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Dec. 13, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:35:39
Glenn Answers Your Questions On: Looming AI Threats; Controversy Over "Pluribus," Epstein Revelations, CAIR's "Terrorist" Label, and More

Glenn takes questions from our Locals audience about fears about AI, the show "Pluribus," Epstein revelations, and more... ---------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening.
It's Friday, December 12th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update.
It's our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern on the dot, every Monday through Friday, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you likely know, every Friday night, pretty much whenever we can, we devote the show to a question and answer format where we take questions that are submitted by our locals members, members of our locals community throughout the week, and we try and choose the best ones based on not the best ones, meaning if yours isn't chosen, you weren't the best.
So many are the best.
Who's to say what the best is?
By best, I simply mean best for the show, meaning what kind of topics we haven't covered before, what kind of topics would be good for the show that we haven't delved into or that we haven't delved into from a certain perspective.
Oftentimes the best ones, in my view, don't even get chosen because they're really great questions, but they're things that we already covered that we may plan on covering next week.
But there's a lot of great questions this week.
And what I try and do is know as little bit as possible about the questions.
This week, I know almost nothing about them.
I saw the thumbnail.
So I have a very general idea of what the topics were, but scripts and preparation, really, that's for losers, for people who are really insecure.
Like, oh, I need a script because I may say something that might get me in trouble or that is misinformed.
No, confident people say, you know what, just let me see the questions live when I'm ready to answer them and I'll address them directly without any kind of preparation.
I think that makes for a much better show.
All right, having glorified myself for the last 40 seconds, let's begin the show.
But before we get to it, a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, system update.
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now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now all right we have a lot of questions tonight A lot of really good ones.
So I hear, as you know, because I just said, I haven't seen these questions.
Maybe they're terrible.
Maybe they suck.
But I trust my colleagues and they've told me, no, tonight, these questions are really good.
So I'm going to rely on them.
They're usually correct about the things that they tell me.
And I'm going to assume I'm going to represent, even though I haven't seen them, that the questions are, in fact, very good for tonight.
So let's just dive right in.
Let's stop wasting time.
We want to get to as many of them as possible.
I don't know why you guys insist on this like constant preface before we get into the questions themselves.
Time is ticking.
We all have infinite lives, finite life.
We all have time that we value.
There's no point in wasting it on these prefaces before we actually get into the question.
We just dive right into the question.
That's obviously the best way to do it.
So please stop insisting that I spend time explaining this segment or talking before the segment.
I'm really trying hard to just dive into these questions.
Oftentimes, you're not letting me.
And I would appreciate it if you would permit me to just go right into the questions.
So let's begin with the first one.
It is from Marie Jerones, Six Marie Drones, which I think it's important to note because we have a five Marie drones, we have an eight Marie drones.
It's not either of them.
This one is the six Marie drones.
And six Marie Drones asked the following: Do you share the concern that as artificial intelligence AI grows more powerful, so do the risks and harms it poses to underage users, which we have to juggle with our values like protecting free speech?
Thank you for caring so much about free speech.
You know, I have to say, I think the most negative reaction I ever got to any program that I've done since we launched this program in December of 2023.
So basically three years ago, was, why did I say three years ago?
It's actually two years ago, December 2020.
No, it was December 2022.
So yes, it was three years ago.
Why are you correcting me?
It's three years ago.
December 2022 is when we launched our program.
I think the most negative reaction I ever got was the two times that I had on Taylor Lorenz.
And I understand it's partially my fault because I had spent years spewing vitriol about her, all of which I stand by.
I mean, I did find some of her behavior, some of her actions, some of her work to be worthy of very virulent criticism.
But, you know, I'm somebody who throughout my career has had very intense conflicts with people and then been able to have dialogue with them after Tucker Carlson often tells the story whenever he's on shows about how nobody hated Tucker Carlson more than I did.
And it's true.
I think I said the meanest things I could possibly think of about Tucker Carlson for many years.
He was obviously reading them.
And then at some point realized, you know what?
Maybe he changed.
Maybe I changed.
Maybe we both changed.
Maybe the politics changed.
But we have things in alignment now.
And these are causes important to me and important to him.
So it's worth working together despite what you speak.
And there are a lot of examples like that.
I tried not to take these sorts of things personally, but I understand why people don't want to see Tell Lorenz on the show.
But the reason I put her on the show, in part, the first time it was because she had actually done some important work on the secret payments that were being made by the D so as you can see, we're not in our normal studio.
I've been on the road for the last month or so.
This internet connection is actually extremely reliable.
But for some reason, the electricity in this whole area fell about 25 minutes ago and then it came right back on.
So I was hoping it wouldn't happen during our show, but my hopes were dashed because it did.
So maybe it'll happen again.
Hopefully not.
But anyway, if it does, I'll be right back.
It just goes off and then comes back on.
And it's just a matter of waiting for the connection to come back.
In any event, one of the reasons I had Tevlore Renz on was because she had broken a big and I thought important story about secret payments from the DNC to a bunch of pro-Democratic Party influencers who aren't disclosing these payments.
But the other reason is she's actually been doing kind of lonely work on the threats to free speech posed by laws being enacted about the internet in the name of protecting children.
And in particular, there are a lot of these laws now that are proliferating that try and establish an age limitation for how old you have to be to use Facebook or Google or YouTube or social media of all kinds.
And obviously, the only way you can prove your age is by submitting government IDs with your birth certificate or your date of birth.
And that means that in order to use social media, by definition, you have to prove your date of birth, your age, to these social media companies.
And the only way to do that is by uploading government-issued ID, which now means that all of our Internet activity can no longer be anonymous.
It's all going to be connected to our real name, our identity, our government-issued ID.
And it's destroying anonymity and therefore free speech online.
Obviously, a lot of people, if they know they're being monitored and watched and that their activities online are being kept in the database, this was the basis of the Sona story, are going to be extremely careful about what they'll say and what they won't say.
They could lose their job.
They could lose their reputation.
In many places, they could be in political jeopardy.
And so it is a threat to free speech.
Masquerading is concern for kids.
It doesn't mean concern for kids about the internet is entirely invalid, but they're exploiting what is a perfectly valid concern, which I think ought to be addressed by parents.
And this was, you know, when television first proliferated and then when more channels started to emerge, this is a big topic of conversation, especially as parents started working outside the house.
You needed two incomes to raise kids.
Kids got home from school.
They were by themselves.
Oh my God, how are we going to prevent them from watching inappropriate material?
So this has often been the idea is that the parents are the ones responsible for ensuring that you can put controls on your kids' phones.
If there's no law that says you have to give your kids a phone, you can give your kids a phone and let them use it only for certain hours.
The idea that we're going to just destroy free speech on the internet in the name of protecting kids, I think is extremely misguided and not even the real goal of a lot of these laws.
And the same is true of AI.
If you don't want your kids using AI, don't let them download ChatGPT or Google Gemini or any other chat or any other AI feature.
At some point, it's probably going to be impossible to prevent them from accessing this technology.
So make the social media companies have an option for kids to click or parents to click so that they're only getting a childish version of the product.
But forcing age differences, age requirements can only be accomplished through the destruction of the ability to use pseudonyms or anonymity and the requirement that you submit government ID to use social media.
Tell Renz has actually been doing good work on that.
She's been screaming for quite a while alone, but with very little help.
There's been a lot of kind of literature, popular pop psychology, like the psychologist Jonathan Chait, who has a, wrote a best-selling book that has been on the New York Times Seller List for, I think,
more than two years now about the very detrimental effects of social media and the internet generally on kids' cognitive growth, on mental health, all of which I think is reasonably valid, but it's caused this kind of moral panic that members of political factions and governments are now exploiting in order to do what they've wanted to do for a long time, which is gain full control and be able to watch everything you do on the internet.
So I think we have to be very careful about fear-mongering in general.
Fear mongering is always how authoritarianism is ushered in.
They make you afraid of some evil, some threat.
And then they tell you the only way they can protect you is if you give up all these rights, give up your privacy, give up your liberties.
And we have to be very careful, even when the fear itself might be valid, not to allow this destructive, excessive, overblown, and overly broad solution in the hands of the government to be imposed.
And of course, part of the problem is people who stand up and object to this are accused of being indifferent to the welfare of children or whatever.
And that is a big potent propaganda tool.
All right, let's move on to the next question.
This is from Futurama, who says this, I saw your Pluribus comments online, and it reminded me of a similar fight I had with my younger brother.
He basically said that Vince Gilligan, quote, fell off and that this new show was, quote, slow, boring, and pretty lame.
I couldn't disagree more, but I'm also a sucker for all of Gilligan's work.
Have you seen Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul?
Do you think Pluribus measures up?
All right, it's a little bit off the beating path for what we often talk about.
I'm not actually a cultural critic.
I'm definitely not a TV critic, but I do consider Breaking Bad one of the greatest television shows made.
I watched it twice from start to finish.
I just, I revere the whole work.
The person responsible, primarily the creator, the showrunner, the director, and writer of much of it was Vince Gilligan, who then went on to create a separate series for HBO called Better Call Saul, which took some of the characters from Breaking Bad and kind of spun it off into this new world.
For whatever reason, I tried watching Better Call Saul.
And at the time, I just wasn't, I didn't have the bandwidth, the mental or just temporal bandwidth to be able to devote myself.
And so I could never really get into it.
Everybody I know says it's great.
I'm sure it is.
I have no doubt at some point I'll go watch it, but Breaking Bad is, for me, spectacular.
So Vince Gilligan, after doing Breaking Bad and doing Better Call Saul, has this new program on Apple TV called Pluribus.
And I was hearing great things about it.
So I decided to watch it.
And I find it to be one of the most one of the deepest, most thought-provoking, unique, captivating works of theater and cinematic art that I've ever seen.
But it's become extremely polarizing, this show, for the reason that the questioner referenced, which is that both Breaking Bad, I can't say this about Better Call Sol, but Breaking Bad was a very slow-paced show.
They would devote entire episodes where the plot wouldn't really move that much.
Like you didn't learn much about the plot, about where it was going.
A lot of times it was just devoted to character study.
Some of the scenes would just be very little dialogue, but cameras fixed on these extraordinary actors who were really letting you deep inside the psyche of the characters and their motivations.
And you had to have patience.
But oftentimes, Breaking Bad, because, you know, I don't think it's, you can spoil a show that's 20 years old or 15 years old.
The main character was a teacher, a science teacher who learned that he had cancer and he was going to die.
His cancer was terminal.
And in order to create a nest egg or financial security for his family, he decided to cook and sell methamphetamine.
And he ended up perfecting it using his knowledge as a chemistry teacher selling the purest, best methamphetamines.
And at some point, it went from this kind of benevolent, noble goal of creating a nest egg for his family, kind of a critique that, you know, people who are teachers don't make any money.
They don't really have any benefits.
So if they die, they leave their families impoverished.
Kind of started off as a benevolent goal.
And he kind of got drunk on the power of being a dealer, of making enormous amounts of money.
So even though it was a very slow-paced show, there were still traditional sorts of excitement of kind of scenes that paid off with shootouts or various ways that the protagonist was able to escape what seemed like certain death of the villain.
There was a kind of investigation going on to find out who the mastermind methamphetamine dealer was.
And it just so happened that the character's brother-in-law was at the DA and he was the one investigating.
So there was a lot of plot payoff.
So people were willing to kind of sit through it.
Pluribus is a show that I don't want to give, I don't think I want to, first of all, really recommend it.
Like not everybody has Apple TV.
No, not everybody wants Apple TV.
Actually, I've gotten Apple TV on and off just when there's something I want to watch on it.
And then when I don't want to watch anymore, I just get rid of Apple TV and I got Apple TV again just to watch this.
I highly recommend it.
I just can't recommend it highly enough.
So I don't want to talk about the show too much because of those of you who haven't watched it who might, I don't want to kind of give you the spoil, but I'll just say, in general, it's a show that is actually slower paced than even Breaking Bad was.
And I think there's now seven episodes released, maybe six, six or seven.
And I think it's a new episode is every Friday night.
So as a matter of fact, there'll be, there's probably a new episode out tonight that I'll probably watch once we're done here.
Now that I think about it, I think it was episode seven.
It's been the pilot was very action-packed.
It kind of created the new world in which these characters find themselves.
But since then, the plot doesn't advance that quickly.
It doesn't, you'll have 20 minutes or 10 minutes with no dialogue.
And you'll watch the characters doing sort of pedestrian, seemingly pedestrian things.
And so a lot of people, including smart people, including people in my life who are very smart, who aren't, you know, part of the Gen Z TikTok generation, keep saying, oh, this show is so boring.
I turned it off.
I couldn't get into it.
I saw on social media this week people who I know to be smart saying, I just, I don't know why people would watch Pluribus.
It's just so boring.
And I find that fascinating because I do think that it is a byproduct of the fact that our brains are trained from the internet, including people who are in my generation or older, who were born into a world with no internet.
We've been using the internet for a long enough time that our brains just crave this constant stimuli.
You know, like our show, for example, is very unusual for an internet show or even a cable show.
Most cable shows use the format where they start off with a big story that's 10 minutes long, 12 at the most, and then everything after that is four minutes, six minutes, five minutes, nothing more.
Constantly another topic, another thing, another drama, another outrage, another guest, another this, another that.
It just never stops.
And our show rarely covers more than two topics at once, sometimes three.
And it's a very in-depth examination into it.
And we ask a lot of our audience because of that.
And we know we're illuminating our audience because a lot of people don't want that.
They want quick seven, eight-minute clips at the most, and then move on.
And I think that is a product of how we now consume information.
Now, I've seen a lot of the debate.
It's been incredibly polarizing online.
And there is this, there has become this sort of sanctimony, this pomposity for people who do like the show.
Whenever anyone pops up and says, I don't like the show, it's boring.
It's this, it's too slow.
Immediately the people will say, oh, your brain is broken.
You're an idiot.
It's an IQ test.
You're too dumb to appreciate it.
This I dislike, this kind of discourse.
So I want to avoid that.
But I do think there is a definite, obvious, evident, evident inability for people to sustain attention unless they're constantly being fed something exciting, that's moving and that like, triggers their immediate emotions of like, suspense or anger or sadness or whatever.
Because Pluribus purposely doesn't provide that.
What it does do is and you know, if you think about, you know, when you were in college and you read a lot of novels it's, you know, people read books far less frequently than they did before.
The best novels you can read 60 pages and nothing happens on the plot.
It's dialogue, it's character development, it's an examination of ideas, and this is how people have always conveyed thought, philosophical inquiry reflection, these essays that are very long and I see Pluribus as that.
It's a, I would say it examined it that the the, the very generalized pre that uh plot is that a foreign signal is sent, and this is all evident in the first 20 minutes of the show.
So i'm not spoiling anything, but a foreign signal is sent.
It turns out to be kind of a mind virus.
It, human beings get affected and the entire human race becomes a hive mind, a collective consciousness.
There's no more individuals, everybody is connected.
An 11 year old kid has the same knowledge, how to fly a plane or how to operate on a heart, because it's all everybody's part of the same, the same, the same entity, the same Union, unified entity.
And there are only 13 people on earth who, for whatever reason, because of their Dna and their, their unique physiology, weren't infected and continue to be individuals.
And the protagonist of the show is a woman who is, is uh unconverted, uninfected.
And there the the, it would seem obvious, like the hive mind, like the collective consciousness, like the unified Humanity, would be the villains because they've lost their individuality.
But part of the virus is they're pacifists, they can't harm anyone, they can't harm anything, they can't harm animals, they can't even harm plants.
So they they, they can't harm the the, any of the human beings who were unconverted.
In fact, they have an imperative, a mandate to please.
As a result, there's no more conflict, there's no more war, there's no more need for security or property.
It's a collective.
And the question is, who do you side with?
Who has the better perspective?
Is it the collective that says, look, we got rid of war and conflict and ego and competition?
Or is it the individual who continues to insist on this being the essence of humanity?
And there are cultures that have answered that question very differently, who emphasize the superiority of the collective over the individual.
Others, like American culture, that always emphasize the superiority, but it forces you to confront a lot of those questions in very interesting ways.
Also, it's obviously, whether intended or not, a very provocative reflection on AI, which is why I raised this in connection with the question and what AI is in terms of it being a collective consciousness.
But is it going to kind of drain humanity of what it is?
Is this collective consciousness, though it's obviously smarter, has more wisdom, has more knowledge?
In its collectivity, has it lost the essence of the human soul, which is an individual navigation through life?
And then there's just a lot of other questions raised about how people deal with these situations and the like.
So I find it so fascinating, even when the plot doesn't advance.
The reason the plot doesn't advance, the reason why they force you for 20 minutes to sit there and just be in these people's homes while they do almost nothing is to really immerse you in this world so that you're really feeling what it's like to be in this world.
You're not constantly distracted by plot.
And the polarized discourse online, though, unbelievably vicious.
And I should just, as an aside, say that I always think, you know, if you're in journalism, if you're in politics, that's when you get a lot of hate online because politics is really about the distribution of power.
People feel passionate over it.
They fight about it.
But if you follow people who are totally political, tennis, my favorite sports.
I follow a lot of tennis writers or TV critics or film critics or art critics, philosophers, you'll see that even they, they don't have a big platform.
They express a single opinion, like this show's good.
This tennis player is not fulfilling expectation.
The hatred that they get is almost the same.
And so the hatred around Pluribus is unbelievably intense.
But I think the refusal of a lot of people who are obviously smart enough to watch the show to be able to sustain attention in it is in fact, it's not because they're not smart.
It's not because their brains are broken.
But I do think it's very much a result of the fact that our brains are getting accustomed to needing constant shifting stimuli.
And this program, this program, this show probably would never have gotten made had it not been for the fact that Ben Skilligan is so popular and has so much credibility in Hollywood because of the two series that he did that were just universally beloved.
Critical successes and audience successes.
And when you have that, you can do anything you want.
But I'm sure Apple executives looked at this and said, you know, what is this and who's going to watch this?
And as it turns out, it has a very big audience, but a lot of people who also hate it.
So that's why I find it really interesting.
Watch the show, see how you like it and how far you get into it.
But it's definitely worth the investment.
All right.
R. Safula asked the following.
Hope all is well with you and your children.
What is the end goal for what appears to me this anti-Muslim rhetoric being ramped up, such as Randy Fine's recent post and Texas and Florida's labeling of care as a terrorist organization?
Is it to distract Ataba from the focus on aid to Israel?
Is it for the next election cycle?
Any evidence that it's a concerted effort within the Republican Party or other organizations?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
So, I've talked about this before, actually.
What was the context?
I think I was on somebody's show that I was talking about this.
Maybe it was on this show.
But I was essentially saying that for a long time, Israel supporters would just directly argue in defense of Israel why Israel was so wonderful, why they're so valuable to the United States, why we get a lot out of sending them money, why they're the only democracy in the Middle East, why they're surrounded by savages, et cetera, et cetera.
And it doesn't work anymore.
Everyone's sick of hearing about Israel.
People hate Israel or they're just sick of it.
No one's buying any more of the propaganda in the United States.
Very few people are.
That says, oh, you should love Israel.
So they have to give up on a strategy that's clearly not working.
I mean, every poll shows an unraveling of support for Israel.
And the more they try to tell people how much they should love Israel, it feeds into the perception that there's a propaganda campaign underway to get them to be loyal to this foreign country.
It's a vicious cycle for the people who support Israel.
And they're not dumb.
You know, the Israeli propagandists are quite shrewd, and that's why they've been able to maintain support.
That's why they've been able to convince the American worker to send billions of dollars of their own money and even go to war for Israel, no matter how much their own families are being deprived, because that propaganda is very effective.
So they're not dumb.
They're shrewd.
They understand what I just said.
And I talked before about how the strategy so clearly now is to just unleash this campaign to try and get Americans to hate Muslims and to believe that Muslims are the gravest threat to our lives.
So you think about what Americans are frustrated by, rising prices, the inability to access quality health care and health insurance for themselves and their kids, the inability to buy a home, the inability to pay rent, the fact that most young men have no prospects for buying a home or starting a family.
You cannot survive, basically, unless both parents work outside the house.
So even if you want a parent to stay at home with your kid, which as a country we've always thought was important, you can't do that.
All the uprooting of the deindustrialization and the uprooting of the social and economic security it provided, all of that.
Imagine trying to convince people the root of all your problems is not Wall Street.
It's not Endless War.
It's not the military industrial complex.
It's not the swamp in Washington.
It's not free trade.
It's not globalism.
It's not the bipartisan establishment.
No, no, no, it's Muslims.
Look over there, those Muslims, those dirty, they're the ones who you need to be afraid of.
They're the ones that are a threat to your way of life.
And it's just such lowest common denominator, crude appeal to people's tribalism.
We're all tribal creatures.
We all evolved to be tribal for reasons that are obvious.
For thousands of years, being part of a tribe and defending against the enemy tribe was central to our survival.
And it's still in our DNA.
We still see things tribalistically.
Still book at people who are like us with more affection and people who are unlike us with suspicion and want to keep them at a distance.
It's just natural instinct.
It can be overcome, obviously, and is with all sorts of other conflicting drives and capacities, but that is a core primal way that we have looking at the world.
It's very easily exploitable.
You just tell people, oh, there's people over there who look so different, who practice different religion, they're the threat to your life.
And if you're an Israel advocate, you obviously have a huge interest in getting people to do that in part because you want to stem the tide of people who are starting to believe that one of the problems in our society is Israel.
And in particular, the control of many of our institutions and our Congress by people who are loyal to Israel.
That's a very dangerous idea that people are blaming Israel, blaming Israel's supporters, which can also spill over into blaming Jews.
And if you're somebody who wants to stop that, one way is to say, no, Israel is great, but that doesn't work anymore.
So the other way is to say, no, your enemy is in Israel.
Your enemy is in Israel's supporters.
It's not that we're sending you to war for a foreign country or making you send all your money to Israel.
The real enemy are those people over there, Muslims.
And the fact that Muslims happen to be considered by Israel to be an enemy of theirs as well is just an added bonus.
It's trying to make the United States and Americans unite with Israel in a common hatred of Muslims.
And I think that's what this is about.
Now, this isn't new.
The whole war on terror was sustained by vehemently exaggerating the threat posed by Muslims.
It's what led to the Patriot Act and the dismantling of Americans' privacy protections, the expansion of the U.S. security state, mass surveillance.
All of that was done in the name of scaring people about Muslims.
And at some point, people stop getting scared about Muslims because they realize that their problems don't emanate from Muslims.
I think part of the reason it works for some people is because in Europe, the level of mass migration, particularly among people coming from predominantly Muslim countries, the difficulty some countries have had with assimilating them, with integrating them into the economy, has created this perception on top of declining birth rates among white Europeans and the increasing number of Muslims.
That there are a lot of people who look at Europe, and this was in Trump's national security strategy and think, oh, Muslims are overrunning Europe and are on the verge of destroying the identity of Europe, meaning white nationalist Europeans.
And as always, when you try and demonize a group, you take stories about what individual members did and try and attribute it to the whole group.
So if some Jewish man in the United States gets arrested for wire fraud or embezzlement or pedophilia, no one attributes that to Jews as a whole.
It's been in the case that if a black man commits a violent crime, they try and attribute that to black people as a whole, but now they use individual stories.
Oh, here's a grooming gang of Pakistanis who rape young women.
This shows how Muslims in general are all group rapists.
This is a kind of very base, primitive strategy that often works too.
But there are problems in Europe that have come from mass migration.
And people are pointing over to Europe to say, you need to fear Muslims, but that's not happening in the United States.
There are far more Jews in the United States than Muslims.
And the idea, I've been hearing this for 25 years from neocons and Israel fanatics.
Oh, Sharia law is coming to the United States.
Where's Sharia law?
Where's Sharia law?
Do you know that in Brooklyn, in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, it's very common when people get divorced or have contract disputes that they go to rabbinical courts, not part of American courts, don't operate according to American law, but under Talmudic law or rabbinical law.
And they submit to arbitration voluntarily and they go, but it's binding and rabbis arbitrate the divorce or arbitrate the contractual dispute or whatever other dispute they have.
And so there are far fewer Muslim courts where Muslims in a Muslim community make the same kind of arrangement.
If we sign a contract, if we have a contract dispute, we get married, if we have a divorce, we agree to have it resolved in a arbitration governed by Islamic law.
It's just a voluntary operation.
People go, oh my God, look, there are Sharia courts already and Sharia law.
This is laughable, laughable.
You can think there's an issue or a problem with Muslims, with migration of Muslims to Europe.
But if you're letting this distract you from how much we do for Israel, how much money we send to Israel, how much money we send to that region because of Israel, how many wars we fight for Israel, how often we deploy our troops for Israel, how loyal our politicians are to Israel, you're being duped.
There was a video, I'll show it next week, of a woman named Brooke Goldstein.
She's been around kind of like a very pro-Israel pundit.
I was on Piers Morgan with her, I think, twice.
I was on Piers Morgan with her once.
I was on some other show with her another time.
Honestly, she's a nice lady, I guess, but when she speaks, I immediately get a headache.
It's like nagging voice.
But anyway, she was on some podcast and she said explicitly, we need to start generating more focus on Muslims as a way of getting people to stop thinking Israel is the problem.
I was like, wow, it's so rare to know there's a covert strategy and then to hear somebody just come out and say it so explicitly.
But that is absolutely what it's about.
Yes, of course, it's also about political gain.
If you can blame Muslims, it could help the party saying we have to keep Muslims out or immigrants out or whatever.
But, you know, when I was so critical of Russia Gate from the start, I was critical on journalistic grounds and astrological grounds, but also I thought it was such a dumb political tactic for Democrats because they just knew that Americans don't wake up and think that Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are what's causing the problems in their lives.
And I don't think that most Americans wake up and believe that Muslims are causing the problems in their lives.
Their frustration with big banks, with mortgage companies, with healthcare companies, with landlords, with their boss.
I don't believe they're going to get convinced that Muslims are the reason why they are confronting the impediments in their lives that they are.
But the main people behind this are absolutely Israel supporters.
And if you start looking for that, you will absolutely see it.
All right, we're going to get into a couple more questions, but we just need to do this quick little break from our sponsor.
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In any event, let's get to the next question.
It's from Teardrinker who says, I recently saw a survey that polled university students in the U.S.
It stated a shocking 70% of college students now believe that hateful speech equates to violence against a person and that the same number believe in some kind of restrictions on free speech.
What do you think this means for the future of the First Amendment?
Can free speech survive the next generation if so many young people have these views and what can be done to educate them on the perils of these kinds of beliefs.
All right.
I don't think I mentioned on the show before or showed the survey, but not a lot shocks me, but this shocked me.
And it's, I think, related to the question, even though it's not directly about the question.
I think a recent survey of Gen Z respondents said that something like 69% of them have had their parents call their manager at work to resolve a work problem.
Seven out of 10 Gen Z employees have had their mommy or their daddy call their manager if they think like there's something unfair or unjust happening to them or at work or they've been reprimanded in the way they think is wrong or they didn't get a promotion.
I mean, I, if I, if, and I'm everyone on my staff is listening.
So if I ever were in a workplace and there was like some, you know, communication that I had with somebody who worked with me and I communicated something that was like a problem or whatever.
And the next day their mom called me or their dad and was like, yeah, I'm calling about my boy, so-and-so, who you talk.
I would be like, oh, don't worry, they're fired instantly.
Like, I don't fire anybody.
I hate firing people.
I do everything possible not to fire.
That's like that would, if someone had their mom or dad call me, the time you hear about adults, it's a workplace.
And it was like some obscenely high percentage, like 54% have brought their parents into the workplace to talk to their manager.
I mean, this I cannot conceive of.
This is arrested development of a very severe kind.
And I do think what has happened is that we went from this kind of overprotective parenting to then kids go off to college.
And then like the dean in the administration is expected to be the protector of the kids.
Like, I went out to college at 18 in a totally different city.
I hated the dean and the administrator and they weren't there to protect me or like the RA or whatever.
Like they were just some like sophomore that you went to if you forgot your keys.
But now like the administration has this duty to like constantly protect the kids.
They give them like therapy days or whatever, just constant like parenting.
And then predictably it's extended into the workplace.
Like anybody who has ever worked with, you know, like at first it was young millennials and then Gen Z knows that they go into the workplace expecting that same kind of treatment.
Like HR is supposed to be their parent.
He said, when something upsets them, they go to HR and HR is supposed to take care of it.
And so getting your parents in you're an adult, you're working somewhere, and then getting your parents involved to help you with issues in the workplace.
I mean, I would sooner jump out the window than I would do that.
But I don't mean like a substantial mind.
I mean, apparently these surveys show that large majorities of them are doing it.
So, of course, they've also been inculcated with this idea that they should never be exposed to aggressive rhetoric or sharp criticisms because this is a form of violence.
And a lot of this came out of peak wokeism.
Of course, words are violence.
And I thought most people on the right opposed this because they said they did.
But then in the last two years, when people are criticizing Israel and protesting Israel, a lot of Jewish students started to say, pro-Israel Jewish students started to say, oh, I feel unsafe because I have to see this sign.
And no, they weren't being physically attacked.
I'm not talking about those people.
And they went to Congress, Mike Johnson had them there, and they're like, I feel unsafe.
And like they would talk about how they would see banners.
So this has become part of this generational ethos.
And I don't think necessarily it is going to endure for life.
I'm hoping people do grow out of that.
You know, when in my generation, I think you're kind of expected to be more or less an adult of 18.
Not fully, you know, you still had your parents helping you with bills because you were going off to college for those who did.
But for the most part, you know, you went to a different city and you were expected to take care of yourself, certainly by 21.
And now we have this prolonged childhood where people into their mid-20s, late 20s still think like they constantly not just need, but deserve protection.
And of course, it extends to how they view rhetoric they find upsetting.
And I guess my belief is, maybe it's naive, but my hope maybe you could describe it is like at some point you get into your 30s, maybe you get married, you start to have kids, and like you start acting and thinking like an adult and realize that the world doesn't owe you that.
And that there's a tradition in this country of free speech.
And but that's one of the reasons why this topic of free speech is so vital to me, why it has been so central to so much of my work for so long, because I do see trends like this.
And I'm not the first one to observe this, but I do think if we redebated the Constitution, held a constitutional convention, the First Amendment's free speech guarantee would have almost no chance.
It would be saddled with all sorts of exceptions.
Remember, Pam Bondi, the conservative attorney general of the United States, went on Katie Miller's podcast and said, free speech is one thing, hate speech is another.
And we're coming after you if you're spouting hate speech.
So this idea is embedded in the culture.
It's not just like blue-haired left-wing sophomores at Bryn Moir or Oberlin.
It's all over the place and it is worrisome.
And I think that's why free speech is something that always has to be aggressively defended.
All right, Ferrick Simmas says, I enjoy your show and also admire Mehdi Hassan's work.
I'm having trouble understanding the disagreement between the two of you as I would have expected you to be aligned on many of the same issues.
It's a little difficult to talk about that question specifically because I've known Mehdi personally for a long time.
I actually, and I will admit this, even though I'm not proud of it, I was the one who recruited Mehdi to come to the intercept in 2016.
I forget what he was doing at the time, but I could see he was like a person.
You have to give credit to people, even the ones you don't like or disagree with politically.
Like I was on Piers Morgan's show yesterday.
We're going to talk about that a little bit, but that's one of the points I was trying to make is like, you can call Nick Funtes a racist, a Nazi, but you have to acknowledge the skills he has.
Like Mehdi is a very skillful media operative, like very conniving, very like self-promoting.
And he's well spoken and, you know, like American, a lot of American.
I once read this article.
It's so true.
Americans just naturally deduct 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks of the Southern accent and adds 30 IQ points for anybody who speaks of the posh British accent, even though it's totally unwarranted on both ends, but he benefits from that as well.
And so, you know, there's, I have a personal relationship with him that was complex.
I don't really want to get into that.
That's part of the tension.
I don't even, I don't talk about Meadie much at all.
But politically, I'll just say that, and this is a problem I have with a lot of people on the left with whom I used to have some, you know, close working relationship, is that a lot of them like to posture as radicals.
You know, like Israel is committing a genocide.
Look at me.
Like, use the word or criticizing the Democratic Party from the left.
And then at the end of the day, every two years, they suddenly turn into, you know, DNC operatives.
And they start saying, look, we have a criticism of the Democratic Party, but you got to go vote for the Democrats no matter what.
Every two years, vote every blue down the line, always Democrat.
Democratic Party, put Democrats in office.
And I think this is a very pathetic way of doing politics.
I think it's a very pathetic way of doing journalism as well.
And to be a journalist and then every two years, just come out and like start shilling for a political party and urging people to go vote for them.
And I also don't, I recently heard, I don't want to use the person's name, but he said he's a YouTuber who has a reasonable size audience, very used to be kind of more independent, left-wing.
Now he's extremely, he's just like a total resistance liberal, loves Democratic Party.
He said this.
He said, the worst Democrat is infinitely better than the best Republican.
The worst Democrat is infinitely better than the worst Republican.
To be that kind of a partisan hack and say something like that, I'm sure Mehdi Hassan would agree with that actually.
That I just, I can't have any respect for it.
Like the same person who just who said that went around for two years saying, Israel is committing a genocide.
Okay, you believe Israel is committing a genocide, which is the worst thing you can accuse a country of committing.
It's a crime against humanity, probably the worst one.
There are Democrats who were vocal, aggressive, passionate supporters of what Israel was doing, defenders and of funding it, Democrats, like Hakeem Jeffries, for example, and many others.
There are Republicans like Thomas Massey and then Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who were opposed to it.
So you're going to tell me that you believe what Israel did is a genocide, but that people who cheered that genocide, who defended it, who enabled it, who financed it, who armed it, are better than, infinitely better than the people who opposed it, simply by virtue of the fact that the people who cheered it are Democrats and the people who opposed it are Republicans.
If you actually think that you don't actually believe that that was a genocide, you're a fraud.
You're saying it because you know you have to.
And I also, just to add on to this point, and I'm trying not to make this personal, but I often see, you know, Hassan Piker is getting an enormous amount of mainstream media coverage, almost all of it flattering, like profiles in the New York Times and Rolling Stone and The Guardian just this week.
And he gets Democratic politicians to come on his show.
And he loves to like feign like shock and confusion about this.
Like, oh my God, I'm a Marxist.
I'm like a communist.
Why are these people like, why am I all in all in the mainstream media?
I'm supposed to be excluded.
Like radicals got excluded or just in passing like mocked and condemned, but they love me.
Why am I like celebrated by the Democratic Party?
And why did I get DNC?
The reason is because everybody knows that you can be as radical as you want, as long as every two years you pop up and tell everybody, tell your flock, go vote for the Democratic Party.
As bad as they are, whatever, they're better than Republicans.
You have to go vote blue, vote blue, vote vu.
And in fact, the Democratic Party considers more valuable because they are the people who spend two years bashing the Democrats, but then at the end and luring young people into feeling like the radical because they listen to these shows that bash Democrats or call the Democrats genocidal or whatever.
That's who the Democrats need to lure these young people and these angry people at the Democratic Party, but who then are told by their heroes, go vote for the Democratic Party every two years.
That's what Mehdi Hassan does.
That's what Hassan Piker does.
That's what a lot of podcasters do, who try and strike the radical pose, but also ensure that they're always welcomed into mainstream circles and celebrated within them, including by Democratic Party politicians, because they pay the price of admission, which is cheering the Democratic Party every two years.
That's my main problem with Mehdi Hassan.
He's just a partisan at the end of the day.
Mehdi is smart.
I don't think he's as smart as he thinks he is.
He thinks he's this great like interrogator and debater.
He even wrote a book like how to win a debate as though like I'm the champion of the debating world.
And if you watch what he does, most of it is just talking over people constantly to ask somebody a question.
And after six seconds, he just starts interrupting.
When I'm debating somebody, I want to have them lay out their case so that I can then take that case and just like dissect it.
I want them to talk.
He just like talks over everybody, uses like gotcha questions.
I'm not saying there's nothing good about him.
Like I said, I think he's smart.
I think he's effective on TV.
I get why he's popular.
I'm just saying that's my, I have difference with him.
I don't want to talk about the more personal who cares.
The political difference is what I just said, that at the end of the day, he's a Democratic Party hack.
He hates anybody who's not a Democrat.
Can't even consider the possibility of creating alliances with people on the right because Democrats are so inherently morally superior to the people on the right that I'd rather lose and be in the minority than join with people on the right.
Like if you actually think what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide, like if you really believe that, you would join with anybody to put a stop to it.
I mean, if you were, if you're saying the only people I'm willing to work with are good leftists and Democrats, and even though I know that means I'm going to be a minority and not be able to stop this genocide, whereas I could actually have a chance to stop the genocide if I create an alliance with people on the right who also are anti-Israel and anti-financing Israel, but I'm too good for that.
I'm too clean for that.
I would never, ever have anything to do with those people.
You're a fraud.
It just means you're self-indulgent.
You're just, you're not willing to get your hands dirty to achieve anything.
And that's a big part of why I spit with the left in a lot of ways because I got sick of being in prison to the Democratic Party, thinking, oh, one day we're going to like run an AOC and this person and they're going to take over the Democratic Party and it's going to become better.
I mean, I watched all these people get sucked into the machine, have it made clear to them that either they play ball and then they get to advance or they continue with their dissent and they'll be marginalized and excluded and ultimately kicked out.
And I've been in the world of politics.
My husband was a member of Congress.
I watch how these people justify it.
Oh, no, I'm making these compromises just so I can get power, so I can get power to do those good things.
And they never do.
So I realized that just cheering for the Democratic Party, good for my career.
Like it was good for Hassan Piker's career, Mehdi Hostan's career, very good for your career if you do that.
The easiest way to make money to become a successful media figure is plant your flag in one of the two parties or one of the two camps, liberal, conservative, whatever, and just constantly feed that.
And that's what a lot of them do.
And I could have done that.
You know, I had a very successful media career with all the things I've done, to be honest, but very smooth path, good lucrative media career.
And I was principally associated with the left and just always abiding by those lines that you can't cross.
But, you know, the reason why I went into this work, to this activity, is because I actually care about the issues I talk about.
I don't talk about every issue.
I don't pretend to care about every issue.
The ones I'm passionate about, I actually want to make a difference.
That's the only thing that drives me.
And so when I get to the point where I realize that staying in prison in the Democratic Party or cheering the Democratic Party or telling people to vote for the Democratic Party over and over and deceiving them into thinking that one day you're going to have a reform within the Democratic Party because now we have Zoron or AOC or Bernie or whoever, that's a path to nothing but benefits for your own career.
And I'm not interested in that.
That's why I started exploring other factions where there was space for these ideas that you could actually change the dynamic of so that you could start to make progress and make a difference in these things.
And that's my main problem with Medi.
I don't think he's a particularly, there's nothing radical about him.
There's nothing innovative about him as a thinker.
He has TV talent.
But at the end of the day, he's a partisan.
I don't hate him for it, but it just means that I'm not interested in him.
All right, last question.
This is from Go Birds.
Piers Morgan's Nick Fundis interview was crazy.
I'm not even young, but it seemed like he was messing with Piers the whole time, not really taking any of it seriously.
You seem to understand him, meaning Nick, though, could you weigh in?
All right.
So I was asked on Wednesday, I think it was, to go on Piers Morgan as part of a panel to talk about Nick Fundes' interview with Piers Morgan.
And honestly, I talked about this before.
I have a pretty much absolute policy against doing panel discussions.
If you ever see me like on a show or on Fox, I'm always by myself.
I will not be part of a panel.
I'll debate somebody one-on-one.
That's great.
I love that.
But I will not be part of like a panel where you have like five people and you're like bickering for that I'm not doing.
It's degrading.
It's pointless.
People end up screaming over each other.
You're throwing poop at each other for the pleasure of the entertainment of the audience.
I just, I'm not interested.
And so I almost, I get asked to do a lot of panels, including that show.
And, and, you know, I, I say no.
I've been on that show before.
One time I went on because I got to debate Dan Crenshaw in Ukraine.
So there are a couple of times I'll go on and say yes.
If there's like, if it's a small panel, not even really a panel, but a one-on-one with somebody I want to debate or a topic on the debate.
But generally I say no.
This time I said yes because I did believe, I do believe that I had things to say about Nick Funtes and how he's understood or more accurately misunderstood by the kind of Piers Morgan sector of the media.
And I wanted to be able to make these points.
And although it was a panel of five people, I never had to fight to be heard.
I just, there were sometimes they were talking about things that bored me so much.
And I was just playing on my phone until then Piers would come to me and say, I want to bring Long Rim and let me ask you this.
And then I just said what I had to say.
So I'm going to show you a couple clips of this.
If you want to watch the whole thing, you can watch the whole thing.
I think I only talked three or four times, but I also feel like I made the most of it.
I was very satisfied.
I got to say most of what I wanted to say.
So here is, I'm just going to go over a couple of these clips.
Here's the first clip where I was on with Mark Lamont Hill, who I've known for a long time.
He's very much like a leftist, but who thinks everybody on the right is racist and fascist or whatever.
I don't want to speak for Mark.
He's not an uninteresting person, but I'm just summarizing how I see him.
And then Harry Sisson, who just, I can't think of anything sadder than being 21 or 22.
And like, I think it's great to be politically active, but like to be politically active, like in defense of the establishment, devote yourself to the Democratic Party and like Joe Biden.
You know, I don't want to judge him too much.
He's 21.
I'm sure I'll have a long trajectory, but he was there.
And And some social conservative, Andrew, something.
And then some of the guy who actually found very interesting, I was not familiar with him.
I think his name is Harrison something.
He was very like low-key, like almost like so low-key that could have been on the verge of sleeping or high, but he was saying very, very like interesting, insightful things.
And the first part of the interview was Mark Lamont Hill basically saying he thinks it's a very difficult thing to decide to platform Nick Fuentes.
He wasn't saying you shouldn't, but he was saying, even in general, if you believe that you should interview all people, probably Nick Fuentes, you can make a strong argument as somebody that you shouldn't ever platform because you're just helping him.
And no matter how much you think you're exposing him or whatever.
And so that was when Piers said, to me, you've had him on your show.
What do you think about that?
And here's how that exchange went.
I think we're having trouble with the audio.
Is that accurate?
Let me just check.
I couldn't hear that.
I don't know if anyone else could hear that.
But let's try it again or whenever I don't know if we're ready.
Can someone tell me if we're ready?
Or if that was a problem with the audio?
Hello.
I think I have a message here.
We're testing.
Hold on.
Something's going on on our end, I hear.
Just stall, just stall, just stall.
They're going to tell me.
I'm stalling.
I'm stalling.
I'm like, I want you to see this clip.
I think it's worth seeing.
That's why I asked my colleagues to get it for you.
And you got to see some of it.
It just, you didn't get to hear it.
So right now they're figuring out how to make sure that you can hear it.
And they're telling me to stall, but like, what am I supposed to do?
I got to do what I'm doing.
I have thoughts on the whole thing, but I actually wanted to have you hear it first.
Hopefully we're close to the point where we're able to actually not just show the video, but include the audio with it.
But it seems like we're not, or they probably would have said so by now.
So, all right, let me offer a couple of reflections because I am stalling.
And then I'm going to try and fill your time with something more interesting than just stalling.
I think one of the most interesting things is every generation starts to have their kind of entertainment and news and media and culture they consume.
And every single time that happens, people in prior generations don't understand it, think it's toxic and destructive and dangerous and freak out about it.
My parents were born in the 1940s.
So they grew up in the 50s and 60s.
And my mother and father loved Elvis Presley, especially my mother.
She was in love with Elvis Presley.
And Elvis Presley was, you know, the first kind of white entertainer to like use this grinding rock stuff.
And the people of the prior generation thought this is going to ruin American youth.
They didn't even understand it.
And then like, how is this even music?
This is screaming.
They wanted Frank Sinatra.
And this is, this repeats itself all the time.
So I go out of my way to make sure I pay attention to Gen Z, especially political content, like streaming, the streaming world.
Because if you don't, you're just going to look at things and be confused by what millions of people who just happen to be younger than you are thinking and consuming.
And you're just being like, I don't understand this at all.
This looks terrible to me.
And trying to understand it, I think, is extremely important.
So I think a lot of the reaction to Nick Funtes, especially by the kind of Pierce Morgan's, kind of very mainstream media part of the media ecosystem is a big part of this.
And I think some of this did come out in our exchange.
So let's look at the first clip, which was when I was asked whether or not someone should platform Nick Fuentes.
I'm not saying we shouldn't interview controversial people.
I'm just saying this particular guy, I feel like we're playing into his interests and his angle.
Yeah.
Well, Glenn Greenwood, welcome back to Uncensored.
You've had Fuentes on your show.
What's your view about that issue, about platforming him at all?
Oh, I don't even, I didn't even consider it to be a difficult question at all.
I mean, if you're going to have people on who are responsible for the invasion and destruction of Iraq based on lies or the incineration of Vietnam or the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of people and welcome them and treat them like respectable people, tell me what it is that Nick Fuentes has done remotely as bad as that that justifies allowing them to come on and speak, but not him.
And whether you like it or not, he does speak for a huge number of people in his generation and even other generations as well who feel the same kind of anger and frustration with the status quo, with the establishment, with the kind of dogma that we've been told we have to accept.
And there's a lot of people who are angry about it and who rebel against it.
And we saw this with Donald Trump on maybe a little bit of a smaller scale, but very much the same pattern.
When Donald Trump appeared, everybody was like, oh, he's racist and fascist and he's the misogynist and he's this and that.
And no one wanted to grapple with the reason why his message was resonating so much.
And to me, it very is very similar to Nick Funtes.
Say what you want about him.
He's extremely smart, an incredibly talented communicator, and very well read.
Like he's very informed.
He's not just some sensationalist babbling on the on the internet.
And I think the reason he has attracted a lot of attention is because he's speaking to the anger and frustration, a lot of which is valid of a lot of people.
And to stick your head in the sand and say, oh, we're going to pretend that this isn't happening because his views are too off.
But the people who start wars or are responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, these are respectable people who we treat with respect, like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or whoever.
That to me is the kind of thing that I think is really distorted.
Yeah, you know, I, Warren Smith, I'll bring, I'll bring response to that.
Well, no, let me bring in Warren Smith first and then I'll come back to you, Mark.
Warren Smith is who I was referring to, actually.
He was the person in the upper center.
It's really like the Brady Bunch format.
We were dismissing like the like Bobby Brady and Cindy Brady and I think Carol Brady, who was at the bottom.
But in any event, he was the one I was saying was actually an interesting, nuanced thinker.
But in any event, this drives me crazy.
Well beyond the Nick Fuentes question.
This whole idea that, oh, so-and-so believes in this conspiracy theory and so-and-so spread this false story.
Why should they have any credibility?
It's like you look at what the New York Times did in selling the Iraq war to the American people based on lies or propagating the Russiagate hoax for years and giving themselves Pulitzers for it or calling any questioning of the COVID origin theory that it came from a wet market and might have come instead from the lab, calling it racist and saying that it shouldn't even be heard.
Nobody spreads fake news and disinformation that has been more destructive than mainstream media outlets.
And if they want to turn around and say these people should be disqualified to be heard because they believe in this conspiracy or one said this, it's like what you've done, even though you're the respectable media people, nobody would ever say you should be excluded.
What you've done is so much worse in every regard.
And this is how I consider the reaction to Nick Fuentes.
Nick Funtes is a podcaster.
Nick Funtes never started any wars.
He's not responsible for anyone's death.
He didn't destroy the financial security of not just Americans, but billions of people around the world.
The repercussions of that continue to this day through turning the stock market into a casino with no guardrails because they knew they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out, which they did.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham and all of them have massive amounts of blood in their hands.
And every day, you know, Piers Morgan would interview them every day, like, ooh, Secretary Clinton, great to see you.
I'm not picking here on Piers.
It's true for every one of these shows.
Like, face the nation and meet the press.
And these are people who have lied their ways into war.
They interviewed Netanyahu, who international courts and Israeli genocide scholars say is committed a genocide.
But Nick Fuentes has a bridge too far.
His views are too toxic or he's too toxic to even allow to be heard.
But all these monsters and criminals, war criminals and common criminals, they're fine.
And they're not just fine, but you put them on the air all the time and you treat them like respectable statesmen.
No, this is something I vehemently reject.
That's been driving me crazy for a long time.
All right.
So speaking of that, seeing that I was kind of defending Nick Funtes' participation in the discourse, and I, you know, they knew ahead of time that I was going to do that.
They had seen me talking this way and, you know, asked me to kind of give some very basic thoughts about my views.
And I made clear that these were a little bit were them.
So this didn't come as surprised.
They put me on knowing this.
But Piers asked me about what he thought was the worst of the Nick Funtes comments, where he basically refused to shed tears about the Holocaust, seemed to make light of the Holocaust.
In the past, has called it to question the authenticity of the six million people who died and basically wanted to say, okay, but isn't this like so morally beyond the pale?
And this was that exchange.
Well, the other thing, the other thing, if I could jump in, the other thing, we bring it back.
Come on, don't crash out like you did on the podcast.
Hang on, let me bring Glenn back in.
The other argument, which I thought was interesting, and I thought I missed a bit of a trick here with him, was when he was talking about the Holocaust, where people have assumed he's a Holocaust denier because of things he said in the past of trivializing it and questioning the number of people who've died and so on.
He seemed to try and take a more moderate position, which was, yes, I believe six million Jews were killed, maybe more, whether he meant that or whether he was being some sort of satirical.
He was satirizing you.
He was satirizing that.
That's what I now believe was probably happening.
Yeah.
So I suspect he was.
But regardless, his argument was it all happened so long ago.
Why did Jews continue talking about the Holocaust?
We've all moved on.
They use it all the time as a political weapon and so on.
And of course, I suppose the obvious question for him, I went and checked afterwards, how many times he's talked about, for example, on his show, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which was over 2,000 years ago.
He does it all the time.
So, you know, if I'd been smart in the moment as a fellow Christian, I would say, well, hang on, but isn't that exactly what Christians do all the time about the crucifixion?
What's the difference?
Because they talk about the crucifixion because it's absolutely central to their religion.
And I think, you know, I do think so much of what your interview with Nick Funtes highlighted was extreme generational differences.
It was sometimes like watching two people speak different languages.
You know, Pierce, you and I are kind of the same age.
You're obviously older.
Everyone can see that, but just a little bit.
And, you know, for people who were born in like the 60s, the Holocaust was just 20 years before.
World War II had just ended 20 years before.
There was a mythology about the United States, about our role in the world, about how great of a country we were, about all the great things we did, about the Holocaust, the unique evil.
Now it's 75 years ago.
And people who are next generation were Harries were born in, you know, 2000 and 2002.
And this idea that, like, yeah, the Holocaust has been weaponized.
We've been beaten over the head with it for eight decades.
We've been forced to spend and pay huge amounts of money in reparations, or that slavery is sometimes weaponized that way.
This is a very common view.
So I think when he's doing things like making jokes about the Holocaust, it's not because he thinks it's funny that huge numbers of people were exterminated.
I think it's a way of purposely being transgressive about orthodoxies and pieties that a lot of people in his generation don't accept.
But there was a bit of a glenn.
Glenn, hang on.
Hang on, Harry.
There was Glenn.
There was a callousness to it.
And I'll tell you why.
I brought on a guy called Danny Finkelstein.
He's a top journalist for the Times newspaper over here who wrote a very powerful book about his family and their horrendous experience at the hands of Hitler and Stalin.
And it's incredibly powerful.
It's very moving.
It's informed his life.
And I'm going to talk to Danny actually after we finish this because he's been on the receiving end of the most appalling abuse in the last 48 hours, all directed by Nick Fuentes, who was so dismissive of him, so dismissive of him talking about his mother and father, so just callous in the way he responded.
It's that kind of utter devoidness of any empathy whatsoever.
You can have a view that we should try and move on generationally from these seismic moments.
Okay.
But you don't have to be so callous towards somebody whose family literally got murdered by people like Hitler and Stalin, do we?
I mean.
But the idea, Pierre, I think the thing is, is like this generation of people grew up in the wake of the Iraq War, in the wake of endless war, in the wake of the destruction of their financial security with the 2008 financial crisis, with all the lies of COVID and Russia gate and all the rest of it.
And faith and trust in these institutions have collapsed.
So when they look at people who represent institutional thinking and they're told you're not allowed to make fun of this and you're not allowed to talk about this and except in the ways that we prescribe and we're going to call you all these names unless you affirm all these pieties over and over and over again, one of the ways of rebelling against that is to say, you know, it's a very common generational reaction is to say, FEU, we're going to transgress every line that you told us we can't because we hate you.
We think that the things that you're doing have been destructive to our lives.
And I think like ignoring that part of you.
You know what?
I think it's occurring.
You know what, Glenn?
I think it's a very valid point.
And there may well be a generational thing to this.
Let me bring in Warren just for the record, by the way.
Andrew, you know, it's really bizarre.
I think a lot of people forget what they did and how they thought when they were younger.
I'll tell you this just quick experience that I had that's very relevant to that exchange, which was when my kids became teenagers, they started engaging in teenage behavior, like just, you know, rebellion for its own sake.
And they were consuming like one of the things they would do, just like that I couldn't stand was I didn't mind that they played video games, but they would watch people playing video games.
Like they weren't playing video games.
They were like watching someone on YouTube playing video games.
That's like how a lot of these streamers who decided to become political, like Destiny and those kind of people, that's how they started.
They like would play video games online and people would watch them play video games.
And my kids would do that.
I'd be like, I would be beside myself.
I would go into their room and I'd be like, why are you?
How can you do this?
Why are you watching other people playing video games?
Like, play video games if you want, but don't watch people playing video games.
And they would look at me like I was crazy.
Like, these shows are so popular and I couldn't understand it.
And then sometimes they would say things, or, you know, I would tell them to do something and they wouldn't do it, like standard teenager million.
I would call my mother or my father and I would say, oh my God, my kids are doing this and my kids are doing that.
My mother, especially, she would like always say, Are you joking?
Do you know you did all of that and so much worse?
And she always says, I'm so glad that I'm alive to like witness your having to deal with that with your kids, given what you put me through.
Like, and I would think about it.
I would be like, God, that's so true.
I did do that as a teenager.
Like, these, these behaviors that my kids are doing as teenagers.
And I'm like, I can't, this is mystifying.
I can't comprehend it.
Why are they like, those are things I did too, and worse.
And I have always said that one of the things for which I'm most grateful, and I mean this, is that there was no internet when I was 18 or 20 or 22, or even when there was internet when I was 25, like it still was so anonymous.
I'm so happy that every thought that I had, every transgressive, you know, act of mine where you're testing limits and surpassing them, and you're angry at the older generation's establishment way of being, and you want to find your own way.
And, you know, it's like the 1960s was all about that at the establishment.
In 1992, Sinead O'Connor went on SNL and ripped up a picture of the Pope.
It's like so unnecessary, but she was trying to express anger at the Catholic Church.
And she was young, and the young people loved it.
And then, you know, years later, she became adult and she kind of regretted it.
And this is so common.
It's like when you're young, and I do think, especially when the system has failed you, and I do think our system has failed an entire generation of young men.
And you could say white, young white men in particular, like in a specific way.
And, you know, there's whether you agree with it or not, there is a perception among that group, a lot of them, that that is true.
And that's what Nick Funt is speaking for in a lot of ways.
Yes, like the Holy Cost doesn't matter to them.
Why would it?
It's ancient history.
You know, I had this experience like when I started writing about journalism, what shaped my views were like 9-11, the reaction to it, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, the lies of Anthrax.
And, you know, you say that to some 23-year-old, and they're going to look at you like you're, well, they like, oh, a lot of people that age don't have any idea what the Snowden reporting was from 10 years ago.
And it seems like ancient history.
And so the Holocaust, it's not just that Jews talk about it a lot.
It's been weaponized continuously to say, this is why you have to give money to Israel.
This is why you have to venerate Israel.
This is why you have to give reparations to Israel.
This is why you have to constantly think about Israel.
This is why you go to the, you know, the welling wall and you visit Israel and you honor Israel because of the Holocaust.
And so it's like this sacred secular religion.
And if you're angry in general about establishment thinking, and if you're in particular angry about how Israel plays such a central role, occupies such a central place in our politics, you're angry that you have to keep giving your money to Israel.
Yes, like mocking the Holocaust is going to be something that people are going to do, not because they like the idea of millions of people being marched into their deaths.
It's not like it's a positive thing.
It's transgression.
It's a way of sticking your middle finger up at the people that you believe often validly are responsible for the problems of your life.
And then, on top of that, you add to that the fact that these people have constantly been told that they're not allowed to say what they think.
And if they do, they're going to be labeled racist and anti-Semites and misogynists or whatever.
And at some point, they stop caring about that.
They don't care anymore.
And like for Piers Morgan, I get it.
Like his whole life, like the Holocaust, that is the most sacred secular event there is.
But for people in a generation, you know, 50 years later, that's not the case.
And so they're speaking different languages.
And it's easy to look at it and say, oh, they're mocking the Holocaust because they hate Jews and want to like, but I just don't think that's the language.
It's like you have to pay attention to what people are talking about.
You don't have to.
You can ignore young culture, but then don't comment on it.
Like, don't convince yourself that you understand it, that you're able to interpret what it is.
But if you're going to comment on it, like understand where it's coming from.
Understand what the factors are that have led to the anger that is being expressed, led to the desire to ignore these rules of discourse.
Like at the end of the day, making a joke about something, like the, you know, any historical evil doesn't mean that you're actually perpetrating it.
And I think that's how people see the Holocaust.
Like, and there was one point in the interview where Piers Morgan was like, how can you possibly make a joke about the Holocaust?
And Nick Fontes looked at him and he was like, what?
Too soon?
And Nick Fun, Nick, Piers Morgan was born 20 years after the Holocaust.
Nick Fontes was born, you know, 50 years after the Holocaust or 40 years after the Holocaust, 50 years after the Holocaust or more.
And now we're 80 years after the Holocaust.
And so that is the difference in perspective.
And I think there's so much of that.
And it does remind me so much of Trump.
You know, not again, I'm not personalizing this about Pierre Morgan.
I don't dislike Piers Morgan.
I like some of what he does actually.
But, you know, Piers Morgan is a very, he has a very successful career.
The mainstream media treated him very well.
The Western establishment rewarded him, has a very nice life, is very wealthy.
He's famous.
He hangs out with a lot of celebrities, goes on yachts, goes on boats.
He doesn't have the anger that you would have if you're 24 and you feel like you're one of the people who's been tossed aside and devalued that can't get a decent job that has to work three jobs to earn a living.
They can't start a family, that can't get a girlfriend, that can't get married, they can't buy a house, that live with their parents.
Like these perspectives, these come from a completely different universe.
And of course, the way of communicating, the way of thinking about things is going to be fundamentally different.
And if you're not working to understand where that other sector is coming from and what's influencing their thought, like I said, it's like speaking two different languages.
All right, let's look at this last part here, which was Pierce Morgan was talking about how he had been inundated with all kinds of obscene and bigoted messages from the Groypers, which are Nick Funtes' followers in the days following the interview.
And I have no doubt that was true.
I'm sure that was true.
I mean, one time I had like a very innocuous exchange with Nick Funtes.
It was like years ago.
He had said something like, if Glenn Greenwald's really gay, why does he dress so poorly?
I forget where he said it.
It was like some forum, but it made its way to Twitter and I saw it.
And I basically said something like, God, this is the gayest and bitchiest comment I ever heard.
Something like that.
And I was inundated with the graper, with graper anger for like three days, you know, every single conceivable insult.
And there were a lot of them.
But, you know, I've been at war with pretty much every political faction in the United States and Brazil and Europe at one point or another.
This is maybe the Gripers are a little more intense.
Maybe I'm not so sure.
Maybe they're a little bit more vicious.
I'm not so sure.
This doesn't bother me at all.
This seems very commonplace for the internet.
But this was the exchange we had about the Gripers and about Piers Morgan feeling like he had been sworn by their rage.
And extraordinarily widespread.
They just come as this mob.
And it's very, and it's, you know, if you're not me, who's got a very thick skin, it's a pretty hard thing to get back at you.
Look, I don't care.
I've had a lot worse.
And they'll move on and that's what happens.
But if you're not, actually, it can be very intimidating.
It was very threatening, very racist, very anti-Semitic, very, very nasty, actually.
Like I said, it wasn't scraped the surface with me because I got a skin of a thousand rhinos.
But to other people, I could see it really being a pretty terrifying experience.
Hey, Peterson.
Can I ask a question about that?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
They're doing that too.
Sorry, Glenn Glenn.
Glenn, go first.
Hang on, hang on, guys.
Don't talk about ones.
Let me start with Glenn.
Ted, thanks.
Mark, I'm sorry to interrupt.
But the issue is, why does he have such a loyal following?
Why does he have to be a large and loyal following?
Now, you can ask that question about Donald Trump, and a lot of people are satisfied by saying, oh, America's just filled with racists and misogynists and xenophobes.
And he's playing into that.
And maybe that is part of it.
You know, politicians do demagogue and play to our worst instincts always, but there was a lot more to it than that.
And I think people understand 10 years later that there is and was a lot more to that.
So you can say, oh, yeah, Nick Funtes has this army of angry young men who are incredibly devoted to him, who believe that he's speaking truth uniquely, because they're also a bunch of Nazis and racists and Jew haters.
Okay, that's an easy, I think there's a lot more to it.
And I think people ought to grapple with the reason why he's speaking for so many people.
No, I think that's a very valid point.
You know, I've always said about Andrew Tate, for example, that a lot of the things he says, I can understand if you're a young, slightly disenfranchised young man, you feel society has got it in for you and all you ever hear is man-bashing.
I can understand why you gravitate to a guy like Tate who stands there, tall and proud as a very masculine kind of guy, beating his chest, talking about, you know, taking care of your body and getting fit and being a protector and all these things.
I get all that.
And then he went on to say, but then he veers into misogyny and that's when he gets off the train.
But like these lines, like you can go up to here and you can't pass it.
And if you do, you're going to call you accused of being a misogynist.
When you're talking about Israel, you can go up to this line.
But over that line are prohibited ideas.
You can't make fun of the Holocaust.
You can't question these sacred orthodoxies.
If you do, you're going to stand accused of being an anti-Semite.
You can talk about immigration, but if you go over this line, you're going to be accused of being people are sick of those lines.
And the main reason they're sick of those lines is because they're being imposed by people they think have no credibility any longer to impose rules and lines.
Because these people and their ideology and their way of thinking has proven to be utterly destructive, especially to the lives of the people transgressing those rules.
And it was, I'll just give you one last quick anecdote that I think makes the point.
And then I'll end it here.
I was going to bring this up in Petersburg, but I didn't have time.
In 2015, Donald Trump was leading all the polls when he first announced that he was going to run.
And it was the absolute consensus, virtually unanimous consensus among all the like wise political reporters like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, those types of like covered campaign for decades.
Like they really, that he was a fluke.
That he was like one of those, like in 2012, every Republican candidate that led, like at first, there was like a big lead, Michelle Bachman had a big lead, and then Herman Cain had a big lead, or Ben Carson, like one after the next, and they all collapsed.
And they were sure this is going to be true of Donald Trump.
But it didn't happen.
He kept increasing his approval.
And then one day, Trump went into an interview, and that was when he made his notorious comments about John McCain, where he didn't just criticize John McCain, but he criticized John McCain in the most taboo way imaginable, which is he made fun of John McCain's military service and his status as a prisoner of war.
Like McCain was, you know, captured in Vietnam, helped by the North Vietnamese.
Like he was beaten and subjected to like all sorts of cruelty, isolation.
And the mythology is, I don't think it's been totally proven, was that he could have been released a lot earlier because his father was a very important admiral.
All he had to do was like do a propaganda video, but he refused because he's John McCain.
He's so patriotic.
And so we endured his suffering and that made him heroic.
And Trump said, look, I don't think he's a hero.
He hated John McCain.
John McCain hated him.
So Trump hated McCain.
And that was when Trump said, I don't think heroes are people who get caught.
I prefer the soldiers who don't get caught and don't crash their planes.
Now, nothing was more sacred to political journalists than John McCain.
The media, the Washington media worshiped John McCain.
And they assumed that America worshiped John McCain.
And they couldn't believe that Donald Trump said this about John McCain.
And there was this political reporter for the Washington Post named Dan Baltz, like one of the most banal trite guys you'll ever find, just like spouting conventional political wisdom for decades, the Washington Post.
But he was revered among political reporters, like the dean of the Washington Press Corps or whatever.
And he wrote an article after the next day saying that like Donald Trump has defied political odds, but he just crossed a line that there's no coming back from.
You're going to now watch his candidacy collapse.
And like being this like traditional reporter, he couldn't actually explicitly admit he was stating his opinion.
So we would get, quote, anonymous Republican operatives saying this, but of course it was really what Dan Balls thought.
Like Republican operatives said, oh, Trump just destroyed his candidacy.
There's no way he can come back from this.
You're going to see him collapse.
And of course, it didn't even make a dent in his.
And the reason is because no one cared about insulting John McCain.
That's not what they care about.
Like it might have 10 years earlier harmed your campaign.
No one cares about it.
No one cared about it any longer.
But these like old political reporters are so out of touch.
They think that their rules are still honored because they think they're still respected and still given trust and credibility to be opinion makers.
And they're not.
People hate them.
They were the ones who led the country into Iraq.
They were the ones who justified endless war.
They were the ones who basically oversaw the saving of the crooks who collapsed the world, the world economy in 2008 while the middle class was evicted and suffered and thrown overboard.
And so by this point, like they hate the establishment.
And so When Trump's violating their rules and generating their anger, that helped Trump so much.
And Nick Funtes is like 2.0.
He's the updated version of that.
And if you don't understand that, you understand nothing about American politics, nothing about the political trends in the West, nothing about the reason why right-wing populism is on the rise, nothing about why these taboos you can blow past them, you can spit on them, you can purposely blow them up.
And not only doesn't it harm you, but you, in a lot of ways, become more popular because of it.
You have to, you know, you can just call everybody a racist and a Nazi or whatever if you want.
But the alternative is a more difficult but more important task, which is to try and understand it.
And I think the Piers Morgan interview with Nick Funtes and also the aftermath of the Tuck Carlson interview with Nick Funtes really reveals just how little attempt is being made to understand these currents and just try and call them names and use their authority that they think they have still, but they don't to just banish it.
And they're going to keep trying and they're going to keep failing.
And people like Nick Fuentes are going to continue to grow.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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