Glenn Greenwald debunks Trump's false claims of an unconditional Iranian surrender, noting the war continues despite alleged sanctions relief and highlighting suppressed anti-war protests. He analyzes Brazil's election, where Lula faces Flavio Bolsonaro amidst Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' corruption scandal and shifting U.S. Magnitsky Act enforcement. Greenwald rejects censorship justifications based on foreign disinformation, critiques Western neoliberalism's imposition of governance models, and contrasts Hamas's alleged human shield usage with Israel's military presence in Tel Aviv residential areas before concluding on the FISA vote blocking warrantless eavesdropping. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Returning to the System Update00:02:16
Good evening, everybody.
It is Glenn Greenwald.
I am very happy to be back on what I guess is kind of a sequel to or manifestation of our system update program.
We definitely intend to do more video along with the writing that we've been doing, but we're building a new studio.
The studio that we were in for the last three years is one that requires a big team of people in order to operate multiple cameras and the like.
So, this is sort of a toned down, reduced version.
We have one studio build I've been using.
That's a little bit, but we want to have a separate one.
I hate to bore with you all the logistics, but that's the reason.
Also, I've been traveling a lot.
I think I mentioned in the post that I did earlier today announcing tonight's QA that I traveled twice to the United States in the last, like, say, two and a half weeks, including to do a debate, a two hour debate about pretty much every topic there is to debate.
That should be out on a very large internet platform.
I can't say which, either this weekend or I believe actually it'll be next weekend.
So look for that.
I'll certainly let you know.
But anyway, here we are.
And for those of you who aren't familiar with, What we do on Friday night, we basically have a QA session where we collect questions and comments and critiques and thoughts and suggestions and topics from our subscribers throughout the week.
We try and get to them as many of them as we can.
Obviously, we try and align some of them with the biggest of the items in the news.
It would be strange if I didn't talk about the war in Iran, for example, or last night's FISA vote.
But often we get topics that I can address that we don't necessarily choose on our own.
It's an important way that I stay accountable and responsive and interactive, which I Always consider to be a crucial part of my journalism in general, what I do here on Substack as well.
So, this has always been something that people have really responded to well.
A lot of people were kind of insisting since we moved to Substack that we resume this part of it.
We have been doing a lot of videos because of the travel, because of the rebuilding of the studio.
So, this is a good way to kind of dive back in.
For those of you who don't know, we always put all of our videos either taped or live, both here on our Substack page or if you're watching on YouTube, on our YouTube page.
Often we try and do it on Rumble as well, though technically, Rumbles a little strange sometimes with live broadcasts, but we always put it there as well.
So there are lots of places that you can watch.
The War in Iran Claims00:12:11
So we have a lot of questions.
I want to try and dive right in.
I try and keep these prefaces short.
I didn't succeed that much tonight, although I can go a lot longer with my preface.
Trust me, I have before.
So let's just dive right into these questions, especially because it's a big news day.
There's a lot to talk about.
And the first question is from Richard Jaffe.
This is about the war in Iran.
I have to say, today was a very strange day in the war in Iran because President Trump went to True Social and just began unilaterally.
Insisting essentially that the war was over, the United States won, Iran essentially surrendered, that we didn't use that term.
You may remember that a few weeks ago, near the start of the war, Trump said the only outcome of the war that he would accept is what he called unconditional surrender, which comes from World War II terminology.
A lot of people like Mark Levine and Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham have been encouraging Trump to think about this war with Iran through the prism of World War II.
And of course, World War II ended by the United States using two atomic bombs on Japan in order to provoke.
what we called unconditional surrender.
And that was what Trump was calling for.
So Trump basically has been trying to depict what happened here as some great American victory, making a lot of claims about what Iran agreed to, claiming that Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz forever, never to close it again, claiming that Iran will stop funding Hezbollah and Hamas, claim that Iran will voluntarily give over all of their enriched uranium that's buried underground, not force the United States to go and get it, will just hand it over.
And even though there are reports today from the US government, the Israeli government, that The United States was in the process of lifting sanctions or even giving Iran tens of billions of dollars in unfrozen assets.
We steal their money.
They sell their oil.
We steal their money.
We freeze it.
We keep it for ourselves.
President Trump says, no, they're giving us everything and we're not giving them anything in return no money, no nothing.
I find it very hard to believe that Iran would ever do a deal where sanctions weren't lifted.
So Trump's not really explicitly denying that.
But interestingly, it's clear that whatever, even if you, so what's so odd about it is that everything we kept hearing about what this deal was was just Trump.
Making claims about it on True Social, and he started calling reporters and making all kinds of wild claims to them about how he got everything he wanted.
They gave him everything, we gave them nothing.
It's a complete great victory.
And a lot of people who were war supporters of MAGA were doing this kind of war dance, this victory dance, this like vindication dance.
Look, we told you it ended so quickly.
We got everything, we destroyed them, they surrendered.
And the whole time, the strangest part was there was no announcement from any other country that any of this happened.
It was just Trump being Trump.
And it's not the first time Trump has claimed, oh, they're on their knees begging, they want to give us everything they want.
And a lot of people just took this at face value, including a lot of journalists, because he called them and they like that.
He calls them and they write down what he says and they run to Twitter and they're like, hey, I just got off the phone with President Trump.
And every time there was a new reporter doing that, the claims about what Iran supposedly conceded escalated.
They gave more and more and more and more to him in exchange for absolutely nothing.
And obviously, there's a ton of reason for skepticism.
Usually, if a deal is announced to end a war, both parties announced it.
That's what happened with India and Pakistan.
That's what happened in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Gaza.
It's what typically happens in a war.
But in this case, all we had were Trump's claims all day that he was making on True Social.
And then he eventually gave a press conference where he made very similar claims.
And I just want to note two things about this.
One is even if you want to believe Trump's maximalist version, we gave Iran everything they could possibly have asked for, they surrendered, they're not getting anything in return.
Even under this Trump version that's utterly uncorroborated, et cetera, Iran did get something very significant, which is Iran has been saying from the start that they will never agree to a ceasefire, let alone a conclusion to the war.
Unless Israel stops bombing Lebanon.
That was something that was going to almost jeopardize, that almost jeopardized the ceasefire to begin with, was Pakistan, which had mediated the talks between the United States and Iran, said the deal includes cessation of hostilities, not just between the U.S. and Iran, but all of their allies, including Lebanon.
And then immediately Netanyahu did that gigantic massacre in Beirut, killed upward of 1,000 people in about 10 minutes, all throughout Lebanon, but also in densely populated Beirut.
And then the Israelis and the Americans began claiming that, oh no, it doesn't.
Entails cessation of hostilities in Lebanon.
But today, President Trump said that he was prohibiting Israel, ordering Israel to no longer bomb Lebanon, that this was enough.
Right after Trump did that, there are reports of Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon.
But Trump says that that's something he gave to Iran a promise that Israel would stop bombing Lebanon.
The Iranians, of course, are allies with Hezbollah and have an interest in making sure that they don't abandon Hezbollah.
Hezbollah entered the war in support of Iran, began attacking Israel.
When after Israel attacked Iran with the United States.
So even there, there's conditions that Trump himself is saying he agreed to meet when it comes to the Iranians.
But as after a few hours of all these wild claims floating around, the Iranians came out and they said, None of this is true.
We would never give our enriched uranium to Trump.
This is as sacred as Iranian soil.
They said, The Strait of Hormuz is not open.
It is open only in coordination with the Iranian military.
You have to get their approval, you have to get their coordinated routes.
Tracking data devices and platforms that were showing that there was very little traffic entering the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump, of course, is still claiming that the United States military is blockading the Strait of Hormuz, but only with respect to oil coming from or in relation to Iran.
But Iran seems to have been vindicated by the fact that there's almost no international traffic transgressing through the Strait of Hormuz today.
Iran says that there is no deal.
And then Trump came out also and admitted there's no deal.
He said, I think we're very close.
I'm sure we're going to get a lot of great things.
They asked him, they said, Iran says you're still very far apart.
He said, Well, we'll see if we are.
I don't think we are.
I think we're very close.
We should get a deal over the weekend.
And if we're very far apart, then we'll just have to deal with that.
One final point is that every time Trump makes one of these announcements, and he's made them many times before, that the war is ending, we don't think we're going to have to go much further, we're getting a deal with Iran.
The stock market, the oil markets go wild.
There are these gigantic leaps in prices or drops in prices.
And every time there's aberrational activity where people seem to be.
Betting quite heavily in unusual amounts about some event that's about to happen with the war in Iran.
And oftentimes, usually, they turn out to be very right.
And a lot of people are making tons of money on these constant, seemingly weekly announcements that the war is over.
Hopefully, the war is over.
Any decent person should want the war to be over.
But this triumphalism that emerged today from MAGA people, from war supporters, was absolutely bizarre to watch.
And it didn't happen from all of them.
Like the more serious ones, the ones who really want Iran destroyed, as opposed to the MAGA people who just want to applaud whatever Trump's doing, people like Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin.
Are again expressing anger about the possible end of this war.
They're enraged that Trump purported to bar the Israelis from attacking Hezbollah more.
They're angry that the regime is still in place in Iran, that we didn't bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people.
They still have ballistic missiles.
There are still sites where there's suspected nuclear activity going on.
But nonetheless, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, given how dangerous this war is, given how wrongheaded and illegal and morally unjustifiable it was to start it, anything that ends the war, including letting Trump think he won everything, is fine with me.
But We did purposely choose a comment that was reflective of this general sentiment about how we won everything.
The war is so brilliant.
Trump is so brilliant.
He's a great war hero.
And I think a representative comment, a thoughtful comment and representative of this sentiment came from Robert Jaffe, who said, Brilliant one two punch from Trump.
Step one systematically dismantle Iran's military industrial base and degrade its proxy network.
Step two choke off the regime's cash flow by blockading all oil exports.
Within weeks, storage fills, production shutdowns, and restarting become slow and expensive.
That combination.
Stop starving the IRGC of funding while keeping direct pressure on the regime itself.
Let's hope we keep the boot on the neck until Iran cries uncle and hands over the 900 kilograms of enriched uranium.
Okay, I mean, yeah, if everything perfect happens like that, then you could have a stronger case that the United States, I guess, won in some way.
But for now, none of that has happened.
There is no handover of the 900 kilograms of enriched uranium, according to the Iranians.
They're not doing that, they aren't going to do that.
And Israeli and American reports say that Iran has at least half of their ballistic missiles, tons of drones, the capacity to make more.
Yeah, we destroyed things in their country.
We killed some of their leaders.
There's a big cost to that.
We lost at least 13 American soldiers.
I think it's going to prove to be much more.
Lots of casualties, dozens, if not hundreds.
On the first day, we blew up 170 Iranian schoolgirls, which we were supposedly there to liberate, to say nothing of all the other civilians that were killed throughout this war.
Those are real costs.
If you actually believe anything you were saying about, Liberating the Iranian people and caring about their interests or whatever.
But even from purely an American perspective, gas prices went up.
Maybe they'll come down, probably not to the extent that they were before.
But this perception that the United States just goes around bombing and attacking and invading and blowing up whoever we want, including countries that have not attacked us and are not about to attack us.
Let's remember that in the last 30 years, the United States has seen multiple major terrorist attacks on American soil, on the American Homeland, the continental United States, 9 11, the Boston Marathon attack, the Pulse shooting, attempted bombs in Times Square on airplanes, and then more minor ones that still killed a lot of people Fort Hood.
If you look at every single one of them, attacks on the United States on the homeland over the last 30 years, the total number that came from either Iranian terrorists or Shia terrorists is zero, zero.
They were Sunni terrorists.
They came from the countries that we actually prop up and embrace, like Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Persian Gulf.
And so, Iran is not a threat to the United States.
We went to war with them because we said Israel was about to attack them.
And the more the world perceives the United States as this kind of bully that just starts wars whenever we want, we don't have any regard for national law.
We impose that on other people.
We don't do it ourselves.
There's a reason why countries in regions traditionally dominated by the United States and Europe, like Africa, like Central and South America, like parts of Asia, are turning to China and away from the United States.
And I think people should think about the reason for that.
Why is that?
Why are people, why are countries around the world not wanting to?
Seek the United States as their primary partner and turning instead to China.
Brazil, for example, is the second largest country in the hemisphere, the largest country in South America, right in the United States' backyard, the sixth largest country on the planet.
For decades, the United States was Brazil's largest trading partner.
That's no longer the case.
Now, China is Brazil's largest trading partner.
And you see this repeated all throughout the world.
And China has not fought a war since 1979.
In the last 47 years, China has not fought a single war.
And obviously, they're doing quite well as a country by every metric.
I don't mean civil liberties.
I don't mean from the perspective of their citizens, but in terms of economic prosperity, in terms of technology, in terms of their military, in terms of becoming a world power, they have exploded influence and power and growth, economic growth, growth of every kind over the last half century.
While the United States, even though they've not fought a single war, the last war they fought was a one month border dispute with Vietnam in 1979.
Look at how many wars the United States has fought.
In that time, that's why we're a country drowning in trillions of dollars in debt, why our communities are falling apart, our infrastructure is shit.
I'm always amazed whenever I visit the United States, which I constantly do every place I go.
I was in Los Angeles last week, I was in Miami and New York the week before, and you just see the infrastructure crumbling in airports and bridges and roads.
And you compare that even to a country that was in Malaysia six months ago, which is just booming to say nothing of Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Why No Massive Anti-War Protests00:09:08
And you can see the transfer of wealth because we are spending all of our resources on wars.
On going to debt to pay for them, on building this gigantic military while our citizenry crumbles.
And so, okay, we weaken the IRGC.
How was the IRGC a threat to the United States?
During the Democratic Party's obsession with Russiagate, one of the reasons why I always knew and kept saying that aside from all the other problems I had with Russiagate, that it was a subversion of democracy, an attempt to reverse the election, the CIA and the FBI manufactured it.
It was journalistically fraudulent, it was dangerous to tell Americans that their gravest.
Enemy was Russia, since they're sitting on the world's largest nuclear stockpile to just feed them anti Russian hatred every day to prevent American and Russian officials from being able to speak.
Aside from all those problems I had with Russiagate, the problem for the Democrats I always knew politically was that Americans don't care about Vladimir Putin.
They don't wake up and think about the Kremlin or what's happening in Moscow.
They don't wake up and confront the problems their families have or that they have with health care and with the fact that they can't afford housing or start families or have to work multiple jobs just to try and keep above water, to say nothing of the anti.
Difficulty, virtual inability to have one parent stay at home with children, which ought to be the option of every family in an advanced society.
Nobody wakes up and thinks and was thinking, oh, this is Vladimir Putin's fault.
So the fact that Democrats are just badgering on and on and on and on about Russia created this huge disconnect between what the Democratic Party was talking about, what liberal media was talking about on the one hand, and what Americans cared about on the other.
And I think the same is true with Iran.
I've never heard anybody, except inside the political class, claim that Iran is the cause of great problems for the United States, for American citizens.
So we'll see how much of this brilliant.
Ingenious success, this great war triumph actually comes to fruition.
Even if it all does, I still think this war is a monstrosity.
But the fact that Trump is running around on True Social, just spouting out things anybody who's observed Trump knows that this is what he does.
He's always done that.
I got the greatest building in the world.
It's the greatest gold.
Nobody ever thought it was pot.
This is Trump from selling buildings in Manhattan to talking about his game show on NBC Prime Time to running in campaigns to his ballroom to His library.
I mean, everything is the greatest.
Everything is the greatest success.
Of course, skepticism is required when Trump is just out there spouting that Iran unconditionally surrendered, basically, and gave Trump everything he wanted in exchange for nothing.
Why would the Iranians possibly do that?
Obviously, they have a strong enough military dead to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.
They were pounding the crap out of American military bases in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
And they were pummeling Israel.
Yeah, they were getting pummeled too.
But Iran is a formidable military force still.
They're not anywhere close to.
Surrendering to giving Trump everything he wants.
But here we are.
It's now April.
The midterm election is about five months away.
And Trump seems incapable of focusing on.
Affordability and domestic issues because he's constantly involved in these foreign conflicts, the exact type that he said he was going to avoid.
So, if the war ends April 6th, which is about seven weeks after it started, I'll be happier than if the war ends seven months after it started.
I want the war to end, but I'm not going to affirm or uphold this fiction that it was some great victory for the United States, that we somehow made ourselves more secure.
Iran was not a threat to the United States.
We shouldn't have bases in the Middle East.
We don't need military bases in the Middle East.
All those countries will voluntarily sell their oil to us.
We don't even need oil.
We're a net exporter of oil.
We're there to protect Israel.
And Iran and Israel definitely have adversarial interests.
They're the two largest powers in that region.
Israel wants Iran smashed because if Iran is shattered into little pieces, Israel has no more counterweight in the region.
They dominate that entire region.
No one can stand up to Israel.
So I get why Israel wants a war with Iran.
And I guess if Iran's capabilities are degraded in a way that's beneficial for Israel, but none of what was promised here has actually happened.
The Iranian regime didn't fall.
The people didn't rise up.
There's no freedom and democracy in Iran.
The IRGC is very much in power.
Arguably, even more radical and hardline people are in charge.
The population is weakened.
They're united behind their leaders, as every population gets when they're attacked by foreign powers.
Iran has plenty of ballistic missiles, plenty of drones, plenty of industrial capability to create more.
They have small boats to terrorize boats that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
They can wreck the economy at any time.
They can hit energy and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf.
The Houthis could get involved and close the Red Sea, which could create.
They have plenty of cards, plenty of cards.
They're not unconditionally surrendering anything.
There's a reason that these wars, I mean, Yes, the United States achieved air superiority, total air superiority, not total, but close to total in Iran.
If there were a ground invasion, you'd bet on the U.S. military against the Iranian military.
But the same was true in Iraq.
We had total air superiority in Iraq, and the Iraqi military dispersed in weeks.
It was a guerrilla war that went on for years.
We killed tons of Iraqi leaders, including Saddam Hussein and his two sons in the first months.
What did that mean?
What did that get the United States?
Nothing.
No one doubts that.
But the issue always was Trump has two choices, both of which are bad once he started this war.
Number one, end it very early and have no credible way to claim that the United States won.
I can guarantee you, Iran is not going to stop fighting and agree to a ceasefire and give up all these things without having sanctions lifted and getting their assets back.
In other words, basically the Iran deal, except Obama didn't have to go to war to get the Iran deal.
Or he can go and try and fulfill all these war goals, these war aims, bring freedom and democracy to Iran, like he said on the first day, was his main goal.
That's what he told the Washington Post.
All the stuff about Iran killing 30,000 people or 40,000 people or 80,000 people or 100,000 people, whatever number you feel like picking on any given day.
None of that is addressed.
There's no different government in Iran.
I mean, they're obviously the people who were killed were replaced by other people of the same ideology or sometimes even more extreme.
Yeah, the United States can go start a war anytime and steal people's resources.
We can go start a war with Saudi Arabia tomorrow and just take all their oil.
It doesn't make it a war that should be fought, nor does the fact that we just got to kill a bunch of Iranian leaders and blew up some stuff bridges and oil refineries and petrochemical plants.
None of that means it was a good war.
None of that means a just war.
None of that means it was a wise war.
None of that means we won.
And it was kind of amazing today.
And maybe it was just online, especially on X, where there's a very heavy. presence of like the hardest core MAGA followers, like the ones who see Trump almost like as a transcendent leader and want to believe everything he says and want to believe that everything he does is good and right and are very unwilling to, or at least highly reluctant to criticize him.
And that's a very dominant force on XO.
It might have created this perception that more people are buying into this than were.
I mean, I think polls show that Americans have been against this war from the start and that opposition rose as the war went on.
So I think it's important to keep that in perspective.
But we obviously have some Trump supporters and conservatives, I hope we do still in our audience.
And I understand that you want Trump to do well, but you shouldn't sacrifice your own critical thinking, your own autonomy, your own dignity in order to affirm things that are just not true.
And I get the questioner is not saying we got all these things.
He's saying if we get these things, but if I like sprout wings today and then use it to fly to Jupiter and find some tonic that gives me and my loved ones guaranteed immortality and eternal happiness, that'll be a pretty good thing.
But those are big, big ifs.
So, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that.
We're very, very far away from this triumphalist scenario that Trump spent all day spreading.
All right.
Benjamin Holm asked, and excuse me if you don't like tennis, I'll try and be quick about this.
Who's your pick to win the French Open?
And the reason people ask me this, just for those of you who don't know, is that on a couple of occasions when I had my Rumble show, we would do this after show solely for our members.
And I'm a very big tennis fan.
I like tennis a lot.
People bet on tennis.
I don't know if you've heard that.
I know I find it scandalous too, but they do.
And, uh, People ask me once who's going to win the Australian Open, who's going to win the French Open.
And both times I picked the men and the women's winner, even though, and it wasn't like the obvious choices, at least with one of them or both of them.
I picked like a, I'm not saying like a shocking winner, but like somebody who wasn't necessarily likely to win.
And so people started thinking I was some sort of like prophet or oracle and that they want to hear my prediction.
So maybe they can use it for betting or maybe they just want to know.
This one's a little hard to avoid picking the favorites just because on the men's side, Alcaraz and Center are so dominant that it's crazy to, Not pick one of those.
Djokovic can't really compete at the French Open anymore.
Wimbledon and the Australian Opener, whose surfaces.
Obviously, I guess if you had to pick between, you would have to pick between Center and Alcaraz, and maybe I'd probably pick Center at this point.
That would be my French Open pick, especially after last year's final where he almost won and didn't.
And then the women's pick, I might pick Coco Goff or maybe Elena Robocano.
Okay.
Tucker the dog asks, Glenn, do you have any ideas as to why we're not seeing massive anti war protests?
Brazilian Left and Establishment00:16:16
I never believed this before, but I'm now starting to question whether a lot of the other big protests were actually funded or organized by deep state actors to sow divisions because this is a pretty universally hated war.
And it seems to be a great way for Americans of all political persuasions to show a united front.
It's a good question.
It's a really good question.
I would note a couple of things.
The last time we had really intense nationwide protests, Even global mass protest over a war was the war in Iraq because that was an 18 month debate that consumed so many countries.
It was extremely vitriolic and it involved sending a massive invading army to the other side of the world to invade another country.
And we knew it was, you know, everyone knew it was going to be a ground war.
People were thinking it was going to be like Vietnam.
And of course, there were a lot of American soldiers to say nothing of Iraqis and other soldiers from other countries that did die.
And of course, the iconic.
War protests were against the Vietnam War, where 60,000 American soldiers were killed.
They were coming home in body bags.
If you have a war that's basically just an air war and you're hiding, for the most part, the casualties on the American side, which the Pentagon did, there was no film of the ceremony when the coffins were turned, except at the very beginning.
There was a lot of sketchy secrecy around how many American soldiers were killed and wounded and how.
There was a lot of obfuscation about planes being shot down, about ships that were suddenly disabled because of really bad luck.
About F 15s being blown out of the sky by friendly fire.
And then on the Iranian side, there was virtually no media in Iran, Western media in Iran.
And I mean, there was a CNN reporter to his credit, did a great job, I think, going around and just being objective about what he was seeing.
But we didn't, as usual, hear about the deaths on the other side.
Those are deliberately kept abstract and cold and distant.
So we don't identify too much with the eradication of human life that our country is causing.
And so.
It wasn't a war that really, it was a war that just kind of happened.
There was no real debate about it first.
I mean, that was one of the first articles I wrote when I came back to Substack is hey, we're about, we're on the brink of a major war with no real public debate, with no explanation from the government about what the war aim is, about why we have to do this war.
And I think that had the effect of kind of sapping the attention of the American public.
As long as Americans aren't dying in big numbers, as long as they're not seeing a lot of horrific imagery, then that definitely dampens the motivation to go and protest.
And then on top of that, I think it's very worth keeping in mind that.
Protesting, obviously, there are tons of exceptions, but protesting is a young person's activity for the most part.
When you're young, you want to go out and protest.
It's the only way that typically, when you're young, you have to find expression is to go out and protest with other people.
Student protests drove the Vietnam War.
Tons of youthful energy drove the protests in the Iraq War.
And then, of course, when the United States was paying for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the destruction of Gaza, that was almost entirely young people, overwhelmingly young people on college campuses.
And Again, student protests is a very central part of kind of the American identity.
Vietnam, then Iraq, but also in the 80s, there were huge protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
It's a big part of why the Israelis were so afraid of a boycott movement against Israel because they saw what it did to the apartheid South Africa regime that was their close ally in the 1980s.
And there were huge protests, very intensive protests that we covered extensively at American universities over Joe Biden's financing and arming of the Israelis.
They went and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians at Gaza.
And I think the big difference there is that every day people were seeing the carnage, whereas that really hadn't happened in Gaza.
This war in Iran, rather, this war in Gaza went on for months before real protests erupted and sustained encampments and the like because people were just horrified by what they were seeing.
Haven't reached that point in Iran.
But I also think it's very important not to underestimate the fact that when Trump got into office, there was a concerted effort to crack down very hard on the right to protest at American universities, not just for foreign students, but American students.
That was why.
They had to make an example to fire faculty to expel students, to deport students who were involved in the protests against the Biden administration's policy to finance the war in Israel because they wanted to make sure that there weren't those kind of protests happening, even though they're an iconic part of American life, gathering peacefully.
And when I say peacefully, I don't just mean going and meditating and holding flowers at the appointed times.
Sometimes peaceful protests are assertive, they're intended to disrupt and to be uncomfortable.
I mean, there were COVID protests against the lockdowns.
They weren't.
Particularly gentle.
That's what you need to do.
That's what a protest is.
If a protest is just, oh, we're going to stand in this designated space at the designated hours and just hold up nice little signs, you're never going to be effective.
You have to disrupt and call attention.
And there was a framework imposed when Trump became president by the administration, up and down that administration, to basically ban these kinds of protests at colleges, to call them anti Semitic against Israel, against the United States, in the Middle East.
And I also think that was a major reason why, as well.
I think the biggest reason, though, is that Americans tolerate wars as long as they're just air wars.
There were no big protests against.
The bombing of Libya.
There were no protests against the dirty war that Obama unleashed in Syria.
And that was just because they weren't the kind of wars that ended up either forcing Americans to confront the realities of what our government was doing or were long enough and causing enough deaths to really trigger the kind of energy that triggers protests.
All right.
Esti Marpet.
By the way, I should say, since you ended the question, before I get to the next question, it seems to be a great way for Americans of all political persuasions to show a united front.
I do think there has been an acceleration of realignment from this war.
One of the most important things that Marjorie Taylor Greene has said is she draws this distinction, which I think is crucial between the America First movement and MAGA, because Trump himself says MAGA is Trump.
MAGA is whatever Trump says it is.
If Trump wakes up one day and says MAGA is X, MAGA is X.
And anyone who says not X, you cannot be MAGA.
You're out of MAGA by virtue of the fact that you disagree with Trump.
But if Trump wakes up the next day and says not X, MAGA is not X.
And anyone who says X is expelled from the movement.
It's basically he's defining it as a cult of personality.
And people who identify as MAGA, As opposed to America first, tend to be the people who are just whose politics are defined by President Trump, either hardcore political junkies who profit from that, who benefit from it in some way, or just people who don't pay that much attention and therefore don't really aren't, you know, as connected to the kind of arguments that takes a while to filter down to people who don't pay as much attention.
And I still think, you know, Republican voters in general still view Trump very favorably.
But there is a chunk of Republican voters for sure who do not like the second term, who do not like.
The war in Iran, who don't like the direction of the Trump administration or its focus.
And I think there is a realignment taking place that I've long thought has been taking place, that I continue to believe is taking place between people who no longer identify primarily through the prism of Republican versus Democrat or even left versus right, but through status quo dogma or pro establishment dogma versus anti establishment dogma.
I think a lot of people who identify with that anti establishment ethos were attracted to Trump based on not the belief that he was going to go in and tear down the establishment.
That's not Trump's personality.
It never has been, but the potential to at least subvert it.
Intentionally or otherwise.
And I do think there was some of that in the first term.
I think there's been very little of that in the second term.
And I think that's why a lot of people, including myself, are more hostile to Trump now than in the first term because this administration looks to me a lot like Bush and Cheney, but with a lot of their worst attributes kind of on steroids.
And I don't think I'm alone in that, including from people who previously identified as MAGA and probably don't anymore.
All right, next question.
Eshti Marpet asks What do you think the recent hard right turn in South and Central America means for Brazil's next election?
Where is the Public these days.
All right.
I'm going to talk about Brazil a little bit here because, you know, I talked about Brazil a little bit before.
And the foreign policy of the Trump administration was supposed to be, to the extent there's been an identified second term Trump administration foreign policy, what it was kind of being called this modified Monroe Doctrine or the Don Roe Doctrine, the Trump version of the Monroe Doctrine, which is when it comes to the Middle East, when it comes to places far away, it's not our business what kind of governments they have.
We're not going to pressure them to democratize.
We don't really care.
We're not going to pretend anymore that we care.
We don't care.
We're fine with dictatorships as long as they're not impeding American interests.
We love Saudi Arabia and Egypt and the Emiratis and the Bahrainis and Qataris and on and on and on, despite the fact that they're as savage and dictatorial, at least as whatever you want to say about Iran.
They, I hope this doesn't hurt, also kill protesters and prison protesters, and we're fine with them.
And the Trump doctrine was supposed to be we're not going to pretend anymore.
The Middle East is not our focus.
Our focus is in our region.
As how they define it, which is the Caribbean, Central America, South America, Brazil is by far the most important country in the region, not just because of its size geographically and population wise, or the size of its economy, one of the 10 largest economies in the world, but because of its resources, massive reserves of petroleum, the most important environmental asset in the Amazon, filled with rare earth minerals.
The country is kind of positioned always between the West, but also a founding member of BRICS with Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
And there's a lot of interest in the United States and where Brazil is going.
There have been obviously right turns in South America.
There are some exceptions.
Including in Colombia, which had long been governed by the right and is now governed by the left.
But obviously, Argentina and other countries in the region.
Obviously, El Salvador has become a big U.S. ally.
And Chile is back to being right wing.
And there is an overall trend of moving to the right.
And there's an election, a presidential election in Brazil in October.
And the incumbent president, Lula da Silva, who is 79 years old, I would say he's as vibrant and mentally astute as Trump is, even a little more so.
Like, that's not an issue.
He's incredibly.
Energetic and active, like a lot of 79 years old are.
And certainly he's not Joe Biden, but he's the face of the Brazilian status quo.
Lula governed Brazil from 2002 to 2010.
His hand picked successor governed Brazil, Dim La Rousseff, from 2010 to 2016.
So that's 14 years consecutive until she was impeached in 2016.
Her vice president, this kind of horrible, hated centrist figure, took over.
And then Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, governed until 2022 when Lula returned and beat him for his third term, 2022 to 2026.
Lula is now running for reelection.
Bolsonaro is in prison by the Supreme Court on charges of an attempted coup against Lula and the Brazilian government.
They kind of have their own January 6th on January 8th.
And they imprison huge numbers of people that were allegedly involved, including people who the evidence is not just sparse but non existent.
And at some point, that'll be fixed.
But Bolsonaro is obviously barred from running.
And so he handpicked his son.
He has three sons in politics, four sons in politics, actually.
He has one who's a federal senator, one who's a federal congressman.
One who's been a longtime city councilman in Rio, who's now running for the Senate in the south of Brazil.
And then he has a fourth son who's in his 20s, who's now a city councilman.
And he handpicked his son, Flavio, who is really the quietest among them, the kind of like most soft spoken, the most serious, I guess you could say.
I don't think he's the smartest, but he's kind of the most like, he's just not, he doesn't have very much charisma at all, unlike his father, who's oozing charisma as Lula is.
But he just looks like and has the, he carries himself like just kind of a very unthreatening, normal, serious politician.
But he has his father's last name.
So that's already a huge head start.
On top of which, the fact that he's a member of the Bolsonaro family, it kind of, it's an interesting mix because no one's going to think or say that he's some kind of moderate establishment figure.
But on the other hand, the establishment in Brazil, which is very powerful, you have a huge banking sector in Sao Paulo, banks and hedge funds, billionaires, big city of international finance.
That obviously exercises a ton of power in Brazil.
Big oligarchical families, industrial interests, agricultural interests that really kind of got nervous with Bolsonaro were outright hostile.
The media did.
They're more comfortable with Flavio.
They can see him as more malleable and reasonable.
And polls are now showing, even though people thought when Bolsonaro picked his son from prison, that it was a terrible choice because of how uncharismatic he is.
And you need a kind of big figure to beat someone like Lula, who even at 79 still has a lot of energy and charisma.
Polls are now showing Flavio is surging.
And not just surging, but Tied with Lula, we're even in front.
And for somebody of Lula's stature, who's an incumbent, to already be falling behind like that against a family who has had everything thrown at them, that is making the Brazilian left petrified.
And if they really believe they're going to lose the election, they're going to start to engage in judicial activities to ban Flavio Bolsonaro.
Just this week, the authoritarian Brazilian judge who's really been ruling Brazil with the tyrannical iron fist, Alexandre de Moraes, who I've talked about many times, he sentenced one of Bolsonaro's sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, to prison for one year.
Actually, he He's the head judge of this case.
And so he needs the other votes of the Supreme Court.
They always follow him.
But he concluded that a tweet that Bolsonaro's son posted about a fellow congressman, he's in Congress.
He's one of the largest vote getters in the history of the Brazilian Congress.
That he posted a tweet about another congresswoman, this kind of AOC type, very neoliberal AOC type.
All he said was she introduced a bill.
That's designed to advance the interest of her billionaire financier.
And Moraes said that tweet is criminal defamation and sentenced him to a year in prison.
He's been outside of Brazil because he knew they wanted to imprison him.
He's basically exiled.
And then, right after that, or right this, that was today, a couple days earlier, another tweet, this one posted by Flavio Bolsonaro, the senator who's running for president, Moraes also opened a criminal investigation to determine whether it was also criminally defamatory.
And if he finds it did, theoretically, that could result in his ineligibility to run.
This is the kind of thing the Brazilian left under Lula has been doing.
Censoring, banning, barring their adversaries from running.
Of course, it's all done under cover of law, like tyranny always is.
But now that Bolsonaro is imprisoned, there's a lot of the establishment that's actually worrying less about Bolsonaro and starting to worry about the Supreme Court that's totally out of control.
They created this monster, this Frankenstein, gave him unlimited power, Moraes.
They thought he was just going to imprison Bolsonaro and destroy his movement and then return the power.
And he's not returning that power.
There's a major corruption scandal where his wife, who's a lawyer, but a very mediocre lawyer, Got paid the equivalent of, I had a contract for the equivalent of $30 million over 18 months to represent this corrupt, billionaire owned, failed, fraudulent bank.
And there's a lot of suspicion that that money was paid to Mauricio's wife, not to hire her as some super lawyer, which she's not, but to curry favor with the Supreme Court by basically enriching him and turning him into a multimillionaire, creating this huge fortune.
So there's a lot of interesting political developments going on in Brazil.
It's interesting to see how it plays out.
I don't think, I think, Lou, I would never, Count Lula out politically just because he's been such a dominant figure in Brazilian political life for so long.
It's hard to count them out.
But clearly, he's politically weakened.
And whether they're going to just allow a free and fair election, I think, is very much something that remains in doubt.
All right.
Will asks, and by the way, and this relates to Will's question, a lot of times people ask me, like, what should the United States rule be?
Trump, the Trump administration, about, I guess, nine months ago now, sanctioned Moraes and other members of the Lula government, put them on the sanctions list under the Magnitsky Act, found that they were human rights violators.
Disinformation from Cuba and Iran00:04:12
Cited the fact that they were censoring, they were attacking democratic principles in America's backyard.
And basically, Lula and Moraes and the whole Brazilian establishment stuck their middle finger up at Trump and said, F you, you don't tell us how to run our country.
We're not going to change anything.
We don't care about being sanctioned.
And instead of enforcing those sanctions, instead of forcing banks to close his accounts, Trump relented.
He had a couple of calls with Lula, said he liked Lula.
From everything I've heard from both the Brazilian side and the American side, Lula's strategy was to say, hey, you know, I was in prison for 18 months, Lula was, and I never cried.
I never went to the hospital or claimed I was sick.
I just toughed it out.
But Bolsonaro is a loser.
He's constantly crying.
You don't like him.
He's a loser.
He's weak.
He's constantly in the hospital.
He can't handle prison.
And it kind of changed Trump's perspective about Lula and about Bolsonaro.
It was kind of very clever.
Tactic by Will, who, if nothing else, is very clever, very cunning, very shrewd.
And whatever reason, the Trump administration lost interest in punishing the people who are violating democratic norms and free speech in Brazil.
And my view of that is that although I do think these people are very threatening to Brazilian democracy and free speech, I don't really see it as the role of the US government to go around policing the world that way.
But this is relevant to the next question.
This is James Robert, rather, Will asks, as a free speech advocate, how do you think countries like Iran and Cuba? Should approach free speech when it's often an avenue for the CIA and Mossad to spread disinformation and discord.
I don't, I'm not going to sit here and justify censorship in Iran or China on the grounds that free speech is exploited by the Mossad and the CIA to spread disinformation, even though, of course, it is.
We were told for so long, oh, these were peaceful protesters, these were just ordinary citizens rising up in Iran, and the Iranian government came and just gunned them all down.
It's absolutely reported the Israeli government admits, US government, Trump said it, that the CIA and the Assad were arming insurrectionary factions in Iran.
These were not just peaceful protesters, they were highly trained, well financed, well armed insurrectionary groups trying to overthrow the Iranian government, armed and financed and trained and organized and backed by hostile foreign powers.
Not justifying what Iran did, but it's a complete fiction and fairy tale to say, oh, they just went and gunned down all of these peaceful protesters, they were heavily armed protesters.
They were killing police officers, attacking government buildings.
Let me ask you the question How do you think the United States government would respond?
If we had armed insurrectionary groups inside the United States, armed and funded by China or Russia or Iran, with the explicit goal of overthrowing the United States government, with the explicit goal of regime change to foster a more pro Tehran or pro Beijing or pro Moscow government in Washington, do you think the United States government would meticulously respect the civil rights of the people marooning in the streets, killing police officers, attacking military installations with serious weaponry?
Or do you think the government might gun them down?
So I don't at all.
Want to suggest that that's somehow justifiable in any way for Iran or China to be repressive.
In fact, I don't think it is because once you go down that road, it can justify any kind of repression.
But I do think that it's important to keep in mind that there are countries that the United States has constantly been trying to overthrow and attack Cuba, Venezuela being among them.
And if you're a tiny little country like Cuba with a giant superpower who spent decades trying to overthrow you and the CIA infiltrating your country, of course you're going to have to clamp down.
It doesn't mean it's justified, but That's going to be the natural course of events.
Anytime national security is threatened, civil liberties suffer.
That's why civil liberties were so aggressively eroded after 9 11 during World War II when we interned people.
We have these very radical pieces of legislation that we've only invoked a few times in history, always with wars.
And I'm not going to say that I think it's justified for governments to crack down on free speech because external forces are trying to disseminate disinformation.
That was the American and European left liberal argument and still is for censorship.
Oh, we have to crack down on free speech because our free speech rights are being.
Exploited and abused by the Russians to disseminate disinformation and subvert our elections.
Civil Liberties Under Threat00:10:01
I don't think we should accept that.
But at the end of the day, I do think, you know, I'll just, I went to Moscow, I went to Russia, I guess maybe, I don't know exactly, maybe 18 months ago now.
And I interviewed several people while I was there, one of whom was Alexander Dugan, who in the West is often called Putin's brain, as though like he's the puppet master of Putin.
Nobody is Putin's puppet master.
I can promise you that.
Putin is very smart, but he is an influential figure.
He kind of attacks Putin from the right.
He's an uber nationalist.
He's not really a nationalist, actually.
I'll get to that in a minute.
But he's a philosopher by nature, by training, with heavy political views.
But because he's a philosopher by nature, and I studied philosophy in college, it was my major.
I really wanted to get a PhD in philosophy.
At the last second, I kind of just chickened out and went and got a law degree just because it was a safer route.
And I spent years, I don't know about regretting it, but wondering what would have happened, how I would have lived my life had I gotten a PhD in philosophy, which was absolutely my other option, was really my passion.
But anyway, it's just how my brain tends to work because you go to first principles and you kind of try and unroot any kind of unexamined assumptions and just commit to certain principles and then have everything kind of follow from that, which is just the natural way I think is not better or worse.
Other people think more creatively or more less rationally.
But that's just how my brain has always functioned.
So I'm attracted to that kind of thing, to people who reason that way.
And Dugan, Professor Dugan, really thinks about the world and speaks about the world and analyzes the world in a very similar way, a way that aligns with the way I think I was really surprised and pleasantly impressed by not what he was saying, but the way in which he was, the way in which he had given thought to a lot of very profound issues.
And one of the things he was, he said, and obviously he's very Russian, born in Russia, lived in Russia his whole life, identifies, you know, as a Russia file.
I mean, he loves Russian culture and Russian civilization and wants to preserve it.
And this is part of what he was talking about he was saying that neoliberals in the West are the real, not racist, but let's say racist, just for lack of a better term for the moment.
Because this was, you know, the golden moment of the United States as a sole superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Oh, the end of history, Western liberalism.
That's the only valid form of government.
That's the universal way of life.
We're going to impose that on the world.
Everyone's going to become, everyone's going to live in accordance with Western liberal principles.
We're going to have democracy and freedom and civil liberties.
And what he was essentially saying was that that destroys the diversity of human beings on earth and of humanity and civilizations because you have so many different civilizations that have such different ways of conceiving of the world Chinese civilization, Persian civilization, Russian civilization, Western civilization, even indigenous civilization, and all kinds of other civilizations.
And civilizational diversity for him is very important.
And it's only in the West where people say, our Civilizational values, our values aren't just best for us, but best for everybody.
And we want to eradicate every other form of approach to how to think about political order or political rights.
And I'm a Westerner.
I was born in the United States.
I led my life in the United States.
I'm imbued with Western and American values about free speech, civil liberties, and democracy.
And I went and studied law and learned about the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and was oriented, like all of us who were born in the United States, to view the Constitution and the American founding as this kind of Almost with like reverence, like our secular religion.
And so I know that a big part of why I am a civilitarian, why I see the world that way, is because I am a byproduct of Western culture, of American history, and of Western culture, of Western civilization.
And I'm not one of these people who's just going to walk around, you know, in this kind of postmodern way, positing that there's no value better than any other.
I think human beings crave to be free.
I think human freedom is an important thing, but collectivism has produced positive outcomes as well.
I don't want to be a part of a collective society, but Certainly, all of our societies, even our free United States, is collective to some extent.
Communities are collective.
Families are collective.
And I do think it's important to be humble and modest when judging other countries on the other side of the world who speak a language you don't speak, who have a history and a civilization that you don't fully understand or don't really understand at all.
It's one of the reasons why I'm so against going to wars and trying to fix these other countries that we barely understand.
You know, we have these like State Department PhDs who studied at Yale about Persian civilization or about Iraq.
And now they're supposed to go, but they're, they don't.
It's like a square peg in a circular hole.
It just doesn't fit.
And I do think respect for civilizational differences is important.
And I don't want to, as an American citizen, obviously I'm very familiar with foreign countries, with the UK, with Brazil, with other countries where I've done reporting, less so, but still some.
But I'm not going to go and pontificate on domestic politics in China or Iran as though I have any influence there and therefore it matters or that I'm even capable of understanding those contexts.
I think that kind of humility is very important.
And that's why, as an American citizen, someone who speaks English, someone who studied in the United States, who is raised in the United States, I've obviously lived in Brazil for 20 years.
My kids are Brazilian.
My husband was Brazilian.
I have a Brazilian media company.
I did reporting in Brazil.
I can understand those contexts, those political contexts, much better, have a much bigger impact.
I speak the languages there than I can denouncing human rights abuses in China or Iran, which, as Noam Chomsky says, has about the same ethical outcome as denouncing some 17th century monarchy as repressive.
I can do it.
And I might even be right about it, but what does it accomplish at the end of the day?
Which is why my focus tends to be on the United States and the countries that it props up.
All right, let's do a few more.
James Robert asks As someone who supports the democratic process and law, what points does violence against our representatives become justified?
The legislative and judicial branches are refusing to check the executive in clear violation of their sworn duties.
I'm getting closer to believing that only real significant change will come when they are fearful of the masses with actual physical consequences rather than of their corporate sponsors.
You know, I have to say, this is a very hard question to answer.
And I always find it odd when people's instincts are to say, oh, no, no, no violence in the political process.
Because our country was born of a revolution against the governing body, against the governing authority, a very bloody, violent revolution.
And there are other revolutions that we're taught to view as positive that involved a lot of violence as well.
French Revolution, we want revolutions and regime change.
We encourage them in Syria that are very violent.
So, this idea that, oh no, violence is never justified, this is not a serious argument.
I don't think it's one that people consistently affirm, even if that's their instinct to say it.
And I get why people want to violence introduced into the political process can be very dangerous.
In so many ways.
But I do want to also say that I'll just give you this thought.
I actually almost wrote a book on this.
I still might.
I think I was writing this book or starting to plan this book when Snowden entered my life.
I was writing a book about Noam Chomsky's relationship to the media as well to understand the media.
But anyway, when Snowden happened, and never got around to either of those.
But if you look at how billionaires of their era, maybe they weren't billionaires because of the value of money, but the oligarchs, the Rockefellers and the Fords and the like, the really, really wealthy capitalists throughout the 20th century in American history, they were really petrified of.
Of the masses.
They were petrified of a revolution, like a Bolshevik revolution that happened in Russia.
And they would live their lives in fear.
They would keep ships and yachts offshore with safes and money so that they could escape easily if there was a kind of revolution or quickly, rather.
And there are those famous scenes of Henry Ford and Rockefeller being driven down the street, giving money to crowds to kind of assuage the crowds and create a positive image.
That's where a lot of that philanthropy came from.
The idea that if we're going to really have this massively unequal society and collect this gigantic fortune and wealth, Maybe we have an ethical or religious duty for philanthropy, but we also have a very strategic value in it, which is it keeps people kind of placated.
And that is, I absolutely think it's an important fear that any elite sectors have when governing over people that if they become too abusive in their governing and their governance or their exploitation or their abuse, there's the danger that they could be attacked.
And I think, largely speaking, power centers that want to be exploitative or that get very greedy or don't or develop an indifference to the, Interest in the majority have two options, very broadly speaking.
One is they can try and placate them.
In fact, that was FDR's argument to capitalists about the New Deal after the Great Depression and the stock market crash was okay, look, you don't care about the poor people.
You don't want to pay higher taxes.
You don't want a welfare state.
But you better agree to this.
This is a very moderate incursion into capitalism because if you don't, people are not going to live without a safety net and intensely.
Poverty on the brink of starvation while they look at you and your mansions and your clothes and your jewels.
You're in danger if you don't do the New Deal.
I'm the thing that's standing between you and a revolution.
And that fear of a revolution, of a socialist revolution or whatever, a violent revolution, was a healthy fear that did motivate them to at least make some concessions.
So that is one course of action is well, let's just throw some crumbs from the banquet table or more than crumbs, like share a little bit of the wealth just to keep them well fed.
And because you really have to be desperate to pick up arms against a power, you have to really feel repressed or.
Or exploited.
And so placating people, giving them just enough to kind of keep them satiated, that is one course of action.
But if you get a very greedy elite class that doesn't want to share anymore, that doesn't want to wall itself behind a wall of adversary, you know, and the probably apocryphal, but nonetheless iconic phrase of let them eat cake.
Oh, just let them eat cake.
Here's what they're starving.
That is a dangerous course of action for elites to take because it can prompt the kind of angry revolutionary violent spirit that overthrows existing orders.
Palestinian Resistance Explained00:09:23
So if you want to do that, what you need to do is make sure that you fortify the monopoly on state violence.
You paramilitarize the country.
You hire mass amounts of private security.
You heavily arm the police and the military so that if there is any kind of uprising or any kind of thought to try and overturn the existing order, they know they're going to be crushed.
You create a surveillance state, keep everybody monitored under just constant vigilance.
You know what they're doing.
You know what they're saying.
You know what they're organizing.
You have the weapons to just.
Completely crush them.
And I do think in a lot of ways, the United States has chosen the second option.
The elite class has chosen the second option.
Our police are completely paramilitarized.
We live in a domestic surveillance state.
And so, even if you want to be this kind of theoretical, even if you want to embark on this theoretical inquiry of is violence justified?
How repressive does the state need to get?
You run into the practical wall that even if Americans have handguns or even semi automatic rifles, there's no, I think it was Joe Biden.
I could be wrong, but it was a Democratic politician who basically said, oh, he kind of mocked.
The idea that the Second Amendment is to allow the citizenry to resist government tyranny by basically saying we have F 15 fighter pilots or fighter jets and bombs.
There was a really interesting event in the 1990s, maybe the 80s, where there was this organization in Philadelphia called Move, and the United States, the police force went and bombed the street, killed a bunch of people.
I mean, it was actually the US government, the US American police force bombed an American street in order to get at this group.
There's a big documentary on it.
If you're not familiar with it, you should go read it.
Presage the U.S. government attacks on Waco and then on the Brenched Dividians at Waco and then Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge.
This kind of government violence against people who aren't quite in line, that is a big feature of our country.
And part of it, you don't want to necessarily use it all the time, but you want to make sure people understand it's there precisely to turn them from having these kinds of thoughts, even if you're not really giving them anything that might otherwise placate them.
All right.
Last question here.
David Diaz Glenn, I have tried to share with family and close.
Friends about Israel's wanton destruction of Palestinian lives in Gaza, to say nothing of state sanctioned violence in the West Bank.
The most common response I get is, yeah, isn't it terrible that Hamas stations its troops in civilian neighborhoods and under hospitals, uses human shields in that way?
How would you go about trying to refute this defense?
I mean, there's a lot of specifics there.
You know, I don't know if you probably saw, I was at Substack when this happened, but I was on Piers Morgan and I was on with a former IDF spokesman who now works at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is a neocon think tank that pushes war in Iran on behalf of Israel.
And There's been a lot of reporting about how the Israelis have purposely built these military facilities and command and control centers in the heart of Tel Aviv, in residential areas surrounded by museums and apartment buildings and shopping malls and restaurants, so that there's no way to bomb them without blowing up a bunch of civilian infrastructure and buildings, which is the definitive using human shields for your military.
And I asked him that, and he said, Yes, we do build fortresses and command and control centers in the heart of Tel Aviv, even though, unlike the Palestinians in Gaza, which is so densely populated, the most densely populated.
Area on earth.
There's no open areas where you could build like a Hamas military base.
They are integrated into the Palestinian population because it's like the Taliban.
They're just part of the population.
There's no separate military facilities or military bases or military cities that you can have in the United States with a huge, spacious country or even Israel, which is obviously a lot smaller.
It doesn't have nearly as much space, but still has enough space to separate military facilities.
The Israelis purposely do it.
The Palestinians do it because they have to.
But I also, it relates a lot to the prior question.
About when is violence justified?
There have been Israeli Israelis, because remember, Israel also, in a way, was born of a revolution, just their revolution wasn't in the 1770s.
Their revolution was in the 1940s and 50s.
And Zionist terrorists, who were called such at the time, it's the only thing to call them, were blowing up places like the King David Hotel, where the British were based and killing a bunch of British and a lot of bombings like that.
And so that's very much in their culture, this kind of very militant revolutionary spirit.
That is still because of how recent it is generationally, whereas for the United States, our revolution is centuries ago.
And more honest Israelis say, if I were a Palestinian, I would join Hamas because the Israelis engage in terrorist violence, terrorist violence to get rid of people occupying what they consider to be their land.
And so, obviously, publicly, that's not what they're going to say, but the more honest ones, the more candid ones will say, like, yeah, they're doing what we would do.
And they don't have a world superpower like the United States paying for their military and shipping them the most sophisticated.
Military technology and AI in the world, and they don't have the United States with a formal policy, bipartisan policy, to make sure that Hamas is militarily superior to all of its neighbors the way we do with Israel.
So Hamas only is left with a guerrilla tactic.
The Palestinians have tried nonviolent protests, including a boycott of Israel.
That was their tactic of choice, kind of civil society in Gaza and the West Bank.
They said, boycott Israel until you force them economically to withdraw from our land, the West Bank and Gaza.
And the Israelis, Immediately got that defined as anti Semitism, which means it got banned and even criminalized in Europe.
Americans have tried to punish people who advocate a boycott.
We've been over this many times.
36 states.
To this day, if you want a contract with the state, require you to pledge that you won't boycott Israel.
It got defined as anti Semitic and even criminal.
That was their nonviolent way of trying to end the occupation, the way boycotts and divestment and sanctions worked against South Africa.
And the West said, no, that's anti Semitic.
That's hateful.
That's illegal.
That's criminal.
You can't do it in the West.
And then they tried to have A symbolic protest at the border fence and the Israelis gun them down.
So, if you're a Palestinian and you know that the Israelis are gobbling up your land and that the idea of statehood and sovereignty is not going to be given to you unless you take it, violence in a lot of ways is your only option.
Now, I get there are people who don't believe the Palestinians have any entitlement to that land.
The international community disagrees.
But if you're somebody who believes at all in the ability of resistance, violence, resistance as a means for resisting unjust occupation, obviously, if foreign invaders enter the United States, there's a big film.
From 1984, called Red Dawn, about an invasion of the United States by the Russians, the Soviets.
And the heroes of the film are the civilians, the American civilians who take up arms against the invaders and use terror tactics and guerrilla tactics.
Those are the heroes because we consider violence and violent resistance against unjust occupiers and invaders to be noble when we want to.
We arm groups like that.
We fund the groups like that.
We call them freedom fighters until we don't like them.
And then we call them terrorists.
And you could obviously make that case for Hamas and certainly Hezbollah as well.
And even the more honest Israelis do.
And that's why I've written a lot of articles going back.
15 years about how this term terrorism, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are designated terror organizations.
This word is so bereft of meaning.
Now, you can say violent resistance is justified, but that doesn't mean that anything done is acceptable or just.
You have an obligation not to kill civilians, to target yourself at armed agents of the state.
But the fact that groups deviate from that, as even militaries do, as we talked about, the first thing the United States did on the first day was blow up an elementary school filled with young girls, not because they wanted to, but because they were insufficiently careful with human life, it doesn't mean that the entire endeavor is unjust because there's a deviation from that, what ought to be that norm of avoiding civilian deaths.
So we're very brainwashed in the West.
We really are, especially before there was this diffuse information stream enabled by the internet, which is why Western power centers tried so hard to control that and censor it.
And so, this narrative that we've been told has come from both political parties.
And when you have the two parties joining in a narrative, go watch the Sunday morning news shows like Face the Nation or Meet the Press, or cable shows like CNN and Fox and MSNBC.
Even when they have on like a Democrat and a Republican to argue, it's a very narrow set of issues.
But when the two parties agree, that issue is considered undebatable.
It's just you'd never hear dissent from it unless you seek it out.
And the stories of the plucky Democratic Israelis and their peace loving ways surrounded by evil, vicious Arabs and Muslims.
Who use vicious terrorist tactics and human shield?
This is so ingrained in people's brains and their understanding of the world that it takes a lot of work, no matter how good your arguments are, no matter how much you try and get them to see things, to get people to even be open to it, let alone renounce it.
And I often think the best way is showing them Israelis.
Israeli officials say that Israel is imposing a part-time end on the West Bank.
You have leading Israeli officials, I'm talking about generals who say, yeah, if I were Palestinian, I would also join Hamas.
And I think using those kinds of sources to try and just get people.
I think the biggest form of propaganda is when you encourage the population never to look at the perspective of anybody else, of the other side.
What we do to them is always justified.
What they do to us is always morally rancid or terrorist.
And getting people to just kind of use the golden rule application for foreign policy, I think, goes a long way into bunking a lot of this propaganda.
Weekly Q&A and Critiques00:02:20
All right.
Those were a lot of questions.
Those were a lot of topics.
We didn't actually cover the FISA vote last night, where Thomas Massey and a few other Republicans, Lauren Boebert, joined with Republicans to.
Block a renewal that the Trump administration wanted, that a lot of Democrats wanted to extend warrantless domestic eavesdropping.
I wrote a long article about the context and history, which you can read.
There was a two week extension, I believe, or 10 days just to give them more time so the law doesn't lapse.
But it looks like finally, I don't want to get my hopes up.
I thought in 2014 and then 2018, and then again in 2024, that there were going to be reforms imposed in order as a condition for a renewal of this law.
But it looks like there's enough votes this time in both parties to do it.
So, we didn't get to that.
I wanted to get to that, but I'll certainly report on that, cover that, probably interview a couple people about it over the course of the next couple of weeks.
Our studio here is almost done.
I do have that studio that you probably have seen, the kind of like rural one.
We have the small farm where I spend time at.
So, that studio is actually done.
Just the one here is still in progress in my house since we're not using the one that we use for system update anymore.
So, until that's done, video may be a little sporadic, but certainly written reporting will continue.
But I think we have a decent setup here that certainly it's not.
Perfect.
It's not beautiful.
It's not great.
It's not going to inspire anyone to copy or create any visual and audio awards, but I think it's reasonably professional and sufficient so that we can continue to do it.
But just having a studio that you just go to kind of like Keeps the flow going.
But I'm also really happy that I'm back to written reporting and articles and analysis.
So we're obviously going to look for a lot of that as well.
All right.
Thank you to everybody who submitted questions.
If we got to your question, we're particularly appreciative.
Obviously, these QA shows are possible only with that.
If we didn't get to your question, sometimes I have them on the list and I just don't get to them enough.
I try and go about 90 minutes or so.
We keep them for next week.
Keep submitting them every week.
We'll post a new post for the QA.
Whatever questions you have, you can book critiques and arguments and Things that you want me to talk about, and we'll try and keep it as kind of diversified and interesting as possible.
I always try and address good faith critiques as well.
So keep looking for that.
Thank you so much for those of you who watched, and look for our work to continue at Substack, on YouTube, and elsewhere.