Q&A With Glenn: On the Epstein Emails; Chomsky's Friendship with Epstein; Differences Between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes; the Babylon Bee's Attack on Megyn Kelly; and More
Glenn answers your questions about Chomsky's friendship with Epstein, the differences between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, the Babylon Bee's attack on Megyn Kelly, and more... -------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern on the dot, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
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We don't try and just zip through them, but we do try and get to as many of them as we can.
We have a lot of good ones on the list tonight and I'm looking forward to answering them before we get to all of that.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There's a lot going on this week.
A lot of items in the news cycle including ones that we cover quite frequently and we are anxious to get to as many of these questions about those as we can.
And we're going to start with this one from GoBirds.
Hey, Glenn, great interview with Murtaza Hussein.
I started following him on dropsite after I missed those Epstein reports of his.
Just a quick question, now that you've had a few days to digest, what are your overall thoughts on this trove of emails between Epstein and his eclectic elite friends?
Can Congress actually get this stuff out or will it die in the house?
Yeah, we did a show on this on Wednesday night, and you're referencing the interview we did with Murtaza Hussein, which I think is a good place to start because he has been able to get, along with Ryan Graham, both of whom are my former colleagues and longtime friends, but I worked with them at the Intercept.
They've been able to get a hold of a trove of emails nobody else has previously reported on.
And it's essentially, as Murtaza said, it was actually publicized or published by hackers who weren't able to hack into the email, the email contents of Israeli former Prime Minister Ahab Barouk, who is also the former defense minister and one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest friends.
And within those emails, there are multiple stories, very clear ones, about the extensive work Jeffrey Epstein did with and for the Israeli government at the highest levels of its intelligence agencies and at the highest level of its foreign policy apparatus,
working for Israel to negotiate all sorts of deals with other countries, to broker deals using his very wide, extensive network of mega-global elite that he was able to cultivate.
And for a long time, there was a lot of speculation.
And in fact, it was one of the things Tucker Carlson said that upset so many people when he appeared at Talking Point before Charlie Kirk was murdered.
That was when turning point donors were enraged by Charlie Kirk inviting Tucker to that event.
And when they demanded Charlie Kirk vowed never to do so again, he refused.
He lost, as he called it, at least two Jewish donors, Jewish billionaires.
What Tucker devoted his speech to was compiling the evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was likely a Mossad agent.
And there are now all sorts of documented, verified stories from Maz and Ryan Grimm's reporting and elsewhere now as well that leave no question that that is true.
You may recall that that was something the Trump administration was explicitly asked about when a reporter went to the White House and there was Pam Bondi and Donald Trump.
That's the first time Trump exploded and said, why are you bothering me with something so trivial as the Epstein files?
And the question was, is there any evidence that you've seen that Jeffrey Epstein worked for with foreigner domestic intelligence agencies?
Trump exploded, dismissed the Epstein question and all the interest in the Epstein as a complete triviality, as irrelevant, even though his own son and vice president and top officials spent four years insisting it was one of the most important stories on the planet.
Suddenly, when Trump gets into office, now it's this irrelevancy, this sideshow that nobody should be paying attention to.
And then Pam Bondi actually responded or purported to respond to that question by saying, oh, gee, I haven't seen anything like that.
Like, it never really occurred to me.
We'll get back to you.
And of course, she never did.
And there's ample evidence, even in just the limited amount of information that journalists and others, and including the Congress, have been able to get outside of what the DOJ has, which is the mother load, demonstrating that Jeffrey Epstein clearly worked with and for Israeli intelligence.
The amount of silence that has been erected around this reporting and around that fact is really deafening.
And Moz suggested that, and he's not somebody prone to these kinds of conspiracies or the uses of these phrases.
If anything, if I had to make a criticism of Moz, he often tends to cling more to establishment ways or mainstream ways of thinking than I do.
But that's what made so notable the fact that he said he almost thinks all the other stuff about Trump and Epstein and Trump and Epstein and the salacious stuff is almost like a limited hangout, like a way of pretending they're disclosing what you really want to know about, but it's just a way, in fact, of limiting your interests.
Like, oh, look, you got everything.
You got all the salacious stuff.
What more do you want?
When in fact, this huge story is sitting over here that Jeffrey Epstein worked directly for and with at the highest levels, the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence.
And it's almost, if not designed to, it's having the effect of preventing people from looking at that.
So that's one point.
The other observation I want to make is that we don't have anything incriminating in terms of a smoking gun regarding Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
But as I said the other night, what we do have, and I think it's the most interesting part of all of this, is that the range of mega-elites that Trump, that Epstein was able to cultivate, is virtually limitless.
This is a person who pled guilty to the felony of soliciting a minor for prostitution.
And the case was far more serious than that.
That was what he ended up pleading guilty to.
Ended up having to be labeled a sex offender because of that.
And somehow, a couple of years later, it didn't affect his standing at all among the wealthiest and most powerful people, the people who occupy the most prestigious positions all over the world, what I would, again, describe as this kind of transnational mega elite.
He was not just admitted to that society or permitted to remain, but remained one of the most seemingly sought after and respected people within it.
I mean, the dynamic between Jeffrey Epstein and some of the most powerful people on the planet wasn't Jeffrey Epstein chasing after them and begging for attention.
It was, if anything, the reverse.
They were constantly going to Jeffrey Epstein, asking for things and heaping praise on him.
And this was after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution.
And you can say that, well, once somebody is convicted of a crime and they serve their time, they get a clean slate.
And in theory, of course, legally, that's true.
Although not always.
I mean, felons actually lose their right to vote, for example, convicted felons.
And sex offenders obviously have to endure all sorts of implications for their crimes long after they're finished serving their sentence.
That's the idea of being a sex offender, registered sex offender.
But even if you embrace that as a theory or as a principle, and of course it is a principle that we embrace, that people get second chances and they're entitled to serve their time and move on with their life.
It doesn't mean it doesn't affect them reputationally.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't have any impact on how you evaluate them, especially if they don't really seem to have much remorse.
Not like Jeffrey Epstein went around profoundly apologizing for and repenting for what he did and devoting his wealth to charities to help victims of child prostitution or child sexual abuse.
There was none of that.
It was just, okay, he had the best lawyers, got away with things as much as he could, and then went on.
And yet you see almost no damage whatsoever to his standing in this world.
And by the way, these are a lot of these people are very, very powerful political officials, people who shape and mold our laws and mores, where there's basically no worse crime in Western culture than having sex with minors.
Even in prison culture, you can kill and rape and pillage all you want and go to prison.
And on some level, there's almost like a respect to those crimes.
But you go to prison as a sex offender against underage people.
That is when your life is very much in danger.
Because even in prison, that moral code says that's the worst kind of crime.
We treat that as the worst crime in terms of the stigma, in terms of the punishment.
And these are the people imposing that more.
That's reflected in our laws.
And yet within their society, it seems to be utterly irrelevant.
Like they don't really have any kind of moral code amongst themselves.
There's no limits.
They all have utter and complete impunity, especially on these kind of moral levels.
Here's one document that illustrates the point.
This is a email released by the House Oversight Committee.
They subpoenaed these from the Epstein estate.
It's dated September 19, 2014.
So we're talking here about just five years after Jeffrey Epstein's conviction, maybe four years after the conviction and the sentence was served.
And He says Jeffrey Epstein does, and it's to an unidentified person, but he's talking here about a trip that he's taking, and he says he makes a joke.
The person wrote to him and mentioned girls, and he wrote, girls, careful or I will renew an old habit.
It's kind of presumably making a joke about the conviction that he had for having solicited an underage girl for prostitution.
Doesn't seem very remorseful to me.
I mean, if you go around making jokes that way, it doesn't seem like you're repenting very much.
But then he's saying here who the people are who he intends to meet.
And he says, this week, Peter Thiel, Larry Summers, Bill Burns, who was the former CIA director, Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, Jaglin, the Council of Europe and Nobel chairman, the Mongolian president, Hardi Pruss of India, Boris Gates, Boris, who works for Gates, Jabor from Qatar, the Sultan of Dubai, Kazan, who works at Harvard.
I presume that's Leon Black, Woody.
You are a welcome guest at any.
Also, if you think there are any interesting people in town, everyone for the Climate Summit, Clinton Security Council, holy shit, I'm on, and it was redacted for the next 30 minutes.
And then the reply was, doesn't look like you're prioritizing your schedule very effectively.
How are you going to manage all of this?
This is the UNGA week, and the boss will be in town too.
Actually, this was to somebody who was an official in the Obama administration.
I believe this is the White House general counsel or somebody who worked in the general counsel's office of the Obama official administration.
So when she says this is UNGA week and the boss will be in town too, she means Obama will be in town.
I'll be here all week.
You may get sick of me.
Just sat down on the train so can't talk freely.
So this is Jeffrey Epstein speaking with a high-ranking Obama White House official about all the mega-elites with whom he's going to meet that week who have scheduled.
And he's saying, look, if you want to join any of us, feel free.
That to me is the most extraordinary part of this.
Now, one of the people with whom Jeffrey Epstein had cultivated a very close relationship is Noam Chomsky.
And I'm bringing this up because in part, to me, it is illustrative of how personally cunning and, I guess, charismatic on an interpersonal level Jeffrey Epstein must have been, but also how successful he was in ingratiating himself with the widest range of people.
And I have talked about before, I think anybody who knows my work knows that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Noam Chomsky and his work.
It has influenced me quite a bit, especially early in my journalism career.
I certainly have differences with him on a lot of things that we've talked about over the years and that I've talked about, but I consider him a major intellectual and political figure of the 20th century and into the 21st century as well.
Anybody who has a critique of American foreign policy that's worth making has been influenced directly or indirectly by Noam Chomsky.
That's the regard in which I hold him.
I've also had a very close personal friendship with him, not over the past few years, but certainly before, say, 2022, 2020, 21, 2022, his wife of many decades died in 2008.
He remarried in 2011.
And the woman he remarried, Valeria Chomsky, is Brazilian, so he spent a lot of time in Brazil as a result.
So we were able to meet here.
We've met a lot of times in the United States.
I feel like I know him very well.
I've known him for a long time.
And this relationship that he has with Jeffrey Epstein, I find so baffling.
It's an intense cognitive dissonance for me.
I really can't reconcile what I know about Noam Chomsky, personally and publicly, with this.
Now, I don't think Noam Chomsky is a sex offender.
I don't think he was, his interest in Jeffrey Epstein had anything to do with abuse of underage people or abuse, sexual abuse of children.
I'm not suggesting that.
I don't believe that either.
As I said, I mean, all the people with whom Jeffrey Epstein was meeting in that prior email, I don't necessarily assume at all that those people are, you know, he had a very close relationship with Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel is gay.
That by itself would sort of impede this notion that whoever was cultivating a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had an interest in underage girls.
We have to be very careful to make clear that just because someone had an association with Jeffrey Epstein doesn't in any way implicate or is incriminating about their sexual activities.
You could be a sexual Puritan in your private life, but still, as I said, the fact that somebody is so willing to become so closely aligned with Jeffrey Epstein, such close friends with him, notwithstanding their knowledge, which everyone had, that he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, indicates to me that within this world, they're of mega-elites.
There's just no mores that apply to them.
They consider themselves exempt.
But that's what I'm saying.
This is something that is so alien to my understanding of Noam Chomsky that this is not a way that he thinks for so many different reasons.
On top of which, as I just said, Jeffrey Epstein had a very close working relationship with the Israeli government.
He was basically an arm of or an asset of Israeli intelligence.
And Noam Chomsky is one of the most vocal and virulent critics of Israel and has been for many decades.
Would I form a relationship with someone who I knew was an actual agent of the Israeli government, I might professionally or journalistically to obtain knowledge or understanding, but I would certainly not be, that would certainly be a massive impediment to my willingness to consider myself friends with that person, let alone to intermingle so, on so many deep and personal levels the way Chomsky and Epstein did.
We've known for a few years now that Chomsky had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, although we didn't really know the full extent to it until these emails started emerging this week.
The Wall Street Journal in May of 2023 reported Jeffrey Epstein moved $270,000 for Noam Chomsky and paid $150,000 to Leon Botstein.
Academics acknowledge the financial transactions with the late convicted sex offender.
There's another Wall Street Journal article.
I don't know if we have it.
Do we have the other Wall Street Journal article that reports on the nature of their relationship?
All right, so I'll just summarize that for you.
This is the first Wall Street Journal article that really described the nature of Chomsky's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
And it basically outlined how, beginning in 2015 and 2016, Noam Chomsky and his wife Valeria Chomsky met multiple times on numerous occasions for social events with Jeffrey Epstein.
Noam and Valeria Chomsky flew on Jeffrey Epstein's plane in order to go and have dinner with Woody Allen and his wife, who used to was his stepdaughter.
And they engaged in other kinds of social interactions as well, on top of the financial involvement that apparently Chomsky was using Jeffrey Epstein for managing his finances of some kind.
And when asked about the relationship that Noam Chomsky had with Jeffrey Epstein, Chomsky was extremely defiant, as is his right.
And he basically said, I don't, it's none of your business.
I don't have to account to you for who I'm friends with.
He said, and then when asked about the Woody Allen dinner, he said, why should I have to tell, I'm not aware of the principle that compels me to tell the Wall Street Journal when I have a dinner with a great artist, meaning Woody Allen.
And then he said, he cited that principle I described earlier, which of course is embedded in law, that once somebody is convicted of a crime and serves their sentence, they get what Chomsky called a, quote, clean slate, meaning that doesn't factor in at all to my calculus of how I judge Jeffrey Epstein.
Among the emails that were released were emails that were quite friendly and chatty between Chomsky's wife, Valeria Chomsky, and Epstein here from the two of them, November 13, 2016.
This is just after Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.
And here you have Valeria saying to Jeffrey Epstein, quote, I knew even before the primaries announced in meetings, lunches, and dinners just to receive a look of contempt and disbelief.
Now I want my position as a political analyst, preferably in the White House, which I presume is a joke referring to the fact that she claimed she anticipated Trump's victory.
And then she adds, yeah, once you asked me who I would like to see talking to Noam, here's a guy.
Can you arrange it?
He could make good use of Noam's advices.
And then Epstein, we called it, please note.
So there's clearly a friendly social relationship.
One of the most bizarre aspects of all of this was that, as many of you know, the current president of Brazil, Lula Da Silva, was in prison in 2018.
And he was there because he had been convicted on charges of corruption.
And that was the reporting that I did that led to Lula's being released from prison, showing that the judge and the prosecutors and the anti-corruption probe that led to Lula's conviction itself had acted corruptly.
But while before that happened, Lula was imprisoned in Brasilia in a federal building in Brasilia.
I went there as well.
And Curtis Chiba, sorry, yeah, and Curti Chiba, which was the home base of where the anti-corruption probe was.
And I went there and interviewed Lula while he was in the same prison in 2018.
And one of the people who went and visited Lula was Noam Chomsky.
He was in Brazil.
Chomsky being a big figure in the international left for a long time, had a relationship with Lula, as he did with many left-wing leaders.
And he visited Lula.
And on the day that he visited, September 21st, 2018, Jeffrey Epstein wrote an email, this is one of the emails that was released, which said this, quote, Chomsky called me with Lula from prison.
What a world.
Now, it seems to suggest, I mean, there's not a lot of detail there, but it seems to suggest that Chomsky didn't just call him on his way into the prison or on his way out, but he called Epstein with Lula from prison.
That's what it says.
He called me with Lula.
Now, I noted this on Acts.
I just noted it, described it, and the Brazilian left went insane.
I mean, insane, you know, claiming that I was implying that Lua was a pedophile.
I did nothing of the sort.
I just reported the email, which of course is of interest to people in Brazil because it's so bizarre.
And a lot of people are saying, how could Lula possibly have spoken to Jeffrey Epstein when Lula doesn't speak English and Jeffrey Epstein didn't speak Portuguese?
The same is true, though, of Lula and Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky has never spoken Portuguese and still doesn't.
And Lula doesn't speak English.
I presume he had his wife with him to translate or somebody to translate.
Otherwise, there was no way that Chomsky and Lula could communicate.
And that person could be easily translated between Lula and Jeffrey Epstein as well.
I don't know that this happened.
I just know that Jeffrey Epstein says it happened.
And he says it on the day that it happened.
So we obviously knew that Chomsky was there.
This was an email in private.
He wasn't claiming this publicly.
And again, it's just, it's remarkable how close this relationship was between Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein.
That even on that kind of a day, I mean, I can't imagine going to visit Lula and then calling Jeffrey Epstein, either before I went in or after, let alone Walla was there.
Like, how at the forefront of Noam Chomsky's mind was Jeffrey Epstein and why?
Like, what explains this?
Here is a letter that Chomsky wrote to, it's unclear to whom he wrote it.
It's basically a letter vouching for Jeffrey Epstein's character.
And although there's no date on it, it's signed by Noam Chomsky as on the faculty of the University of Arizona.
As you probably know, he spent most of his career at MIT.
Only in 2017 did he take a position at the University of Arizona.
He wanted to live in Arizona.
When you get older, Massachusetts winters are very harsh.
It's a nice place to retire.
He didn't, you know, Chomsky would never retire, but he went down to the University of Arizona.
So we know it's after 2017.
It sounds like it could be a letter as part of a court process vouching for Jeffrey Epstein's character.
The context is unclear, but it emerged as part of the emails and documents released from Jeffrey Epstein's estate.
And here's what it says, presumably in Chomsky's own words.
Quote, I met Jeffrey Epstein half a dozen years ago.
We have been in regular contact since with many long and often in-depth discussions about a very wide range of topics, including our own specialties and professional work, but a host of others where we have shared interests.
It has been a most valuable experience for me.
In the area of his own direct engagements, I have learned a great deal from him about the intricacies of the global financial system, about complex technical issues that arise in the often arcane world of finance, and about specific cases in which I have a particular interest, such as the financial situation in Saudi Arabia and current economic planning and prospects there.
Jeffrey invariably turns out to be a highly reliable source with intimate knowledge and perspective analysis, perceptive analysis, commonly going well beyond what I can find in the business press and professional journals.
And I can just say this all sounds like Chomsky, how he writes, how he speaks.
Given the range and depth of his concerns, I suppose I should not have been surprised to discover that Jeffrey has repeatedly been able to arrange, sometimes on the spot, very productive meetings with leading figures.
On another occasion, Jeffrey arranged a meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose record I had studied carefully and written about.
We have our disagreements, but had a very fruitful discussion about a number of controversial matters, including one that was of particular interest to me, the Taba negotiations of January 2001 and the framework of President Clinton's parameters, events that remain obscure and controversial because the diplomatic record is still mostly secret.
Barack's discussion of the background was illuminating, also surprising in some ways, more lively interchanges in which Jeffrey was once again an active participant, often an effective gadfi.
The impact of Jeffrey's limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights, and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality without a trace of pretentiousness.
He quickly became a valued friend and a regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.
You know, honestly, it's painful for me to read that.
I have to admit.
And again, it's because of my admiration for Chomsky, the influence he's had on me, my friendship with him.
I don't know what to make of that.
Now, it should be said that Jeffrey Epstein did purposely cultivate huge numbers of close relationships in the Boston area academic scene.
He donated massive amounts to Harvard University when Larry Summers was its president.
And these emails show an extremely close and often warped and even demented relationship and discourse he had with Larry Summers throughout the years.
Larry Summers being a very high-ranking Clinton official and Democratic Party advisor, formerly the president of Harvard, who maintained a very close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
He funded academics at MIT and Harvard, including Bill Ackman's wife, funded a project for her.
And he was pouring a ton of money into MIT.
And it would naturally be someone, I guess, of interest to Epstein to kind of cultivate the way he kind of collected famous and influential people to cultivate a relationship with Chomsky.
So I don't really question or fail to understand why Jeffrey Epstein might have had an interest in Noam Chomsky and adding him to his repertoire of people that he could show off as someone he knew.
Kind of like being the matchmaker.
You know, hey, Chomsky, I can put you in touch with the former Israeli prime minister, Ahab Baruch, and Baruch, I can put you in touch with Noam Chomsky.
And then here, you two are together.
I'm here with you.
Let's have a conversation.
Like, he definitely liked doing those things.
But Jeffrey Epstein was a pig, like on every level, just even leaving aside the conviction, which, okay, if you're Chomsky, he is a civil libertarian.
I have some empathy for the notion that if somebody is a convict and they serve their time, you don't hold that against them forever, although certain crimes I do think you probably would, especially as I said, if they're not really repentant.
But just the Israel question alone, like, would I meet with Ehub Baruch or an Israeli prime minister?
I guess, like, journalistically, but would I consider it some great social evening that I really enjoyed where we exchanged ideas and got to understand and talk about things?
That, I mean, I could almost, I could see myself doing that more than Chomsky.
Chomsky is very dogmatic.
In fact, you know, Chomsky, because of his perception of my politics over the last few years, basically stopped talking to me.
He once, you know, publicly, I wouldn't say malign me.
He went really out of his way not to malign me, but he was being pushed to malign me.
Like, what about Glenn Greenwald and his seeming sympathy for Trump?
I would never in a million years have said anything negative about Chomsky.
You know, I would criticize him or disagree with his views, but he said something like, look, he's a close friend of mine.
I have a lot of respect for what his work was.
I wouldn't, I don't want to have to say anything about him, but I don't understand what's going on with him, and I just hope he figures it out and changes.
And it was a kind of a personal comment.
And then in the last few years, they did stop talking to me, clearly over political differences.
So I say that only to make clear that Chomsky, it's not like Chomsky's a person who just will socialize with anybody or cultivate a friendship with anyone independent of their politics to the extent that he was even willing to cut off a friendship with me that was quite a long one and quite an in-depth one.
But not Jeffrey Epstein.
That wasn't a bridge too far.
Somebody who actually did constant work for the Israeli government, who was an agent of the Mossad.
That's not somebody who's disqualified because of their political views or Ehub Narouk.
That's what I find so difficult to reconcile.
And it must just be, you know, I mean, Chomsky is human and we all have these temptations of money and power and the allure that it presents.
It's not the case that Chomsky is typically sought after by members of this global elite.
I mean, you know, again, he's certainly someone very influential.
He has a lot of friends who are, you know, like Lua, but not this kind of global money elite.
So maybe he was dazzled by Jeffrey Epstein's interest in him or, you know, he had a lot of institutional loyalty to MIT.
Maybe Jeffrey Epstein's pouring money into MIT.
Who knows?
I don't know what to make of it.
I'm just saying it must be the case that Jeffrey Epstein had some sort of interpersonal skills that were quite exceptional, given the number of extremely influential people who you wouldn't think would need anything from Jeffrey Epstein.
But I guess people are just, I talked before about how people behave around billionaires.
It's shockingly, people who you wouldn't think would do this, not talking about people who work for them, but anybody, it's like that level of wealth and power becomes so captivating to human beings.
It's one of the reasons why I think a lot of billionaires go crazy because they can't be around people who treat them in a normal way.
Everything is just constant sycophantic affirmation.
But if you ever listen to Chomsky talk about oligarchs and powerful and wealthy people, he does so with this scorn and contempt that would make you think that he would be immune to that kind of courtship.
But apparently not.
There's no doubt he was very close friends with Jeffrey Epstein and had a great deal of respect and admiration for him.
And because I can't figure it out and I'm going out of my way not to be ungenerous in my interpretation, I started off by saying and I will once again affirm that Chomsky is and will always be a kind of intellectual and personal hero to me, notwithstanding disagreements I've had.
He says some terrible things about COVID, which I give him license for.
If you're 92, I think it's understandable to have some irrational fear of COVID.
And if you're in public life for six decades talking about the most controversial issues in the most free thinking, independent way, you're going to have some bad moments.
We all are going to.
I don't hold those against him at all.
This, though, I just, I find it fascinating.
And the whole Epstein debacle, among so many interesting aspects of it, really is about the ability of this global elite to create their own world where no rules and no laws and no mores apply.
They just, they see themselves as part of this behind-the-wall Versailles aristocratic elite.
They impose laws and rules and limitations on everybody else and completely exempt themselves.
And obviously there's a lot more to the Epstein case than that, but that definitely is one of the things most interesting to me.
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All right, our next email from D. Terkelson.
Glenn, I've been following you since the Snowden days and Tucker Carlson for years as well.
It has been very heartening to see some of the tension between left and right evaporate and be replaced by good faith discourse.
Over the past few months, I've been listening to Nick Fuentes almost every day.
I trust and believe that you, Tucker, and Nick are all on us brokers when it comes to crises that face our country.
My question, as you see it, what is the critical distinction between Tucker and Nick, especially with regard to Israel and what Nick characterizes as, quote, organized Jewry?
Who has the clearer vision on this issue?
One thing I find so interesting is that so many people have been waiting for a way to try and destroy Tucker Carlson for so long.
And it didn't start with Israel.
That was the accelerant.
And that by far is the primary factor now.
But going back to when he had this Fox show, he was a major thorn in the side of congressional Republicans when it came to their desire to fund the war in Ukraine.
Tucker did more than anybody to turn MAGA and its base against the war in Ukraine.
And this was so true that when Tucker got fired from Fox, many of them, many of these Republicans in the Senate and the House went to Politico or Axios to say how happy they were that Tucker would no longer be on the air because he had made it impossible for them to generate support among MAGA for the war in Ukraine and how it would now be much easier to finance it.
And then in general, he was just a critic of Republican establishment foreign policy.
Constantly warning of the attempt of neocons to try and generate war with Iran.
I remember once, in fact, there was this A couple of days where there was some kind of protest that erupted on the streets of Havana, it was clearly one of those protests that the CIA helped spark, as the CIA has been trying to do for seven decades to overthrow the government of Cuba.
And all these people in Washington, Republican Democrat, got so excited and were posting freedom for Cuba, and just wanting to overturn the government of Cuba.
And I went on that night to talk about something the Biden administration had been doing in terms of eroding free speech and other civil liberties, but nobody in Washington was talking about it.
They were all focused on Havana instead.
And I wasn't going on to talk about Cuba, but Tucker brought it up and said, While all this is happening, you have these 88 idiot members of the Republican Congressional Caucus signing some letter saying how they want the government of Cuba to change instead of focusing on the erosion of rights here at home.
And I then said, you know, I thought the whole idea of America First was that we weren't going to focus any longer on trying to change the governments of foreign countries.
I thought we were going to focus on our own country.
That was the whole idea.
And Tucker said, Yeah, I thought so too.
I remember thinking to myself, wow, like, think about what a sea change it is that you can now go on Fox News, and not just any show on Fox, but like the 8 o'clock Prime Time Show, the most watched show on all cable news, certainly on Fox, and condemn Republicans for trying to change the government of Cuba.
But that is how radical of a change Tucker was and is for Republican Party politics.
So there was a lot of anger and hatred toward Tucker among the Mitch McConnell crowd, Lindsey Graham crowd, Ted Cruz crowd, for quite a long time.
It's just that he was way more popular than they were.
And they couldn't do anything about it.
They couldn't publicly criticize Tucker.
That's why they all, like cowards, ran to Politico Araxios and demanded anonymity to celebrate his firing.
They were too scared to put their name on it.
And then once, after October 7th, Tucker started questioning the Israel relationship with the United States.
That's when they no longer had the luxury of hiding.
They had to find a way to try and destroy Tucker's reputation, like they do for anybody who effectively criticizes Israel.
Anybody who effectively criticizes Israel is going to be the subject of this kind of career and reputational destruction.
The more effective you are at doing it, the more intense the campaign is going to be.
And you see that now.
There's nothing but an attempt to depict Tucker as some old-style anti-Semite of the kind Bill Buckley, so nobly vanquished from the conservative movement.
And all of that happened when Tucker hosted Nick Fuentes on his show.
You can host the worst people on the planet on your show and even treat them nicely and in agreement.
And as long as they're not an Israel critic, you'll be totally fine.
Everybody will defend you.
And the way they try and attack Tucker, the way they tried to use this Nick Fuentes interview that Tucker did to try and destroy Tucker, or claim he was an anti-Semite, was based on an absolute lie, which is that Nick Fuentes went on Tucker's show and Tucker didn't push back on anything, didn't challenge him on anything, didn't disagree with him on anything.
And all you have to do is watch the first half of the interview to know that anyone who's claiming Tucker didn't push back or disagree with Nick Fuentes is either extremely dishonest or extremely stupid, and maybe both.
The whole first half of the discussion is Tucker explaining to Nick why he thinks certain views that Nick has, why he thinks certain ways that Nick expresses those views is either counterproductive or just morally wrong, un-Christian.
Tucker argued that when you reduce things to Not just the ideology of Zionism, but when you reduce it to Jews, I'm just describing Tucker's argument.
He's saying you're violating a core precept of Christianity, which is that you don't judge people based on their blood, based on their demographic groups, but instead on their individual.
All people are created by God.
They're all entitled to the same dignity.
You don't judge them based on, are they black or brown or yellow or white?
Or are they Christian or Muslim?
That's not how you judge people.
And he was saying to Nick Fuentes, look, you're a young, extremely influential, very talented person with a lot of influence to wield and probably a lot of more influence that you will wield.
But if you continue to frame it in this way, you're going to lose a lot of people who otherwise would be open to your message.
It was almost like trying to show Nick what Tucker thinks Nick is doing that is counterproductive to his goals, but also not just as kind of a communication strategy, but also as a way of objecting to the merits and the substance of some of Nick's core views.
Obviously, they have a lot of agreement on a lot of things, but there was a lot of disagreement.
And although Tucker didn't scream and bang the table and scream Nazi and racist, which is how pro-Israel operatives conduct themselves.
So if you don't do that, they'll think, oh, you're not pushing back on him.
You didn't even scream a Nazi in his face once.
You conducted yourself civilly.
It was like a civil discussion.
Obviously, you didn't push back.
The whole thing was this tension between the two about their worldviews and their ways of advocating for it.
And Nick's argument in response was it is a fiction to try and extricate this dependence on Israel that the United States has, subservience to Israel that the United States have, from the Jewishness of the people who have engineered it, because embedded in Jewish identity is a loyalty to Israel, a belief that Israel has to exist as a Jewish state.
And it's a fiction to pretend that's not the case.
And that is a, I think so much of Tucker's worldview has been so deliberately distorted.
And I've been arguing with the left about this for the longest time.
I mean, one of the main reasons that I got expelled from large portions of the left was because I was on Tucker's show so often and was associated with him and there was this perception, this argument.
You can go on a show and disagree with somebody, but he's beyond the pale because he's a clear racist.
He's a white nationalist.
And that just isn't Tucker's worldview.
And maybe it was, you know, 20 years ago.
Tucker has changed on pretty much everything.
Part of what motivates Tucker, what animates him, is embarrassment and regret over the things he advocated before he knew better.
So I'm not defending Tucker from 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
I'm just explaining what I know for certain, both privately and publicly, that Tucker's worldview is not white nationalism.
It's the opposite of that, in fact.
Tucker's worldview is that we judge people based on their character and not their skin color.
And his objection to affirmative action and DEI and discriminating against white people or giving advantages to certain groups has always been based on that.
You don't have to agree with that.
I'm not saying you have to agree with it or not.
I'm just saying that is Tucker's worldview.
And it's one of the reasons why he has disagreements with Nick Fuentes, who does not share that worldview.
Now, as far as what I think, I mean, I guess there's a little bit of Validity in each of those worldviews in the sense that I know for having grown up in, you know, immersed in Jewish culture, even though I wasn't religious, I still had a lot of my entire family, every single last person was Jewish.
There's no non-Jewish part of my family.
My father's side, my mother's side was very close to my grandparents.
My maternal grandmother was religious.
She was a German Jew who fled Germany in the 30s and came to the United States, spoke with a heavy German accent until she died.
She constantly was pushing us to be educated in Jewish settings.
She would send us to Jewish summer camp where you would learn Hebrew and Jewish prayer.
I mean, I've been around Jewish people my whole life in Jewish culture and Jewish society, and to a large extent I still am.
And it just is true, even though you're not really supposed to talk much about it, that you are inculcated and told in every single conceivable way from birth that you have to have and automatically do have a connection to and loyalty toward Israel.
That part of your duty as a Jew is to defend Israel, to serve the interests of Israel, to strengthen Israel.
And that is just true.
To deny there's a connection between Jewishness and love of Israel is a fiction.
At the same time, that doesn't get you very far when analyzing the actual political scenario because there are huge numbers of Jews who have become vehemently opposed not just to Israel but to Zionism.
There's all kinds of things we're taught.
Not we being Jews, but we as human beings from birth that we end up renouncing or rejecting once we form our own critical faculties and evaluate the things we were taught to believe.
And for that reason, there's, I mean, these student protests that took place throughout 2024, though they were characterized as being led by foreigners or Muslims.
The reality is they all had huge Jewish contingents in them.
Leaders of many of these protests were Jewish.
And that's true all throughout Europe.
It's all throughout the world.
Being Jewish is by no means a guarantor that you're going to be a supporter of Israel in any way.
There are a lot of Jewish anti-Zionists.
We had rabbis on our show, Orthodox Jews on our show, who believe Zionism is basically heretical for Judaism, that it's just a violation of the core of Judaism to identify based on a nation-state.
And then at the same time, huge numbers of extremely influential Americans and Brits and French and Germans who are fanatically pro-Israel are not Jewish.
Joe Biden said, I'm a fanatical Zionist.
I'm a Zionist.
And was a fanatical Zionist his whole career.
Obviously, not Jewish.
Donald Trump, same thing.
And then you have the whole Christian Zionist movement.
The Mike Huckabees and the Ted Cruzes, Lindsey Grahams, the whole major contingent in Congress, they're not Jewish either.
And then you have the Israel support that was generated by national security dogma or pro-business dogma.
American corporations made a ton of money off the destruction of Gaza.
Donald Rumfeld's, those types, extremely pro-Israel.
They're not based in Judaism or Christianity.
So I think it does both obfuscate when you talk about it that way more than it illuminates.
And I think it also does have the potential to be dangerous.
Now, if it were true and dangerous, you could say, well, truth is more important.
But I don't think that's the most accurate way of looking at it.
And I think Tucker's argument about that was convincing and is convincing.
And it's why I don't talk about it that way.
At the same time, one of the reasons why there are so many Jewish people who are so fanatical about Israel is because they're taught from birth to be that.
Their identity as a Jewish person is inextricably linked to love of and support for and loyalty toward Israel.
And you can deny that because it's an uncomfortable truth.
It doesn't negate the fact that it is true.
And I do think it's important to adhere to truth always in what you're doing, but especially with sensitive and potentially dangerous topics, I think you have to be very precise as well.
And then, you know, the last thing I'll say is, I do think Nick Fuentes is still quite young.
And it doesn't mean that anything he does or says is justified or even mitigated by his youth, but it is the case that very few people go through life holding the exact same views they held when they were 25 and 26.
And on balance, I think the fact that there's been so many influential people inside right-wing politics, like Tucker and like Candace Owens and Marjorie Keller Green and Tom Massey and Nick Fuentes, who have been getting people to see the extremely unhealthy and bizarre and self-destructive relationship between the United States and Israel has only been positive.
It doesn't mean I agree with everything they're saying and doing.
It doesn't mean I don't think there's also negative consequences to some of their views.
That's true of everybody.
But I consider this to be a very positive development on the whole, and all of those people are playing a role in it.
All right.
This is from Carl Malone.
I just finished watching the first Thomas Crookes documentary on Tuck Carls' channel.
And I was hoping you'd give your thoughts generally on it as well as how the current function of our justice system bodes for the future of society.
I know you share certain views with me regarding centralized power when it comes to civil liberties, but we diverge when it comes to the state's role in economic interventions.
And virtually all of my arguments against intervention parallel your arguments against expanding government power in the area, in the arena of foreign policy, et cetera.
You know, it's interesting.
I presume from the question that the person asking it is libertarian.
And I've been hearing this forever.
You know, look, all the skepticism that you have and concern you have and objection you have to centralization of state power when it comes to civil liberties and war and foreign policy and surveillance.
I share all those, would say a libertarian, but I don't understand why you don't share the same concern when it comes to economic policy, why you're not more concerned about the centralization of economic power in the hands of the state.
I don't really know where that view comes from because I actually don't talk very much about economic policy because I don't feel like I have the expertise to do so.
I really try hard to avoid that.
I definitely have, I definitely do believe that a society is coarsened and even worse, just has a great struggle to be a worthwhile society when you have massive income and wealth disparities where a small number of people are living lives of gluttonous consumption and the majority are living lives of extreme deprivation.
I don't think it's a good thing in society to walk to work and have to step over people who can't afford a home and are living on the street with their kids or whose kids can't afford basic health care.
I don't think we have an interest in a society like that.
I understand the libertarian argument that the reason for that is because the state controls so much and everything would be magically improved if there were this perfect free market.
I don't believe, even if in theory that might be true, that along the way, that's what would happen.
And so I do have just kind of a, you could call it an emotional aversion, but I think it's more substantive than that to having an extremely rich society where huge numbers of people don't have even the basic minimum conditions to have any chance of any kind of decent life for themselves or for their children.
But I don't necessarily either run around advocating this kind of sprawling welfare state.
I really, like I said, I don't comment on all that much because it's just not my kind of expertise.
But I certainly understand the concerns and the dangers.
And I do think that in a lot of ways, there has become this kind of crony capitalism.
When you vest all this power in the state over private enterprise and over industries, what will happen is the richest people in society will use that wealth to convert it to political power and they'll commandeer the state to enrich themselves.
Peter Thiel can go and donate tons of money to Donald Trump and Alex Karp can and then suddenly Palantir is getting all these huge government contracts.
Or Amazon and Meta and Google have to placate the U.S. government because the U.S. government is what determines their wealth.
And you create this merger between this massive, powerful state and this industry and those dangers become manifest.
I understand all that.
And I do think that is a big concern.
But the areas in which I am expert, in which I have expertise, are things like the FBI and civil liberties and the like and the corruption of the FBI.
And I have to say, when Tucker announced that he was going to produce a documentary about all the things that the FBI is hidden about Thomas Crooks and clearly was going to imply that the FBI is hiding this because of concerns that in some way people other than Thomas Crooks are implicated in the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
I was very skeptical about what Tucker was going to be able to produce.
I thought it was going to be a lot of insinuation, which happens a lot with these kinds of things, a lot of oddities or things that can't quite be explained.
But in general, that's often the case with complex events.
They have complexities that can't be explained.
They're aberrational.
This documentary delivered a lot more than that.
I just watched it this morning.
It's about an hour long.
Here's the, I guess it's the preview of it, the teaser that they made, just to give you a sense for those who haven't watched it, what it is.
And I highly recommend if you haven't watched it that you do.
These are videos the FBI has worked hard to make sure you haven't seen.
They're from the Google Drive account of Thomas Crooks, the man who on July 13th, 2024, showed up at the Butler County, Pennsylvania fairgrounds and tried to assassinate the frontrunner, Donald Trump.
And look what happened to our country.
Probably 20 million people.
And you know, that's a little bit old, that chart.
That chart's a couple of months old.
If you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened.
That day, Thomas Crooks came within a quarter inch of destroying this country.
And yet, a year and a half later, we still know almost nothing about him or why he did it.
All right, so that's not a teaser.
That's the first minute or so of the documentary and it just does go on to offer very substantive reporting, things about Thomas Crookes that we simply didn't know before, that the FBI had to have known, but never told the public despite demands from Congress, letters from Senate investigators, and that was true first under the Biden FBI led by Christopher Wray.
And it's true as true now with the FBI led by Kash Patel and Denbong.
They just won't say or tell us anything.
And there have been misleading statements about who Thomas Crookes was, about the fact that he didn't leave any online footprint or left very little online footprint other than one account.
Tucker was able to gather, using a couple of sources and some experts, huge amounts of his online activity to show his evolution of his views over time, but also the massive gaps in knowledge that we have about him that might eliminate whether he was influenced by somebody or worked with somebody or what the FBI knew before about him based on how graphic and explicit his threats of assassination and violence were.
online over many years.
And it does raise a lot of questions about why the FBI hasn't revealed the information that Tucker was able to get, despite demands by many people, including by Trump, who said he wants full disclosure, and yet there hasn't been.
The FBI actually, the day before, last night, right before Tucker released the documentary, created a new account called FBI Rapid Response.
And it was trying to discredit Tucker by nitpicking things that he said, and it got community noted.
But now, in a way, it's kind of ironic because they have a rapid response account that they called it rapid response.
They should rapidly respond to the disclosures in this documentary and to the questions that were raised.
And we'll see if they do.
It's hard to see how they wouldn't.
It's not really the left that has been demanding this information.
It's really been the right who's been saying, how is it possible that this 20-year-old guy left basically no footprint that we know nothing about him?
Where's the toxicology report?
Where are the FBI investigative reports about who we might have worked with?
And the other thing that I think is extremely notable, and this is the thing, Tucker raised this kind of briefly, but I think I want to just highlight it.
You may recall that throughout 2024, including after these assassination attempts, there were all these leaks from inside the government claiming that there was evidence that the Iranian government had approved a plot to assassinate President Trump.
And all of that happened at the time when many Trump supporters, especially neocons and Israel supporters, were beating the drums very openly to try and get Trump to go attack Iran.
And what better way is there to get Trump to want to go attack Iran than telling Trump that Iran is trying to assassinate him or that Iran maybe even tried to assassinate him by being behind that Butler, Pennsylvania shooting?
And that you can find many reports leaked to the media, which of course Judafully published it, saying evidence suggests that Iran was behind the assassination attempt.
And the reason that should immediately raise red flags is because of the history of our country and how that has happened so many times.
One of the historical events that never gets enough attention is the anthrax attacks that happened just a couple of weeks after September 11th, the 9-11 attacks in 2001 in mid-October.
And that was terrifying to people.
I've done a lot of reporting on the anthrax attacks.
I've done a lot of, we did a whole retrospective of the anthrax attacks on this show.
And according to the FBI itself, the anthrax attacks came from inside the U.S. government.
They ultimately pinned the blame on a U.S. Army researcher, Dr. Bruce Ivins, and said that the anthrax that was used to attack Americans in October of 2001 came from inside the Fort Dietrich lab.
And at the time, in 2001, the reason it was so terrifying was because we were told that this strain of anthrax had been weaponized in a very sophisticated and dangerous way, that it was weaponized by weapons.
And it was that.
But what we were also told repeatedly is that the Iraqi government was likely behind it.
This is weeks after 9-11.
And they see these anthrax attacks and they instantly try and link them to Saddam Hussein.
John McCain went on David Letterman, the first show after 9-11 when David Letterman returned and his guest was John McCain.
And John McCain talked about the anthrax attacks and said that there's strong indications that Saddam Hussein and Iraq are behind it.
Brian Ross, the investigative reporter at ABC, did a week-long report, one after the next after the next, in ABC News, and saying that sources inside the government have not only concluded that Iraq was behind it, but he had a theory about why, namely that the anthrax was weaponized and bound together by bentonite.
Bentonite is basically just like a clay that's used for things like cat litter, a very common substance.
But the narrative that we were told was that bentonite is a signature attribute of the Iraqi biological weapon program, of the Iraqi anthrax attack.
And the presence of bentonite, said ABC News and John McCain and many others at the time, strongly suggested, in fact, constituted very concrete links to the Iraqi biological weapons program.
And obviously hearing that after 9-11 already started convincing a lot of people to blame Iraq, to hate Iraq, to look away from Saudi Arabia and to look toward Iraq.
And you draw a straight line from there to the invasion of Iraq based on lies, including that Iraq had an active biological weapons program that, if you believe this theory, was actually not just in existence, but used to attack the United States.
So I remember when I started hearing that Iran was behind attempts to assassinate President Trump, they were behind this Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in particular, that that was going to be used to try and convince Trump to go to war with Iran.
And of course, Trump did end up bombing Iran.
Not in the full extent of regime change yet that Israel supporters wanted, but he not only takes credit for the U.S. bombing that one night, but the full Israeli attack.
That first night after Israel started attacking, Mark Rubio came out with a statement saying, we had nothing to do with this.
This is purely Israel.
It's a unilateral attack by Israel.
This is not the United States.
And then once Trump saw that it seemed like it was so successful and impressive, he now claims, no, I was basically in command of it from the start, that the whole multi-day 12 days of bombing or whatever it was of Iran was all done by the United States.
So when you start to hear a country that a lot of people in this country want to attack, blamed for domestic events, your red flag should immediately go up and not only go up in the sense of, I don't, I want to, I'm very skeptical of this, I want to see proof, but also wondering who really did attack.
I mean, imagine if it had been known in 2001, October, that the anthrax attack came from the U.S. government, came from a U.S. Army base in Maryland.
How that would have been radically, how that, the perception would have been radically different.
But we didn't really learn about that until seven years later, after the anthrax attacks were already embedded in everybody's minds and then used and then gone.
And then the revelation comes out and it's like, oh, what are those anthrax attacks?
Ask people about anthrax attacks now, they'll vaguely remember.
No details, not much of anything.
It was just kind of a weird thing that happened and didn't have much meaning.
It was extremely significant.
And it was a false flag.
It came from the U.S. government, and Iraq was blamed for it.
At a time we were trying to gin up, not we, but the government was trying to gin up support for a war in Iraq.
Same thing with this Thomas Hook shooting.
We were told, oh, Iran is behind it.
Okay, there's clearly a lot of evidence in the hands of the FBI.
Let's see that evidence.
Let's see who radicalized him to go and shoot, if anybody.
Let's see who helped train him at the gun range or who he was speaking to online.
The FBI has all that.
They just won't release it and tell us.
Why not?
I think the Tucker's report will, or at least certainly should, intensify the pressure on Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to show the country what it has about this attempt to kill Donald Trump and who might have been involved in it.
Next question is Dr. Snub.
Hi, Glenn, longtime listener, first-time caller, just wondering to what extent you think the left-right dichotomy is designed to keep us fighting among ourselves rather than punching up.
I'm on the right and I came at things from a grassroots self-sufficiency perspective.
I've noticed that a lot on the left agree with me about this.
Homestead living is something we're rather united on.
It's mostly manufactured culture war BS, which elites seem to use to divide us.
Do you agree?
I definitely do think that the culture war is deliberately pushed because there's not much at stake in the culture war when it comes to the disbursement of political and military and economic power.
It doesn't mean it's unimportant, the culture war.
It doesn't mean it doesn't affect people's lives.
But it's never a threat to any power center.
And the more Americans are fighting about the culture war, the more Americans are ignoring what is actually being done with political and economic power.
That's why I think people like Matt Walsh are such incredibly useful imbeciles.
He wakes up every day and he just wants to talk about the private lives of his neighbors and like police it and judge it and condemn it.
And yes, there's more to the trans debate than that.
It involves things like should biological males be able to play in women's sports or be put in prison or what's taught to kids.
Not even saying that's unimportant.
I'm just saying you can go to war and be a culture warrior the way he is and be a threat to absolutely nobody.
I know he loves to talk about how everyone wants to murder him.
Who does Matt Walsh threaten?
What is Matt Walsh a threat to?
Is he a critic of the systems that determine economic power and the distribution of capital in the United States of the world?
No, we couldn't care less, knows nothing about that.
Is he a threat to foreign policy and war making and the arms industry and the intelligence community?
No, he knows nothing about that, doesn't care about that.
You wind him up and he talks about, you know, trans people.
And fine, again, not saying it's unimportant, have that debate, whatever.
But the more Americans are at each other's throat based on these left-right dichotomies about the culture war, the happier power centers are.
And they want us to fight about that forever.
It's so easily, they're able so easily to commandeer it.
Look what happened with the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
It was supposed to be this radical movement, the street protest movement of citizens rising up and saying, we've had enough of white supremacy.
And within like three months, every major corporation put BLM logos on their corporate pages.
They adopted DEI policies and said, oh, we're going to hire, you know, all these DEI officials and we'll pay for ads and make contributions.
It was just a small cost of doing business.
Didn't threaten corporate power in the slightest way.
In fact, if anything, it fortified it.
Because the corporations that just embraced it then were able to repel every critic.
One of the things I always think about along these lines, and I've written about this before, is when the gay rights movement really started winning and making major inroads in both political parties, where even red states started to have their legislatures enact laws that approved of same-sex marriage, the arms industry, the military-industrial complex, saw the writing on the wall.
So did the FBI and the CIA and the state and the Defense Department.
And they all adopted pro-LGBT policies.
Put the rainbow flag on Pride Month, Pride Day.
Raytheon was named, I think, four consecutive years.
Raytheon received an award four consecutive years from the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest and most well-funded gay rights group in Washington for best LGBT corporation.
So Raytheon is using, is commandeering the culture war, not just to insulate itself from criticism, but to get the left and American liberals to heap praise on Raytheon for having such advanced and progressive LGBT policies.
And that was when the CIA started putting up their ads about how much they love their non-binary CIA agents and the Pentagon or the FBI would have gay day and put the rainbow flag everywhere.
Culture war is so easy to commandeer.
It's a joke.
People in power laugh about it.
And again, I'm not saying it's unimportant.
I'm just saying in the scheme of things, it's an extremely cheap and it's slop.
It's slop.
It's just slop to feed to the idiot.
You can make a lot of money off it.
Matt Walsh become very wealthy, fixating on everything but foreign and economic policy.
You know, his main goal is to somehow like ban adult Americans from being trans if they want.
Like, who needs Matt Walsh to police the private lives of adult citizens of the United States?
And I should just also add it as a side that we've always had these people who make it their lives work to stand up and condemn and morally castigate others for how they're living their lives and their private and sexual choices.
And those people usually have a very dark ending.
It usually turns out that those people who do that are engaging in the very behavior or far more extreme than the behavior they're demanding everybody look at them while they condemn.
We'll leave that aside.
The culture war is distraction and slop fed to people by power centers that wanted to focus on everything except the substantive issues that determine their power and to keep everybody at one another's throats fighting over these issues so that we're not unified fighting against any of that.
And I do think people have come to see that more and more.
I do think that liberal and conservative politics have become less about culture war bickering and more about questioning the fundamental distribution of power and the systems used to preserve it than they are on distractions.
These distractions will always work, and by calling them distractions, one last time, I'm not saying they're meaningless, but I don't understand people who wake up every day and want to.
I guess I do understand it.
It's a very easy life.
You don't really, you make the other culture war angry, other culture warriors on the other side angry.
They need one another.
You know, the pro-life people need the abortion rights activists.
The abortion rights activists need the pro-life people to give them the fuel that keeps that going.
True for every culture war issue.
Feminism and race issues and LGBT issues.
But again, corporate power centers, government power centers are more than happy to have black faces or Latino faces or gay faces.
You think Pete Buttigieg's election as president would be in any way something pioneering or transformative, or Hillary Clinton's election or Tim Scott's?
That stuff is so easily commandeered and integrated that I guess I was going to actually say I don't understand, but I very much do understand the appeal in people devoting their careers to that because you don't ever really challenge anything or anyone that's powerful and provoke their anger at all.
Chuck the lawyer says, quote, the Babylon Bee is now seemingly threatening Megan Kelly with a pager attack.
Mark Levin already started bunching her together with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, which, independent of your feelings about them, is politically insane.
What are we to make of this civil war and conservative media?
So the reference of the question is to this Babylon Bee cartoon that they posted last night and then quickly deleted.
And there you see it, the Babylon Bee, which is run by people who are fanatically pro-Israel.
Their targets these days, it used to be liberals and the left.
It's really now sort of the conservative people who are opposed to Israel.
And even though Megan Kelly is not opposed to Israel, she's actually still quite emphatic supporter of Israel.
She's become grouped within the people who are not reliable supporters of Israel by virtue of her refusal to cut off ties with and deplatform people who criticize Israel, including Tuck Carlston, including myself, including Candace Owens.
So she's now an enemy, not by virtue of her views on Israel, but by the fact that she won't ban and silence and disassociate herself from and cut off friendships over Israel.
And as a result, she's now in the Babylon Bee's crosshairs, which really should at this point change its name to the Tel Aviv Bee, because most of what they do is about castigating people who are in some way critics of Israel.
And they posted this last night: Megan Kelly gets rid of old pager just to be safe.
And there you see the image of the pager next to her face.
And everyone understands what this means.
The pager has become kind of Zionist shorthand for we're going to blow you up.
It's this sick, perverted Zionist joke.
Benjamin Netler goes around the world giving out gold and silver pagers, gave one to John Fetterman, gave one to Donald Trump.
A few months ago, some conservative Israel fanatic was on CNN with Mehdi Hassan debating Mehdi Hassan.
I'll never forgive anybody who turns Mehdi Hassan into a sympathetic victim.
But they were arguing about Israel, and the guy said, be careful that your pager doesn't go off.
So this has become a way of threatening people or implying strongly that they're terrorist sympathizers and that they are legitimate targets.
And the Babylon Bee deleted it.
I mean, with all the Republican and right-wing discourse about how careful you have to be with your language, about blaming the left for using intemperate language when describing the right and people like Charlie Kirk and therefore creating a climate where political violence is now acceptable,
to have one of these right-wing organs so blatantly play with issues of political violence simply because now Megan Kelly is their enemy, because she won't cut off ties with everybody who criticizes Israel.
It's hypocritical at best.
I mean, that's like the most, the mildest critique I could offer it, and I think it's pretty demented.
It's clearly meant as some kind of a threat to putting Megan Kelly's head on other people's heads.
Hey, remember, Israel can kill people in the most ingenious ways.
Now, that pager attack was disgustingly celebrated as some great progress of humanity.
Even though, obviously, if you blow up pagers, thousands of them throughout suburbs in Beirut, you're going to end up probably killing some Hezbollah operatives or maiming some, but huge numbers of people who aren't.
And they're women and children who had their eyes blown off, who had their multiple fingers blown off, whose hands are completely maimed.
Kids who died, they were around the pager.
The pager was on the table where they were.
So congratulations on such a great humanitarian achievement.
It's like those guys who were IDF soldiers who got caught on video gang raping a Palestinian detainee.
They're now celebrated as heroes.
They go into rooms in Israel and people stand and cheer for them.
Members of the Knesset went to the army base where they were detained when they got caught and demanded their release, celebrating gang rape and heralding gang rapists as heroes.
That is a sick society.
And people who think it's fun to use the pager as some sort of stand-in for a threat, like, oh, if you oppose Israel, we're going to blow you up.
That too is sick.
But I think the more important point is the way in which Megan Kelly has somehow become grouped in with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Green and even Nick Fuentes and has become an enemy of the Israel lobby.
This is so bizarre because I've known Megan for a long time.
I was the first guest on her show.
I was just with her in San Antonio at her national stop in San Antonio.
And I think she said during that show, and I'm sure it's true, or if it's not true, it's very close to being true, that I've been the guest who has most appeared on her show.
So, you know, when I go on the show, I spend two hours on with her.
We talk about everything.
And I've gotten to know her personally as well.
And Megan and I vehemently disagree on Israel.
And not just on Israel, but on Israel-adjacent issues.
Like, we had a very robust debate on Mahmoud Khalil and the deportation of students who protested Israel.
She, you know, thinks Ron Mandani is a jihadist.
Megan has still very traditional views when it comes to Israel and foreign policy and Muslims inside the United States and Israel criticism.
She overwhelmingly agrees with the pro-Israel faction.
But she's also somebody who doesn't want to be and can't be controlled.
She won't be told what she can talk about, what kind of people she can talk to.
And she will not cut off her friendships with Tucker.
And she's talked about the same pressure when it comes to me because we are critics of Israel and she won't do that with Candace Owens.
And she understands that there's huge numbers of young conservatives who have turned against Israel.
And so you can't be somebody in conservative politics and media who decides you're just going to cut off everybody who criticizes Israel since Israel criticism is now such a big part of conservative politics.
On top of which, you know, I think people really forget that just a couple of weeks before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was on Megan Kelly's show and both of them were talking about how infuriating it is that they're being called anti-Semites or being put on an Israel enemies list, even though both of them always have been and continue to be very pro-Israel.
And for the crime of questioning a few parts of the Israel dogma, both of them were being vilified publicly and privately, called anti-Semites, being attacked.
Demands were being made on them to not talk to people, to not question things.
And they were both saying this is going to have the opposite effect.
I'm not going to submit to your bullying.
And by grouping Megan in with these people to the point where the Babylon Bee is now using pager imagery for her, it shows the fanaticism behind this pro-Israel movement, the utter lack of tolerance or space to question this foreign government or our government's relation to it in any way.
You're put on an enemies list for the slightest deviation.
I mean, the duties of patriotism that Americans have to their own government pales in comparison to the duties imposed on us to have loyalty to this foreign government.
And people are tired of it.
People are waking up to it.
And people have the courage now to object to it and not care if they're called anti-Semites who are just like the left and liberals overused racism and misogyny and all those other accusations to vilify people and to bully people into questioning things and debating.
People finally got tired of it.
They overused those words.
They lost their sink.
Same with anti-Semitism.
And the fact that they somehow managed to take Megan Kelly and Charlie Kirk, arguably two of their most important media allies, and insists that they're actually enemies because they don't 100% of the time fully adhere to the demands imposed on them by the pro-Israel lobby about who they can talk to and who they can platform and what debates they can have and what they can question.
It shows how much in panic this movement is.
If you're part of the pro-Israel lobby and Megan Kelly and Charlie Kirk are your enemies and you're going to declare Megan Kelly your enemy and even put pagers next to her head as the Tel Aviv Bee did here because she insists on the right to continue to interview arguably the most influential person in conservative media, which is Tucker Carlson or other people in conservative media who question our relationship with Israel, like Marjorie Taylor Green or Candace Owens.
Not only are you revealing yourselves to be extremely repellent fanatics and absolutists, you're going to end up alienating pretty much everybody except the most fervent loyalists to the Israel cause.
And that is pretty much what's happening.
And while it's disgusting to watch on the one hand, it's actually for those of us who are very critical of Israel and want there to be a lot more space for people to criticize Israel, it's going to help for the For people's eyes to be opened even further about what has really been going on, what tactics have been employed to ensure that this issue remains taboo.
It's collapsing.
And once people open their eyes and see it, it can never be unseen.
All right, so I think that's all the questions we have time for tonight.
As I said, it was definitely an excellent mix of different questions.
We will be back on Monday night and Friday night.
We will continue to answer your questions, of course.
And so for now, that concludes our show for this evening.
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