Glenn takes your questions on the NYC mayoral election, Trump's foreign policy, Bill Ackman, and more. ------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Friday, October 24th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
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| All right, so before we begin, we have an event that has attracted a lot of different questions that we're going to try and synthesize into some observations I want to make, which is about the New York City mayoral race that will be held basically two weeks from now on November 4th. | |
| where the frontrunner, as I'm sure you know, is the Democratic Party nominee, Zaron Mandani. | |
| He's running against the, I guess, Independent now, Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York, as well as the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. | |
| And the race has obviously gotten a lot of attention for Zoron, but also because Andrew Cuomo is a very widely known but hated figure. | |
| And Curtis Liwa is just very charismatic, very entertaining, just seems like a good, authentic person. | |
| And I think there's been a lot of positive goodwill generated for him as well. | |
| One of the things that is so fascinating, though, is that despite the fact that Zoron became the Democratic Party nominee because he ran in a primary against eight other candidates and they weren't jokes. | |
| They were people who have occupied elected office, prominent business people. | |
| It was a very competitive field, obviously including the person who had long been regarded as the prohibitive frontrunner, which is the former three-term governor, the seon of this prominent New York family, the Cuomo family, Andrew Cuomo, who is widely expected to win easily. | |
| Zoron kind of appeared out of nowhere. | |
| He's a very politically talented person, whatever else you think of him. | |
| I think there's no denying that. | |
| He has kind of a natural charisma, a very good communicative ability. | |
| And he just stayed obsessively focused basically on this word, affordability, that meant a lot to a lot of Democrats and didn't just stay focused on the word, but his ads were surrounding affordability. | |
| They were creative. | |
| They were out there in the field, speaking with people on the streets. | |
| And he just ran a very good campaign. | |
| He won pretty easily. | |
| So he is now the nominee of the Democratic Party. | |
| He is the Democratic Party candidate. | |
| Andrew Cuomo is not. | |
| Andrew Cuomo tried to be, but Democratic voters rejected him. | |
| He's now running outside of the Democratic Party. | |
| And the reason I find this so notable is because the way the Democratic Party has maintained hegemony, not just over their natural establishment liberal constituency, but also among the American left, which in most countries where there's multi-party choices would likely support not the Democratic Party, but some alternative party. | |
| And a lot of multi-party systems, you have a first round of voting for president, and then it's a runoff between the two candidates. | |
| And typically the left in those kind of places supports the candidate that's more to the left, even if they're not really left. | |
| So that might happen. | |
| And then you have parliamentary systems where you just have representation across the board of multi-parties. | |
| And the Democratic Party is not a party that the left would ordinarily support, but the Democratic Party knows they have to keep the left in line, even though they don't ever really give them left-wing candidates. | |
| In fact, they sabotage those candidates whenever, for example, it seems like an anti-establishment candidate on the left is going to win against an establishment candidate. | |
| They'll actively sabotage that person. | |
| They did it in 2016 when Bernie Sanders shocked everybody by becoming competitive with Hillary Clinton, which is really a reflection of Hillary Clinton's weakness. | |
| But Bernie Sanders was a candidate who came very close to winning. | |
| And when Hillary Clinton got the nomination, because in the words of Elizabeth Warren and Dan Don in Brazil, the DNC rigged the election in her favor. | |
| There were all these very angry, disappointed Bernie supporters who hated Hillary, but they were told by the Democratic Party, by the liberal media, the liberal wing of the media, it is your duty to vote for Hillary Clinton. | |
| Because if you are a Democrat, you have to support whoever the Democratic nominee is. | |
| The same thing happened in 2020 when Bernie ran again, this time against Joe Biden and a wide range of other candidates. | |
| And Barack Obama, when Bernie won the first three Democratic primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then easily in Nevada, when they were headed towards South Carolina, arranged for all these candidates to drop out. | |
| So the only ones left were Joe Biden and then Elizabeth Warren just put the vote with Bernie Sanders. | |
| And Biden got the nomination again. | |
| Nobody on the left like Joe Biden, but they were told it is your solemn duty to vote for the Democratic Party nominee. | |
| And that's what most of them went out and did. | |
| A large majority, very, very large majority. | |
| They were obviously told the same thing in 2024 with Kamala Harris. | |
| And this has been the message that they are sent all the time: that if you are in the Democratic Party, if you lose a primary and don't get the person you want, it is shameful or disgraceful not to vote for the party nominee. | |
| That's the deal that you enter when you make when you enter a party. | |
| And now we have a candidate who has won the party nomination in New York City, who is not the favorite candidate of most of the Democratic establishment. | |
| They all lined up behind Andrew Cuomo because he was a member in good standing of the Democratic Party establishment. | |
| If anybody was, the Cuomo family is. | |
| They're like royalty in the Democratic family, perhaps only after the Clintons and the Kennedys. | |
| And Andrew Cuomo has been around Democratic Party politics forever. | |
| He was in Bill Clinton's cabinet in the 1990s. | |
| He married into the Kennedy family. | |
| His father was Andrew was Mario Cuomo, who was a beloved Democratic governor of New York. | |
| And then Andrew Cuomo himself ruled New York politics with an iron fist for more than a decade until he was forced out in this sexual harassment scandal. | |
| I promise you, had Andrew Cuomo won the nomination, every Democratic office holder, every elected Democratic official from the left to the right and everything in between would be lining up to endorse Andrew Cuomo. | |
| And if Zoran Mandani had lost that Democratic primary and ran as an independent, any Democratic elected official who endorsed Zoran Mandani instead of the party nominee Andrew Cuomo or who refused to endorse Andrew Cuomo for any reason would have not just been shamed and castigated, but would have been punished, officially punished for not supporting the Democratic Party. | |
| You can't be a Democratic Party nominee, office holder, politician running for office or holding office and not support the Democratic nominee. | |
| They would have been told, had Andrew Cuomo won. | |
| Andrew Cuomo didn't win. | |
| Zoran Mandani won. | |
| He makes a lot of Democrats uncomfortable for multiple reasons, starting primarily with his harsh critiques of Israel from a party that has long been pro-Israel, that is on the dole from APAC. | |
| And none of that that they've been preaching and evangelizing and imposing for decades applied to them. | |
| They felt free and feel free to just not support the Democratic nominee because this time they lost the primary. | |
| They perceive Zoran as an anti-establishment, out-of-control candidate, by which I mean the Democratic Party can't control him. | |
| I think they're very wrong about that. | |
| They're going to find that he's very controllable. | |
| He's already being controlled. | |
| But that's the perception of him. | |
| And they don't feel duty bound to follow the same sanctimonious sermons they give to the left and give successfully. | |
| The left almost always snaps into line. | |
| They just openly say, we're not going to support Zoran Mandani, even though he's the Democratic Party. | |
| I'm in the Democratic office, Democratic Party office holder, even though they've been preaching that forever. | |
| Here's Congressman Dan Goldman, who, as you might know, represents Manhattan. | |
| His district, his congressional district, overwhelmingly voted for Zoran Mandani over Andrew Cuomo in the primary, something like two to one. | |
| But Dan Goldman is an ardent supporter of Israel. | |
| He's from a billionaire family. | |
| The Levi Strauss family is an heir to that fortune. | |
| His parents are close friends with the Sulzberger family that runs the New York Times. | |
| That's how he got the endorsement that played a large role in him winning. | |
| He was on the Mueller team as a prosecutor. | |
| He's as embedded in the Democratic establishment as it gets and as fervent of an Israel supporter as it gets. | |
| And he has just refused to endorse Zoran Mandani. | |
| And as the election approaches, he continues to refuse. | |
| Here he is on CNN just a few days ago, October 21st, with the CNN host, Katie Casey Hunt, explaining that he's still not ready to endorse Zoran and explaining why. | |
| You have yet to endorse Zoran Mamdani for mayor. | |
| Are you ready to endorse him? | |
| You know, I've had conversations with him. | |
| I'm not ready to endorse him. | |
| Are you going to vote for him? | |
| I don't know what I'm going to do, to be honest. | |
| You're going to vote for Crime? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Honestly, I haven't gotten to that point. | |
| I've been trying to work through these issues. | |
| You know, I'm a Democrat at heart and I believe in the Democratic Party. | |
| I am very concerned about some of the rhetoric coming from Zoran Mandani. | |
| And I can tell you as a Jew in New York who was in Israel on October 7th, I and many other people are legitimately scared because there has been violence in the name of anti-Israel and anti-Zionism. | |
| And I've asked him to speak out on that and to condemn that. | |
| And I frankly haven't really seen him do much on that. | |
| And I believe that, you know, for my personal reasons and as well as my professional reasons as a representative of New York City, that it is my duty to make sure that everybody, including the Jewish community, feels safe here. | |
| And many in the Jewish community do not feel safe right now. | |
| And I hope that Mr. Momdani takes that to heart and takes some action to make the Jewish community understand that he will keep us safe and secure. | |
| Now, Dan Goldman's not the only one who is a Democratic Party office holder in New York. | |
| Other Democratic Party office holders outside of New York have the excuse of saying, we're not going to tell New York City voters how to vote, even though had Andrew Cuomo won the nomination, they would all be going to New York and endorsing him. | |
| So at least they have that obviously false, but still coherent excuse. | |
| We're not New Yorkers. | |
| We don't live there. | |
| We shouldn't tell people how to, which mayor they should have. | |
| But Hakeem Jeffries is another person who's a Democratic member of Congress, the speaker of, or the would-be speaker of the House, the leader of the Democratic minority, and the minority leader of the House for the Democratic Party. | |
| He represents a district of New York that also voted for Zoran Mandani. | |
| But like Dan Goldman, Hakeem Jeffries, maybe even more so than Dan Goldman, is a obsessive supporter of Israel, is drowning in AIPAC money, and also probably fears that if Zoran Mandani becomes a prominent figure in the Democratic Party, Republicans will be able to use him successfully to win some marginal House seats that will prevent Hakeem Jeffries from becoming speaker. | |
| I wouldn't be surprised if that were part of his calculation as well. | |
| Which is a whole other question. | |
| I mean, the Democratic Party is basically a failed party when it comes to young voters, or especially young men, when it comes to provoking the passion and stimulating the passion of young voters. | |
| And here you have Zoran Mandani, who is this fresh voice. | |
| He's very charismatic. | |
| He has really stimulated the excitement of a lot of people in the electorate. | |
| And the Democratic Party runs away from people like that because they perceive they can't be controlled. | |
| They did the same with AOC at the start until she proved that she was as dutiful of a Democratic Party soldier as it gets, but it took her years for them to be comfortable with her. | |
| That's the same thing that's going to happen with Zoron. | |
| He's already on that path. | |
| He's on the Bernie AOC path, threatening to nobody in the Democratic Party. | |
| But they don't know that yet. | |
| They still view him as somebody who is just too alien to them, just too beyond their grasp. | |
| And so Dan Goldman is just saying, I'm not going to endorse him. | |
| And so is Hakeem Jeffries. | |
| Now, Hakeem Jeffries today said to the media that he's finally going to endorse Zoron, but it's obviously a very reluctant endorsement, very late. | |
| The whole time, not only has he been refusing to endorse Zoron, the nominee of the Democratic Party, even though Hakeem Jeffries is the senior official in the Democratic Party in the House, right after Chuck Schumer, even though he is that, he still is, he was refusing to endorse Zoran the whole time. | |
| not only refusing to endorse him, but actually being quite critical of aspects of Zoran's candidacy. | |
| Here, for example, is what Speaker, Minority Leader Jeffrey said to Bloomberg. | |
| And this was just yesterday, actually. | |
| In terms of the Maya's race, in advance of early voting. | |
| So I did watch the debate, and the themes of criticism that came up from the other two candidates were he's inexperienced and his comments on the Middle East are problematic. | |
| Are those likewise the same issues that you want to talk to him more about? | |
| What's left unsaid between the two of you? | |
| Well, I've certainly already publicly communicated and privately communicated some of my concerns with respect to some of the views that he's expressed in terms of foreign policy. | |
| So when he says, I have differences with Zoran on foreign policy, everybody understands what that means. | |
| It means Zoran's criticisms of Israel, his support for the Palestinian for Palestinian statehood and the Palestinian cause more broadly, his condemnation of Israel for what he calls a genocide in Gaza, which is a genocide, but that's horror that falls very horrifically on Hakeem Jeffries' ears. | |
| And why should it even matter what Zoran Mandani's foreign policy is when he's running for mayor of New York City? | |
| Why is he constantly asked about it? | |
| Why does he constantly have to explain it? | |
| Why would Hakeem Jeffries base his endorsement or non-endorsement on a mayoral candidate's views of foreign policy? | |
| But the bigger issue, at least the one that interests me most for the moment, is that Hakeem Jeffries is one of those people who would be shaming any person on the left who didn't immediately and passionately endorse the Democratic Party nominee. | |
| In 2016, Bernie endorsed Hillary. | |
| He not only endorsed her, but he traveled the country at multiple events, urging people to go out and vote for her. | |
| But because it took him too long in the eyes of Hillary fanatics, because it wasn't really passionate or from the heart, according to them, to this day, they blame Bernie and his supporters, at least in part, for her loss to Donald Trump. | |
| Here's Hakeem Jeffries very reluctantly at the last moment, just out of duty and nothing else, endorsing Zoron, even though the whole campaign, he's been making clear that he wouldn't do so and had objections to his, quote, foreign policy, which is obviously code for Israel and Jews. | |
| Here is Zoron this morning. | |
| This is this morning, even though he eventually said he was going to endorse him after this. | |
| In an interview with C-SPAN, it's on C-SPAN, when he was asked whether he, why he has refused to endorse Zoran Mandani, here's what he said. | |
| Same answer. | |
| I have not refused to endorse. | |
| I have refused to articulate my position, and I will momentarily at some point in advance of early voting. | |
| Oh, I'm not refusing to endorse him. | |
| I'm just stating my views. | |
| I'm just articulating my opinions. | |
| Right. | |
| And your opinions have been that he has extremely unacceptable views on foreign policy, that he's not somebody you're comfortable endorsing. | |
| You've been communicating to him privately what your concerns are. | |
| Now, there seemed to be a lot of horse trading here because over the last week, the New York City police commissioner is a woman named Jessica Tish. | |
| And anyone who lives in New York City knows that this last name, Tish, is one of the richest families in all of New York. | |
| They're a real estate family. | |
| Their name is on endless numbers of buildings. | |
| If you walk in Manhattan, you see Tish then or this, Tish that, Tish this. | |
| They're building their family. | |
| She's an heir to the Tish fortune. | |
| They're very pro-Israel Zionist family. | |
| And she has cultivated a reputation, which is why Eric Adams chose her. | |
| She was the police commissioner under Eric Adams for being very pro-police, very aggressive, hawkish on law and order. | |
| Now, you might like that. | |
| But Zoron Mandani's position and the position of his most enthusiastic supporters in the Democratic Socialists of America and the left generally is that the police are racist. | |
| The police are more brutalizing than they are protective. | |
| That we need reform in the police department, not to expand the police, but to defund the police, which is a cause that AOC supported, a cause that Zoron supported. | |
| And then this week out of nowhere, Zoron announces that he intends to retain this billionaire heiress, who's known for her hawkish views on the police and crime, as his police commissioner. | |
| And only then does Hakeem Jeffries come out and say he's going to endorse him. | |
| Here from Politico today, after a lengthy wait, Hakeem Jeffries to endorse Zoran Mandani, the powerful Brooklyn Democrat, plans to endorse the Democratic Socialist Friday afternoon. | |
| Now, of course, if you're the leader of one of the two major parties in the House, you are powerful in a sense. | |
| I don't know how powerful Hawking Jeffries is among the general public. | |
| I don't think most of the public knows who Hawking Jeffries is. | |
| He's completely charisma-free, not a likable politician in any way. | |
| Maybe his endorsement carries some weight and sway with some institutional New York City Democratic Party organizations, probably does. | |
| But with the average voter, and polls have shown Zoron with a big lead for the entire race, actually expanding over Andrew Cuomo and with Curtis Grey won third place. | |
| Now, I do want to note that Zoran has been depicted as the stalwart enemy of Israel, as somehow an anti-Semite, even though nothing he's ever said is remotely anti-Semitic. | |
| Here is Dan Goldman, who's only been, you know, in public office for a while. | |
| Here is the Track APAC site that notes that he has received $366,700 from independent expenditures and campaign donations received from the pro-Israel lobby. | |
| As I said, Hakim Jeffries is one of the biggest recipients of the pro-Israel lobby. | |
| There you see his graphic. | |
| It's $1.7 million. | |
| And obviously, that is going to play a role in how they perceive a candidate as steadfastly critical of Israel as Zaran Mandani is. | |
| I've been wanting to talk for a long time about what happened with Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party in the UK. | |
| I know there are a lot of people who became convinced that the smear campaign against him was true, that he's some sort of raging anti-Semite, which is so bizarre because if you know Jeremy Corbyn at all, you would laugh at this idea that he harbors this intense hatred for anyone. | |
| There are, like is true in most Democratic countries, lots and lots of Jews who are big supporters of his left-wing politics. | |
| He's been surrounded by Jews his whole life in the socialist movement and labor who joined him in his criticism of Israel. | |
| And I think we've come to see in the United States, especially over the last two years, that people get called anti-Semites automatically as soon as you question or criticize Israel. | |
| But that was the weaponized bigotry and racism accusation that was used to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from winning when he was the Labour Party leader, elected Labour Party leader in the national election to both 2015 and 2019. | |
| What maybe people don't know, and this goes back to this issue of the party dynamic, because usually the UK Labor Party is feeding these kind of centrist, bland establishment politicians, starting with Tony Blair. | |
| Tony Blair was the Bill Clinton of the UK, emerged in the Clinton era towards the end, but his brand of politics is very much the same as Bill Clinton's, which was I'm taking over a left-wing party with the intention of transforming it into this centrist, pro-business, hawkish party that'll appeal more to the middle, to moderates or independents. | |
| He, of course, became, after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the leading supporter in the world for the invasion of Iraq, major supporter of the war on terror generally. | |
| And he embraced a lot of economic policies that were very friendly to big corporations and banks that Labor Party, which had represented, obviously, labor unions and the working person, had been anathema to for a long time. | |
| And Labor started losing and people started becoming disillusioned with the Labour Party, just like people became disillusioned with the Democratic Party. | |
| And Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 rode this populist wave to become the leader of the Labour Party out of nowhere. | |
| And it caused a massive meltdown among the UK elite class. | |
| Because again, he was sort of this, he was too far to the left. | |
| He was somebody they thought they couldn't control. | |
| He was highly critical of Israel, just all the things that scares establishment politicians. | |
| And when he ran in 2019, you can look at the race different ways. | |
| Labor did lose to the Conservatives, but they got more votes than any Labor Party previously. | |
| They actually, by a lot of metrics, did very well. | |
| He was actually very close to winning and becoming prime minister. | |
| Just a few thousand votes in a few districts would have swayed the election in favor of Jeremy Corbyn, notwithstanding the fact that it's depicted as this monumental lost. | |
| And the Labour Party is exactly the kind of party like the Democrats who have the left-wing flank, depend on the left-wing flank, need a left-wing flank. | |
| And even though in the UK, there are multiple parties, you have the Green Party, you have other parties to the left and to the right, it has long been dominated by the Labors and the Tories, the Labours and Conservatives. | |
| Now, though, if you look at polls, by far the most popular party they would win overwhelmingly if there were an election held today is the Reform Party by Nigel Farage, this Farage, this anti-immigrant, anti-establishment, right-wing populist party. | |
| Familiar to people who have been watching the emergence of these kind of right-wing populist parties throughout the Democratic world, labor is hated. | |
| It's deeply unpopular. | |
| There's a lot of space to labor's left. | |
| So that has been the groundwork, and that's why they were so petrified at Jeremy Corbyn taking over the Labor Party. | |
| But usually the Labor Party will tell their left-wing base, we don't care if you don't like our candidate. | |
| We don't care if you don't like our leader. | |
| If you want to be in the Labor Party, your duty is to support the Labor candidate and vote for Labor. | |
| And they usually have. | |
| And then under Corbin, the left tried to say, okay, now the Labor leader is someone you dislike. | |
| And it's you who have the responsibility, centrists and Blairites and moderates and right-wing laborites to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. | |
| And not only didn't they do that, they got caught, the Labor Party, sabotaging their own party, their own candidacy in 2019 because they chose that they would rather lose to Boris Johnson and keep control of their crappy failed party than win with Jeremy Corbyn and lose control of the party to the Corbynite forces who would then be the prime minister. | |
| They sabotage their own party. | |
| That shows you how cynical and dishonest this messaging is from the establishment party. | |
| And it's the same with the Republican Party and the Conservative Party as well. | |
| The UK Conservative, the Tories are already telling people: if you don't vote for the Conservative leader, if you vote for Nigel Farage or the Reform Party, you are giving the election to Labor. | |
| The Labor Party always said, if you don't vote for our Labor candidate, you're giving the election to the Tories. | |
| Same thing with the Republican Democrats in the United States. | |
| It says that when the establishment candidate loses, they don't abide by that. | |
| And so why if you're on the left or on the populist right and you hear this party telling you you have to swallow Mitt Romney, you have to vote for whoever we tell you to vote for, whatever shitty candidate we give you. | |
| Why would you agree to that when the people who are telling you that aren't going to do that if you get the candidate that you want? | |
| You have to have just some basic dignity to be taken seriously. | |
| And that's exactly what happened. | |
| Here from Open Democracy, August 7th, 2020, the headline is, I saw from the inside how labor staff work to prevent a labor government. | |
| Quote, the work of senior labor staffers to stop labor winning is only just starting to come out. | |
| And then here's the mainstream centrist paper, The Independent, kind of New York Times of the UK, of the UK, roughly speaking. | |
| And they had an article that said anti-Corbin labor officials covertly diverted election funds away from winnable seats forward report fines. | |
| So there was this report documenting how the Labor Party sabotaged the Labor candidate because establishment factions in a party will tell you you have to swallow their candidate when they win, but then turn around and just sabotage the party, their own party, and the candidate who gets elected. | |
| If it's the candidate they don't like, that's exactly what's been happening in New York. | |
| Zoron, it turns out, is too good of a politician. | |
| It's just too right. | |
| The moment is too right for him to not win. | |
| And they've been unsuccessful, but it's not for lack of trying. | |
| Now, as I said, I think they're crazy. | |
| I think Zoron is going to be utterly controllable. | |
| Is he somebody the Republicans can use nationwide to say, look at the face of the Democratic Party? | |
| He's this communist, this socialist, born in Uganda. | |
| He's of Indian descent. | |
| He is Muslim. | |
| He wants to give free grocery, you know, government-controlled grocery stores, and he hates Israel. | |
| Whatever. | |
| Maybe, maybe that'll be affected. | |
| They've done that with Nancy Pelosi before. | |
| They've done it with the AOC before. | |
| Democrats have their own boogeyman in the Republican Party who they use for that. | |
| It's possible that that is it. | |
| But what the Democrats need is a huge overhaul. | |
| I think, though, they're still doing that thing where they're relying on just anti-Trump sentiment, the country turning off Trump, and therefore voting for whatever crap Democrat, banal, empty Democrat you hand them. | |
| And that has proven to be a losing strategy. | |
| In 2020, I guess you could argue it worked since Joe Biden won, although every condition was in the Democrats' favor, including the COVID and the economic fallout from it, which obviously is going to hurt a Democratic, an incumbent president. | |
| But relying on that strategy in general has been terrible for Democrats. | |
| They'll do anything to win except look inside themselves and try and find more interesting, more populist candidates to run. | |
| And if you're on the left and the next time you're told and you're ready to obey that you have to go vote for the establishment centristy Democratic candidate that you hate, you're crazy if you listen to that, knowing that the people who are telling you that don't impose that same standard on themselves. | |
| All right. | |
| Let's get to some more of these questions. | |
| Starting with Go Birds, who says this, what do you think about Bill Ackman meddling in the New York City mayoral election? | |
| I saw he demanded a one-on-one conversation with Zoran Mandani recently and was shocked by the entitlement. | |
| I'm shocked by Bill Ackman's entitlement too. | |
| And I say that as somebody who's known billionaires, been around billionaires, not huge numbers, but enough to know that, and I've talked about this before, the lives they live, unless you purposely try to escape it, and some of them do to their credit, but not most, is designed to foster entitlement because you just have so much money. | |
| So many people want things from you, need things from you, and that leads to flattery and sanctum, just obsequious behavior. | |
| Everyone trying to placate you, tell you how great you are, validating you all the time. | |
| And you, of course, start to believe that you are an extremely important, insightful genius who deserves attention of anything or anyone the minute that you want it. | |
| And usually you get it because of how much money you have and for no other reason. | |
| And Bill Ackman hasn't really produced anything. | |
| He hasn't contributed anything. | |
| He's manipulated the economic system well and figured things out within that to make a lot of billions. | |
| Some people admire those skills. | |
| I don't. | |
| But they are skills. | |
| There's, you know, it is a skill. | |
| If everyone could do it, they would. | |
| But that's Bill Ackman. | |
| That's all he has. | |
| He has a lot of money. | |
| He has piles of money, $10 billion or probably more. | |
| There was a Wall Street Journal profile of him that I encourage you to read. | |
| It's remarkable just how empty of a person he is. | |
| They said, did you have any struggles when you were a child? | |
| He's like, no, not really. | |
| Everything was nice. | |
| No struggles. | |
| And it shows. | |
| It shows. | |
| People who don't have any struggles, who don't go through anything difficult, who don't have to fight through things, who have the road paved for them by their parents, generally end up like Bill Ackman. | |
| People who are just empty, who don't have any spirit or soul. | |
| They're just very careerous-minded and accomplished. | |
| They can obviously succeed. | |
| But I believe character comes only from adversity. | |
| And if you build a life where you have none, or that happens to be the life you inherit, I do think you suffer for it. | |
| Now, I don't think it's just the Wall Street Journal profile and interview, but you just see Bill Ackman's private public behavior. | |
| The entitlement of it is so extreme. | |
| Now, let's remember, Bill Ackman, I guess technically, is a New York City resident because he has an apartment there, like a massive, sprawling $60 million duplex. | |
| I think it's on the Upper East Side. | |
| But he also lives in, you know, nine other places. | |
| Billionaires don't really live anywhere. | |
| They have houses and, you know, he has just a massive estate as well. | |
| And the Hamptons, that was where Charlie Kirk was summoned just a month before he was killed or so to Bill Ackman's Hampton estate to be told that he has to become more pro-Israel, disassociate himself with people who are critical of Israel, like Dr. Carlson. | |
| He lives, you know, he has houses all over the world, flies on a private plane everywhere. | |
| So to say that he's a New York resident is already giving him too much credit, but okay, let's say he's a New York resident. | |
| He's one of 9 million New York residents. | |
| The involvement that he has demanded, the way in which he has insinuated himself into this mayoral race is, I mean, it's just so brazen. | |
| You would think these people would do it more in a more subtle way. | |
| That's usually how they do it. | |
| They operate behind the scenes. | |
| Every politician runs to them and meets with them when they want because of how much money they have. | |
| But it's usually not done so much out in the open. | |
| Bill Ackman, especially on Axe and social media generally, has found this added way to get more validation and attention, which is by throwing his money around on Twitter. | |
| And he has really, I mean, after October 7th, he really got this adoration because he was so pro-Israel, demanding Ivy League schools fire their presidents, going on these, you know, artificial outrage tours against college presidents because they weren't sufficiently pro-Israel or allowing anti-Israel protests, | |
| claiming that he was so outraged by their poor scholarship or their plagiarism, only for it to turn out that his wife, who actually got money from Jeffrey Epstein while at MIT, herself had plagiarism problems in her past. | |
| Oops. | |
| But he's really gotten high on this kind of public political affirmation, became a Trump supporter out of nowhere, even though he was never a Trump supporter before, knowing he was going to win. | |
| And that he would be, Trump would be extremely pro-Israel. | |
| You look at most of the leading pro-Israel people, by which I mean the most vehement pro-Israel, none of them were pro-Trump. | |
| They never really trusted Trump fully on Israel. | |
| Of them were lined up behind Ron DeSantis. | |
| The hardcore designists wanted Ron DeSantis. | |
| And then once it was clear that Ron DeSantis couldn't win, or Nikki Haley, but that Trump would, they all started flattering Trump and throwing money around to Trump and got wormed their way into the inner circle. | |
| And Bill Ackman was one of those kind of people. | |
| I'm not saying he wanted DeSantis, but he saw that opportunity. | |
| So just look at some of the things he's been saying about the New York City mayoral race. | |
| First of all, last week, October 17th, a week ago from today, when there was three weeks to go before the election, Bill Ackman went on Twitter and said this about Zoran Mandani, who remember is the almost certain winner, the highly likely winner, the frontrunner, obviously, to become the mayor of America's largest city. | |
| Three weeks before the election, this is what Bill Ackman is demanding. | |
| Quote, no word yet from Zoron Mandani. | |
| He constantly attacks me. | |
| And most recently in tonight's debate, yet he is so far unwilling to have a one-on-one public conversation with me. | |
| Zoron, yes or no. | |
| Zoran hasn't been attacking Bill Ackman. | |
| Why would he care about Bill Ackman? | |
| Zoron is attacking his closest competitor, which is Andrew Cuomo. | |
| And one of the bases on which he's attacking Andrew Cuomo is that Andrew Cuomo is being financed by pro-Trump billionaires, one example of which is Bill Ackman. | |
| So he brings up Bill Ackman, not because he's attacking Bill Ackman. | |
| He doesn't care. | |
| He couldn't care less about Bill Ackman. | |
| He's criticizing and attacking his opponent, which is what all candidates do and should do. | |
| Bill Ackman says, oh, why are you, you're attacking me? | |
| You need to have a public debate with me. | |
| Why would the frontrunner for the mayorality of New York City three weeks before an election publicly debate Bill Ackman, who's not in the race? | |
| I mean, can you imagine how the self-importance and the delusion that you have to be laboring under to think that anybody would do that? | |
| To not even be embarrassed, to demand that. | |
| Imagine if I went on X or anybody went on X who's not in the race and said, I demand that you, the frontrunner, stop campaigning and schedule a public debate with me, not with your opponents, but with me. | |
| I mean, everybody would look at, who the hell are you? | |
| Why would he debate you? | |
| This does not occur to Bill Ackman. | |
| Bill Ackman thinks he transcends everyone and everything in the race. | |
| It's such an amazing thing. | |
| Now, one of Bill Ackman's primary causes for the last four months has been ordering Curtis Liwa to drop out of the race, even though Curtis Liwa became the Republican nominee because the Republican Party chose him as that. | |
| He didn't have any other real opposition. | |
| But the Republican Party in New York City chose Curtis Liwa as their nominee to run for mayor. | |
| No one else ran. | |
| Nobody chose Andrew Cuomo. | |
| Andrew Cuomo just declared himself a candidate after he lost by a resounding margin in the party to which he has belonged for life. | |
| But Curtis Liwa is an actual nominee of the Republican Party, and yet Bill Ackman's primary demand for months has been ordering Curtis Liwa to drop out of the race. | |
| Why would Curtis Liwa listen to Bill Ackman? | |
| Before Eric Adams dropped out, he was also demanding Eric Adams drop out. | |
| And then when Eric Adams dropped out, Curtis Lewa said he thinks Eric Adams likely got payments, not necessarily direct cash bribes, but some guarantee of some involvement in the future and something. | |
| Because why wouldn't Eric Adams do that? | |
| Eric Adams has all this leverage. | |
| You don't want Zoron to win? | |
| You need me to drop out to have any chance. | |
| And of course, Eric Adams is exactly the kind of person who would only drop out if he used that leverage to get stuff what he wanted. | |
| Who knows what he got? | |
| Curtis Lewa says what he got is financial guarantees, lucrative ones from billionaires. | |
| And he says Curtis Liwa does that. | |
| He knows that because that's what has been offered to him as well. | |
| He refuses to take it. | |
| He didn't name Bill Ackman, but that certainly fits Bill Ackman's profile. | |
| I don't know if Bill Ackman did that or not, but I know that Bill Ackman has been obsessed with getting Curtis Liwa out of the race. | |
| Why? | |
| Who are you to tell the Republican nominee that he has to drop out? | |
| Why shouldn't anyone listen to you, Bill Ackman? | |
| Are you responsible for his candidacy? | |
| No, you're not. | |
| Are you responsible for his campaign? | |
| No, you're not. | |
| Here's one of the things Bill Ackman did in his sort of jihad to destroy Curtis Liwa's reputation and force him out of the race. | |
| He said, quote, this was just a couple days ago. | |
| I spoke to someone, someone who knows Curtis Sleewa, and now I understand why he's staying in the race. | |
| The city has an eight-to-one matching program for New York City donors. | |
| Sliwa got $5 million or so of matching funds from the city for his campaign. | |
| According to my source, Sliwa's wife, friends, and others are on the campaign role, and they are enjoying living off the city taxpayers who are funding his race and lifestyle. | |
| He doesn't want to end his campaign and have to return the funds. | |
| Follow the money. | |
| When I asked the donor, when I asked why he doesn't care about New York, my source said he doesn't give a shit. | |
| Clearly, this is hearsay. | |
| Oh, you don't say. | |
| But my source is extremely credible and a highly respected person, and he knows Sleevo well. | |
| Curtis, please correct the record if I got anything wrong. | |
| What personal or other related expenses is your campaign paying for? | |
| Is your wife and our family or friends on the campaign payroll and are receiving any funding? | |
| Please clarify the record. | |
| Now, this is so bizarre and suspicious for so many reasons. | |
| There's some magical, highly respected person who knows Sli-Wa well who decided to come forward with his information about Curtis Sliwa's corruption, which is what that alleges. | |
| He didn't go to a reporter with it. | |
| He didn't go to a media outlet with it. | |
| He didn't present evidence publicly himself or furnish any to anybody. | |
| He just whispered this in Bill Ackman's ear, and then Bill Ackman decides I'm going to be the one to go and claim this. | |
| I mean, even if you're Bill Ackman, unless you're desperate for attention or making it up, that's the dumbest way to do it. | |
| Why not launder it through a media outlet? | |
| Since everybody knows that you are fanatically supportive of Andrew Cuomo because you want to make sure there's not an Israel critic occupying the mayorship of New York, and you could launder it through a media outlet where people would find it more credible. | |
| Was there no media outlet that would publish that? | |
| If it were just in that form, nobody would. | |
| So he voices this unusation unlinked to any identifiable source and unaccompanied by any evidence, documentary, or otherwise. | |
| And then I presume he thought Curtis Sliwa had a kind of, I don't know, strategic obligation, maybe even a moral obligation to just answer immediately Bill Ackman's accusation as opposed to the accusations that come from a zillion other people. | |
| The very next day, 24 hours later, Bill Ackman returns to X and says this, quote, I note that Curtis Sliwa has not chosen to challenge or correct anything in my post. | |
| One can therefore only conclude that my source is correct. | |
| Who goes around thinking like that? | |
| If I make an accusation about somebody, then if they don't immediately respond to deny it, everyone should presume it's correct because I'm so important that the minute I voice an accusation, everyone has to drop what they're doing, including people running for New Year's 3 mayor two weeks out of the race and give it the attention and merit by bothering to deny it. | |
| No media outlet has reported this. | |
| There's no evidence of it. | |
| Why should Curtis Sliwa even deign to respond to that? | |
| But in Bill Ackman's mind, he's Bill Ackman. | |
| So once he voices his accusation, everybody must. | |
| And it's very odd if Curtis Liwa doesn't. | |
| In fact, that probably is proof that he's guilty. | |
| What really this is, is for sure, part desperation and panic. | |
| He's seeing the same polls that everyone else sees, not just about Israel support for Israel unraveling in the United States, but about Zoran's very likely victory. | |
| So he's desperate. | |
| He's just failing. | |
| That I believe is part of it. | |
| But a big part of it is his massive self-importance and sense of entitlement. | |
| I don't even remember something that inflated. | |
| Remember just a few months ago when Bill Ackman somehow, somehow, wormed his way into a professional tennis tournament, actually made the draw. | |
| It wasn't a pro-am. | |
| It was a professional tennis player. | |
| It was in Newport, Rhode Island at the Hall of Fame, the Tennis Hall of Fame, like sacred hollow ground for the sport. | |
| Bill Ackman is 59 years old, never played professional tennis. | |
| And somehow he asked for and got entry into the professional tournament at 59 years old. | |
| If he's not the greatest athletes, I think tennis players are the greatest athletes in the world, certainly among them. | |
| Their fitness, their regimen is extremely intense. | |
| They play five-hour matches at the highest level of physicality. | |
| And although doubles, which is what Bill Ackman played, is a bit less intense, especially over three sets. | |
| Still, I mean, you're talking about playing with the greatest athletes in the world, the people who are, you know, the top 150 tennis players on the planet from every country. | |
| And Bill Ackman went into that tournament, went onto the court, obviously, I guess, thinking he could have lived this fantasy as a tennis player. | |
| It would be like if Bill Gates convinced the Seattle Mariners to let him pitch two games of two innings of a game. | |
| I mean, Bill Gates, if the Seattle Minors said, do that, I'm not going to embarrass myself that way. | |
| But Bill Ackman had no qualms about it. | |
| And he went on to that court and completely humiliated himself. | |
| Could barely hit the ball over the neck, could barely keep the ball in the court. | |
| Had a swing that was like such a recognizably amateur swing, couldn't run, couldn't do anything, couldn't breathe, according to him. | |
| And that just shows, I mean, who would do that? | |
| Who would be willing to, who would think that they are so capable that an age of even the greatest tennis players in the world, Roger Federer, the greatest tennis player, I think, in the world, can't compete at the age of 43, let alone 59. | |
| It's a miracle everyone says that Novak Djokovic can still win tournaments at the age of 38 21 years later. | |
| And Bill Ackman has never been a ton of, I mean, the ego involved in that is off the charts. | |
| And I think you're seeing that a lot in this democratic race. | |
| All right, next question from Katrika. | |
| Now that there's a ceasefire in quotes, what's Israel's excuse for not letting international journalists into Gaza? | |
| Yeah, I mean, what is their excuse? | |
| We did a segment on Wednesday night's show about evidence now emerging about the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli dungeons. | |
| And I use those words deliberately because these are not prisoners. | |
| They've not been charged with a crime. | |
| They've not been convicted of any crime. | |
| They've had no due process. | |
| They're just people abducted, picked off the streets of Gaza or the West Bank by the IDF and sent to these dungeons where by all accounts they're kept in deliberately horrific conditions, malnourished, put in filthy conditions where there's disease, they're beaten, they're assaulted, they've been sexually assaulted, they've been humiliated, and a lot of them die in there. | |
| And part of the ceasefire deal that Trump engineered along with Arab states and Turkey was to allow the return of all hostages on both sides, including deceased ones. | |
| And when Israel released the remains of these dead Palestinian hostages who died in their dungeons, their bodies were mangled. | |
| They had signs of torture, of point-blank execution. | |
| They've had kids as young as 17 die in Israeli prisons from malnourishment. | |
| They come out emaciated with rickets, completely shell-shocked and traumatized. | |
| And so even without international media entering Gaza, we're starting to see the true depth and depravity of the Israeli mind and Israeli behavior. | |
| And obviously, if you allow international journalists into Gaza to see the extent of the destruction, to see bodies everywhere, to hear from witnesses, people already have a pretty good understanding of what Israel did in Gaza. | |
| They know they're horrified by it. | |
| They know it's war criminality. | |
| They consider it genocide. | |
| But I believe there's so many more stories to be told, so many more facts to emerge. | |
| And that will happen only once international media can get in. | |
| Gazan journalists have been too discredited by a lot of people. | |
| They're considered biased or under the control of Hamas. | |
| Many of them have been murdered on purpose by the IDF. | |
| When international media goes in, and it's not just because a lot of people, not me, but a lot of people consider Gaza and journalists to be biased or controlled and only consider international media to be legitimate. | |
| I'm not one of those people. | |
| There are a lot of people who consider that and then they're going to hear from international media and become more convinced. | |
| But also the media itself is going to see. | |
| And there's just no way you can be a human being unless you've been inculcated from birth. | |
| Unless you're Barry Weiss or Ben Shapiro and you've been inculcated from birth to just defend Israel and support Israel no matter what. | |
| Unless you're one of those people, there's no way you can go in and see what Israel did, hear from the people of Gaza and not be permanently transformed by it. | |
| And the Israelis know that. | |
| And I don't, you know, to me, this is so dispositive. | |
| People can debate, oh, Israel did this, they didn't do this. | |
| The party that doesn't want the media to come in, doesn't want witnesses to see and report what's happening, typically is the party with the most to hide. | |
| And for a long time, the Israeli excuse was it's a war zone, we can't allow them in there, it'll jeopardize our operation or whatever. | |
| We can't guarantee their security. | |
| What about now? | |
| That's the question from Catria. | |
| It's a very good one. | |
| Why not now? | |
| The only plausible answer is because the Israelis are petrified of what the international media is going to find and tell the world. | |
| All right, next question from guinea pigs. | |
| Is there any sign of the America first wing of the party rebelling against Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio for pushing Trump into the usual role of a U.S. president in Venezuela and Ukraine? | |
| All the reasons I wanted Trump to win are disappearing fast. | |
| I think we have to be a little bit careful not to exonerate Trump by always formulating this as Marco Rubio is pushing him or Israeli, the Israel lobby is pushing him. | |
| Trump is a big boy, and this is his second term as president. | |
| Trump is not dumb. | |
| He's not an intellect. | |
| He's not the most eloquent speaker, but he's definitely not dumb. | |
| I do think he was ignorant of the ways of Washington when he first got there, which makes sense. | |
| He hadn't ever been there. | |
| I think Obama was as well. | |
| And Obama had at least been there for four years as senator, really, two years as senator, two years running as a candidate, which is nothing. | |
| And he got run over by the permanent power of action from Washington. | |
| Trump did as well in that first term. | |
| But now Trump's on his second term, they had four years of an interval between the two to understand it better. | |
| I think Trump understands these issues. | |
| I think he's very much in control. | |
| I do think he's influenced for sure by the advisors he chooses to trust. | |
| At the end of the day, we have to, though, give Trump either the credit or the criticism for the decisions he makes. | |
| So I just say that as an aside. | |
| Now, I am amazed. | |
| There was an article yesterday with the headline, Republicans cheer Trump's policy saying we, quote, have to liberate the people of Venezuela, which is exactly the language you use for Vietnam and Iraq. | |
| We have to liberate the Vietnamese. | |
| We have to liberate the Iraqis. | |
| We have to liberate the Afghan women. | |
| We have to liberate the Libyans. | |
| We have to liberate the Ukraine, as though we go around the world trying to liberate people. | |
| I mean, I understand we're all subjected to nationalistic propaganda. | |
| Everybody in the world is. | |
| I was in Malaysia a few weeks ago. | |
| I'm going to talk about that at one point. | |
| But one of the things that amazed me that I'd never seen before was in Kuala Lumpur, Lumpur, is that every building in the city, I mean, pretty much every building is covered on the exterior with countless massive Malaysian flags. | |
| I don't mean just one. | |
| I mean, like, 20. | |
| It was just like, and I don't know if it's nationalistic pride or if it's kind of just this pressured, coercive political climate, but we're all subjected to various forms of nationalistic propaganda. | |
| I was impressed by Malaysia in a lot of ways too. | |
| I'm going to talk about it at some point. | |
| It's a Muslim majority company, but defies a lot of the stereotypes and expectations that a lot of people like to spread about Muslim-majority countries, including Lebanon is another good example that defies this occupation. | |
| But anyway, I'll get to that at another point. | |
| Turkey, too. | |
| But even though I know that we're all subjected to this jingoism, this nationalist propaganda, we kind of have to be to have a cohesive society. | |
| It shocks me that anybody actually believes the United States goes around the world and its foreign policy is to liberate people and bring freedom and democracy to them and to banish and consign to the trash heap of history tyranny and authoritarianism and autocracy. | |
| How can anyone believe that? | |
| The United States has gone around the world overthrowing democracies, imposing tyrannies. | |
| We've always supported and continued to support many of the world's most savage dictatorial regimes. | |
| We only care about one thing. | |
| Is the government of the country a government that serves our interests? | |
| And if it is, we like them regardless of whether they're tyrannies or democracies. | |
| And if they don't, we hate them regardless of their tyrannies or democracies. | |
| And you can say, yeah, that's how it should be. | |
| There are a lot of people who have a realist view of the world that that's how it should be. | |
| But then don't go around pretending or trying to mislead others into believing that the relevant metric is whether the United States, whether the government has a democracy and is free or a tyranny and isn't. | |
| That could not be less relevant to the American government under either party. | |
| That's the pretext. | |
| When we want to go to war and we get to go to war against the government, we can depict as repressive. | |
| That becomes the pretext. | |
| Oh, we're going to liberate the people. | |
| Did we go to Iraq to liberate the people of Iraq? | |
| Does anyone actually believe that? | |
| Even though that became a major theme of the reason. | |
| And I've talked about before, you know, I grew up in South Florida. | |
| There was a big Cuban community, even when I was growing up, you know, in the 70s and 80s. | |
| And that has now morphed into a big Venezuelan community. | |
| And it's kind of, you know, metastasized throughout the state, but it's not quite as concentrated in Miami as it once was, but still is. | |
| Marco Rubio is a politician from Florida, from South Florida in particular. | |
| His family are Cubans. | |
| They came and immigrated to the United States from Cuba. | |
| And he was born shortly thereafter. | |
| And like huge numbers of people, I would say definitely the majority, people who emigrate to the United States from the Caribbean or Latin America remain focused on the region. | |
| Just like people who are included from birth to love Israel, remain focused on Israel. | |
| It's a common attribute of human beings. | |
| And they don't just remain focused on it for themselves. | |
| They want the United States government to, in their view, fix whatever's wrong with those countries that they still love and have loyalty to. | |
| Marco Rubio has been obsessed with having the U.S. change the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela for decades. | |
| Do you think it's a coincidence that Marco Rubio wants the U.S. government to change the government of Cuba and that he happens to have this family who came from Cuba? | |
| The Cuban community in Miami, when I was growing up, huge numbers of them didn't speak English because even though some of them were citizens of the United States, they always saw themselves as temporarily here. | |
| They saw themselves as Cuban, wanting to go back to Cuba as soon as the U.S. got rid of Castro for them. | |
| That's why they didn't learn English. | |
| They didn't. | |
| Also, it was because it's a very large, insulated community, so they didn't really need to learn English. | |
| Their kids mostly learned English and assimilated, but they didn't. | |
| And that mindset persists to today. | |
| It's just such a bizarre movement that calls itself America First, and yet there's so many people in it who continue to say we have to go fix these countries, liberate these countries. | |
| On top of that, the pretext is so laughable. | |
| Oh, there's fentanyl coming from Venezuela. | |
| There is no fentanyl coming from Venezuela. | |
| Even the drugs that pass through Venezuela, it's a small percentage of the drugs that enter the United States. | |
| This is not why we're going to fix the government of Venezuela. | |
| The United States had a very close ally in Colombia for decades, right-wing allies. | |
| And it never stopped the flow of drugs from Colombia to the United States. | |
| You cannot defeat militarily the flow of drugs, the demand for drugs, the supply of drugs. | |
| It's too profitable. | |
| It's too easy. | |
| We've been waging this war on drugs, like the war on terror for many decades. | |
| It's destroyed civil liberties. | |
| It's led to massive increases in law enforcement, federal law enforcement, and there is no interruption in the flow of drugs. | |
| The way you defeat drugs is on the supply end. | |
| By creating a society where people don't need drugs, by giving counseling and resources to people who are suffering from addiction. | |
| I think the bigger question is not where drugs come from, but why are there so many people in the United States who need drugs, who depend on drugs, who want drugs, who have become addicts? | |
| Why are there so many overdose deaths? | |
| Yes, part of it is fentanyl, but that has nothing to do with Venezuela. | |
| That is the bullshit pretext. | |
| That's the WMD of Venezuela. | |
| The real reason is because it has a leader that doesn't do our bidding and because they have a lot of oil and they're geostrategically important. | |
| We want to control the country by overthrowing their leader and putting a puppet regime. | |
| We've tried that forever in so many countries. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| And it's not just that it doesn't work. | |
| It's that in many ways, it's what has destroyed the United States. | |
| It's why all our resources go to our military. | |
| It's why we constantly fight endless wars. | |
| And I will just end it on this note, which is that polls keep showing that people believe they want to stop these wars. | |
| They want to stop these regime change wars. | |
| That was a major plank of Donald Trump's campaign was to stop regime change wars, was to stop endless wars. | |
| And now we're right back in them. | |
| In 10 months, Trump bombed Yemen. | |
| He bombed Iran. | |
| He's funding and fueling the war in Israel. | |
| Hopefully that has stopped, but he's, of course, still going to fund and arm Israel. | |
| He's funding still the war in Ukraine, drawing down on the congressional authorization from last year with billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine, trying to end the war, but no one's forcing him to continue to arm Ukraine. | |
| And now he just has a new war that nobody asked for. | |
| Other than Venezuelans and Cubans and the immigrants from those regions like Marco Rubio, nobody asked, nobody in the Maka movement was saying, we want a regime change war in Europe and Venezuela. | |
| In fact, the idea was we're going to go bomb the drug cartels in Mexico. | |
| We're not bombing the drug cartels in Mexico. | |
| Instead, Trump's like, yeah, we're going to go bomb Venezuela. | |
| And everyone's like, yeah, the commies, Maduro, drugs. | |
| I mean, it is remarkably alarming how easy it is to sell a new war to people who spent so long claiming they didn't want anymore. | |
| And I think that's what we're seeing in Venezuela. | |
| I think the fact that people like Mark Rubio are from the region is definitely a factor, just one factor, but a factor in why that's all happening. | |
| All right, those are great questions. | |
| Just being on the road makes it a little hard to spend a ton of time getting through more and more. | |
| So we're going to go ahead and end the show here. | |
| We'll conclude the show for this evening. | |
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