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Jan. 15, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
33:25
Bari Weiss and David Ellison's CBS Spreads War Propaganda for Israel

Glenn discusses CBS News' pro-Israel propaganda about the protests in Iran.  ------------------------------ 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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All right, we're going to talk about Iran again, but this is not about whether the United States should intervene militarily and help change the regime as President Trump has been vowing to do, nor is it about whether the current government of Iran is a good government or a bad government or one that Iranians should want or should want to change.
That is entirely up to the Iranians.
I'm not here to talk about whether the Iranian regime or Iranian government is a good or bad regime.
There are very brutal regimes all throughout that region, including ones that the United States and Great Britain support and prop up, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Emiratis that are at least as savage, and I would say more so than Iran.
If you even tried to organize a single protest in Saudi Arabia or in Egypt, they would crush you either by imprisoning you, torturing you, and likely killing you.
So that's not the question either.
The question I want to address is one of media propaganda about trying to lure the United States into intervening militarily in order to change the government of Iran.
And specifically the propaganda that unsurprisingly is coming from CBS News, which as you certainly know was just purchased by the family of Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire, who is the largest single ever donor to the Friends of the IDF, a fanatical supporter of Israel.
He bought Paramount and CBS and CBS News through his son, David Ellison, who is also as fanatical of a Zionist.
And they put as editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she has constantly manipulated the news and censored the news and suppressed the news, one Barry Weiss, who also has her primary life cause being servitude toward Israel.
And that was a big motive in why they bought these media properties because they saw support in the United States for Israel unraveling and they wanted to buy not just that property, but Larry Ellison is now the head of the consortium that's about to buy and control TikTok after the Congress voted to ban TikTok or force a sale to it on the grounds that it was allowing too much anti-Israel content.
And they're also trying, the Ellison family is, to force Werner Brothers to sell itself not to Netflix as it wants to, but instead to the Ellison family in Paramount.
So they control all of its media properties, including CNN.
So this is a very political operation, a very politicized gobbling up of media, social media, and traditional media with the goal of serving Israel.
And the fact that most of the most extreme propaganda is coming from CBS News about Iran, about luring the United States into a war there and nobody else is what this is about.
You can want the United States to intervene.
You can think the Iranian government is the most savage ever on the planet, even though there's right near Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and the Egyptians and a lot of other governments.
That's irrelevant to this video.
This video is about media lies, media propaganda, and how damaging it is in our obligation, especially for me as a journalist, to object when I see it happening.
We just saw it happen just so it's fresh in your mind when it came to Venezuela.
After President Trump, rather abruptly, suddenly without much groundwork laid, ordered the U.S. military to abduct President Maduro and take him back to New York and what was on military terms a successful effort.
Trump supporters caused to viralize all over the internet video of people celebrating that they falsely said they lied where Venezuelans in Venezuela celebrating the removal of Maduro and thinking Trump.
And in each one of those cases where the video is viralized, they weren't in Venezuela, as was claimed.
They were in Miami or other places in the United States or in Argentina or various communities in countries where Venezuelan exiles, Venezuelan dissidents, Venezuelan immigrants who often have a much different view of Venezuela than the people who videos weren't meaningful.
Doesn't mean they shouldn't have been shown, but there was no need to lie and say they were in Venezuela.
And the Venezuelans inside Venezuela were so happy, were so celebratory.
Why weren't there those sorts of videos in Venezuela?
So no matter what you think of the Vanduela operation, you should be angry when people lie to you and propagandize a war by spreading false claims.
No matter what you think of the war, that's how the United States has been lied into so many wars.
We got lied into the war in Vietnam by being told that North Vietnamese had aggressively attacked our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, which now even the U.S. Navy and U.S. military admit was an absolute fabrication and lie.
Obviously, the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq.
Nobody doubted Saddam Hussein was this evil dictator, but that wasn't enough.
We were told he was on the market for nuclear weapons, developing chemical and biological weapons, had an alliance with Al-Qaeda, would likely pass it to them.
All lies to justify the same in Libya about what Gaddafi was and what he was going to do.
It is so commonplace that it's something we ought to combat, no matter your views on these individual wars and regime change operations and whether or not the United States should be the policeman of the world, even though Americans keep saying that they don't.
Now, just to remind you how this all started, the prospect of U.S. intervention in the Iranian protest, Trump on True Social on the 2nd of January, put a True Social post that said, If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.
We are locked and loaded and ready to go.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
Now, what makes that so odd is that it was one thing to bomb Iran by claiming we were doing so to get rid of their nuclear program, even though Tosa Gabber said they didn't have a nuclear weapons program.
Because at least you could justify that as oh, that's a bombing to protect America and its national interest on the possibility that Iran, an adversarial power, would get a nuclear weapon.
But threatening to intervene in Iran and bomb Iran because now we're the policemen of the world and we're going to punish governments that don't give rights to their protesters.
That's completely antithetical to everything that Donald Trump and the MACA movement said they believed in.
That Americans have been making very clear for a long time.
They don't want either.
We don't mind governments that crush dissent and kill protesters.
We give billions of dollars to Egypt, which does that.
We give all kinds of intelligence and military weaponry to Saudi Arabia, which does that, and to the Emiratis and to Jordan and to Uganda and to Rwanda.
And nobody ever objects.
Nobody in the West says, oh, look, why these look at all this repression?
We don't care about repression, except when it's an issue we can exploit to justify regime change in a government that doesn't do the U.S. bidding.
That's the reality.
Now, I don't know if this matters or not.
Usually it doesn't matter what the American people think when it comes time to the U.S. wanting to start a war, but there's new polling from Quinn IPIAC.
And I realize people can dismiss whatever polling that they want that they don't like.
Yesterday, there was a polling from YouTube, from YouGov and The Economist showing that a majority of Americans don't believe that the ICE killing in Minnesota was justified, believe that the ICE agent should be criminally investigated, even want to abolish ICE.
And all I heard was, oh, YouGov is left wing, this, that.
Okay, now here's Quinnipiak.
And this is what they report.
Independents, Democrats, and Republicans think the U.S. should not get involved if protesters in Iran are killed while demonstrating against the Iranian government.
And it's not even close.
Independents are opposed to involvement in Iran by 80 to 11%, Democrats by 79 to 7%, and even Republicans by 53 to 35%.
So apparently, Americans have mean what they've been saying, which is they don't want to keep intervening militarily and spending American resources, fixing other countries, intervening in other countries, controlling them.
That we believe Americans say that our economics and our communities and our states and cities are falling apart.
We don't have economic security for our children.
We believe U.S. resources should be devoted to that instead.
That's what Donald Trump ran on.
And apparently, people took it seriously, which is why they voted for him for that and are continuing, unlike a lot of MAGA influencers and pundits who change their views the second they have to to align with what Trump does.
American citizens don't do that.
They continue to say, no, we said this and this is what we want.
But given that Trump committed the United States to bombing Iran, to intervening in Iran, if protesters are killed, anybody who is eager for the United States to go change the regime in Iran and having the United States go change the regime in Iran has been the supreme wet dream of Israel and Netanyahu.
The number one wish on the Christmas wish list of neocons and Israel loyalists.
They've been craving this for 30 years.
They've been trying to lure the United States to go militarily take out the government that they regard as most threatening to them.
So if you're an Israel fanatic, like the people who control CBS News, David Ellison and Barry Weiss, you saw what President Trump said.
If they kill protesters, we're going to go militarily intervene.
So you have an interest in trying to convince Trump and everybody else that the Iranian government is killing shockingly high, unprecedented numbers of protesters.
I have no doubt the Iranian government has killed protesters.
Some of those protesters are violent and have been violent, burning mosques, murdering agents of the Iranian state.
And obviously, if the United States had nationwide riots funded and armed by a foreign government, as the Israeli media admits it's doing, think about what the U.S. government would do to such people who are throwing Molotov cocktails, were burning down churches, were murdering ICE and FBI agents.
We just saw in Minnesota the entire conservative movement say, if you even remotely threaten an ICE agent, like drive your car roughly in their direction, not with the intent to kill, but with the possibility of hitting him, even if he's going four, three, four miles an hour and he could get out of the way.
And he instead pumps bullets in our head, that's totally justified.
So Israeli media is saying we've been organizing and funding and arming these Iranian protesters from the start.
Mike Pompeo, the former Trump CIA director, said the Mossad is next to every Iranian protester.
So it's not surprising that if there's an uprising that violent funded by a government, foreign country that wants to take you down, you're going to be very repressive and violent.
Any country would, but on top of that, the Iranians don't tolerate dissent.
That is true.
And I have no doubt they've killed innocent protesters, peaceful protesters.
That's not in question.
But that doesn't mean you get to just lie and invent claims.
Like Saddam really was a bad guy.
Like it was a bad government.
If you were in his reach, you didn't want to be in the reach of Saddam Hussein.
He was truly repressive.
His son, especially Uday, was a psychopath.
Oh, that was true.
But it didn't justify the lies that we heard.
Oh, he's trying to get nuclear weapons.
He's had biological couple grabbers as an alliance with Al-Qaeda.
Nothing justifies war propaganda that are based on lies or wild exaggerations.
And yet, out of nowhere, CBS News reported something that absolutely no other news organization has even come close to reporting.
And it's obviously designed, perfectly catered to try and lure Trump or force Trump into intervening militarily in Iran.
Here's what CBS News claimed: over two over 12,000 feared dead after Iran protests.
His video shows Baladis lined up at the morgue.
Quote: Information trickling out of Iran on Tuesday suggests that a crackdown by authorities to end more than weeks of widespread anti-government protests has likely been far more deadly than activists outside the country have reported.
With phone lines opening back up for calls from inside the public, two sources, they have two sources, including both unnamed, including one inside Iran.
Wonder where the other source is, told CBS News on Tuesday that at least 12,000 and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed.
Every other news organization in the West is reporting at most 2,000, 3,000, which is a high number.
Trump himself is saying the U.S. intelligence community has no idea he's seen much lower numbers.
CBS News, run by Israel fanatics, comes out with a number that is four, five, six times greater than almost anyone else's reporting.
And suddenly that becomes gospel and fact all over the world.
Everywhere you can go, you can find people saying Iran has killed 20,000 people and you want to let them go.
You want to sit by.
It just became fact overnight.
Not even the 12,000, the 20,000 number.
They purposely threw out that 20,000.
It could be as high as a meaningless number.
It could be as high as 50,000, as high as 460,000.
So they purposely threw out 20,000, knowing that that number sounds even worse than 12,000, let alone the 2,000 and 3,000 that everyone else reported.
And it became immediately fact.
Here is Tony Docopil, who has become the new CBS news anchor.
And the reason Barry Weiss chose him, nobody knew who Tony Docopil was.
He was like this totally obscure cable person who's on CBS's morning shows, married to Katie Tur, this MSNBC liberal.
I mean, I work in journalism.
I work in media.
I followed this for a living.
I had no idea who Tony Docopil was until last year when Tanahizi Coates released a book that was very critical of Israel and its occupation of the West Bank.
And he went on CBS Morning News.
And Tony Docopil basically accused him of being a terrorist and said, God, your hatred for Israel is so extreme that it seems like this book could be the kind of scribblings one finds in the backpack of an extremist.
Tony Docopil's wife is Israeli.
They lived in Israel for several years, fanatical Israel supporter, as evidenced by that interview.
Barry Weiss and the free press defended him vehemently.
And so she gets there and just like David Ellison makes her the CBS news editor-in-chief because he knows her devotion is to Israel.
Barry Weiss picks someone who knows that his devotion is to Israel.
Wife is Israeli.
They lived in Israel.
He proved with Tan Easy Coates interview that he'll call anyone who doesn't support Israel a terrorist.
He's now the face of the CBS News anchor.
And even he and everybody else was very surprised.
Like Tony Docopil, no one even knows him.
CBS News is already well behind in the ratings compared to the other two networks.
Since Tony Docopil took over, this last quarter of his last month of ratings has evaporated their audience further still.
He's had all kinds of embarrassing moments.
He had a big teleprompter screw up where he just froze, showing his amateurishness.
He did an interview where he talked about growing up in Miami.
I grew up in Miami.
For some reason, he started crying and weeping because of like his love for South Florida.
Because it reminds him of who does that?
Who weeps because they grew up in a place and then someone asks you, like, hey, where did you come up?
I grew up in Miami.
I love it so much.
It reminds me.
I'm sorry.
And it wasn't just like a little bit of tearing.
It was like sustained, prolonged weeping.
And I don't even mind, I don't have a problem with people showing emotion with men crying public.
I think that's healthy.
I don't, I don't really, I'm not someone who minds that.
But like over this and like the histrionics.
And so he's just become kind of like a laughingstock.
And so they not only publish this on their site, but they had Tony.
There are reports tonight out of Iran that at least 12,000 people and possibly as many as 20,000 have been killed in the regime's crackdown on anti-government protests.
Elizabeth Palmer in London has the details.
There was intermittent cell service again today in Iran and information is trickling out about thousands of protesters killed by security forces.
Here you can see Tehrani's looking through bullet-riddled.
All right.
So that's how the show that the segment started.
Reports say 12,000 Iranians have been killed and as many as 20,000, which is a very reckless and irresponsible way to report because you know exactly how that's going to be taken.
And now 20,000 is the number that people cite as gospel.
So that if you don't want to intervene in Iran, you're going to immediately hear 20,000 people they've killed and you want to do nothing.
Here is the only other entity that has reported this, and they're basically copying CBS News.
It's called Iran International.
It's a London-based quote-unquote media outlet organized by Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman and financed and run by and organized by and owned by Saudis who obviously see Iran as a great rival.
Exclusive 12,000 killed in Iran crackdown as blackout deepens.
And here is the editor of Iran International.
His name is, you know what?
I'm going to pull that up in a second.
But I just want to show you this.
This is The Guardian and many, many other news outlets that have reported on what Iran International really is, which is a Saudi propagand outlet.
Here's from here's reporting from 2018: concern over the UK-based Iranian TV channel's links to Saudi Arabia.
Exclusive Iran International is funded by a firm with ties to Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
So it's a Saudi state media outlet.
That is the only other entity reporting what Barry Weiss's CBS is reporting.
Here's another article from 2018, Ofcom, which is the British regulatory agency, examining the TV network over interview praising attack in Iran.
Saudi-linked Iran International TV gave airtime to supporter of assault that killed 24 at parade.
So this is an Iranian outlet claiming they're for Iranians, and yet they constantly cheer aggression against Iran, murder in Iran, bombing of Iran.
So everybody knows what that is.
Now, here is the editor of this Iran International.
And you see how closely this Saudi outlet worked with what in reality is Israeli state media, which is now called CBS News.
His name is Mehdi Parpanchi.
He says, quote, a source inside Iran who was able to call out told CBS News on Tuesday that activist groups working to compile a full death poll from the protests based on reports from medical officials across the country believe the toll was at least 12,000 and possibly as high as 20,000.
Now, again, feel free to say, even if they killed one protester, that's enough.
Who cares what the number is?
If they killed 2,000, that's evil.
Okay, have fun arguing that.
I'm simply saying that we shouldn't accept lies and wild exaggerations that are done to lure the United States into yet another Middle Eastern war for Israel.
Even if you're in favor of it, you should be opposed.
Just like I said to people, you can be in favor of what Trump did in Venezuela, but you should be infuriated that all these pro-Trump influencers lied and circulated videos they claimed were in Venezuela, none of which were in Venezuela.
And they left it up to allow it to continue to viralize well after it was known that those were lies.
Given how often we've been lied into wars, this should be offensive to everybody.
Now, I just picked a couple of examples of people citing this as gospel.
You can find it all over the place.
Here is Y'all Yacobi, who overnight has sort of become this young penn student who's basically only has one issue, and that's love of and subservience to Israel.
He's constantly retweeted by Bill Ackman and other big pro-Israel accounts.
An absolute liar, total propagandist.
Breaking.
CBS News says that the death poll could be as high as 20,000 in Iran right now.
In one week, 20,000 massacred.
Let that sink in.
Do you see how that became just treated as truth?
It's now just 20,000.
Let that sink in.
20,000.
This is a guy who every day woke up and justified the Israeli incineration of babies and women and innocent people and the flattening of Gaza.
At least 70,000 people killed.
And now he's like 20,000 people.
Let that sink in, which is a completely fabricated number.
And who would possibly take seriously the claims of people who cheered on the massacres and slaughter and genocide in Gaza that now suddenly they're concerned for human rights?
They just want freedom for people and democracy and safety.
Notably, they don't care at all and never mention the brutal oppression in other countries that are friendly to Israel, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis, Jordan.
Just a gigantic coincidence that their human rights concerns are suddenly stimulated in the one country that Israel has long wanted regime change because it's the one country that poses any kind of counterbalance to Israel in the region.
Huge coincidence.
By the way, just in case any of you have forgotten, Yao Yoke is one of the whiny, petulant Jewish students who Mike Johnson and the House Republicans invited the Congress to whine about how unsafe he is because he went out and saw pro-Palestinian protests.
He was never assaulted.
No one laid a hand on him.
No one threatened to lay a hand on him.
He's supporting a government that is bullying and slaughtering people throughout the region, yet here he is making himself the victim using exactly the left-wing framework that conservatives spent years mocking, that if you're exposed to ideas on college campuses, it means you're unsafe and have a right to be kept from them.
Listen to this little whiner.
I do not feel safe.
Let me be clear.
I do not feel safe.
I do not.
I do not feel safe.
Let me be clear.
I do not feel safe.
So that's him.
Now, what I think is so interesting here, and here's just a couple of Israeli newspapers, just obviously taking advantage of this, the Times of Israel, report claims at least 12,000 dead in Iran, and largest killing in Iran's modern history.
And I could show you every other media outlet that doesn't have anything close to this.
Here's the New York Times.
This is about the brutality of the Iranian government.
This is today.
Shoot to kill.
Accounts of brutal crackdown emerged from Iran.
As many as 3,000 fear dead, as witnesses describe government forces firing on unarmed protesters, as many as 3,000, meaning that's the maximum.
The New York Times is owned by the Sulzberger family, longtime supporters of Israel.
They supported the Israeli attack on Hamas.
So spare me the claim that there's some sort of pro-Iranian outlet.
Here's Reuters.
And this is what they say: quote, U.S.-based rights group, H-R-A-N-A, said that of the 2,300 people whose deaths it had confirmed, 1,850 were protesters.
So that means 153 were police or other agents of the Iranian government.
And we have video of protesters kicking police officers in Iran to death.
It said 16,784 people have been detained, a sharp increase from the figure it gave on Monday.
Now, again, I don't think it's actually uncommon.
I'm not even saying it's, I'm not defending it.
I'm just saying it's not uncommon.
But if you have massive nationwide protests against your government, where the protesters are armed by a foreign power, which is really media admits it has been doing inside Iran, most governments are going to crack down on that with violence and imprisonment.
As I said, we just watched the discourse when an ICE agent pumped three bullets into the head of a woman who was trying to drive away because the argument was, oh, he might have been hurt by her car that was just starting to pull away.
Imagine if a bunch of Antifa people broke out into riots all over the country, were kicking to death police officers, were getting arms from China, and we're opening fire on agents of the state.
What do you think the United States government would do in response?
But again, my issue is only this.
Don't let media outlets lie to you or wildly exaggerate in order to deceive and mislead you, no matter how much you support what their underlying agenda is.
It has to be offensive to anybody.
Well, let me just underscore all of this by saying that Donald Trump went on Barry Weiss and David Ellison's network and was interviewed by the Israeli supporter, Tony Dakopil.
And it was actually funny because Trump, being Trump, said things you're not supposed to say.
He basically said, like, the only reason why you have this job is because I'm president.
And he also said, he also at one point referred to Dakopil as an Israeli because I guess he knows his wife is Israeli and they live there.
And even in the clip I'm about to show you, Trump was pretty much smirking and saying, I know if we attack Iran, you're going to be really happy about that.
But the point of this video is that Dakopil was asking about these reports that came from him and the Saudi front group that 12,000 to 20,000 protesters were killed in Iran.
And Trump says he has no idea what the number is, that he's seen numbers far less.
And Trump since the top, this gigantic, massive, sprawling U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, that has all kinds of people inside Iran, all kinds of surveillance.
And here's what Trump himself said.
Mr. President, thank you very much for doing this.
We really appreciate it.
We're standing here on an active Ford Assembly line.
A little bit of loud.
Incredible symbol of American manufacturing power.
And I got a lot of questions about it.
But I actually want to start overseas with Iran.
Americans woke up this morning and they saw that you said help is on the way.
What do you mean by that?
Well, there's a lot of help on the way and in different forms, including economic help from our standpoint and not going to help Iran very much.
And, you know, we put Iran out of business with their nuclear capacity.
And now, depending on what's actually happening, nobody's been able to give us accurate numbers about how many people they've killed.
Well, on that point, it looks like it could be a pretty substantial number.
And that's going to be a lot of problems.
A lot of problems.
On that point, you did say the U.S. would get involved if Iran started killing protesters.
They have by the many thousands, according to reports.
We'll see what that is.
I've heard two numbers, but we'll see what that is.
Well, now we're hearing that they're going to start hanging protesters tomorrow.
So it comes back to the question: have they crossed your red line or has the line moved?
I haven't heard about the hanging.
If they hang them, you're going to see some things that I don't know where you come from and what your thought process is, but you'll perhaps be very happy.
I don't know where you come from.
I mean, I don't think you come from America.
You come from Israel, right?
Like, you lived in Israel, your wife is really.
You got appointed to this job because you love Israel.
That's why David Ellison and Barry Weiss put you here.
And he's like, my guess is if we do what we would do, if they hang people, you're going to be very happy because, of course, you hate Iran because you're Israeli.
But the more important point there is that Trump understands the media so well.
He just has an intuitive understanding for who people are like that.
And he doesn't have the filter that you're supposed to have, supposed to in politics, not to say things like that.
I mean, it's just like Trump has imposed hate speech laws, hate speech codes on American campuses, forcing them to take it that say it's anti-Semitic to say all sorts of things, including that specific Jewish individuals have more loyalty to Israel.
You can get suspended, punished, expelled if you say that on American campus.
Like, hey, I think Barry Weiss or Ben Shapiro seemed to have more loyalty to Israel.
But then he goes to the Knesset and he's like, yeah, there's Maryam Adelson.
Look at her with all her money.
And he's like, I asked Miriam Adelson last when she was in the White House, what do you love more, Israel or the U.S.?
And she refused to answer.
I think it's pretty clear what her answer is.
He's basically accusing her of being more loyal to Israel, even though she's Jewish, and that would violate the speech code.
That's just Trump.
He doesn't have this.
He says things that he thinks are true and often are, and doesn't filter them.
But the more important thing here is that Trump himself, when he heard Tony Docopil, and look at Tony Docopil trying to lure him into the war, thousands were killed.
Didn't you say you're going to intervene if that happened?
What about the hanging?
That crosses your red line.
And Trump said, I don't know about those numbers.
I've seen numbers much less.
I've seen some higher ones.
So not even the U.S. government, U.S. intelligence community is claiming to know these numbers.
Somehow, Barry Weiss and David Ellison alone in the world have decided that the number that they've killed is 12,000 as high as 20,000, knowing that that sketchy, shifty, manipulative language as high as 20,000 would then be used as people as the truth to say, oh, 20,000 people have now been killed.
They know exactly what they're doing.
These are lies.
This is war propaganda.
And so often now you're seeing claims that are coming from CBS News that are clearly about pleasing the Trump administration or Israel that no other news outlets are reporting.
And a lot of people for the moment are being blindly unskeptical, just like treating them as gospel as gospel.
I think everybody who claims to hate legacy media, corporate media still has somewhere in their brain the idea that they're credible.
So if they say something they like, they'll latch onto it.
And at the very least, what this shows is that if CBS News is reporting something that nobody else is reporting, it deserves extreme amounts of skepticism, especially if they're showing no evidence.
They're just saying two sources told us, one of whom was in Iran, the other one of whom was in some other country.
Support U.S. intervention in Iran if you want.
Support the U.S. being the policeman of the world.
We're going to go bring freedom and whatever to Venezuela and then to Iran.
We're going to bring freedom.
And okay, go support that if you want.
Just don't be grateful to be lied to.
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