Glenn Answers Your Questions on an Un-American Candidate in TX, Escalating War with Venezuela, Trump's Loyalty to Miriam Adelson, and More
Glenn answers questions submitted by our Locals subscribers about Valentina Gomez's blatant bigotry, Miriam Adelson's influence over Trump, and the growth of the surveillance state. -------------------------------------------- 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 see, I am not in our normal studio.
I've said that many times before.
I don't know why I have to do that every night.
And as a result, our setup is a little bit different.
We'll be for the next week or two.
And I can hear the people with whom I work speaking in my ear, even though I shouldn't be.
So hopefully they'll be able to do something about that.
As a result of my having just pointed out, though, I think they're talking so much that they may not even be able to actually hear me.
In any event, I want to just say one point before we get into the show, which is that this week, despite not being in the studio, has been really easy for me when it comes to doing the introduction because Monday was the first of the month.
Monday was December 1st.
And so every time we begin the show, I have to say the name, the date, the day, and the date.
And oftentimes I have to try and remember, even though it's on my script in front of me with a teleprompter, I don't have a teleprompter with me, but I don't need one.
And usually there's a little bit of a confusion.
I have to remember, like, wait, what date is it?
What day is it?
But when the date of the first falls on Monday, it's so easy to remember what the date is each day because each day it just goes up by one.
You remember Monday is the first.
I feel like there should be a law requiring the first of each month to fall on a Monday.
And then that way you would just always know, like, hey, if it's a Tuesday, it's only the 2nd, the 9th, the 16th, or the 23rd.
And there's no other possibilities.
And then the 30th, and it would be so easy for everyone to remember.
You'd never have to be like, hey, what date is it?
What's the date today?
No one would ever miss date documents and have to do it over.
I'm really strongly considering sponsoring a campaign to call for Congress to implement a law like that.
Maybe we can have a hashtag like Monday is the first.
I don't know.
I'm just kind of working it out as I unveil it, but feel free to, you know, let's get something going.
Some activism.
All right, for tonight, as I think you guys know, every Friday night, what we do is a Q ⁇ A session where we take questions from our locals members, which they submit throughout the week.
And we always have more than we can get to, more than that, more than we select the ones that we think are the best.
And oftentimes it's about topics we haven't covered or about topics we do cover, but from a different perspective, just try and kind of diversify the discourse.
I try not to see the questions beforehand.
So I'm really seeing them for the first time when you see them for the first time as well.
Sometimes we do prepare a little bit for the segment if I know I want to talk about something.
So that's the format.
And before we get into that, just a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
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Now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Every Friday night, I always say I'm not going to waste any time on the preface just explaining what this format is.
Everybody by now already knows what it is.
We've been doing it for months.
So, I would say we're just going to get directly into, and you can say my dogs love Friday QA.
They're all over the place, so you may hear them occasionally.
They love Friday QA, so they might be a little bit boisterous.
It's like Friday night, you know.
I mean, I dressed up down a little bit.
Friday nights are being casual.
The dogs can be a little rambunctious as well.
Hope you are as well.
All right, let's get into the first question that was way longer of a preface than I had thought it would be.
And the first preface, the question is this: from Will Nunn, hey, Glenn, can you talk about the disgusting Texas 31st candidate, Valentina Gomez, and what responsibility, if any, the conservative movement has in distancing herself and others like her?
So, for those of you who don't know who Valentina Gomez is, first of all, congratulations.
You've really done something well for yourself.
I'm sorry, I'm going to disturb that tranquility.
But she has been a Republican candidate.
She is in good standing in the Republican Party to the extent that the Republican Party in Texas lets her run for office.
She ran as a Republican primary candidate for Congress, a congressional district in Texas.
I believe she ran for political office in Missouri as well, lost pretty decisively both times.
But she's become a kind of social media spectacle.
And she's, I think, in her late 20s and just tries to say the most repulsive things you can possibly say to draw attention to yourself.
There's a kind of currency to this now, where if you say the most racist thing possible, as long as it's not about one particular group, which I want to get into, then there's going to be a certain segment of the right-wing movement that is going to applaud you and think that you're somehow some important voice or some brave person because you're saying the most repellent things you can think of about some minority group, some vulnerable minority group, and hers that she loves to pick on as Muslim.
She wants to expel all Muslims from our country, calls them garbage and like, as we're going to show you.
And there's a lot of interesting things to say about this, including the fact that she's somebody who only she wasn't born in the United States.
She was born in Colombia.
And she came to the United States, I think, when she was as a teenager.
She only became a U.S. citizen about eight years ago at the age of 18.
She has no understanding of our country, of our constitution, of our political culture.
The things she says are just not only blatantly unconstitutional, but just so completely contrary to the way that whether you're on the right or the left, the United States functions.
It's really stuff that only somebody would say who has not really been steeped in American political culture before.
She's just very alien to American politics.
And ordinarily, this would be the kind of person that the conservative movement would hate just for that reason alone.
That she's Colombian.
She came to the United States.
She only turned became a citizen recently.
This is something they constantly said about Zara Mandani.
But she has become quite a social media presence just by being particularly disgusting and then provoking.
You know, a bunch of people to call her racist.
And because that term racist has been so overused and weaponized and exploited over the last five years, people developed a backlash to it, which was very natural and I think even valid.
But it doesn't mean there is no such thing as racism.
It doesn't mean there's no racist, sort of like the way anti-Semitism is constantly exploited and weaponized to demonize people who criticize Israel.
And that's certainly true.
That's how it's often used most often, but that doesn't mean there's no thing as anti-Semitism.
There still is something like anti-Semitism.
And that's true of racism.
So here, I think she got a lot more attention.
And by the way, she's running in, I think it's the 31st congressional district.
Yeah, that was what the question said.
That is what it is.
And she's running again.
She's a primary challenger to an 84-year-old incumbent, the sort of like state judge in Texas, calls himself like judge.
I don't remember his name, but he's a member of Congress.
But he's a very obscure kind of backbencher member of Congress.
He's 84 years old running for reelection.
So that means by the time he finishes his term, if he wins, he'll be 86.
And Trump just came out and endorsed him.
I guess he finds this Valentina Gomez person either himself reprehensible or just believes that she is not a good brand for the Republican Party, especially heading into these very precarious midterms.
But whatever it is, he decided he would rather endorse an 84-year-old incumbent than her.
But I wouldn't underestimate her just because in our political climate, the more outrage you produce, the more attention online you can draw to yourself, that can become political capital, even if it's done in the most primitive, reactionary, trite, empty way, un-American way, as she does.
So I do think she's worth talking about because there's been this debate inside of the Republican Party in general, but inside the conservative and the modern movement in particular, over where to draw lines about people's views.
Like when is some, when are somebody's views so far out of the realm of decency that we have to expel them in good standing from our noble and pure movement, our decent movement.
And a lot of this was prompted by the rise of Nick Fuentes and particularly Tom Carlson's interview with Nick Funtes, which really served to elevate him among a lot of conservatives.
And that was really when the implosion happened.
And a lot of Republicans, like Ted Cruz, who's, I think, planning to run in 2028, based on this view that not just Nick Funtes, but Tom Carlson are anti-Semites and we have to expel them from the party in the name of decency, are basically saying we can't tolerate racism in our party.
And I've always been saying the whole time: Republican Party, the conservative movement, you're absolutely fine being as racist as you can possibly want to be.
The one thing you can't do is what Nick Fuentes does, which is speak about all groups equally, including Jews.
That's the actual transgression.
That's the actual offense.
And the proof of that is if Nick Funtes tried to run as a Republican Party candidate, they would bar him.
They would never let him be a Republican Party candidate.
But Valentino Gomez says infinitely worse things about Muslims than I don't mean individual Muslims.
I don't mean Muslim extremists.
I mean, just all Muslims says infinitely worse things about Muslims, including American Muslims, than Nick Fuentes has ever said about Jews.
And yet he's a bridge too far and she isn't.
And that's why I think it's worth exploring.
So here she was on Piers Morgan.
This was just, you know, when it was?
It was December 3rd, which I know without even looking is a Wednesday because Monday was the first.
You see how easy that is?
So this is Wednesday night.
No one even needs to tell me.
I see the date, December 3rd.
And here's just part of what she puked out on Piers Morgan.
But as you speak, you see, I'm just seeing a brazen Islamophobe.
And people say that phrase doesn't exist.
I'm sure you find it funny, but I think you can make perfectly pertinent points about what's happened here without descending into such vile hatred towards an entire religion.
And there are 5 million Muslims in the United States.
Why would you want to categorize them in such a grotesque manner?
And those 5 million Muslims should definitely go back to their 56 Muslim nations.
And let's get something very clear right now on your little show, Piers.
I don't fear the groomers.
I don't fear the pedophiles.
I don't fear the corrupt politicians.
And I definitely do not fear the dirty Muslims.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that like in some very low-level, like primitive circles, passes is for like spicy courage.
And like I said, a lot of her videos go mega viral among people who just love to hear people saying, like, oh, the dirty Muslims, no dirty Muslims, get out 5 million out.
She would obviously never dare say that about Jews or about people who have dual citizenship with Israel because that would get her kicked out of the party.
But this doesn't, which is why I found all the outrage and the uproar over Nick Fuentes so disingenuous because it was masquerading as something completely different than what it really was.
Nick Fuentes' crime is not being a racist or speaking disparagingly of minority groups or of women.
There are all kinds of very popular right-wing pundits who do that.
Nick Fuentes, what differentiates him is that he also speaks disparagingly of Israel and speaks openly and candidly about Jewish power.
That's the actual problem that Republican establishment and even like conservative pundits have with him.
And Valentina, this Valentina Gomez person, if she's not kicked out of the Republican Party, and I don't think she will be, is living proof of that.
I mean, you heard what she just said.
She says it all the time.
This is, she went to Israel, of course, three weeks ago.
And even for Israel, her flagrant, like just vomit against Muslims and not some Muslims, not Islam, just Muslims in general.
That even for Israel, they like made those right-wing Israelis uncomfortable because they have to pretend that that's not how they think.
They have 20% of the population that is Arab and Muslim.
And they try and have relations with Muslim countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis.
So even the Israelis can't speak in those terms and avoid speaking those terms.
I'm not saying that they don't think that way, but even they know enough not to speak that way.
And she went there and they even, you know, she went on a couple TV shows and they were very uncomfortable with her, obviously.
Here is her campaign ad, just to give you, I mean, she's basically like a campy caricature of some like Colombian woman who comes to the United States and like reads a few like dumb blogs, listen to a dumb, few of the dumbest MA podcasts.
And she's like, I know how I'm going to make a name for myself.
I'm going to go even further.
And she always having like wearing shirts with like machine guns and firing AR-15s or whatever.
I mean, it's like I said, it's high camp, low camp, really.
But I do think that she's gaining political capital in the conservative movement.
Here is her campaign ad part of it.
Texas, I've officially filed to become your next congresswoman.
So the choice is yours.
Vote for me so we can kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas, save your daughters from getting raped by Muhammad and protect our soldiers from getting murdered in broad daylight.
Let me be very clear.
We will make Texas the worst place for groomers, terrorists, Muslims, pedophiles, and illegals to live in.
So help me, God.
For me, this is just an election.
But for you and your daughter, this is your life because Texas has only gotten more Muslim under these weak Republicans.
New York City already fell to Islam.
So did Michigan and Minnesota.
And you're next in line.
If Texas falls to Islam, it's simply because you didn't vote correctly.
God bless you all.
So let me ask you a question.
If she were to go on Piers Morgan and say, I want to make Texas the most hostile place for Jewish garbage, I want all seven and a half million Jews in the United States, these trash, to get out of our country, go back to Israel.
Or if she were to say, hey, New York has already fallen to the Jews.
Our country is captive to the Israeli lobby and the Jews.
How many seconds do you think would elapse before the Republican Party immediately expels her from the party?
About three seconds, maybe.
She's been saying this stuff for a long time.
She keeps joining the Republican Party wherever she goes.
She also had a tendency to, she really wants to incorporate a lot of anti-LGBT language.
She really wants to apply the same stuff to gay people.
And you hear like some of these code words, like groomers and pedophiles.
The problem for her is that her brother, I think it's her older brother, is openly gay.
And he actually worked for the mayor of Jersey City as his LGBT advisor.
And it was discovered that he had donated money to her campaign while she was saying the most vile stuff, even about LGBTs, even though her brother is openly gay.
And because he wouldn't apologize for having donated that money, the Jersey City mayor fired him.
And now he's just sort of gotten more right-wing or whatever.
But it just, it's a little awkward problem for her because you can see she wants to do it so badly.
But because her brother is openly gay and he seems very loyal to her, which is fantastic, he speaks with an even heavier accent than she does.
Again, not the sort of person who would normally be applauded in Republican politics and she knows that.
So I guess she has to, she figures she has to go over.
So I don't think she's important.
I doubt she's going to win.
I just think she kind of is a perfect test case to look at what really the problem is with Nick Fuentes or supposedly Tucker Carlson and anybody else who's been criticizing Israel at Candace Owens.
Like what really is the Republican?
Is it really that, oh, they make disparaging comments about a minority group?
They seem bigoted.
I mean, whatever bigotry is, I know it's wildly overused.
It's a term I genuinely and almost always try to avoid just because of how stigmatized it's rightfully become through overuse.
But if anything is bigotry, it's again, what she's saying about Muslims, that's like classic bigotry.
It's like if you need to teach somebody bigotry, what it is, you would show them that video.
Like all 5 million Muslims are filth and trash and I'm going to make it dangerous for them.
In Texas, they should all, all of them, get out of here.
And just, you know, constantly saying they're a threat to your daughter.
They're going to rape your daughter.
Again, that's infinitely worse.
And Nick Prentiss doesn't really talk disparagingly about Jews.
His crime is that he's very critical of Israel and he talks about the Jewish lobby and the pro-Israel lobby and Jewish power and the way Jews organize as a ethnic group or religious group in a way that, in his view, white people are barred from organizing.
Now, you can think about what that you want.
You can't even think that's bigoted if you want, but it's certainly nothing compared to what this person is saying, this cartoon, this caricature.
And yet she's running as, again, as a candidate in the Republican Party.
Now, just to underscore that point a little bit more, there's this obese gentleman who has very openly devoted his entire life to Israel, Namrendi Fine.
He says that people call him the Hebrew hammer, but in fact, he really calls himself that.
And he became a member of Congress when he ran.
I always forget.
It's either the seat that Matt Gates vacated when he resigned from Congress and President Trump nominated him as Attorney General, or the seat that Mike Waltz vacated in Florida, Northern Florida, when he became Donald Trump's National Security Advisor.
I think it was Mike Waltz's seat.
And he won because President Trump endorsed him as an America first candidate, even though he's the only country he actually cares about is Israel.
And everything he's doing in Congress is about serving Israel, of course.
And part of that, part of serving Israel now, is that you don't defend Israel explicitly all the time because people are onto that game.
They don't want to hear a defense of Israel.
So it's become instead, the code for defending Israel is to get everybody to just constantly attack Muslims because they're perceived as Israel's enemy.
And if people are attacking Muslims, they're not talking about the power of the pro-Israel lobby and why our country is so captured by the interest of Israel, why we pay for their military, why we go to war for them, while we deploy our troops every time and put them in harm's way every time Israel has a new war, why our politicians make pilgrimage there.
Notice they're not doing that to Muslim countries.
We haven't fallen to the Muslims.
And that is why Randy Fine is doing what he's doing.
So he had been praising Israel.
That really doesn't work anymore.
People don't want to hear about Israel, especially in the American right.
Their view is: look, we're Americans.
We don't want to keep having to think about that country.
So now the kind of op has become just trying to get Americans to do anything possible to get their minds off Israel and the pro-Israel lobby and get it onto hating Muslims.
So that's what Randy Fine, that's what all the people who are part of the Israel lobby are now doing.
And here was Randy Fine on Acts earlier today.
He responded, he someone posted this video of Muslims who were praying at 5 a.m. on the streets of Brooklyn.
I honestly don't know why they decided that this video was somehow offensive or indicative of what they called savagery and barbarism.
I mean, they're literally just Muslims who live in Brooklyn, who peacefully just got together for two minutes at 5 a.m. to pray to God, which the First Amendment guarantees your right to do, the free exercise of religion.
And yet, let's show that video and then we'll show what Randy Fine said about it.
Maybe that's like 60, 80, I don't know, 100 Muslims, Muslim men on a prayer mat at 5 a.m.
And they got on their knees.
Apparently, a very Muslim community.
They're, you know, in Brooklyn, ethnic groups dominate various communities.
There are Jewish communities.
There are black communities.
There are Asian communities.
There are Muslim communities.
There always have been.
I lived in New York 15 years.
I mean, this is how New York City has always been organized.
And then a lot of people live in predominantly ethnic neighborhoods and then it intermingles throughout the entire day.
That's one of the things that makes New York City so unique and I think so interesting.
But in any event, I mean, you could probably find a video of Muslims doing something more threatening than getting on their knees and bowing and praying.
But that was the video that Randy Fine decided to post.
And then here's what he said about this in trying to get people to think that Muslims are their enemy.
Here's, let's put that tweet on the screen.
He said, the barbarians are no longer outside the gate.
They're inside.
This is happening in Brooklyn, New York.
America was wake up now.
What is happening in Brooklyn, New York?
There are Muslims in Brooklyn and they're praying.
Is that, why is that threatening?
Could somebody honestly tell me that?
I mean, I know people will say, like, oh, in Europe, there are these grooming gangs or whatever.
And we can talk about who's committing what crimes.
There are no grooming gangs in New York.
That isn't happening in the United States.
And if it is, we find the individuals who rape or who murder, regardless of what their ethnicity is, and we put them in prison.
If you can prove that Jews commit disproportionate amounts of financial fraud or financial crimes or pedophilia, you don't start saying, oh, get all these Jews out of our country, because that's how we judge people.
And these are not people who have been led into the country and are just kind of guests.
They're people who are citizens of the country.
And so, what I found so interesting about that, this Randy Fine saying, look at what's going on in Brooklyn.
These barbarians are on our street with all their religious gear praying.
Is that if you've ever been to Brooklyn, one thing you know, and because it's visible, is that there are several communities, Crown Heights in particular, but there are several now, where that are basically exclusively Orthodox Jews.
And they want it that way.
They want to have their own community, only Orthodox Jews.
They dress in accordance with the views of Orthodox Jewry.
Some of them are even more Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox.
They have their own schools.
They separate themselves from society.
And for whatever you might think of that video that Randy Fine posted saying, look, these barbarians, we have to wake up now.
Like, wake up to what?
Here's also something that happens in Brooklyn.
Amazing.
Come on, looking right over here.
This section, looking right over here, please.
Fantastic.
There we go.
Great.
Looking right over here.
Amazing.
Looking right over here.
This section right over here.
Looking right over here.
Now, I react to that video the same way I reacted to the one that Randy Fine posted.
I don't see anything threatening about that.
These are religious people dressed in religious clothing, peacefully congregating on the streets to pray or to organize or to gather.
It's like a once-a-year meeting of ultra-Orthodox when they come from all over the world as part of an organization.
But you can go anywhere and see huge numbers of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn at any time gathered on the street in exactly the way those Muslims were.
But like I said, if somebody had said what Randy Fine said, but posted that video, the video that I found and posted today on top of his video, instead of posting the video that he posted, how many seconds would elapse before he was expelled from the Republican Party?
And I think that's the key point.
All this uproar over Nick Flentes with Ted Cruz and the Heritage Foundation and Lindsey Graham and whomever saying, oh, these people can't be in our movement.
They're racist.
That isn't their problem.
They don't care if they're racist.
Randy Fine is a racist pig in every fiber of his gigantic body.
This Valentina Gomez, when you can understand what she's saying, expresses the purest kinds of racism and bigotry.
That's so un-American.
And nobody ever suggests in the Republican Party, like, wow, these people seem like they may Trump endorsed Randy Fine.
Nick Funtes' crime, Tuck Carlson's crime for that matter, is not that they're racist or bigots.
It's that they talk about the influence and power of the one group you're not allowed to speak about.
You can speak about as disparagingly as you want about any other group of people, except this one group, where not only can't you just speak disparagingly about them, not only where there is anger about so-called bigotry, but it's a hair-trigger sensitivity.
Where even Ms. Rachel, the primary school teacher, is considered bigoted and anti-Semite because she believes that Palestinian children are human as much as their counterparts 20 miles away in Israel.
And that's what's going on in conservative politics.
And this Valentina Gomez, I hope she doesn't win, but I hope she becomes more and more visible because it becomes utterly irreconcilable to explain how she isn't a bridge too far, but Nick Flinto's is.
All right, let's go to the next question.
I'm so glad to be done talking about her and not have to hear her voice in my ear anymore.
This is from a frequent submitter of excellent questions, Kay Cotwest, who asked, Hey, Glenn, this is more of a philosophical question, but we'd love to hear your thoughts.
You mentioned Marshall McLuhan before, but haven't expanded on his idea that, quote, the medium is the message.
The medium is the message.
Don't you think the breakdown of our institutions, media, government, et cetera, is deeply tied to the breakdown of top-down models of communication like print and broadcast?
Do you think the internet has not only changed how we receive information, but how we're capable of perceiving the world and that the collapse we're seeing today is part of that process?
Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting thing.
I mean, one of the reasons why Malta hasn't talked about Marshall McLuhan is because he was always kind of the classic example of what pompous, kind of vapid intellectuals would do.
Like, let's talk about Marshall McLuhan and specifically what we think about his observation that the message is the medium.
In fact, I think I mentioned it in connection with Woody Allen's excellent film, 1977 film with Diane Keaton, who just passed away, and himself, Annie Hall, and they were standing in a film line, and there was some like incredibly sanctimonious, just pompous windbag behind them, opining, pontificating about Marshall McLuhan.
And Woody Allen turned around and said, Do you have to do that?
And you don't even know what you don't have any idea what Marshall McLuhan thinks.
You don't understand anything about him.
And the guy said, Oh, yeah, I teach a course on him.
I think I understand him quite well.
And then Woody Allen said, Oh, I just happened to have Martin McLuhan here.
He's behind a tree and pulled him out.
And then Marshall McLuhan said, No, actually, you have no idea what I think, sir.
You completely distorted my ideas.
And Woody Allen said, Don't you wish life were like that?
Anyway, but nonetheless, his observation that the medium is the message is, I do think, an interesting window into talking about how we're now getting information.
Because I never really wouldn't say I didn't understand what he was trying to say.
I would never, I never really considered it so important.
And maybe it's because I was born, you know, and grew up in the 60s, late 60s, and then into the 70s and 80s.
And the way we obtained information was pretty much the same.
I mean, the big change, I guess, in those years from like, say, the 70s to the 2000s as 30 years was that we went from having three cable net three network news stations, ABC, CBS, NBC, and then a fourth one with Fox.
And then we had this proliferation of cable, where instead of having only four choices and four channels, you suddenly had, you know, hundreds.
And that, I guess, diversified things a little bit, but not all that much because all of those cable channels were still owned by the same major corporations that owned the networks that became that were huge multinational conglomerates.
And so the lines of acceptable discourse, the things you were allowed to question, the things you weren't allowed to question, were pretty much consistent, even with the proliferation of cable news, because you still needed huge television studios, the ability to transmit it, all the kind of expense of studios, and you needed licenses and cable packages could kick you off their package if you went too far.
It's absolutely nothing like the proliferation first of the internet and blogs and then independent media and now the ability of shows like this to, and I don't mean like this right at the moment because I'm not in our studio, but you know, if you have like a reasonable, reasonably professional studio and setup that doesn't cost nearly as much as it did, you know, you don't have to be a big corporation to be able to develop that.
And even if you don't have such a huge studio, you can still attract a gigantic audience.
And now there's, instead of going from three networks or four networks to say 80 cable channels, now you're having infinite, virtually infinite sources of information that you can get and that you're going to be continuing to, you'll continue to be able to get as long as the internet remains free, which is why a free internet has become such an important cause of mine, one of the most important.
And because I don't want to go back to centralized controlled information in the hands of small numbers of corporations that are in bed with the government, where propaganda is extremely difficult to challenge.
It still is, but it's become much easier.
And here I do think the medium is the message is an important observation.
You can see kind of clearly what McCluhan meant.
I just, I'm not going to mention his name again because I feel pompous.
Like I said, I just associate it with pomposity.
But it's not just that we have more, we get different, we have different ways of getting information.
Like we turn on the computer and we, or our phone and we navigate to YouTube or TikTok or Rumble or social media platforms or podcasts.
I mean, that is a remarkable change.
And that means that now instead of having 80 options, we have an infinite number and you don't have people staying within line except by big corporations anymore.
Everything becomes questioned.
Every opinion can be heard pretty much.
There's still some exceptions if you go into certain areas too far.
I mean, just a couple of years ago, Nick Funtes was banished everywhere.
The only reason why Nick Fontes was able to get a platform was because Elon unbanned him from X and Rumble as a platform where he could have a show and not have to worry about being banned.
And again, that's why I think free speech on the internet is so important because whether you agree with Nick Funt or not, I think he represents the views of a lot of people.
And it deserves to be aired and heard, not having centralized power brokers be able to say this is something you can't hear, this is something you can hear.
Whatever the dangers are of hearing too many views, that to me is infinitely more dangerous, empowering some power center to determine what you can and can't hear.
And it's not just that it changed the way we consume information.
It's not just that the medium is different, but so is the message in the sense that there's really no more top-down information stream where it's in the hands of a tiny group of people.
Instead, you pretty much, if you have something to say that isn't being said and you have an interesting way to say it, a way that appeals to people, you're going to find an audience.
Maybe a mid-sized audience, maybe a big audience, maybe a gigantic audience.
And some of this is not necessarily good.
There is no change, societal change or transformation that is all good and doesn't have any downside.
I pretty much, if you ask me, like, what is the one universal principle you believe in about life?
I would say that the overarching law of the universe is balance.
Whatever you acquire that you desire, that's a value, extracts a corresponding cost.
And simultaneously, whatever happens to you, whatever you do that causes you to lose something or suffer a loss, there becomes a corresponding value.
And I just think this equilibrium is true in almost everything.
And in any event, I mean, I can talk about like the study of yoga and things like this, but like how everything is about balance.
And the more you extend one limb, the more you extend the limb in the other direction to maintain this central balance.
I think the universe operates that way.
But who cares?
That's not really the point.
I'm not going into that.
I just say that to say that there are some costs to this.
Like you could have a pig like Valentina Gomez, like we were just talking.
She's going to find by appealing to the most primal and primitive and crudest instincts in people, you know, an audience.
She kind of, you know, she's like yelling, ranting, and raving.
She kind of this, you know, she's like, I guess, attractive in like a very kind of mid-sense that people are going to want to watch, like for politics.
You know, and she exploits that.
So she's going to find an audience that way.
And if it were 20 years ago, she wouldn't.
And that's true of a lot of different people.
And, you know, there's a, there's another problem, which was if we all silo off into areas of information that vindicate or validate what we say, because it's always more pleasurable than hearing things that undermine or question your overarching views or really even your ancillary views.
It's just not a pleasant experience.
And if someone does it occasionally, maybe you can do it, but you're not going to go to somebody every day who's just going to attack.
You're going to convince yourself that person isn't worth hearing.
So there's a tendency for everybody to kind of polarize and just reinforce their views and their own little fiefdoms of information.
And there's financial incentives for people to do that.
But on the whole, despite those costs, I think the message has become significantly altered by the transformation of the medium in very positive ways as well.
Principally that it's very difficult now for power centers to control the flow of information, therefore to control what people think.
You have to battle in this like this kind of combat zone of information and ideas to persuade people.
But you're not limited anymore in what you can say or what you can think.
I do think Tucker Carlson is an extremely good illustration of both sides of the kind of potential downside, but also the extreme benefit in the sense that he worked his entire life inside corporate media.
I mean, he really worked at every corporate meeting.
We had shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, all three cable networks, major cable networks.
He wrote for the Weekly Standard, which is Bill Crystal's neocon warmongering rag in the late 90s and into the 2000s.
That's where he got one of the places he got his start.
And as a result, he understood what he had to say, what the lines were.
And he observed them because he needed to have a career.
He had children.
He had to support them.
And I think he would tell you this.
And he ended up saying a lot of things that he didn't give much thought to.
He didn't really critically evaluate.
Probably also because he was so connected to, as most political or media professionals Professionals were this kind of narrow range of ideas.
It was constantly being reinforced.
You weren't exposed to people questioning things.
They couldn't be heard.
They weren't heard unless you really worked hard to seek them out.
And he was a much more conventional thinker.
And then he started getting more unconventional on Fox.
And the fact that he got fired, despite being the highest-rated host in the history of cable news, had a bigger audience every night at eight o'clock on Fox and still got fired because he began questioning things previously not questionable on Fox News, like the war in Ukraine, like NATO, like foreign policy dogma, like corporatism, doing whole shows on or segments on why hedge fund vultures contribute nothing to the economy,
just suck out value and capital by constructing nothing.
Kind of things that were never heard on Fox were really any, and he got fired.
And that was as clear of a sign you needed as, or proof as you needed, in case you doubted it, that those TV networks and cable outlets, no matter what they say about themselves or newspapers or whatever, are not just vehicles for profit.
They also have a political agenda and everybody knows who works there, what political agenda you're there to serve and what you can and can't question, what you can and can't say.
And Tucker's getting fired despite being the highest rated host, I think was proof of that.
And then being out of corporate media and just being totally free, having made enough money at Fox, but also using his massive audience to generate a new business that was profitable and gave him financial security meant that he didn't have to worry anymore about these lines and he could just say what he wants.
And maybe you don't think everything he says is persuasive.
Maybe you think some of it's weird.
But I don't think there's any doubt that he feels no fear about straying over lines that even a few years ago when he was at Fox, despite being the highest rated show on television, he would have to observe.
And that is the kind of expansion of ideas, an expansion of the range of views that are permitted and the kind of questioning of orthodoxies and dogma that I think we've been missing for way too long.
And it's not just that the medium has changed, but the message along with it has changed not just the way we consume information, but the type of information we consume.
All right, next question is from Alamatz, who asks: Would you please expand on the idea that there's a continuity of agenda in the foreign policy of the U.S. that Middle East policy isn't run by AIPAC, Latin American policy, by anti-communist Cuban Americans or China policy, as these are all players in a larger billionaire-controlled fifth column, born of the security state?
So I do think what we're seeing with the election of Trump, who did run on a campaign of radically changing American foreign policy, you know, the day of the 2024 election, the GOP tweeted out an image of JD Vance and Donald Trump saying, vote for the peace ticket or vote for the peace party.
That was the explicit message on which they ran, radically changing foreign policy.
And you can have, you can see some changes on the margin.
I think Trump deserves credit for actually really trying to end the war in Ukraine and for orienting the United States away from the European view of Russia, that Russia is his existential enemy.
Just today, I was going to kind of go over it.
Have we not to do the QA, but I think it's better to take the time and do it on Monday.
There was a new national security strategy issued for 2025 where the national security state and the Trump administration lays out its views, its principles, its ideology of foreign policy and the priorities that it says are vital interest in the United States and the ones that aren't.
There's some really interesting new formulations in there.
But those are just words.
And I would say there's been far more continuity in American foreign policy, even with the election of Trump than some radical departure.
And I do think there is this element referenced in this question that is very true.
We obviously spend a lot of time talking about how people who are inculcated from birth to love and serve Israel, whether they're Jews who are taught Israel is the most important thing in your life because it's a thing that will guarantee your survival because Jews have been chased and persecuted and murdered and slaughtered and massacred throughout all of human history.
And so as a Jew, you want to make sure that Israel is as strong as ever because that ultimately is the place that keeps you and your family.
So a very powerful message that gets inculcated in your brain from birth from every different direction.
And then most people who are propagandized that way grow up and think, oh, like I learned early on from infancy that Israel is the most important country and I'm going to do everything possible to make sure that the United States, my country, my government serves this other government that I've been taught to love.
And there are now Christian Zionists, non-Jewish Christian Zionists who are also taught that way to think and they play an important role as well.
That is an element of it.
I think we haven't talked enough about how this desire for war in Latin America and to control the countries of Latin America and part of that national security strategy today reaffirms the Monroe Doctrine, but has a Trump.
I think it's called the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, basically the Trump version of the Monroe Doctrine.
That we demand that the countries in our hemisphere cooperate with us.
They don't have the right, if they're in our hemisphere, to allow China or Iran to have a presence in their country, even though it's their sovereign country and they might want to have relations with China.
We are declaring the right to police the entire hemisphere and make sure governments that do that are going to get removed or pressured to change, which ironically, of course, is Russia's argument for the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine is a vital interest to us.
It's right in the backyard.
It's a neighboring country.
And we can't allow NATO in there.
This is exactly what the Trump administration just affirmed, but not just about the neighboring countries, Mexico and Canada, but for the entire continent, the entire hemisphere, Central and South America.
And I think one of the reasons is because there are very powerful influences inside the United States and specifically inside the U.S. government who grew up in, and the conservative movement, who grew up in communities like the Cuban community, like the Venezuelan community, that are immigrant communities.
A lot of them are first generation, a second generation like Marco Rubio, but or Ted Cruz or Bernie Moreno, I think he's actually first generation.
This Valentino Gomez is first generation.
And they come from those regions or their families come from those regions.
And I grew up in South Florida, very near the Cuban community.
And we always talked about, you know, growing up, I always heard it was it was very true.
I mean, you experience this all the time.
Huge numbers of people in these Cuban communities, this Cuban immigrant community, Miami, didn't speak English.
And part of the reason was they just didn't need to because the Cuban community was very insulated and large and they just lived within it.
But the real reason was, and I'm not having people who came here and were given citizenship.
The real reason was, is that they viewed it as the duty of the United States and the U.S. military to go to Cuba and remove Fidel Castro for them, basically fix their country so that they could go back.
So they, even though they were citizens, they thought of themselves as being here temporarily until they could go back.
And then they had kids, and the kids, you know, got ambitious and went to school.
They were hardworking.
They learned English.
Obviously, Mark Rubio was born in the United States.
Nonetheless, when you grew up in that middle EU, just like Jews growing up in a cultural ethos that teaches them that serving Israel and fortifying Israel with United States government resources and military is very important.
A lot of people grew up in these immigrant communities like Venezuelan and Cuban hearing from birth that the most important thing is we get rid of these governments in Venezuela and Cuba that are the bad governments or in Bolivia.
And then these immigrant communities get a lot of power, a lot of voters, a lot of money concentrated in places that are important political states like Florida.
And they start sending members to Congress who are Cuban or who are Venezuela, who are Venezuelan in ethnicity or descent, or even as first generation immigrants.
And they start looking at that region that they came from that they heard about from birth, that their parents and grandparents come from and prioritize and value.
And we talk obviously a lot about the Jewish lobby or the Israel lobby and the way in which that's true.
People are now talking more openly about that, but it's also true about a lot of other places and the Latin American community, the Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants' communities in particular, are a big part of that.
And I do think that that's why Marco Rubio is the number one driver of regime change in Venezuela because he has long wanted regime change in Cuba and Venezuela, not for the Cuban people and the Venezuelan people to do it, but for the United States government to do it, for the United States military and our soldiers to be sent, for our resources to be used to go to those countries and change the government.
And I think the assertion, the insertion of this Monroe Doctrine, this Trump version of the Monroe Doctrine, where now we're going to be very focused on Latin America, South and Central America, make sure these governments are doing what we want, if not under the threat of removing them.
I think that's a big part of it as well.
But so I do think politically that matters, but the overarching factor is what you asked about, which is the national security state is just this behemoth.
It's not that old.
It's basically 75 years old.
It was created after World War II in the name of fighting the communists and Stalin's Soviet Union in the Cold War.
And that was when the National Security State, the National Security Act 1947 was enacted under Harry Truman.
And people realize: wait, we're creating this part of our government that's like very different than anything we have before.
It's designed to be secretive.
It operates with very little accountability because of that secrecy.
It's kind of for the dark arts.
And then, of course, it just exploded and grew so that 13 years later, Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general Republican who presided over the country for eight years, 1952 to 1960, on his way out, he had about 12 minutes on network news to give his farewell address.
And he went out of his way to warn the military-industrial complex is something that's extremely dangerous to the country.
That was before the huge explosion of the 60s because of Vietnam and domestic unrest and domestic groups, before the era of Reagan and trying to really win the Cold War.
And then before the war on terror, which just put it into an entire different universe.
So now the U.S. security state, the surveillance state, the militarized state, the U.S. security state, is a gigantic part, not just of our government, but of our country and our industries, like Eisenhower warned, but it's so far beyond what Eisenhower could have dreamed that it would.
And you have huge, multi-multi-trillion dollar industries like the oil companies who have the biggest interest in getting control of Venezuela.
And then you have, you know, the military industrial complex like Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing, and Palantir, and Booz Allen Hamilton that are all leeches.
And not just them, but Google and Amazon and Facebook and Apple that are all, you know, just like so with their fingers deep into the treasury of the United States government that the wealth and power that they have amassed and their dependence on the continuity of wars and foreign adventures and just the assertion of U.S. military force all over the world.
Donald Trump is no match for that no matter how much he wants to be, even if he did.
Barack Obama was not either.
I mean, that's why I think smart people say that the one thing that is certain in life beyond death and taxes is the continuity of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.
Until there's some major, major, major backlash by the population, a left-right unity against it.
I think it's going to continue for the foreseeable future, no matter what people in campaigns say they're for or what they're going to do.
All right, next question is from Cushman.
Glenn, Trump took more money from Elon Musk than from Miriam Adelson, yet Trump is willing to insult and cut ties with Musk very publicly, but he asks, act submissively with Adelson and Yahoo.
Do you have any thoughts as to why?
So, well, first of all, the Adelson's have been Trump's massive donors for going back all the way to 2016, the first time that he ran.
I don't know that they were his preferred candidate, but once it became clear that he was going to win, they stepped in with all their money.
We showed you the video many times where Trump said during the 2024, 2024 campaign, nobody was at the White House in my first term more than Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.
And every time they came, they wanted something for Israel.
And so keeping Miriam Adelson pleased, and it's not just Miriam Adelson or Sheldon Adelson.
They're the richest of the Israel First people.
I mean, just, I'm not using a disparaging term.
I mean, I'm using the term that they describe themselves as being.
I mean, Miriam Adelson was an Israeli, is an Israeli.
She was born in Israel, lived in Israel, most of her life, married Sheldon Adelson, got naturalized as well as an American citizen.
She's a dual citizen, but everything she does is about Israel.
And Sheldon Adelson said once, just to give you an idea of his priorities, he said, my son fought in the U.S. military, but not in the Israeli military, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, he wishes he had fought in the Israeli military.
So these are people who have been with Trump for a long time, but it's not just the Adelson's.
It's like, yes, Elon Musk came in and put all of his might and weight behind Trump in 2024, but Elon was never a Trump person.
He was still raising money for the Obama world.
I mean, Silicon Valley loved Obama and the Obama administration.
Elon was never really part of Trump's world until kind of the last year or two.
But it's not just Miriam Adelson and Sheldon Adelson.
They're the richest, but you know, you have like all these other, like Larry Ellison, who's the second richest person on earth and also the largest private donor to the IDF, who just bought, you know, TikTok as a consortium.
And through his boy, his son bought, you know, CBS and Paramount and tried to bid on Warner Brothers and Discovery and CNN and got outbid by Netflix, which announced today that it was purchasing all those properties.
But you're talking about massive amounts of pro-Israel money that you desperately need and you cannot alienate.
I mean, Elon Musk is one person.
And yes, he's the richest person on earth, gave some more money than Mary Middleton, Mary Middleseen did in this last, but he doesn't represent really anything but Elon Musk.
And if Trump splits with Elon Musk, not like all Silicon Valley funders are going to go with him, the Silicon Valley funders and oligarchs are going to be even more interested in ingratiating themselves with Trump to get what they can get out of him.
So is this really like a personality difference between Elon and Trump?
And it was always inevitable they were going to have a falling out.
There was just, obviously, the White House is not big enough for both of them.
It was so inevitable.
It was just a matter of time.
But even still, I mean, it's not, you know, they've been saying very positive things about each other recently.
I think they're going to probably keep somewhat of an arm's length.
I think, you know, Elon's trying to stay out of government and politics so prominently because it was hurting his businesses, including Tesla and potentially even SpaceX.
So I think he quickly saw the lines.
But putting Elon Musk and the Israel lobby side by side is not even comparable.
No matter how rich Elon Musk is, the pro-Israel lobby is vastly more powerful.
It's not just about spending money in campaigns.
You'd be an idiot in a way that Trump is not an idiot.
If you were an American president and you thought you could just flick Israel away the way Trump did with Elon Musk and not pay huge prices on many levels.
Anybody other than the dumbest people have a healthy fear of what will happen to them if they confront Israel and the Israel lobby a little bit too aggressively, a little bit too assertively or excessively.
I don't know what the whole issue with the Epstein files is.
I'm willing to bet it's, or I'm willing to accept until I see otherwise that Trump is probably just worried about mentions of him being politically weaponized or mentions of his good friends who are very close to Jeffrey Epstein, who will be depicted as pedophiles.
He wants to suppress the files for that reason.
But, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was a very good friend of Donald Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s.
And Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad agent and was a Mossad agent.
And some of the, and one of the emails from Steve Bannon actually said to Jeffrey Epstein, Trump sweated whenever your name was mentioned and he was all or whenever he knew I was talking to you and he I think you were always the person with the greatest power to destroy him.
So these are very real things, whether they're just perceived or whether they're real, it doesn't mean they're any less potent.
That kind of fear you put in someone's head is a very healthy fear someone's going to have.
And the willingness that they're going to have to confront a very powerful faction and a powerful government is going to be very limited, no matter how passionate they are about doing so.
And Trump, even though he probably doesn't like Netanyahu and sometimes gets very angry, like he definitely did when Netanyahu bombed his good friends in Qatar without telling them first.
I think that was a time when he was genuinely angry with Netanyahu.
I think he was genuinely angry with Netanyahu trying to annex the West Bank because he knows that would sabotage the Abraham Accords, not because the Saudis care about or the Qataris care about the Palestinians, but because their population wouldn't accept annexation of the West Bank and normalization of relations at the same time.
I think he gets angry and frustrated with Net Yahoo and Israel, but he knows his limits in a way that, you know, with Elon, you're just risking some money and Trump doesn't have to run again.
With confronting the Israel lobby, you're risking a lot more than that.
All right.
Last question is from Baby Brazil.
Maybe not the last question.
We'll see how this goes.
Hi, Glenn.
Thanks for taking questions as usual.
I've been reading Ed Snowden's book, Permanent Record, which if you haven't read, I mean, I'm not saying this kid Snowden was my source and is my friend, but it's a great book.
It's kind of his memoir about what led him to become, I think, clearly the century's most important consequential whistleblower, engaging in behavior, incredibly brave, like exceptionally, unusually brave.
What motivated him, what the thought process was, what he went through, what his views are.
The question is, I'm struck by his outrage when he discovered the details of Stellarwind.
What are your thoughts since publishing his revelations about how the American consciousness has changed and adapted to a new reality where facial recognition software is everywhere?
The core function of StellarWind continuing law and companies like NSO Group and Palantir make surveillance of individuals much easier for governments around the world.
Why are we not outraged still?
You know, I've been talking about and reading about facial recognition software, just to pick up on one of those points, just to illustrate one point.
For years, someone I know who's a journalist of the New York Times, she's married to Trevor Tim, who is executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation that I co-founded.
So I know her reasonably well, wrote a book on facial recognition software that was actually quite good about the rapid, remarkable advances that this technology has already achieved that most people haven't really begun to appreciate, let alone the consequences of them.
And I don't know when it was, probably like nine months ago.
You know, I've been traveling back and forth in the United States, to the United States, you know, for 20 years or more, like with great frequency.
And every time it's always the same, you know, you get, you land in JFK or Miami or wherever, Houston, and you go through immigration, you take out your passport, you give your passport to the customs and immigration official, books of your passport, compares the picture, maybe like scans your passport so information comes up about you that's digitally stored.
And that's it.
And for the last, obviously, I don't know how long, 10 years, every single person who enters the U.S., including U.S. citizens, get photographed.
And you get photographed whenever you travel internationally.
So just constant photographs of your face going into government databases linked to every conceivable part of your government identity.
And you know this.
I mean, you know, that's why they're taking your picture.
And you can imagine very easily the kind of power this technology would provide.
I mean, you walk on the street and you, the probate, the prevalence of drone technology and surveillance, let alone you don't even need street cameras anymore, will enable the government to pretty much identify every single person where they are at all times.
But I remember, nonetheless, you have these views in the abstract and they alarm you in the abstract, but they don't really alarm you like on a visceral level because you're not really experiencing them yet.
I guess nine months ago, the first time I landed in, it was in the U.S. where I went to get my passport to the customs agent.
He made pretty clear he just didn't need it.
And he just told me to look in the camera and then I popped all my information, didn't touch my passport and had all the information he needed.
And there was actually some mark.
I got like secondary screening.
And, you know, I realized then that the ability to just immediately identify you with the tiniest camera and not just identify who you are, but who knows how much other information is immediately connected to your face is extremely potent.
There was an article today in the Wall Street Journal about how Israel used its genocide, destruction of Gaza to test all these great advanced new weapons, including from ones from Palantir.
And I'm certain that one of the things they were doing, and I say I'm certain because when I worked with Jeremy Scahal on our very first story after we founded the intercept, he came to Brazil to work with me because he had a source who had given him information.
I was working with the Snowden archive and we combined them to be able to report on how one of the ways the U.S. government was selecting targets to kill in Afghanistan and Pakistan was through a kind of incipient artificial intelligence where it would analyze the metadata of every person a certain person was talking to.
So if you were somebody who talked to people with many people with frequency who were deemed terrorists in this database, you'd get a very high point score.
And then if you were exceeding a certain point score, you became a legitimate target to be killed.
And you can imagine how quickly and easily error could happen.
If you're a journalist, you might be talking to the Taliban all the time and reporting.
If you're a government official, you might be talking to all kinds of people the U.S. government dislikes, and you could compile a very high score that puts you on a kill list.
And then a drone just comes by and blows up your house.
Obviously, that's what the Israelis were doing a lot of, as well as new weapons that they were using to incinerate things.
And the article was actually about how Europe, a lot of European countries who are making a big showing flamboyantly of condemning the Israelis and even making a point to say, we're not going to allow Israel to do this or we're going to not have connection with contact with Israel for this.
Israel now, because of the two-year experience that they had of testing weapons on the people of Gaza, now has a major export industry of advanced technology and defense.
And the Europeans are very interested in buying it for themselves because they think they're going to have a war with Russia and they no longer think the U.S. is going to protect them.
And so for all the talk about, oh, Israel, we condemn Israel, and they're very much in bed with the Israelis, eager to acquire these weapons that have been proven on the battlefield to be effective.
Proven, meaning Israel was just experimenting in Gaza on the people, the Palestinian people to prove what kind of weapons worked or didn't work in the battlefield.
And a lot of it is artificial intelligence.
That's why Palantir is so important.
A lot of it is kind of trying to assign scores, but in a more sophisticated way to who deserves to live and die based on just algorithms and predictability and machine learning.
And then Palantir not only provides the evaluative software and the algorithmic analysis, but also the weapons that are then connected to it.
So they're kind of like robotic artificial intelligence driven drones that just can go around and suck up information.
Then based on the information, it sucks up, make a decision.
And I'm saying decision in quotes because it's really based on technology of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence to decide who lives and who dies.
And so you can say, well, what about all the uproar?
And there was a lot of uproar over the sonar reporting.
I mean, I was at the in the middle of it.
I know.
I mean, it was a very real consciousness transforming moment.
It went on for two years.
It was the top story in countless countries.
And it led to legislative changes and diplomatic relations being severed or altered to all kinds of laws in countries designed to build their own infrastructure to protect their technology.
And mostly what it did is it changed the behavior of big tech.
That's when they instituted end-to-end encryption.
They had to demonstrate to the users that users could trust Facebook and Google because they were petrified that Germany or South Korea or Japanese company or Chinese company could say, hey, Facebook and Google are giving your data to the U.S. government, use ours and we won't.
And they would lose an entire generation of users.
It was a big deal.
They really had to respond to the Snowden reporting.
That's when Telegram emerged.
People for the first time were starting to understand how the internet, kind of like what I was talking about before, can be this massively transformative technology in positive ways, could also be a tool of unprecedented repression and control.
And there was a lot of global concern about privacy and mass surveillance in the digital age.
But one of the things that the U.S. security state is very good at, that governments are very good at doing, is keeping people in fear.
And if people are in fear, they're going to start thinking privacy is a luxury and safety is and security are the most important things and no longer care.
Like, hey, let the government know everything about what I'm doing.
I'm not a pedophile.
I'm not a terrorist.
Like, who cares?
And when we did the Snowden reporting, Al-Qaeda was, you know, it was like 12 years after 9-11 when we started.
Al-Qaeda was kind of stale, didn't really get people that scared anymore.
And so suddenly you had ISIS.
And they were starting to try and even create like these offshoots of al-Qaeda that were like way worse than Al-Qaeda.
Like the K group or Al-Qaeda Kerson, I forget the names, but they claimed that there were these offshoots that were way like more barbarian and savage and dangerous than OG al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda 1.0.
And then you went into Russia Gate and the fear of Russia.
And now you have the fear of Muslims, the Muslim takeover.
Somalians, you just, as long as you keep giving people some enemy that they fear, like, no, you don't have to fear the government.
You don't have to feel fear oligarchy.
You don't have to fear like the World Bank or the IMF or Wall Street.
Don't worry about them.
You may not like them, but no, it's the Somalians in Minnesota who are the reason your lives are so difficult.
It's the ISIS, it's Russia, it's Iran.
And we need to fight them.
We need to be ready to fight them.
It's Maduro.
If you can't afford to start a family, if you can't buy a house, if you're drowning in debt, it's because of Maduro.
Let us go take out Maduro and your life will be better.
And they're very good at this.
Propaganda is very, very effective.
It's tested over.
It's a science.
It studies how our brains work and what the fear responses are, and it manipulates and exploits those.
And as long as it can keep manipulating or sweating that fear level, the fear level goes up, the authoritarianism goes up, and the demand for privacy or protections or civil liberties erodes.
And if you look at the discourse in independent media, online, you will be amazed at how neurotic people are, like how paralyzed with fear they are.
You know, like just that contrast that I showed you before of the video Randy Fine posted of like Muslims doing nothing but praying on the streets.
I just watched people look at this video.
It was 80 Muslim Americans in Brooklyn peacefully in early morning getting on paramounts and bowing to God for two minutes or however long it takes, practicing their Religion, nothing else.
And Randy Fine says, These are the barbarians at the gate.
We have to stop them.
Oh my God.
I, you know, we kept trying to engage people and say, what is scary about this video?
Like, what are you seeing here?
And they're like, and then when I posted that video of the Jews doing the same, the Orthodox Jewish people doing the same, they were like, the Jews don't want to kill me.
The Muslims want to kill me.
If you go to a Muslim community, they're going to kill you.
And you look at these people who think they're so tough and strong, like Fox News and like Ben Shapiro or whoever convinced them that Muslims are their problem, not like the distribution of wealth, not the centralized control of money and power, not the military defense contractors, the banks, or Silicon Valley or big tech.
No, forget all that.
It's these Somalians in Minnesota.
Those are the people who are endangering you.
And you're like, how does that work?
And, you know, we're tribalistic.
We, the more you point out the differences, it's why people got mad at me when I posted those Orthodox Jews because most Americans look at that, the gathering of those people and they say, yeah, those people don't look like us.
They're different too.
You know, you otherize people, you just point out that somehow they don't think like you, they're not rational.
And then suddenly people are focused on that and they're frightened and scared.
So if you come and say, like, hey, you don't want the FBI to be able to spy on domestic activity or have mass surveillance, and the FBI or the NSA says, no, no, we're doing this to stop the Muslims, which is what they said during the whole Sona reporting.
Huge numbers of people are going to be like, you know what?
I'm scared.
I'm scared.
I want the government to have this power.
Just let them have this power.
I'm not comfortable with it.
I don't like the fact that they know everything I'm doing.
But at the end of the day, like, what are they going to do to me?
I'm let them just have a full dossier and everything I do all my life.
No big deal.
The Muslims are coming and we have to stop them.
And for whatever, the Iranians or the Russians.
That's why Democrats and Liberals stopped caring about and complaining about the U.S. security state because they got convinced that not the Somalis, but the Russians are the reason their lives are difficult and in danger.
And so they wanted the CIA and that's why they became national security state supporters, why they love Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.
And they recruited all these women from the CIA and the NSA and the Pentagon.
And they became a national security party because they got scared by Russia, not by Muslims or Iran, but by Russia.
It's the same exact thing.
It doesn't matter.
It's like an ad lib.
You just fill in the blank with whatever works about on whatever groups of people you have to keep with high fear levels.
And as long as they have high fear levels, we're not going to care about things like privacy or restricting the power of the U.S. surveillance state or palantir or whatever.
These seems like more abstract concerns than like Putin who's going to come and subvert your election or Muslims who are going to come and rape your daughters.
There's no rationality to it.
Like, wait, how many Muslims are actually doing that?
How much crime in the United States is attributable to the Somalis in Minnesota?
Oh, they just got like 60 of them, a few dozen just got caught stealing.
How much stealing is being done by other groups?
You know, it's kind of like the same way you put fear about people with gay couples.
Like, oh, they're going to rape their kids or they're going to rape your kids.
It's like, how many, if you go to Google and I right now tweet pastor arrested or Christian arrested or married couple arrested for molesting kids in their foster care or who they adopt, how many stories are you going to find?
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
But you can people keep people focused on this one particular threat and they're petrified.
And like a lot of people on the right like to think of themselves, these like tough, swaggering, like Valentina, whatever her name is, Lopez, what is it, Valentina?
I fucked it out, Gomez.
You know, she's like, let me tell you something, Pierce.
I'm not scared of the groomers and the Muslims, the dirty Muslims.
And, you know, this is, and it sounds like it's kind of like a caricature, like camp version of some like woman being super, but it's all based on fear.
It's like, oh my God, the Muslims are coming to rape us and they're coming to kill us.
It's just putting people in like a state of permanent neuroses.
And that is a big part of how people give up power.
It's why it's been so potent to convince Jews that they're endangered in the United States, that there's an anti-Semitism crisis, that Jews go out to school and they get beaten up or they walk on the street and they get attacked.
This is all part of the fear-mongering of what keeps people uncomfortable with government centralized power like surveillance and the like, but willing to accept it if it means that they can stay safe.
All right, you know what?
I'm going to end it here.
We had one question about something I do want to just quickly address, which is, I don't know how many of you saw it.
It was this one of the most horrific, repulsive, and grotesque interviews I've ever seen that Tucker Carlson conducted with Milo Lyonopoulos.
And if you don't know who he is, be even happier than not knowing who Valentino Gomez is.
But basically, he became this like kind of alt-right carnival figure when the so-called alt-right first emerged, like with Trump, and he was part of the Breitbart world.
And he was like this gay, British, flamboyant, kind of like racist who went around just making, you know, she was basically like Valentina Gomez or whatever her name is.
Like he just called attention to himself saying like the most crudely offensive things, you know, just very attention grabbing, being an attention whore.
And he was openly gay.
And yet, you know, in the all-right movement, he married a black man and yet was spouting all this racist stuff.
So he's always just like a complete mess.
And then he just destroyed his own career because he started talking openly about how he had these sexual experiences with other men when he was 13 or 14 and they were in their 20s or 30s and he doesn't consider it molestation because he liked it.
And that's like one red line you can't cross.
And if you want to be on the right is suggesting, or really any faction, is kind of saying like, hey, yeah, like I was molested as a child.
I was like victimized by pedophile, but it wasn't that bad.
In fact, I kind of liked it.
It wasn't, I don't consider myself victim.
And he was just very, a lot of other behaviors that are going on.
I really don't care about him.
He kind of just got destroyed.
And now he's trying to just rebrand himself as like the ex-gay.
Oh, I'm, I mean, well, he had no other path, basically, to just try and cling to some relevance, like, oh, please, American Right, welcome me back.
And I'll be like the gay person who goes around telling you that you can, if you're gay, become ex-gay if you just like pray enough and whatever.
And he's still, at least as far as I heard, living with his ex-husband.
And you can make your own decisions about whether he's genuine.
I don't really care about him, but Tucker elevating this discourse was disappointing only because that is not a worthwhile advocate of any view.
And it is, I just thought it was kind of degrading to have a conversation about something like that with that kind of a person who's just proven himself to be just such a complete mess on every last level.
But I don't want to delve into that now.
I just wanted to touch on it because we did have a lot of questions on it.
Maybe I'll address it next week.
Maybe I'll talk to Tucker about maybe going on a show and kind of re-raising that topic and addressing some of what's said.
Also, we have Matt Walsh on.
I did a segment on that where Matt Walsh said, it is infinitely better to leave a child in an orphanage or a shelter or foster care than to allow them to be adopted by a gay couple.
Infinitely better.
He said, not even a close competition.
And, you know, I did a segment on it because anyone who's ever seen an orphanage or a shelter or the foster care system where kids are completely abused, sexually assaulted, passed around, beaten, neglected, abandoned, no resources, no structure, no confidence.
Anyone who says that that is better subjecting kids to a life with no parents, no family, than putting them in a stable home with two women or two men who are married is really somebody who has a lot of internal problems or just somebody who purports to care about kids, but never does anything for them.
Like, oh yeah, leave them in a, leave them in a foster care, an orphanage where they're likely to get highly likely to get sexually abused, physically abused, abandoned, like neglected on every level.
And so I did a segment about that and I talked a little bit about that.
But this was, at least, you know, Matt Walsh is somebody who a lot of people listen to.
Like he's somebody who can express his views in a competent way.
And like, I don't think those views should be excluded.
You know, he speaks for a reasonably sufficient number of people, but it's fine.
I wasn't angry that Tucker put him on the show or anything.
But this person is just a broken mess of a human being who really doesn't speak for anybody.
And if you really want to have a conversation about whether straight people can become gay through enough like pornography and propaganda, which I think it's weird.
I've never heard any straight person before.
So you know what?
I think if I had just been exposed to a little bit more gay porn and propaganda, I actually could have become a gay person.
But conversely, you want to say like people who are gay are really just straight who have been subjected to trauma.
You know, these are like very nuanced topics that require a lot of deep understanding about the research, about the psychology, about sexuality.
And if you want to have that conversation, and Tucker actually brought it up with Piers Morgan a few days ago, so it's obviously something on Tucker's mind.
Anyway, I said I wanted, I'm not going to talk about it.
I said I just wanted to touch on it.
So I am talking about it a little bit more now.
But if I'm going to do it, I'll do it in a more constructive way.
And we'll gather some of the video from that interview and some of the materials necessary to respond.
Just wanted to give a couple, some preliminary thoughts because we did get a lot of questions about it.
All right.
So we're basically out of time.
We got through a good number of questions.
I thought that was a very healthy discussion.
There's always like the questions or what determines the quality of the show.
And honestly, the questions are invariably great and thoughtful and provocative.
We always have way more that we want to get to than I'm able to get to.
So thank you to everybody who continues to submit these and participate in the show this way.
It makes a Friday Night 2 like a kind of different show because a lot of times I get questions that I haven't thought about myself or that I haven't brought up myself.
And so it just kind of keeps me on my toes more.
And I really enjoy it, especially when I don't see them either at all or just very, very shortly before the show is about to go on.
So thank you to all the locals members who have been contributing that way.
And for those of you who want to join the locals community, you can just click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
There are a lot of exclusive things we do there.
We're actually putting together a video about where I am now.
It's like a small farm that we got.
It's kind of a childhood dream to be surrounded by all these animals, like farm animals and dogs, just shelter dogs and like tons of different animals.
They're going to pick up their little video about that.
And we do a lot of exclusive things like that, exclusive content, interview segments, things we don't get a chance to put on this show.
But really, it is the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism that we do every night.
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