The Unhinged Reactions to Zohran's Rise; Dems Struggle to Find a Personality; DHS, on Laura Loomer's Orders, Arrests UK Journalist and Israel Critic
The pro-Israel attacks against Zohran Mamdani become more unhinged ahead of the NYC mayoral election. Then: Dems continue to struggle with authenticity Finally: Civil rights lawyer Zahra Billoo on the detention of Sami Hamdi. ------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can see, I am still not in the studio.
On Friday night, I was in San Antonio where I did an event with Megan Kelly and Emily Jasinski.
It was actually quite good, very wide-ranging conversation, very unconstrained and free.
You can watch it online, the full event, if you're so inclined.
It's on Megan Kelly's YouTube channel.
It's various other places.
As well, I'm currently, as you can see in the background, or maybe you can't see in the background.
I mean, you can see in the background, but you may not identify it.
I'm currently in Miami to do a couple of podcasts and more on that in just a little bit.
I will be home on Wednesday.
We'll return to our studio, but we intend to continue to have shows that are better than ever.
Sometimes when I'm liberated from the studio, they end up better than ever.
Everyone says that.
Everyone's like, I didn't think it could be done, but your show is incredible when you're not in the studio.
People say that.
Now, tonight, the New York City election, the election for New York City mayor and various other elections as well, including New Jersey and Virginia for the Guban Hurdle races, is basically about a week away, a week and a day away.
It'll be next Tuesday.
And nothing has really been effectively done to dent what appears to be the size of a lead of New York City candidate Zoran Mandani.
And obviously, for a lot of reasons, many people are petrified of his ascension, especially people who are very invested in either the political establishment or in Israel, both of whom perceive him as this great threat.
There are other people who have been convinced that he's some sort of radical communist or socialist.
And you're about to see, and I have all my criticisms of Zoran Mandani, that he's going to be a very conventional Democratic politician, pretty much indistinguishable from AOC and Bernie Sanders.
Nothing we haven't seen before.
He's very focused on his career.
But nonetheless, although I have a lot of criticism of Zoran, and I don't expect much, even if he does win, the reaction to him, the utter unhinged hysteria over the prospect that he is going to win, has revealed such a neurosis, such a kind of hysteria and panic in a lot of different factions that I do think it's worth talking about.
I mean, the discourse that has surrounded him and the calls that have been accompanying that discourse for various actions, including denaturalizing him and removing his citizenship and expelling him or deporting him, have been so insane and dangerous that I do think it's worth discussing that.
So we want to go over that a little bit, which is not a defense of Zoran, just kind of being aghast at a lot of the discourse assembled against him.
And then a related issue is that the Democratic Party is not just without policies and not just without identity to be able to present to the public that's convincing and authentic, which I think is one of the main reasons Kamal Harris lost.
Just she was just this blank slate that she was too afraid to fill in with anything substantive.
They actually don't even know what their personality is anymore.
They're so afraid of alienating people if they show their true self or from revealing that their true self is so vacant and unlikable that they're now starting to adopt fake personalities, obviously contrived ways of speaking in terms of their jargon and even the style of English that everybody can see is just nothing but condescending.
And I think it's only going to worsen their problems, especially in the Trump era.
You have to be who you are.
And if who you are isn't enough to make the public like you, to make voters want to go out and vote for you in the case of the Democratic Party leaders, it's not faking it is not going to work.
It's only going to backfire.
You have to find a way to either change those leaders or transform who they really are.
And I just think they're too embedded in that.
We're showing some amazing video over the last week of Democratic Party leaders just adopting completely fake and patronizing ways of communicating that I think is only going to worsen their problem further.
And then finally, something very disturbing happened over the last two or three days, which is that a British citizen who is in the United States legally, whose name is Sami Hamdi, has been traveling around the United States giving speeches about political issues.
He's an invited speaker.
He's become a prominent Muslim activist, vocal critic of Israel.
Laura Loomer and another pro-Israel activist inside our country, inside the United States, decided they don't want people to be able to be in the United States and free in the United States if they come and criticize the foreign government to which they're most loyal and which they've been trained from birth to love, which is Israel.
And as a result, Laura Loomer issued orders to the Homeland Security Department run by Christy Noam to arrest Sami Hamdi and deport him.
And Homeland Security went and did exactly that.
They arrested him despite being in the country legally, despite not being accused of any crimes, because of the content of his views and his speech.
They arrested him at the San Francisco airport.
Marco Rubio invalidated his passport, his visa, something we've seen many times before.
He entered the country perfectly legally.
And now he's sitting in an ICE facility.
And even though the argument is, well, we're going to deport him, he can't even see a judge for two weeks, which means he's going to essentially be imprisoned because his speech politically, the substance of it, offended Laura Loomer, who gives orders to Homeland Security because she's been deputized by President Trump to do so.
We're going to have with us a longtime civil rights lawyer who's the executive director of Carrin, San Francisco, who I've known for a long time, Zura Bilo, who is going to talk about exactly what this case is.
You don't have to like care.
You don't have to like Muslims.
You don't have to like criticism Israel.
But if we're at the point now where homeland security will jump the minute it's a freak, like a world of Luber demands it, because what you say is too critical of the government and country to which he's actually loyal.
And Homeland Security is going to dispatch ICE to arrest people in the country legally and put them in an ICE prison, as we saw them do with a whole bunch of students last year for the crime of criticizing Israel throughout this year, rather.
That is incredibly disturbing in all sorts of ways, regardless of what your opinion is about care, Israel, Muslims, or anything else.
And we're going to talk to her tonight about exactly what it is that's going on.
Before we get to all of that, a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, System Update is also available in podcast form.
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now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now i don't think it should come as a surprise to anybody that i have all sorts of criticisms of saran mandani when When he first ran, announced his candidacy back in late 2024.
I very easily saw what he was doing.
I very quickly saw what he was doing.
And before anyone really knew his name, I went to X and I noted that I thought he was going to be a much more effective candidate for mayor than people understood.
People should actually watch what he's doing because after Trump's victory in 2024, instead of going online and screaming, fascist, racist, we're under the control of Nazis, all the things that other Democrats were doing, he instead went out onto the streets of New York and purposely went to those neighborhoods in New York City, primarily working class neighborhoods, multiracial neighborhoods, which had swung most aggressively toward Donald Trump.
Talking about traditionally Democratic Party districts or precincts within New York City filled largely with minority and working class voters.
And they didn't necessarily, majority of them vote for Trump, but they had large swings of 15, 20, 25% to Donald Trump.
All New York City basically had that.
And he did nothing didactic other than just go out onto the street and ask people, who did you vote for?
And if they said they voted for Trump, he just asked one question.
Why?
What was it that caused you to vote for Donald Trump?
And their answers were very interesting.
And he catered his campaign around that.
A lot of them said, I don't want to keep sending all our money to foreign countries to fight wars like in Ukraine and Israel, the way Joe Biden was doing.
A lot of them expressed resentment at the way in which the influx of immigrants, especially people in the country illegally, were in their minds taking away resources from them.
But the biggest gripe by far, the biggest grievance by far was that Democrats had done nothing for working class people as they continuously promised and that they were tired of being told over and over they have to vote Democrat and their lives will get better only for that not to happen.
Inflation and rent and everything in the city was just too expensive.
And they didn't vote for Trump necessarily because they loved Trump, but because they were sick of Democrats who had been in power and they blamed Democrats for the difficulties and challenges in their life, which they had every right to do.
And it was out of that that emerged Zaran Mandani's emphasis on affordability and promised to make the city more affordable, but he also knew that he was safe to criticize Israel in the way that he always had.
He didn't have to retract that.
He didn't look like a coward because he now was running for mayor in a citywide race instead of just his very left liberal district in Queens.
And that gave him a lot of credibility.
I could just see he was charismatic, very talented communicator.
And most of all, that he wasn't going to fall into the Democratic Party trap of just becoming this mindless anti-Trump fanatic, screeching hysteria and all sorts of exaggerated accusations that had nothing to do with people's lives, but instead was listening to what they were saying and would cater his campaign to what he heard.
And that's exactly what he did.
That is why he has been successful.
It's really something the Democratic Party has been incapable of doing.
They can't talk about the things Zoran has been talking about, affordability and freezing rents, because they're completely beholden to corporatist and militarist interests.
And that's why they have to rely on cheap identity politics that make no difference to anybody, especially to their donors.
And it's why they continue to be so incapable of changing their lack of appeal.
Now, I say all that.
I should also say that in the past month or two months, I've seen Zoran do exactly what a lot of people feared he would do, including myself, which is now that he sniffs the power that he's very close to grabbing.
He's been willing to retreat from all sorts of things.
He's been willing to apologize for past positions.
He's been offering all sorts of compromises that previously he refused to make.
And he's being guided not just by AOC and Bernie, who are already well off the track that people thought that they would be on, but also he's being led around the nose by Democratic Party operatives, including ones of top levels of Obama and Clinton campaign.
That's who's shaping him.
That's who's driving him.
That's who's controlling him.
You already see this lessening of fear among real estate developers.
But nonetheless, the panic and desperation that has emerged now that Zoran is going to likely win is unlike really anything I've seen in quite a while.
I mean, you could probably say Trump 2020 and 2024 had very similar hysteria, had very similar hysteria to it.
But the discourse that has emerged around Zorhan is just completely mad.
And I say that as somebody who expects very little from him now, who's not particularly excited by his candidacy.
I don't even know if I would get off a couch to go vote in this election.
But I just think he's going to be a standard Democrat who's there to trap young people and deceive young people into believing that the Democratic Party still has something to offer them, that it's not the party of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, but cool leftists like AOC and Bernie and so on.
I think that's going to be their mission, their function.
But I nonetheless want to show you some of the things that are being said about him that it makes me feel like I'm living in September 12, 2001.
Although this sort of stuff, even then, after 9-11, really wasn't that pervasive.
It wasn't really deemed permissible.
The one thing I've always said positive about George W. Bush is he really did try and clamp down on the idea that we're at war, especially with our own country's Muslims.
The first week after 9-11, despite being an evangelical Christian, he made it a point to go visit mosques and met with imams and emphasized over and over that this is not done by Muslims, but a very radical sect that's violent and jihadist.
And I think that went a long way in suppressing these sentiments, but now there's nobody like that to suppress them any longer.
So this is the sort of thing we're seeing.
Here's someone named Ellie Kahanim.
And she's a fanatical supporter of Israel.
And here's what she posted on X. I think we're going to put that up on the screen.
Or maybe we're going to, yeah, there you see it.
Never forget, early voting begins today.
Vote for Andrew Cuomo and save our city with a picture of the World Trade Center of the Twin Towers exploding when a plane flew into it on the morning of September 11th.
What is that supposed to insinuate?
That Zoran Mandani is a jihadist that's going to attack New York City, that he's going to empower and side with religious extremists who want to attack New York City violently and blow buildings up.
I mean, you know, I always said the reason why the Democrats' effort to depict Trump as Hitler and a fascist failed was because people look at Trump and that's not what they see for themselves.
So it's very hard to convince them, even if it were true, it's very hard to convince people to look at Trump and see him that way.
They watched him be president for four years.
He's been in the public scene for decades.
He was the star of NBC's apprentice for more than a decade in prime time.
I think it's very similar to Zoran Mandani.
You can try and depict him as a jihadist or al-Qaeda or Hamas or whatever you want.
And people looking at Zoran just don't see him that way because it's not what he is.
It's preposterous.
And we're going to get into why.
Let me show you a couple more examples of how pervasive this has become.
Here's Andrew Cuomo.
He went on to WABC, which is a radio affiliate in New York City.
It's long been a conservative radio station.
Curtis Liwa actually had a show on there before he ran for mayor.
They had been very pro-Sliwa, but they're now becoming pro-Cuomo as the only way to stop Zoron.
And here is what Cuomo said.
Any given morning there's a crisis and people's lives are at stake.
God forbid another 9-11.
Can you imagine Mondami in the seat?
He'd be cheering.
It's another problem.
But can you imagine that?
No.
No.
No, listen, Mondami was in deceit on 9-11.
Oh, come on.
I mean, that's repulsive.
If you want to say that he's not inexperienced and wouldn't be able to manage a crisis, that's obviously fair game.
But the implication is basically explicit, which is that, and it was actually said, not basically explicit, it was explicit, that if 9-11 happened, he'd be cheering it.
He'd be watching planes fly into buildings and he would be jumping up and down and cheering it.
And the only basis for thinking that is that he himself is Muslim.
Here's Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor of New York and believes that she has to be, because she's not Jewish, an even more outspoken loyalist to Israel.
She, of course, is the one who made a name for herself, getting Ivy League presidents fired by demanding that they say that students don't have a right to chant from the river to the sea, that they should be censored and punished.
And a lot of people on the right, despite spending a decade claiming that they're all for free speech, that they hate censorship, were cheering her.
And she became very popular.
Now she's using it as a springboard to run for governor.
When she was nominated to be Trump's ambassador to the UN, which he only withdrew because Republicans couldn't afford to lose her in the House caucus because their margin is so small, she stayed in the House, but every day during her nomination, literally every day, she posted once a day about no topic except Israel every single day.
She's obsessed with Israel.
She's built her political identity on it, and she's very proud of what she's saying.
Kathy Hochul, the current governor against whom Elise Stephonic is running, did blatedly, but nonetheless did endorse Zoran.
And so she's trying to tie Zoron to Kathy Hochul.
And to do so, this is the kind of thing that she's saying.
Reality is, Zoran Momdami is not going to get the majority of votes in New York City.
We are about to have a mayor, if he's elected, that will destroy the greatest city in the world.
And you know who empowered him?
Kathy Hochul.
It was Kathy Hochul's endorsement that has empowered the person that just yesterday went on TV and failed to call for Hamas, a terrorist organization, to lay down their weapons.
We have a full-blown jihadist who has called for the genocide of Jews, does not believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, wants to legalize prostitution, wants to abolish private property, and the list goes on.
Okay.
That's an absolute lie.
Zoran Mandani obviously did not call for the genocide of the Jewish people.
If he had, you would be hearing it every single day.
She just fabricated that as a way of fear mongering.
But let me just say this.
This is what's really going on here in terms of the attacks on Zoran.
We have documented so many times on the show, and I know people probably in your own lives see the evidence of this as well.
I just heard from a close friend of mine when I was in law school.
She and I talk every couple of years, not too much, but she emailed me to say she has three young sons, adult sons, actually two sons and a daughter.
It doesn't matter.
I don't know why I'm detailing that so carefully.
But she said that they are very much questioning U.S. support for Israel in a way that politically they wouldn't otherwise do.
It's very much in the generation.
It's a generational movement to start turning against Israel, questioning Israel.
And it's become a losing battle to try and convince people to love Israel.
That ship has sailed.
That's not going to happen.
Watch what happens to anyone who tries.
And kind of plan B to keep America captive to Israel, paying for Israel, financing Israel, arming Israel, is to instead try and unify everybody behind an anti-Muslim agenda.
Just get people constantly hating Muslims, thinking Islam is the thing that's going to kill their families.
Do you really think, I just want, think about your lives, think about the lives of the people you know.
Are the lives of the people that you know, are your lives really, and all the things that impede it, that burden it, that make it more difficult?
Are Muslims anywhere near that list?
Like, are Muslims the people who are making your life more difficult?
Is Islam making your life?
Are you living under Sharia law?
This is such a fabricated fear-mongering campaign.
And we saw some of it expectedly during world after 9-11, but as I said, a lot of that got tamped down.
Although trying to convince people that they were endangered by Muslims is a very much part of what drove the entire war on terror, the endless wars, the erosion of civil liberties.
It's always what you have to do.
Put people in fear to get them to acquiesce to erosions of their civil liberties.
But at least there, there was an attack by, you know, a few dozen Muslims that could have fueled it.
What?
Whose lives are being impeded or burdened?
Our lives are being impeded and burdened by multinational corporations, by big tech, by free trade and the deindustrialization that is ushered in by endless wars.
Even you could say by untrammeled immigration.
But these are not issues relating to Muslims.
What's happening here is that Israel loyalists, I'm not saying everybody who's anti-Muslim or worried about Islam is a supporter of Israel.
There are some who aren't, but the campaign is intensifying and it's aimed at Zoran.
He's such a perfect vessel for it because it's something that can unify the American right that right now is very divided over Israel.
It's saying like, look, forget about Israel.
We don't have to talk about Israel if you don't want.
We know you're angry at Israel.
We know you're tired of Israel.
Let's not talk about Israel anymore.
Let's come together instead on how we hate Islam and Muslims and all the Muslim countries, which just coincidentally happen to be Israel's enemies as well.
And as long as you're focused on Muslims and Islam, you won't be thinking about the billions of dollars being shoveled to Israel every year.
You won't be thinking about all the arms we're giving about how many wars we fight for them, how often we deploy our armed forces to defend them, how much they're shaping our politics, how much American politicians feel obliged to go make pilgrimage to Jerusalem and make out with the wall, with the Yamakan.
You'll forget about all that.
Let's just focus on Muslims instead.
It's such a blatant campaign.
I don't have any problem with people who dislike Zoron's left-wing politics.
Although, as I said, I think his radicalism is wildly overstated.
He's going to get into office.
He's going to think about his future career.
He's going to have pressure from every angle.
You can't be a mayor of New York City at war with the police department, with real estate developers, with Wall Street, with the city council.
He's going to accommodate everyone and everything.
So, but, but it's fine.
He has a left-wing ideology.
If you don't like that ideology, have at it.
That's what our political debates are for.
But this kind of stuff, this idiocy of trying to say that Zoron is a jihadist.
Zoron is basically, I'll tell you what Zoran Mandani is.
He is somebody who is a sort of avatar of left-wing Outerboro politics, like the Democratic Socialists of America.
That's where he was a member.
That's what his original support became.
That's how he catapulted to the election in New York Assembly.
He's basically just like a standard white leftist, but he has this status that in left-wing circles gives him extra points, which is that he's Muslim and brown and from Uganda and has Indian heritage and all of that.
There's nothing jihadist about him.
He's been, you know, posting things about the New York Police Department is anti-queer.
He just had a big event with a drag queen and not one of those drag queens that's like sexualized or she's not even trans as drag queen.
Drag just like to dress up and sing Barbara Streisand songs and do musical theater, just wholesome entertainment of the kind that like we've had in the United States throughout the 20th century where famous males dressed up as women as a form of entertainment.
Nothing salacious.
And you had kind of the libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh crowd saying, oh, look, Zoron is a far leftist who wants to trans your children, totally pro-LGBT.
And then others saying, oh, he's a jihadist who wants to throw LGBTs off roofs.
Neither of those is true.
He's worked his way into left-wing Democratic circles.
If you look at his wife, she's Muslim, but she's a working woman.
She's an artist and a writer.
She does not even wear a hijab.
She wears mini skirts, in fact.
The idea that these are jihadists, that these are, you know, religious fanatics, it's just utter fabrication.
But the character is important to get people rethinking about Muslims, not thinking about Israel anymore.
Again, if the focus were on his left-wing economic policies, he wants to have government run grocery stores and free buses and rent stabilization.
And you want to argue that that's harmful to the economy, that's perfectly legitimate.
That's the kind of debates we ought to be having.
But this stuff is so manipulative.
It has a completely different agenda.
Here's Ted Cruz, who just gave a speech.
And ever since, by the way, Ted Cruz got humiliated and destroyed by Tucker Carlson in an interview where Ted Cruz basically said he wanted to bomb Iran despite having no idea what the basic facts of Iran were, including its relative population size or location.
He just gave a big speech.
He's obsessed with Tucker claiming Tucker is a Qatari agent, even though there's no evidence for that.
The only evidence we have of anyone being a Qatari agent is that Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, actually was a paid agent for the government of Qatar.
She did lobbying work.
She filed FARA forms.
It wasn't illegal, but she worked for the Qatari government.
Her firm got $120,000 a month for doing for lobbying on behalf of the U.S. Congress on behalf of Qatar.
But this is, you know, part of every Israel critic is a secret Qatari agent.
It's kind of the liberal version of, oh, if you dislike Donald Trump, you're an agent of Russia, you're a Kremlin agent.
It's just the Zionist version of that.
Oh, you're an agent of Qatar.
And Tucker, Ted Carl, Ted Cruz has been obsessed with doing that about Tucker Carlson, but he's also trying to reestablish love for Israel on the American right.
Just gave a big speech at a Zionist organization about the importance of the American right and the Republican Party continuing to serve Israel.
And obviously, he is very much on board with trying to gin up this anger and animosity toward Muslims as a way of distracting from our subservience and captivity by Israel.
And he, of course, is sounding these same alarms about Zoran Mandani for that reason.
Here's what he said.
The alternative here, wherever it's going, right?
Yeah, but to be clear, the alternative here, we're talking Andrew Friggin Cuomo.
We're not talking go right wing.
We're not talking Donald Trump.
We're not talking Ted Cruz.
We're talking Andrew Friggin Cuomo, a left-wing Democrat, corrupt, woman-grabbing, like, like, I'm not a big Cuomo fan, but it's not like if you're a New York voter, you have to suddenly pull the lever for Jesse Helms.
And yet, given the choice between a solidly left-wing Democrat and a full-on communist, and I believe America-hating jihadist, it sure looks like I hope these polls are wrong, and maybe a burst of sanity will pull us back.
The audacity of these people begging Americans to vote for Andrew Cuomo after accurately accusing Andrew Cuomo of killing tens of thousands of old people by forcing them into nursing homes during COVID and isolating them there and locking them down, to say nothing of all of his corruption and multiple sexual abuse cases, sexual harassment cases, is obviously astounding.
But I do think they would prefer Andrew Cuomo because Andrew Cuomo is a very pro-establishment, comfortable, safe choice.
He's very pro-Israel, which is what this is really all about.
Never bothered anyone in power, just presided over his fiefdom in Albany, was a treasurer, a cabinet secretary for Bill Clinton, married in the Gandhi family.
He's a Democrat, but not totally unthreatening.
The thing they're most scared about with Zoran is that not that there's going to be a Muslim mayor.
There's plenty of Muslim conservatives that they're very comfortable with.
The concern is that he's a Muslim mayor who's going to also be a critic of Israel.
It's going to ratify the idea that you can become the mayor of America's largest city, no matter how outspokenly critical you are of Israel.
It's going to be a further plank in the tipping point that we've reached, where it's totally acceptable, infinitely more so than it was even a few years ago.
Not just to criticize Israel, but to do so harshly, called it what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.
And they need to show that you have to pay a big political price.
You can't be elected mayor of a major city.
And that's why they're talking about things like even stripping him of his citizenship and deporting him because they're so scared.
And this is all about Israel.
These people, Ted Cruz doesn't care about rent prices in New York.
He doesn't care about zoning odds or whether the garbage is picked up, the things that mayors are responsible for.
He wants to know what everyone wants to know what Zoran's foreign policy is.
And that's what's driving all this.
Speaking of utterly unhinged fanatics, but you can't ignore because Donald Trump is convinced that she's steadfastly loyal to her and as a result has empowered her, even though she's not steadfastly loyal to Donald Trump.
That's Laura Loomer.
Just to tell you what a scumbag Laura Loomer is before I show you what he's thinking about Zoran.
When Charlie Kirk had Tucker Carlson speak at the turning point conference, and that was a speech where Tucker Carlson said that he thinks Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad agent, criticized U.S. support for Israel.
And then he also hosted a debate with Dave Smith and some fanatically pro-Israel neocon.
That's when he lost donors because he wouldn't, he refused to disassociate him.
Laura Loomer went online and said Charlie Kirk is a fraud, a charlatan who has no place in the pro-Trump movement, no place in the conservative movement.
And then as soon as he was killed, she pretended she was so upset that he was an icon of everything good, that he was a big, great, great friend of Israel.
I mean, so many of these people manipulated Charlie's corpse that way.
Remember Benjamin, who was all over the news from the second it happened in American news, like, hey, let's go to Benjamin.
Benjamin Nani wants to talk about Charlie Kirk.
Here's Ben Minanali to say why he loved Charlie Kirk so much.
Here's Laura Loomer, whose only issue is Israel.
And here's the kind of thing she's been saying: quote, here's a photo of Zaran Mandami with anti-American pro-animal abuse, and obviously Muslim streamer Hassan Piker, who said Americans deserve 9-11.
This photo was taken during Mandami's mayoral campaign.
Tonight at the New York City mayoral debate, he pretended like he has no association with Piker, another Mandani lie.
Now, let me just say that it is true that Hassan Piker hosted Zaran Mandani on his show.
I was just with Megan Kelly in San Antonio.
I appeared on stage with her for two hours.
Does that mean that every one of Megan Kelly's views you can attribute to me?
I don't think so.
We've vehemently debated the views that we disagree on.
You think it's okay to attribute all my views to her?
Obviously not.
The fact that you're associated with somebody doesn't have any, doesn't mean you have any responsibility for their views.
And I should also note that Laura Loomer thinks Nick Fontes is a Nazi, it's an anti-Semite, has no place in our discourse.
Donald Trump had dinner with Nick Fontes and Kanye West, yay, at Mar-a-Lago.
And Trump afterwards claimed he didn't know anything about Fluntes, whatever.
But I mean, I could go on and on.
I mean, if that, if this kind of associational accusation or guilt is valid, nobody will survive it.
Here is Lila Rose, who is on YouTube with Ismail Youssef.
And here's what they are saying about London.
Bom Donnie is practicing Takia.
A thousand percent.
A thousand percent.
It's he's presenting.
Muslims are laughing at you guys.
Like, this is the funniest thing.
Like, dude, give it 50 more years, entire New York is going to be Muslim.
And then before you know, there's going to be Sharia courts.
And then, like, y'all are, it's like, if it's like shooting yourself in the foot.
Like, I can't even believe.
And, like, you see Europe.
You look at Europe.
It's happening right now.
And then you're like, oh, let's just do it here in New York.
Like, it's like, no.
What an articulate gentleman.
It's like, whoa, you look at it.
Like, like, wow.
I mean, like, look at Europe.
Like, you're going to have.
Okay.
I've been hearing students, at least since 2001, about Sharia law.
Newt Gingrich proposed that we amend the First Amendment to reduce the scope of free speech out of fear of Sharia law.
This has been something that we've been told forever.
There are religious courts in the United States.
And if you sign contracts, you can actually go to have these religious courts that aren't subject to American jurisprudence resolve in a binding way your divorce or your contract.
Those are religious Jews who have that.
They have their own religious courts.
They have rabbis who are rabbinical, who decide based on Tamu Duka, disputes between Jews in the United States, divorces.
We don't have Sharia law in the United States.
We're not close to Sharia law in the United States.
We haven't moved towards Sharia law in the United States.
This is all an attempt to make you fear a thing that doesn't exist so that you basically stop talking about American foreign policy and Israel and only focus on your hatred for Israel's enemies.
Now, a lot of controversy was raised over the last couple of days because Zoran Mandani talked about his aunt, who said, wore a hijab after 9-11 and said that she was victimized with dirty looks and animosity after 9-11.
And I want to show that clip.
Actually, I want to show it in the next segment.
I just want to reference it for a second.
A lot of people tried to say, oh, look, Zoran is trying to center Muslims, trying to center Islam as part of his candidacy.
And this is proof that he's now talking about Muslims being the real victims of 9-11.
None of this is true.
None of this happened.
Zoran Mandani did talk about someone he said was his aunt, who it turns out wasn't really his aunt.
He explained today it was actually a cousin, he said, who's passed away.
So we can't verify it.
But in any event, he did talk about Islamophobia after 9-11.
There was Islamophobia after 9-11.
There were people who had animosity toward Muslims, who people walked around in hijabs or other traditional Muslim gear.
That is true, where that is true.
It wasn't an epidemic in the United States, nowhere near as much as it could have been.
But he didn't talk about being Muslim because he wants to make that the center of his campaign.
He wishes he could just go around and just utter the word affordability everywhere he goes.
He talked about being Muslim because his enemies have made it a centerpiece of their attacks on him, as I just showed you.
He's a jihadist.
He's going to turn New York City into Sharia.
He's going to cheer if 9-11 happens.
And after 9-11 is going to happen.
They're the ones who have made it the centerpiece of their attacks on him.
He's not making his identity as being a Muslim the centerpiece of his campaign.
He's responding to it by saying, look, I've endured this for a long time.
You know, people in my family endured it.
Now, I do have a lot of skepticism about the authenticity of the story, of the way he told it, of the tears he conjured.
If I'm being completely honest, completely honest, I think Zaran Mandani has a sort of sociopath tendency.
It's like that smile increasingly seems vacant to me, like masking a lot of things underneath that don't correspond to the smile.
He's very good at just telling you exactly what you want to hear in a way that Bill Clinton was, in a way that a lot of sociopathic politicians are.
And this thing yesterday where he really worked himself up into, it just all seemed very theatrical.
He seemed like a theater kid to me at best and a sociopath at worst.
But he's not centering Islam or his Muslim identity.
That's the last thing he wants to do for obvious reasons.
It's the insanity of these attacks that are making him do that.
But I do want to show you that in the next segment where I talk about Democrats searching for a personality and becoming increasingly condescending.
All right, here's one last thing.
This is Zaran Mandani talking about Andrew Cuomo on Fox.
How many of you have talked about this about Islamophobia in reference on the team crossing she was facing post 9-11?
Is that a relative?
Yes, that's.
I was speaking about my aunt.
I was speaking about Sarah Fui, my father's cousin, who sadly passed away a few years ago.
And for the takeaway from my more than 10-minute address about Islamophobia in this race and in this city, to be the question of my aunt tells you everything about Andrew Cuomo.
So here's the thing.
I know a lot of people react poorly to the term Islamophobia.
It sounds like a lot of these other left-wing terms that people have kind of recoiled against, racist, misogynist, transphobic, xenophobic, etc.
So you throw Islamophobic in there, people are like, oh, that's just a left-wing term to shut down debate.
At the same time, I saw Megan Kelly saying that earlier today, by the way, just speaking of Megan Kelly, at the same time, the very same people are trying to do that.
Oh, don't talk about Islamophobia.
There's no thing.
There's no bigotry against Muslim.
Are the people who wake up every day and scream anti-Semitism and demand that everybody be called an anti-Semite for disagreeing with them on Israel?
I do think there's obviously an element of these unjust attacks on Zoran that are based on the fact that he is Muslim that don't correspond to anything he said, done, or believed.
And if you want to go around saying the word Islamophobia is meaningless and empty, don't ever use it.
Don't ever use it to describe something that is just designed to shut down debate, then don't go around screaming anti-Semite at every single person who criticizes Israel.
The same people saying there's no thing as anti-Islamophobia, wake up every day and call Zoran Mandani an anti-Semite.
Even though Jews are all throughout his campaign, they donated to his campaign.
A huge portion of Jews in New York, possibly a plurality, but if not close, voted for Zoran Mandani, are voting for George Zoran Mandani.
So I would prefer that all of these things just be used only in the most extreme and rare cases.
But I just want you to see here that what's going on is that a lot of these attacks on Zoran aren't about stopping him from winning.
People assume he's going to win.
They kind of want him to win because then he can become a vehicle, like a weapon to make people re-afraid of Muslims.
People lost their fear of Muslims after 9-11.
It's been a long time since we listened to fear mongering about Muslims or Islam.
The reason it's back is because it is a weapon by Israel's most stalwart loyalists and all the people I just showed you who are doing it are that.
Knowing that you are not immune, that you're immune any longer, not vulnerable any longer to being told that you should love Israel, you should pay for Israel, you should finance them, you should go to work for them, you start them.
They know that ship has sailed.
So, what their tactic is to get you to focus instead on Israel's enemies, which is Islam and Muslims, in order to forget about that.
Don't fall for that.
Hate Zoran Mandani if you want.
Be angry at what you consider his socialist policies or whatever.
He's not a jihadist.
He's a Queen's AOC fan and Bernie fan.
He loves LGBTs.
He's pro-choice.
His wife walks around looking like any assimilated American woman does in mini skirts and heels.
She works.
She is a celebrated writer in New York.
These are not Islamic extremists.
And I do think no matter what your preferred candidate is, and like really, who is supporting Andrew Cuomo?
What kind of politics do you have to have to support somebody as fappet and corrupted and just oozing establishment sleaze like Andrew Cuomo?
But even if you do, make your attacks on Zoran Mandani ones that have some basis in reality.
All this bullshit about him being a jihadist wanting another, this is garbage.
And it's not just garbage in terms of it being untrue.
It's sinister garbage because it has an ulterior motive, an ulterior agenda that you should not unwittingly help by endorsing it.
The Democrats lose an election.
They love to analyze why they lost by blaming everybody except themselves.
2024 was absolutely no exception.
I was saying all throughout that campaign once Kamala was the candidate, that this was an extremely politically untalented person.
She was forced to drop out in 2020 before a single vote was cast, despite having massive amounts of money and favorable press, coming from California, where there's so much corporate and Silicon Valley and Hollywood money behind her.
And she still couldn't even make it to the first vote.
That's how terrible a politician she is.
But when she became the nominee, a lot of people were open-minded.
Polls showed that.
I mean, Biden was getting crushed in the polls.
And when Kamala replaced him, a lot of people were very open-minded, the possibility they would vote for her.
She was younger.
Trump's almost 80.
Biden is almost 80.
And both of them had been president.
So she kind of represented something new and fresh.
Like if you look at it in the most superficial way.
And what became very evident to me is that there was no way she could win because she wasn't, she's empty.
There's nothing she stood for.
There's nothing she believes in.
There's no flat like earth in which she planted her flag and said, this is what I'm going to do.
I don't care if it's popular or not, the way Trump does pretty much every day.
If you asked me what Kamala Harris's campaign stood for, I wouldn't be able to tell you.
I know she spent a lot of time renouncing a lot of the things she previously advocated when she was running in 2019, needed to be to Biden's left in order to run to secure the nomination between Bernie and Biden.
She thought that was her lane.
Remember, she called Joe Biden a racist.
She said, that little girl was me when you opposed segregation, who you wanted to prevent from going to good schools.
That little girl was me.
And then she was asked by Colbert, didn't you accuse Biden of being a racist?
And now he preys on him.
And she was like, it was a debate.
It was.
And she started cackling at like, so it's okay to call people racist in debates, even though you don't mean it.
So this is, that was her problem was she, she just, she stood for nothing.
She was, she doesn't have a personality.
She doesn't have a worldview.
She doesn't have a belief system, a value system that's fixed.
And everybody could see that.
And nobody wants that.
It's hideous.
It's basically the worst kind of person.
And Democrats know that they've been, you know, essentially they're repelling people.
And so they want to try and find a certain personality.
And what they often do is just adopt a mode of speaking and a style of speaking that so plainly isn't theirs because they think they're going to connect to people by talking like them or sounding like them or sounding like they're from the streets.
And it's just a fake personality.
I mean, Trump never does that.
Trump doesn't pretend to be working class.
And he just is who he is.
And that's all that for me is a successful politician.
Here is AOC, who's one of the worst offenders of this.
I mean, she does it all the time.
I absolutely cringe when I hear it.
Let me show you a couple examples.
I mean, there's so many.
AOC often styles herself as a black order speaking in a black church.
Even though there's absolutely nothing in her background that connects her to that, that justifies that.
There was no moment in her life where she spoke this way.
It's a theatrical gesture.
I think she believes she can be more popular among black people and therefore among what's in her head when she's doing this.
I just know it's very hard to watch.
I just like it.
I even said to my team, like, can we just talk about this without showing any clips?
Because I don't think I can sit through them.
They make me feel bad.
And they're like, no, if you're going to talk about it, you have to show at least a couple.
I did like five.
I was like, let's just do two short ones.
So here's the most recent.
There was a big rally for Zoran Landani in Forest Hill, Queens in the Forest Hill Stadium, and it was huge.
It was, I mean, I think 15,000 people.
I mean, really a big, big rally.
Bernie Sanders spoke.
I mean, Zoron spoke.
Brad Lardner, the Jewish comproller who's endorsed Zoron spoke.
And AOC spoke.
And here's part of not just what AOC said, but how she said it.
This city was built by the Irish escaping famine.
Italians fleeing fascism.
Jews escaping Holocaust.
Black Americans fleeing slavery and Jim Crow.
Latinos can see seeking a better life.
Native people standing for themselves.
Asian Americans coming together in Queens, in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, in Manhattan, in Staten Island in this country in a vision to build the freest, Toughest and greatest city on earth I don't know what that hopping is for.
That like fake rhythmic speaking.
She's clearly patterning herself after, you know, the great black orders of the past 50 years, the ones who come out of gospel churches, Martin Luther King, black politicians.
This is contrived.
This is like a borrowed personality.
And of course, there's going to be a bunch of people behind her who are basically there to cheer every speaker.
They're going to act like they're getting carried away with like AOC's authentic rhythmic intensity.
But I just think most people are going to look at that and say, what, what is this woman doing?
She seems just completely unhinged and fake.
Let's look at another AOC clip.
This one is from 2019 where she spoke at Al Sharpton's National Action Network.
And she was speaking to black people.
And so it became even more transparent and visceral what she was doing.
Let's play that.
This is what organizing looks like.
This is what building power looks like.
This is what changing the country looks like.
I'm proud to be a bartender.
Ain't nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy.
There is nothing with preparing the food neighbors will eat.
All right, so we're going to get to more of that.
I'm sorry to subject that to you.
Actually, it might be better if we give you a break from that because our guest is here and I want to get to her.
She's actually on the road and she told us she was only going to be able to appear tonight if she could stop and do it from her car.
And we checked the internet connection.
We very much wanted to speak with her about this important case.
And so we said, absolutely, you know, that's totally fine.
And I don't want to make her wait any longer than she has to.
Her name is Zora Billow.
I've known her for quite a long time.
She's a civil rights lawyer, executive director of Karen San Francisco, and she has become a person centrally knowledgeable about and involved in the truly horrifying case over the weekend where Laura Loomer, of all people, and a fellow Jewish loyalist to Israel in the United States flagged the fact that someone was in our country who's a British citizen.
He did not enter the country illegally.
He did not enter the country criminally.
His name is Sami Hamdi.
He's actually a British citizen who was in the United States on a legal visa and he was doing nothing except what you do in the United States, which is go around meeting with people, speaking, expressing opinions.
The problem is that one of the opinions he's expressed is one that has become criminal to express in the United States, which is being critical of Israel.
Laura Loomer demanded Homeland Security arrest him.
The State Department immediately obeyed, invalidated his visa, which rendered him illegal.
He was not in the United States illegally once they withdrew the visa.
Technically, he became in the United States with no valid visa.
And ICE then went and put him into a prison to deport him, but he's still in the prison.
He has not been deported.
And I don't know.
I think, as I said, no matter what you think about any other issue about Muslims or about Israel or about care, I don't think we want to be a country where you can be snapped up off a street and imprisoned by homeland security agents if the opinions you express offend Laura Loomer and the country to which she's most loyal.
So let's welcome our guest, Zara.
Zara, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We're meeting under better circumstances.
Absolutely.
So let's just dive right in.
In a sort of summary way, tell us what it is that happened.
Sure.
For folks who are not familiar with Sammy, one way that we've described him that he's talked about his work that I think is so resonant is that he is America first.
His priorities are to ensure that America is led by and caring for Americans rather than foreign influences.
He's asking, why are people losing their homes because they can't pay their health care bills when we are sending countless free checks, blank checks to Israel?
That's what he's been saying.
That's what he's been advocating for is how do Americans care for America?
He's been touring the country.
He has spoken at Ivy League universities.
He has spoken at corporations.
He has advised the State Department.
He has done all of that.
And this week, he was here in the United States on a valid visa.
He was speaking at mosques and community centers.
He was traveling this weekend between the care banquet in Sacramento and the CARE banquet in Tampa, Florida.
He was picked up by ICE at San Francisco International Airport in the domestic terminal because he was here on a valid visa.
He was immediately processed as he was abducted and taken to a detention facility in Southern California where he remains.
The government has not made any criminal allegations.
Our theory is his crime, as you said it, is that he said what is not allowed to be said anymore.
And that's what's most offensive here is that this man was advocating for America first.
And now we are squandering American values in pursuit of Israel first.
The way you and I got to know each other is when I spoke, when my work was focused on the war on terror and the erosion of civil liberties, a lot of people had their privacy rights eroded by worrontless surveillance, by detention without due process, by a whole bunch of things that a lot of us thought would never happen in the United States or at least led to believe would never happen.
And it affected a lot of people, but obviously it affected American Muslims as well who are American citizens living here.
And CARE is a civil liberties organization that protects the civil liberties and civil rights of American Muslims.
And that's how I ended up speaking at CARE.
CARE has obviously been demonized.
And so part of the story here is that he's speaking with CARE.
He's working with CARE, that this is a terrorist organization.
Can you talk a little bit about the work CARE does and the work Sammy does a little bit more broadly in terms of even independent of this weekend?
Absolutely.
Glenn, that feels like a lifetime ago.
First meeting you and learning about your work and then, right, like all of that stuff we said would never happen and is now an everyday thing.
So for listeners who are listeners, viewers who are not familiar with CARE, we are the nation's largest American Muslim civil rights organization.
We have several dozen offices across the country, including four in California, through which we employ over 100 civil rights and immigrants' rights advocates.
We pride ourselves on providing direct legal services to anyone who is discriminated against because they are Muslim or mistaken for Muslim.
We step up and we advocate for immigrants' rights.
We work with allied and values allied, I should say, elected officials to push for policies that put America first.
We work with media professionals like yourself to tell these stories.
And then we work with impacted community members and individuals to ensure they know their rights.
We learned back then the Constitution was only as strong as our willingness to assert it.
Our rights only mattered if we remembered what they were and claimed them.
And that makes us very unpopular with anyone who is attempting to strip Americans of their rights, with anyone who wants to put Israel first, with anyone who wants to discriminate against people based on race, religion, or other protected status.
And so is Sammy being targeted because he was speaking at a care event?
I'd say the question is bigger.
He was speaking at an event hosted by a civil rights organization.
He was going to another civil rights event in Florida.
So he's here saying America first.
Let's protect American civil liberties.
He's working with Americans to do that.
And he's unapologetic.
He's proud.
He's saying, hey, like, I'm on the truth.
Laura Loomer, Amy Meck, the State Department don't want our fellow Americans to hear the truth.
What they're worried about, what they know is that his message is resonating, that it has been resonating.
And the concern is that if more people hear it, we won't be Israel first anymore.
Americans may actually step up and say, America first.
And that's an important message that we wanted to make sure we convey from him as well is that he stands hopeful right now, hopeful that American values, as he has seen them exhibited across so many American cities he has traveled to will supersede right now.
Yeah, I mean, I should say just a couple of things, which is, first of all, literally every single group of Americans has a civil liberties and civil rights organization representing them.
Christians have it.
Jews have it.
Buddhists have it.
Muslims have it.
Every racial group, black people and white people and Latinos and Asians have it.
This is a, you know, something that is very much the tradition of American things to do.
You start a civil rights group.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Exactly.
And I should also know that every single event where I ever appeared with you, and it's been quite a while, but I know it's still what your work is.
There was this giant image of the Constitution, which is what I was there to speak about because CARE is basically an organization that seeks to uphold the American Constitution and its principal founding values.
Now, along those lines, one of the things that has happened, especially over the last couple of years, is that as criticism of Israel has become probably more prominent than ever, certainly in my adult memory, perhaps in yours as well, people are really panicked as public opinion polls show a collapse of support for Israel.
There's an attempt to criminalize criticism of Israel by essentially equating it to support for terrorism.
Now, there are a lot of cases that even with material support for terrorism laws, which is a crime, it can't be constituted just by speech.
It has to be some act, you know, sending money to terrorist groups, sending arms to them, plotting a terrorist attack.
Is there anyone who has suggested, other than this obviously speech attack and theory, that if you criticize Israel, you're supporting terrorism, has anyone suggested that Sami has committed any crimes at all under American law or the U.S. code?
Because he hasn't.
And so any allegations like that would be without basis.
We have foreign agents online, right-wing active, right-wing voices who will say what they want.
And I haven't read every single one of their tweets, but no one with any credibility has made any allegations of that nature because his only quote-unquote crime was saying the thing that they didn't want to hear, that they didn't want our fellow Americans to hear.
Just before I let you guys have a couple quick more questions.
First of all, can you just give us the update on exactly where he is and what the status of his case is?
Sammy was transported to an immigration detention facility in Southern California yesterday.
It is highly unusual for them to have done this as fast as they did, but we know that Laura Loomer and Amy Meck were crowing victory before it even began.
And so he is detained at an immigration detention facility in Southern California.
The legal team is determining the next best steps, and we will continue to update his supporters, our listeners, everyone that we can as things develop.
So last question.
I don't know if you have much, if of any, have you heard of our first segment, but it was basically dissecting the truly unhinged and sinister attacks on Zoran Mandani.
You know, as I said, if you don't like Zoran Mandani's left-wing economic policies or whatever, have at it.
That's totally fair game.
But applying he's a jihadist and well, you know, using imagery of 9-11, which Andrew Cuomo's campaign is doing and a lot of Andrew Cuomo's new allies on the Zionist right are doing is really reprehensible.
And my belief about this, and I'm curious to hear what you think, is that there has been this kind of renewal of anti-Muslim rhetoric that I haven't quite heard since the years after 9-11.
It kind of dissipated for a while when Americans realized Muslims were not the thing that threatened them, not their enemy, not impeding their lives.
There's this renewal and resurgence of it because I feel like hardcore Israel loyalists, who of course are very prominent and powerful in the United States, have given up on trying to convince Americans once again to love Israel.
They know that ship has sailed.
And kind of plan B is to try and tell people, let's all unite in our hatred of Islam and Muslims because, you know, that way you'll forget about Israel and the money we sent to them.
You'll all unite in opposition to Israel's enemies.
Even if you don't love Israel, it'll be effectively the same thing.
What do you think is spawning this?
Your theory is aligned with where we are right now.
It's not working to sugarcoat what Israel is doing.
It's not working to collectively punish millions of Palestinians.
Americans are not buying it anymore.
And what they consistently see is that our government, our politicians across parties, and so many of these right-wing influencer types are continually advocating for Israel.
Americans are over it.
So they're trying a new strategy.
They're trying it with Sami and they're trying it with Zahran Mamdani and all of us are in the crosshairs and will be collateral damage if we don't intervene, if we don't say, hey, this is not okay either.
They're testing a theory.
They're hoping they can convince our fellow Americans to be racist and anti-Muslim.
It didn't work last time.
It won't work this time.
But you're right to note the resurgence of it.
You're right to note who is complicit in it and the urgency of connecting the dots, that this is not about one individual.
This is about, this is about a last and final attempt to make it Israel first and convince all of us that that's the way forward.
All right, sorry.
Well, I'm so glad we got to catch up.
It's always great to see you.
I'm sure you're going to keep up the great work.
We intend to keep covering this case.
So any developments, please feel free to let us know.
Whatever we can do to keep attention on it, we will certainly do.
Safe travels.
Thanks so much.
All right.
You know, I should just say, by the way, that as somebody who I haven't been to a caravan in, I don't know, probably 12, 13 years, maybe even longer.
But I had never been very involved in Muslim organizations before.
And when they asked me to come, I wasn't certain, you know, what the true function of this group was.
And I asked around in a lot of the civil liberties community and I did my own research.
And then I went to, I think, five or six events, maybe a course of a couple of years, gave speeches about the Constitution and civil liberties, the work I was doing, basically against the Patriot Act and Warrantless spying.
And it is exactly the kind of American organization that we want.
I mean, it just, they go into court and they litigate cases in defense of constitutional principles.
And sometimes constitutional principles are eroded against one group or another or another.
It constantly changes.
There have been constitutional attacks on the American right, which I always denounced because wherever there are attempts to erode the Constitution in the pursuit of some or in service of some political agenda, if you allow any of those to slip past, those precedents get set and then they can be easily expanded.
I've tried convincing the left of that when they were supporting censorship.
I'm trying to convince conservatives that now, especially the pro-Israel ones who are supporting censorship as well.
And CARE does an outstanding job despite all the ways it's being demonized.
It is a classically American organization that is all about supporting the Constitution.
That's not a pretext.
It's not a facade.
It's something that they, these are people who went to law school who are American citizens their whole life, who are believing the American Constitution and the civil liberties that it guarantees.
And that's where their work is directed.
All right.
Let's get back to the segment that we interrupted to talk to Zara, which is about the fact that Democrats are often accused of not having clear policies, not having clear identity, political values.
And that's all true.
But I think one of the bigger problems, maybe it's the cause of those other things, is the fact they don't really have a personality.
Like they don't have a way of being that makes them comfortable in their own skin.
And so often they adopt these ways of speaking that are utterly alien and foreign to them and contrived in the most obviously patronizing ways.
We showed you a couple of clips of AOC trying to sound like a black preacher.
I understand the concept of code switching.
There was an article in The Atlantic defending AOC when she gave these, out of nowhere adopted these, this, this black vernacular.
And it was actually by John McWhorter, who's a conservative, and he was trying to defend her on the ground that all she's doing is code switching.
Code switching is something you can do.
It's kind of like speaking different ways depending on the audience to which you're speaking.
I personally hate it.
I find it unbelievably patronizing.
I don't even like really doing it to young children.
Obviously, I adapt the way I speak to young children, like everyone does, but I don't adopt like that, hi, you know, that like speaking to a young child voice.
I try and give them the respect of like just conversing with them.
I mean, of course, you know, you're aware of their limitations and you don't, you know, ask them what they think about the latest Wall Street Journal article.
You adapt how you're speaking, but I don't put on a different personality or a different way of speaking.
And all of us, you know, have more formal or less formal ways of speaking.
If we're talking to our kids at home, our best friends, obviously we're going to speak differently than if we're in front of a camera, but it still has a core, a consistent core of your personality, of the way you speak, you know, so that you're comfortable in your own skin.
You're not putting on some fake personality.
And if AOC had part of her life that overlapped with black culture, black neighborhoods, she belonged to a black church, whatever, and she learned to speak that way naturally, and then she could come in and out of it.
I would have, I maybe lost my problem with it.
I would still find it a little cringy, but at least there'd be some basis for it.
But AOC just invented this out of whole cough, and it's pathetic and embarrassing to watch.
Speaking of which, Gavin Newsom appeared on a podcast called All That Smoke, which is hosted by two black former NBA players.
Gavin Newsom was recently, he was on a podcast a week ago.
And I'm not sure what the podcast was we covered at the time, but he was asked about APAC and donations to APAC.
And he was like, hmm, APAC rings a bell.
I think it's so interesting that you're asking me about them.
Real interesting because it's not something I ever think about.
I don't like have anything to do with APAC.
I never think about them.
Is it, what is it called?
APAC?
I mean, it was so sad to watch.
This is universe is worse.
He's talking to, and let me just say something one thing about Gavin Newsom before I show you this.
Gavin Newsom grew up in a very prominent family.
His father wasn't just a lawyer.
He was the administer of the Getty Trust, Getty Oil Fortune.
The Getty family lives in San Francisco or a big part of the family does.
And Gavin Newsom's father administered the trust, oversaw the trust.
He was around extremely rich people his whole life.
And his family, maybe not billionaire wealthy, but was quite prominent and wealthy.
Gavin Newsom's first business that he ever created long before he got into politics was funded by one of the Getty boys or two of them actually.
There's an article in a local San Francisco paper from the 80s entitled The Young Rich of San Francisco.
And there's a picture of Gavin Newsome there with two of the Getty heirs and another heir to a very large fortune.
Here's Gavin Newsome adopting a completely fake way of speaking and a fake history and a fake personality and a fake background and a fake life, I guess, to impress the podcast host, but also to build some sort of constituency that he thinks is going to fall for this.
Listen to this.
So, you know, it was also about paying the bills, man.
And it was just like hustling.
And so I was out there kind of raising myself, turning on the TV, started, you know, just getting obsessed, you know, sitting there with the, you know, the wonder bread and five stacks of like the white stick live story.
Come on.
Macaroni and cheese.
Are you talking about me?
Yo, why Jesus?
Why Jesus, man?
Every day.
Every day in the backyard, just bouncing the basketball.
And he goes on like that.
I don't know what to cut off there, but it goes on like that.
And, you know, he basically is trying to make it seem like basketball saved him from the mean streets that he would have fallen into.
He was just trying to make a living with his bread.
And Gavin Newsom grew up wealthier than just about anybody that I knew at the time when he was growing up.
And he doesn't have this background.
He doesn't come from a working class background.
He didn't grow up on the streets.
He doesn't speak with a black accent.
He doesn't speak street slang.
We've all heard Gavin Newsome speak.
We all see his demeanor.
This is embarrassing.
This is the kind of thing.
I mean, this is the, I'll tell you the problem with Democrats, but the problem with Democrats is that they know what they Have to be.
They know what they have to advocate.
They know the policy positions that they could defend in order to win elections or at least become more popular.
The problem is their donor base won't allow it.
They're in bed with a certain corporatist militarist donor base that will not allow them to become a party representing the things they need to represent if they're to get out of the cycle they're in of being an incredibly discredited and embarrassed and cringe party.
And one of the things they had been trying to do and still try to do is use identity politics and this cheap, empty, inconsequential discourse about how they have the first woman this and the first black this and they're pro this and you know and I think for a while they thought it was going to work and maybe at the peak of wokeness it might have had they might have had some evidence that this is a popular way of thinking and speaking the problem is is that there's been a backlash against that people don't
care about that anymore they don't want that they're not fooled by it any longer black voters are not going to go vote for democratic party politicians because they talk a lot about racism
and gay voters or muslim voters are not going to go and talk vote for democratic party politicians because they're talking about pro-trans or pro-gay or pro-muslim it just people want to know what you're going to do for their lives rightly so you have to be more substantive than that and i think this is the next evolution in democrats trying to find some ground to change how people perceive them by adopting fake personalities and
i don't you know short of the changes they have to make but that they can't make i just think this is going to make things so much worse here from forbes uh it's dated october 26 2025 i'm not sure if that's the right date or not because that's uh that's yesterday maybe it is uh we'll check on that inside gavin newsom's multi-million dollar business empire quote gavin newsom california governor gavin newsom may be posting like donald trump on social media but
clearly the similarities don't end there the rumored presidential hopeful was a businessman and when he while he ran for office and built a brand of his own plum jack group when he which he started with investors including oil air and billionaire gordon getty a family friend today plump jack is a power player in both napa valley's wine industry and san francisco's social scene newsom was groomed for such success his father william was a college friend of future governor jerry brown who
appointed william to do judgeships william newsom was also employed by getty as an administrator of the getty trusts compare gavin newsom's actual life his actual you could almost call him a nepo baby his actual wealth and connection to society
that surrounded him all the time to that fairy tale of a person and story that he adopted for those two black former uh nba hosts who were basically shocked that that he was even trying and kind of laughing with him pretending to laugh along with him but clearly laughing at him
now zaron mandani has also done this and you can distinguish it by saying zaron mandani actually does have indian heritage he actually did live in uh africa
but listen to zaron mandani speaking uh this is from 2016 and you'll hear a much different way of speaking mandami thank you so much for joining us and uh welcome to south africa you're very welcome it's a it's a pleasure you were brought in as a music supervisor for queen of katwe and as we know music is almost the last string that brings the picture together it tells the story it's the tie-in of the whole story
how was that for you i mean being anywhere involved with the music will be a daunting task but to be a supervisor at that you It must have been a memo task.
So I actually created a playlist for Mira, who also happens to be my mother.
You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.
All right, here's one more.
This is from around the same time.
This is him speaking on TS SCTV.
Let's listen to this.
Yeah.
So these three things, if you can address it, absolutely.
I'll start from number three.
You know, electoral districts, they actually, they cut them in ways that don't make sense.
And in our district, they cut out every public housing project.
So Australia houses, they cut it out.
Woodside houses, they cut it out.
Ravenswood, they cut it out.
Queensbridge, they cut it out.
They're all in Kathy Nolan's district.
But I totally agree.
Elected officials neglect people who live in public housing, and we need to change that.
So that's just 2020.
That's five years ago.
Now, like I said, when I was home at OC, I could differentiate it and find it a little more defensible if there's something in their background that actually corresponds to that way of speaking.
And he does have Indian heritage, which is, I believe, the accent he tried to adopt in that last interview and the one before that.
Sounded like a South African accent, but maybe I think it could be Ugandan as well, where he lived as well.
And also, it's possible that as he lived longer in the United States, he lost his accent in English or his accent became Americanized.
That's possible as well.
But this isn't 20 years ago.
This is just a few years ago.
And I just, I think that, and you could call that code switching again, I don't like it.
But when there's nothing to it, as is true for Gavin Newsom and AOC and Kamala Harris did this as well during the campaign, we could show you a lot of different examples.
I understand that Democrats are grappling around.
I understand that they're trying to be more likable, to be more appealing, to be more interesting, to be more authentic.
Don't adopt personalities that aren't your own.
Don't adopt speaking styles that are fake to sound like other people whom you're trying to placate and please.
It's disrespectful.
And I think maybe some people fall for it and think, oh, well, that person seems like me.
But I don't think most people want to hear that.
I don't think that's how most people feel respected is by having you imitate their style of speaking so that you can pretend that you're more like them and fool them.
Unless Democrats figure out who they are, unless these people find comfort in their own skin, unless they say, this is who we are, this is what we believe in.
No apology.
We're not yielding from it.
We're not going to accommodate it for or dilute it for political gain.
People are going to continue to look at them as blank slate.
And yes, they can keep gambling on the fact that maybe Donald Trump will overplay his hand.
Maybe the economy will be so poor.
Maybe in a 2026 midterm election, as traditionally happens, Trump supporters won't go to the polls because their party already is in power and they'll be able to count on things like that.
I'm not saying they're never going to win another election.
But if they want to win elections based on people actually being passionate about them, people supporting them, people thinking they're interesting, people being inspired by them, people who aren't Democrats deciding that they want to vote for a candidate.
I mean, look at Obama and Obama, that is who Obama was.
He wasn't playing slate, but that was his personality.
And he inspired a lot of people with it.
And Democrats just don't have, I mean, Pete Bulichage, they're all, they look like they all are just getting out of a board meeting.
And I'm sorry, but AOC is no different.
She tries to adopt a different vibe.
I can see her not necessarily as a board of directors.
She's not serious enough for that, but I could see her working as kind of a support function for a board of directors in a corporation.
And then on Saturday night, she tries to let her hair down and, you know, go out, goozer corporate self, and start speaking like this.
But this is uncomfortable to watch.
It's not pleasant.
It's not inspiring.
And Democrats are going to continue to just, I think, go on a downward spiral if this is what their tactic is.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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