In what can only be described as a stunning reversal on a key political issues, Republicans have now siezed the mantle of supporting free speech away from Democrats — mostly owing to Democrats’ support for efforts to counter what they call “misinformation” and “hate speech” online. But now Donald Trump appears to be willing to crack down on speech he doesn’t like as well, in particular criticisms of Israel and support for Palestinians. Jimmy and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi discuss just how much Trump’s proposed measures against protesters will undermine his free speech bona fides among the MAGA faithful. Plus segments with Taibbi on Trump exposing the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as pro-war tools, CNN’s post-speech poll showing wide-ranging support for Trump’s stated agenda and Zelensky rethinking his stance of pissing off Trump and coming crawling back to make peace with Russia.
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So Donald Trump made a big stink last night about how he brought free speech back to America.
Now, what I say about free speech is that, yeah, I don't think Elon Musk is a free speech warrior.
I don't think so.
I think he's happy to suppress when he has to for his own interests, right?
But it's not as bad as it was, right?
So that's what I say for people like me who wanted to tell the truth about COVID.
I was allowed to tell the truth about COVID.
I was allowed to tell the truth about Syria.
I was allowed to tell the truth about Ukraine.
So it was a big deal for me.
But no, I don't, I don't, in fact, Steve Bannon was on the show and he made the same point.
He's not a, you know, he's a tech, he wants to be a tech overlord.
He doesn't really care about free speech.
But Donald Trump has convinced people that they're for free speech because they're for certain speech, right?
But here's the bad part.
He put this out, I think, yesterday.
He said all federal funding will stop for any college, school, or university that allows illegal protests.
Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.
American students will be permanently expelled or depending on the crime arrested.
No masks.
So you're not allowed to wear a mask so they can now digitally identify you and put you in a database.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, which sounds very scary.
In fact, what this is a response to is him being everybody in government, including Donald Trump.
The way he talked to Zelensky is the way a lot of MAGA wants him to talk to Netanyahu.
So this is all about his subservience to Adelson.
It's about his subservience to Israel.
And so this organization, Fire Org, we defend and promote free speech for all Americans in our courtrooms on campuses in our culture.
They had a couple of tweets about it.
And they say the First Amendment protects controversial political speech.
We don't use the law to punish dissenters.
Instead, as a nation, we have chosen a different course to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.
They go on to say, as FIRE knows all too well from our work defending students and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech.
Schools will censor first and ask questions later.
Today's message will cast an impermeable chill on students' protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, paired with President Trump's 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression.
Students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.
Now, we already talked about at the top of the show, Matt, about your great work exposing the censor industrial complex, the censorship industrial complex.
And you're very sensitive to this because you're a leading journalist and you've had the IRS try to intimidate you into not saying certain things.
And I've been censored.
I've been, you know, my own tax dollars have been used to sponsor Vox Ukraine Media, which did hit pieces on me to try to get me de-monetized and kicked off YouTube.
So I'm sensitive to that.
And so Trump might want to protect certain speech, but now he's doing this, which is just the opposite.
And so you being sensitive to something like this, how would you respond to it?
Well, I'm against it.
I mean, when he signed the executive order, and then there was the anti-Semitism Awareness Act that got passed last year.
And then this thing this year, which is really just an extension of that.
It's, to me, a clear First Amendment issue.
You know, normally what they would do, right, like if you wanted, if you wanted to, if you wanted to be a real, really aggressive about Palestinian protesters and stay within the letter of the law, you wouldn't say that we're throwing you out of the country because of your protests, right?
They would just, they would round people up who had committed crimes and then they would deport them, which is what they're doing in other areas.
But you can't say that you're doing it for that reason.
I think Trump, by doing this, is making a huge political mistake or a potentially huge one.
The Democrats have gifted the First Amendment to the Republicans for a generation, really.
I mean, like, they were so bad on this issue that they could run on this forever.
All they have to do is just show basic respect for the institution.
And this is, you know, it's clearly not in the spirit of the First Amendment.
You have organizations like FIRE that I think fought very bravely for speech when the ACLU wouldn't.
And, you know, they're now turning on Trump.
That's not what they want.
You know, I think they have to be more cognizant of what they have here.
I think J.D. Vance is somebody who understands the speech issue and is more instinctively in tune with it.
But, you know, they have a blind spot about this one issue.
And that's unfortunate.
You know, the problem is, Matt, is that the Democrats agree with him?
Well, right.
I was about to say that.
the reason that you're not going to get pushback from the other side on this is, you know, you watch that 60 Minutes segment.
Those exact same laws are the ones that got Roger Waters in trouble, right?
You know, for advocating for Palestinians.
You know, really what they just do is they define anybody who supports the Palestinian cause as being pro-Hamas or for advocating terrorism.
And then it's any one of a dozen different laws that can come into play at that point.
You know, they went after all sorts of politicians in the UK for being quote-unquote anti-Semitic when really what they were doing was protesting the behavior of the Israeli government.
Palestinians are often kind of the canary in the coal mine for speech offenses.
Like they're kind of the first people who they try out some new horrible tactic on because they have no lobby.
But that's it.
But you're absolutely right.
There is nobody on the other side who's going to stand up and say you're really wrong about this.
So Caitlin Johnstone tweeted out.
She said, if you support freedom of speech, you now have an ethical obligation to oppose Israel, even if you didn't before.
Western government support for Israel is the biggest threat to free speech in our society today.
Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the Western world to protect Israel's information interests, and speech is being suppressed in support of Israel more aggressively than with any other topic.
We're not seeing this level of all-out warfare against free expression in any other area.
So I disagree with her about that, though.
Well, I mean, for instance, look, Israel is not, they're terrible on speech, right?
They have been going back to 2015 to 2016.
Glenn Greenwald did a story about how Facebook had to make a deal with the Mossad in order to operate in Israel and how they abided by, I think it was 95% of their recommendations.
But absolutely the most dangerous thing right now with speech is the European Union, which has already passed a law called the Digital Services Act, which is a comprehensive official censorship law that mandates that every platform abide by the recommendations of thousands of these credentialed content reviewers called trusted flaggers.
They have to be in an agreement with them or else they suffer crippling penalties and go out of business.
And that law is the model for what they want to impose everywhere in the world.
They've done it pretty much everywhere in every Western democracy except the United States.
And yes, Israel's bad, but Europe has already imposed the model for like a true dystopian kind of speech control that can be imposed at scale.
So I'm more scared of that than I am of Israel.
But I understand her position.
So the threat that Trump is making is that he will defund colleges of federal funds.
And here's a brief video from Glenn Greenwald to explain why that's incorrect.
That's an unconstitutional position.
Let's listen.
What is going on?
Okay, here we go.
Universities, or there should be, that's independent of the free speech point, which is that once the federal government or any government decides to offer a benefit that's optional, it doesn't have to provide it, but it decides it's going to, it cannot then condition receipt of that benefit on your expressing a particular view, you're affirming a particular view, or you're refraining from expressing a political view.
This is basic First Amendment doctrine.
You had all these people defending the Trump administration's attack on these universities for allowing anti-Israel protests saying, oh, obviously it's not a First Amendment violation to deny federal funding of a university because the government doesn't have to provide funding to universities in the first place.
It's true, the federal government doesn't have to provide funding to universities.
But once it decides to do so, it cannot then punish the universities by withdrawing that funding only for universities that allow a particular view to be expressed or a particular type of protest to take place and not any other.
That is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
There's so many court cases on this.
There have been efforts, for example, to deny property tax exemptions to people who refuse to sign a vow saying they're not in favor of overthrowing the government of the United States, saying, oh, you only get a property tax exemption if you sign a note saying you don't support the overthrow of the United States government.
But people who sign that loyalty pledge to the U.S. government will get property tax exemptions.
Obviously, you don't have to provide the property tax exemptions, but the Supreme Court said once you do, you can't condition it on a loyalty oath to the United States government because that is a violation of free speech.
There have been all kinds of other cases like that, where there's funding to legal aid lawyers, and they try to say if you're a lawyer and you challenge any welfare reform laws in American courts, you will be ineligible for receiving legal aid.
The only lawyers can get legal aid funding from the government are those who support welfare reform or who stay silent on it about it.
The court has denied that is unconstitutional.
There was an effort to say any news outlet, public media company that gets federal funding has to refrain from editorializing about anything the minute they try to editorialize about something, they lose their federal funding.
The Supreme Court said that's unconstitutional as well.
That's because once you offer a benefit, you can't then deny that benefit as punishment for a particular view.
And it's so obvious that that has to be the principle.
Just consider this hypothetical.
The U.S. government, or let's say a state government, opts to provide unemployment benefits, people who get fired, lose their job.
Obviously, it doesn't have to provide unemployment benefits.
It decides that it's going to.
Imagine a law enacted by a state, say Massachusetts, that said, if you support Donald Trump or express support for the Republican Party, you will be ineligible to receive unemployment benefits.
The only people eligible to receive unemployment benefits are those who take an oath to support the Democratic Party.
Everybody would immediately understand why that's unconstitutional.
And you could justify that law based on the same distortion, the same work rationale as it's being offered for the Trump administration's actions this week, which is, oh, look, the government doesn't have to give you unemployment Benefits, you can't claim that it's a violation of your constitution if the government takes unemployment benefits away from you.
And the obvious answer is the state has the right to terminate unemployment benefits programs for everybody if it wants, but it can't withdraw them or deny them as punishment for a particular view, nor can it condition receipt or the right to have those benefits on affirming a particular view.
So the fact that federal funding is optional doesn't mean the government has the constitutional right to deny it to certain universities that allow a certain type of protest.
This is all independent of it, by the way, of the creepy phrase that Trump officials that President Trump used to justify these attacks to serve probably Israel donors, which is, oh, we're just going after illegal protests.
What is an illegal protest?
Obviously, if somebody breaks the law, they're going to get arrested.
There have been hundreds or thousands of protesters on college campuses throughout 2024, including huge numbers of Jewish students who were protesting the Israeli war in Gaza.
They got arrested.
But there's such a thing as an illegal protest.
And if you're going to deny federal funding based on quote-unquote permitting an illegal protest, you can't just have that be the case for hate speech against Jews or hate speech against Israel.
It would have to be applied universally.
Otherwise, it's clearly unconstitutional as an attempt to punish institutions for permitting a certain kind of protest expressing a view that this current government dislikes.
This is not controversial.
This is not in dispute.
It's entirely clear.
There are multiple Supreme Court cases on it.
Just common sense tells you that you can't condition the receipt of a benefit on the requirement to affirm a certain view, nor can you withdraw that benefit as punishment for expressing another view consistent with the First Amendment.
So, you know, I remember when I was at the Rescue the Republic, by the way, I mean, I'm sure everybody would agree with what he's saying.
I don't think, like he said, it's not controversial.
And, you know, you pointed out that this is a real blind spot for the Trump administration.
I don't know if it's a blind spot or just him intentionally serving his donors and the APEC lobby because the APEC lobby has the ability to, you know, make him lose his control of the Senate and the House, right?
So they, so he has to, he's got to, he's serving, as, you know, Bob Dylan said, you got to serve somebody.
And so that's who he's serving.
I think he's doing it consciously.
And I think he knows it's a contradiction to his free speech stance.
But when I was at the Rescue the Republic, and you make the point, it's politically disastrous, I think, for Donald Trump to do this.
He'd be much, it would make him look like much a stronger man if he allowed protests to happen and just kind of make fun of it if he wants or kind of point out how it's non-American or how they don't, whatever you want to do.
But he should tolerate it because it makes him look weak and authoritarian because that's what it is.
And when I was at the Rescue the Republic, I made a strong defense of, you know, you have to freedom of speech means freedom of speech that you hate.
And if it includes pro-Palestinian protesters, because if they can take the rights of them away, they can take ours away.
And that's what this is all about.
We're all here because we had our freedom of speech taken away during COVID or other or in another way.
And people cheered.
And so that was Donald Trump's audience.
They cheered that, right?
And I saw people in the audience, lots of MAGA people who are pro-Palestine or not pro-Israel.
They had pro-Palestine posters in their hands at that Rescue the Republic rally.
So, I mean, do you see, I mean, I don't, I see this as, how do you see this playing out?
Well, I've given up a long time ago trying to figure out Trump's political strategies.
Every time I think he does something that is politically disastrous that he'll never recover from, somehow it works out in a way that's different than I expected.
I feel very, I do feel very strongly that they should not be punting away the, you know, the good standing they've gotten on the speech issue.
They've fought hard to be taken seriously on that issue.
And people like Jim Jordan and Rand Paul have gone through a lot of grief for the Republican Party to be taken seriously on this issue just to throw it away on this.
And I can't, I find it's very hard to believe that this is a calculation that's meant to guarantee control of the House and Senate.
Trump, I think, has always understood that his support is really his voters.
That's his base.
So if he's making that calculation, it's a wrong calculation.
But sometimes he will do things like this, it seems to me, in defiance of the law openly, because he wants people to see that he's willing to cross a line in a certain direction.
I know I don't agree with him on this one, but there are times when he will do that.
But otherwise, this is illogical to me.
And I think it's a perilous thing for the party.
The other stuff that he's doing in terms of these mass cuts and these other drastic changes that he's making, some of which are probably not going to survive legal challenge, he needs the absolute support of his voters in order to see that through.
And if it falls apart because of something like this, then there's a pro, you know, then he's got nobody but himself to blame, I would say.
And just to put a button on this, fire says, if college violates, if the college violates anti-discrimination laws like Title VI or Title IX, the government may ultimately deny the institution federal funding by taking it to federal court or via notice to Congress and an administrative hearing.
It is not simply a discretionary decision that the president can make.
Likewise, students who engage in misconduct must still receive due process, whether through a campus or criminal tribunal.
This requires fair, consistent application of existing law or policy in a manner that respects students' rights.
President Trump needs to stand by his past promise to be a champion of free expression.
That means for all views, including those his administration dislikes.
So, you know, we'd like to see that.
I haven't seen anybody do it in my lifetime.
And the problem is that the opposition party agrees with what he's doing and saying, and so there will be no, you know, a powerful opposition to it except grassroots, right?
Right.
And, you know, not everybody in the world is a, you know, a First Amendment lawyer, right?
So the nice thing.
I mean, this particular branch of First Amendment law can get pretty weedsy for some folks.
And it extends into places where even sometimes I roll my eyes at it.
Like, for instance, the business with the AP credentials, like that falls under the same principle.
Like, if you're going to give credentials to anybody, you have to, you can't deny them because AP doesn't use the word words Gulf of America.
Now, I don't think like credentials matter.
I think journalists who whine about credentials are pussies.
And I find the whole issue kind of laughable.
But if they took it to court, AP would win.
I think you'd have to concede that.
But I don't see that as a crime against humanity.
But on the other stuff, like denying federal funding to colleges over Palestinian protests, like you can't do that because that will undermine any claim that he has to being a champion of the First Amendment.
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This happened last night.
It's strange how the Democrats, liberals, who are now illiberals, have gone from being defenders of staunch defenders of free speech to being staunch defenders of censorship and authoritarian fascists in that way.
And then now they've also become pro-war.
And here's Donald Trump calling it out last night with Elizabeth Warren.
Let's watch.
With no end in sight, the United States has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine's defense with no security, with no energy.
So now those are Democrats applauding that they're just endlessly supporting a proxy war that has been instigated by NATO, the West, and Americans' economic hitmen.
watch what it goes on applause applause applause applause applause You want to keep it going for another five years?
Yeah, you would say Pocahontas says yes.
Well, Pocahontas says yes, sounds like if Disney animation did porn.
Anyway, I'm just she puts the poke back in Pocahontas.
But let's watch the clap.
And there she goes.
And there she just clapping along because my theory is her mighty native bloodline.
She knows intuitively that if the tribal leader says something, you can't beat him.
You should join him.
That's what I think is happening there.
So that's Elizabeth Warren clapping like a seal for the war machine.
And she's supposed to be, you know, some big liberal champion.
And there's Trump calling her out for it.
And it's so easy for Donald Trump to get to the left of these people because they're all authoritarian tools of war.
And here's Bernie Sanders just yesterday.
He tweeted this out.
For 250 years, the United States has supported democracy, which is laughable, especially what we know now about USAID and the NED.
I mean, we've all known that, but now regular people are getting to know that stuff.
He says, now in the middle of a horrific war that Putin started, again, he's just being ahistorical.
Trump is turning his back on Ukraine and democracy and democracy.
Ukraine is not a democracy.
It's now a dictatorship.
He's outlawed the opposing political parties.
He's outlawed any skeptical or critical media.
He's killed and jailed journalists like Gonzalo Gonzalera.
American.
American journalists.
That's right.
And it was so egregious that he got community noted on Twitter.
It said, even under Obama in 2015, the United States was providing weapons and/or military training to 73% of the world's dictatorships as classified by Freedom House.
The U.S. is the number one supporter of dictatorships in the world.
And so there that, so just to just to let you know, I just want the listeners.
Here's the leading scholar, international scholar Mersheimer, and he's going to tell you what Trump is doing in Ukraine is the right thing.
I mean, he just, he has no real option here other than to go along with what President Trump wants.
And as you and I have said on countless occasions, actually, what Trump wants is what's best for Ukraine.
Zelensky doesn't realize that, and most Ukrainians don't realize that.
But what Trump wants to do is shut down the war as soon as possible.
And that is in Ukraine's interest.
It's not in Ukraine's interest to continue this war.
And although Zelensky thinks that's the case, he's just dead wrong.
So in a very important way, I think that what Trump wants to do is good for Ukraine.
So, I mean, even here at Primo Radical shows you that the people in Ukraine want their elections.
Then Zelensky won't give them an election.
And he says, since when does criminalizing opposition and canceling elections equal democracy?
So, how did this, again, my question is the same as before?
It's a little different.
How did liberals go from being staunch anti-war, anti-CIA, anti-war machine, to being people who are sitting there applauding endless war, which we all know now is a proxy war that was instigated by NATO in the West?
It's amazing.
You just think about the difference between now and the Bush years when the average American liberal actually agreed with the Colin Powell position that you can't go in to a war without a clear objective.
You break it, you own it.
There has to be a goal.
Soldiers need a goal, right?
And we can't just go to war just to do it.
And Ukraine is, it's a slightly different situation because it was a country that was invaded, right?
But this is a situation that it can't be won militarily.
Barack Obama made this exact same decision in not going to Crimea for the very sensible reason that it was always going to have be more important to Putin than that area is going to be to us.
And so they're not going to lose that war.
Like Russia is not going to be defeated in this conflict.
Ukraine can't defend itself at all by itself.
So what we're being asked to do is to support in perpetuity an incredibly bloody, dangerous war that not only involves a huge loss of life in Ukraine, but puts us in real jeopardy of getting into a global conflict with the nuclear power.
And what's so funny is that when you mention that now, and that's called a Russian talking point.
If you bring up the nuclear clock, which has been part of American society since, what, the 50s or 60s, that's now called a Russian talking point.
Worrying about nuclear war is a Russian talking point.
It's a Putin talking point.
But it's true.
We had NATO countries firing missiles into Russian territory.
And only because they decided not to expand the situation, are we not in some kind of a shooting war with the nuclear power?
It's astonishing to me that people who, you know, people I marched with, I remember in 2002 against the Iraq war, are so for this.
They're rapidly for this.
And it's a mystery to me.
I mean, is it to you?
I mean, it just shows you how weak-minded people who I used to think weren't are.
People who I thought would be able to see through the war machine, the censorship machine.
And Trump broke their brains.
And that's just, there's no two ways around it.
Trump broke their brain.
And so now anything that they can, you know, if Trump said he liked vanilla ice cream, they would say vanilla ice cream is Putin ice cream.
And that's it.
Look what happened with COVID.
I mean, they became the, and, you know, they went from being my body, my choice, and to people, people used to protest GMOs in their food were now wanting to take your kids away if you didn't want to inject them with an experimental medical treatment with no long-term studies.
They wanted you to lose your job.
They wanted you to lose the right of travel if you wouldn't take this big pharma product.
So they're no longer my, they're not for bodily autonomy anymore.
They're pro-abortion.
You've seen that shift.
I've seen it.
They say pro but that, which is like being pro-amputation.
Like I'm pro-choice.
Being pro-abortion is a dark thing.
There's no way around that.
And so, yeah, that's to me, it's just Trump derangement syndrome.
But, you know, the fact that Bernie Sanders, it's like, is someone else writing your tweets?
I mean, what?
So he was never what we thought he was.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren, I didn't know much about, but Bernie Sanders, I, you know, he used to start every speech with sounds like you're ready for a revolution.
And he just turns, he turns into Lindsey Graham.
I mean, it's just like at the snap of a finger, and he doesn't have any shame.
And it turns out he has no dignity at all.
I mean, at all.
If you're willing to do that, there's no bigger, I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but that's a scum of the earth activity when you're cheering on the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians for an economic hitman's war in Ukraine.
There are no leaders in the Democratic Party.
That's what I've, there is no point to the Democratic Party, but we're not ruled by parties.
We're ruled by oligarchs.
And they control both parties.
And they can't control Trump as much.
And that's why they tried to kill him twice.
That's why they rushed gated him, impeached him twice, and did January 6th, and then did 92 feneliny indictments, right?
While George Bush walks the earth a free man.
So that to me, it's again, I'm just, I turn to you because you're a much smarter, wiser, more, you know, educated man by myself.
I'm a nightclub comedian.
And I just like, is there a way out of this?
Like, how the Democrat, there's just no snapping these people out of it.
Yeah, I don't know.
First of all, I would gladly trade places with you and be a nightclub comedian, but that sounds like a much better job to me.
But no, I mean, You bring up Bernie.
Bernie is probably the politician that I know best personally of any in the world.
Like, in 2006, he invited me to spend the better part of a month following him around in Congress.
He never once asked to be off the record.
And, you know, I've had dinner with him socially.
He's gone out with my family.
I had an image of him that was, I guess, completely different from the reality, or I'm just confused about this recent turn.
There's only one explanation that I can really come up with because my impression of Bernie always was that he was a person of integrity, I thought.
I thought he was doing these things not for money, not for fame, not for the usual politician reasons.
But I did have a conversation with him once where he said some interesting things about kind of his affection for the Democratic Party.
And he talked sort of very passionately about what it meant to him when he was a kid, you know, growing up in poor in Brooklyn and how nobody he knew was a Republican.
Everybody he knew was a Democrat.
And, you know, Joe Biden had been a friend of his when he got to the Senate, you know, from the House.
Biden had been a mentor to him, told him how the place worked.
And I think there is a part of him deep inside that believes kind of in the classic lefty way in party politics.
All right.
In other words, party before self.
In a way that Americans don't really associate with.
That's the only rational explanation I can come up with for a lot of this stuff because on so many other issues, Bernie, and he will say this openly, that he and Trump were really mining the same territory politically in both 2016 and 2020.
But now he's just gone over into this red baiting, you know, sort of John Brennan style version of what the Democratic Party is.
And there's no other thing I reason a way I can account for it.
Can you?
I mean, I don't know.
No, it just reveals the worst.
You know, he's just, he would have been much better if he got out of politics after 2020 because his legacy is just garbage now.
He's just turned into the thing he's used to be fighting against.
And he is the monster.
There's really no other way to put it.
And he's.
And he was so close, too.
That's the funny thing about it.
He had them by the short and curlies.
He really did.
Yeah, and he could have.
He could have demanded things.
He could have extracted concessions.
You know, if he had a little bit of Matt Goetz in him, he could have did something.
But he doesn't.
He doesn't have that in him.
And, you know, I've had other people, you know, I've seen Michael Parente talk about Bernie Sanders and how after the bombing of Kosovo, he stopped talking to Michael Parenti and things like that.
So Bernie's always been kind of a cuck to the war machine in a way.
And it's that is just disgusting.
There's nothing, there's no, that's just, again, that's John Brennan stuff.
That's not stuff you would expect from somebody who calls himself a progressive or who represents the working man or anything.
It's all the anti-that, you know, every bomb that's produced, every gun is taking a, you know, as Eisenhower said, it's taking a meal out of the poor kid's mouth.
And it's just, and he doesn't care about any of it.
I don't know what he's doing.
He's he's trying to not be, well, as he, as he told Chris Hedges, I don't want to be an end up like Ralph Nader.
And now Ralph Nader is saying the same stupid shit that Bernie's saying.
It's just, it's amazing.
Ralph Nader still thinks that there's communism in Russia.
Did you see his latest tweet?
Oh, I didn't see that.
What did he say?
Yeah, he said it drives me crazy when people say that.
What did he say?
Yeah, he was referring to Russia as a communist.
And yeah, it was just like, dude, I don't, you know, but and I almost tweeted about it.
I almost said whoever is running his Twitter account should be fired, but I just let it go.
And it's that's a 40-year-old error.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's been a while or 30 years or whatever.
It's been a while.
30 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Since they tore down the wall and since the vulture capitalists took over in Russia.
So I'm here with Matt Taibbi and last night Trump had a state of the union and they did some quick polling.
And so here's CNN doing some quick polling.
And you can see how it didn't go well for CNN.
You know, they instantly regretted this.
But I'm going to show you in a minute how they spun it.
It's crazy.
So the reaction to Trump's speech, 44% of the people were very positive.
Somewhat positive was 25%.
Now, if you add those together, that's 69%, right?
And that's an overwhelming majority of people who were somewhat very positive about the speech.
And then there was 31% that were negative, right?
So, I mean, to the results.
What was your reaction to Trump's speech?
44% of speech watchers in our instant poll tonight say they had a very positive reaction to Trump's speech.
25%, somewhat positive, 31% negative.
And that is not the guy who got caught jerking off on a Zoom call during COVID.
That is a different guy who looks like that guy.
That's the guy who he used to sell bed.
You're killing me, Larry, in Los Angeles.
That's who that guy is.
So Mew says CNN instantly regretted this poll.
The vast majority of Americans think Trump's policies will move the U.S. In the right direction.
Look at that.
Trump's policies will move U.S. in the right direction.
66% said yes.
34% say no.
Here, even CBS, views of Trump's speech, 76.
They had it even higher.
76% approve.
23% disapprove.
To me, I was like, those are really big numbers.
Time Trump spent on issues that you care about.
63% of the people said a lot.
28% said a little and 9% said none at all.
That's everybody at Rachel Maddow's house.
And also, does Trump have a clear plan for inflation?
68% said yes.
So whether he does or not, people liked it.
Trump's plan among speech watchers, waste in government spending, 77% like it.
Immigration and the border, 77% like it.
Ukraine and Russia, 73% liked it.
And tariffs, 60%.
So this overwhelming majority of people, in fact, even CBS News concluded poll on Trump's 2025 joint address to Congress, large majority of viewers approve.
So, but I want to play this for you, Matt.
I don't know if you've seen this.
Here's how CNN found a way to make that not good.
In fact, they made it.
Maybe you won't believe this.
Hold on to your verdict.
Here it comes.
And what about to his modern day predecessors?
How does this 44% very positive stack up?
Again, it's the bottom of the barrel here.
51% in 2021 when Joe Biden gave his first joint address were very positive.
Donald Trump himself was at 57% in 2017.
And you see that Bush and Obama even higher than that.
So this was not Donald Trump's best speech, but obviously still, the plurality of speech watchers had a very positive reaction.
So that's the bottom of the barrel.
That's how he spun it.
It's the bottom of the barrel.
I mean, this is how media works now, right?
If you go to PolitiFact and something is totally true, then the judgment needs context.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you read the context, they find some way to tell you the opposite of what the actual fact is.
Those numbers are extraordinary, as you mentioned, because they must include Democrats, right?
They must include a pretty healthy portion of Democrats in order for Trump to even sniff those kinds of positivity numbers.
Remember, this is somebody who never really broached higher than 50% approval rating as a president the first time around.
So the numbers are different now.
People are looking at his whole presidency differently.
And those issues that you showed, I think that's really the key thing, which is that the Democrats don't really have a strategy for returning fire at the moment.
There is no place, there's no winning theme for them.
And they're grasping around to try to find something to attack with.
And it's been bizarre watching them cycle through kind of the same old, same old and seeing each one of those strategies fail.
They have to rethink who they are.
And I don't think they're capable of doing that.
You know, as my friend Russell Dobuler says, that the Democrats, well, during Clinton, he decided, well, if you can't beat him, join him.
So when he became president, him and El Gore did the Democratic Leadership Council, which was just them saying to Wall Street, hey, we're as easily corruptible and viable as the Republicans, so please come do it.
In fact, the Democratic Leadership Council had legit board members of the Koch Foundation in the Democratic Leadership Council.
And so that's when Bill Clinton did things that even Republicans couldn't do, like pass NAFTA, deregulate Wall Street, explode the prison population as he guts welfare.
And he was about to privatize Social Security, except Monica Lewinsky scandal stopped it.
And people still pretend that he's some kind of friend of the working man.
And he's not.
And so there's, as Russell Dobler says, there's no point to a left party that is beholden to Wall Street.
And so that's why we've been talking about gender affirming care and trans and white supremacy and Nazis and dictators and all that.
So because they can't actually advocate for workers because they're beholden to Wall Street.
And you can't be beholden to Wall Street and workers at the same time.
And it's just like Chuck Schumer said in 2016, we don't care if we lose blue-collar voters because for every blue-collar voter we lose, we're going to add two or three white-collar suburban voters.
And you can repeat.
And he said that.
And that's been their strategy.
Their strategy was to become the party of Republicans.
We're going to appeal to the Republicans.
And so that's why it's flipped.
RFK has talked about this, that the parties have flipped.
More people who make less than $100,000 voted for Donald Trump than voted for Kamala Harris.
They're now the party of the working class, not because they're going to represent their interests, but because they got nowhere else to go.
And I remember after Trump got elected in 2016, I interviewed a Waffle House cook from Virginia, and his name was Nick Smith.
And I said, why would you guys vote for Donald Trump?
Do you really think he's going to help you?
And he said, we've known that Donald Trump was a loudmouthed Yankee who should have had his ass kicked a long time ago, but at least he's offering us something.
Hillary Clinton came and said she's going to close down our industry.
And he didn't.
And so where are we, they got, it's, you know, they're like Mayo and the officer and the gentleman.
They got nowhere else to go.
Right.
And so they're put, they've been pushed.
And if the left doesn't offer solutions to workers, they're going to be pushed into the hands of the right wing.
And that's exactly what has happened.
So that.
Go ahead.
No, I think that's right.
And I mean, it may even be worse than that.
I think one of the things that's come out, especially Lately, with this Ukrainian issue, and then also with Vance's speech to Munich and to the Munich Security Conference about the censorship issue, is that the dividing line,
yes, it's left and right, but I think it's really more pronounced along the lines of people who support a kind of a globalist vision of government and people who think politicians should take care of their own countries first and then worry about their imperial responsibilities.
And the Democrats have become a party of imperial responsibility.
That's what they're all about.
That's why they're all cheering for the Ukraine effort.
That's why, you know, they automatically side with Europe on the censorship issues.
That's why they were working so hard to fold us into laws like the Digital Services Act or the code of practice on disinformation.
I think they believe in this vision of a kind of government by committee that knows better than everybody else.
And the average American just doesn't believe that.
They want to see their president, even if he's deeply flawed, motivated to fix their particular problems first.
And Trump, you know, that's what he does.
You know, you may disagree with how he gets there, but he is clearly saying in almost everything he does that, you know, I'm going to advocate for people who actually live in this country and vote in this country.
Zelensky had his meeting, and he said that we're far, far away from having an end to this Ukraine war and that you can't negotiate with Putin because he breaks every agreement he ever made, even though that's not true either.
And now, this is March 4th, Zelensky ready to work under Trump's strong leadership after regrettable showdown.
So now he's, you know, Mr. I don't know, Mr. Blow Monkey needs another cookie.
And I think that's his Secret Service code name, Blow Monkey.
And repeat, Blow Monkey needs another cookie.
And so now this is the tune he's speaking now after he after this happened.
The country's in big trouble.
Can I say, no, no, you've done a lot of talking.
Your country is in big trouble.
I know.
You're not winning.
You're not winning this.
You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of Mr. President.
We are staying, you know, our country staying strong from the very beginning of the war.
We've been alone and we are thankful.
I said thanks.
You haven't been in this cabinet.
We gave you stupid president $350 billion.
We gave you military equipment.
You men are brave, but they had to use our military.
If you didn't have our military equipment, if you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks.
No, I don't always get hard from watching a video, but when I do, it's this video.
And so Zelensky leaves the White House without signing the minerals deal after the Oval Office blow up.
So this was, by the way, that was all orchestrated.
That was all planned ahead of time, in case you don't know that.
He went and he had a meeting with Democratic leaders before he went into this meeting.
He got bad coaching.
And so now he's so that, and then Trump said this after that.
Everybody has to get into a room, so to speak, and we have to make a deal.
And the deal can be made very fast.
It should not be that hard a deal to make.
It could be made very fast.
Now, maybe somebody doesn't want to make a deal.
And if somebody doesn't want to make a deal, I think that person won't be around very long.
That person will not be listened to very long because I believe that Russia wants to make a deal.
I believe certainly the people of Ukraine want to make a deal.
They've suffered more than anybody else.
So here's a very Corleone way of putting things.
I'm just saying, who do you not want to be right now?
You don't want to be a horse that belonged to Zelensky.
That's what I'm saying.
That's absolutely true.
And so after that, now here it is.
He's ready.
He's, oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I acted like that.
I promise I won't do it again.
Let's work together.
And so this is from the BBC.
Overnight, it was announced that U.S. President Trump suspended deliveries of military aid, so he cut him off.
What followed was a barrage of reaction from Ukraine and its allies, Russia and the United States.
Four hours afterwards, however, the key players stayed quiet.
Ukraine's president Zelensky and U.S. Donald Trump were up and active, but both steered clear of mentioning the pause.
Then mid-afternoon, Zelensky shared a lengthy statement in which he expressed a willingness to consider a partial truce if Russia agreed to do the same.
He also thanked Trump personally for his support for Ukraine and said their fiery meeting in the office Oval Office was regrettable.
It's time to make things right.
Let's make things right.
Now he sounds like Al Pacino in Scarface.
Let's make this right.
Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.
Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.
My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.
We are ready to work fast and to end the war.
Wow.
As our North American correspondent Tom Bateman puts it, the key question now is whether Zelensky's statement will be enough.
And so just to give you the rundown, Clandestin did a great rundown.
He said, Friday, Zelensky throws a fit, refuses to sign the minerals deal at the White House.
Saturday and Sunday, Zelensky runs off to London to beg for money from Europe that they don't have to give.
They gave him $2 billion.
That's nothing.
I mean, if the $300 billion we gave him hasn't done anything, they're losing to that $2 billion.
They're just going to take that and buy some more vineyards in France and Italy with it.
They give him a minuscule amount of funds and tell him to go beg Trump for forgiveness.
On Monday, Trump says that if Zelensky does not come to the table ready for peace, then he will not be around very long.
Hours later, Trump cuts off all the weapons, sales, aid, funding, stockpiles, et cetera, until Zelensky is committed to a ceasefire and a peace deal.
Today, Zelensky is ready to commit to a peace deal.
First thing this morning, you just witnessed the art of the deal play out in real time.
Trump is holding all the cards and forced Zelensky to submit.
Zelensky was trying to play games and keep this war going.
So Trump dropped the hammer on him.
Trump essentially told Zelensky, you either work with me on stopping this war or we will let Putin kill you.
So that's we should check and see if he has all 10 fingers.
That's all I'm saying.
So what do you make of Zelensky's turnaround?
Well, it was clearly, as you say, it was clearly orchestrated.
Not only did he meet with people like Chris Murphy before he went in, but I think even more conspicuously, the instant that meeting was over, there were prepared statements from almost every European leader pledging support for as long as it takes to stay with Ukraine in the war.
So those statements had to have been prepared.
They couldn't have been.
You wouldn't compose on the spot a statement contravening American foreign policy, you know, and then just sort of tweet it out.
So this was a planned thing.
And then as that clandestine notes, he ran off to England.
He jumped in the lap of Keir Starmer.
And Starmer promised him that he would stay with him until the end and then gave him $2 billion, which, as you say, wasn't enough.
So I think he was probably playing out the string to see how much he could get out of the Europeans.
And it turned out to be not that much.
The Europeans were very happy to see this thing take place because they wanted to see Trump showing up a little bit.
But in the end, America doesn't have anything to gain or lose in this situation.
Really, all Trump was saying is: okay, if you're not going to do what we want, we're out and you're on your own.
And see how you like that.
Well, he didn't like it for more than 10 minutes, it appears, right?
So he either takes a deal that he considers insufficient or he's going to be overrun.
And logically, and this is what's so crazy about this time period, is that people have been trained not to think in terms of what's logical about all this.
He has to make a deal.
It's in everybody's interests.
Everybody wins from a deal being made.
And not only that, we all knew what the parameters would be of this deal three years ago.
When it started, at this show, I said this war is going to end however Russia wants it to end.
That's how it's going to end.
And this is just amazing that I knew that and Zelensky didn't.
And everybody in Europe didn't know that, but maybe they did.
Well, no, but Jimmy, don't you think that's, I mean, I think that's fascinating, right?
Because common sense, and you're absolutely right.
It was clear to everybody how this was going to play out from the start.
I mean, some of us, including me, didn't see the invasion coming.
I thought it was...
But once it did come, there was no way that this was going to end that didn't involve Ukraine losing some territory and then eventually having to sue for peace that was going that it wasn't going to like.
The Russians were not going to give up.
There's other things that happen in the interim that Russia wants to extract a little bit of a pound of flesh for everything from the Maidan Revolution to the Orange Revolution to things that took place in the Donbass.
They wanted to see Ukraine punished for some things, and they weren't going to, they don't mind losing a few soldiers to make that happen.
So this was always going to be the end game.
They were always going to lose those two provinces.
And you could have guessed that this was the general end.
And people like Mir Shamer did years ago.
And now it's going to end that way.
And everyone's going to say that it's like a tragedy.
We're here with Matt Taibbi, former Russia resident and athletic wear enthusiast, who also is the host of co-hosts of America This Week podcast and of course his great substack, Racket News.
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All the voices performed today are by the one and only the inimitable Mike McRae.
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That's it for this week.
You be the best you can be and I'll keep being me.
