Glenn interviews Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) about the Trump administration's push for regime change in Venezuela, rifts within MAGA, Trump's attacks on Rep. Thomas Massie, 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 Tuesday, October 29th. | |
| 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, we are still not back in our studio, though we have taken one big step closer. | |
| We're back at home. | |
| There's some unrest and violence. | |
| I'm sure you heard about here at Region Narrows, so we decided to not ask our team to come into the studio just to play it safe. | |
| But we will be back in the studio tomorrow night. | |
| For tonight, we have a focus on a couple of issues that I think have been of great significance and are great significance yet have received far little too little attention. | |
| One is what is clearly the ongoing regime change war in Venezuela that is, even in the best of cases, likely to generate a huge amount of instability and violence in Venezuela in the region, even if things go as well as they can be, possibly expected to go. | |
| And obviously, it could be a lot worse if things don't. | |
| And then secondly, the very bizarre phenomenon where Donald Trump has targeted for removal and destruction two members of the Republican caucus, the Republican Congress, who I think if you had told, you had said two years ago were the two people Trump was trying to destroy, you would be kind of shocked, which is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky as well. | |
| And at the same time, he's doing that, he's out there vocally supporting and fundraising for Senator Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, even though Graham has a challenger from his populist right from an America First perspective challenging him. | |
| And he's doing the same for Congressman Randy Fine, the utter and complete Israel fanatic, who's the very living, breathing embodiment of the antithesis of America First. | |
| And to help us sort through all of those things tonight, we are happy to speak with a frequent guest on our program. | |
| He is Senator Rand Paul, who has been outspoken, one of the very few people in his concerned about and opposition to blowing up boats whenever Pete Hagsteth decides or Mark Rubio decides they're going to and then have Trump claim that they are not just drug dealers but on the way to the United States. | |
| But also to talk about more generally what it means that President Trump has targeted Congressman Massey using AIPAC donors to remove him from Congress, starting to target Senator Paul himself. | |
| Senator Paul has endorsed Congressman Massey and he's here to talk about not just that but what it means that Trump at the same time is fundraising for and trying to keep in power the very people that MAGA insisted were the exact opposite of their movement. | |
| Before we get to all of that into Senator Paul, who just as a little bit of disclosure, we spoke to yesterday. | |
| We taped the interview yesterday while I was on the road and are going to play that for you tonight. | |
| A couple of quick programming notes. | |
| First of all, we, as System Update, are available not just here on Rumble, but also in podcast form. | |
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| All you have to do is click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page. | |
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| One more programming note, which is, as many of you know, I was promoting it beforehand on Friday night. | |
| I was in San Antonio, Texas, where I did an event as part of Megan Kelly's nationwide tour. | |
| It was her second stop. | |
| I appeared there along with Emily Jasinski. | |
| Was on the stage for about an hour. | |
| That event, if you want, is available to be watched on Megan Kelly's YouTube program and elsewhere, also on her Twitter feed, and you can find that easily. | |
| I was also yesterday in South Florida where I appeared on Patrick Bett David's program. | |
| He didn't have his panel with him. | |
| It was just a one-on-one. | |
| With him, we talked about many issues, the Epstein files, MAGA, America First, Israel, Venezuela, a wide variety of other issues as well. | |
| Gotten a lot of reaction and repercussion. | |
| That's on the PBD channel, so you can see that here. | |
| And for now, right after this very short message from our sponsor, I give you my interview and discussion with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. | |
| All right, let me ask you something. | |
| How much time do you spend every day on a web browser? | |
| You can be honest. | |
| It's okay. | |
| You don't have to be embarrassed. | |
| I mean, like clicking around, searching, scrolling through endless tabs. | |
| It's a lot, right? | |
| A lot of time. | |
| Well, there's a new AI-powered browser called Perplexity from Perplexity that's called Comet, and it completely changes how you interact with the web. | |
| Using Comet feels like having a personal assistant living right inside your browser, one that can actually do things for you, not just give you answers, but literally click, type, scroll, and search, just like you would, getting past that in the background while you focus on other things. | |
| I've been trying it out. | |
| Here's one of the first things I did. | |
| I had Comet Finder Restaurant that fit my schedule, booked the reservation for me, and even send a calendar invite. | |
| All while I kept doing other things, including working on the show, all I had to do was mention a few things that I was craving in terms of food, how far I wanted to drive. | |
| It figured out the rest in the background. | |
| It can also shop for you, summarize articles, book travel, or even bulk unsubscribe you from spam. | |
| All you have to do is download Perplexity's new AI web browser, Comet, today by heading to pplx.ai/slash glenn. | |
| And when you download it, you'll get a free month of Rumble premium. | |
| That's pplx.ai/slash Glenn. | |
| Take back your time online with Comet. | |
| Senator Paul, it's always great to see you. | |
| Thanks for taking the time. | |
| Let's just dive right into the questions I have for you. | |
| I want to start with something that you have been specifically critical of the Trump administration for doing, which is what appears to be a new regime change war in Venezuela. | |
| Before we get to the regime change part, there has been this spate of killings where the U.S. government blows up boats and then claims afterward it was filled with drug traffickers and terrorists. | |
| They just did another four boats today, killing, I think, three dozen people. | |
| What is your objection to the argument that these are people bringing drugs into the United States? | |
| Those drugs can kill Americans and therefore it's an important form of self-defense. | |
| Well, I think once we start calling things war, so we have a war on drugs or we have a war on terrorism, then you get people accustomed to the idea that the rules of engagement are going to be like a war. | |
| So it's no longer going to be like crime and punishment where you have to accuse somebody of something, they get a trial and a lawyer because it's a war, we can just kill them. | |
| Or that's what the Trump administration is arguing. | |
| It's a war. | |
| We've called these people terrorists and by golly, we're just going to kill them. | |
| They'll be dead, as the president says. | |
| The problem with this, and one of the most damning statistics, is that when the Coast Guard boards ships our boats off of Miami or off the California coast, about 25% of the boats that are suspected of having drugs don't. | |
| So if you have a 25% error rate, people have to decide, well, do you think killing people with a 25% error rate is okay? | |
| So we have never done it this way. | |
| We've always sought smugglers and drug dealers and people like that. | |
| We have treated it as illegal, but we have treated it as a crime, not as an act of war. | |
| What belies their approach also is that when they finally didn't kill everybody, they blew up a boat the other day and two people survived. | |
| They didn't pluck them from the water, get evidence of weapons or drugs. | |
| They just said, okay, you guys could go back home. | |
| They're repatriating them to Colombia and to Ecuador. | |
| And nobody said, well, maybe we should ask them who's the drug kingpin? | |
| Who's the drug overlord? | |
| What's his name? | |
| Where did you get the drugs? | |
| Who hired you? | |
| Did you talk to Maduro last week? | |
| None of this was asked. | |
| They just sent them back home. | |
| So they can kill people on site. | |
| But then when you actually accidentally don't kill them and capture them, there isn't any intent on investigating the supposed crime of drug dealing. | |
| You know, Senator, one of the things that really, I don't mean this argumentatively, I mean it literally, it baffles me, is that the Trump movement, MAGA, America First, really made a long time intense showing of repudiating neocons, talking about neocons being the root of all evil at the heart of the Republican Party, regime change wars, the war on terror, all this waste. | |
| I know this sounds very familiar to you, this whole rationale for blowing up boats. | |
| It sounds very familiar to me, which is right under the war on terror. | |
| This is what Obama did. | |
| They would blow up whatever they wanted, wedding parties, gatherings of people by drone. | |
| They had no idea who they were killing. | |
| Afterward, they would say, oh, don't worry, those are all terrorists. | |
| Those are all militants, even though nobody who knew they'd blow up. | |
| I think the problem here is that the Trump administration, and correct me if I'm wrong, is basically embracing the legal framework that has been in place since 9-11, the war on terror. | |
| I know there were efforts to try and revoke it. | |
| It was never revoked. | |
| I mean, isn't this kind of the danger illustrated that people predicted? | |
| If you don't withdraw the legal framework that allows endless war, the name of terrorism, that'll just become everything and the president can just bomb whoever he wants forever? | |
| Well, I think it is important to remember our history, even our recent history back to the Obama administration. | |
| I think he killed over a thousand people with drones. | |
| They used to have killing terrorist Tuesdays where he had flashcards and they'd go through the flashcards and pick people on the flashcards. | |
| This included an American citizen and the American citizen's two children. | |
| And I think nobody really made the allegation that any of them were carrying arms. | |
| They were sympathetic to terrorists. | |
| They had ideas that most civilized people disagreed with. | |
| But at the same time, they weren't in the middle of combat or engaged in combat. | |
| But the reason it's important is because we seem to have different standards. | |
| You know, when Democrats in charge, Republicans, some were up in arms over this. | |
| Now that a Republican's doing it, Democrats are rightly up in arms against Trump, but some of them forget or are willing to forget that their hero, President Obama, was doing it as well. | |
| But you're right, that legal framework and that precedent has allowed President Trump to say, look, everybody knows this. | |
| They're terrorists. | |
| And it's this circular argument. | |
| Who are terrorists? | |
| Well, the people I tell you who are terrorists. | |
| And what are terrorists? | |
| They're people who kill people in a terroristic way. | |
| And they're terrorists because I tell you they do this. | |
| It's this circular argument with no proof presented. | |
| But there is a real problem with it. | |
| And the thing they can't overcome is that we do this in a normal fashion. | |
| 25% of the boats that are boarded are innocent. | |
| And I guess what gets me about my colleagues is they seem to think that these people are less than human. | |
| They're not even deserving of the respect of animals. | |
| Just kill them. | |
| And it's sort of this laughing sort of ha ha ha, you know, these are really bad people that gets to me is that, well, what if you're wrong? | |
| Or what if it turns out this fisherman's, you know, sister or wife has been kidnapped and they're being tortured at the hands of the cartel or whatever, and he's told to make a drug run or they're going to kill his sister. | |
| That is a very possible scenario. | |
| Or what if he's just dirt poor, down on his luck, has failed making his rent for five months, he's getting ready to be homeless, or he takes his last-ditch job, which pays very well, but has some danger to it. | |
| Is that deserving of death? | |
| And I don't know. | |
| I mean, we don't kill people typically for this. | |
| But I had an interview the other day, and a guy said, Well, it's just self-defense. | |
| It's just like self-defense. | |
| It's like someone breaks in your house. | |
| You write to shoot him. | |
| And I said, Well, no, it's like someone broke into your house, you were assaulted, and you find out three weeks later that he lives two roads over and there's in a certain house, and you don't call the police, you go over there with a missile and you blow up his house. | |
| But what if you got the wrong house? | |
| What if you transpose the numbers on the address? | |
| We don't do that. | |
| Civilized people don't do this, and it's not going to stop the drugs. | |
| They'll go a different route. | |
| And we've got to get away from the ridiculous nature or notion that these boats are coming to America. | |
| Oh, we've got to self-defend against these boats coming to America. | |
| These boats can't go more than about 100 miles without filling up for gas. | |
| They're 2,000 miles away from our coast. | |
| They're going to Trinidad and Tobago. | |
| And if they have drugs, they're serving up drugs to some other island. | |
| Are we now the policemen of the war on drugs worldwide? | |
| I mean, there's so much that is insane about this policy. | |
| But, you know, I hope more people will speak out and that some people, more in my party, will grow a spine. | |
| I hope so too. | |
| Now, you know, one of the bizarre things, Senator, is that this war on drugs is not new. | |
| It's been fought, you know, for at least 55 years. | |
| It's been an actual war. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| There are more drugs than ever in the United States. | |
| I've never once heard a user or an addict complain that they can't get drugs in the United States if they want to. | |
| So it seems to me, and I'm interested in your view on this, that the real goal here, sort of the stopping the drugs is kind of like the WMD, the pretext. | |
| The real goal is regime change in Venezuela. | |
| Do you agree that that's the real goal? | |
| And if so, what's wrong with removing Maduro, somebody who defrauded an election or oppressive to his people, et cetera? | |
| I think it looks like the goal in all likelihood is regime change. | |
| Now, it's hard to get into the mind of folks. | |
| I have no love loss for socialism or Maduro. | |
| I wrote a book called The Case Against Socialism. | |
| In that book, the opening chapters are of a 16-year-old girl who has a gang, and her gang's territory is four dumpsters behind restaurants. | |
| The average person in Venezuela at that time had lost 30 pounds in a year. | |
| So the desperation and terrible thing that socialism does to people, I'm not in favor of that. | |
| But at the same time, regime change often doesn't lead to the results that you want it to. | |
| And this is something that I always liked about President Trump. | |
| I believe it is instinctually part of his nature not to like war, not to want to lose thousands of soldiers, but also that regime change didn't necessarily work out as planned in Iraq, and it didn't work out as planned in Libya as well. | |
| And I think that is still his natural instinct. | |
| But I think he's now surrounded by people who have salivated over removing Maduro and replacing him with Ronald Reagan as soon as they can get Ronald Reagan down there. | |
| That is the goal, I think, of people around him. | |
| And I think he's being influenced by those who are much more inclined. | |
| And it's strange because sometimes I'm now accused of not supporting the president enough. | |
| But I think I do support the president's stated campaign positions much better than some of the people who are now close, who have always been more of the neocon variety and more of the interventionist wing of the party, but they now surround him. | |
| You know, I'm in Miami. | |
| I grew up in my, right at this moment. | |
| I grew up in Miami, and there was always a huge Cuban community, still is, of people who were in the United States, but they never really learned English, most of them, because in their minds they were only here temporarily. | |
| They wanted the U.S. government to get rid of Castro for them and they would go back to Cuba. | |
| There's also a big Venezuelan community down in South Florida that thinks the same about the U.S. responsibility to get rid of the leader of that country that they hate the most. | |
| Marco Rubio obviously emerges out of this community, has for years wanted the U.S. to go and do regime change in both Cuba and Venezuela. | |
| He's obviously crucial to the president. | |
| It does seem like this runs contrary to Trump's natural instincts. | |
| He's an America first candidate, wants to spend resources on our country, building up our communities. | |
| Instead, we're now going to go do a regime change war in Venezuela. | |
| What do you think is the dynamic driving President Trump and why so many people in Washington seem on board with this? | |
| You know, bad advice is the simple answer. | |
| In the first administration, I did everything I could to stop John Bolton from being Secretary of State. | |
| I was successful in that, but then they still brought him in and made him a national security advisor that didn't have to be approved by the Senate. | |
| But I told him from the beginning that he was going to institute his own policy. | |
| And maybe one of the dumbest things a diplomat or foreign policy advisor has ever said was when Trump was speaking with Kim Jong-un and North Korea and they had a summit. | |
| He said, well, just explain to him that we're going to be for the Libyan solution. | |
| And I'm like, well, the Libyan solution is you trade in your nukes and we kill you anyway. | |
| That's not something really we should probably broadcast to people who are trying to get rid of their nuclear weapons that, oh yeah, we'll give you the solution we gave to Qaddafi. | |
| But no, he was a menace. | |
| And I think there are some of those in this administration that share John Bolton's worldview more than they share the president's. | |
| But the thing is, is on a day-to-day basis, it's a matter of trying to appear to accept the president's worldview and then undermine it as much as you possibly can. | |
| In this case, though, I think they've influenced him. | |
| And they just made him think that, oh, well, it's our hemisphere. | |
| We're going to have the Trumpian hemisphere. | |
| And you can do whatever you want over here. | |
| And it won't be as bad as Iraq because these people are closer to us. | |
| And those drugs are just 2,000 miles off our coast. | |
| Speaking of that, I know it's just a couple more minutes left, but one of the things that a president obviously has the power to do if they're popular in their own party as President Trump is is wage war against people in their party who are impeding their agenda. | |
| President Trump is currently waging war against a member of Congress and his own party, but it's somebody who is, I think, one of the people who most embodies the policies and the ideology on which President Trump campaigned and was elected, which is Congressman Thomas Massey of your state in Kentucky. | |
| He's vowing to defeat Thomas Massey. | |
| He has three huge billionaires who are very pro-Israel targeting Thomas Massey. | |
| I think for that reason, I'm not saying that's Trump's reason, but that's theirs who are funding it. | |
| And he has also started to now kind of be very critical of you in similar ways. | |
| At the same time, he's out there actively campaigning for people that the MAGA movement has long said are most anathema to the MAGA agendas. | |
| Lindsey Graham, hardcore neocon in South Carolina, Randy Fine, who seems to put every country, especially Israel, before the United States. | |
| Why is it that President Trump, do you think, has become so obsessed with targeting Congress and Massey into a lesser extent yourself when he's doing everything possible to keep in Congress, people seemingly opposed to his real agenda? | |
| Well, the irony is, you know, there are still some members of the Republican Party in the Senate who voted to impeach President Trump. | |
| I would think that his grudges would be stronger against those who actually voted to impeach him, which I consider to be a political process and to be politically motivated. | |
| My opposition to the president has always just been on policy, and I think Massey the same way. | |
| But I would say Thomas Massey, the House, and myself in the Senate represent the libertarian wing of the party, and there's not a lot of us. | |
| We represent the libertarian wing. | |
| There are a few fellow travelers on a particular day of the week, but we represent the most libertarian members of the Congress. | |
| And that means we're fiscally conservative. | |
| We believe in a much smaller government, balanced budgets, foreign war only when attacked and when voted on by Congress. | |
| Rarely, if ever, should we be at war. | |
| And sort of a live-and-let-live approach to life as far as people's individual life. | |
| And I think Trump agrees with quite a bit of that, but I think there's sometimes the challenge, you know, the idea that it's my way or the highway, it isn't so much, it's hard for people to see all the times we're agreeing. | |
| Look, I'm a chairman of a committee. | |
| I've opposed a few nominees, you know, in other areas of government, but through my committee, everybody they've asked me to get through, I've gotten through. | |
| So I have done some of the things that are traditionally done for a president in your party. | |
| And I hope maybe that it comes around that really does he want to waste a lot of time on money on Thomas Massey, or would he rather not spend it trying to keep a Republican majority in the House? | |
| Because if they want to spend $20 million on Thomas Massey's race to defeat a guy who is the most fiscally conservative, the most constitutionally minded member of the House, and who really does support President Trump the majority of the time, that'll be a great waste of resources. | |
| So I hope they don't do it. | |
| But I'm committed to campaigning for Thomas Massey. | |
| I've been with him two days already. | |
| He's in my state, so I've traveled to his district many times. | |
| I will do this again in the spring. | |
| We will help him raise money. | |
| And I consider this a personal challenge to make sure that the most libertarian, conservative member of the House is not defeated. | |
| Yeah, somebody who's been opposed to intervention and in favor of free speech as well. | |
| Both of you have. | |
| Senator Paul, it's always great to talk to you. | |
| We certainly will continue to follow. | |
| I'm glad there's somebody out there raising questions about this new regime change war hanging on the horizon. | |
| And I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us. | |
| Thank you. |