Journalist Jasper Nathaniel on Brutality and Settler Attacks in the West Bank; Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions: On the Argentina Bailout, Money in Politics, and More
Journalist Jasper Nathaniel discusses his experience being chased by a mob of settlers in the West Bank and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the territory. Plus: Glenn takes your questions on the Argentina bailout, money in politics, and more. ---------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, as we do every Friday night, we've received questions throughout the week from our locals members, which we will spend as much time as we can answering as many of them as we can.
As always, they cover a very wide range of issues, offer different perspectives on issues we have covered as well.
We always look forward to these Friday Q ⁇ A sessions.
They're often among the most popular segments we do, and we'll get to that in just a minute.
But before we do, we have reporting that has been done in a truly superb manner by an American journalist named Jasper Nathaniel.
He is in the West Bank, has spent the last year or so in the West Bank reporting on what has not gotten as much attention as it deserves, given the destruction of Gaza, which is the Israeli abuses and increasing annexation and use of violence in the West Bank, expelling Palestinians from their homes, threatening them, essentially trying to ethnically cleanse the West Bank in a way they've done with Gaza, not yet using quite as much violence, but often using more enduring abuses than even has been done in Gaza.
And he's going to join us tonight in order to tell us everything he's seen, including attacks that were launched against him as an American journalist and the response or lack thereof of the American embassy.
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now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now jasper nathaniel is a new york-based independent journalist He's also the author of the substack Infinite Jazz, where he reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He recently returned from the West Bank, where he documented all sorts of really horrific violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian oil olive pickers doing nothing but sowing their land for food like they've done for centuries, including one incident where the IDF actually lured him and his colleagues in order to set up a violent throng of Israel settlers unleashed on him.
He recorded some actually horrifying video footage that unfortunately is not rare at all in terms of what Israeli settlers do to the Palestinians.
We thought it was very important to talk to him in part because the reporting is so great, but also because the world attention has been on Gaza as it should be.
And that has allowed the Israelis to unleash all kinds of abuses and violence in the West Bank far beyond the system of oppression that they've been imposing for the last several decades.
And that deserves a lot of attention as well.
So we're very thrilled to welcome you, Jasper, to the show.
You've been doing outstanding work.
I'm really excited to talk to you about that work you've been doing.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Glad to be here.
Yeah, I'm glad to have you.
So first of all, let's just start with the question that I have, which is, you spent the last year or so in the West Bank.
We have interviewed other American journalists who have been to the West Bank, including Jeremy Lafredo, who was arrested and held in detention.
That was quite abusive.
The U.S. government did nothing.
We all know at this point, we've all seen it, that the Israeli government is basically operating without limits.
Even if you're an American citizen, you might have more protection, but the Israelis don't really recognize any limits.
It's a risky thing to do.
Why is it that you decided to go to the West Bank and spend the year reporting there?
You said it.
After October 7th, it became clear right away that the far-right.
faction in the Israeli government, which is the most powerful bloc of the government, was going to use the cover of the breathless reporting on the October 7th attacks and then the bombardment of Gaza to fulfill their messianic dreams, basically, which involve ethnically cleansing the West Bank.
And I should say that actually the acceleration of the settlement building and the intensification of the settler violence, it actually started before October 7th.
There was a real turning point in February 2023 when Smocherich, who is a far-right settler who became the finance minister with the new government at the end of 2022, he basically pulled off this, frankly, incredible bureaucratic coup where he installed himself in the defense ministry and gave himself a position, which effectively made him the governor of the West Bank.
Because you have to remember, the West Bank, legally speaking, is a military occupation.
And legally speaking, it has to be ruled by the military.
Smoterich, of course, is not in the military.
He's a civilian.
But with this little sleight of hand, he was then able to completely transform the military occupation, which, of course, was never benevolent, but he was able to transform it to be in complete lockstep with the settler movement.
And so after October 7th, all of this just, you know, the dials turned up.
And I realized pretty quickly it's just not going to get the coverage that it needs.
And, you know, the Smotriches and the Ben Gavirs and the settlers understood this.
And frankly, those guys, they don't care about Gaza in the same way in terms of the historical and biblical significance of the land itself.
You know, what they call Judea and Samaria or the West Bank is far more meaningful to them than Gaza.
So I just knew, okay, this is going to be a really big issue and it's not going to get any coverage.
So I decided to start reporting from there.
You know, it's really bizarre because those of us who have been covering Israel for a long time have been highly critical of the Israeli project.
Remember that the Israeli settler movement was considered this extremist, fringe, marginalized movement, even within Israeli society.
The U.S. government for decades has been vehemently opposed to Israeli settlements under all presidents, arguably until this administration where Mike Huckabee kind of endorsed it, though Trump and JD Vance have said otherwise.
And I want to talk about that in a second.
And in general, the people who just go to the West Bank, not just Israeli Jews, but Jews from the diaspora, a lot of them come from Brooklyn or from the United States.
They go and settle the West Bank, even though international law, the entire global community believes those settlements are illegal.
They have to go there.
They have been typically armed.
They're willing to fight even the Israeli government.
These are the most extremist people.
And what we now see is that, as you just indicated, they're not fringe or marginalized at all.
In fact, they have settler advocates and believers in annexation of the West Bank inside the government.
The IDF is now backing them up.
Can you talk to us about Israeli settlers, kind of who they are, what their worldview is, and what they're like?
Yeah, it's funny because I actually much prefer to, From an interviewing perspective, from a rhetorical perspective, I much prefer to talk to a settler than what we might call a liberal Zionist because they're just much more open.
I mean, I think here we would say they say the quiet part out loud.
In order to maintain a Jewish state in the middle of the Middle East, you have to ethnically cleanse the region.
You have to have a military occupation.
You have to put a blockade up.
Otherwise, it's no longer a Jewish state.
The Jewish majority disappears the minute the occupation ends.
And so, a lot of the like, you know, it's not a monolith, of course.
I mean, like the ones who I had my, you know, the violent encounters with, a lot of them are members of what we would call the hilltop youth.
And these are essentially, you know, militias, which in many cases are directly supported and funded by the government and certainly by the military.
And they are really, you know, on the front lines, terrorizing Palestinian communities.
But behind them, there is a whole political structure and an ideology, which is actually not that far from what the early Zionists would say in terms of their claim to the land.
And what I find so fascinating, actually, when I have the opportunity to talk to settlers when they're not trying to kill me, is that they all have this one line that they say, which is basically that if Israel was, if the Jewish state was formed on the basis of the historical and biblical significance of the land, then our claim to Judea and Samaria is much, much, much stronger than anywhere in Israel.
There's much more history in, say, East Jerusalem or Sebastia or lots of other parts of the West Bank than there is in Tel Aviv or Haifa or a lot of these other places.
And so, you know, when you follow the logic of the settlers, in my opinion, you actually end up with just sort of straightforward Zionism.
These are just the ones who are actively on the front lines, pushing the boundaries.
And it's why their supporters in government will call them Jewish pioneers because they really think they are on the frontier, pushing the boundaries of the land of Israel.
Yeah, I mean, I guess not all Zionists are motivated by beliefs about what God wanted in terms of land, right?
Like some of them are quite secular, in fact, and just believe the Jewish people should have a home because it's important for security or whatever.
And as you know, there's been a big conflict, in fact, between a lot of very religious Jews and the idea of Zionism, which they kind of consider sort of heresy to Judaism.
So it is kind of mixed, but I guess the settlers are people more motivated by religion, although I think not all of them as well.
I mean, I'm interested in your view on that.
But, you know, the settler movement requires a lot of funding.
I mean, they have to go and settle these land.
They need to be extremely armed outside of the flow of the monopoly of violence the state possesses.
They're not technically in the military.
They have to get a lot of weapons.
They need training.
And then they build, you know, enormous infrastructure, all kinds of apartment buildings and land tracts.
It takes billions and billions of dollars to just keep stealing more and more Palestinian land and settling it.
Where does this funding come from?
It comes from the Israeli taxpayers, frankly.
I mean, a disproportionate amount of the tax revenue in Israel goes to support the settlements and the illegal outposts, too.
An illegal outpost is basically just a settlement that is not even authorized by Israel.
So the settlements are illegal under international law.
The outposts are illegal under Israeli law, too.
There's just billions and billions of dollars pouring into it to build highways, to build settlements, to arm the settlers.
And, you know, they don't hide it.
I mean, This is well known in Israel that perhaps the most consistent and well-funded project in Israel in the last number of years has been the settlement project.
And it's also, frankly, a real estate venture.
There's lots of land there.
They have a really effective system down for chasing the Palestinians off their land.
It's systematic.
I think a lot of the coverage of what you see, certainly in the mainstream press about the settlers, makes it seem as though they're these sort of rogue gangs, you know, attacking Palestinians.
But it's actually, it's very planned and coordinated and systematic.
And they are, you know, they're doing a good job based on what they're trying to do of stealing land.
And there's just so much institutional, political, financial momentum working in their favor right now, even with this like sort of sham issue of a formal annexation that it's really hard to see what is going to change that's going to slow down this movement, which is really hell-bent on ethnically cleansing the whole territory.
There's this, there's been this debate.
Actually, before I ask you about that, let me ask you about this idea of a two-state solution, because you were referring earlier to the preference you have for the candor of Israeli settlers, even though their ideas are repellent.
It's actually better to have them clearly express it than the liberal Zionists and say Tel Aviv that pretends to support a certain result that is in fact extremely not just improbable, but probably impossible at this point.
And one of those is a two-state solution, which has core to have been how Western Israel, Western supporters of Israel have justified to themselves how they can continue to support Israel in the wake of all these abuses, which is, oh no, don't worry.
Our dream, what we're working for, the thing we favor is two states living in peace side by side, et cetera, et cetera.
And the idea of a two-state solution, obviously, was that the Palestinian state would be composed of Gaza and the West Bank and some way of making them contiguous.
And the reason the U.S. government has been opposed to expansion of settlement is because the more settlements expand, the more impossible a two-state solution becomes because there's not enough land to form a contiguous Palestinian state.
Where are we in terms of that?
In other words, if the Israeli government wanted to enter an agreement for a two-state solution, and now it was basically said that's no longer the position of the Israeli government, but let's assume a world where the Israeli government wants to.
How would they even go about doing that given these expanded settlements?
I like to compare it to imagining the world once we eliminate fossil fuels and we have a fully green economy.
I mean, it's just practically speaking, you know, we're so far gone from the Palestinians having anything that even resembles a state.
I mean, at the moment, in the West Bank, they are essentially living in Bantustans, which are surrounded by Israeli settlements.
And like I said, they're just growing and growing and growing, and there's nothing stopping them.
So in theory, if the Israeli government decided we're going to create a true Palestinian state, not a state in name and some sort of theoretical idea of it, a true state with borders, it would require getting about 500,000 to 750,000 settlers out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
That would require a civil war, to say the least.
Meaning that if the Israeli government ordered the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to leave in order to fulfill their commitments to create a two-state solution, those settlers would not go.
They would fight the IDF, fight the Israeli government violently to the death in order not to leave.
Absolutely.
And they're very open about this.
I mean, they will die before they leave their settlements and a lot of them will die before they even stop stealing more land.
So I mean, I think the word settler is a bit of a misnomer because you sort of imagine these like rugged guys out on the trail settling new land.
But I mean, a lot of the settlements are basically large cities that have been getting built for decades and decades to say nothing of the fact that they're not.
I bought by guys from like New Jersey and Brooklyn.
In a lot of cases, yeah, New Jersey, Brooklyn, I mean, all over Europe.
When I went to a settlement last year, my guide was basically like a hipster from the Czech Republic.
So like many, many, many of them are not Israeli.
They do aliyah, which means they're just basically exercising their Jewish birthright to build a home there.
And they're exceptionally well armed.
I mean, that's the main thing.
Like, you know, they will go down fighting if they're able to go down at all.
Now, all that said, if there was some sort of a civil war, it's hard to imagine much of the IDF not being on the side of the settlers.
So even just imagining this world where there is an effort to get them out requires like suspending an understanding of the actual situation there.
So on a practical level, on a political level, on a financial level, it's just completely outrageous to imagine it.
The last thing I'll just say about it is that Smocherich, when he talks about his fulfilling his dreams of ethnically cleansing the West Bank, he refers to the changes he's made as altering the DNA of the system.
In other words, he is very aware that he's not always going to be in a leadership position in government.
There may be a left-wing government at some point.
He is fundamentally changing the way the territory is governed, the infrastructure itself, the demographics of the West Bank to make it permanent.
So it's just, I don't know how, again, to me, it's like imagining just a fantasy world that I can't see how it could possibly happen.
Yeah, so we're talking kind of at a high level of abstraction and geopolitics and the like.
And I think it's important to create that context.
And I want to talk to you about the specific kinds of sadism and violence and just utterly, you know, sort of reckless lawlessness that you saw in some specific incidents, but incidents.
But before we get to that, I just want to ask one more question on this kind of political level, which is, as you undoubtedly know, you know, six weeks ago, Trump in the Oval Office was asked about annexation of the West Bank.
His U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, doesn't even call it the West Bank, calls it Judean Samaria.
So does Ron DeSantis.
So do so many people who are associated with the Trump movement, who are the most subservient loyalists of Israel.
And Huckabee basically said, you know, for months, I have no problem with Israel annexing the West Bank.
Trump clearly has a project where he cares a great deal about the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Jordanians.
And they don't really care, I don't think, about Palestinians either, but they feel like it's a threat to their rule if the Israelis officially or explicitly annex the West Bank and Trump cares about them.
And so Trump said the Israelis are not going to annex the West Bank, period.
And then when J.D. Vance was in Israel a couple of weeks ago to try and maintain and fortify the ceasefire, the Knesset humiliated him as they love to do by passing a pro-annexation resolution.
He said, oh, it was a slap in the face.
But of course, you know, the U.S. didn't do anything.
But he reiterated that the position of the Trump administration is no annexation.
Has there been any impact at all in terms of the activities of the settler movement and the IDF that's backing them in the West Bank as a result of those pronouncements?
No, no.
It's really, I mean, a formal annexation would be 90% symbolic.
I mean, there are some sort of material changes.
I mean, the big, actually really thorny question, which is why a lot of people think that Nanyahu might not actually want to annex the West Bank, is that if you're annexing a territory, what you're saying is this is now part of our country.
So that's another 3 million Palestinian citizens part of Israel.
You know, again, the demographics are to move away from a Jewish state.
So, you know, this sort of de facto annexation where you are bringing all the laws of Israel into the West Bank, where you are, you know, chipping away at any sort of ostensible governance capabilities that the Palestinian Authority still has.
I mean, this is all doing the real work that annexation would do.
In terms of the formal declaration of it, I mean, as you said, these Arab countries, Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, my interpretation of it is that it's a similar thing where they know that in order to sort of maintain legitimacy with their own populations, they can't allow a formal annexation, even though they don't actually care about the Palestinian people, which is why they do nothing to stop the de facto annexation.
So, you know, that's why the UAE twice now has basically drawn a red line and said, if they formally annex the West Bank, we will withdraw from the Abraham Accords, which of course is Trump's like crown jewel foreign policy achievement from his last term.
So at the end of the day, this question of formal annexation, I guess it has a lot of sort of diplomatic, symbolic value to people like Trump and, you know, the princes and the Gulf and the settlers too, in some cases, who just really want to be recognized.
But on the level of what's actually happening on the ground, it means virtually nothing.
Yeah.
And as you say and kind of suggest, you know, on some level, maybe Israel critics ought to root for explicit annexation precisely because that gives up the game.
Then those people in the West Bank become no longer occupied residents of an occupied land, but citizens of Israel by definition.
And in order for Israel to maintain this propagandistic claim, oh, it's the only democracy in the Middle East and et cetera, et cetera, they would have to give full voting rights to those people who are now citizens inside of Israel or just admit that they're an apartheid regime.
I actually wanted to ask you about that word apartheid.
You referred earlier to Tibetan stands and this kind of South African imagery.
It's so bizarre to me that if you raise the word apartheid in a Western context applied to Israel's treatment of the West Bank, it's actually deemed anti-Semitic.
It's long been taboo, even though Israeli officials openly say that that is basically either where they're headed or have already arrived.
I went to South Africa last year, maybe the end of 2023.
I took my kids there and we spent a lot of time.
You can go and sort of see the preserved remnants of apartheid.
There's all kinds of not like tourist museums, but real museums where the remnants of apartheid are there.
And if you go there, you will not only understand why apartheid applies entirely and fully to the situation in the West Bank, but why South African leaders themselves, including Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, and more modern day ones as well, insist that that word apartheid applies to the West Bank.
And in fact, their apartheid on some levels is even worse than what South Africa endured.
Can you talk about, having spent so much time there, why that word is so obviously not just appropriate, but the only word to use for the situation?
To tell you the truth, I don't even understand the argument against using that word.
I mean, quite literally, there is a different set of laws for the Palestinians versus the Jews in the West Bank.
There's a different criminal justice system.
There are different roads.
I mean, I guess that there's a sort of academic argument against using the word genocide for Gaza, which I certainly don't agree with.
But at least I can understand that argument.
In this case, I don't even know how you would argue that it's not apartheid.
I mean, two days ago, I was in military court.
I was not on trial, fortunately, but I was there to report on a 16-year-old Palestinian-American teenager who has been accused of throwing rocks.
He's in a military court.
A settler who was arrested for throwing rocks, which maybe happens once in a blue moon, they'd be going to a civil court.
So it is just like fundamentally different.
And this is not even getting into all the little intricate ways that Israel controls everything.
Like just the issue of water, for example.
I mean, they are siphoning, Israel is siphoning the water out of the Jordan, from the Jordan River and from other bodies of water away from Palestinian villages straight into the settlements.
So everything is two classes.
And obviously the Jewish settlers are the higher class.
So it's like, it's kind of silly.
I mean, if somebody wants to say, well, it's a temporary occupation.
So it's not actually apartheid, like fine.
I guess that maybe, again, there's a technical argument there, but it's only 60 years ago.
It's been almost 60 years now.
So I just don't, it's not an argument I'm even able to really understand the other side of it.
It's very clearly apartheid.
I mean, just full stop.
Now, let me ask you about a couple of specific incidents that not only did you witness, but that you were involved in while you were there.
And several of these viralized for very good reasons.
I mean, you just captured on video things that were absolutely horrific.
So I think we have the first one to show, just for those people who haven't seen it.
Yeah, let's go ahead and play that.
Hey, hey, press!
Press!
American press!
I've seen that several times and every time I get enraged by it and I'll tell you why and then I want you to tell the audience and me what exactly what happened there but But you're identifying yourself as an American, as American press, meaning you're a citizen of the country that finances these people's military, that finances and subsidizes their society, that deploys our military to protect them when they start new wars.
That a lot of the funding to the settlement movement, it does come from the Israeli government.
A lot of it comes from the United States.
It's legal for some reason, even though the U.S. government is opposed to the settlement movement.
We allow our citizens to send money to these settler organizations.
And you would think that if you identify yourself as an American, given the dependence of these people on our country and on the work that Americans do, that would have some impact in stopping them from trying to kill you.
And yet there obviously had none.
What happened there?
How did that whole thing get started?
And what did it show?
It actually is even worse than that, Glenn, because I was in Termos, Iowa, which is one of the handful of basically American villages in the West Bank.
So the population there is something like 80% American citizens who have Palestinian roots, of course, and go back and forth.
And so most of the people in that town, including the farmer who I spent the day with, who was attacked alongside with me, are American citizens, are entitled to all the same protections as I am.
And suffice it to say, they're getting no protection whatsoever.
They're not getting any response from the embassy.
And so it's just completely meaningless, their blue passport.
And, you know, I want to be clear that like being American shouldn't entitle me to, you know, be safer or more secure when I'm there.
But just again, on a technical level, it should entitle me to some protection by my embassy.
And, you know, perhaps the soldiers whose guns I've paid for maybe could consider not killing me with them, but it doesn't.
And, you know, in that particular incident, which I should say is one of like three or four times in three weeks that I had to run for my life during the olive harvest season, we were trapped in the olive fields of Termas Aya.
On one side, there was a group of settlers who would not let us pass.
And on the other side, there was a group of IDF soldiers.
So what happened was we were trying to get out.
We were trying to get back to the village after spending some time in the olive fields.
I got out of the car because my friend Yasser, who was driving, did not feel comfortable driving towards the military Jeep because that would be a good way for us both to get shot and killed.
So I got out of the car and I raised my hands and I shouted that I was an American and that we needed help getting out.
The soldiers all aimed their guns at me.
They questioned me.
And then finally, I convinced them that, you know, we really just need to go home and we need help.
We need safe passage because there's settlers, armed settlers who are not letting us through.
So the soldiers agree finally.
They say, get back in the car and drive up.
We'll let you through.
So we do that.
As soon as we get up to them, we discover that also on this side, there's a settler who has a gun and he's talking on the phone.
And so I ask them, I say, are you going to help us get by these guys?
And they say, yes, yes, just wait.
We'll move them and then you can go.
The soldiers then get in the jeep and speed away, leave us in the dust with the armed settler.
What happened next was that actually that settler on his ATV drove away after talking on the phone.
And so for a minute, we thought maybe we were in the clear.
There was a Palestinian car up there that had been damaged by them.
Their tires were slashed.
The window was smashed.
So I got out of the car to try to help push them so that they could get to this top of this hill and then basically roll their car back down to the village.
And within 30 seconds of doing that, a mob of dozens and dozens, if not over 100 settlers wearing masks, carrying not just like sticks, but real clubs that were clearly built as weapons started chasing after me and throwing stones.
And it took me a minute to even realize that it was a full-on ambush.
When I turned around and saw the size of the crowd, I mean, look, like about two months ago, a Palestinian American named Seifola Mousselet was beaten to death by a lynch mob of settlers a couple kilometers away.
So these guys are not playing around.
And so, yeah, I ran for my life and I made it back into Yasser's car.
They smashed through our windshield.
They, you know, kept on stoning our car.
And then there's this video which, you know, let me stop you there because we're going to show that.
But no, I just want to underscore here that it is the official position of the United States government and the entire world that this is not Israeli land.
This is Palestinian land, that the occupation by the Israeli military for 60 years now is illegal, that the settler movement itself is illegal.
Some of these settler leaders are actually sanctioned.
And this is everyday life for people who live not in Israel, but in the West Bank, which is always intended to be part of Palestine.
And they are attacked by this mob of psychotics, of armed psychotics who have always been considered lawless by the entire world, even by Israel.
But Israel has now changed so much that they not only are tolerated, but have the explicit backing of ministers inside the government and the IDF.
And what you experienced, as harrowing as it obviously is, and enraging as it obviously is, is what Palestinians in the West Bank increasingly are experiencing, you know, pretty much regularly now, to say nothing of what's going on in Gaza, which is, you know, a full-on genocide.
All right.
So you get in the car and then you're driving and then you're filming, obviously.
And then I think we have this next video.
Oh, okay.
We don't have the video.
So the video is basically, as I recall it, and maybe we can edit it in, but we'll see.
Or link to it.
But essentially, you are driving on the road and you see an old woman wearing a, I guess, a hijab.
I'm not really sure.
And she's picking olives from a tree, right?
And she gets attacked by one of these young, big settlers wielding a club.
Can you just set that scene and talk about what it is that happened?
Oh, actually, we do have it.
We have, are these?
Yeah, those are the images.
Yeah, those are still images.
There you see that guy who's an Israeli settler wearing a mask, exactly as you described, carrying a club, and he's raising it to bash an old woman's head in.
And she ends up on the ground and ends up in the hospital with injuries that could have been fatal or permanent.
So just tell us what happened there.
So picking up right where I left off, I'm running for my life and I reach Yasser's car, which is basically at the bottom of this big hill.
I get into the car, but we're not moving because at this point, there's now a log jam of Palestinian vehicles trying to get out because people have under people now knew there was an attack.
So we're not moving.
And basically, you know, the guy in that photo with the club was the leader of their pack.
I don't mean that literally.
I mean, I don't know, you know, if he has a leadership position, but he was the one in the front chasing me down.
And so as soon as I get into the car, he smashes through our rear windshield with his club.
He just keeps hitting it five or six times.
And at that point, again, we were stuck and also huge stones are raining down on us.
I pretty much thought he's going to drag us out of the car.
And, you know, this, this could be really bad.
And then he runs up along the side of the car.
And that's when we see this woman up ahead.
And I mean, after the event, Yasser and I have talked about it a lot.
And both of us actually, for all the terrible things we've seen settlers do, for all the sort of uninhibited violence, we both thought he's not going to hit this woman.
There's no way.
You know, what kind of a psychopath beats a defenseless older woman standing by herself?
What was she doing?
What was she doing?
She was, like you said, she was picking olives.
I mean, she was standing by herself under that tree.
I think probably in the moments before she realized what was happening.
And so she was just standing there completely defenseless by herself.
And she couldn't run.
I mean, again, you know, she's an older woman and this guy was obviously young and fit.
And the thing that like disturbs me so much is that he hit her once and I watched her go completely limp.
She was knocked out cold from the first hit.
And then he hit her twice more with the club when she was unconscious on the ground.
And Frankly, it's a miracle she survived.
But I just like, to me, that is the image of not just the settler movement, but that's sort of what Zionism is right now, in my opinion.
It is a completely defenseless person being unilaterally attacked by somebody who's armed and them standing over them.
And so, you know, she went into the, she was in the ICU for two days with a brain hemorrhage.
She's out now.
I actually got to meet her a couple of days ago and she is really banged up and is going to have a long road to recovery, but she was able to smile a little bit and she, I think, started to understand that she's become sort of an icon or a symbol for resilience.
But yeah, I mean, just to like after that attack, it kept going for a couple minutes because remember, there's this whole mob behind them.
So they are, I end up getting out of the car and helping that woman with two other guys.
I think two members of her family get into a car and get her to the hospital.
But this went on for several minutes.
And, you know, I don't have a smoking gun that the IDF coordinated directly with this mob.
But in the most generous reading, generous to them, which is not the one that I would tend to give, but in the most generous reading, we asked them for safe passage.
They said they would provide it.
They then left us alone with an armed settler who this is another whole story, but he's known as the leader of the local outposts and he's infamously violent.
And then within five minutes, this, you know, huge mob attacks us.
It's incredibly loud.
There's literally they set several cars on fire.
There's cars blowing up.
There's a Palestinian fire truck.
So it's incredibly loud.
And the IDF never came back.
They then ended up saying to some news outlets that, you know, in their response to these claims that they arrived at the scene and dispersed the confrontation.
This is just a categorical lie.
It's just from Holklin.
They're trying to claim the IDF makes claims in their own defense that sometimes aren't true.
Well, I think it's like important to make this point because everybody, you know, I think for the most part, people know that the IDF, you know, should not really be trusted.
But, you know, sometimes maybe they're stretching the truth or they're pushing the truth.
In this case, it's just categorically untrue that they showed up after.
I was there for an hour and they never came back.
And so again, in this generous reading, the soldiers who were right there did not hear this, what had become a war zone right there.
And so it just beggars belief.
And look, there's even more to the story that I haven't been able to share yet about, you know, after this, the settler with the gun who is the leader of the outpost showed up to the crime scene with the police who were investigating it the next day, was chatting with them the whole time.
He has then, since then, in the days after, been roaming the olive groves with the IDF.
So I mean, it's just like, it's so brazen.
Oh, wait, are you saying that he bashed an old woman's head in to the point where she almost died with no provocation, but he didn't end up in prison, but instead was walking free alongside the IDF?
Not quite, because I'm talking about not that guy, but the guy who was known to the people.
Oh, the leader of the settlement, the guy who was with the IDF talking on the phone right before the attack.
This guy is a known figure, both among the Israeli authorities and certainly everybody in Termasiah knows him because he's, you know, he's a terrorist.
He's out there every single day terrorizing them.
And, you know, I'll just say this, Glenn, like I can't go into too much detail about this, but some actually very high level people in the Israeli security apparatus reached out to me and I wasn't sure if I should talk to them.
I spoke to the people in Termasia.
I spoke to some human rights lawyers in Israel and they all actually said, you should talk to them because at the very least, there needs to be documentation.
And without going into too much detail, I'll just say that I told them right off the bat that I didn't believe them, that they were serious about the investigation because I know that settlers are never, you know, rarely, if ever, charged.
And I told them the details about the IDF.
And these guys, you know, really, really wanted to convince me that they were going to prove me wrong.
So what I say to that is if this was an incident where a mob of Palestinians chased down a group of Jews, by the way, I'm Jewish, so I was technically chased down by other Jews.
But if it was a group of Palestinians, if it was a Palestinian who clubbed an elderly woman, within an hour, within minutes, every single Palestinian village within a 20 kilometer radius would be surrounded by soldiers, would be gated.
People would be getting dragged out of their homes and frog marched and beaten and tortured and detained.
And they would have arrested hundreds, if not thousands of people to find the people who were responsible for it.
So they are now claiming that they're doing an investigation.
This security official told me it's the most serious investigation into settler terrorism that they've ever done in this region.
And to that, I just say like, okay, prove me wrong.
But at the very least, again, going back to that idea of like two tiers, they're certainly not dealing with this with the same sort of brutality and urgency that they would if it was the other way around.
Yeah, I mean, they've had cases where Israeli settlers have just shot and killed Palestinians who live there with no provocation.
And sometimes it's the Palestinians who end up getting arrested by the IDF and the shooter walks free.
So, you know, I mean, there's cases that are so extreme.
I do, you know, it is true that some of these guys, these Israeli settlers, are such psychopaths that I do think even the Israeli authorities kind of are fearful of them or dislike them.
Even my cockaby a few months ago, when one particularly gruesome act of Israeli settler violence was captured on video, called it terrorism, you know, called this settler violence terrorism.
So you know how extreme it has to be for that to happen.
Let me ask you the last question.
You know, I've seen videos before, I'm sure we've all seen them of like teenage fights where somebody ends up on the ground and they continue to kick him even though he's unconscious.
And now you see it sometimes with, you know, holy guns after soccer matches where everybody's drunk and that kind of just mob violence that just looks inhuman.
But, you know, in one case, they're adolescents.
In the other case, they're extremely inebriated and part of this crowd.
But, you know, I understand violence.
I understand the impulse of it.
But to be able to club a woman over the head and then watch her fall to the ground limp and unconscious and then still beat her requires kind of a level of inhumane sickness that is hard for me to comprehend.
And I'm wondering if you in your, you know, based on everything you've seen by being there, can describe to me what the Israeli mindset is of Palestinians that would permit this kind of behavior.
And I don't, I, again, of course, I'm not painting with too round of a bush.
It's not a monolith, as you said, but like, what is the prevailing sentiment toward Palestinians that either causes people to do this or allows the country and the government and most of society to tolerate it?
Yeah, I mean, you know, that was the most just conspicuously gruesome, heinous physical attack I've seen.
But every single day, there is either actual violence or some form of, you know, psychological torture or like sabotaging of their basic civic functions that demonstrate, I just think that they really don't consider Palestinians to be humans.
I think they consider them to be closer to insects, except like, you know, they will call them terrorists.
And so they, I mean, just like in the village that I think you were referring to, Glenn, where a settler shot a Palestinian dead a couple months ago, it's a village called Umel Hair.
And just, you know, that event, I think, was one of the rare instances of settler violence that sort of broke through into the mainstream and it was covered a little bit.
That village about three days ago was given demolition orders by the IDF for almost the entire village.
And this is a, you know, there's a couple hundred people that live there.
There are so many children.
These are Bedouin shepherds.
There's no armed resistance whatsoever there.
And I mean, I stayed there for a couple of days and I watched the settlers from the outpost next door and I watched the soldiers and I just see like they just they just have no empathy whatsoever.
They really think of them as less than human and that's what enables them to both kill them and you know ruin their lives.
And one of the, I mean, one of the most disturbing things that I have seen is the way these little children, these Palestinian children watch what's happening in many cases by, you know, settlers who are wearing kippahs and they're, you know, also chanting Hebrew prayers in many cases.
And then they have huge machine guns swung over their shoulders and they are destroying the village's property.
And it's just, I don't know how those settlers look at these kids and, you know, don't see any humanity.
I mean, in that same village, I watched a minivan driven by a woman, a settler, who had a full car of children, settler children, drive through the middle of this village at 60 miles an hour, a crowded street with Palestinian kids playing.
And I remember just thinking, like, what kind of a mom in this world would drive 60 miles an hour through a street with children playing on it?
Like, how much do you have to dehumanize them to think that that is the right thing to do?
So it really is just everywhere you look, you see proof that they just, they think of Palestinians as less than human.
For some of them, it means actually, you know, being extremely violent.
In other cases, it's just shrugging their shoulders and, you know, demolishing their villages.
And it's, it's really, it's really just upsetting to see on a human level.
Yeah, it's monstrous.
It's absolutely monstrous.
All right.
Well, Jasper, I think the work you're doing is crucial.
There's way too little reporting about the abuse in the West Bank.
It's courageous reporting.
You do it so well.
For people who want to follow your work and also support it, and I hope as many of you who can will do that, you can do so at Jasper Substack, which is Infinite Jazz.
We have the Substack there on the screen.
We'll put the link as well below the video in the show notes.
So please check out Jasper's work and support it however you can.
And really appreciate the time you took to come on and talk to us about it.
We'll definitely continue to follow your work.
We'd love to talk to you again.
Yeah.
And Glenn, can I just say, you know, I have admired your work for decades, really.
So it's a real honor to hear you talk about my work in this way.
So thanks for having me on.
Thank you.
Keep up the great work.
Talk to you soon.
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All right, it's the time of our show when we do our Q&A.
We try and do that every Friday night.
I thought that interview was very important.
I thought it was great as well.
So I think that was really worth devoting the time.
So I'll try and get to as many of these as we can.
These are questions submitted throughout the week by members of our locals community.
The first one is from Noah Mendex.
I should say I haven't seen these questions at all.
I don't didn't participate in the selection of them.
I try not to see them.
Sometimes I just know in general what they are, but it's often more fun when I don't.
But sometimes it has some surprises as well.
So let's see what we have in store for us this evening.
Glenn, you are rightly very critical of conventional politics and you understand and critique the corrupting influence of mega corporation lobby groups and so on.
And yet, you're also very critical and even dismissive of radical or revolutionary types who would seek to radically change these corrupt systems.
So what do you, what do you see, do you see as the path forward for positive and productive change?
I'm not entirely sure what the question means when it indicates that I'm quote very critical or even dismissive of radical or revolutionary types who would seek to radically change those corrupt systems.
I wish I had some more specificity about who specifically or what specifically you believe I've been critical or dismissive of.
I think in general, the type of politics to which I've been most attracted over the past, let's call it decade or more, it's one of the reasons why I've been so contemptuous of both the Democratic and Republican Party, of two state of the two-party solution,
of the constant back and forth between the establishment wing of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, or people who see politics exclusively through that prism is precisely because I don't think that a politics that is designed to maintain the fundamentals of the status quo and just kind of reform it on the margins is one that has any real promise because the system is so rotted from the inside.
And if you look at the kind of political movements that have interested me most, whether it's Bernie's 2016 campaign, even Obama's 2008 campaign, I know these things ended up being something different, but Trump's 2016 campaign, Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labor Party, other politicians throughout Europe like Sarah Wagenkoch in Germany.
These tend to be, at least in terms of how they're presented, very anti-establishment movements.
They're based on the idea that we cannot preserve the fundamentals of the status quo.
Again, I understand that many, if not most, of those examples I just gave are not people who ended up following through on those aspirations, but I'm just talking about the kind of thing that attracts me are people whose condemnation is not of one party or the other, but of the system itself, of the establishment itself, of the dogma and workings of the status quo and of establishment centers of power.
And anybody who I don't perceive as being outside of that, you can call it radical, even revolutionary if you want.
My guess is you may have different definitions of that word than I do.
But that has been the thing that interests me most.
And when I look at movements now, I mean, even the candidacies of like Zaran Mandani or Grant Planner, which I know I've talked about before, not going to fulfill those promises either for so many reasons, even if they succeed.
Or the kind of politicians on the right who I find most interesting, like Thomas Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even more anti-establishment ones than that.
These are generally people who have either begun understanding from the start or have come to understand that preservation of the status quo is not enough.
And just please don't say, oh, haha, Barack Obama, Marjorie Taylor Greene, these are not revolutionary radical figures.
What I'm saying is that the orientation that I require to be even remotely interested, minimally interested in a political figure or a political movement is some sort of, at least rhetorical premise that radical change is required, that only energy and movement from the outside of the establishment into the establishment to dismantle it and rebuild something else is the only thing that interests me or is worthwhile.
So without further examples, it's hard for me to address.
I mean, I have been critical of movements like Antifa, other kind of movements that I regard as kind of more posing or posturing.
I don't have a lot of patience for that if I don't think it's about a serious political movement, if it's more just nihilism or one of the things I can't stand are things that posture as radicalism, but in reality are there to lure people in and direct them to one of the two parties.
That's obviously my critique of AOC and Bernie Sanders or people like Hassan Piker who are supposed to believe like he's communist and just so hardcore radical and revolutionary.
And yet every two years he encourages people to go for the vote for the Democratic Party.
That's precisely because I don't think that kind of politics will ever get you anywhere.
It's more the politics that is anti-establishment.
Now, what that means requires a lot of discussion.
Who's including that, who isn't, who's only saying that rhetorically, as opposed to following through.
Those are all very valid questions.
But I do think in general, that's the kind of politics that most interests me.
All right.
Olson Eric asks, hey, Glenn, would love to hear you discuss Javier Malay, whether he's truly anti-establishment or corrupt grifter, Argentina, and how it is somehow America first to bail their government out with $40 billion.
It's a good question.
I'm very skeptical of these right-wing figures who posture as anti-establishment but have the most conventional view of foreign policy and the global order.
This woman who just won the Nobel Peace Prize in Venezuela says the first thing she's going to do, she said this after she called Ben Nanyau, is move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem.
It's like, I'm going to now govern Venezuela and that's the first thing I'm going to do.
Javier Malay wraps himself in the Israeli flag.
Even the Bolsonaro movement in Brazil does the same.
So does Garrett Wielders in the Netherlands who just lost in an election because he's just alienated a lot of people?
I generally avoid, and we talk about this all the time with my team here, my colleagues, I avoid covering hardcore economic questions and debates because I don't feel like I have enough of a command of macroeconomic dynamics to be able to meaningfully comment.
If I'm going to comment on the bailout that the United States did of Argentina, I'm going to have somebody on who has expert level knowledge of that simply because I know both arguments.
A lot of people say it's not America First, that Trump wanted to bail out Malay because he wants the conservative movement to win an election.
And if he tells Argentines, if you vote for Malay, I'll save your economy.
And if you don't, I won't.
That's the kind of interference that helps Malay.
And he just won an election, actually had a very significant victory, more so than even, I think, their best case scenario.
And a lot of people say, oh, that's not America First.
Why are you giving money to Argentina?
And then others like Scott Benson say, no, actually, those weren't bailouts.
Those were currency swaps.
We ended up making money on it because the election success of Malay caused an increase in the market.
Other people say it's a form of corruption because Scott Benson has a lot of financier friends, which of course he does as a billionaire, who are heavily invested in the Argentine economy.
And they gave that $20 billion and then $40 billion in order to prevent those people from suffering massive losses.
I follow these debates.
I have an understanding of them, but I really try hard, as I've talked before, not to cover issues unless I have some kind of close to expert level understanding of something, something I've really studied and understood for so long.
And economics tends to be an issue that I avoid.
So I can pick up two extremely well-credentialed articles on the effects of Malay's libertarianism in Argentina and his economic policies, and whether it's ruining the Argentina economy or saving it.
And I can decide for myself which seems more compelling, but I wouldn't ask you to take your time to hear my analysis of that unless I have enough of a kind of, unless I'm steeped enough into it.
But there are a lot of corruption scandals surrounding Malay and his wife.
Those seem serious to me.
There's also, by the way, corruption scandals surrounding Trump and his investment in crypto and his pardoning or commuting the sentence of the founder of Binance, the crypto exchange, that we're going to talk about next week and delve into next week.
Those are things that, again, that's the kind of things that serve attention for sure.
I'm not necessarily the best person to do it, but I think it needs attention and journalistic understanding analysis.
And so I've been doing a lot of work to get that.
We're going to have people on the show to talk about it.
That kind of corruption, I think, is serious, but it's separate from the question of whether their policies are actually benefiting the country.
And when it comes to Malay and Argentina and the Argentine economy, obviously I live in a country that borders Argentina in Brazil.
And so I have some greater attention that I pay to it because of that, but not enough yet, at least, to certainly do a segment on my own or talk about it and just don't pine on it now.
But we'll probably have people on who are better qualified to do that for us.
All right, next question.
Kay Kotwas.
Hey, Glenn, have you noticed that most conservative commentators, even independent ones like Tucker Carlson, continually absolve Trump of any responsibility?
Why is every broken promise always blamed on the people around him?
Is Trump the quote great leader or a child with no agency?
Now, I think what you're referring to here is the fact that the is the fact that a lot of people who critique the Trump administration will do so by say blaming Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or neocons in the White House or the government as though Trump is this easily manipulated,
brainless, mindless figure who deserves credit when he does good things, but when he does bad things, the blame shouldn't get put directly on him.
And I do think that Tucker does that sometimes.
My belief in the case of Tucker, and I don't want to speak for him.
I've never talked to him specifically about this, so this is purely my speculation, is that Tucker has influence in the Trump White House.
And I believe he uses that influence for the good.
He tried to make sure that the U.S. didn't get involved in a extended regime change war in Iran, was also against the bombing itself of Iran, which did happen, but it was much more limited than it could have been.
And he campaigned for Trump.
Tucker did.
He was with Trump.
Trump has, on the few occasions, Tucker did criticize him, or even didn't even criticize Trump, just criticized policy like bombing Iran.
Trump being Trump lashed out at Tucker, mocked him, said he was a loser or something like that.
Doesn't even have a show on Fox anymore.
So I don't know how much, how fruitful that strategy is, but I understand that strategy.
But absent that, I'm not justifying it, I'm just explaining that.
But absent that, I do think there's a tendency because people want to believe in Trump and want, you know, there's all these different versions of Trump that have appeared.
People want to believe that the version they want is the real one.
And so when Trump violates the principles that people believed he had promised to embrace and the policies and direction he promised to go in, I think there's a tendency to say, oh, it's not, that's not Trump doing that.
That's Mark Orubio manipulating him or this sector or that sector.
And it may be true.
I'm sure there are people manipulating Trump.
Trump is not the hardest person to manipulate.
He's manipulated with flattery.
I'll just give you one example that I think illustrates how Trump functions.
There was this clip in 2024, in the 2024 election, when he was speaking before a Republican Jewish conference.
Miriam Adelson was there.
She was the one who was sponsoring it.
She was sitting in the front row.
You know, Trump performed for her.
He needed that money to win.
And remember, Trump needed to win the 2024 election to stay out of prison.
Had he lost the election, I believe the Democrats would have imprisoned him for life without question.
They were certainly trying to.
So he was kind of, I would say, I don't know about desperate, but eager to willing to do things that he might not have otherwise done to get the money that he needed, including for Mary Middleseen.
And Trump was going on and on about how Miriam Adelson and her husband Sheldon would come into the White House and always demand things from Trump about for Israel, and he would always give it to them.
And he said, sometimes I would even give them things that they didn't ask for because they didn't believe it was possible.
Like I gave Israel the Golan Heights.
And he's like, nobody even thought that was possible.
Now, I don't know why the Golan Heights is Trump's to give to Israel.
It's a disputed territory.
It really is not Israel's.
But the U.S. government took the position that Israel has autonomy over the Golden Heights, sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
And Trump said, this is not my description.
This is what Trump said.
This is how we came to the decision.
He said he didn't really even know what the Golan Heights was, the Golan Heights was.
He called David Friedman, which was his U.S. ambassador to Israel, fanatical supporter of Israel, massive Zionist.
And he said, he called him and he's like, give me the five-minute history of the Golan Heights and why it belongs to Israel.
So of course, David Friedman said, yeah, it belongs to Israel.
And then Trump said, all right, the Golan Heights is Israel's.
That's Trump's version of how he did that.
And I believe that's how he did it.
So he is manipulated by people.
He doesn't have an in-depth knowledge of many things.
And he relies on people who he trusts to guide him and orient him.
And that is often how he makes decisions.
But at the end of the day, Trump is the actor responsible for making those decisions.
And if he makes bad decisions, you can certainly analyze who influenced him in a negative way.
And I think the big driver behind the regime change war in Venezuela is Marco Rubio for reasons I've said, including the fact that his family comes from that region.
They want a regime to be in Cuba and Venezuela.
They want to fix that region because they come from there.
But also, at the end of the day, Trump is the president and only he decides.
And if he decides, he's responsible, even if other people are influencing him.
All right, Cassetter, Cassiser, Cassish TR, Cassish TR.
As you pointed out, Senator John Corner recently said, what good are civil liberties if you're dead?
As if freedom becomes optional when the state says security is at risk.
You've always argued the opposite, namely that civil liberties are the core of any free society, especially in moments of fear.
But if America's democratic legitimacy truly collapsed, if the social contract broke and the government no longer ruled with the consent of the governed, where does that moral duty fall?
Is life under a dictatorship still worth preserving?
Or does that moment, or does that become the moment when defending legitimacy, autonomy, and self-determination requires more than words, even force?
And personally, Glenn, is there a point where you would take up arms to defend those principles you've spent your life fighting for?
Now, I think unless you've taken up arms before to defend a cause or a place or an idea that you believe in, I think it's kind of presumptuous to say, oh yeah, I would absolutely do so.
I don't think anybody can say for sure they would until they've done that.
I do know I've taken risks, serious risks, in defense of things I believed in, risked going to prison, came very close a couple of times because of journalism I've done, and risked other things as well in my career in order to fight for my cause.
So I'd like to think that I would do whatever is necessary to fight for a value that I consider crucial, which is liberty, living under in a free society, in the event that whatever doing what is necessary entailed.
But you can't really, it's very kind of self-serving to say, oh yeah, I would go fight in the streets with arms until you go do it.
You don't really know.
But I do think that, of course, life is not the overarching value.
Preserving life for its own sake is not the overarching value, the value that matters most.
If someone were to say to you, hey, you could live 80 years and be miserable, deprived of love, deprived of success, deprived of happiness, or you can live 60 years or 50 years and be surrounded by love and fulfillment and passion and happiness.
I think most people would choose the shorter life, even though it's the shorter life.
It has 20 less years, 30 less years, because it's a life that's fulfilled rather than a longer life that's unfulfilled.
And I don't think it's theoretical to say that people are willing to fight in the streets and even die for a free society or combat tyranny.
I mean, history is filled with examples of people doing exactly that all the time.
It's not a rare event at all.
It's a very common event.
Revolutions and wars against the government, against occupiers, against colonizers, against tyrants.
I mean, history is filled with that.
And it is the ethos in which our country was founded.
I mean, the reason why our country was founded was because the people who were living in the colonies got to the point where the tyranny of the British crown became so oppressive and so intolerable that they picked up arms and risked their lives.
And many of them died in that war to go and fight the most powerful empire on the planet.
And those are the values that are inculcated in us.
This to me is part of the American ethos.
Not saying it's exclusively an American ethos.
I'm just saying these are the things that we imbibe is the idea that we're a free society and this is something you fight for.
And that is why I find it so bizarre when conservatives now, and I'm not saying it's only conservatives.
I've heard many factions say it.
When I hear conservatives saying our ideal model of society is El Salvador, we want to be like Bukhali.
We want to dismantle and renounce all constitutional freedoms.
Want to empower the government to just sweep the streets of anybody they have an little intuition or sight feeling in their tummy is a bad person and throw them into a dungeon for life.
Imprison people who criticize the government, dissidents, not allow free elections, abolish term limits because Bukhali wants to be president for life.
And you could say, oh, Bukhali is popular in El Salvador.
Usually, you know, if you were to say, oh, look, here's an opinion poll saying Russians love Putin, you would say, well, you can't have opinion polls in a authoritarian society because people are afraid to say they don't or the information they're getting is very partial or censored.
And I don't know how El Salvadorans think.
Maybe there are people who want to live in it, who prefer to live in a tyrannical society than to live with a lot of gang violence.
I just don't think I'm that kind of person.
I don't think that's what American culture is about.
I don't think it's what we've learned to think about ourselves.
And I would hope that the number of people who look at El Salvador with envy, look at their growing autocracy and repressive tyranny with desire to live under that.
I hope those people are a minority.
I like to think they are.
But at the same time, I did watch The War on Terror.
And that was very much the prevailing sentiment that many people accepted.
Oh, the scary thing just happened, 9-11 attack.
Unless you want to keep repeating that, unless you want your family to die in that, unless you want to be blown up by Muslim terrorists, you better let us take all these powers that previously weren't thinkable, the Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance and building a prison in the middle of the ocean and putting people there for life without any trial,
arresting people on American soil, putting them in places, putting detainees in underground detention facilities in Eastern Europe that the Red Cross doesn't know about and therefore can't visit so we can treat them however we want, droning people with no scrutiny, with no evidentiary burden, unless you agree to all these things and you better, because if you don't, we can't keep you safe.
A lot of people accepted that calculus and said, yes, I'd rather be safe than free.
John Cornyn, there was another Republican senator too, I'll find out who it was because I wrote about it a lot at the time, said, what good are civil liberties if you're dead?
Meaning, yeah, we're giving up civil liberties for safety, but who cares?
That's what we should be doing.
Even though the founders all said, don't trade freedom for safety and security.
Down that path lies authoritarianism.
And I think that that ethos has really been lost.
And it's obviously something that I try and fight and argue against as much as I can.
If anything, I think that's been the defining value of my journalism.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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