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Jan. 31, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:02:13
Q&A With Glenn: On Nick Fuentes' Support for Minneapolis Killings, Dems and "Abolish ICE," and Josh Shapiro's Antisemitism Whining

Glenn answers your questions about Nick Fuentes, ICE, Josh Shapiro, and more.  ---------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Justified Violence Rhetoric 00:15:05
Good evening.
It is Friday, January 30th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update.
As many of you likely know, we try to devote every Friday night to a Q ⁇ A session with the audience, particularly people who are part of our local community who have submitted questions throughout the week that we try and devote as much time on the Friday night show as possible to answering as many of them as we can because they're almost uniformly excellent and they cover a wide range of topics, including ones we wouldn't necessarily cover on our own.
So I always look forward to that and I'm excited to get to that.
Before we do though, I just want to make a quick programming note, which is some of you may have seen that yesterday we promoted tonight's show as not just May, but also as entailing what we called a major announcement or major news about our program and the future of it, which we had intended to share with you.
We're very excited about it.
At the last minute, just a couple of into place in a way that was make the announcement tonight.
I was very excited to do so, but look for that.
Answer as many of them as we can.
The first one is about the ICE shootings, and it comes from Teardrinker, who wrote the following, quote, hi, Glenn.
I'm interested in what your response to what Nick Flent has recently said about you, Ryan Grimm, Max Blumenthal, and other left-leaning journalists bearing the lead when it comes to these shootings in Minneapolis.
It is amusing to me.
Pretty much every week there will be some media outlets when they refer to me for whatever purposes they have as being an independent journalist.
Some refer to me as a leftist journalist.
And then this week, for example, the Deli Beast, a couple of other liberal rags tried to weaponize the fact that I was critical of several of Trump's policies this week by calling me the pundit turd MAGA loyalist or the MAGA defender Glenn Greenwald.
And the next day you can just pick up another journal and see the left wing, the far left, Glenn Greenwald.
So it's just a good reminder of how little meaning these titles actually have.
But I understand what's happening here and I have no problem with it.
The questioner goes on, quote, Fuentes says you guys are all really against deportations anyway, and that these kind of violent apprehensions were inevitable because people out because people who do not want to leave were always going to require coercion from authorities.
He also disputes the mainstream claims that these are just protesters and says that they're actually organized far-left agitators communicating with each other through signal where members of ICE are and then deliberately showing up to harass and physically impede them from making arrest.
The Twitter user Data Republican has published research that seems to corroborate that these are not organic protests and that there are serious money and organization behind them.
I have to say, I tend to agree more with them on this.
Obviously, it's terrible and tragic what happened to those two people in Minnesota, but I have agreed that if, but I agree that if Alex Predi hadn't thrown himself in between those officers Officers and the persons they were detaining with a gun in his waistband, he would be alive today.
I'm not defending what they did to him.
Arresting him would have been the job.
However, being in the violent hair trigger environment where people are attacking you, I can see how that could lead to tragic consequences sometimes.
What do you think?
Are these actual protests or are these organized agitators operating in groups to disrupt ICE operations and create chaotic scenes to drum up angry reactions from regular Minneapolis residents?
All right, there's a lot of question that I think deserves a good amount of analysis because it raises issues that I think are extremely important in relation to all of this and to politics generally that haven't gotten nearly enough attention in connection with these ICE shootings, which tend to be very reactive, day-to-day partisan type of narratives.
So I want to spend as little time as possible on the question of what I think of the specific killing of Alex Predi and whether or not it was justified.
Because there was, well, first of all, I have done several segments on that, which if you're interested in my views, you can watch.
And there's been just an endless tsunami of commentary from every different camera angle.
I presume by now people's opinions are pretty set.
My own view was that it was not justified.
And that is a point I just want to make in general, not about the Alex Predi case or even the Renee Good one, but one that relates to the critique here that was offered by Nick Fuentes and by a lot of other people on the right.
That look, if we want to have mass deportations, you're just going to have to accept that we're going to have to get our hands dirty and do some really ugly, violent things.
I'm not even sure.
I don't think Nick Fuentes is wrong about that, but there are a lot of implications from it that I think are worth examining.
So, first of all, my general view, and I actually believe this is a view that most Americans have, and it's why people don't generally like seeing violence on the street, especially when the violence is coming from armed agents of the state against American citizens, is that there's nothing graver that a state can do, literally nothing more consequential or graver than taking the life of one of its citizens.
In order for them to do that as punishment for a crime, there's an endless array of trials and appeals and legal challenges and new laws, because we want to make it difficult on purpose for the state to extinguish life in part because of the sanctity of life, but also because of the historic dangers, the obviously visible dangers from having armed agents of the state, especially, not even after a trial or a sentence, but just on the street reacting.
You want to make sure that the circumstances in which federal armed agents or police agents are justified in putting bullets into the heads or the backs of American citizens and killing them is extremely narrow.
We want to really err on the side of that being a very small range of circumstances.
Obviously, when the self-defense of the police is being directly incredibly threatened, obviously, if someone they're trying to apprehend points a gun at them or tries to pull out a gun or uses another weapon against them, of course, the police officers have a right to respond in self-defense and kill them.
But that's what I mean by that being a very narrow range of justifications.
I look at it exactly the same way as war.
I'm not somebody who's prepared to say that war can never be justified, but the idea that war is a last resort is both a cliché, but an absolutely vital truth.
And we have completely dispensed with that.
And the reasons we go to war and the casualness with which we go to war is unlike any other country on the planet.
And I think that's one of the major problems in the United States.
And I think those two things are actually related as well.
There's all sorts of historical examples when empires start using brutality and savagery and dehumanization to justify wars all over the world,
that eventually that mentality comes back to the imperial capital and it starts creating violence in the United States that becomes quite similar to both in tactics and in underlying justifications to what had been what the government spent decades teaching the American or the their citizens to accept.
I think that's part of what's going on here as well.
So I do have a strong presumption when I see armed agents of the state shooting American citizen.
I guess I have a high bar for when we ought to applaud that, when we ought to justify it.
I'm not saying it has to be a perfect case.
Obviously, people react imperfectly.
Human beings react imperfectly in difficult situations when their instincts are kicked in and their justifiable desire for self-defense is involved.
I'm not saying rigorous in the sense that it has to be a perfectly calculated evaluation that stands up with complete scrutiny retrospectively.
I'm just saying that the standards we use as a society to say this is justified have to be a lot narrower than, at least to me, they seem to be, just like going to war has now been accompanied by a wide range of justifications beyond self-defense.
So that's my first issue with it is that I think in general, that mentality is missing from a lot of our discourse.
And I do think a lot of it comes from war.
I think a lot of it comes from the increasingly violent rhetoric that we use in our domestic politics, the idea that the two sides are becoming increasingly comfortable with seeing people with different ideologies shot and killed.
Obviously, we saw that with Charlie Kirk, but we've seen it in a lot of other cases as well.
I think it's part of what's going on here.
And that's what one of the things that concerns me about these last events in Minneapolis.
Now, I hadn't seen the specific clip where Nick Fuentes apparently mentioned me along with Max Bumenthal and Ryan Grimm as people who are essentially, I guess, from what I see here, disguising their real motive,
that the concern that people like us have isn't that we think the police use force unjustifiably in either of these cases, but instead that we're really just opposed under a lot to the underlying goal of mass deportations and are kind of therefore obstructing and objecting to everything done in the name of that policy that we actually oppose.
I don't think that's a very fair criticism in the slightest.
And I think everybody, including people on the far right, I think Nick is a good example, to be very careful of making that claim.
There are all kinds of policies we can support where we object to the implementation of them.
I was very much in favor of the withdrawal from Afghanistan that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban and then President Biden carried out.
But I was obviously extremely critical of the fact that on the way out, we vaporized a car full of innocent people, including children, just a family, because of mistaken intelligence or recklessness or whatever.
And I was disgusted by the fact that we just so casually erased the lives of all these civilians on our way out.
And it doesn't mean, oh, no, what you're really opposed to is the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
You're just using that as a proxy to criticize this.
No, I was in favor, very much in favor, passionately in favor of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but still very critical of the use of violence that was effectuated in order to, that was used in order to effectuate it.
And you can, there's a zillion other examples where you can say, oh, I'm on the right.
I think the murder of Ashley Babbitt was completely unjustified.
She was an unarmed woman killed by armed agents of the state who wasn't posing a threat to anybody.
That was my position, certainly.
And a lot of liberals said, oh, they're not really, they don't care about Ashley Babbitt.
They're not analyzing the facts of the killing.
They just think that the American right should have been able to overthrow the government that day and they're angry about anything that was done to impede that.
And like maybe there were some people on the right who were just angry that they protested and overturned the election and they were just using every case like that.
But I'm sure there were a lot of people on the American right who didn't necessarily want hordes of people storming into the Capitol and killing politicians and forcibly overthrowing the election, but who were just genuinely angry about the facts surrounding the shooting of Ashley Babbitt.
So, I mean, that tactic of saying, oh, they're claiming to have this view, but in reality, it's masking some underlying view that is really driving that.
It's kind of like chief armchair psychoanalysis of the kind typically Nick avoids and that I think it's in the interest of all of us to avoid without strong evidence because we all can be subjected to that kind of claim in order to discredit whatever we're claiming that we believe in.
And just by the way, I do think Ryan Graham is opposed to deportations of people in the country illegally who haven't committed crimes.
There's a lot of Democrats, most liberals on people on the left have that view.
I'm not sure what Max Bullman Paul's views are.
I'm willing to assume that he does too.
But I'm not a person who has been opposed to deporting people who enter the country illegally, especially if they're people who have committed crimes beyond just entering the country illegally, who have posed some menace to the country as opposed to actually contributing favorably to it.
And that's important for the last point I want to make about this idea of what mass deportation entails.
So at least in my case, I'm not masking any opposition.
My views on immigration have been very clear.
In fact, one of the very first articles I wrote when entering journalism, even when I was associated with the left, was there was a lot of claims going around that the American right and that conservatives had become much more aggressive about favoring limits on immigration.
And the reason for that was that they were driven by racism and white nationalism, that they didn't want non-white people entering the country.
And I read an article saying, like, look, I'm sure there are some people who oppose immigration for racist reasons.
You can find people who support any cause that have malicious intentions or just very misguided ones.
But the article I wrote was saying it was defending a immigration restrictionist congressman named Tom Tancredo of Colorado by basically saying, I don't have to necessarily agree with Tom Tencredo, but I don't think at all that being concerned about or opposed to untrammeled immigration in the United States necessarily means that you have racist motives.
There are all kinds of other valid reasons why people are concerned about this.
I think part of my worldview on immigration was very much shaped by growing up in South Florida in the 80s.
And I've talked about this before, where the Cuban community, the immigrant community in Miami, who was extremely isolated, but big, but they had isolated themselves because they always believed they were in the United States, even the ones who were citizens, not permanently, but because they were going to go back to Cuba once the U.S. government got rid of Castro for them.
And they especially thought that in the 80s with Ronald Reagan, that he was going to get rid of Castro.
And so they never really integrated into society.
They never learned English.
And then so I grew up in a place where there was this big community of people who had united together based on common language and common political views and common tradition that Americans writ large were excluded from.
Why Mass Deportations Are Unlikely 00:08:35
And while I understand that human tendency, I always, even as, you know, as a young teenager, I always felt like there was just something wrong with that, that that was not good for society, that major communities living next to each other and among them couldn't even communicate in a common language.
And so I always felt like concerns about immigration were valid and not racist.
I am not one of these people who's marching in the street saying every person who went to the United States should be able to live here, to be able to live in the United States and stay here permanently.
But I think the point Nick makes, and this is why I think this is one of Nick's virtues as a commentator is that unlike most people, he's willing to be very candid about what the policy is that he's defending, what the ideas are that he's advocating.
And as a result, he says things and realizes things that most people are absolutely unwilling to say.
And the fact is that if you are going to mass deport every person who's in the United States illegally, you're talking about who knows how many now.
I think it's 15 million, 25 million, whatever it is.
Think about that.
If you're going to go find them wherever they are in their workplaces, in their homes, you're going to round them up.
You have to put them somewhere.
You have to have massive efforts to get them out of the country, sometimes with courts, sometimes with not, sometimes not.
It's going to require one of the most extraordinary US federal armed power on domestic soil that we've ever had in the history of our country.
And that's going to entail all kinds of abuses, not only against people who are in the country illegally, but people who are in the country legally as well, as we're already seeing.
And if you ask Americans and polls, this is really true, do you support removing from the country everyone who entered illegally?
They'll say, yes, I do.
Use a very kind of clinical abstract formulation.
You tell people they entered illegally.
Most Americans are going to say, yeah, if they entered illegally, there should be some consequence.
People aren't accustomed to saying, oh, yeah, they broke the law, but who cares?
Let them stay.
But there's a big difference between supporting that idea in the abstract and understanding, like Nick Fluntes does, but then supporting what would be required to actually make that happen.
Which is why I think so many people, even if they believe in principle that people in the country illegally should all be deported because they broke the law, I don't think there are many people who are willing to support a policy if they understand it once they start seeing what that would actually entail.
We're getting a tiny glimpse of it now.
There really aren't mass deportations.
Trump in 2025 was a little bit above Obama's 2011 and 2012 deportation numbers.
A little misleading.
I'm just saying there's not mass deportations on this grand scale that a lot of people on the right envision.
There's a lot of theatrical immigration rhetoric and the like.
And they are deporting more people than certainly the Biden administration did.
And even with the very limited mass deportations that we're seeing, just look at some of the barbarism and the cruelty that we've all seen and the extremism required and invoking 18th century laws to claim that we're under an invasion so we can just ship people to El Salvador, have nothing to do with that country, to one of the worst prisons on the planet, and now actual violence in the street.
And I want to just use the war on drugs as an analogy.
We've been fighting the war on drugs, declared war on drugs for 80 years and have barely made a dent in the flow of drugs into the United States.
And in many ways, drug availability has increased, drugs have proliferated.
And we've been bombing and fighting and engaging all kinds of wars with the DEA and the military all over the world in the name of the war on drugs.
And we've made no progress, which is why I found it so laughable that somehow the drug supply was going to meaningfully diminish in the United States if we bombed a bunch of boats off Venezuela or even changed their government.
And so the question is, you know, knowing that drug addiction and the widespread use of drugs for many people really is a scourge.
I mean, it's fatal for a lot of Americans.
Why haven't we found a way to stop the flow of drugs inside the United States or their manufacture and distribution in the United States?
And the answer is we could, but the cost is a cost that no one is willing to pay.
Given the ease with which you can transport drugs, the size of drugs, they're very small.
There's all sorts of creative ways to make sure they are manufactured without detection or entering the United States.
The only way that you could actually stop it is by turning the United States into an utter and complete police state, even more than you might think we already are.
Just constant, massive surveillance of everybody, police being able to just, armed agents of the federal government, the DEN, the like, being able to break into people's homes and offices and cars, no warrants of any kind.
Just being able to demand that people can, that they can inspect whatever is in the contents of a box you're carrying or any other kind of luggage or container, not when you're in the border, but inside the United States.
I mean, just the level of erosion of civil liberties that would necessarily be required if we wanted to actually stop the availability of drugs inside the United States is so draconian and would destroy every other component of our society that even though most people agree it would be great if we could stop the availability of drugs inside the United States,
given how much harm it does, nobody's willing to pay the price or virtually nobody is willing to pay the price in terms of the sacrifice of our core liberties that define who we are as a country.
And I think mass immigration is very similar.
Could you round up and first find, round up and deport many millions of people?
Sure, you could.
I mean, the U.S. government, if it puts enough resources into it and has its will and determination, probably could do that.
But the amount of disarray and violence that it would create, the amount of massive strengthening of armed agents of the state, and not the state, the federal government, that would entail the surveillance that it would induce, the increased detention authorities that the government, it would be a complete attack on almost every other value in terms of how our government reacts with its population.
That's what would be necessary in order to engage in mass deportations.
And I think Nick Flintis is right that look, what's happened is a lot of people supported that theory in principle.
But now that they're getting just a tiny glimpse of what it looks like, a lot of people are horrified by it and saying, yeah, I want these people removed, but I don't want to see this kind of violence.
I don't want their shootouts in the streets between citizens and our government.
Nobody wants that.
Or the kind of cruelty we've seen, not just from Trump immigration policies, but Obama and Biden and so much worse.
People are squeamish about these things.
They don't want to support that.
They want to support the concept of justice that people who break the law should pay a price.
But if the price is way too high, and I think for mass deportations, it would completely destroy the United States forever, even if you think illegal immigration is as well, then I think that's something to strongly consider.
You can be in favor of mass deportations or just deportations of people who are here illegally and who have committed crimes, proven themselves a drain on society, but not the ones who have worked here for 30 years, raised kids who are integrated in citizens.
That is a very valid principle line to draw, just on its own, but also because even if you think in theory everyone who entered the country here illegally should be removed, what it would do to this country, what it would require in terms of the transformation of our government and how all of our rights are understood or actually just evaporating is so much worse than whatever value you think comes from that.
And I think that's a lot of what this reaction is.
And a final point I want to make, the final point I want to make, and it's a little bit complicated.
Perhaps we'll do a show on this once.
I think we might have done a show on the right-wing politics of the 1990s, but I do think there is something very odd about far-right figures like Nick Fuentes.
Right-Wing Politics of the 1990s 00:10:42
And by far right, I just mean like how society and the government understands the political spectrum, cheering on the presence of armed federal agents, Customs and Border Patrol and ICE.
And now they're sending in the other agents, the FBI, the ATF, that they're cheering the deployment of these armed federal agents in American cities who are now using violence against American citizens because the politics of the 1990s was driven in very large part by what had become the central perception,
you might say of far-right politics, but really even mainstream conservative politics, that the gravest danger to liberty in the United States was the fact that we have standing federal armies and these agencies, even like Bureau of Land Management, they would go into places in the West and force people off land or enforce rules that had long been outside the purview of DC.
Obviously, the ATF and the FBI with things like ACO and the killing of Randy Weaver, vehement opposition to empowering the armed agents of the federal government and deploying them in routine operations with a constant presence in American states and cities, there was probably nothing the American right actually hated more than that.
And things like Wake as they invented this fear-mongering, this kind of boogeyman that they called right-wing militias.
And it started appearing on the front page on the front cover of Time magazine.
It was basically like a bunch of guys, you know, during the on the weekend, taking their rights seriously as Americans, gathering with guns, forming what the Second Amendment calls well-regulated militias, and basically saying, we're not going to attack anybody, but we're preparing ourselves to defend ourselves against armed tyranny by the state, like what we saw in Wake Olin and Ribby Ridge.
And the Clinton administration seized on this, gravely exaggerated the threat that it posed, and used it to obtain a large array of authoritarian policies that exist to this very day.
In fact, that was right when the internet was starting to emerge.
And the Clinton administration seized on this, this idea that we have far-right anti-government radicals in the United States who need to be stopped.
And therefore, they demanded a back door to the internet, full and unfettered access that tech companies were required to give them.
And it was a big debate and they barely failed because of Republican opposition that emerged out of this deep concern that we're not supposed to have federal armed standing agents at the direction of the president who govern from DC the streets of our communities and our states.
This was a major political theme of the 1990s in American right politics.
And I understand the argument.
Well, now it's different because now we have the pretext, not of the far-right militias, but of illegal aliens.
But if you endorse this infrastructure that's being built, the normalization of these kinds of agencies just marching through the street and using pretty permissive standards for when they can kill people, including American citizens.
How do you think the Groyper movement is going to fare under that?
How do you think other far-right factions are going to fare under that?
They're still viewed as extremely hostile threats to the American government.
Any anti-government action is any ideological group outside of the two parties is viewed as a threat to the United States.
It's been the argument in the view of the Homeland Security and the U.S. security state for many years that the gravest threat to the United States is not Iran or China or Russia or Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
It's homegrown right-wing extremists, white nationalists and anti-government radicals.
They're at least going to be as much in the crosshairs and have been as people who are in the country illegally.
Nick Funtes was put on the no-fly list after January 6th.
Many other people had their civil liberties radically curtailed.
And you can say, well, look, they did it to us.
So why shouldn't we do it back?
Why should we care about principle?
But each time this is escalated and fortified, and this is a major fortification of armed federal police powers and so many other powers that will come with it about detention and surveillance and the like and the name of this policy of mass deportations that isn't happening anyway.
I think you have to be mad or maybe just easily forgetful of history to be in a faction the government considers radical.
And that's certainly true of the far right and the Groyper movement and cheer this on as if you're not going to be not possibly, but almost inevitably a main target of it and not into some imagined distant future, but very, very imminently.
And I think a lot of people on the right should probably stop and think about the consequences of other cheering, but I think the kind of focus on the need to purge Americans of immigrants makes that kind of more abstract analysis or concerns about the future unlikely, but hopefully some of that can start to dawn in.
All right, next question.
It comes from the millman who asked this.
Glenn, wondering what your assessment would be on the sincerity of Democratic opposition to ICE funding.
Do they really want to, quote, abolish ICE?
Is this similar to their quote pro-choice stance, which historically has been all talk and no action?
With an example of Obama promising to codify Rogue versus Wade, but he never did.
Is this another faux debate between two parties that basically agree on this subject?
Yes, it's a faux debate between countries that the two parties that agree on this subject.
Although I do think this is one area, and I'm typically a very, very skeptical, you could even say jaded of the idea that there's these radical differences between the parties.
I mean, there definitely is, there are meaningful differences between currently the Republicans and Democrats when it comes to the treatment of people who are in the country illegally.
I mean, you can go find, you know, video of Hillary Clinton as recently as 2016 saying, or 2014 saying, I don't care if we have to separate families.
It's terrible, but we got to get these people out of our country.
We can't allow them to come here illegally, illegally, and staying.
She wasn't only talking about the people who committed crimes, which I do ultimately think is going to be a compromise.
Let's focus on the people who are actually doing damage to the United States and more than just an abstract way of being here illegally.
I don't think we're going to get to this extremist kind of mass deportation, Which Trump promised in his first term, but never got close to.
I think in part for that reason, there's just too much opposition, not enough support.
So I, you know, the idea that Democrats, in one sense, this whole embrace of more radical ways of speaking, I've talked about this before.
They like throw in obscenities very unnaturally that are clearly scripted by consultants.
You see Gavin Newsom being unconstrained in his rhetoric.
A lot of this just comes from an attempt to copy Donald Trump.
And why wouldn't you?
He's been unbelievably successful in transforming American politics.
I mean, I do think he's the most consequential American president in our lifetime.
Yeah, I would probably go so far as to say that.
Not just the effects he's had on our U.S. government, but on worldwide political culture.
And a major part of his success is that he crosses these lines all the time.
And it makes him appear to be an enemy of the establishment that most people hate.
And I think the major problem of the Democrats over the last 10 years is that they have been increasingly perceived, based on the way they chose to so histrionically oppose Trump as more and more loyalists of the establishment.
And I think that's an accurate perception.
They did align with the establishment that hated Trump with the U.S. deep state, with the corporate media, with large corporations.
They became the party of normalcy and norms, which people hated.
And the more they tried that, the more politicians they offered who just seemed like a kind of safe continuation of the status quo, the worse they fared.
And so I do think they have this kind of this very like tactical notion that they should embrace more radical ideas like abolish ICE, but it's just not who they are.
These are like very compliant conformist people.
They are very pro-establishment.
Most Democrats are.
That is what the party is.
That's its function.
That's who funds it.
Those are its allies.
Those are its ideas.
And that's why I think so much of this is coming off as inauthentic.
And at the end of the day, I also just don't think that they are willing to embrace these kinds of, even if you can convince them that abolish ICE was a politically successful or politically appealing idea for the upcoming election based on what will happen.
I just still think they're so instinctively opposed to embracing the kind of rhetoric that say is appropriate for in their minds, what the far left does, that they won't do it.
And then there is the ideological fact that the Democratic Party is despite Biden's, let's call it open border policy, has long been a party that has been opposed to untrammeled immigration.
Going back to when the Democratic Party was the party of labor and believed, like Bernie Sanders still does, it's in his blood that unrestricted immigration is a corporate plot by the Koch brothers to drive down wages for the American worker by flooding the supply of workers in the United States.
And there's long been this kind of opposition in the Democratic Party for various reasons to untrammeled immigration.
And they very much, you know, when they criticized Trump in the campaign, it wasn't for being too extreme on the evils of immigration.
It was saying, you're the reason we have untrammeled immigration because you blocked this legislation that would have fixed it.
And Trump's argument was, you don't need legislation and this legislation sucks, but you don't need it.
The president could just close the border.
I think everybody scoffed at that time.
And that is one of the major vindications of the first year of the Trump administration was not only did he have the authority to do it, he exercised it.
Israel Criticism Censorship 00:05:04
And that has been undeniably a success from the perspective of what Trump has promised and followed through with.
All right.
Next question Is from possible villain.
So, is somebody kind of teetering between good versus evil?
Seems to be strongly considering falling on the side of evil and becoming a full-on villain, or maybe feels the compulsion to do so, even if they don't want to.
Um, these names are always nonsensical on the one hand, but I think quite revealing to people's psyches on the other if you analyze them long enough.
But anyway, possible villain, and we're rooting for you.
I won't say which outcome I hope for you.
Says this, quote, Hi, Glenn.
This that segment you did after October 7th on the right's love for Israel-driven censorship is aging well, but it seems like the Democrats aren't immune either.
Josh Shapiro threw a tantrum for Kamala's campaign, asking him some pretty basic questions.
Do you think he's an agent?
Is it true that Kamala kind of profiled him based on his identity and past?
Uh, well, first of all, let me just say that long before October 7th, I have been talking about the Israel exception to the First Amendment, the fact that a huge amount of censorship, yes, has been devoted to conservative students on campus and very left-wing climates and the like.
But the primary target, by now it's not even close, but even before October 7th, the primary target was we're outspoken, effective Israel critics.
I mean, friend of the show, Norman Finkelstein, got approved for tenure based on his scholarship by a committee, and Alan Dershowitz went on a crusade against him, arguing that he was too hateful of Israel to be promoted.
The offer of uh tenure was withdrawn.
So many professors getting fired.
I just go, we could do a whole series on that, but well before October 7th, I was worried worrying about this, and it has always been bipartisan.
Obviously, since October 7th, it has intensified enormously.
And one of the primary strategies that has been used to effectuate censorship is the one that is always used.
It's the one that the liberal left used in the age of peak wokeism.
Oh, look, there are these victim groups, they're very marginalized, they're very vulnerable.
And while certain things that are said about you as a privileged person don't really harm you or pose a threat, these are people who are so endangered, so singularly hated and vulnerable that you can't have words and ideas about them being circulated that might increase the level of critical scrutiny of them.
And for a decade, the American right, and this is one of the common ground that one of the basis of the common grounds that I had with them was that they were relentlessly, viciously mocking this mindset as based on what is this on this very un-American idea that you're entitled to as an adult, we're not talking about elementary school, to go as an adult and not hear things in classrooms that make you feel unsafe, even though they're just words.
And I think that was one of the arguments that conservatives and other people opposed to wokeism successfully made to kind of tamper it down and create a backlash.
But it has been amazing to watch since October 7th, this spate of, I would say, unparalleled institutional and cultural censorship aimed at Israel critics in most Western countries, including the United States.
And we've gone over all those examples and all the evidence many, many times.
I just did one on how the Anti-Defamation League is now the leading censorship organization in the United States.
But the basis of it always is this victimhood claim that mirrors exactly what the woke victimhood claim is.
It's just more preposterous and laughable because of all the groups to try and claim are vulnerable, marginalized groups in American society.
American Jews are pretty much last on the list.
But it's been done unflinchingly.
There was even an ABL report warning, I think at the end of 2023, complaining that Hollywood hasn't should include Jews in their diversity roles because Jews traditionally have been blocked from opportunities in Hollywood.
Just no doors opening for Jews in Hollywood.
And that's been true from the beginning.
That's how far this self-victimized illusion has gone.
And the idea that American Jews are some sort of unique victim group, that there's massive anti-Semitism constantly being openly expressed is all based on just the most ungenerous interpretations of everything, like a lot of the claims of other types of bigotry being radically spreading as opposed to being camped down.
Pathetic Book Tour 00:06:46
And Josh Shapiro's book tour is based on whining about anti-Semitism.
That is one of the most pathetic cases I think I've ever seen.
It illustrates this broader cynicism that pro-Israel groups have tried to scare American Jews and Western Jews to their core in believing they're under constant threat and assault and need censorship laws and other types of ways to attack Israel critics.
That is what these kind of groups typically do.
People aren't afraid.
They don't need these advocacy groups.
But it goes beyond that, just self-organizational stuff.
It just is a broader tactic to regenerate support for Israel and justify the suppression of Israel criticism.
But Josh Shapiro was vetted as one of the last three vice presidential possibilities for Kamala Harris to choose.
It was Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, and Tim Waltz, the governor of Minnesota.
And one of the reasons, because a lot of people thought, of course it should be Josh Shapiro.
He's the governor and very popular in one of the most important states in this election, Pennsylvania.
And one of the reasons they didn't pick Josh Shapiro, but picked Tim Waltz instead, is because they perceived him as a slimy opportunist who would have no loyalty to the administration or to anyone else but himself if they won.
And there weren't very many views of the Kamala Harris campaign that ended up vindicated, but that was definitely one of them because in this book, he's basically accusing the Kamala Harris campaign of anti-Semitism because they asked him about whether he has any ties to the Israeli government still.
Now, when you vet a candidate for the highest office in the land, and that's vice president as well as president, almost nothing is off limit.
I mean, nothing is off-limits because you're petrified that there are things lurking that you don't know about that are going to be discovered by somebody else and it can destroy the campaign.
It's notorious for anyone who becomes a nominee or is buying for the nomination or wants to be chosen for vice president has every aspect of their life completely pipped apart.
And only one person in the history of this process that I'm aware of has not only complained about it, but called it anti-Semitic, and that's Josh Shapiro in his book.
Now, if the Harris campaign just asked him out of nowhere based on nothing, hey, by the way, do you have any ties to Israel?
I still think that would be a legitimate question for a lot of reasons, but at least I could understand the view that that's a little strange.
What makes this so unbelievable is that Josh Shapiro was actually an agent of the Israeli government as an adult.
He worked for the Israeli government.
He was an employee of the Israeli government.
He got paid by the Israeli government to carry out work on behalf of the Israeli government.
He also, in his own words, did volunteer work for the IDF.
He never enlisted in his own country's military that he wanted to lead.
He never joined the military of the United States, but he went to Israel and did volunteer work for the IDF.
So had he not been asked this, it would have been one of the most ridiculous and pathetic things ever because it would have been only because they were afraid to ask questions that they would ask any other candidate about any other country.
But they didn't.
They said, hey, we need to know.
Do you still have these ties?
This could be brought up.
And he's so bitter about not having been selected, but also probably really does believe he's an anti-Semitism victim that he's on a nationwide book tour to whine about how he was victimized by this brutal anti-Semitism.
And you're see, I'm describing it perfectly.
It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating or making it more ridiculous than it seems.
It's based on exactly this.
So here is, I think this was one of his first interviews, media interviews, about this new book that contains these grievances where he was asked about his ties to Israel as part of the vetting process.
And he was on CBS Morning News, where he obviously expressed a lot of anger and grievance over the questions that were asked of him.
Here it is.
While you were being vetted to be Kamala Harris's running mate, you were asked, have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?
Yes.
And they also asked you if you were a double agent for Israel.
Actually, he asked if I was an agent and if I had ever spoken to an undercover agent of the Israeli government.
And what did you say?
Well, on the first, I said, of course not.
And on the second, I said, of course not.
And I mean, look, I was the attorney general.
I send people undercover on operations all the time.
And if you're doing a good job being undercover, you don't know that person is undercover.
So I sort of made that point to try and lighten the mood that if they weren't.
Like, how would I know if I was talking to an undercover agent if they were undercover?
Right, literally.
And again, I understand they had a job to do to ask me those questions.
I think it went beyond just checking a box on a questionnaire.
Why do you think they asked you that?
I don't know.
Look, I don't want to sit here and ascribe beliefs to others.
I can tell you that it landed on me in an offensive way.
I have dedicated my entire adult life to serving this country, serving this country in different elected capacities, different volunteer capacities.
I love this country.
And for someone to question that, for someone to question my loyalty, particularly as someone who is as open about his faith as he is, was offensive to me.
Do you think Kamala Harris knew that you were being asked that question?
I don't know.
To this day, I don't know if the vice president knew that I was being asked that question.
And I don't know if the vice president knew that I called 48 hours before she announced her decision to pull out and tell her I did not want to be considered.
I don't know.
All right.
And that led to a lot of the normal suspects, the people who describe anti-Semitism in every case, jump on this bandwagon and say that, oh my God, how could an American Jew be automatically assumed to be an Israel agent when that's not even remotely what happened?
Here's Megan McCain, who said, who for whatever reason has a very intense devotion to Israel, even though her mother actually performed quite heroic and noble work trying to warn the world about the famine in Gaza that Israel had imposed and did everything she could to try and undermine it and alleviate it to her credit.
Josh Shapiro's Israeli Army Volunteer Past 00:09:57
But Megan McCain said, Democrats and the woke right have an extremely serious problem when they believe every single Jewish person or Zionist is somehow an Israeli agent or being paid by Israel.
Just an absolute brain rot.
Shapiro is so lucky he was smart enough not to end up on the Harris Titanic.
Now, I will say that I don't look at the world this way, but since a lot of people like this do to claim that it's the Democrats who have huge, unique problems with Jews and with Jews in politics because they all believe that they're secret agents of the Israeli government is such a bizarre claim to make for so many reasons, starting with the fact that forever large supermajorities of Jews have voted for the Democratic Party,
not the Republican Party.
Going all the way back to at least FDR and their support of the New Deal and civil rights legislation under LDJ.
I mean, the Jews in the Democratic Party have been like this, and Republicans have largely been anathema to Jews.
Already kind of a strange claim to make that the Democratic Party hates Jewish politicians because they assume they're sinister and working for Israel when American Jewish voters feel a far greater affinity toward Democrats than they do to Republicans.
On top of that, the Democrats already had a Jewish vice presidential candidate.
His name is Joe Lieberman.
And he wasn't just like a Jew, like a secular Jew.
He was a mega-religious Jew, an absolutely fanatical supporter of Israel, a hardcore Zionist, was part of this trio with John McCain, Lindsey Graham that wanted war in the Middle East for Israel all the time.
The Republican Party has never nominated a Jew for the national ticket, and the Democratic Party was the one that nominated the first ever in history.
Again, this is not how I look at the world, but for people making these claims, these seem relevant to that claim that the Democrats all hate Jews.
And on top of that, I don't know that I don't have exact numbers in front of me.
I found them last week, but I think something like 93% of Jews who are in Congress are Democrats.
I think it's all 10 Jewish Democrats are Democrat, Jewish senators are Democrats.
And virtually all, with three or exceptions or so, of the large Jewish caucus in the House are Democrats.
To say nothing of the fact that it was Joe Biden that financed and armed the Israeli destruction of and genocide in Gaza for two years, and that Democrats have been as pro-Israel and beholden to AIPAC as anybody.
It's just such a beyond this specific Josh Shapiro case.
Do you see just the level of intellectual deceit that you need to reach for to try and claim that, oh, Josh Shapiro was victimized by systemic anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party?
Now, here is Jeffrey Goldberg, who is not only the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, but he himself didn't just go do volunteer work for the IDF, as Josh Shapiro characterized what he did.
Jeffrey Goldberg never, ever enlisted in or worked for the military of the country of which he's a citizen, which is the United States.
He did, however, travel to Israel and join this foreign military, the IDF, where he worked as a guard in a notoriously harsh prison where they kept Palestinians, many of whom had never been charged with the crime.
So, of course, now Jeffrey Goldberg wants to exclude any questioning of somebody's ties to Israel, even though they have ties to Israel, as some sort of anti-Semitic prohibition.
And here he is promoting this article in the Atlantic, January 18th, 2026.
Josh Shapiro on his vice presidential vetting, quote, had I been a double agent for Israel?
Was she kidding?
I told her how offensive the question was, more here via the Atlantic.
And then here, The Atlantic again, promoting the book, a new memoir, blast Kamala Harris for being offensive, ideologically obsessed.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro discusses the strange questions he received during his vice presidential vetting.
Now, as I said, if I were somebody who was on the shortlist for being a vice president of a major political party, I don't think anything would surprise me about what they asked.
I would be expected, I would expect to be asked about everything.
Even like things that maybe just are found only in a tiny corner of the internet that nobody ever says there's no evidence for.
That's part of the deal.
If you want to become vice president of the United States, your life is going to be picked apart.
It's true of everybody.
But apparently we now have a new rule that it's still true.
You can do that, except you can't ask Jewish politicians about ties to Israel, even when they have demonstrated ties that would make not asking that question unbelievably malfeasant.
Here is the journalist Mark Caputo, Will Simmons, and Manuel Bonder.
This is in August of 2024.
So this is, sorry, the journalist is Mark Caputo.
And then those are Josh Shapiro's spokespeople.
And there were questions back during this vetting process about whether Josh Piro had worked for the Israeli government.
And the answer is yes, he did work as a employee for the Israeli government.
Here's what they published.
I believe this is at Politico, or it could be at Axios.
Those are basically interchangeable.
But anyway, these are the facts.
From April until September of 1996, in between jobs working for members of Congress, Josh Shapiro worked in the public affairs division at the Israeli embassy in order to get foreign policy experience.
His job largely involved educating the public about Israel by visiting local schools and hosting open houses for the public at the embassy.
I'm not saying this was the most important job in the world.
It wasn't a big part of his career.
But he was an adult.
He was in his mid-20s and he went to work for this foreign government as an employee.
Now he wants to lead a different country in the United States.
Can you imagine any other person seriously being considered vice president who actually worked for a foreign government, was a paid employee of that government, whose duties and loyalties were to that government as their agent and not to the United States.
Could you imagine anyone else being asked about that and then going on a book tour and whining that it was inappropriate to ask and only was asked because of the rising menace of anti-Semitism?
Do you see the constant exceptions and licenses so many of these people are creating for themselves to push this narrative that anti-Semitism is everywhere?
So he did work for the Israeli government.
He was a paid agent of the Israeli government.
That is just a fact.
Now, on his other ties to Israel, it doesn't just end there.
Here's the Times of Israel in August of 2024.
Josh Shapiro seeks to downplay his time as an IDF volunteer after college op-ed resurfaces.
So Josh Shapiro wrote an op-ed in college boasting about and touting the importance of the work that he did, not for the U.S. military, but for the Israeli military.
He went to Israel to work in what he called a valunteer capacity for the IDF.
And here's what he's now, he was then saying when it became an issue, quote, I was 20, says Pennsylvania governor, potential VP nominee about the op-ed titled Peace Not Possible, in which he described himself, quote, as a Jew and a past volunteer in the Israeli army.
So fair enough.
I do think the fact that when you're 20, you say and do things that aren't reflective of who you are when you're 30 or 40 or 50.
It's why I find so irritating a lot of this like critical focus on what 19-year-old college sophomores do.
There was just some protest.
Ezra Klein went to speak at Sarah Lawrence College.
I don't know, maybe like 10, you know, leftist activists went in and put signs on the wall and interrupted Ezra's speech, accusing him of supporting genocide.
Even though Ezra has been more basically critical of Israel, not very vocally, though I think he even did call it a genocide at some point.
And there are all these media professionals saying, this is a really intemperate choice for a target of your protests.
It's like, okay, yeah, maybe it isn't temperate.
Maybe it's not like perfectly designed, but they're 19, they're 20.
They're acting out of all kinds of motives and impulses and emotions and passions that have nothing to do with the kinds of more pragmatic considerations that you might learn and then apply when you're older.
And it's just such a bizarre demand.
So yeah, I accept the fact that he was 20 when he wrote it, but it was a not bad saying like Israel's neighbors are too violent or too whatever, and therefore there can't be peace between Israel and its neighbors.
And his qualification that he included in his own words was that he was a past volunteer in the Israeli army.
So he worked after college in his mid-20s for the Israeli government as a paid agent, and he never went to volunteer for the U.S. military, but in his own words, said he went to work for the Israeli army.
Now, just to give you an example of how common this is, and this is true for every, I could show you a million of these.
Tim Waltz's Controversial Past 00:04:32
Here's from CNN.
This is in January of 2026.
The headline is Tim Waltz was asked about foreign policy ties during Harris vetting.
Sources tell CNN.
So they didn't just single out the Jewish candidate as Josh Peer and a bunch of whiny anti-Semitism activists are trying to imply.
Tim Waltz and every other person in this position was similarly treated.
Quote, the Minnesota governor whom Harris ultimately picked was asked by her vetting team if he had ever been an agent of China, prompted by AIDS review of the multiple trips Waltz took to China before running for office.
That was the same line of questioning for people involved with that process, say, which led to top lawyer Dana Remes asking Shapiro if he had ever been an agent of Israel.
And a conversation that Shapiro recounts in his memoir set to be published next week.
The four people involved with the vetting process argue that the question of being a foreign agent is standard on the forms of all the politicians hoping to be picked and were asked to fill out, and which is the same use for all high-level federal government appointees.
I mean, again, like if you, if you're vetting a candidate for high office in the United States, especially vice president or president, where you know every last iota of scrutiny is going to be applied to every part of your life, asking about your relationships with foreign countries is like such an obvious line of inquiry that I'm sure is always asked of everybody.
Tim Waltz's ties to China were far less extensive than Josh Apiros, at least from what we know.
And Tim Waltz was asked, have you ever been an agent of China?
Did you ever work for Chinese government-affiliated groups?
The problem here is not that they treated Josh Apiro differently.
The problem is that they treated him the same.
And one of the tactics for feigning and fabricating this anti-semitism crisis and in general for the attempt of a lot of Israel supporters to justify previously unthinkable acts of censorship and other kinds of punishment for people who are critical of Israel is to reject the idea that they're supposed to be treated the same and insist that they actually have the right of special treatment.
Sure, ask Tim Waltz about his ties to China.
Ask Mark Kelly about what work he did with the Russians and joint space programs.
That's all fine.
But you don't ask me.
I'm a Jew.
You don't ask me about my ties to Israel, even though I actually worked for Israel and really was an agent.
You don't ask me if I was ever an agent of Israel, even though I was, or what my ties now currently are to them.
This is self-victimized deceit to the point of fabrication of such a such a transparent form, but it really has come to permeate a great deal of U.S. mainstream political discourse about how people are allowed to talk about Israel, how people are allowed to talk about Jews, whether they can talk about Jews in the same way they can talk about anybody else or whether special rules apply.
There have been special hate speech codes created for Israel and for Jewish supporters of Israel on American campuses of the kind that the right previously viewed as DEI and one of the worst attacks on basic notions of treating people equally.
But this to me is, I think Josh Shapiro, and I think this is part of the reason why he wasn't chosen, is he does just so transparently seem like very self-interested to the point of extreme opportunism.
I mean, most politicians, most people are self-interested, but I think the assessment that he would stab anybody in the back to advance his career even a small amount was a correct one.
And who would want somebody as your vice president by your side who is like that?
Because once he wasn't chosen, his vengeance is to write a book accusing them all of anti-Semitism because they dared to ask him about not fabricated non-existent ties to Israel, which also would have been fine, but actual demonstrated ones that he himself previously described in the past.
And that's how we know about them.
But this is really a perfect window into this campaign of extreme propaganda writ large that I think deserves a lot more awareness.
Appreciating Our Locals Members 00:01:14
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
We really appreciate those of you who have watched and especially our locals members who are the people who provide these excellent questions.
As always, I had more that I really wanted to get to, but time permitting, we just weren't able to.
We're doing a lot of content on YouTube these days, not just on Rumble, and we cover topics there.
Maybe we'll have time to address some of these questions over there as well where we post it to Rumble as well.
I'm just saying it's not always during the seven o'clock show, so you can look for it there.
But we love our locals members in part because they enabled this Friday night show, but also because it's our local members who, through their support, really have enabled the independent journalism that we do here every night to prosper and to continue.
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