Glenn Greenwald addresses the show's potential schedule shift and critiques corporate media's incestuous ties to power before analyzing Tucker Carlson's genuine apology for past neoconservative stances. He argues Trump bears ultimate responsibility for the Iran war, driven by Zionist billionaires and maximalist demands that render a modified JCPOA unlikely without a false victory claim. Greenwald also questions the Southern Poverty Law Center's informant tactics and highlights how foreign-funded NGOs in nations like Brazil are viewed as sovereignty threats due to histories of US-backed coups, contrasting this with American superpower immunity. Ultimately, he champions critical thought over rote memorization while exposing geopolitical double standards regarding intervention and funding. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, MahmoudAshraf/mms-300m-1130-forced-aligner, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.00, and large-v3-turbo
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Tucker's Apology and Corporate Media00:14:49
Good evening, everybody.
Welcome back to our Friday night edition of our Q and A session that we do where we take questions and comments and critiques and ideas throughout the week from our subscribers.
And then every Friday night, uh, we devote as much time as possible to answering them as many of them as we can.
I've explained many times why this segment is so popular, why we also think it's an important segment to do.
I think reader interactivity with one's readers and viewers is of the utmost importance.
It's one of the ways you stay accountable.
I won't bore you with repeating all the reasons that.
I do this, but I do think it's very important.
It's also very enjoyable because the quality of the questions, because it's my audience and my subscribers, is universally good.
And I often end up talking about things that I wouldn't otherwise talk about or talk about things that I do talk about, but from a different angle.
So it's always something that we really enjoy doing.
We're happy to be back doing it.
We might move the date from Friday to Thursday, the regular day of Friday to Thursday, just because Friday night is a little bit of an awkward time to do this.
And Thursday night, I think, sometimes brings a more vibrant audience that can pay more attention in the middle of the week.
But we will definitely let you know if we move that.
For now, it is a Friday night occurrence, a weekly occurrence.
And we're going to get into questions in a second.
Just as a quick note, this weekend is the weekend for the unbelievably dreary and scummy and sleazy White House Correspondents' Dinner, where all of the swampy corporate media gather and they hobnob with the president, with BLS celebrities.
Or C list celebrities.
They all dress up.
They think it's like the Oscars for them.
And on the one hand, it's kind of trivial.
It's just like a little party for Washington journalists.
On the other, I do think it really does reflect one of the main pathologies of Washington journalism, of large corporate media journalism, which is this interdependence, this very incestuous Versailles like mentality, like a royal court mentality, that even though they're supposed to be adversarially checking and being even a little antagonistic to those in power in order to report on them in a way that's Investigative and not just subservient.
This party ends up being a reflection of how just intermingled they are and intermarried they are, and how it really does resemble this kind of like Versailles and the Potomac.
And there's an alternative party that has emerged, which is the Substack party.
And basically, that's for people who are journalists who don't get invited to the White House Correspondence Dinner or who do get invited but don't want to go.
I was planning on going to that just because it's Substack, it's more of an independent event.
But logistically, it just fell through at the last minute, which means I can comfortably and with a clean conscience.
Mock and deride self righteously all of these festivities since I actually won't be there.
But I do think the Substack one is an attempt to build kind of an alternative channel that allows people to gather for whatever reasons they gather.
But I won't be attending any of those.
So that's why, actually, if I did, I would have to get on a plane tonight or last night.
And that's why I'm able to be here with you, which I very much prefer.
All right, let's get into the questions.
And we do have a couple on the Iran war, which I obviously am going to talk about and want to talk about.
But we have a couple first on a couple other different topics.
The first one is from CJ Fitzpatrick.
Who says this, quote, Tucker Carlson has faced considerable criticism from the so called left recently for admitting that he was wrong about Trump and apologizing for supporting him.
I don't agree with him on many subjects, but I personally find his self reflection and honesty admirable and refreshing.
How do you make sense of that pylon given that Carlson has been more vocal about opposing war and challenging Israeli influence than most Democrats who attract far less scrutiny from the same crowd despite doing considerably less on either front?
So, anytime I talk about Tucker Carlson, I think it's important to note that I know Tucker.
Off camera.
He's a friend of mine.
We talk a lot.
Tucker is exactly the same off camera as he is on camera.
And I think one of the benefits of him leaving Fox, and I know that I felt this when I left even the foot that I had in corporate media, like the toe with Salon and The Guardian and then The Intercept when I came to Substack in 2020 after I had to leave my media a lot.
It is a sense of liberation and you feel liberated from constraints you weren't even really aware you had.
You think you're very free, but in the back of your mind, There's an awareness of where you are and a part of what institution, the kind of damage you can do to other people with whom you're linked if you say certain things.
And it definitely does end up being a kind of constraint, even if you're not aware of that.
And I think you see that with Tucker ever since UF Fox started his own podcast.
I think the mentality kind of was look, I've done everything in corporate media there is to do.
Clearly, he's liberated from whatever constraints he previously had.
As I was saying about Tucker, I think, you know, he got very liberated after.
After he left Fox.
And one of the examples that I often use is that prior to October 7th, 2023, Tucker never really talked about Israel.
Maybe you could find clips of him over 20 years talking about Israel in just a very perfunctory and cursory manner.
He always was a little bit of a paleo conservative, meaning like sort of the Pat Buchanan school, though that wasn't very popular.
That wasn't the way to advance in corporate media.
And I think he had those instincts even around the Iraq War.
But his role was to be a kind of mainstream conservative, and he fulfilled that role.
Including by advocating the Iraq War, advocating the war on terror, all sorts of things that he came to believe were not just wrong, but repugnant.
And this is not the first time Tucker has apologized.
He basically, and I do believe this is his motivation, he talks about how he's ashamed that he spent 20 years on television advocating neoconservatism and wars.
One of his first jobs was for Bill Crystal.
He wrote for the Weekly Standard in the 90s.
And I do believe gradually that he came to see this ideology that he was very much defending as something extremely repugnant and destructive.
And as a result, he's Apologized many times for what he did and talked about how a big part of what he does now is once redemption for those lies that he told on television about Iraq and about a lot of other things.
That's what he says drives him.
So he has apologized before.
And this idea of opposing the Iran war didn't come out of nowhere.
As I said, when he was on Fox at the 8 p.m. hour, the reason Republicans hated him, congressional Republicans, is because he was a major dissident on the war in Ukraine.
He pretty much single handedly convinced MAGA.
That they should turn against the war in Ukraine, that we shouldn't be financing this foreign war, that it wasn't in our interest.
It was incredibly dangerous.
And most Republicans are hawkish.
Even though they pretend that they like Trump's foreign policy plank and identity, they're really just more like traditional Bush Cheney Republicans.
And they wanted to fund the war in Ukraine.
In fact, most Republicans voted to fund it from the beginning.
And Tucker was there vehemently arguing against it back in 2018 when Trump killed the Iranian general, Soleimani.
Most Media outlets, including MSNBC, the New York Times, CNN, applauded that.
Tucker was one of the very few people on television, if not the only one, condemning it, saying it was provocative, it was for war, it was neoconservative, there was no benefit to that.
So, this has not been a sudden shift for Tucker.
It's been a very gradual, progressive one, but also one that is very real.
And I do think one of the problems with corporate media is that very few people ever acknowledge error and apologize for it.
There's just no accountability at all.
I've talked many times about how most of the people, Who have the most influential jobs in corporate media were the people who were vehemently in favor of the Iraq War and who peddle all those lies, including the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, and so many others.
It's like they got rewarded for lying and being wrong, but being wrong in service of the US security state, they never apologize.
They got benefits from it.
Some of them might have excused it or admitted they got some things wrong, but never apologize.
And I think it's incredibly noble for Tucker to go in front of a camera repeatedly and say, I'm ashamed of what I did and I apologize.
And this anti war, anti neocon, Believe as he became more overtly religious as well.
I think he thinks more about the value of innocent life and the wrongness of just extinguishing it just so casually.
I do believe he's horrified by that.
This is something that you can see a long time in the making.
And so, once the United States under Joe Biden started financing and arming the war in Gaza and diplomatically and militarily protecting it, and then Trump did the same thing, although he engineered two different ceasefires for which he deserves some credit.
Biden never even tried to do that.
Just looking at the kind of destruction of what that entailed, I think really horrified him and made him start questioning what is our foreign policy and for whom is it being implemented?
And turned more and more against it and turned more and more against our support for Israel and the people who were behind these wars.
And I should also point out that Tucker's not just a pundit.
He was very close to Donald Trump and tried repeatedly, even at the expense of risking his very valuable friendship with the president of the United States.
That relationship brings a lot of benefits to whoever has it monetary benefits, but also access, which is monetary benefits, but also just influence, the ability to have your voice heard by the decision makers who are making them.
And he risked all that to desperately try to stop the war in Iran.
Went multiple times to the White House and tried to talk Trump out of it.
And he ended up losing his relationship with Trump as a result.
You could argue that Tucker did more than anybody to try and stop the war in Iran.
And so now, after seeing everything the second term has become, and my own view has always been that the kind of ceiling for Trump, the way the potential benefits were higher than the Democrats' ceiling, the Democrats, he just knew, were going to perpetuate the status quo, be establishment drones.
I mean, you think Kamala Harris would radically or meaningfully change anything?
Of course she would.
And Biden really didn't either.
But I always thought the potential for Trump was higher because of these instincts of anti war and anti corporatism and those sorts of things.
But I always thought the floor was lower.
I mean, Trump's character is not admirable.
I think everybody, including his supporters, can acknowledge that.
And the second Trump term has basically accelerated and strengthened and provoked all of the worst possible characteristics of Donald Trump and his administration.
Like, whatever the floor was, that's where we are bombing the Houthis in Yemen after criticizing Biden for doing so, funding and giving a green light to everything Israel wanted to do.
Bombing Iran last year with Israel, abducting the president of Venezuela, threatening that Cuba and regime change is next.
Now, a major war that he started, a war of choice, a war of aggression, that his own State Department in a legal document that they published last week in order to legally justify the war said is a major motive is that we are doing it for Israel, for our ally Israel.
And the focus of the second Trump administration, other than sealing the border, which is no small feat, he ran on that and he fulfilled that promise and deserves credit if that's a policy that you believe in.
Most of the focus has been on everything.
But American communities and American interests, the interests of the average American, the people who voted him to office and whose interests he promised to prioritize.
And Tucker was one of the people most promoting the idea that this is who would, this is what Trump would do.
And now he sees that Trump is doing everything but that.
And on top of that, you have this grave corruption.
Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis, Trump's kids getting all kinds of money from the UAE, millions and millions and millions of dollars flowing to the Trump family and to Steve Witkopf and his family.
From the exact Persian Gulf tyrannies that the United States is constantly benefiting with its foreign policy.
And you see all of this on top of just these kind of behavioral traits of Trump that sometimes I found charming and funny, in part because of how much they upset people.
It's really gone into a much darker and more unhinged place.
And if you don't see that, it's fine.
You can continue to find Trump amusing.
I do find him amusing sometimes, but I think his behavior has become a lot darker.
And so, for Derek Carlson to say, I'm apologizing for something not that I did 20 years ago or 10 years ago, I'm apologizing for something I did last year and over the last five years and six years, which is I promoted Donald Trump based on things I thought he was going to do and things that I thought he was.
And it turns out he's none of those.
And I feel like I misled my own audience.
And therefore, I'm apologizing to the people who believed in me.
How is that not noble?
We need so much more of that.
Now, the people on the left and a lot of Democrats who have been.
Inculcated to believe that Tucker is a white supremacist and Tucker is a Nazi and Tucker is this and Tucker is that.
They are so immersed in this iconography of Tucker as like the supreme evil, the actual Nazi, they will say, that their brains just cannot process the possibility that anything Tucker is saying is beneficial or anything he's doing is genuine.
They're constantly looking for ulterior motives.
Oh, it's in order to gain a bigger audience, ride this wave, or position themselves in 2028.
Try and make the space for JD Vance or try and usher in white supremacy, or he's only against Israel because of anti Semitism.
Amazing to watch the left criticize people who are critics of Israel on the grounds that they're just anti Semites.
But I think the reason for this is in part it is because if you are just so fixated and stuck and imprisoned and captive to one party or the other or one wing of the ideological spectrum or the other, you are trained to believe that the people in the other camp opposed to you.
Are just unmitigated evil and nothing positive can come from them.
Nothing good can come from them.
Like, even if it seems like it's good, even if it seems like there's positive, it just can't be the case.
I'll just give you an example.
There are a few people I find more despicable than Laura Loom for all the obvious reasons.
And yet, last week, there was this big protest of animal rights activists.
And it was at a company called Ridgland Farms that breeds beagles, keeps them in absolutely horrific conditions, tries to sell them to universities and research institutes that subject them to the sickest, most sadistic experiment, all of which are gratuitous.
And then, afterward, these beagles are just killed.
And the ones they can't sell, they just kill.
And the conditions inside the farms will make you sick to your stomach.
And the reason they use beagles is because beagles are one of the most trusting and loving dogs, breeds of dogs.
So they're very trusting.
They're very pliable with humans, which makes it extra sad.
And I did a lot of reporting on this 2018, 2019, 2020, including on these activists, on this sickening company and the dogs they keep.
And when they had this big protest last week in Wisconsin where they tried to enter the facilities and rescue these beagles, And they were met with incredible, incredibly severe.
Activism, Zionists, and Genocide Claims00:10:37
Police force, private security force, including tear gas and a lot of violence.
In response to my bringing attention to this, Laura Loomer said, Oh, I know you work a lot with dogs.
People ask me, What do I do in my spare time?
And basically, what I do most of that, more than anything, is I rescue dogs.
And if you and I could work together, we could save a lot of dogs, a lot of animals.
And I didn't look at that and think, Oh, Laura Loomer is such a repugnant person.
She can't possibly love dogs.
I think it's probably genuine.
And I took it as that, even though, as I said, there are a few people I find more repellent.
But a lot of people on the left will not do that ever, ever.
And so part of their kind of anger at Tucker's apology and their insistence that it's cynical or jaded or too late or whatever is based on this binary brain that they have.
But a bigger part of it is for a lot of people, politics is a religion.
And when you are a devotee of a religion, by necessity, you believe that the religion is the holder of truth.
And whatever other religions contradict those core views that you believe are the embodiment of truth, they become just.
Godless or blasphemous.
And it kind of drives you to look at people in those other camps as kind of inherently corrupted.
So even if it seems like they're saying something good or doing something good, how can it be?
And I think a lot of people on the left and a lot of people on the right, but we're talking here about the left's reaction to Tucker's apology, see politics through this binary prism.
And the reality is Tucker has done more to stop the war in Ukraine and the US funding of it, to stop this horrific war that's so incredibly destructive and stupid with Iran.
To convert people and change their minds on Israel and U.S. support for Israel.
And there's just no denying the massive benefits this has.
And as the question suggested, he's done this far more than almost any Democrat or even person on the left.
And so I think they look at Tucker and feel a sense of shame that he's doing the things they wish their political leaders or influencers would do.
And it's not that there's no one on the left equally vehement in opposing Israel and opposing the war in Iran.
It's that Tucker has gone beyond just.
Advocating it, but because of the enormity of his platform and the influence he has with conservatives in particular, he's able to change minds.
If you're on the left and you denounce Israel, people just nod their head.
They already disliked Israel.
You didn't really change anything.
Now, there are people on the left who have done good things.
I was a big defender of the student encampments and protests.
I thought the actions against them and the attempt to depict them as anti Semitism were sinister.
I had them on my show many times.
So it's not that there's nobody on the left doing activism, but someone of Tucker stature taking a Position on many issues with such vehemence, and at the same time, pairing it with action that can actually influence things for the better.
I think they just feel like we can't allow anybody on the right the credit of actually doing something positive.
And so we have to be jaded about it.
We have to demean it and malign it because they just can't tolerate the idea that anyone on the right actually is doing something as good as, in fact, better than the people they politically revere.
And I find it incredibly self indulgent and selfish.
It's like if you actually think, That's what Joe Biden supported and financed and armed was a genocide in Gaza.
If you actually think the war in Iran is this.
Moral crime and this danger to the world, then you should be so happy by definition that whoever is doing something to oppose it and stop it, you should welcome that.
I mean, if somebody's trying to stop a genocide or trying to stop a major war, and you actually believe that that's a genocide or this is a major war is a huge disaster, why would you look at somebody who's effectively influencing people to be opposed to this and even starting to stop the war himself with this access to the president that he is now, to his harm, to his detriment, has lost?
Trump now constantly attacks Tucker Carlson.
He has no more access to the White House.
He risked that.
It wasn't just risk free advocacy.
Why would you look at that and think, oh, this is something I need to attack and destroy rather than celebrate and welcome?
And I do think a lot of it is to shame that there aren't people on their side doing that.
So those are my basic views on the whole Tucker issue.
All right.
Next question from John.
It seems that there are two camps on the Iran war.
On the one hand, it's almost all or mostly Israel's doing.
Perhaps you, Tucker Mearsheimer.
The evidence is, of course, quite interesting.
Intentional photos and videos of Gaza from the idea of themselves, genocidal language from state officials, the lobby, AIPAC, Miriam Adelson, and so on.
And on the other hand, the idea is that it's just a convenient pretext.
People like Norman Finkelstein, Michael Tracy, Brian Berlitik, to name a few, while they differ in many ways, not putting much of the blame on Israel and instead having varying degrees of blame on Trump and the United States, and in general, they balk at the idea that Israel controls the U.S. Berlitik even suggested it's a convenient story to blame Israel.
I believe Finkelstein may share that.
Norman Finkelstein may share that opinion.
All right.
So, whatever your views are on that, and I'll explain mine in a second.
At the end of the day, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.
The decisions of the United States government are the decision of the president.
There's no exonerating him from it.
There's no excusing it or exculpating it because it was Israel that forced him to do it.
At the end of the day, the decision to bring the United States to war with Iran was Donald Trump's and Donald Trump's only.
And that has to be hung around his neck.
That is his decision.
And whatever.
Good happens from this war, if any, whatever disaster and destruction happens.
And there's already been a lot of that goes around, goes on his legacy.
So even if you think Israel influenced him or even hypnotized him or deceived him, it's still Donald Trump that made the decision.
That's his responsibility.
So I don't think it's true that if you talk about what influences a president, it means that you're excusing what he did or justifying what he did.
For instance, I know that President Trump gets a lot of his information from Fox News because he basically likes to live blog Fox News.
He'll see something on Fox News that I like and immediately.
Tweet or go on True Social and say, Get that woman off.
He did that with Jessica Tarlov.
He was watching The Five in the middle of a war.
He was watching The Five and she's the Democratic kind of token.
And she criticized Trump in a harsh way.
And he immediately went to True Social and said, This, she's disgusting.
Take her out there.
So I know he gets a lot of his information from Fox.
And I have no doubt that that's part of why he's so often misled and misinformed.
Because Fox is a propaganda channel for Israel, for the US security state, for wars.
It always has been.
But saying that Fox influences Trump doesn't in any way excuse what Trump does.
If anything, it's a criticism of him on its own for letting Fox News give him information when he has a $75 billion a year intelligence community that's there to spy and collect information and give him information.
Instead, he likes to get it from Fox News or Newsmax.
So I don't excuse, it's not an excuse for Trump to say, oh, he's getting his information from Fox News and therefore doesn't have accurate information.
It's actually a criticism.
Now, anyone who denies that Israel has played a major role in this war, in my opinion, is being naive at best and deliberately bind, willingly bind at worst, because, or I guess worse would be actively deceitful, knowingly deceitful, which I think a lot of people in this camp are.
You think Mary Madelson has given hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, including more than 100 million in this last election cycle to Trump in exchange for nothing?
Even Trump says he asked Mary Madelson if she's more loyal to Israel or the United States, and she wouldn't answer, which Trump knows means she's more loyal to Israel.
She's been an Israeli citizen her whole life.
She was born in Israel, served in the IDF.
She only became an American citizen later in life when she married the billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
And the Adelsons, as Trump said, would go to the White House all the time and demand things, not for the United States, but for Israel.
And Trump would say, Here are all the things I gave them.
So they have incredible access to Trump.
They're very powerful.
Trump worships and reveres wealth and power, always has.
That's what he respects.
And it's not just them, it's all kinds of other Zionist billionaires, including his own son in law, Jared Kushner, who has been a fanatical Israel supporter his whole life.
Their family donates to West Bank settler groups, even though it's been the position of the United States government under both parties that West Bank settlements are a direct national security threat to the United States because they impede a two state solution, which in turn jeopardizes and endangers the United States in that region.
And Steve Witkopf is one of Trump's best friends, a Jewish Zionist billionaire.
Howard Lutnick.
I mean, these are Bill Ackman, who gave a lot of money.
These are people who Trump's constantly influenced by and listening to and relying on, in addition to Mary Middlesex.
And also, Donald Trump's daughter, who a lot of people have claimed is his favorite.
She was the only one on the apprentice.
He obviously, I think he loves all his kids.
I don't think Trump is that dysfunctional in terms of his personality, but he clearly loves Ivanka a great deal.
He's always like kind of the most beautiful of his kids, like the prized jewel of the family.
She's now married to Jared Kushner, who's an Orthodox Jew.
She converted to Judaism.
They go to a temple where that has associations with a lot of extremist Zionist views.
And Jared Kushner is running Middle East policy for him with Steve Whitcock.
And then on top of that, you have the entire Christian evangelical Zionist movement, the Lindsey Grahams and the Mike Huckabees.
So, Trump is constantly influenced by people loyal to Israel.
Netanyahu came to the United States seven times in one year.
You think he did that because it was ineffective?
The only item on his agenda was he wanted the United States to attack Iran.
He got the United States to do it last year and then got Trump to do it again.
There's reporting, including from the New York Times, that Trump decided to go to war when he sat in the situation room with Benjamin Netanyahu the last time Benjamin Netanyahu came to the US.
And Trump didn't sit where the president typically sits, which is the head of the table.
He sat across the table from Netanyahu, kind of like his equals, and they presented a Mossad presentation.
To him about why going to war with Iran would be easy, why very quickly the population would rise up and overthrow the government, why it would be easy to win, none of which turned out to be true.
So clearly, Israel played a huge role.
In fact, as I said, the Justice Department, the State Department, in justifying the legality of this war.
Is saying we're doing it for a legitimate national security reason, a main one of which is we're doing it to protect Israel, one of our most important allies.
But saying that doesn't excuse Trump, nor does it mean there's no other interest that the United States has.
The US security state is constantly looking for wars.
Obviously, oil is a big factor.
It's not a coincidence that we typically go to war and have military action with oil rich countries.
Venezuela's oil reserves are gigantic.
That was not unrelated to the fact that we went in and took out Maduro and put a gun to the head of everybody else and said, do our bidding or we'll kill you too.
Or will prison you.
So it doesn't mean there aren't other factors.
Indictment Details and Southern Funding00:09:20
There are.
But Israel is a major one.
But saying that doesn't mean that it's not the United States doing it.
Trump is exculpated.
It's only Israel.
Trump is surrounded by people, by Americans in his family, in his cabinet, in his closest circles, his biggest funders who also were pushing for this.
And a lot of them are pushing for it because of Israel, but a lot of them are pushing it because they're just warmongers.
And that's what Washington does it goes to war.
Defense contractors get richer.
Palantir gets richer.
They're incredibly influential in Trump's circle.
They have enormous amounts of data on everyone and have a lot more, thanks to Trump, who centralized a lot of spying data under their exclusive control.
They're war fanatics.
They're excited about it.
It's what they want to do.
They want to use AI to basically make decisions on the battlefield.
There's reporting that that first strike, that first day on the elementary school, filled with 170 young schoolgirls who we liberated from life, was due to poor calculations by AI on which the military was relying.
There are all kinds of reasons why the U.S. would go to war.
Israel is one of the major factors.
You could even say the major factor, but it doesn't mean that, oh, that means the U.S. has no blame, or that this isn't what the U.S. does as well, or that Trump is somehow excused from making the decision to go to exactly the kind of war that he spent a decade promising he would never do.
All right.
Next question.
Greg asks Hi, Glenn.
Given your background in law, what's your take on the SPLC situation, the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment?
The DOJ, if you don't know, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which styles itself as this.
Group that is an activist group opposing right wing extremism and white supremacy, and the Justice Department indicted them for reasons I'll explain in a second.
Is this simply a politicization of law enforcement, or are there legitimate claims made by the state?
It's difficult to find a clean read on this, given how polarizing the SPLC and the Trump administration are in American political culture and discourse.
Thanks.
All right.
First of all, I cannot stand the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I think they're incredibly pernicious.
They masquerade their standard left liberal views as combating hateful ideologies and white supremacy.
They put people on their little hate list that are just conservatives that they want to sanction.
They have worked their way into a lot of companies so that if you are on this list, You can have your interests jeopardized, lose all sorts of contracts.
You'll be banned from the internet at times.
And I've always viewed them as this anti free speech, very deceitful organization.
I have a long record of publicly denouncing them.
So I can't stand the Southern Property Law Center.
I actually had my own personal conflicts with them when I was a lawyer and I was representing right wing groups, including white supremacist groups and free speech cases where they were trying to implement into the law curbs on free speech to allow people.
To claim this very threatening theory that has been rejected by the Supreme Court going back decades that if you give speeches that inspire other people to go and commit violence, the victims of that violence can sue you, even though all you did was give a First Amendment protected speech.
That's actually what a lot of people wanted to do, have Jack Smith do, is hold Trump criminally accountable because he gave a speech that theory was he inspired others to go commit crimes at the Capitol.
And I've been, I was always saying that that kind of prosecution would be threatening to free speech, would actually destroy free speech.
And the Southern Poverty Law Center, this was their obsession.
And so I had cases where they were the main culprit.
And I used to have all kinds of conflict with them and then in my journalism as well.
So I can't stand the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I hate them, really.
I find them unbelievably poisonous.
But let me say a couple of things about this indictment.
Just as a general matter, one of the things that alarms me, and maybe this is from my lawyer days, or I think it's just my instinctive belief in things like due process, you know, like people talk about what my ideology is all the time.
The core of my ideology, maybe at least one of the linchpins, is that I distress when human beings have unlimited power because I feel like they're going to abuse that power.
I always want power restrained and balanced and checked.
And due process is a critical way of doing that so that if power centers or the people with guns make an accusation against you, it's vital that you have due process.
You're not punished until they prove with evidence tested in the court that you're actually guilty.
That I go back to always, Benjamin Franklin said, or rather, Thomas Jefferson said, it's better to allow 10 guilty people to go free.
Than it is to punish one innocent person.
Benjamin Franklin said, it's better to allow 100 guilty people to go free than punish one innocent person.
There are a few worse injustices than punishing somebody without proving they did anything wrong.
That's why I hate mob justice.
I hate trial by internet.
I don't trust it.
It's so often driven by all kinds of primal and venal instincts.
And so one of the things I've been disturbed about for a long time is people will take at face value, as though it's proven and true, the issuance of an indictment by the Justice Department.
The Justice Department indictment is just allegations from prosecutors who are often wrong, who often lose cases, who are often forced to withdraw those because the evidence isn't there.
So, I'm not even talking about the Southern Pond for Gladiator case.
I'm just saying, in general, I think one should be extremely careful not to take indictments at face value, not to assume that everything in the indictment, even if it has pretty Department of Justice letterhead on it, is true because there's nothing proven in there.
They don't have to include any evidence in this indictment.
Allegations.
And I would think conservatives learned that lesson better than anybody when they watched Donald Trump be indicted multiple times for things that were not crimes or things that were dependent on false allegations that Jack Smith was making, that Alvin Bragg was making, that Fannie Willis was making.
You don't just put blind faith in the allegations of a prosecutor, even if it's against an organization that you hate.
So that's one thing take that indictment as what it is, not saying disbelieve it all or discard it all.
But also, don't assume it's all true.
That's not true just for this case.
That's for every case, for every indictment.
Now, as far as I can understand it, and again, I think the indictment is kind of vague as well.
It's specific in some instances, obviously, but vague in others.
The basic idea is that the Southern Poverty Law Center, while claiming to combat hate groups and white supremacy, was actually paying people in these groups, either to join the group or who are already in the group, to serve as their informant, their eyes and ears, to be able to tell them, oh, This is what they planned.
You know, it's kind of like when the FBI uses informants in a drug gang or a terrorist group or whatever.
And the informants there, for whatever reason, he's getting paid.
He got caught committing an unrelated crime and they're promising leniency, or they planted him there.
He actually went to a mosque or went to the drug trade specifically with the intention of infiltrating it as an informant.
So it seems very clear because even the Southern Property Law Center admits that they were paying people inside these groups, including the planning of the Charlottesville. Rally that caused so much allegations about Donald Trump and about the right wing movement because it ended in a vehicular homicide of Heather.
I'm sorry, I don't remember her name, but of a woman who was protesting, counter protesting the rally.
And the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying people in the Ku Klux Klan, in these white supremacist groups, as part of the Charlottesville rally, to be their informant.
Paying people to be your informant is not illegal, nor is it really considered untoward.
It's an important part of investigative work.
Journalists can't pay people to do it.
But obviously, journalists rely on people on the inside of a group to give them secrets.
That's how I did the Snowden reporting.
Snowden was inside the NSA.
And at some point, he turned and became somebody who wanted to inform on them, not serve them or work for them.
And that's how journalists get information all the time.
The FBI pays informants all the time.
And so, whether an activist group should be paying informants, I think you could argue both sides of that, but it's not criminal.
That part is not criminal.
What the indictment has to demonstrate is what the FBI is trying to argue.
What Kash Patel is publicly alleging, which is that it wasn't just that they were paying informants, they were funneling money to these groups and basically fueling them or supporting them or even at times directing them when they were telling the public they were combating these groups and collecting money on that basis.
What they were telling the public they were doing was the opposite of what they were doing, according to this indictment.
They weren't combating these groups, they were funneling money to them.
And the informant inside the Charlottesville rally, the planning of it, was posting racist, uh, Postings and even making suggestions at the direction of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So the crime would be that they were representing themselves to the public and collecting donations based on false claims about what their actual function was.
I have a hard.
Now, let me just say this.
I do think that one of the main problems with these activist groups, I've talked about this before with LGBT groups, like mainstream gay rights groups, like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, is that the NAACP, same thing, is that they are highly motivated to ensure that the problem or the threat that they claim to be combating remains strong.
Creating Injustice for Gay Rights Groups00:04:59
Because if racism is not a major force in American life, or if homophobia is not a major force in American life, then you don't need these groups anymore.
The donors will stop giving, the jobs will dry up.
Might as well just close the doors.
And I do think that happened with gay groups, by the way, which is that for a long time, the kind of North Star, like the ultimate goal of the gay rights movement, was to secure full and complete legal equality for lesbian and gay citizens or LGBT citizens, whatever, gay, lesbian, and bisexual citizens, as it was called for a long time.
And the ultimate white whale was gay marriage legalized in all 50 states, same sex marriage legalized in all 50 states.
Attitudes were radically changing, especially among young people, including young conservatives, where favorable views were the majority view toward gay people, something that a lot of people never imagined they'd see in their lifetime, including me.
And even as all this progress was made and anti discrimination laws and providing rights that previously didn't exist, even unions, legal unions, spousal unions, the argument was always we won't have full and legal equality until we get gay marriage.
Once we get gay marriage, then we'll have full and legal equality.
And as you probably know, the Supreme Court in Oberkfell.
Ruled, I think it was 2015, that banning same sex couples from the institution of marriage is unconstitutional.
Same sex marriage was being legalized democratically in most states.
I think it was like 38 states have legalized same sex marriages at the time of Overfell, maybe a little bit less, but democratically it was on its way.
But with Overfell, instantaneously, overnight, all 50 states recognized same sex marriage.
And because they ruled that excluding same sex couples from their institution of marriage violates the 14th Amendment.
So although that was a success, Ostensibly for these huge gay rights groups funded with massive amounts of donors.
I mean, the Jewish community has a lot of big donors, so does the Indian diaspora, but gay people.
Have a lot of discretionary money, are major donors in the political system.
That's one of the reasons why those trends happen so quickly.
Once that happened, once Oberfeld legalized gay marriage in every single state, really these gay groups should have been like, okay, we won.
Everything is done.
Let's close up shop.
We accomplished it.
We overcame the injustices we said we were fighting.
Obviously, they would never do that.
Talking about major organizations with tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars with all kinds of perks and access to power and the Democratic Party and huge.
NGO salaries, and that's their purpose.
That was their identity.
They're not going to give that up because they won.
So they had to create some injustice against which they could claim to be fighting.
And that was when LGBT activism started to focus almost entirely on the issue of transgender rights.
You could just see it after 2015.
That's when it skyrocketed.
They all started, okay, now there's all these, okay, we don't have injustice anymore against gay and lesbian people systematically or legally, but there's all these things that trans people are excluded from.
They're not recognized according to the gender they identify with.
They're not allowed to play in the sport of their real gender.
They don't get put in prison.
And all these things, trans kids.
So they kept having to keep digging and digging and digging.
I don't really think people cared about trans issues.
There were trans people before all this.
And Martina Navratilova, the huge tennis star, had a coach who was transgender, Renee Richards.
And prior to her transition, she was an ophthalmologist, played on the Yale tennis team, was married to a woman, had kids, kind of the all American story.
And then she transitioned later in life around the age of 35, 38, and became trans.
A woman.
She had all the gender reassignment surgeries.
And although she was never a good enough player as a man to make it on the tour, not even close, once she transitioned to being a woman, she sued the WTA, the Women's Tennis Association, for the right to play.
And WTA basically said, okay, a court said in the early 1980s she had the right to play.
And then the WTA just accepted it.
And she got to like number 20 in the world.
And she was old.
She was 42.
Had this been 20 years earlier, she would have probably dominated the tour.
In fact, Renee Richards has come to regret that she forced her way into women's sports.
And she did say that.
She said, The only reason why I didn't beat everybody, why I could only get to number 20 in the world, which is very high, is because I was old.
Had I been younger, I would have beaten the shit out of all these, like the best at Chris Everett, Martina Navratilova, Billion King, all of them.
She would have just bashed them off the court, she said.
And so she became this like dissident figure as a trans woman, regretting that the whole sports issue.
And then Martina Navratilova, who was very good friends with Renee Richards, who she, Martina Navratilova hired her as her coach when she was number one in the world.
Martina Evertlova has become this outspoken opponent of allowing trans women to participate in women's sport.
And Martina was a longtime openly gay icon when few other people were, and she got kicked out of all these groups.
So when Renee Richards was trans, she was always on television and sitting in Martina's box.
She had this lawsuit no one even really knew about.
She played in WT, no one really cared.
Skepticism on Spies and Informants00:03:05
It wasn't really a thing that was put in front of people.
There was no effort to coerce how they spoke about it because being trans was so rare that it just, No one really cared.
No one was bothered by it.
And Americans do have this live and let live attitude by and large.
Like, hey, if my neighbor, that guy who lives down the street, decides he really identifies as a woman and wants to live his life as a woman, what's that to me?
No one really cared.
It was only so that was the challenge of these gay rights groups.
They had to create resistance so they could claim they were overcoming some kind of injustice.
They basically manufactured it.
And so while my instinct is to say, I doubt the Southern Poverty Law Center, these people who are just extremists who think everything is a hate group, there's nothing more important than combating white supremacy, white supremacist groups.
While on the one hand, I doubt that they would deliberately Strengthen and finance these groups, and that it's more likely that their motive was to get informants so they could know more about these groups to better combat them.
I do think in these groups, there's this intrinsic need to strengthen the injustices you claim you're fighting against because that's what elevates your mission and justifies your jobs and provokes more and more donations.
Southern Poverty Law Center is drowning in money, has been drowning in money.
So, I want to take a wait and see attitude.
I want to see what the evidence actually shows.
We do not see any evidence yet.
We just have these prosecutorial allegations.
There is no question, because again, the group admits it.
They were paying informants inside these groups a lot of money and sometimes even directing them hey, post this, post that.
It'll make you more genuine and authentic.
You won't have so much suspicion around being an informant.
But also, you can go back.
Alex Jones and other people on the right, I think Mike Cernovich is one another, were warning people don't go to Charlottesville.
It's a trap.
There's feds there, there's informants there.
It's designed to, to, Demean and put into and to discredit this movement against immigrants or whatever.
And they turned out to be right.
In fact, I think Alex Jones actually said that the Southern Poverty Law Center was involved in a lot of these groups.
So there is something deceitful about it.
Whether it's criminal is going to depend on whether the government can prove that the intent really was not to combat these groups, the KKK and white supremacy group, but to strengthen them.
And I guess the idea would be that way they could make these groups seem bigger, which would also elevate the importance of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the people who work there as well.
I've seen that.
Before that dynamic, before I just explained a couple instances, and I don't put it past these people.
They're really the lowest.
The Southern Property Law Center has the worst people working, but I'm not going to declare them guilty until I actually see evidence.
And I think that's kind of a skepticism that's well advised for all criminal cases when all we have is the indictment.
All right.
Next question is from Phil Nichols Might or could Trump accept a treaty with Iran that resurrected the JCPOA with a few tweaks so he could say he got a better deal, along with Closing our Middle East military bases is useless and effective, and quote, to save money for the American people.
He could call these wins and walk away.
APAC would not be pleased, but most Americans would.
All right.
I think Trump is in a terrible bind.
And it was one that was foreseeable when this war started.
I talked about it before the war, during when the war was started.
Iran Nuclear Program and Regime Change00:11:36
A lot of other people did too.
It was not that difficult to see, which is Iran is a very formidable country.
Part of the propaganda that we are subjected to when our country goes to war with another country is that country gets demonized.
They get depicted as, you know, primitive and like, Just not advanced, not part of sophisticated culture.
They're basically just Cretans, you know, like barely human.
That happened in Gaza.
You know, Gaza has had a society extremely focused on education.
Education was the most important thing to Gaza.
There are so many fluent English speakers in Gaza, even though they can't leave Gaza because the Israelis and the Egyptians surround them and then the Israelis bomb their airport.
There's no way to get out and shoot them if they try and leave by sea.
But they're very studied people.
They produce some of the best medical facilities and universities in all of the Middle East, all of which are, of course, destroyed now by Israel, paid for by the United States.
In fact, the medical facilities were.
Respected in Europe and elsewhere.
The literacy rate in Gaza was something like 98%, as high as, if not higher than, almost every other country in the Middle East.
How many Americans do you think know that?
How many Americans probably have the perception of Gazans as just being these totally backward, primitive people, barely coherent, barely able to speak a language, let alone multiple languages, let alone highly educated?
And now this is the same thing with Iran.
Oh, these are primitive people from the Stone Ages who murder women if they show a little bit of hair.
It's kind of these freaks.
Go listen to Iranian leaders.
Go look at their educational record.
These are highly sophisticated people.
Persian culture has produced incredibly impressive achievements.
There's just no denying that.
And as a result, one of the things that they're extremely good at is military strategy and defending their country.
They've known for a long time that the United States, there are huge factions in the United States that serve Israel that want to go and take down the regime.
They wanted to do that in 2003.
Part of the idea was go to Baghdad, take down Saddam, and then go to Tehran and take down the government there and reinstall a pro US puppet like the Shah.
So, they've been planning for war for many years.
There are papers online where Iranian war planners were studying very intensively Iraq and Ukraine and Russia to see what the successes were there in building their military and their strategy around that.
Obviously, they can't match the American military, but it was so obvious that it was going to be extremely difficult to just crush them and defeat them and force a surrender the way Trump was convinced he'd be able to do, like he did in Venezuela.
So, once you start a war like this that you can't win easily, the dilemma is you have two choices.
You can either A, Just end the war because you can't fight it anymore financially, economically, politically, or just because you don't want to fight it anymore because you know this is the kind of thing that has destroyed presidencies.
Iraq destroyed the Bush presidency, Vietnam destroyed LGBJ.
So I think Trump knows that because he said it many, many times.
And so he doesn't want to get drawn into a very protracted conflict, but he can't stop the war unless he has a credible claim that he wants.
That's why he's constantly saying, Oh, we destroyed their Navy.
It's the bottom of the sea.
They don't have any Air Force.
They have no missiles.
They have no radar.
Meanwhile, they seem to be doing quite a lot.
They closed the Strait of Hormuz.
We couldn't get it open.
Now, We're blockading it.
They pummeled American bases and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf tyrannies.
They pummeled Israel.
They seized ships in the Persian Gulf over the last week.
So they're not a joke and they're not near collapsing.
They're not near regime change.
That's why Trump keeps saying, oh, we already brought regime change to Iran because obviously that was one of the stated goals.
Everyone knows that hasn't happened.
The IRGC is still very much in control in Iran.
And so President Trump needs to find a way to convince people that he won.
But in order to credibly win, he has to actually point to something concrete.
Especially with regards to the nuclear program.
Now, this is something I talked about a lot last year because, as you might remember, leading up to the June bombing with Israel of Iran's three nuclear sites, Operation Midnight Hammer, in contrast to Epic Fury, President Trump was constantly claiming before leading up to that war, and this is why.
The Iranians don't trust him.
It's one of the reasons why the Iranians don't even want to negotiate.
Now, he kept saying, Oh, I don't think we're going to need to attack Iran.
We're very close to a deal about their nuclear program.
But that was always the problem how was Trump going to say that he got something better than the JCPOA?
Because the Iran deal was steadfastly negotiated over a lot of time and involved a lot of parties Russia, China, Europe, United States, Iran.
And it was tons of back and forth to get to that deal.
The Iranians pretty much Made all the concessions they were willing to make.
They allowed incredibly invasive inspections in all of their nuclear facilities, constant 24 hour surveillance in every crevice there.
They agreed not to enrich uranium above the level needed for nuclear energy, which were all things Iran was insisting they would never do.
And they got to that point because they wanted to be reintegrated into the international community, wanted sanctions lifted.
And so they gave up a lot of rights that they had by treaty under the Nuclear Not Proliferation Treaty, and that the United States would never agree to.
Israel doesn't agree to.
So they made a huge number of concessions.
So It was very difficult to see when Trump was saying, Oh, we're going to get a deal with Iran, given that Trump painted himself into a corner because he invalidated the Iran deal, as said, it was the worst deal ever.
So the only deal he could possibly justify signing would be one meaningfully better than what the JCPOA provided.
And it was very difficult to understand how that was going to happen.
There wasn't a lot of space that the Iranians could even give.
They were never going to give up their enrichment.
And that was, I think, what ended up deceiving Trump this question of enrichment.
Nobody ever thought the Iranians were going to completely give up the right to enrich.
Every country has the right to enrich uranium for nuclear energy.
It's a matter of sovereign pride.
No country is going to give up that right.
And so when the negotiations began, Steve Witkopf was saying, yeah, of course, they're going to have to enrich to 3.67%.
The question is, how do we make sure they're not enriching beyond that?
But at some point, it was like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Netanyahu saying, no, Iran can't have any nuclear program, meaning they were conflating nuclear weapons and nuclear energy and saying, any enriched uranium, any production of uranium, any enriched uranium, Would be Trump allowing them to get nuclear weapons.
And then Trump, I think, doesn't understand the difference.
I really believe this between no nuclear program, meaning no nuclear energy program, no enriched uranium at all, and a nuclear program.
I think Trump got convinced that any enrichment of uranium was necessarily a way to get a nuclear weapon.
And so by insisting on this maximalist claim that they had to give up any right to enrich uranium, something they would never have agreed to do ever, Trump made it inevitable that the negotiations would fail.
And now he's in that same position.
In order to get a deal to end the war, That Trump can credibly claim as a victory.
He needs a deal on the nuclear program.
They need to give up their enriched uranium underground.
They need to say they'll do things that they didn't agree to as part of the Iran deal.
And it's very difficult to see what that might be.
Now, they could get some trivial symbolic concessions around that will allow Trump to exaggerate and insist that he won this great victory.
He's the greatest war hero ever.
Fox News will be like, look at what we got.
But in reality, it's going to be very similar to the JCPOA.
In fact, the invalidation of the Iran deal. Was one of the things the Adelsons wanted most.
When the Israel lobby got behind Trump in 2016, they were certainly not behind him at the start.
They were behind Jeb Bush and Mark Rubio and then Ted Cruz.
And then finally, once Trump's nomination was inevitable, they got behind him.
Their main demand was that Trump pull out of the Iran deal because the Iran deal is what was allowing the Iranians to reintegrate into the international community, to trade, to sell their oil, to have sanctions lifted.
And the Israelis, what they wanted more than anything was Iran suffocated and broken and isolated and starved because that benefits Israel.
And that was the concession they extracted from Trump.
And so Trump being Trump said, it's the worst deal ever, the worst deal ever.
It was a deal that basically every independent institution, including the IAEA, said was effectively working to prevent Iran from enriching above 3.6%.
There were sometimes problems, but on the whole, even US intelligence said, Tulsi Gabbard said two months before we attacked Iran last year, that the assessment and the consensus of the US intelligence community is that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons.
So this is the dilemma Trump has created for himself.
How do you get out of this war?
The only way he cannot stop the war.
If the reality is that most people perceive that the United States lost or only fought to a stalemate, as clever and shrewd as Iranians are, it's still a mid level power.
It doesn't compare to the U.S. military.
How can the U.S. military go to war with Iran and not have a complete victory?
It would be humiliating if they don't.
And yet it's clear that they don't have that.
So the only choices Trump has end the war prematurely and pretend he won, even though he didn't, or go all in in the kind of protracted war, boots on the ground, full scale destruction of Iran that Trump has been threatening.
He thinks there's a third alternative, which is that if they blockade, This straight of war moves enough and don't allow Iran to sell any oil for no Iranian oil to be shifted, they will be so economically suffocated that they'll be forced to capitulate.
The problem is that the Iranians view this blockade as an act of war like any other country would.
Blockading a country is an act of war.
And they still have a lot of weapons, a lot of things they can do to cripple the world economy, to cripple the Gulf states that have done so much to enrich the Trump family that Trump doesn't want to see harmed Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Qatar and Bahrain.
There's all kinds of things Iran has done and can continue to do even worse to those countries.
And right now, it's just kind of a game of chicken.
How long will Iran tolerate being blockaded?
Oil prices are again above $100 a barrel.
There's serious shortages in Asia starting to seep into other places.
How high can Trump endure oil prices going?
How much will the American people tolerate that?
And the Iranians know there are midterms coming up.
This is a major albatross for Trump politically and for the Republicans politically.
He can, yes, the U.S. can blockade Iran, but we're inflicting huge amounts of economic damage on the world and on Americans.
And so the question is, how long can the Iranians survive without being able to sell oil, which is the main driver of their economy, how they pay their soldiers and their expenses and their buildings?
Is that longer?
Can they endure that longer than Trump can endure keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, despite the crippling effect and enduring effect that will have on the world's economy?
So that's where we are.
It's a terrible place to be.
It's very dangerous because it could spiral and escalate out of control very easily.
But as of now, the Iranians feel like they have the upper hand.
Trump announced that Steve Woodcock and Jared Kushner, his top Israel loyalists, are going to.
Pakistan to negotiate with the Iranians running and saying, no, we're not negotiating with Trump.
We don't trust those two.
And we're not going to negotiate under threat of a blockade.
Now they're saying they're going to submit their views about a deal to the Pakistanis, but they're not going to negotiate directly with the Americans.
Obviously, both countries want an end.
The Iranians want to be able to continue their government as is, continue their Islamic revolution, stay in power, and have the sanctions lifted and their assets unfrozen.
That's what they want.
And they've just discovered, they've just proven that this major power that they have is to close the Strait of Hormuz at will, which gives them a lot of leverage going forward.
And Trump needs something, just something to claim he got a victory.
I can't imagine the Iranians agreeing to turn over all their industry.
Maybe they will buried underground.
And that will give Trump a way to say, oh, look, I destroyed their nuclear facilities.
They have no more enriched uranium.
Maybe the Iranians are willing to promise not to enrich uranium for the next five years or so.
But then the question is, how do you trust them?
That's what neocons have been saying.
You can't do a deal with Iran.
They're not trustworthy.
It's going to be very difficult for Trump to get out of this with a credible claim of victory unless he just goes and obliterates the entire country, you know, with a level of violence and destruction that's basically unfathomable.
Cuba as the White Whale00:03:46
All right.
Next question from Kevin Trundell.
Any thoughts on Trump's quote, Cuba next threats?
Do you think it's just more Greenland type nonsense or do you think it's serious?
No, I think they're very, very serious about Cuba.
First of all, the most influential person in the Trump administration when it comes to foreign policy, far and away, is Marco Rubio.
Started as a Secretary of State, now is also Trump's National Security Advisor.
The last person to serve in both of those positions was Henry Kissinger in the next administration, who arguably was the most powerful Secretary of State in decades.
And in part, it was because he was not only the Secretary of State, but also the National Security Advisor in the Oval Office.
And Marco Rubio is Cuban American.
He grew up in the Cuban exile community in South Florida, which I know very well because I grew up in that area as well in South Florida.
And the Cuban community in South Florida has only cared about one thing, kind of like a lot of American Jews and evangelicals only care about Israel.
This community, which is very large, because part of the Cold War was to allow huge numbers of people to flee Cuba, come to the United States.
It's a very large community in Miami, which means they have a lot of power, not just in Miami, but in Florida, a very important state.
And their only goal is to have the United States go fix their country.
Cuba.
That's all they care about.
They want Castro gone.
They want the communists gone.
They want a pro US puppet restored.
They hate Castro and the government with a burning passion.
And they think it should be the obligation and responsibility of the United States to go fix it.
JFK obviously tried to invade the country in the Bay of Pigs and failed miserably.
Huge humiliation.
He fired Dulles as the CIA director because of that failure.
And then shortly after, 18 months later, JFK was assassinated when his head was blown off.
So it's been an objective of the government for a long time.
Reagan was obsessed with Cuba.
But no, although we've been suffocating the Cuban island for a long time and immiserating their population, we haven't ever destabilized or overthrown their government.
Trump has imposed much greater and more drastic measures of a blockade, which is causing the Cuban people to be even more immiserated than ever.
And Marco Rubio grew up in this environment, this community.
His parents were from Cuba.
They were Cuban immigrants.
And he grew up in a neighborhood, in a culture, in a subculture that only cared about toppling the Cuban government.
Undoubtedly, that's what Marco Rubio is indoctrinated with and drummed into his head from birth, like a lot of Jews are drummed into their head that they should be supremely loyal to Israel.
So I don't think you can discount that factor.
At all.
Marco Rubio's dream forever has been to overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Cuba.
Didn't overthrow the government of Venezuela, but effectively the US is controlling Venezuela like it's a vassal state.
So Marco Rubio got his wish there.
And Cuba is the white whale for Cuban Americans, the way regime change in Iran is the white whale for Zionists and for their loyalists in the United States.
And I can't imagine Marco Rubio, with the power that he has, not using it to change Cuba.
So again, the Trump administration will now be bombing the Houthis in Yemen, funding the Israeli destruction of Gaza, bombing Iran last year with Israel.
Going to Venezuela and removing the government, removing the abducting the president and arresting him, starting a whole new war with Israel against Iran.
And now Cuba is next.
It's like all these immigrant communities and these exiles, this diaspora, they all have a wish list for every country they want the United States to go and change and fix and regime change.
And it's like Trump is just going down the list one after the next, focused on these other countries when the whole point of his movement was America first.
And so people understand when he's focused on Israel, when he's focused on Iran, when he's focused on Yemen, when he's focused on Venezuela, when he's focused on Cuba, he's not focused on them.
This is not the.
Administration or the agenda, the hierarchy of priorities that people were promised.
And they know that and they know it because it's true.
But I absolutely do think that one way or another, they will do everything to topple the Cuban government.
All right, next question Eleanor M.
I am a longtime fan.
I have a question, but it doesn't have to do with the news or anything specifically going on right now.
Teaching Constitutional Rights to Students00:05:35
I'm a seventh grade teacher in the U.S., I spend a lot of time on the American Revolution and the United States Constitution.
Since you are a constitutional lawyer, I'm wondering what you think are the most important things the next generation should understand about these topics.
Thank you for your time.
All right.
You know what's so interesting?
I often get accused of being anti American because I oppose American wars.
I really thought we were done with this bullshit.
Like, if you oppose the Iraq war, you hated America, you were pro Saddam.
That was all over Fox News, the Bush administration.
I thought we were not going to have to confront this stupidity again.
But if you oppose the Iran war, you will instantly be accused of being anti American, pro MOLA, whatever.
Just like the dumbest propaganda talk.
And the interesting thing about being accused about being anti American is not only was I born in the United States and lived my whole life until 40, basically in the United States.
But I went and studied law.
And when you go and study law, you spend a lot of time on the Constitution, on the debates that led to the Constitution, on the Federalist Papers, on the principles and values underpinning the founding of the country.
And I have immense respect and even kind of a certain form of adoration or reverence for those founding principles that attempt to create a government, which, as I said before, I said at the top, the people grapple sometimes with what is his ideology?
Is he right?
Is he left?
Is this that?
And I basically said, my ideology is.
The importance of restraining authoritarian power or unrestrained power by governments.
And that was the main goal of the Constitution.
They had just fought this incredibly dangerous, bloody war against the world's most powerful empire to liberate themselves from centralized tyranny.
And the thing they were most afraid of when creating a centralized government was how are we going to avoid replicating the exact kind of centralized abuses that we just risked our lives and lost a lot of our family in order to emancipate ourselves from?
And the solution was we're going to have these three branches of government.
We're going to Distribute powers so the president can pick the Supreme Court justice, but the Senate has to approve it.
If there's a war, it's the president who will be the commander in chief of the armed forces, but only Congress can declare war.
The Supreme Court can review and then invalidate acts of the other two governments if they transgress the limitations of the Constitution, which was really a Supreme Court case that came in the early 19th century, not really explicitly part of the founding, but from the start, basically, was part of how government worked.
And that to me is still the blueprint.
And then you add to that the Bill of Rights, which, as I said, guarantees what are for me the most important liberties.
Free speech, free press, freedom of religion, the right to practice your religion, the right to assembly, to petition the government for grievances, due process, privacy, jury trial, all the rights of a company being charged with crimes by the government.
This to me is what the United States is.
Like, how can I be anti American when I so enthusiastically embrace the defining values and principles that are designed to shape what our country is supposed to be and how it's supposed to work?
Like, when I criticize the US government is because I believe they're violating those.
So, if you're teaching middle school students, About the American Revolution and the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, I think it's not only important to really do your best to get them to understand this idea of not submitting to government authority, but demanding your right to question it, to oppose it, to challenge it.
You know, that's something I really try and teach my kids.
Like, if my kids, I don't try and indoctrinate my kids at all with any political ideology.
I will never do that.
Like, if I catch myself even coming close to that, I immediately stop myself.
I don't want them to be indoctrinated.
All I care is that they think critically.
And so if they come home from school, And they are spouting some kind of political idea that they heard as though it's truth, like from their teacher, from other students, or just something they picked up in the ether on the internet.
I'll automatically start questioning it and interrogating it and adversarially examining it to make them defend it, even if it's an idea that I agree with, even if it's an ideology that I want them to have.
That to me is the American spirit.
Like you have those, that is a foundational right.
The American founding comes from the Enlightenment, the purpose of which was to say God endowed human beings with the capacity to reason, which means we don't want and don't need and shouldn't have centralized power, whether it be.
A monarch or an emperor or the church dictating to us what is true and false to the point that we're not allowed to even question it.
The most important part of the Enlightenment is the ability of human beings to debate ideas and come to their own conclusions using their own powers of reasoning, which is why censorship is so pernicious and unnecessary and repressive.
And so I think for me, if I were teaching, and I'm not a teacher, but I went to school obviously, and I think when you're a parent, you get the experience.
You are kind of a teacher in a way for your own kids and have, you know, nieces and nephews, same thing.
What I try and do most is just instill in them the Ethos and instinct of the founding of the Constitution.
I don't want them to walk away believing anything I believe or thinking a certain thought.
I just want them so much to understand that they have the inherent right to come to their own conclusions, to question authoritative pronouncements.
And they only have that right socially and culturally, but they have that right guaranteed by what the United States is and to understand the context of how it emerged from the Enlightenment and how it got debated and implemented.
Like, if you can impart that, I think it's so much more valuable than having to be able to quote the 14th Amendment or the Fourth Amendment or whatever.
Or know everything about Benjamin Franklin or George Washington.
Like, I think that for me, the Constitution represents critical thought and the fact that it's sacred.
And that's what I try and teach kids, my own kids and my own family members when I have the chance.
All right, that's a great question.
All right, last question.
Foreign NGOs and Sovereignty Issues00:07:26
Fellow traveler asks Glenn, this is a bit of a follow up on a question from last week regarding foreign funded NGOs.
Mexico recently pulled the tax exempt status of NGOs that refuse to disclose their funding sources.
Peru and Georgia have tried similar strategies to bring back democratic and local control.
On the other hand, other allegedly populist governments like Brazil and Colombia are awash in foreign NGOs, where some say Orban in Hungary simply shut down EU funded NGOs and only used his country's taxpayer money to fund new think tanks staffed with foreigners ideologically aligned with his party.
It seems that the international NGO think tank problem is one of the greatest threats to global sovereignty.
Do you think Mexico's approach is the correct one?
All right.
So, this idea of sovereignty is something that if you live in the United States, born in the United States, educated in the United States, you end up thinking about through an American prism.
And American sovereignty really isn't.
Threatened.
America has been one of the two superpowers of the world going back to the end of World War II.
And we invaded other people's sovereignty, as did the Soviet Union.
We subverted it, we undermined it, but ours wasn't really undermined because we're isolated geographically.
We're very powerful militarily and economically.
And then once the Soviet Union fell, we became the only superpower.
Now there's, I think, another one emerging in China.
So, but still, sovereignty is something that we regard as important for ourselves, but not for other countries.
And it was when I really started getting immersed in Brazilian history, Brazilian politics, Brazilian culture.
Did I start thinking about it in a different way, which is I'll just give you one example.
Brazil has a law that bans media, newspapers, and magazines from being distributed if they're foreign owned.
I forget what the percentage is.
I think it's like 70%.
And we had this issue when we started the Intercept Brazil in Brazil because it was mostly foreign owned.
It was owned by the Intercept back in the United States, even though it was being run by people who live in Brazil, it was stopped with Brazilians.
And at first glance, you think, wow, that's a.
Kind of strange law.
Like, why would you just ban international media from being distributed in Brazil?
And the reason is because Brazil was a country that struggled very intensely for their sovereignty in the Cold War.
They were constantly trapped between Moscow and Washington, and they really wanted to just be independent, but Washington wouldn't accept that.
They were being pressured by Moscow.
And in 1964, the US worked with right wing generals and overthrew the democratic elected government in Brazil and imposed a 21 year military.
Tyranny on the country, common story.
And at first, the US denied it, but then documents came out, and the US government now admits it that the US played a central role in this coup, in this change of government, and then also in propping up the repressive regime.
So imagine you're a citizen of a country and you know there's this foreign power behind the overthrow of your government and the imposition of a tyrannical regime.
You're going to think about sovereignty much different because your sovereignty has been radically violated.
And so, one of the reasons they have this law banning foreign media is because Is really about Time Magazine.
Time Magazine was extremely influential in the 20th century, not just in the US, but internationally.
And it was owned by Henry Luce of the Luce family.
And Henry Luce was very, very aligned with the US security state, basically a mouthpiece for US foreign policy.
And when the CIA wanted to do something in a country, Time Magazine would be distributed in that country.
And it would basically be a propaganda arm of the US government to undermine the sovereignty of that country.
And that's why a lot of countries that have been victimized by coups and infringements of sovereignty look at foreign NGOs as a potential threat.
And they have good reason to do so.
Now, foreign funded NGOs are sometimes just humanitarian, but so often they're NGOs masquerading as some kind of foreign influence operation or attempt to change the country by masquerading as a humanitarian organization.
Obviously, we saw a lot of that with USAID.
Did USAID fund some genuinely humanitarian groups?
Sure.
They always had a secondary intent, which was to improve the image and perception of the United States.
But if all they're doing is genuinely just handing out medication for deadly diseases like HIV that would otherwise be unattainable or vaccinating babies from polio, then you can say they're largely humanitarian, even though they have a foreign policy component.
But there are so many foreign NGOs that are about defending democracy or combating disinformation, or even ones that masquerade as humanitarian groups that are really there to manipulate the population and scree their way into a bunch of different political factions.
And I do think there's good reason for countries like Georgia, which have been.
I don't think people understand how much Georgia, the country of Georgia, was targeted by neocons with control.
They had a very neocon aligned president in the late 2000s, early 2010s, that was very pro US, pro Western in a country where, in a place very, very important to Russia geostrategically, and where at least several provinces identified far more as Russian than Georgian, especially under a leader like that, similar to how people in Crimea and the eastern parts of Ukraine identify as Russian and not Ukrainian.
They're ethnic Russians.
And that was part of why you had those breakaway provinces that wanted to be part of Russia.
And led to a change of government and a Russian attack on Georgia in order to protect the rights of the people they viewed as ethnic Russians, kind of like they've defended the rights of ethnic Russians in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine from the repression that comes from Kiev.
And a big part of that was effectuated by foreign NGOs.
And so Georgia has kind of freed itself from Western influence.
And now it looks very, with a lot of skepticism about foreign NGOs, as do a lot of countries, including Mexico.
So, I think a lot of it depends on what kind of country you are.
If you're a big, powerful country, you probably worry about that less.
But if you're a country that has been invaded and manipulated and controlled and subverted by foreign powers, you're going to look at anything that comes from the US, that comes from the West, with a very jaded eye.
And I think that's something that the leaders of those countries ought to be doing.
I certainly would be doing that if I were a leader of one of those countries.
And it's why I found the USAID scrutiny and dragging it out into the light to be so important.
The US.
Government has these agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy that are just arms of the CIA.
They were created in order to accomplish things the CIA couldn't accomplish because of how negative the CIA came to be perceived.
So they needed these nicer sounding agencies like, oh, it's a National Endowment for Democracy.
It just fights for democracy.
Who could be opposed to that?
And it was an arm of the CIA.
They did things like fund under Hillary Clinton the opposition in Russia to destabilize Russia, only for us five years later to whine about how the Russians manipulated our elections, interfered in our sacred domestic politics to help defeat Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was funding Russian opposition groups, organizing and funding protests in Russia to destabilize Putin a few years before.
That's what the U.S. does in so many of these countries.
And they often do it through NGOs and through USAID, which, again, has some programs that are principally humanitarian that really do save lives.
But by and large, it's part of the State Department.
It's now and it's part of the U.S. security state.
And it was created to extend U.S. influence into these countries.
And these countries look very askance at U.S. influence because in the past, it's always been used to, or mostly been used to, Turn them into vassal states and to destroy their sovereignty.
And so I think that is a very valid view of Mexico, other countries in Latin America, and Asia, and Africa, and other parts of the world as well.
Join Us Next Week00:01:09
All right.
Really great questions.
We have a few more that I wanted to get to, but I try not to make it like a lightning round QA where I'm just like giving two minute answers that are basically like cable news hits or like yes, no answers.
I try and really dig in and analyze.
Sometimes it leads to some wandering off the path, but I think it always kind of creates a fuller picture.
So We get to fewer questions than I'd like to, but at the same time, I think the quality of the interactions are better.
So, again, if you're somebody who has submitted questions and you didn't get to them, we'll keep them for next week.
Keep submitting questions.
We always try and pick ones that are provocative, that look at things from a different perspective.
If you have critiques of things I'm writing or saying or doing, by all means, feel free to submit those.
We definitely go out of our way to find good faith ones that are worth engaging with.
I think that's an important part of this QA.
So, by all means, voice your critiques as well.
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