Reaction to Trump's Primetime Speech; Coldplay "Adultery" Couple Reappears for More Shame; Australia and the UK Obey Israel's Censorship Demands
Glenn reacts to Trump's rambling speech which failed to mention the rationale for U.S. aggression against Venezuela. Then: why are Americans so obsessed with the Coldplay concert "adultery" couple? Finally: Australia and the UK cave to Israel's censorship orders. -------------------------------------- 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 System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Donald Trump gave a primetime address last night that I think was reasonable to expect would contain a certain amount of substance.
And for that reason, we decided to delay our show until after that speech so that we could analyze whatever it was that was announced and react to the important substantive revelations of the speech, which we assumed would at least include some discussion of what is basically a war against Venezuela, not yet a full-on ground invasion with troops on the ground, but acts of war on every level.
And yet the word Venezuela was never mentioned.
It was a speech that even though I watched it 24 hours ago, I couldn't tell you a single thing that was in there other than the fact that the economy is great and to the extent it's not, it's not Trump's fault.
And there was really nothing to react to, even though we announced that we would.
And so we want to go over at least a little bit of that.
And then we also have a story that I think is worth examining.
It was actually on Megan Kelly's show earlier today for about two hours plus.
And this is one of the stories we discussed.
And I had some thoughts about it afterwards that I wanted to cover, which was this couple that got caught on this Kiss Cam at the Cold Play concert six months ago.
And for reasons that to this very day, I still don't understand, it became some major story.
But when something becomes a major story, there's usually a reason.
And if you don't understand why, it's worth trying to understand it because something about it resonated with the culture or with mores or with whatever needs people have to cast judgment on others.
And it's back in the news because the woman who was the head of the HR of this company, who had been, I guess, having an affair with the CEO of the company and got caught on that cam, gave a couple of interviews in which she seemed to depict herself as a victim.
And that renewed this kind of very moralizing and judgmental condemnation of her for, I guess, the crime of having sex with a married man, even though her own marriage seemed to be in the process of separating and being divorced.
But even if it weren't, like, why is there so much focus on this couple when we all act not just politicians in Congress, but even as presidents of the United States who we know are serial adulters, chronic serial adulters?
I just find public morality and the need to pontificate on it in a way that shows that you're the moral person because you condemn others.
Such a fascinating exercise in so many different ways.
So I just want to delve into that story and the reaction to it a little bit.
And finally, on Tuesday night, we covered at length what I at the time regarded as the rather bistar and not bizarre and obviously disturbing fact that in the wake of the massacre in Sydney, Australia, perpetrated by apparently two people, a father and son with allegiance to ISIS, that attacked a traditional gathering, a Hanukkah gathering of Jews in Bondi Park, in Sydney, Australia,
that Israeli officials immediately proliferated all throughout news media in Western countries in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in the UK, throughout Europe to issue orders, basically,
demands that the free speech rights of the citizens of each of those countries, not just Australia where it happened, but other countries where it didn't, be eroded and suspended by criminalizing a whole wide range of phrases and chants and thoughts and ideas that Israel dislikes.
And I was so, I guess, stunned by the audacity even for Israel to so blatantly exploit that situation in Sydney that we covered what I thought at the time was a very audacious organized demand that all these countries censor their own citizens in order to protect Israel or to banish or criminalize or outlaw phrases and chants and ideas that Israel dislikes.
And I guess it turned out that it wasn't really that bizarre after all, because within less than 24 hours, two major countries, Australia, where the massacre took place and the UK where it didn't obeyed the censorship orders and announced massive crackdowns on free speech, perfectly aligned with the demands of the Israeli officials.
And in some cases, went even beyond that.
So we want to show you the crackdown that's taking place in the West that has been ongoing, by the way, for the last two years in the name of protecting not these countries or their interests or their governments.
That would still be bad.
That would still be censorship.
But to protect the interest or shield from criticism a foreign government on the other side of the world that for some reason doesn't just feel entitled to pop up and issue demands to Western countries to censor, but has great success when issuing those demands.
So we want to cover that as well.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The major networks announced that they were going to reserve 20 minutes of prime time beginning at 9 o'clock p.m. Eastern last night in order for President Trump to address the nation, a request made by the White House.
and as is typically the case, was honored immediately by networks.
And the reason for that type of relationship where the White House demands prime time minutes for the president to speak to the nation and why network news outlets have traditionally honored that, even though it's their prime time, their most important money-making part of the day, is in part, they feel like they have an obligation under their license to provide a public service of allowing important messages to be heard by the American people from their president,
but also because presidents typically use it very sparingly only to announce major news.
President Obama used it, for example, to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed after nine years of finding him.
He was an old, decrepit, unwell man who was hiding out in Pakistan.
But the country, I think, thought that was important enough news to hear that directly live from the president on prime time.
Oftentimes, being the United States, presidents use it to announce new wars.
It's certainly something George Bush used, for example, to announce various aspects of the war on terror.
And so when Donald Trump last night announced that, or the networks announced that he had requested 20 minutes of prime time television beginning at 9 o'clock p.m., we decided, well, presumably this is a very important announcement because when the White House requests it, it always is.
And we don't want to do a show which begins at 7 p.m. and we knew the president was speaking at 9 because we thought it was important to be able to react to whatever news the president broke, which is, of course, what you would expect a president to do when making that kind of request.
And so we told our audience, we're not going to have a regular show tonight, but instead we're going to be on right after President Trump speaks in order to analyze and to react to whatever it is that he announced.
And we expected, even if it wasn't the focus of the speech, which it very well might have been, as some had speculated, but even if it wasn't, we certainly expected we're going to get some explanation directly from President Trump explaining to the American people why it's necessary to have assembled this gigantic military buildup in the Caribbean around the country of Venezuela,
even though that was never talked about during the campaign, why it is important to continuously bomb boats and blow boats up with no evidence presented that they even have drugs on them, let alone that they're drugs being taken to the United States, why it's important now to seize oil tankers, why President Trump authorized the CIA covert regime change and destabilization campaign in Venezuela, what the effects of that might be, what the intentions of the United States are.
That would obviously be something that President Trump, having the attention of millions of Americans who don't watch cable news and don't follow the news every day, would want to explain to the American people, hey, we have this new war, and it is a new war.
When you're blockading a country and bombing their boats and destabilizing their country with the CIA and threatening a land and Bombing campaign to begin imminently, and the goal is clearly regime change.
That is a war.
It may not be a full-scale land invasion yet, but it's certainly something the American people have the right to have explained to them.
It's extremely expensive.
Obviously, troops are in harm's way by definition.
And so you would think President Trump would have talked, at least in part, if not in its entirety, about this new policy that was, again, never talked about during the campaign.
A war with Venezuela was never part of the Republican platform, the Trump platform.
To the contrary, part of the Republican platform was no more regime change wars.
The Republican Party was campaigning actively on the idea that it was Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz and Joe Biden, the Democrat, who were the warmongers while President Trump was the peacemaker.
So you would think the country is owed something other than a couple of sound bites here and there, which is thus far what they've been given.
And that's what we expected we were going to hear.
We wanted to dissect it as well as whatever else President Trump ended up saying.
Instead, the word Venezuela was never mentioned once or even alluded to.
Basically, the 20-minute speech, which was rambling and unfocused and poorly delivered, was really designed to do two things.
One was to insist that the economy is actually doing extremely well, even though polls show overwhelmingly Americans believe that they're not doing well economically, basically telling them, don't believe your eyes, don't believe your experiences, look at the economic metrics.
And then secondly, to say, to the extent that the economy is not doing well, it's not our fault, even though we've been in office for a full year now.
It's the fault of Joe Biden because we inherited such a mess.
So once we heard that speech, I mean, I even said to my colleagues, like, I think we should go out and say something.
And they were like, well, what do you want to say?
I was like, I don't know.
There's really nothing to react to.
Maybe it's just better to say nothing rather than take people's time by saying things that have no real worth because the speech had no real worth because it had no real substance.
But with the positive time, I just want to reflect on a couple of things as to why, first of all, we expected it to include and believe it should have included some explanation about Venezuela.
I know people made a lot of the about the fact that Tucker Carlson had said on the podcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano yesterday that he heard from a member of Congress that the speech was going to be devoted to Venezuela and about a war with Venezuela.
I have no doubt that's what Tucker heard.
Sometimes members of Congress get things wrong.
Sometimes they hear things and plans change.
Who knows what happened there?
But I'm not even saying my expectations are based on that.
My expectations are based on the fact that you would think the Trump administration would want to explain this, but they didn't.
They acted as if none of it's happening.
And just to give you a sense for how much is happening, here's a true social tweet that Trump posted on Tuesday, and it read this, quote, Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.
So that sentence alone indicates the gravity and the magnitude of this military operation, this aggression against Venezuela.
Don't you think the American people are owed an explanation as to why it is that in Trump's words, Venezuela is now completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America?
And then he goes on and promises this, quote, it will only get bigger.
And the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.
I pay attention quite a bit for obvious reasons.
It's my job to American politics, to foreign policy in particular, and I've been doing so for 20 years now.
And I believe with a lot of certainty that I've never heard anybody previously say that Venezuela has stolen American oil or land.
Like, what conceivable land does Venezuela possess that they stole from the United States?
And I've never heard anybody, the oil that Venezuela possesses is oil that exists within their soil or in their water and their sea.
How did Venezuela steal that from the United States?
I've never heard anybody, I've never heard Donald Trump say that in the three times he ran for president.
I've never heard anybody say that.
You would think that would also require some kind of an explanation, given that that is apparently, according to Trump, the condition for stopping what he describes as not just the largest armada ever assembled, but one that will continue to grow and that will cause Venezuela great suffering.
He then goes on to say the illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping for the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking.
The Venezuela regime has now been designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Therefore, today I am ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.
The illegal aliens and criminals that the Biden administration are during the weekend in that Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace.
America will not allow criminals, terrorists, or other countries to rob, threaten, or harm our nation.
And likewise, will not allow a hostile regime to take our oil, land, or any other asset, all of which must be returned to the United States immediately.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
What is this?
What is that?
That is deranged.
I'm sorry, that is deranged.
Venezuela has stolen our oil, and no one mentioned this previously.
They've stolen our land, and they have to give back our oil and give back our land.
What land?
What oil did Venezuela steal from us?
I presume, I guess, in an attempt to make the best argument I can in defense of Trump's statement, that what he means is that U.S. oil companies made investments in extracting the oil and refining it.
And then Venezuela decided that it actually wanted to use its oil for nationalistic purposes, not to give to Exxon and Mobile and Chevron, although Chevron does still do business with Venezuela.
I mean, this was very similar to the rationale for the war in Libya.
Of course, it wasn't stated explicitly.
And I guess credit to Trump because, you know, it used to be in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s when primarily the left would say, oh, all these wars, certainly in Iraq, too, that were being told are for freedom or, you know, vanquishing the dictators, all the propaganda.
Actually, it's for oil.
That was like the hallmark that meant you were a crazy person, like that you were a left-wing, crazy conspiracist who hated America.
How dare you suggest we fight wars for oil?
It's a gigantic coincidence that we continuously fight wars in countries that are that are rich in oil.
It says, not like there's any causal connection.
Credit to Trump, I guess, for being candid at least.
Although, remember, the whole framework, the whole groundwork that was laid for this had nothing to do with oil.
It was all about, oh, they're sending drugs into the United States, which is not true in terms of fentanyl at all.
And even in terms of cocaine, it is barely true in the scope of how much cocaine enters the United States.
And even if we were to change the regime, that wouldn't affect the flow of drugs into the United States because the new government that we control is not going to immediately seize control of all of Venezuela.
They have drug gangs that are going to actually thrive even more in the instability that will ensue.
We controlled all of Colombia for the last 25 years with a puppet regime that we had there.
And the cocaine continued to proliferate and even grow the more we aided the civil war in Colombia.
Because those militias like FARC and others, drug gangs, thrived in the instability.
The same thing is going to happen in Venezuela.
So not only is there no truth to the underlying claim about the problem, there's also no connection to the solution.
So now Trump's, I guess, just saying no, no, that's about oil.
We want their oil that they stole from us.
Again, this is very similar to what happened in Libya.
The reason why the UK and France were so determined to go to war in Libya and remove Gaddafi and ended up roping the United States in because Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice and Samantha Power convinced Obama to go along with it.
And you may remember the whole justification was, oh, we're just going for a very limited humanitarian mission to protect the people of Benghazi from being slaughtered.
We're going to have a no-fight zone over Benghazi.
It's not a regime change operation.
And within like three weeks, Gaddafi was being gang raped to death on the street of Tripoli, which then produced anarchy and drug gangs and slavery and ISIS and a migrant crisis.
That was our glorious regime change.
And the reality was Libya had committed the crime.
Gaddafi had committed the crime of saying oil is an incredibly important resource for our country.
The people of our country are impoverished.
We want to use the oil not to send to Western oil companies in France and the UK, but we want to use it.
We want to nationalize it.
We want to use it for our own citizens' benefit.
And that was why Gaddafi had to go.
And most people consider the war in Libya to be the regime change war to be a gigantic failure.
And now this is the same rationale.
The crime of Maduro is that he wants to use, and Chavez before him, that they wanted to use the resources, the oil of that country for their own national interest.
And that suddenly that means they've stolen our oil and we have to get it back.
And I don't even know what argument to construct about the land.
But in any man, this is obviously a major, major escalation of military conflict that has barely been explained to the American people.
So you would have thought that would have been included in Trump's speech, and yet it wasn't.
Probably the most powerful person, not just in the Trump White House, but I think in all the Trump administration, is Stephen Miller.
I regard him as basically kind of the president, the junior president.
I think Trump trusts him more than anybody else, delegates more to him, is more influenced by him than anybody else.
Maybe Marco Rubio competes with that.
Maybe Susie Wiles, you know, within kind of a Democratic, a domestic politics or White House functioning role is quite influential.
But Stephen Miller is the most powerful, one of the two or three most powerful.
And here's what he posted yesterday on X in his attempt to explain what's going on here.
He said this, quote, American sweat, ingenuity, and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela.
Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.
These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries, and drugs.
Okay.
The reason people, there's a migration problem, a migration crisis in Latin America and Central America is because those countries, for a variety of reasons, doesn't matter why for the moment, are destabilized.
They're dangerous.
There's little economic prosperity.
And so people flee those countries and want to come to the United States where they believe their lives will be better.
It's not because the government rounds them up and forcibly sends them to the United States.
But even if that were true, even if you've now been convinced that like Maduro rounded up the people of Venezuela and sent them to the United States, it's kind of weapon, the southern border is closed.
That's one of the primary accomplishments of the Trump administration.
So it would be no longer happening.
What is it like revenge?
And why wasn't this on the agenda in 2024?
Like, why didn't Trump campaign?
Hey, want to do a major war in Venezuela?
Want to get our oil back?
The only thing I was talking about was dropping the bombing the drug cartels in Mexico because that's actually where the fatal drugs come from.
That's where the fentanyl comes from, Mexico.
And yet, there's been no bombing of drug cartels in Mexico, which is a central plank of the Trump campaign.
But apparently now that's all shifted to Venezuela because we want to take their oil.
Here was Trump asked about this question about Venezuela, and here's what he said.
Not gonna let anybody going through that shouldn't be going through.
You remember they took all of our energy rights.
They took all of our oil from not that long ago.
And we want it back.
But they took it.
satirizing the Trump administration's case for regime change in Venezuela by basically saying, you know what, why don't they just claim Maduro has weapons of mass destruction?
It would be so much easier, straightforward.
People would be familiar with it.
And I obviously thought at the time it was exaggerated satire.
This is the point of satire is to mock the rationale and to point out how similar it is to the other regime change wars.
But apparently, when it comes to war propaganda, you can't ever stay ahead of the United States and satirize it because it'll eventually catch up to you.
And it's almost like they decided to troll the American people to so much of an extent to see how much they could get away with that they actually have now used and are now using the claim that Maduro has weapons of mass destruction.
The White House issued on December 15th, just a few days ago, an order that, quote, designates fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
Again, fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela.
There are dozens of government reports, including many under the Trump administration, that were charged with identifying the sources of fentanyl coming to the United States and killing people in communities throughout the United States.
The precursors to the fentanyl are produced in China, see these reports, and they come from Mexico.
Not a single report even hints that any of them come from Venezuela.
No one has ever claimed that.
But the propaganda campaign to sell this regime change war constantly implies that fentanyl Venezuela.
Sometimes they'll just lie about it outright.
Like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who obviously will stand to profit greatly and already is from this war in Venezuela, said, Look, I can't tell you what Palantir is doing, but whatever we're doing, I'm very proud of because fentanyl is crushing our community.
So we need to change the regime of Venezuela.
So the lie is explicitly stated, but usually it's just implied.
They'll say, Venezuela is flooding our country with huge numbers of drugs that last year killed 80,000, 90,000 people.
They're talking about the total number of drug overdose.
And we've been through this data many times.
Most of that is from fentanyl.
None of that comes from Venezuela.
But now, why not?
Why not just call fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction?
I mean, just make the whole neocon case that was made for all those regime change wars 20 years ago that the whole point of the Trump administration was we were supposed to liberate ourselves from and no longer go back to.
So now, think about it.
Trump is saying Maduro is a terrorist.
Marco Rubio has claimed they're in an alliance with terrorist organizations and they have weapons of mass destruction and they don't just have them, but they're sending them to the United States.
But no, Trump supporters will say this has nothing to do with the neocon mentality that led to the other regime change wars.
Just because we're saying it has to be done, because Missouri is a terrorist in an alliance with terrorist organizations and sending weapons of mass destruction to the United States.
It's killing our citizens.
It may sound on the surface to like a simpleton like this is yet another neocon regime change war, but Paris have thought it's completely different.
But in the end of it, it would have been nice for Trump to have taken some of his prime time television time that he basically commandeered from the networks and used it to, I guess I'll just like allude to maybe, let alone explain this new war that we're obviously headed toward based on rationale that is beyond bizarre.
But he didn't do that.
Instead, here is, let's give you a couple of segments for those of you who are fortunate not to have seen it to show you how you missed basically nothing.
Here's how it began.
Good evening, America.
11 months ago, I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it.
When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country, which caused prices to be higher than ever before, making life unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans.
This happened during a Democrat administration, and it's when we first began hearing the word affordability.
Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions, and insane asylums.
They were drug dealers, gang members, and even 11,888 murderers, more than 50% of whom killed more than one person.
This is what the Biden administration allowed to happen to our country, and it can never be allowed to happen again.
We had men playing in women's sports, transgender for everybody, crime at record levels with law enforcement and words such as that, just absolutely forbidden.
We had the worst trade deals ever made, and our country was laughed at from all over the world.
But they're not laughing anymore.
I mean, they probably are if they heard that speech.
I mean, like, what was that?
You know, I think people are sympathetic to the idea after like a month in office that you're still dealing with the problems left by the old administration.
But after you're in office for a full year, people don't want to hear it anymore.
They elected you to improve their lives.
And if you're not, or if they perceive that you're not, they don't want to hear that it's not your fault.
That it's their, this is not, polls show that overwhelmingly Americans think Trump is responsible for the economy.
And it's not because it's Trump.
Americans think the current president was elected to fix the economy.
And if he doesn't, it's his fault.
And so Trump demanded 20 minutes of prime time to say, none of this is my fault.
This is all Joe Biden because he let girls playing boys, boys playing girls' sports.
I just, it was such an unfocused, it was something that you heard a zillion times from Trump during the campaign.
Here was his attempt to convince Americans that the economy is actually doing really well, even though polls overwhelmingly show that Americans do not think so.
Here at home, we're bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin.
The last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before.
I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.
Let's look at the facts.
Under the Biden administration, car prices rose 22% and in many states, 30% or more.
Gasoline rose 30 to 50%.
Hotel rates rose 37%.
Airfares rose 31%.
Now under our leadership, they are all coming down and coming down fast.
Democrat politicians also sent the cost of groceries soaring, but we are solving that too.
The price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33% compared to the Biden last year.
The price of eggs is down 82% since March, and everything else is falling rapidly.
And it's not done yet.
But boy, are we making progress.
Nobody can believe what's going on.
Here are just some of the efforts that we have underway.
You will see in your wallets and bank accounts in the new year.
After years of record-setting falling incomes, our policies are boosting take-home pay at a historic pace.
Under Biden, real wages plummeted by $3,000.
Under Trump, the typical factory worker is seeing a wage increase of $1,300.
For construction workers, it's $1,800.
For miners, we're bringing back clean, beautiful coal.
It's $3,300.
And for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.
All right, here's the thing.
If people in the United States believe their lives are not doing well economically, it doesn't matter how much you badger them with statistics and tell them that they're wrong, That prices are really falling, that wages are increasing, that their lives are getting better.
They don't decide if the economy is good based on statistics that they hear from the White House.
They decide based on their own experience.
And this was, I think, by far the biggest mistake of Democrats heading into the 2024 campaign.
And I said it constantly.
Polls showed overwhelmingly that people felt economically suffocated.
They hated the economy.
They blamed Biden for it.
And you would have all these like snide MSNBC hosts and like writers on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post constantly writing about how dumb people are to believe that they're suffering economically when like all the smart economists know that the relevant metrics show that the economy is actually doing well.
And they started saying, oh, the problem isn't the economy doing well.
The problem is that we're not communicating well enough to people to make them understand how grateful they should be.
Like you have these very rich MSNBC hosts.
Chris Hayes was probably the leader of this.
You know, he works like an hour a day on his dumb MSNBC partisan show, like interviews Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, like Dick Durbin, about how great they are.
He's making millions of dollars a year under an MSNBC contract.
He's like, no, the economy is great.
These people who think it's not are so stupid.
They need to understand the economy is great.
Let's just keep telling them how great the economy is.
Like eventually they were going to be like, oh, wow, Chris Hayes is right.
I mean, it's good for Chris Hayes, that's for sure.
But it wasn't for the majority of people.
And they were badgering them.
I mean, I can show you examples all day.
I used to talk about this all the time.
Here's Corine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary in July of 2022, sounding very much like Donald Trump last night.
Because, because when you look at inflation, when we look at where we are economically, and we are in a strong, we are stronger economically than we have been in history.
When you look at the unemployment numbers at 3.6%, when you look at the jobs numbers, more than 8.7 million of new jobs created.
That is important.
Now, that wasn't working.
Biden was incredibly unpopular.
The economy was a major reason why.
People didn't think the economy was the greatest ever.
They didn't care how many times the White House told them it was or MSNBC told them they were dumb.
So when Corine Jean-Pierre went on the view in the end of 2023, and obviously everybody's thinking about the upcoming election, and the hosts of The View are very nervous, like, hey, what's going on here?
Like, people think you're doing a terrible job with the economy.
Here's how Corine Jean-Pierre explained the problem.
And again, she sounded exactly like Trump did last night.
It's not doing much to lessen people's anxieties about pocketbook issues like lowering food prices, college tuitions, paying off debt.
So what is he doing to address this disconnect?
Well, first of all, thank you for listing out all of our amazing accomplishments or what the president has done to make sure that the economy gets back on gas by a dollar and 77 cents since its peak.
Remember, Putin's war caused gas prices to go up.
And this is his war against Ukraine.
And so, look, it's a very good question.
This is one of the reasons I'm here with all of you, right, having the conversation.
I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
When the president got into the White House, we all know that the economy was at a tailspin, right?
We had COVID, was just going through this country and the world in a way that was just unfathomable, obviously.
And the president came in and had to fix that because obviously the last administration did not have a comprehensive plan.
And so we had to come in and do that.
And the actions that he took, to your point, really took effect on the economy in a good way.
14 million jobs were created.
Unemployment is at a historic low.
We have wages are up.
And so we got to continue to talk about it.
And we're going to continue to do so.
If you look at where we are currently right now, we're heading into the holiday seasons.
I know I've watched you guys.
You guys do these segments on the holiday season.
And we just finished with Thanksgiving.
The prices have gone down, went down on turkey, went down on eggs, you know, went down on goods that Americans truly need, gas prices, as you just mentioned, because of the work that this president has done.
I mean, it was basically verbatim.
Like, hey, we just had the holiday season.
The price of a turkey went way down.
The price of eggs were way down.
The economy is great.
And to the extent it's not, it's because we inherited a gigantic economic mess from Trump.
It's verbatim.
The same tactic that Democrats tried over and over to address these horrible poll numbers about perceptions of the economy and their role in it and completely failed.
And then at some point, they just started denying reality.
And they just said, you know what, we're just going to keep telling everyone how great the economy is and we don't care whether they feel it or not.
Here was Corrine John Pierre from the White House podium in January of 2024.
It's clear Americans are starting to feel President Biden's strong economy.
Wages have risen faster than inflation for 10 months in a row.
The unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years.
Inflation has fallen by about two-thirds.
I mean, it's like Trump and the White House.
First of all, a big part of what happened last night is that the whole first year of the Trump administration has been focused on almost everything except the welfare of the American people whom they supposedly were going to represent, the working class, the forgotten man, all that.
It's been about bombing Iran and going to Israel and arming Israel and bombing Yemen.
To his credit, trying to solve the war in Russia and Ukraine, building up now a war toward Venezuela, everything, fighting to prevent the disclosure of the Epstein files.
It's like a huge dent in people's faith and trust in Trump.
And like none of this is solving anything in their lives that they care about.
And so I guess like part of the reason they just did this primetime address is to show, hey, let's talk about the economy.
Since I know you perceive we haven't done anything about it.
But talk about the economy isn't what people want.
They want to feel the results in a very tangible way.
Here's just to give you a sense of the kind of media theme that proliferated during the Biden presidency.
Here's The Hill by Stephen Clements, a Democratic Party partisan.
October 28th, 2024, just like the week before the election.
The Biden-Harris economic record is much better than critics claim.
So, I don't know.
Maybe Trump will succeed where the Democrats failed.
I think it's going to take a lot more than a 20-minute speech that was like, again, not a good Trump speech.
Trump's talent is not those kind of speeches where he's like strictly constrained by time, reading telecom prompter.
It wasn't even a well-written speech.
It wasn't well-delivered.
I mean, again, I was following it because I thought I was going to talk about it.
So I probably was listening more closely than anybody.
And I found myself drifting.
Like, I don't know what it was or what they thought they were accomplishing.
And like, a lot of people probably were watching their favorite shows and saw it because it got interrupted.
And I guess they probably were like, okay, there must be something important happening.
And then they heard like basically the equivalent of a Trump rally, but without any of the pizzazz or entertainment of a Trump rally.
It just, it seems very poor on every level, not just politically, but substantively.
And if this war in Venezuela does continue to escalate and does happen in a way that goes beyond what it is now, that's just going to be more focused on things other than what people want the government to focus on.
And you're going to have the Epstein file disclosure tomorrow.
And so I think the problems of this administration will only continue to proliferate.
so much of it, so much of it is their own doing.
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We're going to talk about this.
And then I was on Megan Kelly's show earlier today.
I, you know, I think I do her show about once a month, maybe once every six weeks.
It's a two-hour show.
And Megan talks about some of the things we focus on here, but she talks about a lot of other things that we don't.
And I enjoy being able to go on and commenting on things that I wouldn't otherwise talk about myself.
Often, you know, she focuses a lot more on kind of cultural issues than we focus on.
And as a result, sometimes I go on and I talk about things that I didn't ever really focus on or know much about.
And then they send me the list of things that they want to talk about.
And I kind of read up on them.
And one of the issues that we talked about today was that whole issue, that whole, I guess you could call it a scandal, where that couple got caught on a kiss cam at a cold play concert kissing.
And it was a scandal because they got caught in the camera and then they immediately realized they were on camera and they pulled away as though they were doing something extremely shameful.
Turned out he's married, she's married, but not to one another.
He's the CEO of the company.
She's the head of PR of human resources rather.
And I don't know why, but this became like a major shaming scandal.
Everybody was like, adultery.
And okay, it's fine to shame adultery, I guess, if that's what you want to do.
I personally consider that to be a transgression between spouses.
Like it seems like it's between them and it's for them to work out.
I don't know why we have to insinuate ourselves into the marriages of other people whom we don't know and whose marriage we know nothing about, nor should we, because it's not our business.
But it's a favorite pastime.
People love to sexually immoralize in public.
I personally think the reason people love to do it is because it helps cleanse themselves of whatever shame they feel.
Like, oh, look at those people over there doing that wrong thing.
And the implication is like, I would never do that.
But whatever, it's a thing that people love to do.
I think there's a lot of complicated psychological and social reasons to it.
But I vaguely saw it at the time, and that was kind of my reaction.
Like, doesn't interest me.
It was like, actually, I didn't understand.
I don't really understand why people concern themselves with adultery, even when it's a public figure or a political figure.
Because, again, it's between the people in the marriage.
You have no idea what goes on in that marriage.
You have no idea what their arrangement is, who's doing what, to whom.
You're just like issuing moral decrees and condemnations and judgments based on almost no information.
So I don't go on a crusade against it, but I just don't participate in it.
It doesn't interest me.
But I really didn't understand.
Like, this is not a public couple.
This is not a couple exercising public power or holding public office or even with any degree of like fame, not even like really financial or corporate power.
And yet it captivated everybody.
And people were just in unison, it seemed to me, like in absolute agreement that one of the most shameful scandals had been revealed.
And the reason why Megan raised it with me today was because the woman who was the head of HR of this company got agreed to two interviews, her first interview since all of this happened.
And so it kind of, the interview was very, it came off very, it didn't, it didn't make her look very good.
I don't guess she didn't have many options, but it was basically like, yeah, I did wrong, but I paid for it.
I sacrificed my career for it.
What more do you want from me?
And then I've been victimized and I'm yelled at and I'm okay.
So it got me thinking about a couple things.
So let's just go through, first of all, the facts in the quickest way possible.
Here from the New York Times today is why this has all re-emerged.
The title is The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Cold Play Concert.
Kristen Cabot was caught on camera with her boss at a concert.
The video went viral as soon as she was drowning in the vitriol of strangers.
And that's true.
So this happened in July, so maybe five months ago, six months ago.
Here was, for those who didn't see it, it was about 14 seconds long.
They were at a cald play concert.
And as you probably know, they do this at sporting events or concerts.
They have cameras all over the place and they just like capture anybody who's kissing or who's you're just fair game.
You're in a public venue.
And he might appear on screen.
And I guess you know that if you go to these places, you watch any sporting event.
You see people in the crowd just unexpectedly put on the screen.
It's just somehow part of the social contract of going to these public events.
And here's what caused, again, for reasons that I genuinely don't understand, but I want to delve into a little bit, immense amounts of public shaming, scorn, and discourse.
Oh, look at these dudes.
All right.
Either they're having an affair or they're just going to shine.
Now, as I understand the facts, they were at this company called Astronomer and he was the CEO and she was the head of HR.
She was married, he was married, not to each other.
Her marriage was in the process of dissolution.
She was separated and they were getting divorced.
And he claimed at one point that he too was getting divorced, but it didn't seem like it was really true.
And they're still together, so they never got divorced.
So I guess the idea was he was a scoundrel for cheating on his wife with the head of HR.
And yet somehow she got all of, or the vast bulk of the public ire.
And I've never understood that at all.
Like if you want to judge adultery, if that's really something that you feel like you need to publicly condemn, like of all the crimes in the world and all the moral transgressions being committed, you want to like defend the marital vows of people you don't know.
Okay, go ahead.
But like it seems to me like the person who deserves the blame in an adulterous relationship is the person who's actually in the marriage violating their vow, which would be the husband and not a woman who has sex with him because she's not violating any vows.
She doesn't have any vow that she's violating.
And for some reason, she got a lot of the, or most of the, the, the, the vitriol and the shame.
I do think part of it is the fact that she's head of HR.
And so her job is to enforce rules of workplace propriety.
And so for all, of all people to be having an affair with the boss, with the CEO, the fact that it's the head of HR, who probably has fired tons of people for extremely minor infractions of workplace rules, probably produced a lot of resentment, especially because everyone knows that the worst people on earth are HR managers.
Maybe there's a couple good ones if you're an HR manager and you're listening.
I don't mean to condemn you.
Maybe you're a really nice person.
You like actually care for the employer, the employees, the way you're taught to pretend to.
But most people see the HR manager as a total fraud.
They're always like there to pretend that they're so interested in how you're feeling and making sure you're okay.
But in reality, they're just often there to make sure you get fired in a way that's good for the company or to just enforce rules for the sake of it.
So a lot of people hate HR managers.
Maybe that explained why there was so much shaming of this person.
She's like an HR manager, like getting caught doing what she would instantly without giving a second thought fire anybody else in the workplace for having done.
So maybe that was part of it as well.
But I want to get to the point that I want to get to.
I just want to say, she gave an interview, and this is part of what she said.
In the scheme of what our politicians do, what our elected leaders do, what our president does, what he has done, what other presidents have done, and senators and members of Congress.
Like, what is the scandal?
Okay, but cold play, kiss, scam scandal, woman admit.
She had a couple of high noons fueled embarrassing career ending moment.
And then the New York Post, ex-astronomer employee caught canoodling with boss at Cold Play concert, blames, quote, a bad decision on a couple of high noons, which I don't know, probably seems plausible.
I imagine they were drinking and alcohol does sometimes motivate people to do things they otherwise wouldn't do that are reckless.
I don't think it's news.
I don't know why this explanation became like part of the reason to just rejuvenate this hatred for this woman who has, I don't know, seems like she suffered in a way quite disproportional to the offense.
But what I really think I ultimately want to bring out here is the idea that, you know, it did used to be the case, sort of, that adultery was considered very shameful.
Although, you know, if you look at like the most beloved Hollywood stars of the 20th century, all of them were married like seven times.
They all had overlapping affairs with their husbands and wives.
They, I mean, it was just, it was like kind of, it wasn't even a secret, really.
It was all in the open.
It didn't really affect any of them.
And everybody knows that JFK, who is like a political icon and whose family for decades has been considered like political royalty, was screwing everything that moved in the White House while his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, was just like right in the East Wing.
He would just like have sex with multiple women in the White House poll.
And the reporters just decided like this didn't matter.
And it didn't get reported because I guess the ethos of the political White House press corps was that it didn't matter.
This is like not the head of HR of some like mid-sized corporation, like the president of the United States.
And then there was this other case in, I remember this so well, I was, you know, I guess in my early 20s at the time.
There was this senator, Gary Hart from Colorado.
He was like a centrist Democrat, young kind of centrist Democrat, had a lot of like political cachet.
He was running for the Democratic Party nomination in the primary.
A lot of people thought he had a good chance.
Michael Dukakis ended up winning that race and got crushed by George H.W. Bush.
So it wasn't a very strong feel.
So Gary Hart had a pretty good chance.
And he basically got caught having an affair with a woman named Donna Rice on a boat that was called the monkey business.
And it was like, the media acted as though this was the biggest scandal ever.
You know, it was a consensual affair.
There was no hint of abuse or assault or non-consent.
There was no question of age.
He was an adult woman.
And it destroyed his political kindness forever.
He dropped out of the race and was driven out of politics over it.
And then in the 1990s, you had Bill Clinton, who got elected despite a whole strew of women talking about the sex and affairs they had with him while he was married to Hillary Clinton.
He got elected.
And then during his campaign, he also, like JFK and probably lots of other presidents we don't even know about, had all kinds of sex in the White House with Monica Lewinsky and I'm sure others incredibly accused of sexual assault, credibly accused of rape.
And he got re-elected.
And the Democrats did perfectly well under him as well as that scandal unfolded.
No one cared.
It was shameful, I guess, but and apparently Hillary didn't care because here they are 40 years later, still married.
Or maybe she did care, or maybe she didn't, or maybe that was their agreement in the relationship, or maybe it wasn't.
Like, who knows?
Who cares?
But it was obsessed on.
And now we have a man who's president who has lived a completely libertine tabloid life.
I mean, Donald Trump's been only married three times, but he never got a new wife because one of them died.
He pretty much got a wife, had some kids with them.
She got a little old, traded them in for a newer model.
The relationships overlapped.
He had a very open affair with his second wife, Marlo Maples, while still married to his first wife.
The first wife was raising young children while he was having an affair with Marlowe Maples, the newer, younger version.
Then had an affair with Marl while married to Marlowe Maples when she had a young child at home with a bunch of women, one of whom was Melania Trump, became his third wife.
And then while he had an affair with while he was married to Melania Trump, we know he had an affair with Stormy Daniels.
Trump was a serial womanizer, a serial adulterer for a long, long time.
And not all this is in the very distant past.
And people decided they didn't care.
They didn't care when he got caught on tape on the Access Hollywood little scandal talking about how, yeah, because he's a star, he can just go and grab women's pussies whenever they want, whenever he wants.
He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
They were very close friends.
He was on tape talking about how Jeffrey Epstein likes women.
Obviously, there's evidence now, but it's not like it was a mystery.
They shared, they talked a lot about women.
Women was a major interest of theirs, and he was married the whole time.
So here, then at the president of the United States, the person with the nuclear clothes who not only can start wars, but does start wars, who we all know is a serial adulterer.
I personally don't care.
I don't, it doesn't matter to me at all.
And here we're talking about the president of the United States.
So why did this woman, like, why did this couple become the source of so much scorn for doing something that we have pretty much decided is now none of our business to the point that we elect presidents that we know openly do it?
And I really do believe that we just need every now and then some mechanism for coming together and condemning the private sexual lives of other people because I hope this isn't too hurtful to learn,
but the vast, vast majority of people engage in sexual behavior that has long been considered wrong or immoral or shameful or irreligious or sinful.
And these kind of shaming campaigns are kind of a way to a way of absolution, a way to kind of feel good about ourselves for things that we don't actually even believe, these kind of like moral condemnations.
We're very inconsistent about them.
I still would love to understand why this one in particular captured the public contempt and rage to the extent that it did, given that it was 14 seconds on camera.
You know, sometimes it's just the mood, sometimes for whatever reason that people don't, the public just doesn't like them.
I think part of it is, is that the fact that they felt ashamed, like they, as soon as they realized they've been caught, they acted like they had done something terribly wrong.
So maybe that gave the signal to the public to think, oh, well, they think they just have been terribly wrong.
And that's the green light for us too, as well.
I just have always found these spectacles of moralistic judgment about people's private sexual lives when there are no victims.
And if you want to say, okay, adultery has victims, it's the spouse, let them work that out.
Like, no, no one needs your help in interfering in the marriages of people you don't know or understand.
And I guess maybe my views of this are colored by the fact that I have seen quite often, in fact, more often than not, people who posture, who position themselves, who brand themselves as public moralizers, the people who like enforce public morality, who shame and condemn others.
And you look at them and you see they're like the paragons of sexual virtue, which is why they get to condemn everybody else and rant and rave and rage against other people's behaviors.
So often those people turn out to be the people who are most violating the standards they're purporting to uphold.
Go look at what happened with all of the mega preachers of the 1980s, the people who formed the moral majority, who were trying to rejuvenate social conservatism and inject it as part of the Republican coalition under Ronald Reagan.
Or go look at Denny Hassert, who was the Republican Speaker of the House who oversaw the most sexually moralizing political agenda in decades.
And it turns out he was a serial pedophile who ended up going to prison because when he was a high school wrestling coach, he had molested many of his students.
These are not rare cases.
These happen a lot.
There's definitely a correlation between how aggressively one publicly calls attention to themselves in order to moralize about others and the shame that they feel is hovering within themselves, which is why they need to make such a public display about it.
And I think sometimes that ends up happening writ large in these social shaming scandals that when you compare it to what the real mores are of the society, of the very trivial transgressions in the context of what kinds of crimes people are doing or transgressions they're committing, the victims they're leaving in their wake and the way we tolerate those, when you compare that, it's obviously nothing rational.
It's something very primal.
It's something very emotional.
It's a very deep psychic need.
And I don't, I'm not even saying I understand it all.
I don't understand it all.
I didn't understand that at the time why this resonated so much and I still don't.
But I think there's a lot worth exploring there.
And talking about a Megan show, maybe you want to kind of think about it today and examine it here as well.
All right, so let's talk about something, just a follow-up that we did from Tuesday night show, where in the wake of the massacre in Sydney...
Israeli officials went on television networks in almost every Western country and they issued demands like you are to prohibit this phrase and you are to criminalize this kind of protest.
We've had enough.
You need to crack down on this.
We showed UCBS News under Barry Weiss.
They like had an Israeli woman on and they were like, tell us, please, Israeli woman, how we can better serve you, how we can make you feel safe, how we can address your concerns.
And she was like, you need to adopt the expanded definition of anti-Semitism that bans all sorts of criticisms of Israel and Jewish people and adopt it into the law.
And they went on British television, Australian television, and we showed you.
And I really was like, can you believe this?
Like, what kind of country goes around the world demanding that governments crack down the free speech rights of their citizens, especially like Western countries that have been the foundation of free speech, that growed the Enlightenment?
The UK grounded the Magna Carta.
Never mind the Enlightenment.
And Israel is saying, yeah, we know you think this free speech stuff is important or whatever, but no more, not when it comes to us.
And as I said, for someone who has seen a lot of audacity coming from Israel, the audaciousness of that actually surprised me.
It was so brazen.
It was so dictatorial.
But I guess I should have realized that there was nothing really bizarre about it, that it actually worked so well that at least the UK and Australia, two pretty big and important countries, instantly complied in exactly the way the Israelis demanded and have promised to continue to comply even further.
So first of all, here's an announcement from the Metropolitan Police in the UK.
And I should note that Metropolitan Police in the UK have been pretty much every single weekend arresting British citizens for peacefully protesting in defense of the Palestinians cause or against the Israeli war in Gaza.
They are dragging 88 Euro, Euro, 88 year women, 88-year-old women out of these protests, young college kids, Jewish protesters, often Holocaust survivors.
And one of the ways they've done that is they took this group called Palestine Action, which the worst thing they've done and are accused of doing, they didn't kill anybody, didn't blow anything up, they didn't threaten to blow anyone up.
They spray painted a couple of British military jets at a base that's used for providing logistical support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And as a result, the Labor government, the center-left labor government, branded them a terrorist organization, prescribed them as a terrorist organization.
And once they do that, it not only becomes illegal to be a member of that group, it becomes illegal even to express support for that group or even to question the government's decision.
So you had all these people protesting against Israel or in defense of Palestine who would say free justice for Palestine action or the government should reverse its persecution of Palestine action.
And just for saying Palestine action, the police would immediately go and arrest them.
Totally peaceful.
So there's already been a major crackdown throughout Europe.
France and Germany early after October 7th banned all pro-Palestinian protests.
You could have a pro-Israel protest all day and night if you wanted, just not a pro-Palestinian protest.
Because of course, those countries supported Israel, armed Israel, financed Israel.
So there's already been a major crackdown on free speech.
in Europe, but also in the United States.
We've done many shows on how the Trump administration forced American universities to adopt that wildly expanded hate speech code that defines anti-Semitism as saying all sorts of things about Israel and Jews that are very common criticisms that are political opinions protected by the First Amendment.
So here was the Metropolitan Police.
This was yesterday.
They issued this statement, quote, joint statement from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police.
Quote, we begin by acknowledging the horrific terrorist attack in Australia where Jews were deliberately targeted while enjoying the Hanukkah celebrations.
Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families, and those injured coming so soon after the Heaton Park synagogue attack in Manchester and amid rising anti-Semitism globally.
This is deeply alarming.
Jewish communities across London, Greater Manchester, and the rest of the United Kingdom are already worried and scared, and this only adds to it.
The words and chants used, especially in protests, matter and have real-world consequences.
We have consistently been advised by the CPS that many of the phrases causing fear in Jewish communities don't meet prosecution thresholds.
Now, in the escalating threat context, we will recalibrate to be more assertive.
We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as globalize the intifada, and those using it at future protests or in a targeted way should expect the Met and GMP to take action.
Violent acts have taken place.
The context has changed.
Words have meaning and consequence.
We will act decisively and make arrests.
They're not talking there about people who plan violence.
They're not talking about people who engage in civil disobedience.
They're talking about people who have used phrases or used phrases and words that the UK government has previously said you can't arrest them for because that's protected by free speech.
And they're now saying we're going to recalibrate because two guys with loyalty to ISIS, 1,000 miles away in Australia killed 15 people in a obviously horrific massacre, but not one that justifies reducing and infringing free speech in the country that gave birth to the Magna Carta and played a major role in the Enlightenment, for which free speech has supposedly been a value for which they even go to war.
But that's exactly what they're doing.
They're going to now arrest people for saying things like globalize the intifada.
Words are violence is the theory here.
The Israeli embassy in the UK gave the UK the head pat, the pat on the head, the little praise the UK government was obviously seeking.
Here's what they said.
The Embassy of Israel in the UK welcomes the joint announcement by the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police, forces that they will arrest people promoting the phrase globalize the intifada.
Now, I should note here that intifada is an Arabic word, kind of means like a brushing off.
It's been used to talk about resistance.
It's used for the occupation.
There's nothing inherently violent about that word.
Like any cause, it can have a non-violent expression.
It can have a violent expression.
That's true of any cause, of any resistance, of any struggle.
And globalized intifada means nothing more than the intifada is the uprising of the people in the west bank in Gaza against their occupiers.
And globalized intifada means let's all work to end this injustice.
That phrase is now illegal.
You will be arrested.
You can be the most peaceful person.
You can be doing nothing but sitting on a park bench.
If you have a shirt on or you hold a placard that says globalize intifada or you have a sign that says justice for Palestine action, the police are going to come and arrest you for nothing other than the expression of your political opinions because those political opinions are ones that Israel says need to be criminalized.
The statement goes on, as Israel and the Jewish community have been saying for years, calling to quote globalize the intifada is clearly an incitement to violence and a direct line can be drawn between those anti-Semitic chants and the acts of terror that we have been seeing against Jewish people worldwide.
That, of course, is the theory that wokeism has long used for censorship.
If you take this position about trans people or black people or gay people or whomever, even though you're not advocating violence, even though you're not calling for violence, even if you're not engaged in violence, you should still be censored because you're jeopardizing these groups, their safety and their security and their lives.
In the United States, even if you were calling for violent attacks on these groups, your speech would still be protected, provided you weren't speaking to a crowd of people and directing them to go right at that moment, attack other people.
But other than that very narrow exception, in the United States, you can open up a sign saying, attack all gay people and save the kids, attack gays.
And that would be considered protected speech inside the United States.
Europe has different standards, but still, as the statement says, these chants have long been rolled non-prosecutable.
And yet now the people are going to be arrested because Israel demanded it.
Israel goes on, quote, it is disappointing that it has taken such a long time for British authorities to recognize this.
And it should not have been on the Jewish community to plead with the authorities to take these threats seriously, only being done so after more Jews have been killed.
However, we now hope that real action is now taken to stop the chant before it can lead to the further radicalization of violence against Jews.
Israel succeeded in bullying the UK somehow to censor phrases that are often used at Palestinian protests, often including used by Jews.
And instead of, I guess they are kind of not celebrating, but they're giving a little head pat of encouragement to the UK for censoring their citizens Israel demanded.
They're also complaining, you should have done this a lot earlier and we shouldn't have even had to ask.
You should have been censoring these phrases long ago, arresting people long ago who expressed this political opinion.
Already people are being arrested.
In case you think it's just theoretical, here's AP News.
Today, UK police arrest pro-Palestinian protesters as authorities toughen hate speech law enforcement.
Quote, people in London arrested two people police in London arrested two people who called for intifada during a pro-Palestinian protest, which followed a decision by authorities to toughen enforcement of hate speech laws after a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia.
Two protesters were arrested for, quote, racially aggravated public offense orders.
And they then shouted slogans calling for intifada during the protest outside the Ministry of Justice on Wednesday night.
The Metropolitan Police Service said on social media, a third person was arrested in trying to interfere with the initial arrests.
is a reporter with Sky News describing the arrest earlier today.
As you say SJ the context here is important because these arrests do come hours after two of the country's biggest police forces the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police made warnings essentially saying that they were going to change their approach that they were going to be bringing in new measures to in their words deter intimidation saying that anyone chanting slogans like Globalize the Intifada would face arrest.
And we've seen two arrests tonight at a central London pro-Palestine protest.
And they said that's because the context has changed following the Bonsai Beach terror attack, which in Australia, which saw 15 people killed, an attack, of course, which targeted the Jewish community who'd been celebrating the first night of Hanukkah.
So the Met have said that three people have been arrested in total at this protest, two people who shouted slogans arrested for racially aggravated public order offences and a third person for obstructing those arrests.
Now, in terms of the response to this change of approach by these two big police forces, they've been welcomed largely by Jewish groups.
The chief rabbi has said that such chants are, in his words, unlawful, but have faced criticism from elsewhere with Ben Jamal from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign saying that it restricts the right to protest.
But what it certainly does mark, as I say, is a change in approach.
After both the Bonsai Beach terror attack, but also the attack at Heathen Park Synagogue in Manchester a couple of months ago now, again, a target on the Jewish community at a synagogue during Yom Kippur, two people were killed, and authorities saying that they really want these changes, this change in approach, making this arrest to show that words have meaning and have consequences.
Now, I hope I don't upset anybody by pointing this out, but there have been similar massacres on other groups besides Jews.
Jews are not the only victims of massacres of this kind.
The United States has had massacres in recent years where people went and gunned down black people on purpose at a grocery store in Buffalo, at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and many others, similar ones.
Muslims have been targeted with these kinds of massacres, including an absolute atrocity in New Zealand a few years ago, where somebody attacked two different Muslims at two different mosques and killed dozens of Muslims.
And imagine if the US government or some government had said, look, we need to crack down and criminalize certain ideas about Muslims or about black people because of these massacres.
Everybody would be like, that's not an acceptable response to crack down on free speech because of these massacres.
And yet that's exactly what's happening here in the name of protecting not even Jews, but Israel.
That's where these demands have come from.
Here's the Australian Prime Minister who looks very, very rattled and shaken as he announces all of the steps they've already taken to abridge free speech in Australia at the demand of Israel and all the steps they intend to take in the near future.
It's clear we need to do more to combat this evil scourge, much more.
A special envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Jillian Siegel, has delivered a report that sets out further steps we can take.
The Australian government adopts and fully supports the plan to combat anti-Semitism.
We'll continue to work through the implementation of the 13 recommendations in consultation with the Jewish community and the envoy.
And of course, the first recommendation was the adoption of the IRA definition of anti-Semitism that the government adopted.
Today I'm announcing a significant number of additional actions to build on the plan.
Firstly, the Attorney General and Minister for Home Affairs will develop a package of legislative reforms to crack down on those who spread hate, division and radicalization.
The National Security Committee has agreed that changes will include the following five points.
Agreed changes will include one, aggravated hate speech offence for preachers and leaders who promote violence.
Secondly, increased penalties for hate speech promoting violence.
Thirdly, making hate an aggravating factor in sentencing crimes for online threats and harassment.
Fourthly, developing a regime for listing organisations whose leaders engage in hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred.
And fifthly, developing a narrow federal offence for serious vilification based on race and or advocating racial supremacy.
The Minister for Home Affairs will also have new powers to cancel or reject visas for those who spread hate and division in this country or would do so if they were allowed to come here.
David Gonski has agreed to lead a 12-month task force.
Any idea we can cut this off now.
Now, some of you might hear that and think it sounds intuitively reasonable.
Like, hey, we're going to criminalize hate speech.
The problem is that, and I think that should be problematic in and of itself.
We've been over many times.
There's no difference between free speech and hate speech.
If you think there's a hate speech exception to free speech, you don't believe in free speech.
Any speech can be classified as hate speech.
Any criticism can be classified that way.
But once you announce the adoption of this International Holocaust Remembrance Act definition, the IHRA definition to which you referred, that Europe has adopted into its laws that the Trump administration has forced on American colleges, that wildly expands what it means to make anti-Semitic statements.
What it's actually saying is it is now going to be a crime if you engage in hate speech, but hate speech means anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism has now been radically expanded to include all sorts of ideas that you would never consider hateful.
For example, under this IHRA definition, you're not allowed to say that Israel is a racist endeavor, that Zionism is a racist ideology.
You can say that about the United States, you can say it about China, you can say it about Iran or Russia or South Africa or any other country you'd like.
You just can't call Israel a racist endeavor because that's now considered anti-Semitic.
You're not allowed to compare the actions of the Israeli governments to what Nazis did.
You can call Trump a Nazi all you want, no problem at all.
You can say the United States government in its conduct of this war acted like Nazis.
No problem, you're fine.
Say that about any other country, just can't compare Israel and its government to Nazis.
You're not allowed to say that the Jews, the Jews, killed Jesus Christ, even though the Bible leaves no doubt that Jews, along with Romans, played a role, a key role, in executing Jesus Christ.
And has long been a central dogma of Christianity.
You say that now, and you're expressing hate speech, which is criminalized.
You are not allowed to say that a Jewish person seems to have more loyalty to Israel than to the United States, even if they pretty much say it.
Even if they say, you know what, I love the United States, but at the end of the day, as a Jewish person, my priority is to strengthen and preserve the security of Israel as a refuge for Jews.
And you say, wow, this person sounds like they have more loyalty to this foreign country, Israel, than to their own country, the United States.
Nope, that's hate speech.
That's anti-Semitism by definition.
You're not allowed to say that.
And a whole long list of other political opinions that never used to be considered anti-Semitic, maybe they were anti-Semitic tropes, but now they're official expressions of hate speech.
That if you're on American campus, thanks to the Trump administration, and you say them, or you're a faculty member and you assign materials that express them, you can be and will be subject to punishment.
In the UK, in the EU, in Australia, you say those, you're now subject to arrest and prosecution.
This is how Israel has eroded free speech throughout the West.
And it's amazing.
It's amazing when your own government gets the citizenry to give up their free speech rights.
But to watch some foreign country just march into every other country in the West and say, these statements are not allowed anymore.
If your citizens express these views, you're going to be arrested.
And the government says, yes, sir, sorry, we haven't done it previously.
We should have done it faster.
But we will do it now and make up for it.
It is, it's extremely alarming, but it's also confounding and ultimately quite revealing as well about how these Western democracies work and who wields power within them.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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