Marco Rubio, Europe Thwart Ukraine Peace Deal; NSA Illegally Leaks Steve Witkoff's Diplomatic Calls; Bari Weiss's Comically Out of Touch Plan for CBS
Marco Rubio and the DC establishment continue to undermine the Trump administration's efforts to secure a Russia/Ukraine peace deal. Then: the leak of Steve Witkoff's diplomatic conversations reveals a disturbing truth about the power of the deep state. Finally, Bari Weiss comically attempts to transform CBS into a sensible outlet with no fringe voices. -------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can undoubtedly see, we are not in our normal studio.
It may look like I'm in some sort of log cabin or something.
And that's because I kind of am in a sort of log cabin.
I also have a beautiful dog situated behind me, but she's there completely voluntarily and not because she's forced to by virtue of any shot caller or any other sort of coercive behavior.
So she may move.
She may get herself more comfortable.
Other dogs may come as well, but that's just part of the charm of our show.
All right, for tonight, there's all sorts of breaking news going on, and that's because there is finally an attempt underway and making real progress to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, the war between Russia and Ukraine, or really between Russia and all of NATO in the U.S., that is now about to enter its fifth full year without really much of any progress taking place at all, except that the Russian military continues to move slowly but inexorably westward,
gobbling up more and more Ukrainian land.
And there's nothing that generates more spasm and panic and indignation and outrage within the bipartisan DC class than any attempt to end a war that the DC class wants to be fought infinitely.
And as progress is finally being made to bring about an end to this war, you're seeing all sorts of efforts on the part of Marco Rubio and his allies and a bunch of irrelevant people in Europe attempting to sabotage that deal to sabotage any attempt to end the war.
And just a couple of hours ago, a major leak came, almost certainly from within the government of the NSA, spying on not foreign adversaries, but Steve Witkoff, the president's envoy who has been attempting to facilitate a resolution to this war, spying on him, talking to Russian officials, and then leaking those conversations to Bloomberg with the intention of making Steve Witkoff look bad, but also to sabotage the deal.
In other words, we have unelected operatives inside the U.S. security state, inside the deep state, yet again using their powers of spying, not aimed at foreign adversaries, but against American officials and American citizens to try and sabotage the policies of the elected president.
President Trump ran out of policy of trying to end the war in Ukraine.
There are huge parts of the government, including the secretive parts of the government with spying powers that don't want that war to end.
And they're now criminally leaking conversations that they're spying on involving Steve Witkoff and other top Trump officials that are designed to railroad the diplomatic process.
So we're going to tell you all about that.
That story just broke about an hour ago or so.
The reaction to it is exactly what you would expect, which is a bunch of people who don't want an end to this war applauding the NSA for abusing its powers in this way.
And we'll tell you all about that.
And finally, a certain person who has been made the head of CBS, Barry Weiss, was at a Jewish leadership conference a couple of days ago alongside Ben Shapiro.
And she spoke about her strategy for revitalizing CBS.
CBS, like most major corporate outlets, is completely in decline.
It's failing.
Nobody watches.
Nobody's watching it.
She believes she has a plan to rejuvenate interest in CBS news to once again make it relevant.
And her plan is half revealing and half hilariously pathetic.
And so we really wanted to break that down, given that the purchase and acquisition, the acquisition of CBS News by Israel supporter Larry Ellison and the elevation of Barry Weiss to lead CBS is a major news event.
And as she speaks more and more about what her true intentions and plans are, all of that becomes manifest and it makes you worry less about all of this because Barry Weiss's plans are so destined to destroy CBS, even more so than it was already being destroyed, that it almost makes it just nothing more than amusing to watch, but still worth examining.
Before we get to all that, a couple of quick program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right after this quick message from our sponsor.
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In moments when the insiders move first, informed action is not alarmist.
is prudent.
Remarkably, what happens in the United States sometimes is that we fight so many wars and we finance so many wars and we engage in so much covert action to instigate war that major wars go on in which the United States is directly involved, including by paying for much of it.
And we simply forget that it exists.
It just goes on year after year after year and the public just forgets that it's happening.
And that has been pretty much the case with the war in Ukraine.
Remember, it began in February of 2022.
2022, 23, 24, 25, we're now going to 2026, which would be the fifth full year for this war.
And it's doing very little other than slaughtering huge amounts of Ukrainian and Russian men, young Russian men, young Ukrainian men, causing an entire generation of Ukrainians to disappear, destroying Ukraine, and causing hundreds of billions of dollars to be drained from the American treasury along with weapons that the United States is actually short on.
That's the reason why Donald Trump ran in 2024 based on a campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible.
And although he hasn't done it, he certainly has been trying.
And there's been very little progress actually made because, as a lot of people said from the very beginning, the people who ended up being right, like John Mearsheimer, it basically became impossible for the West to end this war once it defined victory, which it promised to fulfill in completely impossible terms.
Namely, the West, NATO, the U.S. vowed that they would do everything possible to achieve victory.
And they defined victory to mean the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, something the Russians would rather go to nuclear war than allow to happen because of the existential threat they perceive from allowing NATO to move right up to the most sensitive part of their border in Ukraine.
It was never going to be the case that NATO would be able to achieve that, at least not without directly starting World War III.
And now here we are going into the fifth year of the war.
Virtually nobody believes that the Ukrainians can expel Russian troops from their soil.
If anything, the front line is moving in the opposite direction.
More and more Ukrainian land is being gobbled up by the Russians.
And this war has to end.
It's unsustainable.
It's unsustainable for Ukraine.
It's unsustainable for NATO.
It's unsustainable for the United States.
And especially the burden is falling as usual on the American taxpayer, even though this war is not really about anything other than the question of who will govern a few provinces in eastern Ukraine and whether Ukraine will make a pledge never to join NATO.
Things that could not be more remote to the lives and the interest of the American people.
And Trump deserves credit for trying to end this war.
He certainly deserves a lot of criticism for a lot of other things.
And I've certainly not been hesitating to voice those criticisms.
But in this case, trying to end this war, he is doing something that so blatantly needs to be done.
There is no purpose in having this war continue other than allowing NATO to save face and to continue to fill the coffers of Ukrainian oligarchs who are embezzling and stealing huge amounts of money in Kiev and to enrich the arms dealers that all of this money is going to.
And that's it.
Those are the only people who are benefiting from it.
And so finally, Trump seems to be making some progress.
He's been using Steve Witkoff, primarily his envoy, to negotiate ceasefire deals.
He's the one who negotiated the ceasefire deal in Gaza at the very beginning of the Trump administration and negotiated the second ceasefire deal that, although not exactly holding because the Israelis continued to certainly have significantly reduced the amount of destruction in Gaza, Witkoff has been actively trying along with others, including JD Vance, to negotiate a deal.
In the last week or so, there was ideas circulated.
For some reason, elites, the kind of people who don't want to end this war, could depict as being, quote, wishlist for Russia.
They rejuvenate Russia gate by saying Trump has control the interests of the Kremlin and saying that this 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine was nothing but a list of demands from the Kremlin that the United States decided to sponsor, even though all you had to do was read the 28-point plan and see that huge amounts of it were not only things the Russians wouldn't want, but things that might actually be unacceptable to Russia,
including using $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine.
allowing Ukraine a military of 600,000 people, which is far greater than the size of the Ukrainian military when all of this began, having the U.S. offer security guarantees to Ukraine, things that the Kremlin would never want.
But we're still so addicted, our elite class is, to this Russian narrative that Trump is always carrying out the orders of the Russians and doing the bidding of the Kremlin and Putin that it immediately got cast in this way.
But what's really going on is that there are a lot of people who actually don't want an end to this war because they never want an end to any wars.
Every single war that the United States has tried to end over the last 60, 70 years in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, and now the one in Ukraine provokes all kinds of anger and revulsion among our elite political and media class, but it also provokes serious sabotage on the part of the U.S. security state that never wants an end to this war,
even though ostensibly, as part of the executive branch, they work for the elected president.
They so often work against the elected president, especially when it comes time to end the war.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
So first of all, here you see a true social post from Donald Trump on November 25th saying over the past week, my team has made tremendous progress with respect to ending the war between Russia and Ukraine.
This is something that obviously President Trump wants a great deal of, wants very much.
He ran on a campaign, promised that the American people, the American voters, that if they elected him, he would end the war in Ukraine.
Americans voted for him, at least in part, understanding that that was going to be his policy.
And that became the official policy of the U.S. government, the elected part of the U.S. government, at least, was to end the war in Ukraine.
But there are huge numbers of members of Congress in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party who absolutely do not want an end to this war.
There are huge power factions outside of the government that don't want an end to this war.
And most disturbingly of all, there are huge numbers of factions inside the U.S. security state, the deep state, the part of our government that operates in secrecy and without democratic accountability that also don't want an end to this war.
And another person who doesn't want an end to this war is Marko Rubio.
So the deal that was causing so much optimism, this 28-point deal that the media absurdly called a wish list from the Kremlin, even though so many planks in it were things the Russians didn't want.
This was negotiated largely by President Trump's envoys to work on his behalf to end the war.
Mark Orubio was more or less left out of the loop.
And that's why progress was being made to end the war.
And then suddenly, Marco Rubio flies to Ukraine over the weekend and meets with Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials and radically revises this peace deal to remove basically all of what Russia would want,
namely what's most important to them, retaining control of the territories in eastern Ukraine that they fought so hard to control that they do control, recognition of their right to annex Crimea, and especially limiting the strength of the Ukrainian army and prohibiting or having a vow that Ukraine will never join NATO.
There are things that could have been agreed to at the very beginning of the war, back in 2022, that were very close to being agreed to in March of 2022 in Istanbul by the testimony of everybody that could have averted this entire war to begin with.
And that was when Victoria Newland and Boris Johnson swept in and told the Ukrainians, told Zelensky, you cannot sign this deal.
This deal is not in Ukraine's interest.
We will back you.
We will give you everything you need in order to fight the Russians, but you cannot sign a peace deal.
And there's no question that Ukraine could have gotten a much better deal back in March of 2022 without all the death and without all the destruction and without all the U.S. taxpayer resources being burned and incinerated yet again, had it not been for Western warmongers who wanted this war to continue not to protect Ukraine, but to sacrifice Ukraine, to sacrifice Ukrainians at the altar of trying to weaken Russia.
And that's what this war has really been about from the beginning.
Nothing to do with protecting Ukraine or Ukrainian democracy.
Ukraine has been destroyed.
Ukrainians have been soldered in massive numbers.
Huge numbers of Ukrainians who don't want to fight have been dragged off the street as part of conscription.
Many of them have fled.
Many of them have died trying to flee because they realize they're being used as cannon fodder, not for the interest of Ukraine, but for the West.
Huge numbers of people in Ukraine don't want to fight either.
But because there are so many Western interests that they desire for this war to continue, you're seeing these spasms of panic and desperation designed to derail President Trump's efforts, along with Steve Witkoffs and others to negotiate an end to this war.
And that's what happened.
Mark Orubio flew to Ukraine.
And at the very same time, Mark Orubio flew to Ukraine.
The Europeans, who have been basically been ignored, nobody cares about the Europeans.
Nobody has negotiated with the Europeans.
They're just utterly left on the sideline because who cares what the Europeans do?
The Europeans issued their own peace plan that was actually, it read like a surrender document for Russia.
In the Europeans' mind, in the minds of the Europeans, they think that Ukraine has not only expelled every Russian troop from Ukrainian soil and has won the war, but also has the Kremlin surrounded with the Azov battalion ready to facilitate regime change in Russia.
And their peace plan reads like the terms of surrender that Russia has to agree to, unconditional surrender, because they're living in a fairy tale like so many Americans are as well, that it's Ukraine winning this war, when in fact Russia is clearly winning this war by every battlefield metric.
And that was so predictable and predicted by people who are honest analysts, including many people on our show from the very beginning, like Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and many others who are vehemently opposed to this war, knowing that just Russia's size alone would ensure that it would win, let alone how existential they view this conflict by not having NATO move up to their border.
Now, one of the people who has been defending that original plan that made so much progress that the media absurdly called the wish list of Russia, but in fact was a very plausible, realistic document to at least make progress in negotiating an end to this war was JD Vance.
And JD Vance has become an outspoken defender of trying to end this war by facilitating a diplomatic solution negotiated by Steve Witkoff.
And when this deal first emerged, this 28-point plan, and a bunch of Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Democrats and the media all predictably accused the Trump administration of serving the interests of the Kremlin, JD Vance went on to X.
This is on November 22nd and defended these efforts as following.
He said, quote, any Russia, Ukraine-Russia peace plan has to, one, stop the killing while preserving Ukrainian sovereignty.
Two, be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine.
Three, maximize the chances the war doesn't restart.
Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misunderstands the framework or misstates some critical reality on the ground.
There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.
Peace won't be made by failed diplomats or politicians living in a fantasy land.
It might be made by smart people living in the real world.
And I think this is exactly the point is that if you want to live in a fantasy world, because you hope Ukraine wins so much, you're going to pretend that Ukraine is winning and then demand a peace deal that reflects this fantasy land in which Ukraine is driving the Russians out and even making incursions into Russia.
Then yes, you're going to think, oh, this peace plan is too favorable to Russia because Ukraine is winning.
But that's not the real world.
Ukraine is not winning.
Ukraine is being destroyed.
It's being gobbled up more and more by the Russian army.
And any peace deal has to reflect that reality, as JD Vance said.
And yet, if you look at the reaction to this peace deal, it's exactly the sort of Russia gate fanaticism that has been dominating our country for a decade where, oh, Donald Trump is in bed with the Russians and serving the Russians.
Here's CNN, November 21st.
Trump is giving Russia almost everything it wants with his Ukraine peace plan.
The Atlantic, November 21st, Trump's devastating plan for Ukraine.
The White House is giving Putin permission to try again.
Rolling Stone, November 22nd.
Trump's Ukraine peace plan gives Russia nearly everything it wants.
These people are living in a fantasy world.
And you can also see how the media is this hive mind of groupthink.
It's just so predictable.
They say the same thing.
They're always in concert with one another.
Ukraine has become this national religion for whatever reason.
I think mostly it's because Americans who wanted Hillary Clinton to win so badly still blame Russia for the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton, the victory of Donald Trump.
And so they just see Russia as this grave existential enemy of the United States, the way the most hardcore Cold Warriors did in the 1950s.
And Ukraine is just their tool, their little asset to get back at Russia.
They don't care how much of Ukraine they sacrifice.
They don't care how many Ukrainians die.
They just want to harm Russia.
And Ukraine is their tool to do it.
And all of these media outlets that are saying Trump is giving Russia every, these were the same ones that were laundering every Russian gate fantasy, every Russian gate hoax, and never apologize.
It's just an extension of that mindset.
Now, it's not just the media.
It's been Mitch McConnell, too, speaking out against this peace plan.
A lot of Republicans in Congress have been doing the same.
Obviously, Democrats constantly accusing Trump and Vance and Witkoff of serving Russian interests.
And in response to all of that, JD Vance went back onto X and made some points that I think were actually really important points that were a broad assessment of how the U.S. bipartisan political class operates when it comes to war.
Here's what he said.
I think this is, and obviously you can claim that JD Vance doesn't himself fulfill this ideology, this worldview that he's advocating here.
He's the vice president.
He's constrained in what he can do.
Maybe he never will.
Nonetheless, the points he makes here, whether he's going to follow them or not, are extremely important ones.
And I think very, very valuable ones to hear.
This is what he said, quote, after four years of house prices doubling and in some areas tripling, many young Americans feel priced out of the American dream of home ownership.
A welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota reveals that large numbers of new arrivals aren't assimilating and are funneling our tax dollars to literal terrorist groups.
An innocent woman was set on fire in Chicago as the mayor resists federal law enforcement resources to bring peace to one of our great cities.
The Obama insurance system is buckling under its own weight and the country is $38 trillion in debt.
Now, you can bicker with some of those claims.
The point is that Americans are under enormous economic pressure.
The American dream is essentially dead.
You talk to anyone under 40, they're having difficulty even buying a home, starting a family.
These are all massive problems that Americans in the United States have.
And he says our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems.
And then he goes on, but as you, but you know what really fires up the Beltway GOP?
And it's interesting here, he's chiding not the Democrats, but the Republicans who are angry at the effort to end the war in Ukraine.
He says, okay, you have all these problems in the U.S., but you know what really fires up the Beltway GOP?
Not any of the above.
Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four-year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close.
I'm not even talking about the substance of their views.
Much of what these people have said about the war in Ukraine has been proven wrong, but whatever, we can agree to disagree.
But the level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers.
It disgusts me.
Shows some passion for your own country.
And this is, I think, unbelievably true.
You get these people who get elected to the Senate and elected to the House.
And essentially, they're there to represent the constituents who sent them there, the people they represent, who are struggling with every conceivable aspect of financial and economic and cultural life in the United States.
But the minute they get to Washington, what starts to animate them, what makes them excited, what they want to spend their time on, is not solving the economic and social problems of the people they represent.
It's fueling wars, foreign wars.
They love foreign wars.
That's what JD Vance is saying.
Yeah, they'll talk about certain things domestically.
They don't really show any passion for it.
You know what they really get excited about?
The one thing they really get passionate about is demanding that this war continue, demanding that wars go on, demanding that we start wars, that we continue wars.
Now, it's true, the Trump administration has started its own wars.
It fueled the war in Israel for 10 months and armed it and financed it.
It bombed Yemen for 30 days.
It's threatening to engage in a regime change war in Venezuela, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela.
So the Trump administration is not perfect in this regard.
But just take JD Vance's critique on its own terms.
It's absolutely true.
You think Mitch McConnell has cared about anything forever other than foreign wars or any of these people?
Saving Ukraine, fighting Ukraine, ensuring that this war continues.
These are the things that get these people excited.
And it has nothing to do with the United States.
It would be one thing if this were a war that were about defending American borders.
from a country wanting to attack the United States.
Russia's not trying to attack the United States.
This war is about one thing and one thing only and only has been about one thing and one thing only.
The perception that Russia needs security guarantees to prevent NATO from going right up to its border by using the Donbass and these provinces in eastern Ukraine where the people identify like they do in Crimea far more as Russian than Ukrainian by having either those regions be semi-autonomous or occupied by Russia and by ensuring that NATO, that Ukraine never enters NATO.
And this is the fact that this is a reasonable view doesn't require my own argument or analysis.
It was Barack Obama, as I pointed out many times, who in 2015 and 2016 was under a great deal of pressure from McCain and the Republicans, but also a lot of people in the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, to go and confront Russia over Ukraine.
That was after Victoria Newland engineered a coup in Kiev, and then the Russians annexed Crimea.
And there was all this pressure from neocons of both parties for Obama, do more, do more.
And on his way out, Jeffrey Goldberg, the neocon editor of The Atlantic, who used to actually, he went and actually joined the Israeli military like so many Americans do.
He's now the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, which of course is now running articles saying Trump's giving everything to the Russians, asked Obama, why didn't you do more to fight the Russians over Ukraine?
And Obama said, why would we risk more with Russia over Ukraine?
Ukraine, said Obama, is not a vital interest to the United States.
And it never will be.
It is and always will be a vital interest to Russia because it's right on their sensitive part of their border that was twice invaded in the 20th century.
And Russia will always, he said, have escalatory dominance in Ukraine because the West will never do anything necessary like go to war with Russia over Ukraine.
That was Obama who said that back in 2016.
And yet the entire political class has went berserk over Russia.
And what JD Vance is saying is that the thing they care about is not the interests of the American people, not their economic struggles, not the thing that Americans are begging Washington to address and care about.
Instead, what excites them, what animates them is this war in Eastern Europe.
Now, what was always so bizarre about that 28-point plan that the media called a wish list on the part of the Kremlin was that for all the reasons I just said, for things that weren't in there, but also for things that were, it was, I would say, not just uncertain, but maybe even likely that the Russians wouldn't have accepted that as a peace deal.
Remember, the Russians have been fighting a very brutal war for four years.
They've invested a lot.
They've paid a big price in terms of life and in terms of resources to secure what they perceive as their security interests.
And they believe they're winning the war because they are.
And they're not going to give this war up unless they get the things that they feel they need.
Who would?
Why would they?
That's been why it's been so difficult to end this war.
But at least that peace plan was a strong step toward finding a way to get the Russians to agree to a peace deal.
But what happened instead was Marco Rubio, who has always been a neocon and a warmonger despite efforts to try and mold himself into the Trump administration, decided that he was going to get involved and flew to Ukraine to involve himself, to insinuate himself into a peace deal that fortunately he had been left out of.
And he announced in Ukraine, oh, we made great progress, meaning not we and the Russians, but we and the Ukrainians.
We got a deal that the Ukrainians are going to agree to.
And the only way that happened was because Marco Rubio created a peace deal with Zelensky that the Russians in a zillion years would and could never accept.
In other words, Marco Rubio is there trying to sabotage the policy on which Trump ran of ending the war between Russia and Ukraine because Marco Rubio doesn't want that war to end because Marco Rubio, despite all the rhetorical flourishes designed to ingratiate himself with Trump, is in fact the same neocon and warmonger that he always was, part of the GOP establishment.
Here's how the New York Times framed it.
Of course, the New York Times is on the side of Rubio.
The New York Times on the side of Ukraine wanting this war to continue.
New York Times, November 24th, 2025, how Marco Rubio tried to bring a pro-Russia peace plan to a middle ground.
So you have Trump and JD Vance and Steve Witkoff defending and praising the plan that they negotiated with the Russians.
It's the Russians you have to negotiate with.
They're the ones who are winning.
And then Marco Rubio flies to Ukraine and in the words of the New York Times, transforms a pro-Russian peace plan into a middle ground.
This is what they said, quote, last week, President Trump set a hard deadline for Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, to agree to the details of a 28-point draft peace plan with Russia.
If you refused, Mr. Trump said the Ukrainian leader would be left to, quote, fight his little heart out.
By Monday, that deadline, Thanksgiving, was gone.
The 28-point plan, which was widely criticized as a series of one-sided concessions to Putin, then has shrunk to closer to 20 points.
The price of the changes made during a series of meetings over 11 hours in Geneva, led by Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is clear.
Mr. Putin, some Trump administration officials predict, is likely to dismiss the new draft out of hand.
By any measure, the administration's rollout of the new plan was maladroid at best.
Mr. Rubio downplayed the proposal last Wednesday as a, quote, list of potential ideas, while Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Carolyn Levitt, the White House press secretary, embraced it.
Shouldn't Trump, JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, outweigh what Marco Rubio wants?
It's Trump who's the elected president.
Trump was out there touting this plan as an important step of progress.
And then Rubio somehow goes and undermines it all and does a deal with the Ukrainians that has zero chance of ending the war, which is what Trump says his policy goal is.
New York Times goes on.
The specifics outrage the Europeans who have been kept in the dark, even though they are funding Ukraine's arms and designing a security guarantee for the country.
Republican leaders were equally blistering about the league proposals, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, who said in a statement that, quote, Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool.
In Kiev, the Secretary of the U.S. Army, Daniel Driscoll, a friend of Mr. Vance's, presented the proposal to skeptical Ukrainian officials.
By Saturday, Mr. Rubio was in damage control.
He headed to Geneva to meet with Ukrainian European officials.
So essentially now we went from having a deal that could very much have finally ended this war to Marco Rubio somehow insinuating himself into all of this and single-handedly sabotaging it by removing all of the parts of the deal that would have made it at least preliminarily attractive to Russia and maybe not gone as far as the insane Europeans went,
but still became a lot closer to the European model of pretending that Ukraine is winning this war and that Russia is suing for peace and that Russia has to simply sign whatever deal the West puts in front of them because Zelensky has the Kremlin surrounded.
It is insanity of the highest order.
This war makes no sense from the perspective of American interest.
Zero sense from the perspective of American interest.
When you add on to the fact that even the pretext that we had that Ukraine is a democracy is gone, given that Zelensky has shut down every conceivable democratic attribute, including elections and free speech and a free press.
And the proof, not that anyone needed it, but the proof that there's now massive embezzlement taking place in Kiev where the money that we're sending to the Ukrainians is simply being siphoned off by corrupt officials very close to Zelensky for their own personal wealth.
This is one of the most senseless, obscene wars we've seen in a long time.
And we've seen a lot of senseless, obscene wars.
But as JD Vance said, nothing animates the bipartisan DC class.
He really talked about the Republican establishment more than ensuring that wars continue without end.
And Marco Rubio and a lot of other people inside the U.S. government are doing everything possible to sabotage what Trump said he wanted, what the plan that Trump endorsed and ratified and publicly defended in order to ensure not that Ukraine gets a better deal when this war ends, but that this war never actually ends because too many people are benefiting from this war.
In fact, pretty much the entire elite class is benefiting.
The people who aren't benefiting are the Ukrainians, the Russians, and the American people who continue to pay for a war that has absolutely nothing to do with them.
I'd like to ask you a question, and it's this.
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All right.
So I just want to continue on this very important theme of doing everything possible to assess what the president went on and his top of the war in Ukraine by facilitating a diplomatic peace.
Because over the last hour or two, some breaking news took place that I think is extremely disturbing and very consequential.
And before I get to that, I just want to set the context for it, which is that this is not the first time we've seen something like this happen.
I think one of the most underappreciated events of the first term of President Trump was what was done to General Michael Flynn.
As you may recall, President Trump named General Flynn his national security advisor in the transition.
And the transition exists in order for the incoming administration officials to start transitioning into their jobs, not so that they don't just arrive one day at the White House with no preview work done.
And one of the things Michael Flynn did during the transition is what all national security advisors not only have the right to do, but are expected to do during the transition, which is they began reaching out to their counterparts in important governments.
And at the time, Russia was probably the most important country in terms of the United States because of everything that was happening between the United States and Russia as a result of the Russiagate hoax and the 2016 election.
President Obama had issued all sorts of sanctions on Russian officials.
The two sides were expelling each other's diplomats.
Basically, there was no communication, which is incredibly dangerous when you consider that the U.S. and Russia are the two largest nuclear armed countries.
Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet.
United States has the second largest.
They both have all of those archaic Cold War systems where they have thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles that are nuclear tip pointed at one of their cities with hair trigger alerts.
It's unbelievably dangerous to have what we had at the end of 2016 of the Obama administration where there was all this intense tension to the point where neither side could even speak.
And Michael Flynn did exactly what you would hope a national security advisor incoming would do, which is he picked up the phone and he spoke to Russian officials, including the ambassador to the U.S., Ambassador Kisliak and others.
But as it turned out, the NSA was spying on those telephone calls between General Flynn and Russian officials.
And their excuse was, oh, we weren't targeting General Flynn.
We were targeting Russian officials.
But what the NSA did was they leaked the content of those communications between General Flynn and Russian officials to the Washington Post.
And the Washington Post then published the contents of those communications.
David Ignatius, the CIA spokesman at the Washington Post, is the one who published them.
And it made it seem like General Flynn was trying to undermine these sanctions.
When in reality, what he was saying was, look, once we get into office, we want to reset relations.
We want to have better relations with Russia.
But at the time, with all of this Russia gate hysteria going on, the fact that General Flynn spoke to his Russian counterparts was treated as some sort of nefarious, sinister act.
President Trump forced General Flynn to resign, which I think Trump really regrets having done.
And the FBI then used those transcripts to put General Flynn in a perjury trap where they asked him if they could talk to him about his conversations with the Russians.
And when he began to answer, they knew exactly what he had said because they had those transcripts.
And anything that he said that was a little bit off or inaccurate or poorly remembered, James Comey used it to create a perjury indictment for General Flynn.
And he was indicted over that and persecuted over that.
And the reason this was so disturbing was because, and this was the point of the Snowden reporting, of course, is it showed that the NSA now has the ability to spy not where they were intended to use their spying powers, which is to gather information about foreign adversaries.
And instead, they're constantly using it for domestic purposes to spy on American citizens with no warrants, to spy on American officials.
And that was a case where the NSA, where the deep state was vigorously opposed to the Trump administration's policy of trying to improve relations with Russia.
They didn't want to improve relations with Russia.
The deep state didn't.
And already the deep state was at war with Trump.
That was when Trump was mocking the CIA for getting Iraq wrong.
He was angry that they were trying to suggest his election victory was due to Russia.
They had leaked all throughout 2016 incriminating and ultimately false information about Trump's relationship with the Russians designed to help Hillary Clinton win.
And there was enormous tension between the deep state, the unelected secreted part of the government on the one hand, and the elected, the new elected president, President Trump, on the other.
And the NSA used its powers of spying, not to spy on foreign adversaries, but to spy on General Flynn, and then leaked the contents of those communications to the Washington Post.
Now, as it turns out, of all the leaking crimes, and obviously, as somebody who's a journalist and who has worked with whistleblowers, I believe in whistleblowing, in leaking information designed to expose government corruption, government deceit, government illegality.
That's not what this was.
The NSA wasn't trying to expose illegal.
It was trying to undermine policies with which it disagrees by using its spying powers, abusing its spying powers to try and destroy the Trump administration's efforts to improve relations with the Russians.
And for all the hysteria about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and Daniel Allsberg and Edward Snowden and their leaking, under the U.S. code, the most serious leaking crime, in fact, it's one of the very few crimes that not just the leakers, but the journalists can be prosecuted for, is this if you leak the contents of telephone calls that the NSA has spied on.
Because among other things, not only is it a huge invasion of privacy, but also it alerts the officials that the NSA is spied on, that their phones are compromised.
It shows the Russians, it shows Kislyak, it shows the Russian officials the NSA has compromised your phone.
They're able to listen in your conversations, and obviously they will then adjust their security measures and the NSA will lose that access.
So that's considered the worst crime, but the NSA did exactly that along with the Washington Post, not to expose government lawbreaking, but to undermine and sabotage the newly elected president's policy of trying to improve relations with Russia.
So that brings us to today.
And a very similar thing happened just about an hour and a half ago.
Steve Witkoff is the person on whom President Trump most relies, who he most trusts, to negotiate peace deals.
He's known Witkoff forever.
Witkoff's a New York real estate billionaire like Trump.
They go back a long way.
He trusts Witkoff completely.
And he tasks Witkoff to try and negotiate the deals, the two ceasefire deals that President Trump was able to engineer between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza.
And now Witkoff has been tasked to work on a peace deal between the Russians and the Ukrainians to end the war, which is one of President Trump's top foreign policy priorities, even though so many Republicans, even his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and most of the deep state oppose this plan.
That is the elected president's policy.
And as part of his work for the president, Witkoff was speaking to top-level Russian officials and a Western intelligence agency, if probably the NSA, maybe the British counterparts,
spied on those conversations, created transcripts of Steve Witkoff's conversations with Russian officials that were geared toward facilitating a peace deal with Ukraine that many people inside the U.S. government want to sabotage, and then leaked the contents of those telephone calls to Bloomberg, which then published it.
Here you see the Bloomberg article.
This is just an hour or two ago.
Bloomberg, Witkoff advised Russia on how to pitch Ukraine plan to Trump.
And the framing here is designed to suggest that Steve Witkoff was somehow working in collaboration with the Russians against the United States, that he was sort of acting almost in a treasonous manner to betray his own country by giving tips to the Russians on how they could speak to President Trump in order to facilitate a peace deal, to get a better peace deal.
Now, it's so childish to think this isn't what a negotiator does.
Steve Witkoff's goal, his task, his assignment, is to get a peace deal done between Russia and Ukraine.
And whatever he has to do to try and get that done is what he's supposed to be doing.
But the NSA or British intelligence or whomever who spied on this call leaked this call and the transcript of it.
Again, if it's the NSA, that means spying not on a foreign adversary, but on a United States official, on an American citizen, and then leaking the contents of their call in order to make it seem like Steve Witkoff had done something treacherous, that he was, again, this Russian gate narrative that he was working on behalf of the Russians.
When what he's actually doing is his assignment that President Trump has given him of trying to facilitate a peace deal.
So here's part of what Bloomberg said with these transcripts: quote, in an October 14th phone call that lasted a little over five minutes, Witkoff advised Yuri Yushikov, Putin's top foreign policy aide, on how the Russian leader should broach the issue with Trump.
His guidance included suggestions on setting up a Trump-Putin call before Zelensky's White House visit later that week and using the Gaza agreement as a way in.
Quote, this story proves one thing.
Okay, so that's the framing is that Witkoff is giving tips to the Russians on how to deal with Trump.
So we're all supposed to say, oh my god, Witkoff is betraying the United States government.
He's betraying Trump.
He's working with the Russians on how to manipulate Trump.
And that's why we leaked the call because this is a traitor to the United States.
The problem is that President Trump and the White House believe that this is exactly what Steve Witkoff is supposed to be doing.
So Bloomberg took these transcripts to the White House and said, here's what Steve Witkoff was saying to the Russians.
What is your response?
And here is what the White House said, quote, this story proves one thing.
This is White House Communications Director Stephen Chung.
This story proves one thing.
Special Envoy Witkoff talks to officials in both Russia and Ukraine nearly every day to achieve peace, which is exactly what President Trump appointed him to do.
It's a little bit difficult to try and say that somehow Steve Witkoff was betraying President Trump, was betraying the United States government when the policy of the United States government is determined by the elected president, which is President Trump.
And President Trump believes this is what Steve Witkoff should be doing, that this is exactly what is his job, to do everything possible to negotiate, to try and work all sides in order to accomplish something very difficult, which is to get a peace deal.
But you have so many people inside Washington and inside the deep state who want this war to continue.
It's their war.
They don't care what the elected president wants.
They don't care what the American people voted for.
And so now you have a case of the NSA yet again abusing its spying powers to invade the privacy of American citizens, to release the text of the calls that American officials have made, even though it's considered a grave crime under the U.S. code.
Obviously, nobody's going to be prosecuted for that.
There won't be charges under the Espionage Act like there were for Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden or Julian Assange or Daniel Allsberg.
These are the highest levels of the U.S. deep state.
They are not held responsible under our laws.
They're their own government.
Now, I've seen some imbeciles when I noted these things on social media saying, oh my God, it's hypocritical of you to oppose leaks when you're a journalist who has constantly worked with leaks and defended leaks.
Now, just on principle, for just one second, before I get into this positive, just think about how utterly stupid that is.
Sometimes it really worries me the U.S. education system produces people who reason this way and can't immediately recognize the obvious fallacy in their reasoning.
The fact that I'm a journalist who has worked with people who have leaked classified information doesn't mean I support every leak.
If tomorrow the NSA leaked incriminating information about Lindsey Graham's personal life or JD Vance's private conversations or the personal lives of citizens who are critical of Donald Trump as punishment for their politics, that doesn't mean I would support their leaks.
I would obviously oppose those leaks.
I would say these leaks are wrong.
And then you would have these imbeciles saying, oh, look, Glenn Greenwald's denouncing leaks, even though previously he worked with leaks.
The fact that you think some leaks are justified, meaning leaks that are designed to be whistleblowing, to expose illegality and criminality and deceit at the highest levels of the American government, doesn't mean that in order to be consistent, you have to defend every leak.
The question is, what is the leak for?
What is it designed to do?
Who's doing the leak?
This is not a case of people inside the government discovering criminality and blowing the whistle.
This is the case of people who control the deep state abusing their powers, their spying powers as part of the NSA in order to sabotage and undermine the work of our elected leaders.
It's the deep state sabotaging and undermining and subverting American democracy, as they did throughout the entire first Trump term, including with that Flynn leak.
But even the specifics of it, the whole point of the Snowden reporting was that the NSA has this immense omnipotent spying power that they increasingly abuse not to spy on and collect intelligence about foreign adversaries, but instead to spy on the conversations and activities of American citizens and American officials and use it not to provide the president with intelligence about foreign adversaries, but instead to subvert and interfere in our American politics, something the NSA was never supposed to do.
This is exactly this example of what the NSA just did, or what the Western intelligence agency that leaked this just did is exactly the thing the Snowden reporting was designed to warn about.
So the idea that there's some inconsistency between my doing reporting about whistleblowing showing how abusive the NSA is on the one hand and now denouncing the abuse of power by the NSA, that there's some inconsistency between those two things requires an immense amount of stupidity.
It's like the sort of thing that the most simpleton mind would find appealing.
Like, oh, look, he previously worked with leaks and now he's defending leaks and now he's denouncing leaks.
There's an inconsistency.
It's so childish.
But the more important point here is that this shows the abuse of the power of the deep state.
This is what the whole first president term of the Trump presidency was.
The media would celebrate when generals would ignore or countervail orders of President Trump to remove troops from Syria.
And they would deceive him and pretend they've done it when, in fact, they would keep troops in Syria.
And there were so many examples like that of leaks designed to subvert the policies of the elected president by the deep state.
And the people who claimed they were so in favor of democracy, the guardians of democracy, would cheer and applaud the secretive, unelected parts of our government, abusing their power to undermine democratically ratified policy goals.
That's exactly what has happened here.
These are people who do not want the war in Ukraine to end, who see the progress being made by Steve Witkoff, by the Trump White House, toward a negotiated settlement that people in the deep state think is too favorable to Russia.
And so they're abusing their power as the NSA or as the deep state or with foreign intelligence agencies to try and undermine and sabotage a policy that President Trump ran on, which is ending the war in Ukraine, so that this war instead will continue.
If you even pretend to believe in democracy, this is something that should outrage you, regardless of your views of the war in Ukraine.
This is something we've seen from the deep state for decades.
It's why it's called the deep state because it's a powerful faction in elections, and often it's even more powerful than our democratically elected officials because they operate in secrecy without democratic accountability.
And this is a perfect instance of this, working hand in hand with the U.S. media that also wants this war to continue.
And that's why people lose faith in democracy.
You can go to the ballot box and vote for a politician who says, I'm going to end the war in Ukraine.
And yet you have all these people inside the government, unelected people, abusing their power, working hand in hand with the corporate media to undercut and sabotage and impede that goal because they oppose it and don't believe in it.
And that is so much of how our government has worked for so long.
It's why the deep state is so menacing and why the U.S. media is subservient to the deep state, its partnership with it has been as damaging as anything else.
All right.
So.
So there was recently a Jewish leadership conference that Dan Sienner, who's a longtime Jewish Zionist who has been inside government for a long time dealing with policies of Israel, very supportive of Israel.
He hosted a conversation that included Barry Weiss and Ben Shapiro, need to say, as fanatical supporters of Israel as it gets.
And there were a bunch of things that were said, some of which we analyzed last week.
But there was something that Barry Weiss said in an interview that was released earlier today in which she was explaining the kind of thing she wanted to do at CBS, the sort of thing that she thought in her new role as CBS, as the head of CBS News, would be the kind of thing that would improve corporate media, would restore faith and trust and interest in dying legacy media outlets like CBS News.
And here is the video of Barry Weiss explaining her vision of what corporate media should do.
All of us see the moment that we're in, and all of us see that the choices that it feels like we have sometimes, which is Hassan Piker and Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes and, you know, Andrew Tate, the kind of people that are rising in the podcast charts, those don't actually represent our values.
And I don't think that they represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans.
And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75%, for the people that are on the center left and the center right, that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in, which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility.
And in the most basic level, the right to know what is actually going on in the world.
Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what's actually going on in the world and in your community.
So you can make decisions about where to send your kids to school, about where to live and about how to vote.
That used to just be normal.
And the goal of what we're trying to do at CBS is to get back to that normalcy.
And I feel incredibly energized and enthusiastic because I think that is where the vast majority of Americans actually are.
So that articulation of that set of goals to speak into the lives of the 75 percent.
How are you going to do that?
What's your strategy for success?
So I think one of the problems is a lot of people have tried to do centrist news.
I know this because I am like the target audience for those things.
And the reason that they have all failed is it's like trying to force feed spinach down someone's throat, right?
It's felt very like tofu, oatmeal.
It's like centrist news is choosing the midpoint between every single topic.
It's felt like an absence of charisma and identity.
And I, you know, as nostalgic as people might be for an era in which 30 million Americans every night watch Walter Cronkite and saw him as the voice of truth, and I understand why they're nostalgic for that.
We're never, we're not going back to that.
So how do you build trust in a moment of unbelievably low trust in all of our public institutions, especially the mainstream press?
I don't think it's by pretending like we can go back to having a view from nowhere.
I think it's about who's in the room, right?
I think it's about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture.
I don't mean that in like a censorious gatekeeping way.
I mean having people that are that are clearly identifiably on the center left and on the center right in conversation with each other.
And we've been doing so much of this at the free press.
was in, where was I, Chicago, last week.
I think I've lost all track of time, where Dana Lash, former spokeswoman from the NRA, was debating Alan Dershowitz on guns.
Now, these are people that have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment, and yet showing that they can have good face, very passionate, very charismatic disagreement and still like each other at the end of the day, we think it's important.
And so it's, for me, it's always about the curation, like who's in the room?
How are you showing Centrist news, not as the absence of disagreement and the absence of charisma, but explicitly charismatic and disagreeable and yet doing it in good faith.
And the other, the other way you do it, you do it is, you know, by, by being really honest with your audience, like, all right, so.
So that's Barry Weiss's prescription for how to improve CBS.
And I just want to make a couple of notes about that.
First of all, you'll note there that every person that Barry Weiss wants to exclude from our discourse, she mentioned Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Hassan Piker.
These are all people who have one thing in common.
They are critical of the state of Israel and they oppose U.S. financing of Israel.
I know it's a huge coincidence.
I'm just saying all the people that Barry Weiss wants to exclude from our 40-yard line of mainstream discourse all just so happen to be people who are opposed to the foreign government that Barry Weiss worships above all else.
And then the people that Barry Weiss wants to include in our discourse as a way of solving the problems of our republic, and she named Alan Dershowitz and Dana Leit, the former NSA spokeswoman, just by coincidence are all people who revere the state of Israel and want the U.S. to finance and arm the state of Israel.
I know that's also just a huge coincidence.
I'm just pointing out the coincidence.
It's like, just like it's a coincidence that the person who just bought CBS News and installed Barry Weiss as the head of it, Larry Ellison, through his son David, is the largest private donor to the friends of the IDF.
That too is a huge coincidence.
So you have Barry Weiss saying, look, there are certain people I think have to be excluded from our discourse for the health of the United States.
And just coincidentally, whether they're on the left or the right, they all happen to be critical of Israel and don't want the U.S. funding and arming it.
But then conversely, we have to include a lot of people who are going to rejuvenate and revitalize discourse and interest in corporate media.
And by coincidence, those people happen to be people who love the state of Israel, have devoted themselves to supporting it like I have, and who want the U.S. to arm and fund it.
So there's that odd oddity, that coincidence in terms of Barry Weiss's prescription for how to save corporate media in general, CBS in particular, and just American discourse on the whole.
But then the funniest part is the example that Barry Weiss gave for how we can revitalize interest in corporate media outlets that are dying like CBS News.
And she said, we have to get really charismatic people who can debate the issues of the day in a way that is very civil.
They end up being friends after they're debating, but they're really charismatic and the debates they're having are the kinds of debates that Americans want to hear in this very responsible and representative way of 75% of the audience of the public.
And the two people she has said as her example Are the kind of people that need to be re-included into corporate media discourse as a way of being so charismatic that they represent the vast majority of the great middle is Alan Dershowitz and Dana Lach.
Now, Alan Dershowitz, of course, is a lifelong Israel fanatic.
He's, I think, 84 years old.
I don't really think he's the person that a lot of younger people who have stopped watching corporate media feel their craving for as a charismatic figure to be able to watch CBS News in order to hear from again.
And then Dana Lach, I think I'm pronouncing her name wrong.
And if so, I apologize, really not intentional.
I think the reason is that she was a very big deal, like very relevant for about six seconds during the Obama administration.
She became this new face of the NRA.
She's very pretty.
She walked around with all these guns all the time, attracted a lot of attention.
I really haven't heard about her or from her or thought about her for a decade.
The reason she's on Barry Weiss's mind is because last week, as part of this whole intra-MAGA debate over whether Tucker Carlson should have interviewed Nick Fuentes, she came out and gave this stirring speech about the importance of eliminating from right-wing and conservative politics anyone who doesn't support the state of Israel, condemning Tucker for interviewing Nick Fuentes.
She interviewed some person who was a critic of Israel in a very aggressive way, saying conservative politics.
That's the only reason Barry Weiss has any interest in her.
So the idea that the way you're going to revitalize interest in corporate media is by getting people like Alan Dershowitz and Dana Lach to come and debate gun control, which is so 1990s.
You know, it's like all those debates about from the 1980s and 1990s, like gun control and the death penalty.
These kinds of debates that, yeah, they're still relevant and people still debate them, but like no one's craving debates on gun control.
These debates have been around forever.
They haven't changed at all.
But then we can test it.
Like maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe Barry Weiss is right.
That's why she's now in charge of CBS because she really has her pulse, her finger on the pulse of what the American public wants.
So the debate that she arranged on gun control between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Lach was actually published on the internet on the free press's YouTube channel.
And at least earlier today, there you see it on there.
After five hours, a total of 800 people had watched it.
This is now about 14 hours after it was first published.
And it has a grand total of 2,300 people who have watched it.
Even the smallest YouTube channels attract more views than that.
All right.
So Barry Weiss and David Ellison just caused a little interruption in our stream, but I think we're back now.
So anyway, that was the great example of Barry Weiss's that Barry Weiss offered for how to rejuvenate interest, something that barely attracted more views than, say, just like filming a cat for about six seconds and just randomly throwing it on the internet would.
It's almost hard to get that few views for a hour-long debate on the free press's page.
This is something that CBS News just paid $150 million for, and it barely got over 2,000 views after being up all day.
But the final point I want to make is this view that Barry Weiss has, which is, look, the problem with media is that we include too many fringe voices, people like Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker.
Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker, no matter what you think of them, they're people who have attracted millions and millions of Viewers on their own without the backing of CBS News.
People who huge numbers of Americans want to watch, choose to watch.
And Barry Weiss's solution for revitalizing interest in corporate media is to further narrow the views and perspectives that can be heard.
It's interesting the phrase she used for the range of views that I did is the 40-yard line.
Debating within the that was President Obama's description.
President Obama once complained that Republicans are all right.
I'm back.
I think I fixed it.
We're actually experimenting.
This is the first time we're doing the show from this specific location, but I believe we solved the problem.
In any event, what I was saying was Barry Weiss seems to be saying we need to get rid of these voices that are on the extremes, people who happen to have millions of people wanting to watch them, and instead narrow it down so that we only have people like Alan Dershowitz and Dana Lach and other people who love and support Israel and only allow those people on.
The problem with corporate media is exactly the opposite.
The reason people lost faith and trust in corporate media and turned by the millions to independent media is not because corporate media was offering too wide a range of voices.
It was exactly the opposite.
They offer an extremely narrow range of views.
People who just basically support and recite establishment dogma, who are in the establishment, only the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that's it.
And exclude all the rest of the range of opinion.
As I was saying, that was President Obama's view.
He was saying to the media, the House Republicans keep saying I'm some extremist.
In reality, our differences are very small.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, we're basically just fighting within what he called the 40-yard lines.
And that's what Barry Weiss thinks should be the model for how to rejuvenate corporate media interests and CBS in particular.
And that's because Barry Weiss's real mission is not to revitalize CBS news.
It's to fortify this idea that the only way you have a right to be heard, the only entree into mainstream media is if your views are what she considers mainstream.
And to be considered mainstream, you need to be able to love and support Israel, want the U.S. to fund and arm Israel, and want the U.S. to engage in neoconservative intervention and wars of the kind that have been the dogma of both political parties.
That's what that project is really about.
And there is a sense in which I do think it's important to note how dangerous it can be that Larry Ellison is buying up so many media outlets and not so much CBS, but also Paramount and all the entertainment products that it produces that people still do watch, as well as now trying to buy Warner and Discovery that controls CNN, but also a lot of entertainment properties there.
But then also, let's remember, he's one of the leaders of the consortium that the United States government forced TikTok to sell to.
And the mission there is to reverse the trend of declining support for Israel and for wars and to repropagandize the American public to once again embrace what Barry Weiss wants to pretend is the views of 75% of the public in the middle.
But what she actually knows is a worldview that more and more people, especially young people, are rapidly turning against.
But anyway, congratulations to Barry Weiss on the smashing success of one of her first experiments in regaining audience for CBS News, a gun control debate with an 87-year-old Alan Dershowitz and some washed up former NSA spokesperson on gun control that Barry moderated that just moments ago passed 2,000 views on YouTube.
You know, it's a stepping stone.
It's $150 million that CBS paid to buy the free press.
It's not going to be an overnight success, but that's a huge amount of progress to be able to hold a debate on gun control that got 2,000.
Imagine that, 2,000 entire people.
Probably a good portion hate watched.
Then there were people who clicked on it by accident because the algorithm showed it to them.
And then there were definitely people who watched because people like myself and a few others on social media mocked it and put it online that way.
So maybe on its own, organically, it would have gotten about six or 700 views.
As I said, when I first noted it, it was about five hours after it was posted.
It had just passed 800 people watching it.
So it is pathetic and comical what Barry Weiss is up to, but it's also quite sinister as well in terms of what the real goal is.
And given that she has behind her, and not just she, but a lot of other people involved in this project have behind them, the world's richest people like Larry Ellison, who will stop at nothing to repropagandize the American public into once again loving and supporting this foreign country.
It's tempting to write it off as laughable, but it's probably unwise to do so.
I do think it's probably a cause that's already lost and cannot be rewon, but it's nonetheless worth keeping an eye on.
And that's certainly something that we intend to do so.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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