"Former" Al-Qaeda Leader Welcomed to the White House; The "New TikTok" Clamps Down on Israel Critics: With Influencer Guy Christensen
The White House warmly welcomed the "former" Al-Qaeda leader-turned-Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, demonstrating the absurdity of the term "terrorist." Plus: Glenn and pro-Palestinian activist Guy Christensen discuss TikTok's intensifying crackdowns on Israel's critics. ----------------------------------- 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 o'clock p.m. Eastern on the dot, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, although the idea of the TikTok ban was first introduced in 2020 by claiming that it allowed China undue influence over American minds, the bill only attracted enough votes to pass after October 7th, 2023, when the Biden White House and leading Democrats in Congress became convinced that young Americans were turning against Israel, not because they were watching dead babies be blown up every day and starved to death and set on fire,
but rather because that platform was simply too permissive when it came to anti-Israel content.
Now the forced sale of TikTok is putting it into the hands of the same Larry Ellison whose family just bought CBS and who just happens to be by coincidence the largest ever private donor to the friends of the IDF.
Already, as expected, extreme censorship of Israel critics is very visible on the platform.
And we'll talk to Guy Christensen, who is a very young and very popular TikTok commentator who has made criticism of Israel one of his primary focal points and has already seen and firsthand experienced an explosion of censorship firsthand on that site when it comes to that foreign country.
Then the president of Syria was welcomed today for a state visit at the White House.
Even under the most normal of circumstances, that would be newsworthy.
No Syrian president has ever been received before at the White House.
But given who the current Syrian president is, a longtime operative and even leader of al-Qaeda, as you may recall, that's the group in whose name the U.S. launched, then fought for 25 years, a multifaceted war both abroad and at home.
The imagery of him being welcomed into the White House in the Oval Office was absolutely wild.
In sum, imagine going back in time 20 years or even just 10 years ago and telling the average American that in 2025, the Taliban will be ruling Afghanistan with no opposition as if nothing happened.
And a longtime chased after fugitive, an al-Qaeda operative, will be embraced in the capitals of the West and in the White House as an honored state leader of one of the most important countries in that region.
What exactly did the war on terror accomplish other than enriching arms dealers, killing huge numbers of people, wasting $2 trillion, and radically destroying the civil liberties of all Americans in ways that look to be increasingly permanent?
And then finally, a young college student was arrested yesterday for yelling an anti-Jewish slur and then throwing a penny near Barstool's Dave Portnoy, who, until his own group had been targeted, made a name for himself, really a career for himself, defending not just the most offensive jokes imaginable, including offensive jokes that came from himself, but also endlessly mocking anyone who claimed to be alarmed by or victimized by racism or other form of bigotry that affected other groups.
Well, look at this incident and Portnoy's all too common abandonment of his own purported beliefs and tough guy in the wake of racism and bigotry as soon as his own demographic group is targeted.
Before we get to all of that, a couple of quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update after this very brief message from our sponsor.
Before we continue with our program, I want to focus on something.
I want to pause actually and then focus on something that fits directly into the themes that we covered here.
We are living in a moment in a moment where powerful institutions continue asking for public trust, even as their actions show very little accountability or foresight.
For years, the Federal Reserve told Americans that inflation was temporary and the system was sound, yet the cost of ordinary life keeps rising.
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Goldman Sachs is warning of a 10 to 20 percent market decline.
Morgan Stanley has moved away from the long-standing 60-40 portfolio approach and now recommends that investors hold roughly 20% in gold and silver.
That's not a small tweak.
It tells you that confidence in policymakers and centralized monetary decisions is weakening.
Earlier this year, gold broke above $4,300, but not because of speculation, but because real assets do not rely on political promises or carefully crafted press statements.
If you have retirement savings, it is reasonable to evaluate options outside a system that has shown it can misjudge fundamental economic realities.
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If the system is not prepared to protect your future, then the responsibility to protect it falls on you.
At Wilmer Forrest to name the single most consequential event of the last 25 years in the United States and more broadly in the West, it wouldn't really be that difficult of a challenge.
One would certainly have to say that it was the 9-11 attacks, principally because of the 25-year so-called war on terror That followed.
I suppose you can make a case for the 2008 financial crisis, since that also has had ramifications that have been severe and enduring for billions of people around the world.
But it's really the 9-11 attack and the ensuing reactions to it extending over 25 years that I think more than anything radically transformed the relationship between the U.S. citizen and the U.S. government, as well as the nature of our domestic politics and our standing in the world.
It encompassed an endless array of wars and bombing campaigns and covert operation, radically new and previously taboo programs for how to deal not with terrorists who were convicted of crimes or even accused of crimes, but simply ones the U.S. government deemed to be crimes, from things like creating a prison in the middle of an ocean where no due process was given, no one was convicted, many, many innocent people put there, indefinitely, to torture regime,
to CIA black sites where the U.S. government would kidnap people off the streets in a rendition program of Europe and send it to places like Bashar al-Assad in Syria or Egypt to be tortured.
And perhaps most significantly at the end of the day, certainly in terms of American politics, is the very aggressive and radical erosion of civil liberties for Americans inside the United States.
It was 9-11 that ushered in things like the Patriot Act and warrantless NSA spying on Americans, of theories that the president, as long as he calls someone a terrorist, can basically do anything to anyone, including arresting American citizens on American soil and then putting them in military brigs for three years with no representation, no due process, no charges, no lawyers, as happened in the case of Jose Badilla and others.
It was really a time when previously unimaginable ideas for how the U.S. government can and does function on American soil became normalized.
And 25 years later, essentially none of that has been dismantled.
Almost all of it has been strengthened.
Because in reality, the war on terror continues.
The war on terror, the classic kind of OG version, where we occasionally bomb Somalia or Yemen or other places, and we claim that it was done to bomb ISIS or al-Qaeda operatives.
Also, of course, in Syria and Iraq, there was a lot of bombing there, and there continues to be occasional bombing there.
The war on terror, both legally but in reality, is still very much alive 25 years later.
And it's also been expanded in ways that in some sense were predictable and predicted, but the whole point of the prediction was that it will expand to wars and to cases that you would never imagine the original legislation was designed to accomplish.
Right now, whatever you think of the policy, President Trump claims the right to blow up boats with no evidence presented of their having drugs on them, let alone bring drugs to the United States.
By citing 2001-2002 war on terror legislation that was passed in the wake of the trauma of 9-11 with very little opposition because he simply decrees these groups to be terrorists.
Even though that word terrorist has no definition, it means whatever we want it to mean from one day to the next, however evil you think drug traffickers are.
They don't even come close to the classical definition of terrorism.
They're not killing innocent people deliberately or threatening to kill innocent people deliberately with the intention of fostering political change.
They don't do any of that.
They're just at worst a profit-making group that profits off the misery and suffering of others.
Nothing to do with terrorism though, and yet all of that legislation is still central to the power we give to the government to create wars whenever it wants without Congress.
It's central to our discourse.
How often are people just called terrorists in order to demonize them and justify any number of evils against them?
And it continues to be the way in which we conceive of when the government can exceed its powers.
And we live with the enduring aftermath, not so much of the 9-11 attack itself, but what the government did in exploiting the fears and anger that emerged in order to transform our own country.
And on top of all that, the war on terror estimate is estimated to have cost at least $2 trillion, certainly an undercount.
It cost the lives of thousands of American service members.
Over a million lives were extinguished in it in the multiple countries where we invaded and waged war and bombed endlessly.
New ways of bombing were pioneered and then installed, principally by the Obama administration, that used unmanned drone operations to kill people, usually when they had no idea who they were killing.
Huge numbers of them.
It's really impossible to overstate what the consequences of the war on terror were and how not just enduring, but likely permanent they have become, not just in a foreign relations sense, but also in America for Americans.
And the reason so many Americans acquiesced to it, the reason so many Americans accepted it or even voted for it, or to this day continue even if they're uncomfortable by it to accept the necessity for it is because we were told that we had faced an enemy.
We were facing an enemy more evil, more sinister, more threatening, less human than any we had previously faced in all of human history, including the Soviets, who had that role for decades, could have destroyed the world, had thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at our cities.
We were told they were godless, barely human.
But of course, you have a new enemy and you have to say that they're even worse.
And so al-Qaeda became this unprecedented evil, this never before seen threat that required complete radical transformations of the United States because whatever else was the cost, whatever we had to do, destroying and obliterating not just al-Qaeda, but every last al-Qaeda operative, we were told throughout administrations for many years, was paramount to the American project, paramount to American national security.
And yet we have today a scene where the current president of Syria, and he's not just the current president of Syria, but he's long been a leading al-Qaeda operative who less than a year ago had a bounty on his head of $10 million by the White House in order to lead to his capture and arrest,
came to Washington today as a newly rejuvenated president of Syria, an al-Qaeda operative, not from 20 years ago, but from at least 11 months ago, and he was welcomed in the arms of the White House.
And we're going to get to that to break it down because it demonstrates how this kind of propaganda works, how the word terrorism is often deployed, even though it has no real meaning.
It just changes what everyone thinks.
And even though we're going to get to that a little bit later in the show, I wanted to start with that because I want to focus on what has been happening inside the United States when it comes to our free speech and especially our ability to use the internet and social media outlets freely.
Because I don't think people have really appreciated up until now just how extreme was the effort to take the social media platform that at least a third of the country voluntarily chooses to use.
You're talking about tens of millions of Americans and who has a social media platform that principally young Americans have been using to speak with one another, to be heard, to organize politically, to learn, to get access to information.
And when the government saw that it was too free, that it was too out of their control, they were able to control Google, they were able to control Facebook, they were able to control certainly the pre-Musk Twitter.
They were able to escalate their control over the internet through the concoction of disinformation, this new disinformation industry, and all sorts of other ways, pressure on big tech to censor.
TikTok was one of the very few significant platforms out of their control.
And originally, When the idea of banning TikTok was first announced, which is under the Trump administration, the argument for it was that its ties to the Chinese government made it too dangerous to permit to exist in the United States, that it would poison the mind of young people.
But that argument really didn't go anywhere.
That was introduced in 2020.
And three full years later, nobody banned TikTok.
That legislation hadn't advanced in Congress.
People looked at TikTok.
Their kids were on it.
It just didn't seem like a Chinese-controlled propaganda model.
It seemed like a bunch of people linked to China who wanted to profit and were profiting off of what became this massive corporation.
But there was very little evidence that it was being used by China either to propagandize or to harvest information, especially once TikTok began making all the concessions the United States government wanted.
And that was why the bill really never went anywhere.
That all changed after October 7th.
And especially once this student movement erupted on college campuses where people in very large numbers, very passionately risking their own future careers, their standing at their universities, their ability to work in the future, began protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the U.S. support for it in a way that really started alarming Israel supporters who for decades had just assumed that support for Israel was and would always remain a taboo topic and one protected by the bipartisan class.
And instead, they saw huge numbers of young people who suddenly seemed to have turned against Israel in large numbers, not just on the left, but the right and everywhere in between.
And that was when, not because of China, but because of Israel, the ADL came out and said TikTok has to be banned.
The Biden administration has to sign on to it.
The Biden White House then did sign on to what had been a Republican bill.
Members of Congress and the Democratic Party who are loyal to AIPAC also joined.
And that is how the TikTok ban got passed in 2024, even when President Trump opposed it.
It was because of a perception, not that it was allowing China influence in the United States, but that it was turning young Americans against Israel.
And that's what had to be stopped.
So TikTok would either be banned or they would force a sale of TikTok to the control of people the U.S. government could control, the way they do at Facebook and Google and elsewhere.
Now, the latest news on the TikTok deal is that President Trump announced a deal to sell it to a consortium of people who are both very close supporters of President Trump, but also fanatical supporters of Israel.
Here's the Jewish Telegraph Agency October 30th, just to give you the status of the deal.
Quote, Larry Ellison's oracle is poised to run TikTok, raising hopes for tougher rules against anti-Semitism.
Note, this is the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, so they see that as a positive, that by forcing a sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison, the richest or second richest person in the world, who, as I said before, is the single largest donor to private donor, to the friends of the IDF, a fanatical supporter of Israel his whole life.
He just bought CBS and was already, for example, doing things like installing Barry Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS.
You already see the evidence of CBS and what it's airing, being extremely pro-Israel.
That's what they want to do to TikTok as well.
And so this article says, Ellison's Oracle is poised to run TikTok, raising hopes for tougher rules against anti-Semitism.
Quote, U.S. officials say a deal that giving Oracle control of TikTok's American operation has won Beijing's approval.
Quote, in Kuala Lumpur, we finalized the TikTok agreement in terms of getting Chinese approval, and I would expect that would go forward in the next coming weeks and months, and we'll finally see a resolution to that, Treasury Secretary Scott Benson, told Fox Business following a meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Details of the agreement have not been released, but the White House had previously said that a consortium of U.S. investors led by Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a longtime supporter of Jewish causes and of Israel, would acquire a controlling stake in the app.
For the leader of one of the largest and most broadly representative Jewish groups in the country, these developments are hopeful.
Quote, at the Jewish Federation of North America, we are optimistic about this moment, said the CEO Eric Fingerhut, while moderating a panel on the deal at the organization's Washington headquarters.
Also on the panel was social media expert Sarah Quinn, the U.S. Director for Public Affairs at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who said she shared this optimism that TikTok's new owners would take steps to lessen the spread of anti-Semitism on the platform.
Quote, this change in leadership, are they going to improve their policy?
She asked rhetorically, I think that's probably true based on the broad support coming from Ellison and Oracle on that issue.
Remember when one of the main conservative grievances, arguably the primary conservative grievance, was that the Biden White House was using its power as the U.S. government to coerce and cajole and pressure big tech to change its content moderation policies to more accurately align with the policies of the U.S. government.
This was supposed to be one of the worst assaults on the First Amendment.
I certainly thought it was.
That's why we spent so much time covering it.
And now you have something which, in a way, is a lot graver.
It's not just taking the current owners of these big tech platforms and pressuring and threatening and cajoling them to change their policies to remove critiques of a foreign country the United States government, for whatever reasons, is devoted to and loves.
It's actually threatening to close the platform entirely to prevent 90 million or 100 million Americans from using it or forcing a sale to somebody who has devoted their lives to Israel in order to take this platform that they believe has been responsible for being too free, for allowing too much Israel criticisms that has contaminated the minds of young Americans to make them question, wait, why are we spending all our money and arming Israel as they do something like destroy Gaza?
That's what had to be stopped.
Young Americans getting too much information too freely.
That's what the TikTok ban was.
And the sponsors of it and people who are happy about it say this outright.
They didn't just force a sale to anyone, they forced it to Larry Ellison, who has made clear both with the acquisition of Paramount and CBS, his attempt now to buy CNN, and this consortium-led TikTok acquisition that as a response to the unraveling support for Israel and the United States,
his objective, and Netanyahu talked about this as well as being one of their most important battles in their war, one of the most important fronts, is to reseize control of social media and to make sure that Americans are no longer hearing anti-Israel content.
It's not just an aspiration.
This is what's happening.
That's what the TikTok ban was.
And now it's fully in effect.
And because it's been this slow drip where this idea has been around for years, originally it was justified based on China, I don't think the full repercussions from a censorship perspective, from a perspective of information control, of re-education by a foreign country of millions of young Americans, I don't think the effects of that have been truly appreciated.
In part because October 7th is somewhat like November 11th, the attack of September 11th.
The all-justifying event.
So you say anything, oh, this seems really extreme.
This seems authoritarian.
But what about September 11th?
What about October 7th?
It's exactly the same framework.
Here is Iran's press TV, obviously a critic of Israel.
In a press release on November 1st, Press TV was, quote, permanently banned from TikTok a mere hours after releasing our expose, Israel's covert operation of paying social media influencers, featuring Derby Chris W and TikTok influencer Guy Christensen, who we're about to speak with.
So you have a press TV program, a documentary on how Israel is covertly paying young influencers to influence Americans inside the United States, something that American media outlets have reported as well.
It features a very young and extremely popular American critic of Israel, Guy Christensen.
And TikTok's response to it is to just ban the entire network.
Just to ban them so young Americans can no longer hear them.
Doesn't matter what you think of Iran.
Americans have the right to access whatever information they want.
And as a result of the U.S. government action, not the private sector's action, the private sector didn't do this.
The owners of TikTok didn't want to sell.
They were forced to sell by the U.S. government and then forced to sell to Larry Ellison.
This is what you're starting to see.
Here is on press TV on Axe with Guy Christensen.
There's a clip of this program that led to TikTok simply banning this channel.
Here it is.
I understand that you were offered money to post Zionist Hasbara, weren't you?
Yeah, that's right.
This situation is what really solidified my support for Palestinian rights.
When October 7th happened, I didn't know the first thing about Israel or Palestine.
And so I ended up making a few videos talking about Palestinian struggle for freedom.
Just very surface-level videos supporting Palestine.
And soon after, I think it was a week or two, I received an email from an Israeli news outlet offering me $5,000 to go live on my TikTok page and pledge my support for Israel.
I was appalled.
My morals are not for sale.
And I quickly exposed this incident and how Zionists were making efforts to buy support for their war crimes, which were already more than apparent.
And look, they try to buy a 17-year-old American support for an unfolding genocide.
I reached out to my creator friends.
I was in the comedy niche at the time in TikTok in the early 2023.
And I asked, I was like, hey, this is random, but have you received any similar offers?
And they had a handful, the multiple people shared with me emails from other Israeli news outlets like Haretz for like a week-long campaign, paying $250 or more a video for covering the quote-unquote Israeli hostage crisis based on a handful of Retz articles.
For a lot of us, this was a wake-up call very early on.
It was for me.
What we learned from this is, you know, Israel has always been paying people and paying for influence all over the world and in the United States.
Whatever you think of these issues, whatever you think of Israel and Gaza and support for it, whatever you think of TikTok and Larry Ellison, any country where a report like this, utterly devoid of hate speech, incitement to violence, or any of the other clichés often invokes justify censorship, any country in which content like this, a news report like this, is prohibited from being heard,
where the U.S. government conspires to ensure that one of our largest and most important social media platforms is in the hands of Israel supporters who will ban this, is a country by definition that is not free.
It isn't just TikTok, of course.
As I said, Meta and Google have long been far more under control of the United States government because of their close relationship to the U.S. government, the dependence on big contracts and the security state than TikTok.
That's what made TikTok so different and produced so much anger inside the Beltway, the perception that it was freer and they couldn't control it quite as much.
Also banned from Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp, a whole bunch of other properties.
Here is Guy Kershenson, who again is our guest tonight, who we're going to talk to in just a second, talking about the multi-platform bans of this sort of content.
I was blacklisted by Meta because I spoke out for the Palestinian people.
They deleted my account with nearly half a million followers about a month ago.
And before I tell you how this happened, please, I want to urge you to go to my bio and follow me on Substack.
I need to rebuild somehow.
Meta has been hiring hundreds of IDF soldiers into their company, putting them into moderation roles.
And what has happened is that Zionist soldiers now wield a lot of influence over what counts as free speech on meta platforms.
And so they have used their power to start banning pro-Palestinian activists, Palestinian people telling their stories from Gaza, Palestinian academics, anybody involved in the movement.
Honestly, I have had many of my friends banned for their activism speaking against the Palestinian.
If you're somebody who is at all identified as a free speech advocate, somebody who object to the Biden administration's coercion and cajoling of big tech, who in general believes censorship is an un-American threat to our freedoms, all of which is true, it shouldn't matter in the slightest what your views are on the underlying issues.
This level of systemic censorship of what the world is and should be debating very robustly, which is Israel standing in the world, the war crimes and genocide in Gaza, the support of U.S. governments for it, the ability of Israel to project political influence in the United States, these are topics that aren't going away.
And to have big tech censoring that, not on behalf of our own government, but on behalf of a foreign government, but inside the United States, censoring American voices for an American audience, from a constitutional perspective, a free speech perspective, a perspective of being a free country, it's hard to conjure many things more threatening to and eroding of those values.
It's not really even hidden.
From NBC News July 24th, Meta says it will remove more posts attacking, quote, Zionists, a term some interchangeably use with Jews.
The idea that Zionism is a word interchangeable with Jews is itself actually anti-Semitic.
Zionism is an ideology, a new one at that, that didn't even exist until the late 19th century.
didn't really come into the mainstream until the mid-20th century, not talking about even 100 years ago.
The idea that every Jew is now duty-bound to support Zionism and does so is completely ahistorical.
Huge numbers of religious Jews oppose Zionism from the start.
We've interviewed rabbis and Orthodox Jews on our show who despise Zionism.
Huge numbers of Jews have become anti-Zionist.
And by contrast, there are all kinds of Christian leaders inside the United States who believe their own religion gears them towards Zionism.
There's nothing interchangeable about Zionism and Jews.
People understand the difference very well when they're critiquing Zionism.
They're not critiquing Jews because Zionism is an ideology that some Jews believe in and some Jews don't believe in.
It was Biden himself who said, you don't have to be a Jew to believe in Zionism.
I, Biden, am a very fervent Zionist.
This is a pretext for taking legitimate speech about debating an ideology, Zionism, and masquerading it as hate speech to justify its suppression.
This censorship has been happening to not just people who are younger, who are building a platform, but also to already established and big journalists and creators.
Here's Crystal Ball talking about the Gaza-related clips that have been censored on her creator page on TikTok.
And you can see there just some of the many posts of Crystal Balls that have been receiving warnings that have been otherwise censored or that have been unrecommended, a way of kind of suppressing them.
Anyone who's listened to Crystal Ball knows that whatever else she is, hate speech or incitement to violence or any other excuse for censorship is utterly absent from anything she ever talks about.
Very standard issue critic of Israel that has become a person who speaks for millions and millions of Americans.
And yet this is what is being censored on TikTok and was deliberately engineered that way by virtue of the sale, the imminent control by Larry Ellison, who's already in charge of CBS and Paramount and all of its related properties.
It should always be worth remembering who the chief censor of TikTok has become.
It's actually a former IDF soldier.
It's an American citizen, one of those many American citizens.
I've never understood why this is legal, but it is.
Who, even though they're an American citizen, get all the benefits of American citizenship, travel on American passport, decide that they want to join the military, but they don't join the military of their own government or their own country.
They go to Israel and join the Israeli military.
That's true of so many people throughout American media and politics, including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who went and worked for the IDF, joined the IDF, worked as a prison guard for one of those dungeons where Palestinians are kept and abused with no charges.
And the list goes on and on.
And now one of these people, a young person whose basically whole adult life has been devoted to serving Israel to the point where she went there as an American and moved there and joined the IDF, she's now been hired at the insistence of the ADL to be TikTok's new chief censor for all matters relating to Israel and anti-Semitism.
Here from the Jerusalem Post, July of 2025, TikTok's new hate speech manager is a former IDF soldier and a proud Zionist.
Erica Mindel's new position involves developing and driving the company's public policy positions on hate speech, according to her job description.
And you can find endless numbers of videos of her talking about the centrality of Israel, not America, but of Israel, in her life.
And this has been an ongoing issue.
Here from NBC just this week, November 1st, critics renew calls for a TikTok ban, claiming the platform has an anti-Israel bias.
I'm sorry, this is not November 1st, 2025.
This is actually November 1st, 2023.
This is what reinitiated the move after October 7 to get Democrats on board with the ban on TikTok.
You see, it has nothing to do with China.
The argument was we have to shut TikTok not because it's controlled by the Chinese, but because it allows too much anti-Israel content that's turning young Americans against this sacred country.
The very powerful, especially among Democrats, but bipartisan power, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, went on, went to a conference in Israel.
He had gone on American television previously and demanded that TikTok be banned after October 7th.
And shortly, the Democrats fell into line and did what the ADL demanded.
Here he is in Israel reporting to essentially his bosses.
And he's proudly boasting to them about the success in having, in his words, captured TikTok, meaning for the group he represents, but more so for the government of Israel to whom he's reporting.
We must, you must, take this deadly seriously.
Pushing extremists off Wikipedia might not seem equal to the challenge of pushing Hezbollah north of the Latani River.
Capturing TikTok might seem less meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon.
Libelous tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen.
But this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline.
You don't have to listen to me about the centrality that Israel views control over social media, not in Israel, but inside the United States, because the Israelis are openly talking about it themselves.
Nor do you have to listen to me when I tell you, notwithstanding the mountains of evidence I've been presenting for a long time now, that the impetus for banning TikTok, the reason the Biden administration got behind it, Democrats voted for it, has nothing to do with China at all and everything about protecting Israel from criticism inside the United States.
Here's Mitt Romney, the at the time Republican senator from Utah who was a supporter of the TikTok ban, speaking with Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, obviously a major supporter of Israel, at the McCain Institute.
This is in May of 2024, and they're very explicit and very open about the reason TikTok had to be banned.
Don't listen to me, don't listen to anyone else.
Listen to Mitt Romney and Tony Blinken about why this happened.
And of course, the way this is played out on social media has dominated the narrative.
And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.
And we can't discount that.
But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
Yeah, a small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature.
If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.
So I'd know that's of real interest, and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.
I mean, what else do you need?
That's Mitt Romney saying, hey, in case any of you are wondering why we had to ban TikTok, it's because of how many posts there were critical of Israel.
You may remember that during the GOP presidential debate when Nikki Haley was still clinging onto her candidacy, she advocated for a TikTok ban at the time President Trump opposed it for all sorts of reasons, having little to do with free speech, but he did.
And Nikki Haley invented this statistic that to this day I laugh at when I hear it.
I think it was something like for every 18 minutes somebody spends on TikTok, they become 17% more anti-Semitic.
So if you spend like a half an hour on TikTok, you've now become 30% or 34% more.
I don't know what happens if you spend four hours on TikTok.
You spend like 330% more anti-Semitic.
But this is the explicit stated rationale for why they banned and then forced the sale to Larry Allison of one of the most important and influential social media platforms in our country.
There's no ambiguity or confusion about it.
All right, one more quick video that I think it's urgent that you see because it's from today before we get to our guest guy, Christensen, who I'm really excited to talk about since he understands TikTok very well, understands the censorship aspect extremely well.
Also, but I want to show you just a quick interview, an excerpt of an interview that Barry Weiss, the aforementioned Barry Weiss, conducted today with Senator John Fetterman, the Democrat of Pennsylvania, who has become arguably the most vocal and fanatical supporter of Israel in the entire United States Senate, not just in the Democratic Party.
And you may recall that whenever Democrats lose when they lost the 2024 election and people say, hey, you need to look inward, they never do.
They say, no, inward, everything is great.
We did everything great.
The problem was we just didn't communicate how great we were.
We didn't convince enough Americans of all the great things we did for them.
It's just a communication problem.
And this is what these people who want to censor the internet and censor social media believe about Israel.
Oh, the reason people are turning against Israel isn't because Israel has killed tens of thousands of babies and imposed mass starvation and set people intense on fire and committed some of the worst atrocities and war crimes, certainly in this century, if not since World War II.
And that's said not by me or Israel critics, by Israel scholars of genocide who resisted saying things like that at the beginning, but had no choice to once they saw the reality.
No, it's not because of that.
It's not because our politicians make pilgrimage there every week or send our billions of dollars while our communities are falling apart or impose censorship in our country against American citizens in the name of this foreign country.
That's not why people have turned against Israel.
It's because social media has allowed too much free speech and that has created an unfair perception about Israel.
That's why they've prioritized controlling and censoring social media, even at the expense of the free speech rights of Americans, which is our birthright in defense of a foreign country.
Here's John Fetterman describing this to Barry Weiss today.
You're saying it's becoming almost impossible to be an outspoken defender of Jews and defender of Israel and to be a proud Democrat.
Why?
Why is that happening?
Why has that been allowed to happen?
I mean, I've witnessed it.
You know, like for two years, I've had protesters showing up at my home, in my office, and in public, you know, even with one of my kids.
And now social media was an accelerant for anti-Semitism and TikTok.
You know, like there was the study, 17 to 1, anti-Israel for every one pro-Israel one.
And the algorithm has accelerated this.
And that's why we've lost the younger vote.
And I struggle with the younger voters as well, too, because that's a strong correlation with being very pro-Israel.
And that's now being increasingly incompatible with parts of the base.
John Fetterman thinks he's the real victim of the destruction of Gaza because he has protesters signing up at his house.
Maybe the reason that there's 17 to 1 ratio against Israel among young Americans on TikTok isn't because there's something very strange and propagandistic happening, but because most young Americans haven't been indoctrinated with the pro-Israel position that has dominated our politics for decades and used their own minds with diffuse, decentralized media to see the reality of what's going in Gaza.
And huge numbers of people have empathy in this world and have decided what Israel is doing is evil.
Public opinion polls show that as well.
The idea that there's not an equal number of content, it's not like the content is being created by the TCP.
It's being created by American citizens, primarily young American citizens, who express their view.
And most people on the left and the right and the center in the United States have turned against Israel, not because social media manipulates them to do so, but because social media enables them to be liberated from the tiny number of centralized corporate media outlets that for so long blinded them to the truth.
All right, Guy Christensen is an activist.
He's a political commentator who in recent years has become one of the most visible creators on TikTok advocating for the Palestinian people amidst Israel's genocide in Gaza.
He currently has 3.5 million followers on the platform where he and other creators are increasingly seeing their Israel critical views censored.
He also has some impact in his real life that also strikes me as very un-American.
We're going to try and talk to him to the extent he's able to talk given ongoing lawsuits.
And he joins us tonight.
And I'm really excited to talk to him.
Guy, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's great to see you.
Thank you, Glenn.
I'm glad to be on.
Absolutely.
All right.
So for those who don't know you, and it was funny before the election, I used to talk to my staff a lot about how we have such a diffused world now of influence and fame and celebrity where the people who are often the most famous among people under 30 or 35 are completely unknown to the professional media class.
That's why you see the New York Times up the 2024 election running these profiles like, hey, there's this guy named Theo Vaughn.
Who is he?
And hey, there seems to be this sensation involving a guy named Kai Sanat.
And, you know, these are people who attract millions and millions of people.
And I think that's the case for you as well.
A huge following on TikTok, but I would guess most political junkies who are a little bit older aren't familiar with your story.
So you're very young.
You've obviously made the Palestinian cause and Israel's destruction of Gaza one of the main focal points of your activism and your commentary.
Can you just talk us through a little bit about what your trajectory has been that brought you to being a political commentator on TikTok and why that issue has become so important to you?
Yeah, so I've been making videos on TikTok since I was 13 years old.
I'm 19 years old now.
And I didn't really do politics before October 7th.
So it was about, you know, four or five years of me making comedy videos, a little bit of political adjacent videos, but I garnered a platform on there of about two and a half, two million followers.
And all of a sudden on October 7th, my feed was flooded with pro-Israel zapaganda, dehumanizing Palestinians.
And me, having no prior knowledge about Israel, I was shocked.
I was disgusted by what I was hearing, like not knowing anything.
And that shock provoked me to dig into the reality of Gaza, which I discovered it was an open-air prison far before Hamas crossed the border on October 7th.
I learned a little bit about the apartheid system, the brutal military occupation that Israel has had over the West Bank for the last 50 plus years.
And I mean, I remember saying to myself, like, why do I have so many followers?
Why do this platform, this influence, this privilege, if I'm not going to say something when I think I should?
And, you know, at the time, there was no pro-Palestinian voices that I knew of that I was seeing on my feeds or in the media.
It was all the opposite.
It was like, you remember the Harvard students getting doxxed on that truck going around campus because they signed simply a letter calling for a ceasefire on October 8th.
And Bill Ackman was saying they were going to be blacklisted, kicked out of college, never going to have a job.
And I was looking at all this, and so it was a hard decision, but it was, it ended up being the right one for sure.
And so I've spoken out about Palestine with my platform ever since.
We've reached hundreds of millions of people with our message about humanity.
And I mean, this year alone, we raised over half a million dollars and sent it all to Gaza, where we are running daily on-the-ground food distributions and multiple refugee camps across the territory.
You know, it's really interesting about this, and I've thought about this a lot, especially the last couple of years, is that as you get older, well, first of all, you're going to find that you become a person who starts sentences by saying as you get older, and that's disturbing enough.
But in addition to that, as you get older, you're going to start to realize that a lot of political conflicts that seem new are actually repeats of history.
And, you know, there's all kinds of cliches about repeating history.
But a lot of times our political fights that seem really new in the moment are actually either based in the past or just you can find very similar, if not identical, conflicts in the past.
And as somebody who has been a critic of Israel for so long, what's fascinating me about the last couple of years is that we haven't really had Israel and the U.S. relationship to it on the front burner of American politics, probably since at least 2014, which is, you know, Israel bombs Gaza every year, but that was the last time Israel bombed it on a massive scale.
Nowhere near what they did this time, but still massive enough that people are paying attention.
But that's a long time.
That's a decade.
It's like a lifetime in politics.
Didn't really nearly last as long.
And so while a lot of people like me and my age group are very seeped in Israel and understand it, I know that for people in your generation, and even older, this is like the first time you're really getting a look at the true face of Israel, but also the true face of the U.S. relationship to Israel.
What is it that kind of surprised you or shocked you to the extent that you prioritized this issue?
Like, what was it about this as opposed to all the other injustices and suffering in the world?
Well, I think there's two things.
Right after I'd begun my research into the true nature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, I saw parallels as you were talking about, you know, things repeat across history with the idea, the Zionist idea of a greater Israel and America's manifest destiny and the colonization and genocide of the Native American people here.
And that was actually one of the first videos, if not the first video I made talking about Gaza during that initial period of learning.
And I think that what I've come to learn, and it's, you know, it's not shocking anymore, but as I've paid close attention to the actions of our elected officials, the actions of those in the executive, the power brokers and institutions in this country, is that following October 7th, I swear they spent about six to eight months exclusively working to further Israel's interests.
All the discourse online, all the votes in Congress to redefine anti-Semitism or to ban TikTok or to enshrine certain definitions across the political levels in this country.
It was really honestly disgusting because I mean, it was my first, as you said, confrontation with the nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
And I, prior, I believed naively that our elected officials were supposed to serve us and learning about APAC.
And, you know, they're not the only, as we know, not the only pro-Israel lobby.
It's an extensive network of billionaires and registered lobbying organizations and foreign agents in the United States all working to fund our elected officials.
But seeing them in 2024, just a few months after I was introduced to all this, blow $100 million.
APAC blew $100 million.
The pro-Israel interests spent at least a quarter billion and they bought a majority, a super majority of the seats in our Congress.
I mean, all this was shocking.
And I realized how important it is to counter Zionist influence in this country who are buying and taking away our representation in government.
And so that's why I've focused so hard on this.
I think it's not only important in terms of getting in touch with our humanity and standing up for our brothers and sisters who are being killed with our tax dollars, but also in terms of trying to make possible real change in this country.
You had said this is kind of your first introduction into this issue, and you talked about some of the incredible exertions of corporate and financial and political power wielded at the very beginning, almost a signal to people.
Look, if you want to have a career, if you're a young person and you're thinking about opposing Israel, you better think twice.
And we interviewed those Harvard students who at the very beginning, whose faces were plastered all over Harvard, paid for by very wealthy Israel interests, trying to permanently ruin not just their standing in school, but their careers before it even got started.
And I remember asking them, like, whether you expected this kind of level of, you know, attacks or not.
Do you kind of regret it?
Like, you're at Harvard.
I know that means, I know a lot of people went to Harvard that you're hyper-competitive in your career.
You're hyper-competitive in your academics.
You've just been told that entire industries, big law firms, hedge funds, those are going to be cut off to you as a result of this blacklist Bill Ackman and others are keeping.
Do you regret it?
And they immediately said, you know, not even in the slightest.
Like, I wouldn't even feel that I could look at myself in the mirror if I hadn't done this.
When you started talking about this issue, because I can tell you that for decades, this is what has changed so much.
The bipartisan control of Israel discourse was so great that everybody understood that you were either going to suffer career destruction and reputational destruction or come very close to it if you decided to speak out against about Israel.
There's countless examples of people who did that and then got destroyed, which of course makes it less likely others will.
Did you have a feel as somebody who came to this new as to kind of what you might be unleashing against yourself, especially given the size of your platform?
Yeah, I mean, that was the main question.
I was, I was, I mean, I was 17.
I was a senior in high school when, you know, all this started happening in the world and in my life.
And looking at that specific story about the Harvard students, I remember thinking to myself, if I do this, I'm opening myself up to all the attacks that they're facing.
And, you know, I, at the time, I'm about to wrap up my high school education and go on to hopefully college.
And I was definitely thinking that they might kick me out of college for this one day for simply speaking up.
All right.
So that turned out to be quite prescient, given that, and I know you had mentioned to me, and I told you I was a litigator and a lawyer in previous life.
So I understand fully that there's litigation around this question.
So you're restricted in what you can say.
I know your lawyers will kill you if you say too much.
So I want to just ask you about it and talk about it however you can to whatever extent you're comfortable doing it.
So this is obviously, you've been attracting a lot of attention for a while.
I've seen you in places.
I've seen your influence growing.
I think you're on Breaking Points, who hosted by my friends.
And I remember seeing you on there.
And I think I watched some of it.
So you've obviously been attracting a lot of attention.
But the real, and my guess is there had to have been people waiting for you to do something that could have given them a kind of a hook into really trying to attack you, given the size of the platform that you have on TikTok and how outspoken you've been against Israel.
And there was this incident at the Israeli embassy, I think it was in June, something like that, when two Israeli staffers, staffers at the Israeli embassy were gunned down in the streets of Washington.
You posted about it originally saying, of course, you abhor the violence.
You don't support killing of civilians, kind of rethought it, decided they weren't entirely civilians.
They were diplomats with a government committing a genocide.
Maybe there's some justification to it, all of which is constitutionally protected speech.
And those posts kind of gave your critics a way to start pressuring Ohio State to take action against you and punishing you, and they proceeded to do that.
What can you tell us about that whole incident, where things are with it, if you can tell us about anything?
Bear with me as I think about what exactly I'm allowed to say.
But the ACLU is representing my case right now.
Shout out to them, defenders of free speech in this country.
And I want to make it clear that I am a nonviolent person.
I don't commit violence.
I don't incite violence with my platform.
And I've never, ever said anything, posted any video, shared any message that goes towards that end of violence.
I'm not encouraging of that.
It would ruin my platform, obviously, in the way that they've tried to paint me as this violent individual who's like a jihadi terrorist, a sleeper cell in the United States, influencing young Americans to follow these violent steps.
So now that we've got that aside, I do want to mention that around the time when all this happened in the spring, I had launched this campaign.
I actually went on a, what ended up being a six-day hunger strike of my own and raising money off of that and the viral videos to launch our campaign on the ground in Gaza, which I mentioned previously, doing daily food distributions inside of refugee camps in a humane manner, unlike these GHF death camps ran by Israel and mercenaries from the United States.
And this campaign was gaining a lot of traction.
And so I think it's not a coincidence that they took that moment as the opportune one to go after me and smear me with all these accusations like in the New York Post, the Times of Israel, Horetz, Jerusalem Post.
Every single Zionist outlet in the United States, every single Israeli news outlet overseas all posted the same story the same week about me smearing me and trying to generate a harassment attack against me to throw me off of what I believe could have been even bigger than what we made it,
distributing food to Gaza and raising awareness about the, you know, it was three months of total starvation of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip by Israel.
Yeah.
And I would just let me ask you before I move on to something else just on this case and to the extent that you can again, I mean, according to the ACLU releases, according to news articles about your story, and it's got to be weird having massive numbers of media outlets from, you know, not just the United States, but around the world attacking you in such vicious ways when you're 18 years old, you know, 19 years old, a freshman in college.
It's kind of indicative of how desperate they are, especially when it comes to young Americans to destroy any space to criticize Israel.
But your school did, the Ohio State did in fact take action against you for those posts, right?
And you do currently have either your enrollment suspended or actually expelled.
Is that accurate based on, and if you can't talk much about it, of course, I understand.
Yeah, that is accurate.
I was an Ohio State University student and they expelled me under pressure from various Zionist groups, forces, and including people in our government.
Richie Torres, Pam Bondi are some names that were involved during this time.
And they all kind of came together at the same time this smear campaign was being launched to get me kicked out of their school, which they folded and violated in the case what the public filing says is they violate, and it's true, they violated my First Amendment right and my right to due process.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.
I don't know how much you followed it, but during the Biden administration, and I think you might have heard me say this when you're waiting, one of the biggest grievances, and I'm somebody who, as a lawyer, I became a lawyer in part because it was inspired by the ACLU.
I did a lot of free speech cases.
I have a big free speech pronoun as a journalist.
And I agreed with the American Right entirely on this, that there was a huge controversy because the U.S. government was picking up the phone under the Biden administration, calling Facebook, calling Google, other social media platforms, demanding they censor and remove people who were dissent, expressing dissent on COVID, on Ukraine, on the 2020 election.
And the idea that the U.S. government could censor private actors to punish people who were critics was such an offensive idea under the First Amendment.
And now here you have members of the Trump administration.
I mean, Pam Bondi's the attorney general.
Richie Torrey is a member of Congress calling your school publicly, privately, and demanding that you be punished, not for any crimes, not for anything remotely criminal in what you said, constitutional protective speech, but because they dislike the content.
It kind of as the silence of those same people in the conservative movement to object to that is sort of deafening.
Guy, can I ask you, again, as somebody who's been watching this for a long time, one of the things I think has shocked a lot of people, and I had Norman Finkelstein on my show, you know, I think a month ago, maybe a little longer.
He's been obviously an outspoken Israel critic.
He suffered professionally.
Alan Dershowitz got his tenure offer removed because of Israel criticism.
And he's been a voice of kind of gloom and doom for a long time, you know, sort of like, look, Israel controls the United States.
We're totally bankrupt and corrupt on this issue.
And he even says, and he says, as gloomy as it gets, that he kind of for the first time in a long time sees a cause of optimism.
John Mearsheimer, who's also on our show a lot, has been, he wrote the pioneering book, The Israel Lobby in 2006, was attacked more than I can describe, says the same thing that, look, no matter how bad things are, the major change here that's a cause for optimism is that people in your generation have turned against Israel, are questioning all of these issues openly and without fear for the first time for as long as anybody can remember.
And that's certainly my view as well.
Why is that happening?
I mean, given all the ways that they can punish you and destroy you, they've shown not just their ability, but their willingness to do that.
Why has this become really the issue of your generation?
Well, I think that number one, for the first time ever, social media has been used by most of the people in the world where when Israel commits these crimes, they're documented.
The footage is posted on social media platforms, like especially TikTok.
And young Americans who use these platforms are seeing them and recognizing that what they're seeing is criminal, it's evil, and they should be opposed to that by their nature of being a human being.
And I also think that it's because Zionism from the very beginning has the seeds of its own destruction within it.
You can't take someone's land and spend the next hundred years denying their rights to return, self-determined, destroying their governments, putting them under occupation, apartheid, the whole nine yards, and expect that the world is going to support something like that.
No oppressive ideology, no ethno-state or wannabe ethnocracy like Israel is has ever lasted permanently.
As we saw the collapse of Nazi Germany, apartheid in South Africa, Rhodesia as well.
It's an untenable, it's an unwinnable proposition.
You know, one of the critiques I think of activism from young people, and this goes, you know, there's a long history, very rambunctious, sometimes even, you know, civil disobedience-driven activism on the part of young people, people your age, college, age, students going back to the civil rights movement in Vietnam and the apartheid regime in South Africa of the 80s.
You know, people act like the protest movement in 2024 was some unique deviation from the American tradition when in fact it was an expression of it.
But oftentimes, even going back then, there's this patronizing idea that young people who question American foreign policy are speaking and are thinking in very like overly emotional, not very educated and informed ways about the issues that they're focused on.
It's kind of an automatic reflexive empathy that's very unsophisticated, doesn't have a lot of historical context to it.
What have you done to inform yourself on what is, you know, no matter what your view is, a long and complex history in this region between two people?
I don't mean what's happening in Gaza is complex, but I mean the history is complex, and it's important to understand for analyzing today.
What kind of things have you done as somebody who came to this without much knowledge to make sure that you're informed when you're talking to millions of people?
Well, I was careful not to, I guess, speak with much authority when I was learning, first starting out.
And I was, you know, reading human rights reports, looking over, you know, the factual history of the conflict and the struggle.
And then I started diving into the literature by the new historians out of Israel, reading Rashid Khalidi, tapping into all the news reporting about the ongoing and unfolding events in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza.
You know, my bookshelf over there is filled with books on this topic, which I've studied.
There's notes all throughout.
It's important that we're informed about this.
And I guess what you were saying about the criticism that young people are just speaking out of our naive, foolish, emotional hearts is untrue because I believe we're the ones who are the most tapped in with the real news, the real side of the story, versus all this baseless Zionist propaganda that's on Fox and CNN that is given to the rest of the older adult population in the United States.
We're hearing the actual truth about Israel's actions.
We're hearing the truth about their history, unlike other segments of the population.
And so I think that while I'm not saying that we're the most knowledgeable overall about foreign policy and geopolitics and the history of Israel and Palestine, but I think you have to give the young generation, Gen Z and millennials, a lot of credit here for being the ones who have pushed this student movement, these campus protests, despite repression under the Biden administration,
who arrested 3,300 of our students and our academics on our campuses to suppress us while making threats in the media and on the Senate floor.
We stood up against this.
And I think it was a big mistake that in 2020, well, in 2020, the Democrats aligned with the popular protest movement of that time, the Black Lives Matter movement, but they did not take the same opportunity in 2024 to align with the popular pro-Palestinian movement, and it ended up crippling them, undermining Harris's chances to win election.
Although there was a lot of problems, I would say that, you know, there's a polling that came out before and after the election, but the one I'm talking about was after, where they asked 19 million Americans, they pulled this group of people who voted blue in 2020, but chose not to vote blue in 2024.
So they either voted for Trump, third party, or did not vote.
And their number one issue over the border, inflation, healthcare, number one issue for them was Gaza.
They were upset with the Democrats' policy on Gaza.
And that could likely have swung most, if not all of the swing states for Harris.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
I think the Black Lives Matter movement and the Democrats' support for it will be seen, especially with more time.
It's kind of an easy thing for Democrats.
The Black Lives Matter movement ended up not really being a threat to power centers.
The Democratic Party obviously has a big black activist base on which it depends.
It kind of didn't have a choice.
Whereas the Israel issue is something that has been much more of a third rail for Democratic Party politics, given who their funders are.
And that is about the distribution of power.
That is about foreign policy and arms dealers and kind of everything that lies at the heart of Imperial America.
And so I think that was a much harder decision.
I think as much as seeing the true face of Israel, a lot of people like you saw the true face of the Democratic Party.
Let me ask you, you said, which I agree with, look, on some ways, even though we're young, we're more informed.
We haven't been imprisoned by Sean Hannity and Fox News and CBS News.
We get information from a lot of different sources.
In fact, we get to hear directly from people in Gaza, from Western doctors and organizations that have visited Gaza.
We don't just hear from Benjamin Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham.
We hear from a lot more diverse range of voices.
And that is because of the internet and social media.
It's one of the reasons why I've made free, a free internet and free speech on the internet, one of probably my central cause over the past years, precisely because it allows a citizenry that's informed.
And that is conversely what makes this crackdown on the freedom of information and free speech on platforms like TikTok so incredibly alarming and dangerous is it can transform the internet from this place of liberation and free information into this weapon of unprecedented control if you put it in the hands of a small number of people who want to manage information for a particular political agenda.
That's clearly what happened with Larry Ellison with CBS and now with TikTok.
Talk about, and I don't even think the deal with TikTok is completely yet yet, although they've been doing a lot to kind of placate the U.S. government in order to stay, knowing that they had to.
What have been some of the changes that you've seen?
You do have the former IDF soldier in charge of censorship.
You obviously have these political pressures.
TikTok knows who's coming in and what their goals are with the platform.
What have you seen in terms of changes in free speech in general and with Israel in particular?
Yeah, so I know you talked about her.
Erica Mindel, former IDF soldier, former State Department contractor.
She's documented saying a few years ago that it's her number one goal to destroy the BDS movement.
That's her words.
And so, you know, like you said, the ADL lobbied social media platforms like TikTok and successfully placed her as the head of the hate speech policy and enforcement.
And this was on August 13th of this year.
The following day, TikTok pushed out an in-app pop-up for all of its users, explaining that in one month's time, they would be changing their free speech guidelines.
And as I, I mean, I saw this and I thought to myself, this is definitely going to serve the Zionist narrative.
And, you know, lo and behold, September 13th rolls around one month later.
And in this new free speech update, they transform their hate speech policy.
They mandate that people have to condemn terrorist groups designated by the U.S. State Department when mentioned in any videos, even when mentioned in a neutral, you know, reportive investigative context.
They opened the door to classifying anti-Israel speech as hate speech based on their new clause about national origin.
They banned the reading of manifestos.
They restrict videos from the feed that show videos from war, aka Gaza.
And so I've been forced and other people have been forced to stop showing real footage, real imagery from the destruction of the Palestinian nation in the Gaza strip.
And so, you know, as soon as these changes went into effect, my videos started getting banned or removed from the recommendation feed left and right.
And to kind of put this into perspective, over the last, you know, almost two years before these changes, as I was posting consistently about Palestine every single day, there's only been a handful of videos that I've ever gotten removed.
And I looked, and over the last, you know, year prior to September 13th, it was one or two that you could even count.
And so very quickly, I racked up about 10 violations, either removed completely without any recourse to appeal, or they were either shadow banned.
It would get like 100 views from people who only went directly to my profile to view it.
And my fellow collaborators, fellow people in the movement on TikTok, I reached out to them and they reported back the same exact thing.
I know you showed that Crystal Ball was being censored.
I didn't know that.
It's insane to me.
And, you know, we also believe that more than what they explicitly tell us when they take down or delete our videos or shadow ban it is that they're doing this secretly and suppressing our views across the board when we talk about certain topics.
And there's certain topics that are particularly sensitive under this new free speech regime.
It's talking about Charlie Kirk and Israel.
Every single video where I've spoken about that, those two issues connected to each other.
I've had them entirely deleted off the platform immediately.
When you talk about Palantir, when you talk about AIPAC and their influence over our government, or when you talk about Larry Ellison, now, you know, this happened, these changes came in effect about halfway into September.
And by the end of September, Trump had announced for the first time that Larry Ellison was poised to take control of Americans' TikTok.
And, you know, Netanyahu, again, at the end of September, met with what was the next batch of paid American influencers by the State of Israel's Hasbara budget, which I think has about $190 million in total this year for their budget to pay people to post Zionist propaganda.
These are the people who were getting paid $7,000 a post.
He met with them in America when he was visiting Donald Trump.
And, you know, this is recorded.
He is talking to them about their strategy of this eighth front of the war on the Americans' discourse about Israel.
And he says that the number one most important thing happening for Israel's narrative right now is the sale of TikTok.
Number one, number one, he says, he repeats it, making it very clear that his buddy, Larry Ellison, who once offered him a board seat at his company, Oracle, that's number one donor to the IDF, that lets Netanyahu vacation on the island he owns in Hawaii, that has data centers underground in Israel that process and store their surveillance data on Palestinians that fuel their apartheid system and their AI killing machines,
that that is the most important thing that is about to happen for Israel.
And what that tells us is that Larry Ellison, the reason he is taking control of TikTok and he's buying it, is for Israel.
It's for Netanyahu.
It's to protect their narrative.
And it's frightening because this is aided and facilitated by the Trump regime, who is obviously under the thumb of other MAGA Zionist billionaires like Mary Adelson and, of course, Larry Ellison, who's always at the White House.
Yeah, the you know, you can say a lot of things about Netanyahu.
I don't think anyone can deny that he's shrewd and he understands better than a lot of people inside the United States who talk about this a lot, how important the acquisition of TikTok was, as you said, engineered by the U.S. government, not the free market, where Larry Ellison ends up in control of it at the same time as he's buying up Paramount CNN and CBS and possibly CNN.
All right, last question I wanted to ask you is you mentioned Charlie Kirk and the sensitivities surrounding him as evidenced by the censorship regime on TikTok.
And that seems obvious to me.
There was this immediate attempt by Benjamin Netanyahu, incredibly rapid, to insist that Charlie Kirk was the greatest friend of Israel the world has ever seen.
And obviously all the changes Charlie Kirk was going through when it came to Israel have been very well documented.
Netanyahu wanted to erase that in the public mind.
And I think there are a lot of people who knew Charlie well.
I knew him somewhat, I wouldn't say well, but other people who know him well, making Kelly be one of them, have said, and I think she's right about this, that Charlie, who had always been pro-Israel, that is true until the last nine months or year, felt that he had to make kind of a sea change because his project is to represent young people, young conservatives in particular.
And young conservatives have in very large numbers turned against Israel.
So it was impossible to claim the mantle of speaking for this young generation of young conservatives and then being so pro-Israel, whereas on an issue important to them, they have become anything but that.
And you obviously see the rise of Nick Fuentes within the same demographic, largely driven in part by, at least in part by that.
And I think one of the things that has been most alarming to Israel supporters here in the United States, and certainly I think that has been most interesting to me, is I do think, you know, there was once a time when support for Israel was very bipartisan.
And then Netanyahu came to the United States, kind of openly campaigned against Obama, courted the American right, kind of as part of Israel's broader international strategy to tie themselves to the right, but also in the United States, kind of right off the left and say we're going to have establishment Democrats and the American right still guaranteeing Israel's future.
I think what has scared them more than anything is watching conservative thought leaders in the United States, you know, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, the rise of Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gates, of course, with the things that were happening with Charlie Kirk, and all of these kind of things getting mainstreamed among conservative opinion, especially young conservative opinion, which I'm telling you, before even a couple of years ago was utterly unthinkable when Fox News had everything on lockdown and the Murdoch and all of that.
The idea that major elements of the American conservative movement would start turning against Israel was beyond the wildest dreams of even people like me.
So I'll kind of ask you, you know, there seems to be some sense I see a lot of times from people on the left that, look, we don't want to really welcome people like Megan Kelly or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or Marjorie Taylor Greene, let alone Nick Fuentes, because these are odious people with bad ideologies and we don't want their support.
We don't want to have anything to do with them.
And then the other side of the argument, which I think is a much stronger one.
I'm interested in your view is, look, if you actually believe what you've been saying, which is that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, you know, of historic proportions, to pick and choose who your allies are and how you're going to get a majority seems very self-indulgent to me, like not very sincere or authentic about the stated belief.
You know, if you want to stop the genocide in Gaza, you will at least temporarily work with whoever can help you stop that, no matter what other opinions they might have that you disagree with.
How do you look at the rise of anti-Israel sentiment among young American conservatives as opposed to people on the left and the ability to kind of form a coalition around that?
Well, I think it's very simple.
We need to join together.
We are only the majority here in the United States.
I mean, is the left kidding themselves when we try to say that we don't need the right to tackle this issue for our country and overseas?
I think it's ridiculous to think that the left can do it alone at this point.
We're never going to convince these liberal Zionists and these, you know, I doubt that we'd convince the older Republican class about Israel anytime soon.
But the young people and the people who are awake in this country on both the left and right should be crossing the aisle, joining arms together and countering APAC, electing anti-Israel, anti-genocide politicians.
It's what needs to happen.
And I embrace Tucker, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I embrace Candace Owens.
I embrace Nick Fuentes pushing the envelope in the conservative wing of this country to teach people the truth about Israel, to teach people that we must be opposed to their crimes and the evil that is Zionism.
And so I mean, one message, the one message I have is we need to be working together.
We can't be fighting over who is, you know, the better anti, who has the better anti-Israel position.
Our country is being, has been taken from us by, you know, these Zionist influence operations, these dual loyalty representatives in Congress.
And it's disgusting.
It's un-American.
And I agree.
We should be putting Americans first, not Israel first.
It's abhorrent.
And I think that the only way to do this at this point, I mean, we've pushed the boundaries.
We pushed the envelope really far.
And I'm proud of all of us who have worked together on both sides to spread the message and spread the truth about Israel.
But now is the time when we need to come together and make change happen with our collective efforts.
Well, one of the characteristics of human beings I admire most is a willingness to sacrifice material and career benefits in pursuit of some cause, something that is far too rare in our culture.
And I think it's even more difficult to do so at a very young age before you're established as you've done.
So I want to really congratulate you and other people who have done exactly that.
I think the work you're doing is super important.
You've obviously confronted your own ramifications for it.
To me, that's just a sign of how effective you're being.
I know that you, in response to concerns about censorship on the platforms you've been using, including TikTok, have recently created a Substack, which is a platform where I was at.
And I know the founders and CEOs very well.
They're absolutely committed to free speech, sort of like Rumble is.
I would be shocked if they ever engage in political censorship.
So where can people find and support your work through a platform that's a lot more reliable?
Yeah, the number one platform is going to be Substack.
You can find me on there.
My username is your favorite guy on there, your favorite guy.
You can also find me on Upscrold, which is a new app that's meant to serve as a replacement for X meta and TikTok.
It's a free speech platform that's never going to be dominated by a billionaire in their interests and their censorship that they want to put down on us.
That we've all seen happen to the largest social media platforms that Americans use.
You know, we need to get away from these billionaire-controlled spaces.
And that's what Upscrolled is.
It's free.
And I encourage people to check the app out, join, and start posting.
Join us.
All right, we're going to put those links in the bio for your show in our show notes.
And I want to thank you again for taking the time to talk to us.
I really enjoyed it.
We'd love to have you back on as well.
Thank you, Glenn.
I just want to say I admire your work.
I hope we cross paths once again.
Absolutely.
We'll make sure that happens.
Have a great evening.
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I opened up the show talking about the visit to the White House today by what is now being called the president of Syria, who in fact spent his entire adult life as an operative and then a leader for Al-Qaeda, one hated so much by the United States government that as recently as 11 months ago.
they had a $10 million bounty on his head, accusing him not just of being a leader of al-Qaeda and killing Americans, but also working alongside ISIS.
But he's now a beloved leader.
They put a suit on him, changed his name, and seems to have undergone a complete transformation, at least in terms of how he's treated somebody who for years was considered one of the worst terrorists on the planet.
I think it says so much about the war on terror, about the emptiness and manipulative propagandistic nature of the term terrorism.
I talked about it at the start of the show, just giving the context for the war on terror and the 25 years of the radical changes it ushered in, to point out how, in so many ways, bizarre this is, how history is so easily rewritten on at the spur of the moment.
So here's the New York Times today.
Syria's president meets Donald Trump at the White House for the first time.
Quote, President Trump waived sanctions on Syria on Monday after meeting with President Ahmad Al-Shara at the White House, the latest effort to throw his support behind the former rebel leader who had once been designated a terrorist by the United States with a $10 million bounty on his head.
And again, as an aside, that wasn't 20 years ago.
That was less than a year ago that the United States called him a terrorist, so evil and so wanted that they had a $10 million bounty on his head.
Mr. Trump has granted Syria-wide exemptions on sanctions and pushed for Congress to repeal 2019 law, the Caesar-Syria Civil Protection Act, which opposed the toughest sanctions on Syria.
On Monday, he issued a 180-day waiver so that he first granted in May.
It was Mr. Al-Shara's first visit to the U.S. Capitol since coming to power and the first by any Syrian head of state to the White House.
Quote, we want to see Syria become a country that's very successful, and I think this leader can do it, Mr. Trump said.
People say he's had a rough past.
Yeah, we've all had a rough past.
Who hasn't been an al-Qaeda leader before?
We've all had rough pasts, but he has had a rough past.
And I think, frankly, if he didn't have a rough past, you wouldn't have a chance.
I mean, that is Trump's view of the world.
It's not entirely baseless that in order to become an effective leader, especially of a complex country, you have to have shown some grit.
But we fought a 25-year war based on the view that we've never faced anything as evil or as dangerous as al-Qaeda.
And so to call being a leader of al-Qaeda having a rough past sort of minimizes the entire premise of the war on terror, which, by the way, is ongoing and which radically changed our country and its standing in the world in so many ways, in permanent ways.
Here was Trump offering a similar analysis when he was asked about the terrorist who used to be called Al-Jalani and now is President al-Shara.
Here he was in the Oval Office November 10th.
Syria, as you had earlier, did you come to any agreements today?
Well, I've had an agreement with him.
He's a very strong leader.
He comes from a very tough place, and he's a tough guy.
I like him.
I get along with him.
The president, the new president of Syria.
And we'll do everything we can to make Syria successful because that's part of the Middle East.
We have peace now in the Middle East, first time that anyone can remember that ever happening.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the United States should go to war with Syria or try and kill the new Syria leader because of his long-standing ties to Al-Qaeda, but I'm not somebody who believed in the war on terror and the premises of it from the start.
So of course, I wouldn't believe that.
But it was the bipartisan political class in Washington that believed in that and continues to believe in that.
That wherever we find al-Qaeda leaders, we have to bomb them, not hug them and embrace them and praise them as a good guy and welcome to the White House.
It really, for me, just gives the important part of this story is not that Trump per se is doing anything wrong, but that it just gives the lie to the entire war on terror, the whole narrative that we were fed.
Again, not just to justify all sorts of foreign wars that killed huge numbers of people and cost $2 trillion and enriched the arms dealers, but radically transformed the nature of American politics and the powers of the American government inside the United States with respect to our own citizens.
The Patriot Act and all of the carousel of evils that we're living with today was all based on this idea that everything had to be done for the paramount goal of extinguishing al-Qaeda.
One of the people who did believe that was Donald Trump.
And let's remember that in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton was a very vocal advocate of removing Basjar al-Assad from power, of empowering the CIA to go wage war in Syria to take out Assad, in part because it was part of her obsession with Russia.
Syria, Assad was an ally of Syria, but also she was a loyalist to Israel and Israel wanted Assad gone.
He was a link between Iran and Hezbollah, part of this axis of resistance that opposed Israel.
And Donald Trump's view when he ran for president in 2016, but also before he even announced his presidency, was that the Obama covert war in Syria where Obama didn't give Hillary everything she wanted.
He unleashed a billion-dollar a year CIA covert war to remove Assad.
We were looking to remove Assad, knowing that who would replace Assad would be people who are Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda adjacent, meaning we were still waging the war on terror based on the argument that Al-Qaeda, there was no enemy like it, nothing threatened us more.
We had to extinguish them no matter where we found them.
And then in Syria, the Obama administration was essentially engaged in an operation to remove Assad for some reason.
Someone the United States had worked with, had sent people we detained and picked off the street of Europe during the war on terror and sent them to Assad to be tortured.
Suddenly removing Assad was some huge priority of the United States, even though the people fighting against Assad, at the beginning they were ordinary Syrians, but by the time the war really broke out, as often happens, it was the experienced fighters of ISIS and al-Qaeda fighting against Syria.
And we knew that removing Assad would result in the Al-Qaeda becoming empowered.
And it was Trump himself who said it here, September 4th, 2013.
Many Syrian, quote, rebels are really radical jihadis, not our friends.
And supporting them doesn't serve our national interests.
Stay out of Syria.
Which is not exactly a crazy idea.
If your entire country is organized, reorganized around the idea that you have to destroy al-Qaeda, and you suddenly find yourself engaged in a covert war and increasingly an overt war that has either the goal or the likely effect of empowering al-Qaeda in that country, it does seem extremely contradictory to put it mildly.
It kind of gives, makes the whole war on terror and all of the radical erosion of rights and death and everything else is ushered in a gigantic fraud.
It's kind of hard to maintain the central premise that al-Qaeda is the world's greatest threat when we're actually looking to empower al-Qaeda in Syria, something that we've now successfully done.
And we seem thrilled about it.
As does Israel, that boasted that it played a major role in accomplishing that.
Here is an email that was inside the Hillary Clinton State Department in 2012 while the United States was fighting this covert CIA war to remove Assad.
It was an email that was released ultimately as a result of the hack of the Hillary Clinton emails, and it was published by Wikileaks.
And it is an email from Jake Sullivan, who of course became Joe Biden's national security advisor.
A lot of people think he ran foreign policy as Biden's brain was melting.
I certainly think that.
He also had a very high-up position in the Obama State Department under Hillary Clinton.
And he wrote an email that is now a notorious email to Hillary Clinton about the situation in Syria.
This is basically a decade after September 11th.
The war on terror is in full force.
Obama's embracing and extending many of the Bush-Cheney policies that he vowed on his campaign to uproot, saying, no, Al-Qaeda is still an existential threat.
We have to keep these powers in the hands of the U.S. government, including the United States.
That was NSA spying and without warrants and everything else.
And it was all based on the idea that Al-Qaeda was the gravest enemy we've ever seen.
And yet, as this secret, then secret email inside the Clinton State Department acknowledged on Syria, Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton, see the last item.
Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.
I mean, it's really one of the most remarkable things.
Al-Qaeda is in our side on Syria.
We're fighting this major covert war at the height, the peak of the war on terror.
And we weren't there to fight al-Qaeda.
We were there to fight with al-Qaeda.
Knowing that if we succeeded in our goal, which is removing Assad, it wasn't going to be some nice Syrian liberal who was going to take over that country, that very geostrategically crucial country in the middle of the region.
It was going to be Al-Qaeda.
We were fighting a war to empower al-Qaeda in Syria.
It took a decade.
And we finally succeeded in it.
We seem utterly giddy about it.
We couldn't be happier with the al-Qaeda leader, who less than a year ago, we wanted to kill and find and pay $10 million to do so based on the fact that he was the evilest of terrorists.
He just put on a suit, changed his name, promised to love Israel and join an alliance with Israel.
And now, poof, all the al-Qaeda evil is gone.
In case any of you have had doubts about whether any of this was ever authentic or sincere, or whether the word terrorist actually means anything.
The fact that it could just be diffused in an instant.
Here from the BBC, this was December 20th, 2024, again, less than a year ago.
This was when essentially Al-Qaeda forces swept into Damascus.
U.S. scraps a $10 million bounty for the arrest of Syria's new leader.
I remember when he, at the time, was known as Al-Jalani still before he got his makeup, his Western makeup.
I remember he led forces into Damascus and he was appearing giving press conferences.
And right on the DOJ site, it still had this $10 million bounty on the head.
And I wrote an email to the Justice Department saying, hey, you have a $10 million bounty on the head of Al-Jalani for information leading to his whereabouts.
I know where he is.
He's in the presidential palace in Damascus.
Here you have the Justice Department.
This is up at least as late as November 2024.
There you see a picture of him.
That's Al-Jalani, President Al-Shar, as he's now known.
Stop this terrorist.
And you see, he exchanged his classic terrorist headgear and clothing, camouflage clothing for Armani suits.
Still the same person.
Stop this terrorist, Muhammad Al-Jawwani, reward for justice, up to $10 million reward.
And then at the bottom, in small print, it says, Mohammed Al-Jalani, also known as Abu Muhammad Al-Jalani, also known as, and then various other names, is the senior leader, the senior leader of the terrorist organization, the Al-Nazaro Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.
Under Al-Jani's leadership, ANF has carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.
The U.S. government is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information about al-Jawani.
Absolute confidentiality is assured.
So this wasn't just some guy who joined al-Qaeda because he had nothing else to do.
He was some low-level courier.
According to the rest of the army, he was the leader of Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, who was responsible for deliberately slaughtering civilians across the country.
He spent time in an American prison in Iraq as well.
And then less than a year later, no longer a terrorist.
He's an honored leader of a sovereign country, a friend of the United States, someone Donald Trump admires despite his rough past.
Here from ABC News in February of 2012, this was about the organization which Al-Jahani founded.
Twin suicide attacks rattle Syrian city of Aleppo.
He was accused of having carried out suicide attacks against civilians in Aleppo, which we were always told was the hallmark of radical Islamic terrorism.
So this wasn't a guy who kind of was a member in good standing, the way you can like join a union and not really participate.
He was the leader who carried out, according to the United States, suicide attacks.
Here from Al-Arabia English, June of 2015, Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate kills 20 Druze.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths come Wednesday in the village of Qayb Lazwa in the Ibdil province.
Here is some of the reaction to Al-Sharra's presence, Al-Jalani's presence, in the United States when he came first in November of 2025.
I want you to just imagine going back 20 years ago, but even 10 years ago, even five years ago, and tell people, look, I know you're in the middle of the war on terror.
You believe the most evil groups are the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
We have to even dismantle our own civil liberties to destroy them, fight endless wars to do so.
But I'm just telling you, in 2025, the Taliban are going to be governing Afghanistan with absolutely no opposition as if nothing ever happened.
We're going to fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan.
And once we leave, Taliban is going to be like, all right, we're here.
Time to go back into power and govern Afghanistan as though exactly a 20-year war that just might as well never happen.
Not one thing changed other than a bunch of deaths and money.
And on top of that, a senior leader of al-Qaeda is going to come to the United States and be granted and be welcomed by throngs of cheering people and then embraced by the president of the United States as a great friend of the United States.
Not someone who was in Al-Qaeda in 2005 and renounced it and defected it to the West, but somebody who less than a year before was called one of the worst terrorist leaders, one of the leading al-Qaeda leaders by the Justice Department.
I mean, it's a farce.
It is a farce.
And the farce demonstrates that this word terrorism, which is at the center of our legal framework, which dominates our political discourse, you call someone a terrorist, supposed to be the end of the debate.
Oh, look what we're doing to this person.
Oh, he's a terrorist.
Oh, he's a terrorist?
Oh, in that case, who cares?
Torture him, drown him, poke his eyes out, send him to Sudan in a prison, even though he's never, whatever you have to do.
He's a terrorist.
Oh, we're blowing up boats.
That sounds odd.
What about the evidence that they're doing something wrong, like carrying drugs, carrying?
No, no, these are narco-terrorists.
Oh, okay, terrorists.
I'm sorry.
I didn't know.
Yeah, of course, you kill them.
No evidence needed.
Why would you protect terrorists?
That's how powerful this word is.
This word means nothing.
It means nothing.
It's just assigned arbitrarily to whoever we want to demonize to justify whatever we want to do to them.
Routinely, people who attack soldiers in an active military are called terrorists.
People who target civilians are not.
People who are terrorists one day become freedom fighters the next and vice versa.
This has been going on for decades.
This is a word that is bereft of meaning.
It's a pure propaganda term.
Maybe in academia you can find fixed meanings of it.
In politics, it has no consistent application.
It's an empty word.
And for that reason, so useful and so dangerous.
Here's Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina, November 10th.
Grateful to meet with President Al-Shara.
A free, united, prosperous Syria is the biggest opportunity since the end of the Cold War.
We must give Syria a chance and achieve complete and total repeal of CSA.
So now it's al-Qaeda that brings peace to the Middle East.
They're the guarantors of pluralism.
They protect religious minorities.
Marlon Stutzman, a congressman from Indiana, tweeted this, productive meeting today with Syrian President Al-Shara in Washington as we worked toward making religious freedom in Syria a reality.
The Syrian people are ready for peace.
I know it might sound weird, but I just want you to know that if you want to have a country that's pluralistic, where non-Muslims are protected, where religious freedom is guaranteed, what you have to do is remove a secular president like Bashr al-Assad and replace him with an al-Qaeda leader.
Al-Qaeda is who guarantees pluralism and religious freedom and peace in the United States.
He went on Fox News, Al-Jalani did, now known as Al-Shara, Fox News Ground Zero, for support for the war on terror, for depicting al-Qaeda as the root of all evil, for calling everybody a terrorist, not just who blows things up, but who questions the United States government response.
And he wasn't treated like some sinister criminal, some moral villain.
He was treated like a really interesting guy with an interesting backstory who has become somebody that deserves a platform in the West and gets an interview more friendly than any Democratic politician who would ever go on Fox.
Here's part of the exchange that he had on Fox.
Has President Trump raised with you, discussed with you, your own past affiliation with al-Qaeda terrorism?
I think this is a matter of the past.
We did not discuss this actively.
Yes, look, it's a matter of the past.
I mean, you know what?
This whole Al-Qaeda al-Shmaida terrorism, whatever.
Yeah, it was in the past.
I mean, like, 11 months ago in the past, but who cares about the past?
He was also asked about 9-11.
Remember that?
9-11, the thing that Fox News spent 20 years scaring Americans into believing they have to accept every renunciation of their basic rights and every single last war and redirect all of our resources into the pockets of Boeing and general dynamics and the military-industrial complex because it's a threat too great to even fall a little bit short or have any limits when vanquishing.
So they raised that.
Like, hey, yeah, about that 9-11 thing.
And here's his answer.
Do you, Mr. President, have regrets that Al-Qaeda carried out those attacks that killed 3,000 Americans?
I was only 19 years old, so I was a very young person and it didn't have any decision-making power at that time.
And I don't have anything to do with it.
And Al-Qaeda was not present right then in my area.
So you're speaking to the wrong person about this subject.
We mourn for every civilian that got killed, and we know that people suffer from the war, especially civilians who pay the price, a hefty price for the war.
Oh man, that's so sweet.
Did you know that al-Qaeda terrorists lament the death of all civilians?
Because that's not anything I've ever heard previously on Fox News.
In fact, if anyone had even suggested that previously on Fox News, they would have spent weeks being vilified as a traitor and a terrorist lover who the Department of Justice should investigate.
I love how she asked him, like, hey, what about 9-11?
That was kind of bad, right?
And he was like, look, I was only 19.
I mean, I wasn't like responsible for 9-11.
I was really young.
And follow President and be like, I know, but then you joined and became a leader of the organization the United States claims is responsible for it.
So doesn't that kind of suggest that you were supportive of 9-11, the fact that you joined an organization that is set around the world to have perpetrated those attacks?
But he wasn't there to be adversarily questioned.
He was there simply to be heralded and justified why he's our newest ally.
Now, I just want to end with this note, which is that Fox News is the same news outlet that has spent the last four months railing against the evils of jihadism and Islamic extremism.
So it's not like they've changed their view on that.
But they haven't been doing that with an actual al-Qaeda member who they welcomed into their studios today and treated like an honored leader.
Instead, that rhetoric, oh, he's a jihadist, he supports terrorism.
He might endanger American Jews or will danger New York and Jews, might even cheer for another 9-11.
That wasn't rhetoric applied to an al-Qaeda leader.
That was rhetoric applied to Zoran Mandani, who's, by all accounts, if he's religious, is not very religious.
And is somebody who supports basically just every standard left-wing cause from LGBTQ rights to battling racism in the police department to being pro-choice.
Not exactly an embodiment of Sharia law, Zoran Mandani.
Nor does he seem like somebody ready to massacre Jews in a synagogue.
Unlike this new hero of Syria who's going to bring priests and pluralism and protect religious freedoms in Syria, Zoran Mandani never actually went and joined 9-11, joined al-Qaeda, never engineered suicide bombs on civilians, never defended that or suggested it or recommended it.
Never railed against the evils of the United States or the justification for attacking American civilians.
He didn't do any of that.
But on Fox News, in the world of Fox News, Al-Jalani, the longtime leader of the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is someone who just kind of had a sketchy past, like we all have.
Who didn't join al-Qaeda when they were like in their 20s and 30s and then lead it until a couple years ago?
I mean, it's like you're going to judge everybody by that.
There's going to be anyone in politics.
But Zoran Mandani, that's the real jihadist.
Now, that begs the question: why is Fox News so favorable to, like conservative politicians, favorable to Al-Jalani, now named Ahmad al-Shar Shara in Syria?
Why do they like him so much?
Why are they willing to herald his character and embrace him while they're so hostile to Zorad Mandani?
Like, what's the difference?
Other than the fact that, as I said, Zoran Mandani never joined al-Qaeda or did anything else like that.
But other than those things, those obvious things, what's the real difference that makes Fox News and that crowd hostile to Mandani and makes this new Syrian leader someone that they cannot just tolerate but embrace and respect?
One major difference is that while Zoran Mandani is an outspoken critical of Israel and is threatened to do things like arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under ICC warrants if he enters New York, Al-Sharra, the longtime al-Qaeda operative, is seeking very positive, normalized, and even good relationships with Israel.
He let Israel bomb his country to smithereens once they took over, bomb all their military equipment, bomb at will, take Syrian land, didn't utter a peep of protest.
And now he wants to join the Abraham Accords to normalize relationships with Israel.
He wants to have a very pro-Israel posture, this Al-Qaeda leader does.
In contrast to Zohar Mandani, so you may think, certainly reasonable, that is always the dispositive factor here, what's driving this otherwise seemingly bizarre, surreal embrace of an al-Qaeda leader while demonizing his jihadist, someone who never joined al-Qaeda or got close, is simply the fact that one supports Israel and wants to support Israel and the other one is critical of it and hostile of it.
And that's it.
Here was his answer when asked about Israel and various negotiations.
Mr. President, the White House has said that President Trump would like Syria to join the Abraham Accords.
The foundational principle of the accords is that Israel has the right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state.
Is that something that you agree with?
I believe that the situation in Syria is different from the situation of the countries who went on with the Abrahamic agreement.
Syria has borders with Israel and Israel occupies the Jolan Heights since 1967.
We are not going to enter into a negotiation directly right now.
Maybe the United States administration with President Trump will help us reach this kind of negotiation.
So maybe Israel is a factor here.
And when you consider the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the takeover of Syria by a former leader of al-Qaeda and not only celebrated it but boasted of the crucial role Israel played in enabling it.
And when you add on to the fact that the United States spent at least a decade, starting with Obama in a CIA covert war to remove Bashar al-Assad from power, a former U.S. ally, knowing that it would likely empower Al-Qaeda and Syria all at the same time Americans were being fed this narrative about the war on terror in Al-Qaeda.
It's hard to make sense of that absent Israel as an explanation.
Remember, we showed you a couple days ago, late last week, that people like Ben Shapiro and John Podoritz are very open about this, basically saying we don't care what a person's character is.
We don't care that they've done.
If they support Israel, everything is forgiven.
And Holger wrote a bunch of tweets in 2015 that were widely interpreted as anti-Semitic about Jewish power and the like.
Ben Shapiro defended her, saying, yeah, these tweets are disgusting.
They're probably anti-Semitic.
But at the end of the day, Anne Culture supports Israel and always has, so it doesn't really bother me.
I'm not losing sleep.
In other words, I don't care about any.
I don't judge a person by any factor other than do they support Israel or not.
And John Podoric said, oh, good, Trump bombed Iran.
That means he can utter Jewish slurs for as long as he wants and I wouldn't care.
It's kind of like the liberal version of having one metric, do you like Trump or not Trump?
That even that if you don't like Trump, even Dick Cheney's sins are forgiven, Liz Cheney, Bill Craig, the whole, it's all forgiven.
It's all absolved.
That's the only thing that matters.
If you don't like Trump, you can even have started 100 wars if you wanted, have the death of millions of people on your hand.
We don't care.
As long as you don't like Trump, that's all that matters.
For Israel supporters, that's the only metric.
Oh, you were in Al-Qaeda for all those years and suicide bombed civilians?
Who cares?
You support Israel.
But Zoron, who is an exemplary American, purely law-abiding, ran for political office the right way, got elected, convinced Americans to vote for him from there, that's somehow the jihadist.
And the obvious determining factor is one that has nothing to do with whether someone's a terrorist or jihadist.
It's whether someone supports Israel or not.
That's clearly the difference here.
But at the very least, I think most people by now are critics of the war on terror.
I don't need to spend more time on that.
But one of the things I really hope you take away from here, I really do.
And I've written articles on this, about the etymology of the word terrorism.
how once it started becoming defined by international conventions and international organizations, the difficulty was how do you define terrorism without including the acts of the United States and Israel?
Oh, you're deliberately targeting terrorists in order to achieve some political end.
That's what shock and all was.
We purposely bombed Iraq to Baghdad in the most terrifying way, which obviously includes the bombing of civilian areas and infrastructure, because we wanted to terrorize them into immediate submission.
So how do you write a definition of terrorism that doesn't include that?
Oh, you just say only non-state actors can commit terrorism.
So you just exclude states like Israel and the United States out of the definition.
It's impossible for the United States of Israel to commit terrorism, even if what they do is classic terrorism because they've been written out of the definition.
And then if you want to accuse a state like Iran of terrorism, you just say, oh, they're the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism.
But I want you to just see here how easily this term is applied and removed.
We had people in Guantanamo as terrorists who did nothing other than attack American soldiers in Afghanistan.
They weren't targeting civilians.
They weren't trying to achieve political change.
They were fighting defense of Afghanistan against occupying and invading foreign forces with UN approval, but to them, it's their country and foreign forces were in there.
Same with Iraq.
People fought against Iraq.
They got imprisoned as terrorists.
These are people attacking military soldiers in an active war zone.
That's now terrorism.
They've done against the United States or Israel.
Hamas on October 7th killed a lot of active duty soldiers.
Some of them got taken.
And that was called terrorism.
People in the West Bank kill Israeli soldiers, what the whole world says is occupying the West Bank illegally.
They're not killing civilians.
They're killing soldiers and an illegal occupation.
Those people are treated as terrorists.
So what definition does the word terrorist have now if you don't even need to target civilians with death or threats of death?
To say nothing of what's happening now with these narco-terrorists that we're killing, even if you believe every word the Trump administration is saying about them with no evidence, these are people who are driving speedboats thousands of miles away from the United States who somehow want to bring it to the United States.
What is terroristic about that?
If the definition of terrorism has any meaning, namely targeting civilians with death or threats of deaths to achieve political change, none of that applies.
They're not targeting civilians with death.
They're not deliberately targeting civilians who are not threatening to, and they're certainly not motivated by political change.
They're motivated by profit.
Same with cigarette companies or alcohol companies or anyone else.
Just look at how flexible the term is by which I mean meaningless and manipulated.
And if it were just a semantic matter, like I was just kind of a history professor or a political science professor or an English professor and I was trying to show you this word doesn't have a fixed universal meaning, it'd be interesting.
But it's the fact that terrorism is so central to our political debates and discourse, but also to the powers and laws we give the U.S. government that it's so crucial to understand the emptiness and therefore the danger of this term.
And it's continuing to be applied in all sorts of ways, but I can't think of anything more illustrative of the meaningless of this term than how quickly Al Jelani got transformed into something else simply for one reason.
We needed him to be something else.
And the word terrorism disappeared and now it's gone.
I mean, if that doesn't show you the meaningless of this word, nothing ever will.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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