that people find in being transgressive.
They think it shows that they are somehow like courageous.
And it has become an ethos in the Trump movement among, especially a lot of young people.
You talk to anyone in the MAG movement, they'll tell you this.
I think a lot of it comes from this kind of reaction to wokeism, where wokeism policed everything you say and just should prove your anti-woke or non-woke.
You not only say the things that wokeism tried to prohibit, but you go even further to show that you have no recognized limits on the kinds of things you're willing to say.
And yes, they're offensive, and I guess they're worthy of some attention in terms of the sentiments that might be pervasive in some of these circles.
But at the end of the day, I regard people who are starting wars and funding wars and advocating wars or serving corporate interests or neoconservative agendas infinitely more dangerous and threatening than people saying things that are kind of off script or worse.
And it's especially true when you have the question of age of youth.
I've often said, and I will say again, and I really do mean this, that one of the things for which I am most grateful in this world is that there was no internet to record my every thought and my every statement when I was 17 and 19 and 23.
Because that is a time when part of coming of age, when part of becoming an adult, but at the same time not really an adult, involves oftentimes at least, Probably not for everybody, but oftentimes.
And I do think it's more common among boys, though I know plenty of girls, plenty of young women who do it too.
Where you play with prohibitions.
You transgress lines on purpose.
I mean, this has been, you know, so basic to American culture forever.
You know, you go look back and look at the music of the 50s.
And Elvis Presley and his grinding of his groin was so offensive to like the older population.
Like, why don't you listen to Frank Sinatra?
But young people loved it for that reason.
This is anyone who has kids understands this dynamic.
It's part of how kids start expressing their rebellion and independence as they start doing the sort of things that they know might upset you or might upset authority.
Just so basic.
So Nick Funtis, I think he's 26 years old.
Which means, you know, he's been around for a long time.
And a lot of the statements that are pointed to that he he has uttered that people use to demonize him most were things you've said when he was 20, 21, 19, even 23, 24, even 26 is still very young.
I mean, if you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s, think about how different or 60s.
Think about how different you are now from when you were 26.
I I mean it's a different person, it's a different universe.
And I presume that as he gets older, he's gonna become more measured, not necessarily less radical, but more measured in his statements.
I think a lot of the stuff that he was saying was for shock value.
A lot of it was uh to be funny.
Because when you're a 23-year-old boy, you find off-caller jokes funny.
I know we're supposed to act like we're all so pure and uh noble in our adherence to these societal norms, but that's just not the way people function.
And so if you ask me, are there Nick's Funtest statements that I find offensive?
Yes, they're Nick Funta statements that I find offensive.
If you ask me if there are Nick Funta statements that I find dangerous in terms of like the ideas they represent, if they spread and they became public policy, I probably would say yes as well.
I asked him about some of those when I had him here.
But I don't think that's the main focus of his political worldview.
I don't think that's the main focus of his political project.
I've talked before about what I think about Nick Fuentes, and in the scheme of let me just say this.
If I listen to Nick Funtes for five hours or ten hours, and then I listen to Nick uh to Ben Shapiro for five hours or ten hours, I'm gonna find far more offensive and dangerous views expressed by Ben Shapiro over and over and over and over again than I will Nick Funtes.
And if I'm thinking about the people who are most dangerous in this world, I'm gonna immediately think about people like Marco Rubio or Victoria Newland.
Then I am gonna think about Nick Funtas.
For a lot of reasons.
But I think a lot of times people who are in power, people whose ideology is prevailing, want you to focus on sort of these relatively powerless people.
Nick Funtas is not in Washington, he's not making power, he doesn't control militaries, he doesn't control the government, he doesn't control armies.
He has his influence for sure, and a lot of it I think is for the good.
Trying to get people to understand things, wake up to a lot of things that they've been propagandized to forget.
But people in power love to say, oh, look over there, that guy on the fringe is there, the stuff he's saying, that's what makes him dangerous.
Look at these conspiracy theorists on 4chan.
When by far the most dangerous conspiracy theories, the worst amount of disinformation, and the most dangerous policies come not from people on the fringes or from influencers on the internet, from the people who wield political power in Washington and the people the people who advocate propagandize for the ideology that they shapes them.
So when I think about who's off limits, who's dangerous, who's offensive, I'm not thinking about things Nick Funta said about black people when he was 23.
I'm thinking about things that people who kill people and who start wars and who destroy the economic security of vast major parts of the country.
I'm thinking about what they believe and what they're saying and what they're doing.
So that's pretty much my answer.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
We wanted to get through more questions, but as I said, about uh 815, which is pretty much right now.
I'm gonna be on Scott Horton's show with Daryl Cooper, I think a couple other people, uh, talking about the John Bolton indictments we covered last night, probably a couple other topics.
So look for that if you are inclined to do so.
Otherwise, uh we just wanted to remind you that system update is also available in podcast forum.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble.
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Where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Remember, a week from tonight, Friday night, I'm gonna be in San Antonio, Texas, along with Megan Kelly and Emily Jacinski.
It's part of Megan Kelly's nationwide tour.
This is the first stop on that tour.
I'll be appearing with her and Emily at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio.
There's still a few tickets left.
It starts at 7.30 p.m.
So if you're inclined, you can find the tickets online as well.
And if you're in the San Antonio area, we would love to come and see you.
And finally, as independent journalists, remember we do rely on the support of our viewers and members, which you can provide by joining the locals community.
All you have to do is click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you directly to that community.
For those of you watching this show, we are needless to say very appreciative.
We hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live, exclusively here on Rumble.
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