System Update - Glenn Greenwald - GLENN REACTS: Iran's Strategy in the Strait of Hormuz, Fighting Journalists, Animal Rights, and More
Aired: 2026-05-08
Duration: 01:07:42


=== Friday Night QA Timing (02:09) ===

[00:00:07]  Good evening, everybody.
[00:00:07]  Welcome to the Friday night QA session that we do.
[00:00:11]  Although, as you might have noticed, it's not actually on Friday night, it's on Thursday night.
[00:00:15]  We talked last week about the possibility of moving our Friday night QA session to Thursday, which I think is what we're going to do, which is why we're doing it now on Thursday night.
[00:00:24]  It pains me a little bit because it's been called the Friday night QA session for so long.
[00:00:28]  It just flows so freely out of my mouth that I may change it permanently.
[00:00:33]  We may do that for Thursday night and still call it the Friday night QA, even though it'll be confusing just because I'm very attached to that name.
[00:00:39]  Or I might just bite the bullet and step up to the plate and just call it the Thursday night QA, even though it pains me to do so.
[00:00:48]  I think it'll be less confusing, less misleading.
[00:00:51]  And at the end of the day, as a journalist, truth is my North Star.
[00:00:54]  And so probably that's what I'll have to do.
[00:00:56]  All right.
[00:00:56]  As you probably know, the format is very simple.
[00:00:58]  We take QA questions rather throughout the week from our subscribers.
[00:01:03]  We sometimes put the post up on the day to make sure that the questions are timely, but we still have the ones from last week that get submitted throughout the week.
[00:01:12]  Then we try and pick kind of the best mix that's reflective of the news cycle and things that we may not otherwise discuss, or at least from a perspective that we might not discuss it from.
[00:01:21]  And that is what we're about to do.
[00:01:22]  So before I dive into the questions, I try and get to as many of them as I can without making it like a lightning round sort of QA where I just answer yes or no or break things on a scale of one to 10 or talk about what my favorite color is.
[00:01:33]  I try and give some in depth analysis, but still get to as many as possible.
[00:01:37]  Just a quick programming note earlier this morning, I was on Breaking Point with Crystal Ball and Sagra and Jetty talking about a.
[00:01:44]  Variety of topics, including this blockbuster and completely deceitful and fraudulent report from the ADL about the supposed explosion in what they're calling anti Semitic hate crimes for 2025.
[00:01:57]  Even they admit that it's gone down from 2023 and 2024 when they manufactured an epidemic.
[00:02:02]  And I talked about how these statistics are manipulated by the ADL, the reasons that they do so, what they consider an anti Semitic hate crime, which is far more often than not, people just marching in the street and criticizing Israel or expressing constitutionally protected phrases.

=== War As A Last Resort (12:26) ===

[00:02:16]  That for whatever reason, people find anti Semitic, even though they're not.
[00:02:20]  So you can look for that there.
[00:02:21]  I also talked a little bit about a protest in New York City last night that, of course, is also being described as anti Semitic, even though it was basically a protest against a sale of illegally seized land in the West Bank.
[00:02:32]  They're having a real estate sale of land in the West Bank that Israelis just stole, that all international law and the US government recognizes is stolen, and they're selling stolen property.
[00:02:42]  And because they knew there was going to be a protest, they put it at a synagogue so that they could claim that people are protesting.
[00:02:47]  The synagogue simply because it's filled with Jewish people.
[00:02:50]  And of course, that had nothing to do with what the protest was about.
[00:02:52]  Talked a little bit about that.
[00:02:53]  Talked as well about a couple of issues involving animal cruelty and the factory farm industry, some of which we're going to get into now.
[00:03:01]  So, if you want to take a look at that interview, you're obviously more than welcome to do so.
[00:03:05]  It's on YouTube and everywhere that podcasts are found.
[00:03:09]  All right, let's get into the actual questions from what really matters, which is not Crystal and Sagar, but our audience.
[00:03:16]  First question is from Philip B.
[00:03:19]  And it reads as follows The regime in Iran has been a global pariah for decades now, except to Russia and China.
[00:03:26]  It's a fact that, justified or not, they have funded Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
[00:03:30]  Trump says past U.S. administrations have known this for years, but have not taken any action.
[00:03:35]  Do you agree that we won't know if he was right to attack Iran until five years after this war is over and Trump is long gone?
[00:03:41]  Perhaps we should reserve final judgment until then.
[00:03:44]  All right, there's a lot there that merits commentary, and I'm going to actually devote commentary to the parts.
[00:03:50]  The components of the premise that merit commentary, because I think some of that is quite tendentious and I don't agree with it.
[00:03:56]  But I want to step back and actually address the broader point, which I think is so important, not only on its own, but has been a point that has been completely lost in American discourse and only American discourse, maybe Israeli and American discourse only.
[00:04:10]  This idea that, hey, maybe there are some benefits to be had from this war, and we really can't tell until we wait five years to see how it all shakes out before knowing whether the war was just.
[00:04:21]  We can't have an opinion right now.
[00:04:23]  We just have to sit kind of quietly and neutrally by while we let President Trump do whatever he wants in this war.
[00:04:28]  Because maybe it'll produce some long term benefits that we can't see right now.
[00:04:31]  This to me is extremely misguided and dangerous as a mentality because basically what it posits is that the justifiability of a war is not determined by the just cause that's asserted at the start or whether there's some transgression of international law, some attack on our country that justifies a war, but instead it's just a byproduct of whether we can get some benefits.
[00:04:56]  So, like, we can start a war and invade Saudi Arabia and steal all their oil and sell it and make money.
[00:05:01]  It must be a just war because at the end of the day, we won't have lost any soldiers.
[00:05:06]  We'll just have invaded some foreign country and stolen their oil, maybe killed a bunch of people who are guarding that oil.
[00:05:12]  But even if you could do that, it wouldn't make it a just war to me, even if it produces pragmatic or concrete benefits.
[00:05:19]  Because war is not just like, unlike, it's not just any other policy, any other foreign policy that you just embrace.
[00:05:26]  It's not just an arm of national interest.
[00:05:28]  War is really supposed to be an option of last resort.
[00:05:32]  Not as a cliche, not as something we just go around like mouthing and reciting to seem moral.
[00:05:38]  Like, oh, war is a last, war is an option of last resort.
[00:05:41]  It's actually supposed to be a last resort because war is the single worst thing that you can unleash on the planet.
[00:05:47]  It eradicates human life, it destroys massive amounts of human work and cities and infrastructure, causes immense suffering, not just for the countries that are attacked, but also for the countries doing the attacking.
[00:06:00]  It requires a certain kind of dehumanization.
[00:06:02]  Like, yeah, we.
[00:06:03]  Eradicated the lives of 170 schoolgirls on the first day.
[00:06:06]  It was probably something we shouldn't have done, maybe a mistake, a little reckless, but whatever.
[00:06:11]  Maybe there's some oil we can control at the end of the day that makes it worth it to just wipe out that human life and bomb bridges, set oil refineries on fire and poison the air and the water, as long as we can get some benefits after.
[00:06:22]  This is not how any healthy, minimally moral society thinks about war.
[00:06:28]  War is supposed to be a last resort, by which we're supposed to mean that we can only secure our national security, our borders.
[00:06:35]  If we fight a war, war is supposed to be an instrument of self defense.
[00:06:40]  It's only supposed to be justified if some country is attacking you or about to attack you, not if they're engaged in behavior that you dislike.
[00:06:47]  But in American discourse, that is how we think of war.
[00:06:51]  We fight infinitely more wars than any other country by far.
[00:06:55]  I always think it's worth noting, and you can criticize China all you want, that China has become a major world power, a leader in many critical industries.
[00:07:02]  I guess some would say, despite the fact that they haven't fought a war in 40 years.
[00:07:08]  The last war China fought was in 1979, which was a one month border dispute with Vietnam, barely even a war.
[00:07:15]  It was 47 years ago since China dropped a bomb or sent troops to invade another country or shoot at people or destroy things or kill.
[00:07:23]  47 years.
[00:07:24]  And they've exploded as a power economically, politically, culturally, militarily.
[00:07:30]  And it's genuinely hard to count how many wars America has fought since then, how many wars the United States has started, how many countries it has bombed, how much.
[00:07:38]  How many billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars have gone to maintaining a footing of permanent warfare, a policy of endless war?
[00:07:49]  And the reason for it is that other countries take wars very seriously.
[00:07:52]  They barely happen, but it is a tool of American foreign policy, a very casual, constantly used tool.
[00:07:58]  Iran did not attack the United States.
[00:08:01]  There have been many, many serious terrorist attacks on the United States and its homeland in the last 30 years.
[00:08:07]  Obviously, 9 11, but before that, the First World Training Center attack, the Pulse Nightclub shooting, the Boston Marathon, the shooting at Fort Hood, other threatened ones, including the attempted detonation on an airplane of the so called shoe bomber, the attempted Blow up a bomb in the middle of Times Square.
[00:08:25]  And of all of those terrorist attacks, the total number that came from Iranian terrorists, or for that matter, Shia terrorists, is zero.
[00:08:34]  Zero.
[00:08:34]  Iran is not, has not been, and cannot be a threat to the American homeland.
[00:08:39]  And if Iran is funding proxies in the Middle East, it's because the United States and Israel are also funding proxies in the Middle East.
[00:08:46]  We prop up governments, we replace governments with ones we like better, and then they do our bidding militarily.
[00:08:52]  And of course, we call our proxies freedom fighters.
[00:08:55]  Democrats or whatever, including when our proxies are Al Qaeda leaders in Syria, where we're empowering former Al Qaeda leaders to run Syria in the middle of that region.
[00:09:05]  And then we call Iran a terror state because they support groups that we've called terror states or terror groups.
[00:09:11]  I understand that framework, but that is not a rational framework.
[00:09:14]  Iran doesn't do anything in the Middle East that the United States and Israel doesn't do in the Middle East and that the United States hasn't done in every region of the world for a long time.
[00:09:22]  But either way, it doesn't justify a major war.
[00:09:25]  It doesn't justify bombing a country, killing huge numbers of civilians.
[00:09:28]  Blowing up bridges, poisoning water, poisoning air, and risking a major outbreak of escalation.
[00:09:32]  Obviously, Trump wants to end the war.
[00:09:34]  The problem is he can't end the war.
[00:09:36]  He can't find a way out of the war yet.
[00:09:38]  And just today, there were two ships, American ships, that tried to enter the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:09:43]  Iran has declared a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:09:45]  They enforced that blockade by attacking two American ships with speedboats and small arms fire and drones.
[00:09:51]  The CENTCOM says that no ships were hit, but they did turn around.
[00:09:56]  And for now, they're not considering it a breach of the.
[00:09:59]  Ceasefire.
[00:10:00]  But once you start a war, it doesn't mean that you get to decide when you get out of it or how many people you end up killing or how much destruction you're wreaking on the people and the population or on the world economy.
[00:10:10]  So I'm not quite sure what this question means.
[00:10:12]  Like, hey, maybe five years from now, we're going to find out what?
[00:10:15]  That we changed the government of Iran and got a more compliant puppet government like we had when we overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and replaced him with the tyrannical and savage Shah of Iran that spread anti American hatred all throughout Iran that led to the revolution that led to.
[00:10:32]  American diplomats being taken hostage because they saw us as their enemy.
[00:10:37]  We're just going to repeat that.
[00:10:39]  And then if we do that, we're supposed to declare this a good war.
[00:10:42]  War is for countries that are going to attack the United States and threaten American national security interests and the lives of American citizens.
[00:10:50]  Iran is not doing that.
[00:10:51]  Iran hasn't done that.
[00:10:52]  Iran can't do that.
[00:10:53]  Yeah, no, obviously, if we deploy our bases all throughout the region and then our allies and we attack and bomb Iran, Iran is going to attack our bases in retaliation.
[00:11:04]  And that has happened over the years.
[00:11:06]  But that's infinitely different than, oh, Iran is attacking the American homeland.
[00:11:11]  And if anything, if we're worried about threats to the American homeland, to American citizens in the United States, the biggest threat by far is attacking Iran.
[00:11:19]  They're going to use asymmetrical warfare to attack the United States.
[00:11:21]  That was the reason for 9 11, that we had interfered in that region for so long.
[00:11:25]  The CIA calls that blowback.
[00:11:27]  So, no, there is nothing in five years from now that's going to make me wake up and say, you know what?
[00:11:30]  We extinguished 170 schoolgirls on the first day, killed untold numbers of other civilians.
[00:11:36]  Drove up gas prices and oil prices for the entire world, including for the United States citizens that Donald Trump promised to, whose lives he promised to materially improve.
[00:11:45]  But somehow, because we got them to stop funding Hezbollah or Hamas, which are groups focused on Israel and not the United States, that in five years we're going to conclude, no, no, all that's worth it.
[00:11:55]  No.
[00:11:56]  Even if the United States ends up controlling the entire Iranian oil reserve, it's still not going to be a just war.
[00:12:00]  It's still not going to be a war that can be justified.
[00:12:03]  And even if you don't care about the morality, Of wars.
[00:12:07]  Oh, I don't believe in this just war.
[00:12:09]  Yeah, the Catholic Church has talked about it for two centuries, and pretty much everybody who has ever lived, who's written about philosophy and geopolitics and the morality of international relations, has said that just war theory is crucial.
[00:12:21]  If you're somebody who just said, I don't care about any of that, I believe in might is right, and we should always just go to war, bomb people, kill people whenever we get some benefits from it.
[00:12:29]  I think it's very worth thinking about why it is that China is supplanting the United States in regions that the United States and for that matter, Europe have long.
[00:12:37]  Dominated, including Africa and Latin America, where countries prefer to deal with China than the United States, where they prefer that China become the relevant superpower to their country rather than the United States.
[00:12:48]  And a big reason for that is the perception that the United States is a bully, that the United States starts wars and uses military force whenever it feels like it.
[00:12:56]  And obviously, China brings its own dangers and its own repression, but the Chinese really don't care what kind of government another country has.
[00:13:06]  They're not engaged in coups, they care about their immediate region.
[00:13:10]  For sure, they care about that.
[00:13:11]  They care if countries try to interfere in Chinese politics and internal Chinese politics.
[00:13:15]  But there's a growing perception that the United States is this rogue superpower that just goes around bombing whoever they want, funding wars like we're doing in Ukraine, all these wars in the Middle East, unleashing Israel on the world, overturning democratically elected governments, engineering coups, interfering in other countries' politics.
[00:13:32]  Nobody wants to live in a world dominated by that mentality.
[00:13:35]  So even if you only care about pragmatism and benefits and outcomes and results and not this boring, annoying, Unmanly concern about just war developed over centuries.
[00:13:46]  Even if you don't care about that, you should still consider war to be an instrument that is very dangerously used if it's too casual, if it's not actually a last resort, if it's actually a first resort or just close to the top of the list for ways to deal with countries that don't obey us or don't submit or comply with our orders.
[00:14:08]  Nobody in the United States, other than people loyal to Israel, has been waking up over the past year or five years.
[00:14:14]  Or decade or two decades, and worrying about what was happening in Tehran or perceiving that they're somehow endangered, that their future is jeopardized, that their problems are caused by the Iranian government.
[00:14:26]  This is an invented fear mongering narrative to justify wars, just like Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat to the United States and they invented reasons to scare Americans into believing that.
[00:14:35]  So, no, I don't think we have to wait five years for some magic secret to emerge that proves that the war was actually just and effective and desirable after all.

=== The Reality Of Factory Farms (11:44) ===

[00:14:43]  It's causing immense damage.
[00:14:44]  To American citizens in the United States, to their economic security, to their affordability.
[00:14:50]  Air prices are skyrocketing.
[00:14:52]  Gasoline is more expensive than ever.
[00:14:54]  It's going to continue.
[00:14:54]  It's going to be very hard to reverse, even if the war stops suddenly.
[00:14:58]  And again, Trump doesn't have the ability to stop the war.
[00:15:00]  He needs the Iranians to make concessions to him that will allow him credibly to claim that he won.
[00:15:05]  But the Iranians also need those concessions.
[00:15:07]  They also need to show their population that they didn't capitulate.
[00:15:11]  And although Trump, every week, right when the markets are closing or declining, Uses Barack Ravid at Axios to leak to him and say, go tell everybody we're very close to a deal.
[00:15:20]  And he dutifully does it.
[00:15:21]  We've been hearing that for nine weeks now, 10 weeks.
[00:15:24]  And maybe we're close to a deal, but thus far, one has been very elusive.
[00:15:29]  And until there's a deal, there's always the danger of greater escalation.
[00:15:32]  And I can't think of any benefits that justify any of that.
[00:15:35]  All right, next question.
[00:15:36]  This is from Nicholas Spinelli.
[00:15:38]  What was your first motivation in becoming an animal rights advocate?
[00:15:42]  All right, so those of you who don't know, and I presume if you're in my audience, you probably do because it's something I've written about a lot over the years and talked about a lot over the years, but I have done a great deal of reporting about the barbarism and savagery and torture and sadism that takes place in industrialized factory farms where billions of highly intelligent and emotionally complex animals,
[00:16:05]  like pigs, who Are as intelligent as, and I would say more emotionally and socially complex than dogs, are subject to the most extreme abuses.
[00:16:16]  And it's not only a matter of animal cruelty, but it's repulsive and disgusting.
[00:16:21]  If you've entered one of these factory farms, which I have, you will battle not to vomit.
[00:16:26]  It's filled with cadavers on the floor, corpses, viruses, filth, and disease.
[00:16:33]  They inject all their animals with massive amounts of antibiotics just as a way of trying to keep enough of them alive to be.
[00:16:39]  To profiteer off of them before they die.
[00:16:41]  They want them to be extremely large.
[00:16:44]  It causes all kinds of disease that in turn requires mass use of antibiotics, that in turn has a very high risk of creating antibiotic resistant viruses that can be unleashed into the human species and endanger huge numbers of people, if not the species itself.
[00:16:58]  The dumping is repulsive.
[00:17:01]  The psychological trauma that is done to workers who work in these places and have to treat animals as though they're industrialized objects is quite severe.
[00:17:10]  And It is a multi pronged atrocity, but it's often hidden.
[00:17:13]  The industry controls the laws.
[00:17:15]  They've made it so that it's actually been criminal in many states, although the courts have finally overturned this, to expose what happens inside factory farms because they know that if people know the reality of what's taking place in there, people will be disgusted and won't tolerate it.
[00:17:29]  And so there have been a lot of movements in various states, including referenda in places like California, to ban the use of, say, pork if gestation crates are used, which are these tiny little cages that pigs are kept in.
[00:17:43]  Female pigs, where they impregnate them, they keep them in these gestation crates.
[00:17:47]  They're so tiny, they're basically the width of their body and maybe a few centimeters longer than their body.
[00:17:53]  They cannot physically turn around.
[00:17:55]  And I have a small farm.
[00:17:57]  I have pigs there.
[00:17:58]  I have goats.
[00:17:59]  I have chickens, a lot of different animals because I wanted to connect to animals, but also I wanted to understand the dynamic of their life cycle and just of the reality of how they live when they live freely.
[00:18:10]  And pigs, in particular, but also goats, also chickens, they're very social.
[00:18:16]  Animals.
[00:18:16]  They're constructed to live in social settings, in families, in communities of other pigs.
[00:18:23]  It's as essential to them as human beings need interaction with human beings.
[00:18:28]  And if you stick human beings in a cage in prolonged solitary confinement, the human being will go insane because we're social and political animals.
[00:18:36]  We're constructed to need human interaction, not to be alone for our whole lives.
[00:18:41]  And these pigs who are kept in these cages, they step on their babies, they constantly are impregnated, they give birth, they don't see their babies, they can't turn around, the babies just feed on them until they can be taken out at the earliest possible opportunity to then be also sold and turned into food.
[00:18:55]  They go so insane that they incessantly start biting on the metal cages to the point where their teeth fall out, they're bleeding, they throw themselves and hurl themselves into these kinds of gestation crates.
[00:19:08]  It, and they, they get internal injuries that are horrific.
[00:19:12]  I've done a lot of reporting on this.
[00:19:14]  It's sometimes I actually have to limit myself because it's so hideous to have to look at and describe and hear about and see.
[00:19:20]  And then there was just this huge success with activists who have been working on this facility called Ridgeland Farms that I wrote about in 2018, which would breed dogs, beagles in particular, because among the most docile and trusting and loving breeds of dogs.
[00:19:35]  And so they're the easiest to manhandle or to mistreat or to abuse.
[00:19:39]  They don't fight back.
[00:19:40]  They don't lose trust in the human.
[00:19:43]  They don't ever get aggressive.
[00:19:44]  They're docile.
[00:19:45]  That's why beagles are used.
[00:19:46]  And they're bred for no reason other than to be kept in metal cages their whole lives.
[00:19:50]  They don't step on the ground.
[00:19:52]  They don't run around.
[00:19:53]  They don't have any interaction with other dogs.
[00:19:54]  Nothing.
[00:19:55]  They're kept in metal cages with always stepping on metal and never the ground, never the grass, never the sand, never the dirt until they're sold to some research facility funded by the US government, by Dr. Fauci, where they're subjected to absolutely hideous experimentation and then they're killed.
[00:20:12]  So they're bred into existence to suffer and die.
[00:20:14]  And the activists have been working on getting Ridgelyn Farm closed for years under animal cruelty laws.
[00:20:19]  They finally succeeded.
[00:20:20]  Ridgelyn Farm is now closing.
[00:20:22]  These beagles have been liberated.
[00:20:23]  And I'm going to write about this because it's been a really interesting.
[00:20:28]  Activist success because for a long time, animal rights or fighting against animal cruelty and animal abuse was perceived as kind of a fringe sort of boutique left wing type of activism.
[00:20:39]  Even people on the left hated it.
[00:20:41]  They said, How can you work on abusive animals when there's all these humans suffering and starving and living under in poverty or whatever?
[00:20:47]  But I think mostly because dogs have been kind of the thing that has opened up a lot of human beings' hearts to empathy that animals deserve, to the fact that they are sentient, they suffer, they Feel sadness, they feel happiness, and people increasingly connect to their dogs in part because society doesn't quite offer that kind of connection.
[00:21:06]  People turn to their dogs increasingly to get it.
[00:21:08]  And it's led to a really interesting trans ideological bipartisan movement where animal rights and ending experimentation are at least as robust and prioritized among the American right as it is among the American left.
[00:21:24]  And one of the reasons animal rights activists actually had success against an extremely well funded Powerful industry is because they didn't end up getting discriminated.
[00:21:33]  They didn't end up discriminating about with whom they were willing to work.
[00:21:36]  Oh, this person's a Trump supporter.
[00:21:38]  This person's a fascist.
[00:21:39]  This person's a reactionary.
[00:21:40]  I'm not going to work with them.
[00:21:41]  I'm not going to pop.
[00:21:42]  No, they only cared about success in their stated cause, which was saving animals from extreme suffering.
[00:21:48]  And there's a group called the White Code Project that merged concern for animal experimentation and cruelty with tax dollars going to animal experimentation.
[00:21:57]  And they were able to fuse the right and the left together in this extremely effective.
[00:22:02]  Bipartisan trans ideological movement surrounding your cause.
[00:22:06]  There's a lot of lessons there for a lot of other types of people who are doing activism or trying to change things in the society for how you actually find common ground with people where you don't actually need much other common ground.
[00:22:18]  I'm going to write about it at some point, but the question was, how did I become an animal rights activist?
[00:22:21]  It actually, dogs were my gateway animal as well.
[00:22:26]  When I was young, my parents were divorced.
[00:22:29]  I kind of was like this latchkey kid of the 70s, very standard.
[00:22:33]  I'd come home.
[00:22:34]  My mother was at work.
[00:22:35]  She had to work.
[00:22:35]  She was a single mother.
[00:22:37]  And there were these two black labs who lived next door to me called Birthday.
[00:22:42]  Their names were Birthday and Bear, a mother and a son.
[00:22:46]  And as soon as I got home, because the woman who lived next door was working, they would run over to my house, hang out.
[00:22:53]  If I was feeling lonely, those two dogs would be there.
[00:22:56]  I connected the dogs.
[00:22:57]  And then eventually in adulthood, I always had kind of an affinity for animals.
[00:23:00]  I just think animals are the most majestic thing or one of the most majestic things on earth.
[00:23:04]  I mean, just you observe animals.
[00:23:07]  Of any kind.
[00:23:08]  And it's extraordinary the complexity, but also just the beauty and like their inner life.
[00:23:13]  Anyway, but it was really when I started doing this investigative journalism that was taking place in factory farms.
[00:23:21]  And I was never someone who was vegan.
[00:23:25]  I always ate meat, but I always had this image in my head, which was purposely put there that my food and my meat come from normal family farms.
[00:23:33]  Cows run around and are active and free roaming, and so are pigs and so are chickens, and they're well treated and then they're killed in a humane way.
[00:23:42]  And those were the values of family farms.
[00:23:44]  Family farms basically have been destroyed by.
[00:23:46]  These massive corporations, two in particular, actually, one of which is now Chinese owned, which is Smithfield Farms, that used to be American owned, but now is Chinese owned, and the other, JBS, which is actually controlled by Brazilian billionaires.
[00:23:58]  And their two corporations are absolutely despicable.
[00:24:01]  And the more I became aware of the sociopathy driving these industries, you know, I'm not saying everyone has to be vegan or we should stop consuming meat.
[00:24:12]  That's my own choice that I made, not because I think it's going to make a difference or that's the way to stop it, just because I wanted to align my own personal behavior with the.
[00:24:20]  Values that I was expressing and defending, and the activism I was doing.
[00:24:24]  I think it's important to align your life choices and the way you're living with the values you want others to be persuaded to embrace.
[00:24:31]  And one of my criticisms a lot of people on the left is that they like to signal belief in a lot of values, but not if it means any kind of sacrifice or change their life to bring themselves in alignment with those values.
[00:24:42]  But I don't advocate for veganism.
[00:24:44]  I don't try and persuade other people that something people can come to on their own or not.
[00:24:47]  It's not the solution.
[00:24:49]  I consider that more of a personal choice.
[00:24:51]  But public policy that says, okay, we're going to consume meat and pork and chicken because that's pretty much the choice that the population has made.
[00:25:00]  And we have to do it on a mass scale.
[00:25:03]  So it needs to be industrialized and take place in large factory farms.
[00:25:06]  We can't rely on smaller farms anymore at scale.
[00:25:10]  That won't work.
[00:25:10]  You can still put limits, moral limits, or health limits on the type of treatment to which these animals can be subjected, the conditions in which they can be held.
[00:25:18]  It's like most people don't want to eliminate capitalism, but they also think there should be some kind of social safety net.
[00:25:24]  Social security, so that old people don't end up in the streets after working their whole lives or unemployment, people get fired or some kind of health care to like sandpaper the rough edges off capitalism.
[00:25:35]  And obviously, not everybody believes that.
[00:25:37]  A lot of people believe in them.
[00:25:38]  No limits whatsoever, just pure profit driven, and that'll elevate the society.
[00:25:42]  But not most people.
[00:25:44]  Most people don't believe in that.
[00:25:45]  And to me, that's the analog here, which is okay, you don't have to eliminate meat consumption, you don't have to eliminate even factory farms, but there's no reason not to put some moral limits.
[00:25:55]  And yes, maybe it makes food a little bit more expensive, but we're not savages.
[00:25:58]  We, we, major religions teach that animal life is created by God, that we're the stewards of animal life, that we have a responsibility to take care of them, to protect them, to treat them well.
[00:26:08]  Generally, people have an instinctive contempt for those who abuse animals gratuitously.
[00:26:14]  And so I don't see why we should allow that on a, you know, people see some game hunter going into shooting a lion or a giraffe or some beautiful animal or abusing a dog or abusing a cat.

=== Michael Acosta And Propriety (15:35) ===

[00:26:27]  The internet gets, Insane with the kind of uncontrolled rage that I share, but sometimes that level of mob justice alarms me.
[00:26:34]  But if you have that, it already shows that there's kind of an instinctive empathy for animals and a propensity to despise people who gratuitously abuse them.
[00:26:43]  It's like a form of bullying, like the helpless animal.
[00:26:45]  So the fact that it's taking place on an industrialized scale for profit doesn't make it any less repellent to me.
[00:26:51]  And if anything, it makes it even more so.
[00:26:53]  All right.
[00:26:53]  Next question.
[00:26:55]  This comes from Matt.
[00:26:56]  Who would win in a fight, Michael Tracy or Jim Acosta?
[00:26:59]  All right.
[00:27:00]  For those of you who don't know, and since Michael Tracy has been somebody who I've had on what had been my Rumble incarnation of the show quite a bit, but he also recently had a podcast with Matt Taibbi.
[00:27:12]  And I know some of you.
[00:27:14]  Subscribe to Matt Tahibius podcast.
[00:27:16]  So, probably already know, but Michael Tracy, I got invited to the Substack party at the night of the White House Correspondents' Dinner because now I'm back on Substack.
[00:27:25]  So, they invited me.
[00:27:26]  And I don't go to Washington parties and try and socially connect to journalists and politicians who I want to adversarially cover.
[00:27:36]  I find it not just compromising, but just unpleasant.
[00:27:40]  I have people I like to socialize with.
[00:27:42]  It's not Washington journalists and politicians.
[00:27:44]  The only reason I went or I consider going.
[00:27:46]  I didn't go, but the only reason I considered going, and I mean this for real, was that I knew that Julie K. Brown and Jim Acosta and Joy Reid and people like that, many Hassan, who Michael Tracy hates, were going to be there.
[00:28:00]  And Michael Tracy was intending to go.
[00:28:02]  And I knew that he was going to accost at least one, if not more, of those people.
[00:28:06]  It happened last year at the Substack party where he went up to David Korn, one of the primary spreaders of the Russiagate hoax.
[00:28:14]  I mean, one of the hardest-core dead-enders who still believe in the Steele dossier, who introduced the Steele dossier into American discourse.
[00:28:20]  And he accosted David Korn, and it was a huge, kind of acrimonious argument.
[00:28:26]  But I know Michael hates Julie K. Brown in particular.
[00:28:28]  She's the Miami Herald reporter who kind of revitalized the Epstein reporting.
[00:28:33]  She just got a special citation Pulitzer for having done so, even though it was six years ago.
[00:28:37]  They're kind of embarrassed that they didn't give her the Pulitzer in the first place.
[00:28:39]  Michael thinks, and you can go and check if you're interested in the substance, that her reporting was basically just being fed to her by lawyers for the so called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, many of whom have very Dubious stories, and she just basically did stenographic work for them.
[00:28:56]  The plaintiff's lawyers made huge amounts of money, even though many of these women didn't even meet Jeffrey Epstein until they were well into their 20s or 30s.
[00:29:03]  And he believes Julie K. Brown's reporting is fraudulent.
[00:29:05]  He documented this once.
[00:29:07]  I think there were some good points raised.
[00:29:09]  He emailed her.
[00:29:09]  She refused to engage, refused to answer it.
[00:29:12]  So I knew he was going to go up to her at this party, and he did.
[00:29:15]  And it's not Michael is not aggressive in public, but he has no social ability or inclination to modulate his behavior to make it.
[00:29:27]  Comport with the norms of social interaction.
[00:29:31]  So there's a way to go up to Julie K. Brown and try and engage her about why she told or reasons she wouldn't answer you, or she even falsely claimed that Michael was being paid by Epstein Associates.
[00:29:41]  There's a way to engage that, even at a Substack party, but you have to do it in a sort of subtle way that comports with or aligns with the behavioral norms of that party.
[00:29:51]  And Michael either can't or won't or both.
[00:29:54]  And so he just, you know, it was like a bull in a china shop, went up to her, just started like, Hey, Julie, hey, Julie.
[00:29:59]  Not intending to be in any way intimidating, not intending to be menacing, but because Michael is very rambunctious and, like I said, doesn't really constrain his behavior to align with social norms, which can be a good attribute for journalists, but also can sometimes impede what you want to do.
[00:30:18]  There's kind of two sides to it.
[00:30:20]  I do think it's a good trait for journalists for whatever reason, autism or just behavioral personality issues, to be more inured to public.
[00:30:30]  Disapproval and criticism than the norm because the worst thing for journalists is to succumb to groupthink and just try and embrace conventional wisdom to be out of fear of provoking public or political or societal disapproval.
[00:30:43]  You want journalists to be iconoclastic.
[00:30:44]  You want journalists to be willing to confront sacred truths and taboos and be willing to kind of take the slings and arrows.
[00:30:51]  And being, I'm not saying Michael's autistic, I'm just saying being autism can actually be a positive way to do that, or it can be just your personality as you don't care about social norms, you don't care about how people react.
[00:31:04]  So it can be positive, but it can also impede you.
[00:31:06]  And Jim Acosta was nearby, apparently inebriated, and saw Michael questioning Julie K. Brown.
[00:31:14]  She apparently was trying to flee, acting like the damsel in distress.
[00:31:17]  Jim Acosta, like the big macho, gallant savior of women in distress, intervened and started yelling at Michael and saying, and challenging him to a fight, saying, Hey, let's take this outside, which is like the 1950s way of saying, Yeah, let's go into the parking lot.
[00:31:33]  And Michael was like, Okay, let's go.
[00:31:34]  And then Jim Acosta wouldn't.
[00:31:36]  Even though he was the one who kept calling Michael to go fight, Michael was willing to, ready to, eager to, apparently.
[00:31:41]  Then Michael left.
[00:31:42]  He got kicked out of the party by Substack.
[00:31:44]  And then he went to his Hampton Inn hotel where he just started posting on Twitter Hey, Jim Acosta, you said you want to fight me.
[00:31:51]  Here's my address.
[00:31:51]  I'm outside the Hampton Inn.
[00:31:53]  Come and fight me.
[00:31:54]  And Jim Acosta never showed up.
[00:31:55]  And then Michael went around challenging various people to fight throughout that week.
[00:31:59]  And I do find it very unsurprising that Jim Acosta wanted to pretend to be willing to fight in defense of Julie K. Brown's honor, but actually wasn't willing to because Jim Acosta is probably the most.
[00:32:09]  Ridiculous fraud in all of corporate journalism.
[00:32:11]  He wrote a book about his own bravery and courage entitled A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, Trump's America, and had a picture of himself like in a suit and tie, his hair all blown dry, like asking a question to Donald Trump on a street with a bunch of other journalists at a press briefing, as though that's somehow dangerous, like as though American journalists have been swept away to the gulag.
[00:32:34]  This is Trump's first term for asking Trump difficult or challenging or critical questions.
[00:32:39]  Trump would call them liars and mock them and call them fake news, but No one went to a gulag.
[00:32:44]  But if you look at how Jim Acosta depicts himself and portrays himself, thinks about himself, he thinks he's like a martyr of journalism, even though he's never bothered anyone in power.
[00:32:53]  He never, no one's ever acted against him in any remote way.
[00:32:56]  So I would put my money on pretty much anybody who wanted to fight Jim Acosta.
[00:33:01]  There's that, there's this young female, extremely obese Democratic Party partisan activist named Olivia Juliana.
[00:33:10]  She became kind of known because, get exactly what happened, but something with abortion and she raised a bunch of money for.
[00:33:17]  Abortion.
[00:33:17]  She was like 20.
[00:33:18]  Now she's like 23.
[00:33:19]  She's extremely obese, has no ideology, like nothing interesting about her.
[00:33:23]  She's just a Democratic Party hack, which I find so sad.
[00:33:26]  Like, imagine you're in your early 20s, like the time that you can experiment with dissident ideas and ideologies and experiment in radicalism and think about who you are.
[00:33:34]  And instead, you just become like a Democratic Party apparatchik, like someone who reveres Joe Biden as like an exciting political figure.
[00:33:40]  Anyway, that's her.
[00:33:42]  She apparently, not apparently, but she also was one of the people who during this online drama, Intervened and said, Hey, I'll fight you, Michael Tracy.
[00:33:51]  And honestly, like, I think she's way scarier than Jim Acosta.
[00:33:55]  I mean, someone with that weight can just lean into you, sit on you, eat you, whatever.
[00:33:59]  And I would even place money on her against him.
[00:34:02]  I'd place money on anybody against Jim Acosta.
[00:34:04]  But it's if you go around challenging journalists to a fight, it's already pathetic behavior.
[00:34:10]  But then if you do it and you make a spectacle of yourself, but then obviously are too afraid to carry through on the threat you issued, that's even sadder.
[00:34:18]  And that is Jim Acosta in his And all of his, Gory, that's the essence of Jim Acosta.
[00:34:24]  All right.
[00:34:24]  Matthew Kidd asks Regarding Comey's arrest for the 8647, I thought it was black letter law that encouraging violence was permitted as long as you aren't inciting imminent violence.
[00:34:36]  Aren't all of the following statements constitutionally protected speech?
[00:34:39]  Quote, I hope so because I'm about to read them.
[00:34:41]  Quote, I think it would be good if someone killed the president.
[00:34:43]  Quote, we should do another Holocaust.
[00:34:45]  Quote, we should bring back chattel slavery.
[00:34:47]  Question that any of those ideas, including advocating the Justifiability or even the necessity of violence against American political officials is protected speech.
[00:34:57]  So, in the case of Jim Comey, who I think he claimed to find this, but probably wrote it in the sand and posted a picture on his Instagram, but then deleted it when it caused an uproar.
[00:35:07]  86 is the number that I worked in restaurants.
[00:35:11]  I was like 16, 17 in the red lobster in a bagel shop.
[00:35:15]  86 is the term that means there's nothing left on a menu item.
[00:35:19]  So, someone says 86 lobster, it means, hey, we're the red lobster, but we don't have lobster.
[00:35:23]  And 86 has become a term of kind of saying, like, end this, and like, get rid of this, end this.
[00:35:29]  86 means end.
[00:35:30]  There's no more.
[00:35:31]  And 47 is the number of Trump's presidency.
[00:35:35]  He's the 45th and 47th president.
[00:35:36]  So 8647, which Jim Comey either found on the beach or himself put on the beach in pebbles and then posted to his Instagram, clearly means let's get rid of the president, end the presidency, end this president.
[00:35:49]  Now, obviously, that could mean end it through violence and assassination, but it doesn't have to mean that.
[00:35:54]  It could mean impeach him, it could mean defeat his movement, do the 25th Amendment.
[00:36:00]  And remove him that way.
[00:36:02]  But obviously, it also has this potential to mean violence.
[00:36:04]  So the question is well, and now the Trump Justice Department has indicted Jim Comey.
[00:36:09]  They're right wing activists who during the Biden administration would post 8646.
[00:36:14]  And I mean, like some big MAGA accounts, nobody ever thought, hey, shouldn't they be prosecuted?
[00:36:18]  No one has prosecuted them.
[00:36:19]  The Trump Department, Justice Department hasn't prosecuted them, but Jim Comey, they did.
[00:36:24]  Now, you can say it's irresponsible rhetoric for the former FBI director to post something like that.
[00:36:28]  That's a debate about propriety.
[00:36:30]  But On the question of legality and constitutionality, there's absolutely no question that is protected speech.
[00:36:36]  And I'll tell you why.
[00:36:37]  The leading case defending or rather defining the outer limits of the First Amendment is Brandenburg versus Ohio, which is a case from 1967, Supreme Court case.
[00:36:46]  And if you just listen to the facts of this case, you will have no doubt that what Jim Comey did is protected speech because the speech there wasn't susceptible to different interpretations, including a nonviolent one.
[00:36:55]  Brandenburg was a leader, a local leader in Ohio at the KKK.
[00:36:58]  And he stood up and he gave a speech basically saying, Our government is discriminating against white people.
[00:37:03]  And if they don't Quickly stop.
[00:37:05]  We're justified in using violence against American political officials, and we should use violence against American political officials.
[00:37:12]  He's heading to speech.
[00:37:13]  And the state of Ohio arrested him and prosecuted him under various laws, including terrorism, advocacy of violence for political change, threatening the president.
[00:37:23]  And he was convicted.
[00:37:24]  And this conviction went to the Supreme Court.
[00:37:25]  And his lawyers, Brandenburg's lawyers, argued he didn't threaten the president.
[00:37:29]  He didn't incite anybody to go kill the president.
[00:37:32]  He simply expressed the view that there are times when political violence is justified, which I think everybody agrees.
[00:37:37]  It is.
[00:37:37]  Our country, after all, was founded by political violence through political violence against authorities, against unjust authorities.
[00:37:44]  And you're allowed to advocate that.
[00:37:45]  You're allowed to advocate, okay, the government has become so oppressive that political violence against political leaders is necessary.
[00:37:50]  And the Supreme Court agreed.
[00:37:52]  All right.
[00:37:52]  So I was talking about Brandenburg, and I was saying that the Supreme Court in Brandenburg said that that speech where the KKK leader stood up and said it is now appropriate to commit violence.
[00:38:05]  In fact, we should commit violence against government officials because they're anti white.
[00:38:09]  That is protected speech because you're allowed to advocate the justifiability of violence.
[00:38:13]  The phrase was the abstract advocacy of violence, meaning you're not, you haven't gathered a crowd and said, Hey, go, Donald Trump is speaking over there, go kill him.
[00:38:23]  You haven't gathered a crowd and said, Hey, there's this guy's speech there, a house there, go burn it down.
[00:38:29]  You're not directing a crowd to go do it.
[00:38:31]  You're just advocating the abstract justifiability of political violence.
[00:38:35]  And that is protected under the First Amendment.
[00:38:37]  So in that case, there was no nonviolent interpretation.
[00:38:39]  He said we should use violence against American political officials if they continue to be anti white.
[00:38:43]  Unlike Comey's, where there's obviously a nonviolent interpretation, plausible, even if not likely.
[00:38:49]  But it doesn't matter even if Jim Comey's statement was indisputably violent, meaning he was advocating violence against Trump.
[00:38:56]  Under Brandenburg, there's no question that it's protected.
[00:38:58]  And I get with political violence obviously increasing and some pretty horrific acts of political violence that have materialized.
[00:39:06]  Obviously, the assassination of Charlie Kirk in such a brutal way that everybody watched and an assassination attempt, two of them on President Trump, a third one that didn't really get close, but was still an attempt.
[00:39:18]  That is in the ether, political violence, nowhere near like it was in the 60s.
[00:39:22]  When the Supreme Court issued this ruling, remember that was the 60s where an American president was killed, his brother, the attorney general, was killed, Malcolm X was murdered, Martin Luther King was killed.
[00:39:33]  And even in the midst of that, far more severe violence and instability from the protests of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Act, civil rights movement, the Supreme Court still said his First Amendment protected speech to advocate violence against political officials.
[00:39:45]  So this to me seemed like a prosecution headed nowhere.
[00:39:48]  It was done to kind of satiate Trump's base that wants to see people like Jim Comey and John Brennan.
[00:39:54]  Pay for crimes.
[00:39:55]  And it's very much like a lot of people wanted to see Wall Street executives pay for what they did during the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:40:02]  And the Justice Department's claim was, we just can't find laws that they violate.
[00:40:05]  Books and volumes of essays have been written about why that was not true.
[00:40:09]  But that is sometimes behavior that you think and know is corrupt or abusive, just doesn't quite fit squarely into a criminal law.
[00:40:17]  And people who voted for Trump, in part based on the expectation that he was going to prosecute people like Brennan and Comey, are frustrated that they haven't seen those kind of prosecutions.
[00:40:26]  And so they're kind of giving them this.
[00:40:28]  Illusion of an attempt, even though it is, in my view at least, quite frivolous for the reason I just explained, even though I stand second to nobody in my contempt for Jim Comey, one of the most loathsome people in public life.
[00:40:40]  All right.
[00:40:41]  Next question.
[00:40:42]  Murat Emragolu.
[00:40:45]  Hi, Glenn.
[00:40:45]  I'm a big fan.
[00:40:46]  Thank you.
[00:40:46]  I would love to hear your views on the possible reasons why, until recently, Iran hasn't ever utilized the threat of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz against the US sanctions for the last 47 years, though, through which last year's 12 day war also took place.
[00:41:00]  Also, as Iran is currently doing, why hasn't it threatened to destroy the Gulf countries for enabling aggressors against it and collaborating with them and posing an existential threat or any threat to Iran?
[00:41:09]  I assume Iran has always been aware of its strategic bargaining power derived from the strait and the vulnerabilities of the Gulf state countries, yet up until now, it has never used them as a deterrent.
[00:41:18]  As soon as it did, the balance of power shifted in Iran's favor.
[00:41:21]  Can you elaborate on why Iran hasn't ever utilized these deterrents and thus been exposed to decades of aggression?
[00:41:26]  One of the things that President Trump said, he said so many things that make no sense that are completely negated by reality.
[00:41:32]  That contradicts other things he said.
[00:41:34]  But one of the things he said that I found most astounding he said, Oh, nobody thought that the Iranians could or would close the Strait of Hormuz or attack Gulf state countries if we attack them with the Israelis.
[00:41:47]  I doubt you could find a single article in the last 30 years talking about a possibility of US attack on Iran or US Israeli war with Iran.
[00:41:54]  And this has been in the ether for decades because Netanyahu has wanted this as his main wish list, his main item on his wish list.

=== Nuclear Leverage In Iran (07:33) ===

[00:42:02]  Neocons have wanted this.
[00:42:03]  This is supposed to be part of what the US did after Iraq.
[00:42:06]  If they hadn't been tied up in Iraq, they would have gone to Tehran.
[00:42:09]  There's been endless discourse on a war with Iran.
[00:42:11]  And every single article that I can remember, every single discussion which I've heard, every interview in which I've participated, every debate that I've done was premised on the obvious understanding that Iran had leverage if you attack them, which is one of the reasons why this war hasn't happened until just a few months ago.
[00:42:28]  And the main leverage was that Iran could easily close the Strait of Hormuz to 20% of commercial.
[00:42:36]  Traffic because of how narrow the strait is, you don't need a big navy to do it.
[00:42:40]  You don't even need a navy at all.
[00:42:41]  Just with drones and missiles, you can make it so dangerous to pass through that insurance companies won't insure it.
[00:42:46]  And you can just make it unusable.
[00:42:49]  And that will cripple the world economy, especially if done for long enough.
[00:42:52]  And then the Gulf states are barely countries at all.
[00:42:55]  I mean, Saudi Arabia is, but Bahrain and the Emiratis and Qatar.
[00:42:59]  I mean, if you visited these countries, you see they're not even countries.
[00:43:03]  They're just tiny little enclaves of monarchical power backed up by US military power that are just energy outlets.
[00:43:11]  And it's so obvious how vulnerable they are to a real country like Iran.
[00:43:14]  Big country of close to 100 million people.
[00:43:16]  And of course, those countries are vulnerable to Iranian aggression or Iranian retaliation.
[00:43:22]  Now, this is the part that is most interesting to me for so long, we've been told about the Iranian government, and I've known for a long time, this is not true, but this has been the narrative, is that the Iranians are unlike any other country because they don't operate according to the normal human impulses.
[00:43:39]  They don't have the will to live.
[00:43:41]  They have the will to die.
[00:43:42]  They want to die as martyrs.
[00:43:44]  They want to go to heaven and get their 72 virgins.
[00:43:47]  They're not rational.
[00:43:48]  It's an apocalyptic doomsday cult.
[00:43:50]  That's why if they got a nuclear weapon, they would instantly use it, even though it would mean immediate annihilation, because they don't think rationally.
[00:43:56]  They're eager for destruction.
[00:43:58]  This is what we've been told.
[00:43:59]  This is the demonizing, fear mongering rhetoric, which we hear about.
[00:44:03]  Everyone was supposed to go and attack.
[00:44:04]  The Israelis invented all those lies about what Hamas did on October 7th cut babies out of wombs and baked babies in ovens and beheaded babies because they needed to say, oh, Hamas isn't just any old group that used violence because we all use violence.
[00:44:17]  They're uniquely inhumane.
[00:44:18]  They're worse than ISIS, is what Netanyahu said on October 8th.
[00:44:22]  Worse than ISIS.
[00:44:23]  And that's why we heard lies about what Saddam Hussein did in the first Gulf War, that he and his henchmen pulled babies out of incubators.
[00:44:30]  There's always these demonizing lies around anyone we're supposed to hate.
[00:44:33]  And the idea that the Iranians are not rational, that they're a fanatical, apocalyptic, religious doomsday cult, has been the reason we're supposed to be so afraid that they get a nuclear weapon because a lot of countries have nuclear weapons.
[00:44:43]  India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons to hate each other, but they don't use it.
[00:44:46]  North Korea, which we're told is such an insane dictator, has nuclear weapons and he doesn't use it.
[00:44:52]  And the reason is because human beings do have a will to live.
[00:44:54]  And anyone knows with nuclear weapons, that the minute you use nuclear weapons, especially against nuclear power, you will be instantly and inevitably annihilated.
[00:45:01]  The whole country will be vaporized.
[00:45:02]  And people don't do that.
[00:45:03]  That is an effective deterrent.
[00:45:05]  And so the argument was always wait, if Israel has nuclear weapons, if Iran had nuclear weapons, why would they use it against Israel with a stockpile of 300 nuclear weapons?
[00:45:12]  Why would they use it against the United States?
[00:45:14]  It would mean instant annihilation.
[00:45:15]  So what we're supposed to be told is oh, it's because Iran doesn't operate by pragmatic considerations.
[00:45:19]  They don't exercise self restraint.
[00:45:21]  And yet, look at how restrained Iran has been.
[00:45:23]  Exactly.
[00:45:23]  They had the power to close the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:45:25]  For decades, and they never did it.
[00:45:27]  Why?
[00:45:27]  Because they understood that that was a major impact on the world economy.
[00:45:34]  And countries, if that were just done out of the blue, would probably go to war with Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:45:40]  Same with attacking the energy infrastructure.
[00:45:43]  I mean, the Qataris and the Emiratis and the Bahrainis and the Saudis, their energy infrastructure is critical to the world economy.
[00:45:50]  And yet it's very vulnerable, it's not hard to destroy.
[00:45:52]  And yet the Iranians have it.
[00:45:53]  Why not?
[00:45:54]  Those countries have aligned with the United States.
[00:45:56]  They've been used to attack the United States, to attack Iran before, including last year.
[00:46:00]  The reason is because the Iranians are very strategic and careful, knowing that if they escalate that way, they'll be more likely to be attacked, almost certainly likely to be attacked.
[00:46:10]  And they've held it as leverage to not being attacked.
[00:46:12]  And the only time that they actually went and closed the Strait of Hormuz was when they were attacked in a major war of choice, of aggression, unprovoked major war of choice and aggression by the United States and Israel.
[00:46:21]  And even now, with their attacks on the energy infrastructure of various.
[00:46:26]  Arab dictatorships, they have imposed far less destruction than they're capable of.
[00:46:31]  They don't want to use all their leverage.
[00:46:32]  They want to hold their leverage.
[00:46:33]  They want to prevent further attacks on their country.
[00:46:35]  And to do that, you can't use all your leverage because if you use all your leverage and you destroy the entire energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, or if you just permanently close the trade of removes, you incentivize countries to attack you for the war to escalate.
[00:46:47]  So they're very cunning, they're very strategic.
[00:46:50]  And this is why people have been able to live with Iran all this time.
[00:46:52]  And let's remember as well that President Obama and the EU and Russia and China engineered a deal with Iran that by Iran made concessions that no other country makes, allowing inspections of their nuclear facilities.
[00:47:05]  Constant 24 7 monitoring by the IAEA, limitations on their enrichment capabilities, not above 3.67%, even though no other country has limitations on how much they can enrich to.
[00:47:16]  And all reports are that the Iranians were not pursuing a nuclear weapon under that protocol, and that the United States and the West and the IAEA had full scale monitoring.
[00:47:26]  Trump, if he gets a deal, it's going to be a deal similar to that.
[00:47:28]  The reason Iran has been considered a demonized threat is not because they're a threat to the United States, it's because they're a threat to Israel.
[00:47:35]  And anybody watching or reading anything I've written over the last several years understands how powerful and influential the Israel lobby is in the United States.
[00:47:44]  But if you look at Iran's behavior, even when Israel blew up their consulate in Damascus and then attacked, and then Iran felt compelled to retaliate, they assassinated invited leaders on Iranian soil.
[00:47:55]  Nothing, something that no country, sovereign country would accept without retaliation.
[00:48:00]  They used old missiles, slow missiles.
[00:48:02]  They knew they were likely to be intercepted.
[00:48:03]  They didn't come near pummeling Israel to the extent that they could.
[00:48:06]  And then in the 12 day war of 2025, they retaliated more.
[00:48:10]  They definitely imposed hurt on Israel, but nowhere near like they've done now with a full scale war.
[00:48:16]  So they're very restrained in what they do.
[00:48:18]  They purposely don't escalate to the top ladder.
[00:48:20]  They're not this suicidal cult.
[00:48:22]  If anything, the doomsday country run by religious fanatics willing to blow up the world for their own interests is Israel, not Iran.
[00:48:29]  And I do think there's a case to make.
[00:48:30]  And John Mearsheimer, the professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, has made this that it would actually be better for the world, safer for the world, if Iran did get a nuclear weapon, because that's the only thing that will stop Israel and the United States.
[00:48:42]  From constantly attacking and starting wars in the Middle East and dominating that region with wars and violence and instability, is if they have a counterweight to them in Iran.
[00:48:51]  And we've created a world where rational countries should be and are motivated to get nuclear weapons because we've taught the world that the only way to protect yourself against US invasion and US bombing campaigns and attack or Israeli attack is to have nuclear weapons.
[00:49:03]  If you have those, we don't mess with them.
[00:49:05]  But if you don't, we'll come in with our military in the middle of the night and just kidnap your leader like we did in Venezuela.
[00:49:10]  We'll just take him and his wife and put them in a cage in the United States.
[00:49:14]  We'll bomb you when we want.
[00:49:15]  We'll invade you when we want.
[00:49:17]  But if you have a nuclear weapon, you get nothing but respect and deference.
[00:49:20]  That's a very dangerous motivational framework to have created.
[00:49:23]  All right, next question is from Jacob Zawanda, who says It seems increasingly common to hear the view that America is in decline and that its potential institutions have been fully captured by corporations and special interests.

=== Wealth And Social Unrest (10:39) ===

[00:49:35]  Yet the country has also endured and recovered from extraordinary crises throughout its history, including a civil war, the Great Depression, the corruption of the Gilded Age, and two world wars.
[00:49:44]  In my view, one of America's defining strengths has been its adaptability.
[00:49:48]  And repeated ability to confront major structural problems.
[00:49:51]  I'm curious about how you view today's challenges compared to those of the past.
[00:49:55]  Do you think the current problems are ultimately addressable?
[00:49:57]  And if so, what mechanisms or forces historically initiated and enabled course correction might serve that role in the present moment?
[00:50:06]  It's really interesting.
[00:50:07]  The United States has always obviously been a capitalist country, has always been based on and accepted of income and wealth inequality.
[00:50:14]  That's obvious going back to the founding, including the fact that property right owners were given rights, including the right to vote, that other people who weren't property owners.
[00:50:22]  Weren't given.
[00:50:23]  And the founders talked about economic inequality, but they also talked about the fact that while economic inequality can coexist with political inequality, with political equality, so you have equality under the law, political equality, everyone has the right to vote eventually, everybody is, nobody's above the law, and that that kind of political equality can coexist with economic inequality, even drastic wealth and income inequality.
[00:50:45]  At some point, economic inequality can become so severe that it contaminates everything, including democracy and the idea of individual rights.
[00:50:53]  And for that reason, you see moments in history because the one thing that can really destabilize a country and ultimately blow it up, it's much more likely from within than from without.
[00:51:02]  And it's when the population perceives that they're being so abused, so mistreated, their lives are so miserable and deprived by a group of ruling elites who don't not only care about them, but have contempt and scorn for them and indifference to their misery, you know, hiding behind the palace in Versailles while all of Paris struggles to eat, that that's the sort of thing that leads to revolution and serious political instability and that threatens political elites.
[00:51:25]  And what you've seen even throughout the 20th century were attempts to mollify that, not to change it, but to placate it.
[00:51:30]  So the oligarchs of the time, Rockefeller and Ford, et cetera, used to ride through the streets and very flamboyantly hand out money to peasants and to poor people to show that they were kind hearted and philanthropic.
[00:51:42]  That's where a lot of philanthropic endeavors come from.
[00:51:45]  And from that spirit was okay, we're going to be extremely rich, we're going to have whatever we want.
[00:51:49]  But in order for that not to provoke a socialist revolution or just a revolution driven by resentment and grievance, we're going to give just enough to people.
[00:51:57]  Just, we're going to contribute to their entertainment, create some hospitals in our name, some colleges, so that they feel like we're part of the society.
[00:52:05]  They don't have to hate us.
[00:52:06]  We're not like just completely greedy.
[00:52:08]  We'll make some symbolic concessions.
[00:52:10]  And that was how FDR sold the New Deal he convinced the Wall Street barons and the class of generational wealth who hated the New Deal, who saw the New Deal as a threat to their way of life, an attack on capitalism, a socialist scheme.
[00:52:25]  He convinced them, he said, if you don't make these concessions, if you don't give some social safety net after the Great Depression, you're going to have.
[00:52:31]  People overrunning your estates with pitchforks.
[00:52:34]  I'm the only thing standing in the way between them and you.
[00:52:36]  And you support the New Deal, even though you hate it, because it'll deflate revolutionary sentiments in the United States.
[00:52:43]  It'll give people enough comfort so they're not willing to get off their couch or leave their house or risk their lives to go and have a revolution.
[00:52:50]  So this has been a critical part.
[00:52:52]  And then obviously, LGBT, LGBT, LBJ with the Great Society in the 60s, there's been this constant effort to placate masses.
[00:53:02]  So, that even though there's a perception of growing wealth and income inequality, and not just a perception, but the actuality that the American dream, the American way of life is eroding rapidly, people can't even start families like the most foundational element of American happiness, of human happiness, because they can't afford it into their 30s.
[00:53:23]  Maybe you have one kid, both parents work outside the house.
[00:53:25]  You can't afford decent care for your older relatives, your parents, your grandparents.
[00:53:31]  It's like eroding the foundation of American life.
[00:53:33]  People can't buy houses, they don't have property, they don't have an investment.
[00:53:37]  They're filled with debt.
[00:53:38]  And it seems like the spirit of placating and mollifying as a strategy has been lost to untrammeled greed.
[00:53:47]  I remember at the time of the 2008 financial crisis and shortly after, when there were serious threats to the economic stability of the United States.
[00:53:56]  And then it turned out that huge numbers of people were getting evicted from their home or underwater on their mortgage.
[00:54:01]  This massive fund that Obama was given to keep people in their homes just wasn't used.
[00:54:05]  And all their focus instead went on saving the big banks and massive corporate donors to the Democratic Party and to the Obama campaign.
[00:54:11]  And this created a potential for serious unrest.
[00:54:14]  And there were movements that grew out of that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party and similar populist movements like that, that I think to this day shape our politics.
[00:54:23]  And I had at the time, I was writing, it was kind of the last days of my writing on my blog, but then going to work for Salon.
[00:54:32]  But I was still reader supported at this time.
[00:54:34]  And I had a donor who was a very wealthy hedge fund official.
[00:54:41]  He worked in one of the big hedge funders, made a lot of money.
[00:54:44]  And I remember talking to him.
[00:54:45]  Because I didn't know many people of that level of wealth until I started writing about politics.
[00:54:52]  And I asked him exactly that question.
[00:54:53]  I said, you know, it seems like the upper class, like the real upper class, has lost this sense of, you know, giving people enough crumbs to keep them at least satiated enough not to be motivated to go out and try and overthrow everything, burn it all down.
[00:55:08]  And he agreed.
[00:55:09]  He said he thinks that that kind of noblesse oblige or whatever you want to call it has been lost.
[00:55:15]  And I actually was going to write a book on this.
[00:55:16]  And that was when Snowden entered my life.
[00:55:18]  And so I didn't.
[00:55:20]  But I started thinking about this more and came to the conclusion that you can actually deal with widespread mass social resentment and grievance in two different ways.
[00:55:29]  One is you can mollify it, you can satiate it, placate it in all the ways I just talked about.
[00:55:33]  The other is you just say, you know what?
[00:55:35]  We're going to build a massive paramilitarized and surveillance state.
[00:55:39]  We're going to build our walls higher.
[00:55:40]  We're going to fortify them with meter technology.
[00:55:43]  We're going to arm our police more.
[00:55:45]  We're going to monitor the population.
[00:55:47]  We're going to keep them under a surveillance microscope.
[00:55:49]  So we're going to know what they're doing if there's any organized unrest and we're going to crush it.
[00:55:53]  If they want to try it, we're just going to crush them.
[00:55:55]  We're going to destroy them.
[00:55:57]  And I remember Joe Biden was asked about gun control once and the argument of a lot of Second Amendment enthusiasts, which is that the ideal that the Second Amendment captured was that government elites need to fear the population.
[00:56:10]  And one way you do that is by making sure the population is well armed, that it's not just government officials and government law enforcement that has a monopoly on violence.
[00:56:20]  And in response, Biden kind of scoffed at this because he's been around Washington forever.
[00:56:24]  And he said, Oh, yeah, people with handguns are going to challenge the U.S. government.
[00:56:27]  We have fighter jets and, you know, helicopters with bombs to blow up a house.
[00:56:31]  They can sit in their house with all the arms they want.
[00:56:34]  And our level of power and military might and force is so much greater that they can't even get close.
[00:56:41]  This thing is threatening the U.S. government with some aid, some rifles or automatic weaponry or whatever.
[00:56:48]  And the U.S. government has done that.
[00:56:49]  That was what was done at Waco.
[00:56:50]  They just went and fire bombed the house where the people were with weapons.
[00:56:55]  They did it.
[00:56:55]  To an organization called Move, this kind of left wing, far left kind of socialist, black socialist organization in Philadelphia that had been having increasing confrontations with the local police.
[00:57:06]  And they just went and firebombed the block, killed a bunch of them, just blew up their house.
[00:57:10]  And I do think one of the other strategies that America has opted for, that American elites have opted for, the Western elites really have opted for, is to say, okay, we're not going to care anymore about showing you that we're concerned about you.
[00:57:22]  We're going to hand you things.
[00:57:23]  We're not going to give you things.
[00:57:24]  We're going to hoard our wealth.
[00:57:25]  We want more and more and more.
[00:57:26]  We want you to see there are people worth.
[00:57:28]  $250 billion, not just billionaires.
[00:57:31]  $250.
[00:57:32]  We want Elon Musk to be a trillionaire.
[00:57:34]  And you're going to see that, and you're not going to be able to do anything about it.
[00:57:36]  Even though you can't buy a house, you can't start a family, you can't send your kids to school, your kids can't leave your house.
[00:57:42]  They live with you.
[00:57:42]  They can't really get jobs, even if they go to college.
[00:57:45]  And the reason you're not going to do anything about it is because we are going to crush you before you even think about it.
[00:57:50]  Now, that does make it harder, but I don't think it makes it impossible.
[00:57:54]  And, but I do think that elites, global elites, have become so hubristic.
[00:57:58]  They live, they don't even live in the United States.
[00:58:00]  I mean, American, uh, Multi millionaires or oligarchs used to have yachts on the coast filled with safes with money and jewels in case they did have to flee from a social revolution.
[00:58:09]  They feared it.
[00:58:10]  I don't think modern day oligarchs fear that at all.
[00:58:12]  They have Palantir and all kinds of apparatus as a place to keep the population fully under control to propagandize them and then, if need be, to crush them.
[00:58:19]  And I don't, I do still think that at some point you can deprive a population to such an extent that they have no choice but to kind of have unrest and uproar.
[00:58:30]  But at the same time, if you scare them enough, if you keep them under enough of an authoritarian thumb, people can lose that spirit that, okay, I don't even have enough agency to get off the couch.
[00:58:42]  I'll just leave one, make one more point about this, which is I remember in Brazil.
[00:58:47]  In 2013, there were these massive nationwide protests, and they began kind of small as a protest against the increase of bus fares.
[00:58:57]  In Brazil, the vast majority of people who are poor or even working class take buses, and the bus system are very inefficient.
[00:59:05]  They're unreliable, they're unpleasant, but they're also expensive.
[00:59:09]  And oftentimes, cities will raise bus fares or the country will as a way of compensating for budgetary shortfalls.
[00:59:16]  And every time they do, people get very angry about it because they already hate the bus.
[00:59:20]  They're already working very hard for little money.
[00:59:22]  And now they have to pay more for the bus.
[00:59:24]  And it sparked these protests that then turned into this kind of broader vehicle for expression of resentments about Brazilian society generally, the ruling class.
[00:59:33]  I remember hearing some Brazilian political scientist or historian talking about how he sees this as a very positive sign because when there was no middle class in Brazil, when everybody was just so immiserated in utterly unthinkable poverty, they were impotent.
[00:59:49]  They had nothing, barely could.
[00:59:51]  Think about getting enough food.
[00:59:52]  And when that happens, you don't feel empowered or engaged enough or entitled to go fight the government and rich people and power structure.
[01:00:00]  But only once you start feeling like you're a little bit more empowered and invested in the society, when you start going to school, have some opportunities, have a little discretionary money, then you start feeling empowered.
[01:00:10]  And those kind of protests, though a sign of discontent and grievance, are also a sign of progress.

=== Reason Beyond Enlightenment (07:27) ===

[01:00:15]  And I do think we can get to the point in the United States where that ethos is crushed.
[01:00:19]  You just keep the population so dumb, so uneducated.
[01:00:22]  So hooked on whatever they're hooked on, so obese.
[01:00:26]  You saw that with January 6th.
[01:00:28]  I mean, some of those people were fit, but most of them, I remember, two Trump supporters died on that day.
[01:00:34]  Only Trump supporters died on that day, despite the lies of the media.
[01:00:36]  No, no Capitol Hub police died on January 6th.
[01:00:39]  But there were four Trump supporters who died, one Ashley Babbitt, who was shot, but two who had heart attacks.
[01:00:46]  These are people who were just kind of very unfit, eating junk food, not really capable of even going to a protest.
[01:00:53]  Without dropping out of a heart attack or on speed.
[01:00:56]  And if you do that to the population enough, you can really disable it so that even if they reach that level of frustration and grievance, it just gets channeled into impotence.
[01:01:05]  And I do get concerned sometimes that that is where things are headed.
[01:01:10]  All right.
[01:01:11]  I tried one more question, which is from fellow traveler.
[01:01:14]  Hi, Glenn.
[01:01:15]  I wanted to probe your thoughts.
[01:01:16]  Well, that sounds potentially painful.
[01:01:18]  On enlightenment thinking, its prominence in our governing architecture and political culture, and whether, despite your admiration for the Enlightenment, you believe it is time to break away from those intellectual restraints.
[01:01:30]  After all, our Enlightenment inspired constitution produced or tolerated chattel slavery, Jim Crow, periodic imprisonment and censorship of political and war opponents, the Red Scare, mass incarceration, a vast surveillance bureaucracy, and deep corruption in our political and economic elite.
[01:01:43]  What are the odds that a small group of guys in 18th century Europe had all the answers to organizing human societies?
[01:01:48]  Do we need to borrow from other political philosophies, either Eastern or Western, to reform our decaying society?
[01:01:54]  I think it's very important to distinguish between.
[01:01:57]  Ideals and how those ideals are implemented.
[01:02:00]  And the founders talked about this as well, that they believed they had created a system based on the right values and objectives and the right formula for how to create a just democratic society.
[01:02:13]  But they also understood that they were getting things wrong, that they were applying things wrong, they were deviating hypocritically from their own values.
[01:02:19]  And that's why they included mechanisms to change the constitution, because future generations were going to come to realize that they were wrong about so many things, that they had upheld injustices, various forms of oppression.
[01:02:29]  And of course, that is the history of the constitution, it has been amended many times.
[01:02:33]  People still want to amend the constitution.
[01:02:34]  I don't think it's an indictment of founding values if the society goes wrong, at least not necessarily.
[01:02:40]  And it's not that I think the Enlightenment and 17th and 18th century Western European thinkers had all the answers, but I do think that it led to the age of reason.
[01:02:49]  And that there was, to me, the core of the Enlightenment was the understanding that because we're endowed with the capacity to think critically, to reason, to examine ideas, that we must necessarily have a society by definition that's just.
[01:03:05]  That fosters those endowed abilities of human beings and not prohibits them.
[01:03:10]  And that we should never accept that truth and falsity or right and wrong are decided for us by some supreme authority or institutional authority, a monarch, pope, or a dictator.
[01:03:22]  That at the very least, we need to have a society that permits and encourages and extracts value from the capacity that we all have to engage in human reason and rational thought, critical thinking, which is protected by things like free speech and a free press and freedom of religion.
[01:03:38]  Freedom to practice religion, freedom from religion.
[01:03:40]  And I think that model continues to be vital.
[01:03:44]  It doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all of how we think about constructing societies.
[01:03:51]  It doesn't mean that there's not other intellectual innovations that have taken place since the Enlightenment or that will take place from now, or that there are other cultures that also don't have crucial insights about how to, at the end of the day, the goal is, I guess, to maximize human happiness in whatever form that takes.
[01:04:07]  But I'd have to be convinced that.
[01:04:09]  Enlightenment values are an impediment or destructive of intrinsic human happiness.
[01:04:15]  And I certainly don't see that at all.
[01:04:18]  I think those values continue to be worth preserving and using as a foundation.
[01:04:22]  Now, I'm the byproduct of my culture.
[01:04:25]  I'm a person who was endowed with Western ideas.
[01:04:28]  I grew up in the 20th century, now the 21st century, which very much is still a byproduct of Enlightenment thinking.
[01:04:34]  I was born into a society whose country and constitution was based on Enlightenment ideas, whose founders emerged as.
[01:04:44]  Believers in the Enlightenment.
[01:04:45]  So, I have no doubt that that's part of why I look at enlightened values and see them in the light that I do.
[01:04:51]  But I think it is important.
[01:04:53]  And I feel like I have made strides in being able to critically evaluate even things with which I was indoctrinated from birth.
[01:04:59]  I'll never cleanse myself of my own subjective prison.
[01:05:02]  None of us will.
[01:05:02]  But you can fight against it as much as possible.
[01:05:05]  But at the end of the day, you have to be humble and realize that no matter how much you want to think about your brain as some kind of free and unconstrained instrument for arriving at conclusions based on rational and objective and critical thought.
[01:05:16]  It's very much constrained by and imprisoned by, captive to the arbitrary societal norms and ideas into which you are born and in which you were raised.
[01:05:26]  But having said that and acknowledged that, I still see enlightenment values as being an important ingredient in the creation of any just society.
[01:05:36]  All right.
[01:05:36]  We try and keep this to around 90 minutes.
[01:05:39]  Lots of great questions this evening.
[01:05:42]  Definitely, as usual, some we were hoping to get to, but I just didn't have the ability to get to it because of time.
[01:05:48]  But continue to submit those questions.
[01:05:51]  If we have great ones that we really want to do that are not dependent on the news cycle and are still viable next week, we often put ones in that were from the week before.
[01:05:59]  So, keep using this post to throughout the week put your questions.
[01:06:02]  Also, it's not just questions like critiques, challenges, ideas, suggestions, whatever will create an interesting conversation, a conversation that I hope is nutritious and insightful in order to indulge in and engage in, and just keep submitting that.
[01:06:16]  I'm super enthusiastic about the interactive model of journalism.
[01:06:21]  I always have been the ability to hear from your readers, to interact with readers is not just an important check on what you do, but also for me, very enjoyable.
[01:06:30]  So, Really appreciate all of you who have submitted questions, for all of you who have tuned in.
[01:06:35]  I'm going to try and get this article out in the next day or two, the one that I talked about at the start about lessons that we can learn from these successes.
[01:06:41]  We focus a lot on failures and problems in politics, and we should.
[01:06:45]  But when there are successes, I think especially impressive ones that have insights to offer, we should take the time to reflect on those as well.
[01:06:52]  So it's not just constant doom and gloominess and pessimism and nihilism and blackpilling.
[01:07:00]  I think it's important to understand that we all obviously believe, by virtue of the fact that we're here, That you have the capacity to change things for the better.
[01:07:07]  And when you have a model that offers insights on how to do that, I think it's important to delve into those, which I want to do with this animal rights success and multi level success, really.
[01:07:15]  So look for that next couple of days.
[01:07:16]  We'll have our, what we have been calling our Friday night QA, but we're now going to change to our Thursday night QA.
[01:07:22]  By definition, next Thursday, 7 p.m. Eastern is the time we do it.
[01:07:25]  We do it live on Substack and then kind of populate our other platforms, YouTube and Rumble and X, with clips of the show that we do.
[01:07:35]  So definitely look for us here.
[01:07:36]  Always great to see you live.
[01:07:37]  And I hope you have a great weekend, a great week.
[01:07:39]  And we will be with you next week shortly.
[01:07:41]  Have a great evening, everybody.