The Fraudulent GOP War Against Tucker and Nick Fuentes; Dick Cheney: Hero of the Resistance; Lindsey Graham's Deranged RJC Comments
Pro-Israel members of the GOP continue to wage war against Tucker Carlson for his interview with Nick Fuentes. Glenn breaks down this dramatic split within the Republican Party. Then: Democrats celebrate the life of Dick Cheney, turning him into a "Resistance" hero. Finally, Glenn reacts to Lindsey Graham's deranged comments at the Republican Jewish Coalition. ------------------------ 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, we are now well into week two of the seemingly endless meltdown within establishment Republican and conservative politics, all over Tucker Carlson's interview of Nick Fuentes.
People are obviously free to have whatever views they want of any or all the figures involved.
But the pretext that the pro-Israel faction of the Republican Party is using to try and expel not just Fuentes, but also Tucker Carlson from acceptable mainstream conservative precincts, namely, oh, this is just about our principled commitment to excluding anyone who expresses racist or bigoted views.
That is so patently deceitful as to be laughable.
But that fraud is necessary because the real point of all of this, which is obviously to destroy anyone questioning or critical of Israel, has to be hidden given how many conservatives, especially young ones, now share those views.
It's about a lot more than Israel, and we're going to take a look at all of that.
Then, former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Monday, as we told you last night.
We're going to do a segment.
We didn't have time.
But the tributes that poured in from virtually every major Democratic Party leader and major large liberal news outlets about Dick Cheney went far beyond just standard condolences that are typically offered when a political leader dies.
In fact, they were so effusive that one would have thought Dick Cheney was one of the most universally beloved and admired political statesmen in American history.
The Democrats and their media allies issued statements of admiration, even veneration for Cheney.
It says a great deal about our political class and our current political dynamic, and we'll take a look at it for that reason.
And then finally, for years, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was vilified by most people in the MAGA movement as the living and breathing embodiment of all things that needed to be purged from Republican politics in the DC swamp.
And now, Senator Graham can hardly contain his glee as he giggles and boasts that the Trump administration is almost entirely aligned with his long-standing agenda.
All while President Trump, who seems to agree, campaigns for Lindsey Graham against an America first primary challenger, Lindsey Graham hasn't changed any of his views.
So what explains what ought to be a bizarre phenomenon?
We'll take a look.
Before we get to all of that, we have a couple of quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
When I learned that Tucker Carlson was going to interview Nick Fuentes on his show, I obviously knew that it was going to be an extremely well-watched interview.
And it certainly has been that, probably, not probably, definitely one of the most watched political interviews of all of 2025.
Just millions and millions and millions of people who have watched it on multiple different platforms.
I also, of course, knew it was going to be controversial.
Both of them, in their own right, each of them is controversial.
They had had a lot of animosity between them.
And so the fact that they were actually going to sit face to face and have some differences that they explored, which they did, but also a lot of common ground, which I knew they had, and would each see that in the other if they actually sat down the way they did.
I knew that was obviously going to create a lot of uproar because among the common ground that they each share is questioning why it is that the United States generally, but also the America First movement specifically, remember it's named America First, seems so continuously and obsessively devoted not to the interest of the American people or to the United States and its interests, but to this foreign country on the other side of the world.
It just is irreconcilable.
And there's been a lot of emergence.
There's been an emergence of a lot of questioning and doubt about that relationship, about Israel itself, not just among young leftists, but among a lot of young conservatives whom Nick Fuentes, as much as anybody, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, you could probably say more than anybody, speaks for and represents.
And Tuck Carlson, being probably the most influential voice in American conservative politics over the last 10 years, outside of, say, Donald Trump, the fact that he too has now become a leading critic of Israel and the U.S. relationship with Israel, the fact that those two got together, obviously was going to create a great deal of consternation among Israel supporters.
But I don't think anyone anticipated, certainly I did not, that it was going to come close to imploding American conservative establishment politics, conservative institutions.
And we're on week two, as I said, basically two full weeks since it happened.
And there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.
This has really become a kind of tipping point for conservative establishment politicians, for the American right in its most traditional form to have to confront the fact that one of its most long-standing, most sacred pieties, namely that Israel must be served, must be protected, must be financed, must be armed, is now coming into serious doubt among not just people they can demonize,
but among the people that they think they certainly purport to represent.
It was only a question of time before all of this exploded.
And apparently what galvanized that explosion was Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson being in the same room and spending a little more than two hours talking to one another about their differences, but also their common ground.
That evidently was so frightening and so scary that it is threatening to just blow the lid off of a lot of things that deserve for a long time to be seen, but have been very effectively hidden.
And it seems like we are past the point of no return.
Certainly, at least I hope that we are.
Now, if you have any doubt about Nick Fuentes' arrival in terms of being an unquestionably influential person in our politics, you need look no further than today's New York Times.
It's, I think, the third time or the fourth time they've run an article, either entirely or primarily about Nick Fuentes.
And the headline of the article somewhat tells the story, which is Nick Fuentes' rise puts the MAGA movement in a, quote, time of choosing.
Obviously, the New York Times is not on the side of Nick Fuentes.
They're not on the side of Tucker Carlson.
They vastly prefer their Republicans to be traditional establishment Republicans of the John McCain variety, of George W. Bush, of Mitt Romney, of Paul Ryan.
These are the kind of conservatives they love and want.
They don't love them necessarily when they're the ones seeking power.
They'll call them Nazis or fascists or whatever they need to to make sure they lose.
But once they're neutered and no longer seeking power, retroactively they become rehabilitated.
Those are the good kind of Republicans.
And that was why so much turmoil erupted when Donald Trump arrived on the scene because he explicitly said he was going to run against long-standing Republican dogma, both on foreign policy and domestic policy.
And that's what alarmed not just Democrats, but also establishment Republicans who became Devord Trump.
That was the threat of Donald Trump.
But the New York Times has ever since, along with most institutions of the United States, sought to rush into the arms of traditional American Republican, traditional Republicans, conservative establishment conservatives.
For all the dislike that they had for them, the arrival of Trump, they now look at those people almost with admiration, or at least with a lot of comfort.
And so obviously they're against people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump, anyone who even thinks about stepping outside of those more comfortable, traditional, bipartisan precincts.
So here's how they talk about Nick Fuentes' rise.
Quote, for much of President Trump's second term, the political heirs of his America First agenda have tried to form an intellectual framework for their movement that embraces nationalism while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition.
Now, let me just stop you here because that first sentence is remarkable to read in the New York Times because they now want to draw a line at Nick Fuentes.
And really that line that they want to draw for Nick Fuentes is really about drawing a line for people like Tucker Carlson, keeping Tucker Carlson out of mainstream precincts.
Nick Fuentes doesn't really even want to join mainstream precincts.
His success has been as a figure who's already on the outside.
What this really is, is about trying to take Nick Fuentes and say he is the living, breathing embodiment of the anti-Israel view that's emerging in Republican politics.
They want to equate it with Nazism in order to say that anyone on the right who is a critic of Israel, questioning Israel, falls outside of the lines of acceptability.
And so to do that, they now have to suddenly declare that, oh, look, pro-Trump conservatives, says the New York Times, have been trying really hard to develop this view of nationalism that at the same time excludes overt bigotry out of their coalition.
Since when does the New York Times credit the Trump movement and MAGA with trying to embrace a model of nationalism, quote, while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition?
They're trying to do that in order to create a framework where Nick Fuentes and then Tucker Carlson and anybody else questioning Israel is supposed to be expelled from conservative politics in the name of keeping MAGA respectable.
It goes on, quote, with the rise of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist and his young, racist, and anti-Semitic griper movement, some fear that exercise has failed.
The interview triggered rounds of acrimony and recriminations on the American right on the Tucker Carlson show, in which Mr. Fuentes called for an exclusive, quote, pro-white Christian movement and said that, quote, organized jury undermines American cohesion, was denounced by high-profile elected Republicans, including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, as well as Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the Speaker of the House.
Quote, this is a poison.
And I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and in our country, Mr. Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual summit last week.
Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition's chief executive, said Mr. Carlson hosted a, quote, fawning interview that failed to hold Mr. Fuentes accountable for his, quote, virulently anti-Semitic and racist comments.
I think what's going on here is so fascinating.
We're about to show you a Ben Shapiro clip in just a little bit.
Ben Shapiro, just earlier tonight, went on CNN.
Let me say that again.
Ben Shapiro went on CNN on Jake Tapper's show in order to denounce not Nick Fuentes, but Tucker Carlson as basically a racist and a bigot.
Isn't that amazing?
Conservative politics for the last decade was about this main grievance.
Oh, liberals, and the minute you disagree with them, instead of engaging your ideas, they call you a racist and a bigot.
They go on CNN and they accuse you of having bad character.
They want to destroy your reputation.
They want to shut down debate.
And they weaponize racism and bigotry accusations against their political opponents.
And this is what makes them evil.
And now you have all these pro-Israel fanatics in the Republican Party, Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz, and all the rest of them, Mark Levin.
And that's pretty much all they ever do now.
They just run around calling everybody they disagree with on Israel a racist, a bigot, an anti-Semite, a hater.
And not just Nick Fuentes, but Tucker Carlson and anybody else who questions the U.S.-Israel relationship.
I just want to show you what a warped world we're now living in.
Ben Shapiro goes on to the show, the CNN show, of his friend Jake Tapper, who's also a lifelong and vocal supporter of Israel.
And Ben Shapiro went on there to call Tucker Carlson a bigot, which is, you know, it's like going back into a time machine in 2020 when liberals would go on CNN every day and call everybody who they disagreed with politically a bigot.
I thought that's what we were supposed to be liberating ourselves from.
That was like the peak of vocism.
And now it's not Ibram Kendi or Nancy Pelosi who goes on CNN to call conservatives like Tucker Carlson racists and bigots.
It's Ben Shapiro who does so.
And the reason they're doing it is because they are desperate to ensure that anybody who questions Israel, young conservatives who they know are questioning Israel, who are starting to turn against Israel, they want them to know the Ben Shapiros of the world, the Ted Cruzes of the world, the Apex of the world, the Markovins of the world.
They want everyone to know that there is still a major price to pay if you question the bipartisan consensus on Israel.
That Ben Shapiro will go on CNN and he will call you a racist and a bigot.
And if they can succeed in forcing conservative institutions to declare Tucker Carlson beyond the limits of acceptability, obviously they could do that to anybody.
And that's why it's become so important.
So now you have this spectacle of conservatives like Ben Shapiro who complained about racism and bigotry accusations being weaponized forever, now being the ones perpetrating it in defense of the foreign country they most love and revere.
Look at what happened earlier today.
This is just about an hour ago on CNN.
The real issue here is I think that Tucker Carlson's morphing from, I would say, a very edgy right-wing political figure on Fox News, but certainly within the mainstream, into a conspiracist, a person who ideologically launders anti-Semitism, who ideologically launders all sorts of anti-Americanism on his show, and then airs it for the public to hear with interviews like the ones he did with Nick Fuentes, which was essentially a massage of Nick Fuentes.
I think that took a lot of people by surprise, probably including Kevin.
And that was basically the gist of it.
I mean, there's other clips that there's other parts of the clip as well where he says Tucker Carlson traffics in anti-Semitism, traffics in bigotry, all because he sat down with Nick Fuentos.
Now, I just want to make a couple points, and then I want to show you Tucker Carlson's own words where he appeared with Megan Kelly as part of that Nationwide event that I did.
I did the second stop in San Antonio with Megan.
Tucker just did the last one.
I think it was last night.
I'm not sure exactly where it is.
But she asked him about the Nick Funtes interview.
So I want to make sure that you hear Tucker in his own words because he said some things that I think are really worth hearing.
But I just want to make a couple points about this idea that Tuck Carlson sat down with Nick Funtes and that somehow makes him somebody beyond the bounds of decency.
Go and look at who is on CNN on virtually a nightly basis, who they treat not adversarily, but as like honored statesmen.
People like John Bolton, who have enormous amounts of blood on his hands for lying the United States into all sorts of wars and trying to cajole and manipulate the United States into countless more that he hasn't been able to get the United States to fight in yet.
Or people like James Clapper, who ran the U.S. National Security State for President Obama.
All kinds of members of Congress who crave and have caused all sorts of bloodshed.
But because these are mainstream policies, it's perfectly acceptable in mainstream politics or mainstream media to sit down with them and have a good, friendly, cooperative relationship with them, not to challenge them, but to treat them like honored statesmen.
Caitlin Collins at CNN has John Bolton on practically every week.
It's like her friend.
And there's endless examples of people like that.
And yet somehow Nick Fuentes, who, for whatever you might think of his views, hasn't ever started wars, hasn't ever led the United States into wars, hasn't tried to get the United States to go fight in wars, hasn't bombed anybody, hasn't been responsible for massive amounts of bloodshed.
That's somebody that you can't sit down and talk to, but it's fine to sit down and talk to the world's worst warmongers, to sit down and talk to Lindsey Graham or Ben Shapiro.
And then the other issue is this idea that, oh, it's okay to sit down with Nick Fuentes as long as you push back on his ideas.
Anybody who claims that Tucker sat down with Nick Funtes and didn't push back on any of his ideas is someone who either didn't watch the interview they're purporting to critique or is just an outright liar.
Because a good chunk of that discussion, arguably the majority of it, was devoted to Tucker explaining to Nick Fuentes why there are views and opinions that Nick expresses and defends that Tucker disagrees with vehemently and fundamentally.
And then Nick explaining to Tucker why he thinks the critique is invalid.
It's true Tucker didn't pound the table with his fist and have his face turn red and spit and scream, you're a Nazi, you're a racist.
He didn't do that.
And I think what has happened is that in pro-Israel conservative circles, that's pretty much all they do now.
They scream Nazi, racist, bigot.
And so if you talk to anyone like Nick Fuentes, you're not screaming racist and Nazi and bigot at them all the time.
It's going to seem to that crowd that relies on those tactics that you actually haven't pushed back on them.
But the entire discussion was, or what was composed of two people who have a lot of things in common, but as I said, a lot of differences exploring each of those.
All right, so Megan Kelly last night at this event that Tuck Carlson appeared with her at asked her about the Nick Fuentes interview and the fallout from it.
The entire discussion is about 20 minutes.
I really recommend going on YouTube.
You can look at Megan's channel and find the whole discussion.
I'm just going to show you a couple of clips.
So here is Tucker explaining, essentially when Megan asked him about the Nick Funtes interview, he explains why he did it, why he thought Nick Funtes was worth speaking to, talked about his major influence and his talent.
But he also then said he wanted to talk to Nick Fuentes in part because there were some disagreements he had with his understanding of what Nick Fuentes believed.
And he emphasized that he hadn't, you know, Nick Funtes speaks to a younger generation, and Tucker is not in the age group that is typically the kind of person that listens to Nick Funtes.
And Tucker says, I heard clips of Nick Funtes, but I wanted to sit down and hear in his own words what he thinks.
And he came into the interview with the impression that Nick is a kind of racist, a blatant racist and an anti-Semite and a bigot.
And Tucker explains why he wanted to go and talk to Nick Funtes and explain why he rejects that worldview.
But in doing so, he said a lot of things that I think are really worth hearing.
And here's one clip in which that's the case.
That idea is not only being challenged in our country, it's being disregarded.
It's disregarded in DEI.
It's disregarded in affirmative action.
Identity politics is a refutation of that idea.
We are awarding some people something because of how they were born and hurting others for the same reason.
That is anti-Western.
It's evil.
And it leads, in the end, inexorably, to genocide.
That is the root idea behind what happened in Europe in the 40s under the Nazis.
It's the root idea behind what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
It's the root idea, just saying, behind what's happening in Gaza right now, where it's like, we're going to kill the kids too.
We don't care.
And we're going to, by the way, move everyone out because they're a people that is fundamentally opposed to us.
Yeah, well, I'm not for that.
Sorry.
Because that's not the Western understanding of justice.
We punish the guilty alone.
We do not punish the innocent.
Period.
And that's not racism.
And in fact, it's the answer to racism.
It's the answer to anti-Semitism.
It's why anti-Semitism is wrong.
It's why racism is wrong.
No, you're not better than me.
No, you're not worse than me because of how you were born.
You're the same as me because we were both created by God.
Period.
So the whole idea of thinking of people as members of tribes, any tribe, including my tribe, is prima facie immoral.
And yet it is the operating idea behind so much of our politics.
And I reject it.
I reject it when it manifests as anti-Semitism.
I reject it when it manifests as anti-white racism, which has been pretty common.
I know we're not supposed to say it, but it's real.
But I'm not mad about that just because my kids are white, which they are.
I'm mad about that because the idea is immoral.
It's anti-Christian.
And that is the destruction of the West.
And so when I see these people be like, we're defending Western, when Mark Levin's like, we're defending Western civilization, or Randy Fine, who's like, yeah, we just have to kill every Palestinian because they're Palestinian so we can defend Western civilization.
I'm like, no, no, no.
You are the enemy of Western civilization because collective punishment is the enemy of Western civilization.
Period.
Wow.
That's what I wanted to say.
And I said it, and they called me a Nazi.
And I'm like, actually, I hate the Nazis for that specific reason.
But wait.
I mean, there's so much going on there important, but the main point I want to make is this.
Aside from the fact that one of the reasons why it's so important for these people to destroy Tucker is because he has always been an extremely effective communicator.
It's one of the reasons why he's had a very successful career in television for decades.
And he built up a massive platform bigger than ever as a result of those seven years at Fox in the 8 o'clock time slot, which is when he became one of the most influential voices in conservative politics in the country, not just in the country, but the West.
And he's now using those skills and that platform to link what Israel is currently doing in Gaza with the Americans' help to things like the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide and doing so in an unflinching and unapologetic way.
And it's hard to overstate how threatening that is to this bipartisan beltway swamp for whom support for Israel has been sacrosanct, just not permitted to be questioned, let alone denounced in terms that eloquent and that unapologetic.
But besides that, I think the crucial point that actually is being made here involves Nick Fuentes and the reaction to it.
And what I said at the top was this obviously fraudulent pretext for why Republican establishment politicians and pundits like Ben Shapiro are so intent on not just throwing Nick Fuentes out of anything relating to conservative politics, but also people like Tucker Carlson and everybody else who questions Israel and the U.S. relationship with it.
This idea that, oh, we're doing this not for Israel, but because we're just so, we're so inherently offended by anything that's racist or bigoted.
And Nick Fuentes is a racist and a bigot, and Tucker Carlson is a racist and a bigot.
As Ben Shapiro said with his friend Jake Tapper on CNN earlier today, Tucker traffics in anti-Semitism.
He traffics in bigotry.
And the way Tucker's answering that is by pointing out that actually the people who are demanding that Nick Fuentes not be spoken to by pretending what they actually hate about Nick isn't that he's opposed to Israel and getting a lot of young conservatives to be opposed to Israel, but instead what they hate about him is he's a racist and a bigot and a Nazi, and that that's also what they hate about Tucker.
Tucker's saying the entire project of demanding support for Israel is based on exactly those kinds of that worldview.
Israel is a country premised upon Jewish supremacy.
And as a result, anyone that is the enemy of the Jewish state of Israel is looked at as someone who's not human.
That's what Tucker is saying there, that once you start judging people, not as individuals, and once you depart from the idea that the only people you're supposed to punish are the guilty, but instead you can punish entire groups of people.
Oh, who cares if Israel kills a bunch of babies in Gaza?
Those are Palestinians.
They don't really have any real worth.
Jewish life is more valuable.
We can just extinguish huge numbers of Palestinians, all of them.
We can drive them out.
We can kill them all.
That was and is the foundation of mainstream Israeli politics when they look at Arabs and Palestinians in particular and certainly was the driving ethos of the U.S. supported and funded and armed destruction of Gaza.
And whether Tucker is consciously doing it or not, the effect of that statement is to say that the Ben Shapiros of the world and the Mark Levins of the world and Ted Cruz and all the rest, they're not offended by racism or bigotry or the idea that you don't judge people by groups.
That's not their problem with Nick Fuentes.
If Nick Fuentes were an Israel supporter, that's the only thing you change about him.
And he held every other view that he holds and expressed it in every way that he expresses it, nobody on the right would have a problem with Nick Fuentes.
There are huge numbers of outright bigots and racists who are perfectly welcome and long have been in conservative politics, but they're not a problem because they support Israel.
And there are Israel supporters who have said exactly that.
Ben Shapiro once said, I know that Ann Coulter is anti-Semitic and hates Jews, but I don't have a problem with her because she's pro-Israel.
When John Pedoritz, the fell son of one of the founders of conservative politics, Norman Pedoritz, when Trump was bombing Iran, this is what John Pedoritz said: quote, Trump bombed Iran.
He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever, as far as I'm concerned.
Meaning, Ben Shapiro saying, John Pedoritz is saying, we don't care about bigotry.
You can be as anti-Semitic as you want.
You can be as racist as you want.
As long as you support and serve Israel, then we're happy with you.
That's the fraud of all of this.
So many of the whole pro-Israel project, the idea of we're going to fund Israel and support Israel and arm them and never impede them or use our leverage when they eradicate Palestinian life in a way that not just human rights organizations, but even Israeli scholars of genocide have said is a classic genocide.
The mindset that says that that's okay, or even something that ought to be cheered, is exactly the kind of racist, bigoted mindset based on group supremacy that these people who are pro-Israel and the Republican Party are pretending to find so offensive.
They can't admit what they're really up to, which is to destroy Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, whoever, because they're opposed to Israel.
That's their real reason.
They can't admit that, though, because there's too much anti-Israel sentiment, even in their own movement.
They still have to pretend that they're not that tied to a foreign country.
So they have to pretend that, oh, no, we're like the left after George Floyd.
We're just so single-mindedly devoted to an anti-racist agenda that the minute we sniff out racism or bigotry anywhere, we have to kick those people out of our movement.
We can't tolerate that.
That's a joke.
And Tucker's explanation for why all of these kinds of atrocities, the Holocaust or the genocide in Rwanda, or the genocide in Gaza, as he calls it, the reason they're all linked is because they're based on that same mindset, the mindset that pro-Israel advocates share, even as they pretend to find it so repulsive.
All right, let me show you one more clip.
This is where Megan Kelly notes that a lot of people were angry at Tucker for quote-unquote platforming Nick Fuentes for sitting down and talking to Nick Fuentes, and here's what they both had to say about that.
So, what about?
I don't want to spend the whole time on this, but I am curious.
The main criticism, as I understand it, has been, well, yes, platforming, they say that.
I don't accept platforming as a valid objection.
What is that a verb?
Like, you take a noun and you make it into a verb and nobody says anything.
As a former editor, I say no.
Yeah, agree.
Honestly, but like, as far as I know, Nick Fuentes hasn't eaten anyone.
You know, I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer ate people, and he was platformed by Diane Sawyer.
We have a member, a sitting member of Congress.
I spoke to the Speaker of the House about this today.
We have a sitting member of Congress from Florida called Randy Fine who has literally texted or put on Twitter, we should kill them all, every single one.
Someone texted a picture of literally of a dead baby and he laughs at it.
And it's like, this guy's a lawmaker who's appropriating money to a military committing genocide, and that's cool.
It's not cool.
And let's just be honest, that is much worse than anything Nick Fuentes has said, period.
Exactly.
A political movement that not just tolerates Randy Fine, but let's remember President Trump is currently campaigning for Randy Fine, endorsing Randy Fine, raising money for Randy Fine, even though Randy Fine has a Republican primary challenger who's running on the grounds that Randy Fine is of America First.
President Trump is embracing and supporting Randy Fine.
Randy Fine is welcome on every major media show.
He's not excluded the way that they're managing not just Nick Fuentes, but Tucker Carlson be excluded.
And he has said things as repulsive as it gets, laughing about dead babies in Gaza, saying, yeah, we need more of that.
Just some of the most psychotic, sociopathic, monstrous statements you will ever make.
A political movement that has room for Randy Fine in it is not a political movement that has any standing to pretend that what they're upset about with Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens is bigotry and racism.
That is not a political movement disturbed in any way by those things.
Those are pretexts for what they're really after.
Now, I want to show you some of the discourse that has emerged around these leading Israel critics like Tucker and like Nick Fuentes.
Because again, all I heard from conservatives for the last decade was how wrong it is to weaponize racism, bigotry accusations, and to call your political opponents racism and bigots all the time as a way of avoiding debate, as a way of discrediting people, destroying their reputation.
And yet, you look at pro-Israel discourse, and that's pretty much all they have left.
They've given up on trying to convince people in the United States that it's somehow in our interests.
It's in the interests of some 26-year-old who knows he's not going to be able to buy a house, who has no money to get married, let alone have kids, has to work shit jobs, even if he did everything that he was told to do, like go to college, or just try and have some kind of vocation or profession.
Those people are no longer open to the idea that, oh yes, it's somehow in your interest that you have a moral obligation and a patriotic duty to fund Israel, to fund their wars, to go fight for Israel.
Those arguments are defeated.
Those are no longer viable.
The only tactic left is to try and destroy people's reputations by saying you will be vilified.
You will be excluded from having careers.
You won't work for media outlets.
You won't work for conservative institutions.
If you're a conservative and you even think about joining with this growing doubt about the U.S.'s relationship or criticizing Israel, look what we just did to Tucker Carlson.
Look what we're doing to Nick Fuentes.
Look what we're doing to Candace Owens.
Now, as it turns out, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes have nothing happening to them other than an exploding audience.
Tucker has either the number one or number two most listened to show in the United States right after Joe Rogan.
Candace Owens, I think, is today the number one most listened to show and podcast in the Western world.
In third place is Theo Vaughan, who routinely, in a very strident and heartfelt way, condemns Israel, constantly puts on guests arguing against U.S. support for Israel.
And then Nick Fuentes' audience and his influence are just growing by leaps and bounds.
But what they want to do is, despite how much their views are resonating with people who understand what they're saying, who are now having, who have the ability to listen to people willing to say these things, they still want to destroy their reputation, and that's why they go on to places like CNN or the drama at the Heritage Foundation that we told you about.
And the head of the Heritage Foundation was just forced to apologize for defending Tucker Carlson, go through this whole struggle session.
They took the head of the Heritage Foundation and here from the Washington Free Beacon, this was yesterday, exclusive, quote, I made a mistake, Heritage Foundation president apologizes to his staff for video refusal to cancel Tucker Carlson and throw shade at former chief of staff.
And then the whole thing leaked.
It was like this, again, it was a scene from peak wokeism in 2020.
Employees of the Heritage Foundation crying, saying how difficult and upset this has been for them.
There was someone who works at the Heritage Foundation who went to Israel and fought in the IDF.
And he stood up, and I just want you to listen to what he said because there you have Kevin Roberts who defended Tucker Carlson, created a massive backlash against pro-Israel donors of the Heritage Foundation, Republican politicians.
And they forced him now to sit there in front of the whole staff while people like this IDF soldier, this American citizen who never fought for the U.S. military, he went to Israel and fought for the Israeli military.
He's coming back now to tell Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, how much pain he's in, how difficult this has all been for him, watching Kevin Roberts refuse to declare war on Tucker Carlson.
It's always so bizarre when, if you're an Israel credit, people will tell you, well, why are you so obsessed with Israel?
I'm not obsessed with Israel.
We're not obsessed with Israel.
They're obsessed with Israel.
All of Washington is obsessed with Israel.
They fund it, they arm it, they sacrifice U.S. interests to defend it.
They censor the free speech rights of American citizens for that country.
They constantly make pilgrimage there.
It tears up institutions, long-standing major conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation.
The president says, oh, I think Tucker Carlson is within his rights to question Israel.
He's a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.
We're not going to cancel him.
And then it leads to this struggle session, just more intense and humiliating than anything I even watched liberal media outlets and liberal left institutions go through at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Just listen for yourself.
Again, this is someone who went and fought for the IDF, who's now back in the United States, trying to set the parameters and limits for what Americans can do when questioning U.S. support for Israel.
This is somebody who declared his loyalty to a different country, to Israel.
And just listen to this whiny, self-victimizing, petulant, on the verge of tears grievance about how difficult this has been for him as a Jew and as somebody who went and fought in the IDF to watch the Heritage Foundation defend Tucker Carlson.
Daniel, yes.
Thank you.
I had some prepared remarks between Amy's comments, Rachel's, Jay's, some others.
And the way this conversation's gone, I kind of actually want to address my colleagues.
For those who don't know, I work in the Elsin Center, focused on the U.S. as a relationship and combating anti-Semitism projectes.
It's been a very tough week, to say the least.
I'll share that a couple of weeks ago I met with the Orthodox Jewish student group here, and I said there's no better place inside the Ballway to be Jewish.
And I think that's still true.
Not that I think.
That is still true, excuse me.
But it's been a very tough week for obvious reasons.
And there's an email chain of the members of the task force to combat anti-Semitism, of which Heritage is a member, but candidly, we provide the most resources, I being one of them.
So we are a leading member, and obviously we're Heritage.
And it's invariably been, what is going on?
Has Heritage lost its way?
What is Kevin doing?
Where's the leadership?
What's happening?
The only kind of saving grace, to borrow a phrase, is that I've built relationships with these people, these organizations.
They know it's not you, Daniel.
It's not you, your colleagues at Heritage, other members of the task force.
But it's very disconcerting.
And because we're talking about anti-Semitism and Israel, I want to say from the outset, first of all, I said this to the YLP two weeks ago in a lecture.
This is not about the Jews.
This has nothing to do with us.
It's everything to do with all of you.
I mean, all of us.
Anti-Semitism is many things throughout history, but it is always and invariably a bigotry of grievance.
And Ruth Wise, who's a retired professor of Yiddish history from Harvard, said that, defines anti-Semitism in some ways as the organization of politics against the Jews.
So if someone's trafficking in anti-Semitism overtly or covertly, they have another objective in mind.
By the way, that's Daniel Flesh is his name.
And among other things, besides being the anti-Semitism warrior at Heritage, he's a former senior advisor at Israel's UN mission.
So he worked for the Israeli government as well.
And he's an IDF paratrooper.
This is who is inside mainstream conservative institutions demanding that Tucker Carlson be excluded for the crime of quote-unquote trafficking and anti-Semitism, namely criticizing Israel.
It is wild to me.
You know, sometimes when I see people who spent years claiming to believe in something and then just turn on a dime and advocate exactly the opposite, even though I know people are going to do that, sometimes when it's this brazen, it actually surprises me that they can do it without embarrassment because they don't even try and hide it.
You know, like all the people on the right who pretended for so long to be believers in free speech and opposed to censorship when it was being done to them, turn around and cheer for all sorts of punishments for people who criticize Israel, be censored, be expelled, be deported.
You know, you're just like, four seconds ago, you were pretending to believe in free speech.
It was, you know, same thing when liberals were railing against the evils of the war and terror with George Bush, and then Barack Obama gets into office after vowing to uproot it all and instead starts embracing the same policies, even extending them.
And then, you know, liberals, the same ones who were calling George Bush a fascist and a Nazi for these policies, are now defending Obama for doing it.
I remember the first time I watched these kind of things, I was like, how can human beings?
I'm not saying I'm surprised or I'm not so naive as to believe that we believe everyone's so principled.
None of us is so completely principled.
We see things through our own interests.
We're willing to bend our own rules to advance our interests.
But you try and be consistent.
And so that means if you see yourself so blatantly espousing exactly that which you condemned a very short time ago, you question yourself and you say, at least maybe I should hide this better.
And yet there's none of that.
These are the people who were insisting for so long that we can't have cancel culture.
We can't get people fired for their views.
We can't exclude people or de-platform them because they have views that we dislike.
You shouldn't go around calling everybody a racist and a bigot who disagrees with you.
And now these are exactly the tactics that they use.
That's why we started off showing you Ben Shapiro with Jake Tapper on CNN screaming bigot and racist about Tucker Carlson.
Something that Jamal Bowman could have been doing and probably has done.
Or Robin D'Angelo.
Instead, now it's Ben Shapiro.
Probably will be Ted Cruz tomorrow, who's called Tucker an anti-Semite and a bigot countless times.
Here's Mark Levin, who's been a favorite on Fox News for a long time, a leading conservative voice.
Here is his view about Tucker Carlson, as well as other Israel critics like not just Nick Fuentes, but Steve Bannon, who's also questioning the U.S. support, U.S. relationship with Israel.
And listen to the words he chooses to describe people who are opposed to the country he most loves, which is Israel.
So I think, depending on what happens in New Jersey and potentially New York City, you're going to see the radicalization of the Democrat Party.
You're going to see significant numbers of Democrats voting for it.
Not overwhelming number, but significant number.
And now you know why I'm fighting like hell against the Tucker Carlsons and the Fuentes and the Bannons and the others who are myopic.
Who they're dancing with Hitler and Stalin and bigots and racists and segregationists, Christian haters and Jew haters is a prescription for massive electoral defeat from which I don't think we'll ever be able to recover.
You're a racist.
You're a bigot.
You're a Nazi.
I mean, isn't that exactly what the American right mocked liberals for constantly saying about their political enemies?
Now you have Mark LeBin and Ben Shapiro saying exactly that.
Here's Ben Shapiro when the interview between Tucker and Nick Fuentes came out and then the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson.
Ben Shapiro had this whole tweet and video that went along with it that all the Israel supporters cited as kind of the gospel of the pro-Israel view.
And he said, no to the Groipers, no to cowards like Tucker Carlson who normalized their trash, no to all this.
And then of course, no to bigotry and anti-meritocratic horseshit.
No, so no to bigotry.
Somehow, Tucker Carlson has become a bigot overnight for his steadfast opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and U.S. support for it on America First Ground.
This is all the pro-Israel discourse is about.
Here's Ben Shapiro as well.
And this was Ben Shapiro in 2010, and he eventually said that he regretted this tweet.
But this is exactly the worldview that Tucker Carlson was just describing lies at the heart of the Israel Project and the way that they treat Palestinians.
These are the people who are claiming they're so offended by bigotry.
They're so offended by racism.
These are the views on which Ben Shapiro was weaned.
This is what he said: quote, Israelis like to build.
Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.
This is not a difficult issue.
Is that somebody that you think credibly is driven by anti-racism and an attempt to root out bigotry wherever it's found?
Or is that somebody driven by Jewish supremacy and loyalty to Israel?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Here's the free press, Barry Weiss's rag, and she and the free press published this article on November 2nd, Ted Cruz, the fight against anti-Semitism is, quote, existential.
The combative Texas senator talks to the free press about Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the rise of, quote, bilious bigotry on the right.
It's just, they sound exactly like Abram Kennedy and Robin D'Angelo.
Exactly like them.
You wind these people up and they will scream Nazi racism bigot at you if you just screw up them on Israel.
This is all to say nothing of the discourse that emerged about Zoran Mandani, where somehow this very kind of standard DSA leftist from Queens who emerged on the same political climate and environment as AOC, this kind of politics.
He's a ardent supporter of every last aspect of the LGBT agenda, trans rights and every other kind of, he called the NYPD anti-queer just a few years ago.
His wife works.
She walks around in mini skirts and standard Western clothing.
They're just a very standard young left liberal Queens couple.
But because he's Muslim and a critic of Israel, it just became standard language in pro-Israel conservative politics to call him a jihadist, someone who wants to implement Sharia law.
I mean, it's just a joke.
But they look at him, they see this Muslim, and so they automatically say, oh, that's a jihadist, suggesting he would be happy with terrorism.
Do you think these people have any credibility at all to pretend that what offends them about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes is the fact that they're racist and bigots?
Do you think these people have any credibility at all to pretend that that's what is driving this?
Here's Ted Cruz on Fox News talking about Mamdani.
Look, last night was a disaster.
It was an electoral blowout.
The results in New Jersey were disastrous.
The results in Virginia were terrible.
The results in New York, Comrade Mamdani is the face of the Democrat Party.
We have an actual communist jihadist.
And it's important to note, Mamdani is not a socialist.
He is a full-on communist.
He has called for seizing the means of production in our economy.
He is a Marxist.
All right, I don't really care about all the communist stuff.
I mean, it's a joke.
He's a Bernie Sanders Democratic socialist.
He doesn't say he's a communist.
He calls himself a Democratic Socialist, same way Bernie Sanders does.
There's his wife, by the way, on the Fox News screen.
Does that look like a wife of a Sharia law jihadist?
But again, this is all grounded in exactly the sort of racism and bigotry that they're now pretending to be so offended by in order to kick Tucker Carlson out of the conservative movement.
Here, speaking of somebody who spouts racism on a regular basis, is somebody who is one of Donald Trump's closest confidants, Laura Loomer.
I mean, everyone knows if she goes onto Twitter and starts attacking someone who's an official in the Trump administration, even high-up people in the national security world or wherever, she calls up Donald Trump and those people get fired.
She's incredibly influential with Donald Trump.
She's one of his closest confidants.
You won't find anybody more overtly racist than Laura Loomer, overtly more bigoted than Laura Loomer.
But the difference between Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, at least one of the differences, the determinant of difference as to why conservatives are insisting that Nick Fuentes be banished, but Laura Loomer has a open door and an open line with Donald Trump is because Laura Loomer loves and supports Israel and Nick Funtes doesn't.
Here's the sort of thing Laura Loomer says, September 8th, 2024.
If Kamala Harris wins, the White House will smell like curry.
And White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.
And the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.
Even with Elon Musk's ex, the tweet was, the visibility of that tweet was limited because X decided this post may violate X's rules against hateful conduct.
Laura Loomer has been on a crusade for the last several months to insist that Muslims be banned from all aspects of American life, not be allowed to vote, not be able to hold elective office.
Here's Laura Loomer, September 25th.
Quote, we have Sharia law all over America.
It's time for the GOP to start cracking down on Islam in America before we turn into the UK or France.
We need real leadership on this issue now, or the Muslim Brotherhood will take over our country by 2032.
Muslims should also be banned from holding elective office in America since their allegiance to Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.
Does anybody believe that a political movement that places Laura Luber in an extremely influential position as she says things like that is a movement that actually is so passionately devoted to kicking anybody out who has any connection with bigotry and racism because they're just so deeply offended by it?
Here's Bill Ackman on November 5th, after calling Zoran Mandami every name that he could think of.
He says, Jordan Mandami, congratulations on the win.
Now you have big responsibility.
If I can help let me know.
And Laura Loomer replies, never congratulated jihadi.
Mandani wants you dead because you're a Jewish and American, Bill Ackman.
You can't work with jihadists.
Here's a tweet from Colin Rugg, who said, just in New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mandani blames bomb threats at polling places on President Trump.
And Laura Loomer replies, his Muslim voters probably called in the threats.
Here's Laura Loomer on November 4th.
This is all just in the last week or two.
Replying to a similar post like the one up above, she wrote, quote, the Muslims can't think of a better way for the Muslims to celebrate the victory of a Muslim mayoral candidate today than by committing an ISIS attack in New York City.
If you want to pretend that you're offended by the alleged bigotry of Tucker Carlson or of Candace Owens or of Nick Funtes or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gates because they criticize Israel and yet you're fine with a movement that elevates someone like Laura Loomer saying those things, just expect to be laughed at.
Don't expect to be taken seriously.
And as I said, there are Israel critics who just outright admit that they don't care at all about racism.
All they care about is whether somebody supports Israel.
We showed you that John Throwitz tweet.
There's a similar Ben Shiro tweet.
I think we have that on the screen.
Where here, Ben Shapiro, 2015, this is when Ann Coulter posted a bunch of tweets about Jews that were widely condemned as anti-Semitic.
Ben Shapiro said, regarding Ann Coulter and her tweets about Jews, they're awful and nonsensical.
Ann Coulter is also super pro-Israel and always has been, so I won't lose sleep.
Meaning, we don't actually care about racism or bigotry.
What we care about is if you're pro-Israel or not.
And if you're pro-Israel, we don't care.
You can be as bigoted as you want.
You're totally fine and welcome in our movement.
You can be totally bigoted against any group.
As long as you're pro-Israel, that's the litmus test.
That's the determining factor.
And the fact that they're so honest about it at unguarded moments is incredibly valuable because I can show you all the proof that this is all a pretext and a fraud to expel and destroy Israel critics by pretending that what they're really concerned about is racism.
But if you're electing the Randy Fiennes of the world and having President Trump campaign for him after he openly said, ha ha, dead gods and babies, give me more of those.
We want more of those.
Don't even think about turning around and then pretending that the reason you're after Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson is because you're so deeply concerned about bigotry and racism.
Everyone sees through this.
Everyone understands exactly what's going on.
This is a war that conservatives who are pro-Israel are losing to conservatives who are finally opening their eyes.
And in fact, people across the political spectrum finally understand the true face of Israel, the true extent of American subservience to Israel, the true extent of the cost to Americans and to their country, the United States, as a result of that subservience to Israel.
These are like the last gasps of a desperate panic movement, but they still wield a great deal of power.
And if they succeed in forcing just weak, pathetic people like Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, who writes a very well-thought-through script that he wanted to read to defend Tucker Carlson, he goes to the camera and he like delivers it with great confidence.
And then like a week later, he's calling around the ground saying, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.
And he's like sitting there all chastised while IDF soldiers stand up and accuse him of trafficking in racism and making it so hard for Jews to live in the United States.
And he's apologizing.
And if you can do that to the head of the Heritage Foundation, you still do wield a lot of power within institutions in D.C., if not within the broader public opinion of the United States.
And if they can succeed in pushing Tucker out, in pushing Candace Owens out, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Thomas Massey, who Donald Trump was notably trying to remove from Congress while he campaigns for Randy Fine and Lindsey Graham, that will still be a strong deterrent to a lot of people and who are going to think twice and say, wait a minute, is this really an issue that I want to talk about?
I feel strongly about it, but is it really worth it to me?
I just watched what they did to people like the head of the Heritage Foundation.
I watched them remove members of Congress over this.
I'm even in the process of watching them try and destroy Tucker Carlson.
Who am I?
If I step up and do this, they can crush me like a bug.
That has been the deterrence that they have used for so long to shut off debate on this question, on this very consequential question.
And so much of this is now coming to a head, and the reason why Tucker and Nick Fent is getting together and talking in a way that wasn't entirely aligned, but aligned enough to cause panic, is because there's no more escaping the reality that this orthodoxy is finally crumbling.
And that's what all of this is about.
It has nothing to do with bigotry or racism, other than the fact that the pro-Israel faction, to a large extent, depends on those sorts of things to justify what Israel is doing.
But their attempt to destroy Israel critics has nothing to do with that.
That is the pretext.
This is all about trying to ensure, as one last-ditch effort, that people are too afraid to criticize this foreign country that for so long has been sacred in American politics.
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Monday, and from the reaction of Democratic Party politicians, you would have thought that one of the most beloved and honored and benevolent statesmen and leaders in all of American history...
maybe even all of Western history, tragically passed away.
When Dick Cheney was in office, he was spoken about, and I know a lot of people who are too young don't remember this.
They didn't live through it.
Even people who did live through it probably don't remember the extent of it.
But Dick Cheney was spoken about very much in similar terms as Donald Trump is spoken of now, as somebody who was an autocrat, a tyrant, a sociopath, a corrupt monster, someone who stole the 2000 election, including using the threat of physical force and violence to do so.
He was routinely referred to or compared to the worst monsters in history, Adolf Hitler, and whoever the liberals chose at any given moment to try and compare him to.
There were few people more hated than he in my lifetime in American politics.
He left office and his approval rating was below 20%.
And the New York Times was one of the leading voices against the Bush administration and Dick Cheney, at least in the second term of the Bush administration.
The first term, they were very pro-Bush.
Remember, the New York Times helped sell the war in Iraq, probably were the leading, most important media outlet that helped do that by putting Dick Cheney's false leaks on the front page every day to justify why we had to go to war with Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, that he had a biological weapons program that he was going to give it to his friends and allies in al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
All of that appeared on the front page of the New York Times, laundered constantly with very little questioning, played a big role in getting so many liberals to support the Iraq war.
But by the second term, once George Bush and Dick Cheney became unpopular, the New York Times started attacking them and they became a leading voice blaming Dick Cheney, principally Dick Cheney.
Not just critiques of his ideology, but very much like they talk to Trump now, somebody who's destroying American democracy, introducing autocracy.
All the evils that are said about Trump were said about Dick Cheney.
And yet, when Dick Cheney died, he was somebody not just forgiven in mainstream liberal circles, but somebody really kind of admired.
Obviously, his daughter, Liz Cheney, who supported Dick Cheney in everything he did, never had a view even slightly different than Dick Cheney's, supported all the whole thing, the Iraq War, the war on terror, the torture program, to this day supports all of that.
Obviously, she became a heroine of American liberalism.
Remember, Kamal Harris campaigned with her as though that were her running mate.
I guarantee you she would have been Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense at Commonwealth I. Liberals talk about Liz Cheney like she is Mother Teresa.
But that, and a lot of that spilled over onto Dick Cheney, especially because right before the 2024 election, Dick Cheney announced that he was endorsing Kamala Harris.
He hated Donald Trump.
Remember, Donald Trump in 2016 ran against the Iraq War, called it dangerous and stupid.
And Dick Cheney was one of the leading Never Trump supporters.
And as I've pointed out many times, in liberal politics, there's only one question that determines, are you a good or bad person?
And that is, do you support or oppose Donald Trump?
Nothing else matters.
Adolf Hitler could be reincarnated and give an interview to the New York Times.
And if he said, oh, I think Donald Trump is authoritarian and corrupt, he would be invited on to Jen Saki's show the next day or Nicole Wallace's show the next day and be welcome.
Hey, look, we have disagreements with Adolf Hitler, but, you know, I mean, he's really at least being principled by speaking out against Donald Trump.
You have to see this headline in the New York Times as the obituary for Dick Cheney to believe it.
If I wanted to satirize and mock liberal attitudes, as I just described them, toward the Cheneys, I probably would have created a headline similar to this.
And it turns out it was the real headline the day Dick Cheney died and the New York Times went to basically eulogize him in their obituary.
Listen to this headline in the New York Times.
For Dick Cheney, a journey from champion of war to voice of resistance.
Dick Cheney, in the eyes of the New York Times, died as the voice of the resistance.
He was on a journey from champion of war and then to his final place, the voice of the resistance.
Dick Cheney was to many the embodiment of the unpopular and bloody Iraq War, but his late-in-life anti-Trumpism changed his image for some of his longtime critics.
Dick Cheney never changed a single view, never acknowledged that anything he said was wrong, never admitted that the Iraq War was a disaster.
And it wasn't just the Iraq War.
It was a whole panoply of policies.
Remember, torture, building an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Guantanamo Bay, and then putting people in prison for life without any kind of charges, creating black sites, CIA black sites all throughout Eastern Europe, underground sites that nobody knew about so the Red Cross couldn't monitor, where people were tortured, kidnapping people off the streets of Europe, calling it rendition,
and sending them to Egypt or to Bashr al-Assad in Syria to be tortured.
They were accused of letting New Orleans drown because they didn't care about the black population that lived there.
He didn't renounce any of these things.
He didn't apologize for any of them.
He didn't say any of these were wrong.
The only thing that Dick Cheney did that caused a change in his view is he opposed Donald Trump.
And he opposed Donald Trump because Donald Trump ran against the policies that liberals, that made liberals hate Dick Cheney in the first place, including the Iraq War, but by no means limited to it.
Spying on Americans without warrants, all of these extreme abuses that are laid at the feet correctly of Dick Cheney, all of it was washed away and forgotten.
Simply because he did the one thing, the only thing that matters to liberals, which is oppose Donald Trump.
Here's Joe Biden, or whoever writes for Joe Biden these days, heralding the greatness of Dick Cheney, quote, guided by a strong set of conservative values, Dick Cheney devoted his life to public service.
Okay, I just got to stop for a second.
The other thing about Dick Cheney, when he was Chosen as George Bush's vice president, he was a major stockholder in a energy company called Halliburton and was constantly accused of pursuing policies, including the Iraq War, that had no purpose other than to enrich himself and enrich Halliburton.
But now, according to Joe Biden, he devoted his life to public service, from representing Wyoming in Congress to serving as Secretary of Defense and later as Vice President of the United States.
While we don't agree on much, he believed, as I do, that family is the beginning, middle, and end.
Jill and I send our love to his wife, Lynn, their daughters Liz and Mary, and all of their grandchildren.
Here's Kamala Harris.
I am saddened to learn of the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Vice President Cheney was a devoted public servant from the halls of Congress to many positions of leadership in multiple presidential administrations.
His passing marks the loss of a figure who, with a strong sense of dedication, gave so much of his life to the country he loved.
I once read an article, it was in, I think, 2021 at Substack, where I said, let's just look at the world through a liberal prism.
Just adopt every defining value of an American liberal and then look at the world through that way and compare the Bush administration, Bush 43, to Trump.
By every single liberal metric, you would have to say what George Bush and Dick Cheney did was not just worse, but significantly worse than anything Donald Trump did.
Just the Iraq war by itself.
That killed a million people, that created a power vacuum in the Middle East, that gave rise to ISIS, massive instability, strength in Iran, killed thousands of American soldiers, disabled many, many more, destroyed American credibility.
Just that alone, never mind everything else I already identified.
You'd be very hard-pressed to say anything that Donald Trump did from a liberal perspective that comes close to that.
Invading a foreign country on the other side of the world based on lies that you manufactured and disseminated to the public deliberately through the New York Times and other media outlets.
And the thing people would say to me was, well, Dick Cheney at least believed in democracy.
Trump tried to do an insurrection.
To this day, every liberal that I know believes that George Bush and Dick Cheney did not win the 2000 election, that the winner of the 2000 election was Al Gore and Joe Lieberman.
And that George Bush and Dick Cheney stole the election through a variety of maneuvers, including having a bunch of conservatives go and intimidate and threaten poll workers who were counting ballots in Florida, which was the decisive state, in order to ensure that the Republicans won an election that they actually lost.
Here from the Herald News, just by the way, November 15th, 2019, quote, it's insanity how the Brooks Brothers riot killed the 2000 recount in Miami.
And it recounts the story of how a bunch of conservatives were called the Brooks Brother Riots.
They were Bush and Cheney supporters.
They went and they intimidated poll workers by banging on the doors and threatening them.
And yet here's Nancy Pelosi who said, Dick Cheney was a patriotic American who loved his country.
While we strongly disagreed on most policy issues, his patriotism was clear when he returned to the House floor to commemorate the first anniversary of January 6th.
We all saw then how proud Vice President Cheney was to see his daughter Liz follow in her father's footsteps to serve the House with courage and integrity.
May it be a comfort to Lynn, Liz, and Mary that so many are praying for them at this sad time.
Bill Clinton.
Throughout his long career in public service, Dick Cheney was guided by a deep belief that he was doing what was right for America.
Though we often disagreed, I always respected his dedication to our country and his unwavering sense of duty.
My thoughts are with Lynn and the Cheney family.
Now, some of this is just about the fact that, as I said earlier, Republicans are depicted as Nazis when they run, and then once they're neutered, they get rehabilitated.
Oh, Mitt Romney, this very evil figure.
You know what, actually, Mitt Romney was a great guy.
Wish more Republicans were like Mitt Romney.
So part of it is just that.
Dick Cheney's dead.
He's not a threat to Democratic Party power anymore, so he's not nearly as threatening.
But what it really is is about, and I mean, of course, you know, it's, I guess, customary and to be expected that American leaders are going to issue, you know, condolences when other American leaders die.
But what this really is about is the fact that everybody got rehabilitated.
Bill Kristol and David Frum, all the neocon scumbags, all the Bush Cheney monsters.
Every one of them who be Robert Mueller, George Bush's FBI director, turned into a liberal hero.
Anyone who opposed Trump, that was all that was needed to absolve sins.
And the same thing is going to happen to Trump.
10 years from now, 15 years from now, AOC or whoever is going to be running for president and whoever the Republican nominee is, they're going to say, you know what?
I had a lot of fights and a lot of disagreements with Donald Trump.
He and I agreed not very much.
There were some things we agreed on, but we didn't agree very much with Donald Trump.
But we always knew that he was doing what he was doing because he was devoted to the American people, unlike this current Republican nominee who's basically like Adolf Hitler.
If you have any doubts about that, all you have to do is look at how Dick Cheney is being talked about now.
Now, I just want to point out one thing, which is this current critique of Donald Trump, that he is a threat to democracy, that he is centralizing all power in the presidency, that there's no more role of Congress or even the courts, that everything is being centralized in a dictator-like figure, which is the primary Democratic critique of President Trump.
It was in the campaign and it is now.
This was all said about Dick Cheney.
And for good reason, Dick Cheney devoted his entire adult life.
He was a member of Congress in the 80s.
Before that, he was actually the chief of staff for the Bush White House, the Gerald Ford White House.
He was defense secretary as well.
And in the 80s, especially, there was a big scandal involving Iran-Contra where the Reagan White House got caught funding the rebel movement in Nicaragua, the Contras, even though Congress had passed a law called the Bolin Amendment banning the use of any funds to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
The Reagan White House ignored it.
They got the money by selling very sophisticated arms to Iran, took that money, and then gave it to the Contras, even though there was a law in place banning the use of funds for giving to the Contras.
And Dick Cheney in Congress became the primary defender of the Reagan administration, admitted the Reagan administration funded the Contras, even though Congress had barred them from doing so.
And he created this argument that is essentially what has become the unlimited view of executive power theory, which is that whenever the Constitution gives the president any kind of power as commander-in-chief or to conduct foreign policy, Congress has no role at all.
It doesn't matter what Congress does.
Congress can't pass laws, the president has the right to just ignore them.
And that was how, after 9-11, the Bush-Cheney administration ordered the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants required by law.
The FISA law required that you get warrants before the NSA can spy on Americans.
And the Cheney faction of the Bush administration said, we can ignore that law.
Just like Reagan could ignore the law that he violated, we could ignore that law too.
Congress has no right to limit our power to eavesdrop or to require warrants.
That's our role, not theirs.
So we're not constrained by law.
And now, whatever the critique is of Donald Trump in the hands of liberals or establishment Republicans, that, oh, he is a tyrant, he's running the United States as a dictator, this all came from Dick Cheney, who they worship.
And from the Bush 43 presidency, who are their allies.
That's what's so incoherent about liberal politics.
Here's a article from the New York Times.
This is from their editorial.
This is December 23, 2005.
The headline was, Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency.
Which is exactly what they say about Donald Trump.
Here's the longtime congressman from Harlem, Charlie Rangel, the Democrat, March of 2006.
Vice President Cheney, again, resign for the sake of your country.
The fact that George Bush does not fire Dick Cheney, hold him accountable, creates the assumption that the U.S. is a rogue state with a Cheney-Bush regime bent on imposing preemptive war, torture, or prisoners, disregard of its constitution and the will of its people.
His conduct creates the impression that America is a dictatorship or worse, becoming a fascist state.
Sound familiar?
The Vice President's intentional disregard of the Constitution, the Congress, and the people of this great country sets the worst standard of conduct for the fudgling democracies the president states we must bring to every country in the world.
The New York Times published an op-ed today entitled The Tragedy of Dick Cheney.
And it's by Ron Susskind, who actually wrote a book on the Bush presidency, and specifically the fact that the Bush presidency was devoted to creating this imperial presidency that Democrats now try to claim Donald Trump invented, as they are allies with all of the Bush officials who actually did what they now claim they find so objectionable.
And here's part of what this op-ed about Dick Cheney said, quote, Dick Cheney is now gone, but he will be living with his legacy for a long time to come.
Cheney wrote a playbook of how to exercise executive authority beyond constitutional boundaries and the rule of law.
Donald Trump has added pages and is working on a sequel.
I should add so did Barack Obama.
But it was Vice President Cheney guiding his underexperienced boss, George W. Bush, who brought unitary executive theory into view.
Operating out of a parallel executive office staffed with people loyal to Mr. Cheney directly, he unleashed the war on terror, justifying brand new, brutal new tactics, an ill-conceived invasion, and a system of mass domestic surveillance.
He declared his priorities to be national emergencies, obviating the need to work within the structures of democratic power.
He went after those, Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill, who stood in his path, and he prioritized the bank accounts of the wealthy by supporting tax cuts in wartime against the strongest of warnings.
Disastrous as all these actions were, Mr. Trump has undertaken even more significant expansions of power and illegality, often under even more dubious claims of emergency.
Basically, it's the war on terror model without the war.
Mr. Cheney made it possible.
Leave aside whatever your views are on Donald Trump.
If you're somebody who is issuing statements about what a patriot Dick Cheney was, about what a principled public servant he was, about how he honored his country, don't come with grievances about Donald Trump concentrating unlimited power in the executive branch.
That's not Donald Trump's doing.
If any person is singularly responsible for that, it's Dick Cheney, the person that Democrats have allied with.
who they turn to, the Bush Cheney pundits as their thought leaders.
They're all over the Atlantic and the New Yorker and on MSNBC and CNN.
These are the people who actually created that system that they claim to find is such a threat to American democracy.
And if you're somebody who thinks that Dick Cheney is somebody well within the precincts of acceptable political ideology, you have no basis for trying to claim that Donald Trump is outside of that tradition.
To the extent that any of these critiques about Donald Trump are true, and obviously I share some of these.
I share them at Abo Lamba as well.
The author of them is Dick Cheney.
And yet Dick Cheney is now rehabilitated, has been completely revised into somebody who, although somebody you disagree with if you're a Democrat, is the kind of American patriot we all honor and we all unite with at the end of the day because he's somebody whose values are at least aligned with the American tradition as opposed to big bad Donald Trump, who's against everything decent in the world.
This has been the just one of the absurdities at the heart of liberal politics for years now, that the very people that Democrats spoke about in terms at least as badly as they talk about Donald Trump became their political allies and in many ways the leaders of their political movement.
And everything else just fell to the wayside.
Every political value, every critique of institutions like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, it all disappeared at the altar of only one question, which was, are you in favor of or opposed to Donald Trump?
All right, I just want to do one last quick segment, which is about the senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham.
Because Lindsey Graham for so long was one of the uniting figures in the MAGA movement.
And he was uniting in the sense that everybody who identified as a member of the America First Movement or the MAGA movement universally hated Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham was always the symbol of everything wrong with not just Washington, but the Republican Party establishment.
A warmonger, a globalist, a corporatist, someone who was willing to sacrifice the interests of the American people, of the American worker, at the altar of this agenda that had nothing to do with American interests.
He was the enemy.
He was the kind of person that the Trump movement vowed to expunge from Republican politics.
And yet Lindsey Graham, despite the views of, again, I can't think of an exception, to people who were actually adherents to the American First Movement, who identified as MAGA.
Obviously a lot of traditional conservatives are fine with Lindsey Graham.
They should be.
He's representative of them, but that's the agenda that the Trump movement purported to set out to want to destroy.
Lindsey Graham has always had a very good relationship with Donald Trump.
He's always been among the most influential Republican senators with Trump's ear.
And Trump has supported Lindsey Graham as well.
It's not just Randy Fine who Trump is campaigning for, but also Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham has a Republican primary challenger, as you would expect from what I just said.
Somebody who identifies as a Trump supporter, a member of America First, as MAGA, and who is running against Lindsey Graham in the Republican primary on the grounds that Lindsey Graham is a leader of the Republican establishment and its rotted ideologies, which is true.
And it's not that Trump is staying neutral or even just giving him a cursory endorsement.
Trump is actively campaigning for Lindsey Graham.
He's raising money for Lindsey Graham.
And Lindsey Graham is not somebody who really even pretends to have changed any of his views.
He's not like Marco Rubio, who knows how to manipulate Trump by pretending that he's changed into some America first adherent while in fact pursuing all the same neoconservative policies that Marco Rubio has always pursued.
Lindsey Graham is pretty candid about the things he thinks.
And not only is he very popular with Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is very popular with Lindsey Graham as well.
The Trump administration is something that Lindsey Graham loves.
Ben Shapiro loves the Trump administration too, and for good reason.
Lindsey Graham was speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition, of course, earlier this week, and he was almost, he seemed to be shocked at how much he loves the Trump administration and how aligned it is with his agenda and his worldview.
And the way he said it was so crass and disgusting and sociopathic, which is why Lindsey Graham is so uniquely contemptible.
But I do think it also reveals a lot about what the Trump administration has become in stark contrast to what they vowed to be.
Here's Lindsey Graham's view of the Trump administration.
He recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel.
Why?
Because if you got a problem with that, take it up with God.
He's the guy that did it, not Trump.
So I just want to say I feel good about the Republican Party.
I feel good about where we're going as a nation.
We're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes.
Trump is my favorite president.
We've run out of bombs.
We didn't run out of bombs in World War II.
So as a coalition of Republicans, some Baptists, some Jewish, we organize ourselves around principles that we love and we cherish.
We love individual freedom.
We love entrepreneurship.
We love capitalism.
We love Israel.
We love the idea of Israel.
We love the struggle they've been involved in.
We love them helping them because you're helping yourself.
So to those who worry about these stupid interviews in far-off places, don't worry.
The Republican Party has figured it out when it comes to Israel.
We understand that Israel is a friend of America to the bitter end.
We understand that God blesses those who bless Israel.
And where I come from, I figured that crap out when I was six years old.
God bless you.
Thank you very much.
You could maybe suggest that, oh, Lindsey Graham's not really happy with the direction of the Trump administration.
He has to pretend he is because he needs Trump's endorsement.
That might be a plausible argument if not for the fact that the Trump administration is in fact doing all the things Lindsey Graham just, while cackling practically, boasted that they are doing and how perfectly it aligns with.
He's like, we ran out of bombs.
That's how happy I am.
We didn't even run out of bombs in World War II.
He's saying, we're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes.
I mean, that's basically Lindsey Graham's ideology.
It has been for decades.
That's the neoconservative ideology.
We're the corporatist establishment Republican ideology.
Go to war, bomb everybody, support Israel, love Israel, and cut corporate taxes.
That's the Bush-Cheney agenda.
That's the agenda of the Republican Party for as long as I can remember.
And I thought, I think a lot of Trump supporters thought that the purpose of the Trump movement was to undermine and subvert and overthrow that Republican establishment ideology and not affirm it and build on it and expand it.
But the fact that Lindsey Graham is so happy with Donald Trump and Donald Trump is so happy with Lindsey Graham, while Donald Trump tries to remove Thomas Massey and Rand Paul from Congress.
I could spend night after night, as I do often, breaking down the policy of the Trump administration, how it conflicts with the rhetoric that a lot of Trump supporters insisted Trump would follow.
But at the end of the day, those actions speak more loudly and more clearly than anything that I could say.
The fact that Donald Trump is out there working as hard as he can for Lindsey Graham, even though Lindsey Graham is the same Lindsey Graham he has always been, and the fact that the Trump administration advances so aggressively the worldview of Lindsey Graham and his neocon friends in Washington shows you exactly what the Trump administration is for the most part better than anyone who's trying to break it down journalistically or analytically could possibly do.
So as nauseating as Lindsey Graham is, I think some gratitude is owed to him for that little speech of the Republican Jewish Coalition as well as the reaction there because it speaks volumes about what the Republican Party actually is these days in our nation's capital.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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