Abby Martin dissects Israel’s apartheid-like tactics—banning her from Gaza, sniper attacks targeting Palestinian protesters’ heads and genitals during the 2018 Great March of Return, and settler-only roads—while Joe Rogan draws parallels to Nazi dehumanization. They critique U.S. media’s imperialist framing of Venezuela and Syria, exposing funded propaganda like the White Helmets, and debate Huawei’s spy risks versus systemic data exploitation by firms like Cambridge Analytica, backed by billionaire Robert Mercer. Martin’s independent journalism, despite threats and financial struggles, challenges power structures, underscoring how tribalism and corporate branding distort truth and accountability in politics. [Automatically generated summary]
I think historians in the future, when they go back to the period where the internet was created, essentially it was like 94 when it became mainstream.
I think they're going to look at this time between 94 and 2018 as unprecedented explosion of change.
The craziest part about it is not the fact that he had sex with a porn star and that she was trying to do a transactional thing to get on The Apprentice.
It's that he sent someone to threaten her and her child after that.
There's a lot of really good jokes about Trump, which you would think would be easy, but I guess for comedians it's probably not easy because it's so satirical, the world that we're living in.
Well, yeah, the problem is reality is already a joke.
It's so crazy that you have to figure out what is your unique perspective, if you have one.
I just think...
We're very childlike in what we do with and, you know, how we treat our leaders and how we choose our leaders.
And I'm really fascinated by the cult of personality that goes behind really any big time leader, whether it's Trump or Obama.
There's people that think that person can do no wrong.
I was very fascinated by that with Hillary.
There was a giant group of people that refused to look at any of the things that Hillary was doing that were wrong.
Any of the things like the Clinton Foundation or those speeches that she was giving to these bankers where she wouldn't release the transcripts or the lies that she would talk about, the difference between Comey's version of what the FBI had found her to have done wrong versus her version of it.
And there's a video where you see the two of them back to back and she's a deceptive person.
She's clearly a liar.
She's not a good person.
She's not like this shining example of what we would like our leader to be.
Love or hate Obama, what that guy was, to me, was like a statesman.
The way he would communicate was so calm and smooth.
Even if you didn't like his policy, you've got to admit the guy was incredibly articulate.
Beautifully literate.
The way he would speak and communicate, he was well-read.
He, to me, represented what I would like the version of the person who's running the big thing to be.
And I think that's the whole crux of people who have brainwashed themselves into thinking there's some sort of deep state apparatus that's outing Trump.
I think that the real problem...
Look, the deep state is the military-industrial complex.
They're winning at the end of the day no matter what.
Defense contractors' stocks are skyrocketing.
Trump is basically the de facto arms salesman in chief on the phone to the Japanese prime minister being like, "Hawk these killer drones, bro.
Like we got to sell these surveillance drones." That's who's going to win at the end of the day.
The neoliberal establishment is who hates him because he removes the mask of empire.
That's what he does.
He removes the mask.
He's making it less palatable to sell imperialism around the world.
And I think that's the crux of why you see kind of these think tankers and...
The liberals on TV, and we can get into this later, but there's a whole misnomer going on about the left and a mischaracterization about the left.
There's a myth of the fact that the media is liberal in general.
I think that, you know, TV culture aside, news is not, there is no liberal media.
Media is owned by multinational corporations with conservative business owners that have interlocking boards of directorates at defense contractors, Monsanto, etc.
Those people aren't fucking liberal.
They're not left.
They push down their policies.
It doesn't matter if you're a Maoist working at Washington Times, you're not going to be able to put out That contradictory narrative that your shareholders are pushing.
It's really unfortunate that the left has been basically...
I don't know.
I mean, they've just demonized the entire left where now you have the NRA fomenting civil war against the fucking left.
Trump and all of his followers are just like, the left is what's really wrong with this country.
There's no power!
We don't have any power.
You have given me...
I have more of a platform than probably any other leftist because you have given me a platform on the show.
Anything to do with Isis, anything to do with, like, ideological warfare, all that stuff scares the shit out of me.
You know, when you see what people are capable of doing, if they really believe in their cause, and they really believe God's on their side, they really believe...
And also, if you really believe you've been fucked over by the great Satan.
All that stuff scares the shit out of me, because most people are blissfully unaware of what the United States and, you know, what...
The commander in chief or whoever the fuck is pulling the strings is doing overseas and what the repercussions of those actions are going to be.
Yeah, the guy who I think, I don't know when the Quebec mosque shooting was, but his basically, his justification was, you know, Islamic terrorism made me do this.
So if that's the case, what are all the people that we kill with drones?
And we just killed the bride at a fucking wedding party in Yemen.
I think that a good way to look at the world is, you know, there's the colonizers and colonized.
The states that are basically remaining that we know that the establishment or the empire wants to take down Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, right?
What do they all have in common?
Independent of our economic hegemony.
And so we use our economic and military might to commit violence around the world to subject these countries to bend to our will economically.
And it's really obvious.
And unfortunately, people just continue to buy into this humanitarian bullshit propaganda, no matter who's in office.
All you have to do is be, you know, a token person and like the Joey Villa woman who was like, all All right, I'm going to wear a Trump dress to the Grammys and then I'm just going to, you know, sell tons of records because there is a huge vacuum to be filled of Trump supporters who are looking for people like this.
I thought The Rock was gonna run for a while, and then I was like, yeah, well, and then I saw that he had a big dinner with the Saudi king, and he was like, oh, man, like, next time I'm bringing the tequila to your house, and everyone was like, Saudi Arabia's a dry country, dude, like, and he was like, oh, shit, and then he deleted the tweet.
It's like, obviously, you just drank a giant bottle of tequila with the king.
That's a campaign with a large amount of money behind it because the Israeli lobby likes to come down very hard on people who speak out against the crimes of Israel.
As you see, this is a third rail issue.
No one talks about it, even though it's so fucking obvious.
I mean, we hear the mantra...
Putin kills journalists all the time.
Well, Israeli forces are sniping dead journalists and children on camera.
And it's a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to, too.
But I mean, it's just very easily verifiable facts.
That Israeli military law governs the West Bank.
This is verifiable in five seconds on Amnesty International.
So it was just very desperate measures to try to obfuscate what I was saying.
And this is really all they have left because the tide is turning, man.
I mean, look, Natalie Portman just signed on to boycott this conference in Israel and they are running scared.
I mean, they're trying to revoke her citizenship because she's basically participating in BDS. Because she said recent events have made her greatly disturbed, as it should disturb everyone, the fact that there's this ongoing massacre.
And if I could just explain to people what's going on really quickly, it is horrifying, you guys.
I mean, there's a thing called the Great March of Return.
And it's been completely nonviolent on the side of Palestinians.
It's in Gaza, which is the open air prison where about two million people are housed and caged like animals and they're not allowed to leave.
I can't think of any other place in the world that refugees actually can't leave.
Otherwise, they'll be shot.
So there's like Israeli guard posts surrounding this place.
They count their calories.
They don't let them have concrete, anything that can be construed as a weapon, etc.
So anyway, they're protesting this, right?
Because they have no dignity, no humanity and no agency to live their lives.
And so they're protesting nonviolently.
They're going up to the fence, and thousands and thousands of them, and 40 people have just been executed.
There's Israeli soldiers sitting up perched on a hilltop with sniper scopes.
This isn't just random gunfire that people are being hit with.
They are deliberately attacking every single person with headshots.
With genitalia shots.
It's sick.
And press.
There's people marked press.
I mean, that's an egregious war crime.
You have Nikki Haley vetoing every single UN resolution or investigation into Israel.
I can't imagine another country.
So I think that Israel can only survive with U.S. sponsorship.
And we love to have that beachhead in the Middle East.
We love to have that military garrison because we use Israel like what happened in Syria.
We used Israel to bomb Syria first to test the waters.
We use Israeli forces to execute nuclear scientists in Iran.
We use the Mossad to do all kinds of stuff.
So we love to have that kind of You know, military post, outpost in the Middle East that we can use to try to intimidate all those post-colonial states that are independent or we want to overthrow.
So I think that's why, you know, a lot of people say, oh, the lobby controls us.
And I think that that's wrong.
I think that there's a lot of lobbies that have influence, but I think it's more strategic than that.
Yeah, well, they, yes, and a lot of people are like, oh, what about Egypt and Jordan?
They can try to go out that way?
No, I mean, basically, they're all in cahoots with Netanyahu's administration, and they're all basically client states of the U.S. So, no, they can't leave, and Israel controls their water, the passageways, everything.
They don't let them leave.
Like, a lot of these people who have been shot with sniper rifles can't even get treatment because they're denied treatment.
So there's so many amputations that are totally unnecessary.
So now you have, like, thousands of people who are just amputated.
Yeah, so I think they thought it was, they probably calculated that it would be less risky to just block me from entering than having me go in and show the horrors and the abuses that are going on there.
But I mean, we're talking about executing children in sniper scopes, and there's videos of these soldiers gleefully laughing.
They are literally like, man, did you see his legs go up?
Like, look at that shit, man.
Oh, did you get a headshot?
IDF soldiers have t-shirts where they have pregnant women in crosshairs.
They want to terrorize and put fear in the hearts of these people.
They don't want them to protest.
They want them to submit.
They want them to submit and they basically have dehumanized them to the point where they, you know, you can't put a kid in a sniper scope and kill him unless you have completely dehumanized him to the point where you think that he's an animal or And that's just how it works.
I mean, they've been so dehumanized there, it's not even funny.
And what these people are asking is very simple.
They want the right to return, which is authorized by the UN when the refugees were expelled in 1948. The right to return to Israel.
The right to return to Israel and live as equal citizens.
It's not about, you know, like it's not about expelling the Jews or people who live there.
It's about living and coexisting and having equal rights because right now there's an apartheid state where there's 50 discriminatory laws within Israel proper, not to mention the fact that the West Bank's under Israeli military law, not to mention the fact that Gaza is an open air prison.
So within Israel proper, there's apartheid, too.
So it's sick.
We are sponsoring this with $10 million a day.
Israel would not survive without the US, which is why I focus on ending the US empire, because I'm like, it doesn't matter if everyone in the world boycotts Israel.
we're still going to subsidize the whores and the daily atrocities with our tax dollars.
And they're not going to stop.
And that's why this is so fucking brazen.
Wow, have we been vindicated, Joe?
Because I can't think of another.
I mean, when else has anyone done something this brazen?
Committing an ongoing massacre for a month straight.
Just sniping people who are completely unarmed.
This is insane.
The only thing I can think of that's slightly similar is when Israeli commandos hijacked that boat.
There was a flotilla going to Gaza to bring wheelchairs because they don't allow wheelchairs in.
That can be construed as a weapon even though there's tons of amputees.
There was a boat going with aid workers and they were bringing aid supplies and commandos jumped on the ship like helicopter down and just started executing like people, humanitarians that were going to bring Gaza And the news made it seem like they were like, look at these people on the boat, like hitting them with chairs and stuff.
It's like, dude, they fucking propelled onto the boat and started executing people.
Of course, you're going to use whatever you can to try to like ward off these soldiers.
So that's the only thing.
And that really woke me up to the whole situation is when I saw how the media was covering that massacre.
So now seeing this, I don't know how they're getting away with it.
I don't know how people have not woken up to this.
But the media, the way that they're covering it is atrocious.
They're saying there's clashes.
They're saying that the Palestinians are dying of head wounds.
It's like, no, just say that they were executed with sniper scopes like this is deliberate.
But the way that the media plays around and uses this passive voice is just nuts.
Whether it's Palestine, Venezuela, Syria, whenever you have complete media uniformity just peddling a line, probably the truth is somewhere on the other side.
But look, it's a settler colonial state, just like a lot of other things in the past.
But this is different because it's ongoing.
And ever since the inception of Israel to today, the colonizers who colonized that land always knew that there was an indigenous Arab population that they wanted to...
Kill or expel.
And that's still the goal, like from Ben-Garion himself, the original, you know, Prime Minister of Israel.
I mean, he said there's so many Arabs here, we need to expel them and take their places.
So it was never a land without a people and a people without a land.
It was always overrun with Arabs and they've always just wanted to expel the indigenous population so they can have an ethno supremacist state.
I mean, there's so many things that people can check out, but I would really recommend the work of Miko Pilat and Ronnie Barkin, their two anti-Zionist Israeli-born Jews who have extensively talked about this.
But I mean, just in the roads, like there's settler-only roads compared to Palestinian roads.
People have different license plates, you have different ID cards, segregated schools, like just all that stuff.
No, you can, but it's so segregated and hostile and you're so indoctrinated from an early age to basically hate these people and think of them as the other.
And I encourage everyone to check out interviews that I did with just average Israelis in the streets because the genocidal rhetoric is very apparent and it's very open.
Well, I didn't even know what Palestine was until I was 18 years old.
So when people say, oh, you're only telling us one side of the story, look, I didn't know that.
The Palestine side of the story until I was an adult, which really should say something about our education system and our media when you completely obfuscate an entire reality and are only told one side.
But before I went there, I had a conception of what it was.
But once you go, you really see how much worse it is.
So I, this is the thing, and also the Stand With Us people in the Israeli lobby basically said, oh, you cherry-picked these interviews, you only picked like genocidal people to talk to.
What the hell are you talking about?
I was in Jerusalem.
There's a place called Tolerance Square.
It's a bustling shopping area.
I spoke to people from all backgrounds, all walks of life, and I just asked them very simple questions.
What is it like to live here?
How do you deal with the problems?
And basically, they just were very, very readily comfortable to tell me very crazy genocidal things on camera, thinking that that would actually look good for an American audience.
So keep that in mind and check this out.
A lot of people are sympathizing with the Palestinian plight.
Can you talk about what it's like to kind of live in this situation?
We don't have to live together and everything will be just fine Every Arab that doing a terrorism attack We have to kill him and not because he's a Arab because he's a terrorist think you should also kick out the family Because it's all begins with the He's wearing a sons of anarchy t-shirt by the way, which is just so strange the kids the kids Does you know its families?
A lot of people, when you look at Israeli society, you know, it started off as kind of a socialist project with the kibbutzes and now it's just turned into a fascist supremacist state where Netanyahu reflects the true face of Israel just like Trump reflects the true face of this country.
Natalie Portman to be a you know this ambassador to Israel you know that the tide is turning but unfortunately there's so much shit going on Congress hasn't said anything they just totally support this man and there's weird like BDS legislation trying to criminalize basically dissent where you have contractors in Texas having to sign clauses promise that they won't support boycott of Israel to in order to rebuild hurricane homes What is BDS? Boycott divestment sanctions.
It's the movement that Palestinians have asked us to help them to, you know, boycott.
And that's what Stephen Hawking was all about.
He boycotted scientific conferences in Tel Aviv.
So this is what we got to do.
And we have to fight our government to stop endorsing these massacres and atrocities.
Well, obviously, this attitude that these people have, it's coming from a place and they were talking about terrorist attacks, like how many terrorist attacks are actually happening in Jerusalem or in Israel?
And when you look at the actual amount of people who, when you look at those terrorist attacks and see how many are against soldiers, like how many stabbing attacks are against soldiers, the numbers become very different.
And what's really weird is during the last massacre in Gaza in 2014, like half of the Israeli soldiers that died were American because that's what colonial that's what the colonial settlers are.
They go over there from New Jersey and they just post up on top of an Arab village.
But I remember a lot where I was like, why are so many Americans going over there, 17 year olds and joining the IDF? I mean, how bizarre is that?
What kind of mentality do you have to have to move from like a comfortable suburb in Philadelphia to go like move on top of an Arab village and harass these people?
That's why it's so sad that so many Palestinians can't ever go to Jerusalem, which is one of their holiest sites is there and they're banned because, again, they're banned from everything.
So their concern is if they open up Gaza, the idea is that if the Palestinians come and they live in Israel with everybody else, that they're just going to cause trouble and kill people and create suicide bombs.
And the Israeli lobby and the stand with us and all these people have said, you know, you're portraying us as really different than we really are because they like to portray themselves as this peaceful, loving, democratic nation.
And they're like, Palestinians will say the same thing about us.
Not true.
I was driving around in settler plates in a car that looked like I was a colonial settler.
I did not hear one person say anything remotely genocidal about Jewish people.
And maybe they haven't experienced what you've experienced.
Well, not maybe.
Most likely.
It's just terrifying to me.
Forget about whether it's Israel or Palestine.
Forget about what it is.
The idea that people could be stuck, born stuck in this spot and really have no recourse and nowhere to go and just be thought of by people that live just a few miles away from you, that you're a subhuman.
And the fact that someone can make that T-shirt with one bullet, two kills and show a pregnant woman with crosshairs on her belly, that scares the shit out of me.
That is Nazi Germany.
I mean, the fact that they can't understand that this treatment of the Palestinians in that t-shirt is essentially the same way the Nazis were looking at the Jews.
It's treating people as the other.
It's a very difficult to understand quality of human psychology, is that when we're in conflict with another nation, another person, we think of them as less than us, like literally less human, not human.
The enemy.
They're that thing that we have to stop, and it's been a part of warfare since the beginning of time.
I did a show out there and after the show we went outside and the cars, the police cars, they looked like they were in the craziest fucking war zone you'd ever seen.
First of all, the entire thing, the front of the car was completely covered in thick steel.
They had this big steel grate over the windshield.
They had bomb shielding all over the car.
We were looking at the cop car like, what the fuck is this?
Like, oh yeah, man, this is when the IRA was bombing.
This is what they did.
They just started setting everything up like this.
And we were talking to this driver, and the driver was explaining to us what it used to be like.
When, you know, they were at war and what people had done to people that knew him and, you know, just people that look incredibly similar to each other.
Again, speaking the same language, just gutting each other in the street, torturing each other, killing each other, Protestants versus Catholics.
I mean, it's that thing that humans do where they treat An enemy as something less than them the other and just decide that that's the red team and we're the blue team So fuck them that that is a scary creepy fucking thing that humans are capable of I'm not really,
yeah, I'm confused about the whole religious, like, how it grew into a religious conflict, because originally it was just the British colonial overlords, like, harassing the fuck and beating the hell and raping women who were just Irish in these villages and towns.
And, you know, how much can you subjugate other people and put them in cages, like in Gaza, or do this and harass them and humiliate them until they do something about it?
Well, if anybody wants, if you really want peace on Earth, I mean, is that really possible, first of all, right?
There's always a question, like, we're so tribal, and people are so committed to their side and their team, and is it ever possible to eliminate all war?
But the first step has got to be...
We have to be able to identify with those people and see their plight and understand, put yourself in their position.
If you were born in Gaza, if you were born in Northern Ireland back when the war was going on, if you were born, pick a spot where there's a conflict.
You've got to be able to realize, like, we got lucky.
You got lucky.
We got lucky we live in California.
I got lucky I was born in New Jersey.
We got lucky we're not in Gaza.
We got lucky we're not wherever it is, wherever the conflict is.
If you can't see that, if you've blocked off that aspect of your perception, This is a classic trait that human beings have exhibited since probably the beginning of tribal life.
The beginning of organized groups of people living together in a community fighting against all outsiders.
It's almost like ingrained in our DNA. The way we stay alive is anybody who's outside of us, fuck them.
Even though after we decimated the entire country, all the infrastructure dropped napalm over the entire country, where we actually retreated only because there was no infrastructure left to bomb.
And for the past, I don't know, 70 years, North Korea has literally been building up defenses to prepare for the next time that they know that that will happen.
And we're like, oh my god, they're so fucking crazy!
That's got to be so strange, the North Koreans and South Koreans looking exactly the same, staring at each other across the line.
Back when I was competing in Taekwondo, Koreans are extremely nationalistic.
And the South Koreans and the North Koreans, they would occasionally compete in North Korea.
It was, you know, it's got to be so bizarre to think that if you zigged, if your ancestors zigged instead of zagged, if you were born like 50 miles that way, you'd be North Korean and you'd be stuck under the ruling of this fucking wacky sun and instead you're over here making Samsung phones, you know?
Most certainly is, but it's also observable, right?
Like there's a clear ancestral origin to certain body types and diets.
There's certain people that live in parts of West Africa that are just fucking phenomenal runners.
And there's no denying that.
There's certain traits that people have that you can clearly say.
I think the real problem is when we say race.
And then that gets us tribal again.
That's us versus them again.
Because it's just humans.
It's just humans.
It's one race.
But humans that live in high-altitude climates are much more adapted to low-oxygen environments.
Humans that live in, like the Inuit, that live in extreme cold climates and have no access to vegetables, they adapt to this specific fat-rich diet.
Their hands are less likely to get cold.
They actually developed a genetic predisposition For their ability to withstand cold with their hands.
Like, we would go over there and our hands would be numb.
We'd be like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
And they would just be like playing piano and shit.
Like, it wouldn't even bother them.
Like, this is genetic.
I mean, this is because their bodies have adapted.
But they're one race.
It's just humans are malleable.
We're super flexible.
You could see that in your lifetime, right?
I mean, if someone works out, they develop more muscle, they get stronger, and then there's the concept of epigenetics and the possibility that some of these traits and some of these learned behaviors you're passing on to your children through genes.
Yeah, it's a show that shows how animals and the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.
It's really insane.
And there's a whole Inuit section, but there's like, you know, tribes in the jungle and stuff who will work with birds to get beehives and the birds will get the reward and get some honey.
And then if you don't give them any honey, then they'll trick you and take you to like a non-beehive tree.
I mean, it's just nuts.
And then helping humans fish and...
Man, Blue Planet 2 is also fucking nominal.
You would love it, dude.
There's an octopus who makes a seashell suit.
He literally makes a suit of armor out of shells to block himself from a shark.
You know, just like slavery doesn't exist anymore, in the United States at least, I'm hoping that as time goes on, there's going to be less tribalism and that as human beings are able to freely travel and communicate with each other, we're going to be dealing with less of this.
Yeah, put it on Adam Green Tree and we could read it.
But what Yeti did, they discontinued these...
I forget the way they described the program, but they had a bunch of outdated incentive programs where if you signed up for something, you get a discounted program.
So anyway, they notified the NRA, and the organization has changed.
Yeti explained to them that they're offering an alternative customization program broadly available to consumers and organizations, including the NRA Foundation.
So then the NRA releases this statement that Yeti coolers doesn't want to work with the NRA anymore.
They don't support the Second Amendment, so fuck them.
And especially, there's a real problem in that regard.
Because they need to understand.
Everybody needs to understand.
We should all...
Anybody that supports any outdoor activities...
It has to understand that the conflict, if you have any internal conflict against each other, like, but the thing about hunters and fishermen, all these people, what their real opposition is, is animal rights activists and radical animal liberation organization type people.
That's the real enemy.
The enemy isn't Yeti coolers who makes their business selling shit to hunters and fishermen and anglers.
Like, these people are crazy.
So this conflict just shows to me, like, people are just looking for a fight.
I'll send this to you, Jamie, because I sent it to my friend Ben O'Brien, who's freaking out about this because Ben is an executive at Yeti, my buddy Ben.
And I sent him this thing where all these other coolers All these other cooler companies are freaking out and jumping in and saying, we're all sick.
It's like mass hallucinations on both sides of the political aisle.
You're either a Russian bot or troll, or everything's fake news, and it's all, you know, QAnon, like this rabbit hole, or you're a libtard or snowflake.
So these people are killing people because, now Bourdain was tweeting that there's like some sort of a Reddit forum with all these folks, and there's like 40,000 members.
Well, the guy who shot a bunch of women in Santa Barbara a couple years ago, he was also like, I'm so attractive, why don't you guys want to have sex with me?
It's like a Look, it doesn't matter what you look like, there's healthy, loving relationships that exist for everyone.
So it's just crazy to me when people blame women and are violent misogynists because they think that they're unattractive and they basically just blame attractive women for not having sex with them.
It's really disturbing.
And this guy apparently mowed down a bunch of people in Toronto because he was one of these people.
You know, all I know is that Assange, they basically said that they could not promise that he won't be extradited to the US, which means they will extradite him to the US. And we've already had Pompeo, who's the psychotic co-brother shill who just got appointed.
He said he wants to basically see Julian Assange go down.
I mean, he had harsh words for Julian Assange.
So even though Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth on the campaign, he was like, I love WikiLeaks!
He is going to prosecute him, probably to save his own ass and to pretend like he, you know...
But it's an irresponsible trolling where he's just kind of trying to stir shit.
I mean, I don't know.
If I were Julian Assange, who knows how I would feel being pushed in an embassy and, you know, being arbitrarily detained like that and not being able to leave.
The Bolton shit's so nuts, though, because it's like, dude, these people were way too crazy to even be taken seriously during the Bush administration.
I mean, they were the most psychotic outliers of the Islamophobic neocon wings, where John Bolton's writing op-ed saying why we need to attack North Korea first, why we need to bomb Iran, bomb.
And whether he means to be or not, he's a master at getting people to pay attention to him.
Yeah.
Whether this is just because he's so wacky that everybody's paying attention to him or whether it's a real calculated sort of maneuver to act outrageous and act like he's out of control.
You know, vices on the ground acting like badasses.
They're embedding themselves in the protests and being like, look at these fucking awesome dudes.
It was basically fascist mobs tried to lynch us, and we got chased out of the country, and then our colleague got shot.
Because we dared to tell that the death toll that we kept hearing in the mainstream media that Maduro is mowing down all these protesters, we found out that the majority of the deaths were actually caused by the protesters, like either shooting people, lynching people alive, burning them alive, or doing these giant road blockades where they would light giant flaming piles of trash and people would be...
You know, flying off the freeway or getting in accidents and shit.
And so once we just reported those facts, then this lynch mob came after us.
It was very, very scary.
And look, I mean, the media is lying about the popular support that Maduro's government has.
There was massive pro-government rallies there.
And the country is pretty divided where it just depends on who you talk to.
I think they have a hard time filtering everything out.
I think they've gotten, you know, they were this radical sort of like upstart where people hadn't heard of them before and they were doing wild shit and they had some really cool videos like The Guide to Travel and they did that thing where they went to Liberia and they met with General Butt Naked and he's explaining about eating children and cutting their hearts.
That's all great, but I appreciate that kind of style of journalism, but I feel like what's missing is the context behind it.
Vice will go to India and be like, fuck, this is fucking nuts!
And you're like, well, why is there this massive disparity in equality?
So it's a different style of journalism, but I do think that they really miss the boat on Venezuela, Russia, and Ukraine, and some other things when it comes to covering global conflicts, because That's just the problem with a lot of journalism and corporate media in general is that you're towing a line because you're an American, just like we're talking about Israelis.
I mean, you have preconceived notions, you have your own bias, you have your own ethnocentric lens about world issues.
So it bleeds over into those conflicts.
And unless you're like an internationalist, can you see the world from a different lens?
But when I was on the ground in Venezuela, I was like, this is not what we're seeing.
I mean, there's a lot of things happening, but the thing that the U.S. government wants to obfuscate, and that's why you see Venezuela continues to come up all the time as another country that needs to be taken out and helped by U.S. interests, right?
Because they haven't bowed down to U.S. economic hegemony.
The narrative is that he's a totalitarian dictator who has seized all of power and that there's zero democracy and that everyone wants him gone and that the protesters, he keeps mowing down and executing them whenever they come to the streets.
And unfortunately, we've, you know, the white helmets over there are kind of an arm of the US government, too.
We've been funding them with 200 million dollars on USAID. I mean, All of these groups on the ground.
It's like whether you're Obama and you use more covert means through USAID and more like drone warfare or you're the Trump John Bolton type where you're like, let's fucking preemptively bomb them and kill their families and torture their families.
I mean, it's two sides of the same coin.
It's the empire that's consistent and will maintain.
But it's scary because Syria, it shows you how easy we're duped.
You know, I mean, during the Iraq war, it's like at least you had Colin Powell holding up the vial being like, here's the anthrax.
Now it's just like you just have a social media video and we just fucking have Israel, our garrison in the Middle East, bomb.
Syria to test the waters and then we just bomb them.
And then you have asshole like neoliberal think tankers all paraded around the media, all these generals, right?
All these experts who are all literally Iraq war propagandists or generals or defense contractor CEOs.
And they're all just like, Trump isn't doing enough.
He needs to bomb more.
This isn't sending enough of a message to Assad.
It's like, when have we ever, when has bombing anyone ever done anything good?
Tell me when the fucking US has intervened that's actually turned out good.
So don't sell this bullshit humanitarianism.
It's just nuts that we just keep falling for it.
And people are like, well, what are we supposed to do?
Fucking don't do anything.
Don't.
Don't do anything.
And I know that people are like, oh, you know, isolationism is bad.
Look, the US empire is horrific and the largest threat to humanity.
The world's biggest polluter, exempt from climate treaties, all the shit you never see on the mainstream media.
Isn't it fascinating the difference between what you hear from internet commentators who are free of networks and producers and executives that are telling them what to do and sponsors and the version that you're getting on television?
The version that you're getting on television, on CNN, or on any of these major mainstream news networks, you're getting a very watered down, very homogenized and pasteurized narrative.
Because I think that's why I do the show The Empire Files and Media Roots Radio with my brother, Robbie Martin, at fluorescent gray on Twitter.
I do the show with my partner, Mike Preissner, because we want to retell these narratives that have been lost.
History has always been written by the victors.
All of the shit that we're seeing around the world needs to be analyzed within the lens of the U.S. being the largest empire that siphons all the fucking money in the world for military expenses.
I mean, every issue, domestic and internationally, it's all shaped.
Doing this, you're traveling to Palestine, you're traveling to Venezuela, you're doing all this stuff, you're writing all these things, you're doing all these videos.
Does this ever get Too much for you?
Is this ever, like, overrun your brain?
Does this ever freak you out that none of this is getting any better and in fact some of it's getting worse?
I mean, it is depressing to, like I was saying, I mean, just the discourse now where I'm called a Russian stooge and I was like, look, I guess once a Putin puppet, always a Putin puppet.
And then the intelligence report that came out as the definitive proof of Russian hacking basically said my show that had ended two years prior was part of the reason why Trump won.
So you have all this desperation to try to dilute the narrative and call everyone a Russian troll.
But yeah, it's depressing as hell, Joe, because I feel like the sanity is fucking lost and I can't actually have conversations with people and talk about reality because either you're a Trump bootlicker who thinks everything's fake news and you think QAnon is...
Gonna fucking expose the pedophiles across the country, or you think I'm a Russian troll because I'm saying something that goes against the grain.
Because, you know, there are pedophiles out there.
I mean, whenever someone does get exposed and some pedophile ring gets broken up, you go, oh, that's real?
Well, I didn't even think it was real because these people are so fucking stupid and some of the shit that they believe is so dumb.
You know, a lot of them are the same people that are chemtrail people or flat earth people.
There's like so much of the same shit coming out of these people that when you find out that there is a group of people that are pedophiles, that really have been involved in human trafficking or child slavery, which is a real thing.
I mean, this is something that's almost like, It's almost like been talked about by so many wacky people that people don't believe it until you read like the story about Jimmy Savile.
Do you know I saw that was great what that fucking Tom Cruise movie that made American made made in America, whatever is American made the movie about Barry Seals who's a CIA drug runner and Wait, is this older?
Like, I've heard very different versions of that, from Zinke, when that guy, what is he, Secretary of the Interior?
What is Zinke?
Yeah.
When he was talking about it, he was explaining that's not what happened, and that it essentially went right back to the way it was before Obama changed the legislation, changed the rules.
I don't think we should protect Confederate statues in the sense that I don't think they should be in the middle of fucking town squares and shit like that.
But they should do something with them, the same way they should do something with Genghis Khan statues.
But the thing is, like, they are a representation of history, just like a Genghis Khan statue would be a representation of that monster.
I mean, we think of Genghis Khan as a guy who opened up trade with China today.
You know, you vaguely understand that he was...
10% of the population of the world back then changed the fucking New York Times an article about how he changed the carbon footprint of the earth There's literally a difference in the carbon footprint because 10% less people were alive during Gingrich Kahn's reign They killed everybody.
They fucking were killing millions of people.
There's a great Dan Carlin series on it called The Wrath of the Khans, but I've talked about that way too much.
But today, Genghis Khan's not offensive.
Like you could bring up Genghis Khan, nobody cares.
He's way more horrific than anything that happened during the Civil War.
They had slaves and they did everything.
They would capture people and use them as the front lines.
They would push them towards their own people so they would get shot.
They would be the first people to get shot with arrows.
I mean there's some horrific shit, but I don't think we should melt Genghis Khan statues.
Well, I think the good thing about him, this is the good thing, is that we realize now how easy it is.
For a person to win the popularity contest that is the presidency of the United States.
And that you could get a popular person, whether it's Trump or whether it's Oprah or whoever the fuck it is that decides to win next.
And this is a ridiculous way to pick the person who runs the biggest fucking military complex the world has ever known.
I mean, the greatest army the world has ever known by far is the United States military.
The commander-in-chief is now the guy who's the host of The Apprentice that was famous for saying, You're fired!
You're fired!
I mean, this is a popularity contest.
It's insane.
You don't have to have special qualifications.
You just have to be deemed the person that people like the most.
That's insane.
It's also insane to have one giant alpha chimp to be the top guy or the top gal to run the whole project.
And I saw that with Hillary, too.
There were so many people that were looking for Hillary to win because they wanted a woman to win, because they thought it would be a historic victory.
Regardless of how fucking creepy she is, regardless of all the crazy shit that she's done, regardless of her history, regardless of all the fucking way that they hacked the DNC, and they literally conspired to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination.
But what's crazy about the Hillary sycophants is, like, you see Neera Tanden and all these assholes who worked for Hillary Clinton's campaign on the fucking eve of Trump bombing Syria.
They're like, thanks, Susan Sarandon.
Thanks a lot.
Great job.
It's like, oh, I'm sorry, Susan Sarandon made Trump bomb Syria?
What person laughs like that when someone gets killed?
Even if Bill Cosby, if some woman who Bill Cosby raped showed up outside the courtroom and he was walking down the stairs and she ran up, leave Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby style, and shot him right in the chest, I wouldn't laugh.
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I'd be like, whoa, that's fucking crazy.
But I wouldn't be like, she came, she saw, he died.
...and chastise me on the phone for being too dirty on stage.
It was real weird because I had never met him and he just thought he should call me up because he was Bill and tell me that he did about what comedy is all about.
And I sat and listened to this man chastise me And when Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget you've grown.
You feel like one of the Cosby kids and shit.
And I ran in the house all excited to talk to Bill and picked up the telephone and Bill got raw on me.
I was like, hello Mr. Cosby?
And you hear, I would like to talk to you about some of the things that you do in your show!
Yeah, well, she got coffee from some weird driver the morning of the debate, and we already know that that crazy shit was happening between her and Trump, and she said she got violently ill.
She was trying to tell him, I don't drink coffee, and then he was like, no, drink it, it's good.
She drank the coffee, got violently ill, and had to, like, sit next to a puke bucket, almost thinking that she would have to cancel the debate.
Basically alluding to the fact that Trump might have poisoned her that day.
It's going to be really interesting to see what happens with all these criminal charges and what's going to happen with Cohen and all these other people, the Mueller investigation.
It's so strange because it's all just...
We're waiting for something to be highly illegal and obvious, and it's not yet.
So I'm like, where's the thing?
And when the thing comes out and people start going down, they start going to jail, well, who's going to rat him out?
No, it's interesting too, like Stormy Daniels and the other woman who said that she had an affair with Trump, she said that both of them said that Trump told her, you remind me of my daughter Ivanka, you're beautiful and smart.
Once you're president, the scrutiny is just so overwhelming.
I mean, it's not just a scrutiny from the American media.
It's a scrutiny all across the world.
I mean, everybody's paying attention to everything you've ever done, ever.
And with him, honestly, the thing that scares me is not that.
The thing that scares me is all the business deals.
What's crazy is how many small business owners went under because Trump had these relationships, apparently, allegedly, whatever I have to say, with They would do these construction jobs, and small contractors would just not get paid.
And they would have to sue, and they would wind up going under.
They couldn't compete with him.
And this is something that Joey Diaz talked about on the podcast, that he knew people that were involved in construction companies that went under because Trump fucked the moment.
You'd have to know a few crooks, you know, and just the amount of money...
That's involved.
How the fuck can you pay attention to all that?
To think that he's responsible for all that is also naive, honestly, because if you really look at the amount of properties that Trump owns and to think that he's paying attention to all that and the management of all that and the paying of the contractors and all that...
But it probably trickles down from the top, right?
The kind of ethics that would be involved in not paying off contractors.
It's the think tank that you see unquestioningly repeated in every single article about Russian trolls, where it's like, Russian trolls!
Russian trolls are spreading NRA shit online to try to foment discontent in this country or Russian trolls are promoting Bernie Sanders or Russian trolls are promoting Jill Stein.
When you look at the actual methodology of how they determine who's a Russian bot and who's a Russian troll, it all comes from this think tank run by literally Iraq war propagandists, Bill Kristol and Michael Chertoff.
So that's what I'm saying.
These narratives are so, it's so obscure to find out who's really managing the narratives, but it really is all the same people.
Where they're conning us again.
They're conning us.
Because the end goal of the empire is basically Russia, China, Iran.
You know, Iran and Syria are the stepping stones basically ultimately to China and Russia.
And those are the biggest competitors with the empire.
So they want to just foment that hot war with Russia.
Huawei makes some really good cell phones, like beautiful 40 megapixel camera, excellent design, gorgeous screen, and they were about to be launched in America under AT&T, and then the State Department warned against people buying Huawei phones, saying they're spy devices, and told people to not buy Huawei phones.
So then they're bringing up charges against Huawei for something to do with Iran.
And then there was an article today.
This is where it gets really weird.
The compliance of the media.
There was an article today about the drop in sales of Chinese cell phones.
Chinese cell phone sales plummet by 21%.
I was reading today.
Mm-hmm.
But what is happening here?
They were saying that there was some networking equipment that was made by Huawei that was sending a certain amount of data that didn't seem right.
And they believed that something was encoded in their software or in their hardware that allowed them to hack into it and extract data and use this as a spying device.
So then they were saying that this is the case with the phones and we shouldn't buy these Huawei phones.
But then the Android people, like I sent Jamie a couple articles on it because I was fascinated by this.
I read like 30 articles about it in like the last week and a half.
And these real smart tech people were like, this is horseshit.
First of all, if these devices did have something in them other than stock Android or Android with whatever their operating system is that they put on over it, like their skin, you would see it.
These guys would be able to see it.
They'd be able to find it.
They're not any more sophisticated than these people.
Well, there's something going on.
There's something going on.
There's some weirdness to it all.
It's like they might be trying to tank these companies.
There might be a concerted effort.
And then the thought was...
That maybe, perhaps, there's some sort of a deal with Samsung and iPhones, which are the two top manufacturers, to keep out this third party, which makes these really high-end cell phones.
Like, the Huawei has this Porsche design Mate Pro RS. It's $2,000.
It's like the most expensive cell phone you could buy.
What I think might be happening, which people are noticing now, is not just that it's happening within software, it's that your actual device, the microphone is on, and the laptop camera is on.
So people have blocked the camera with tape, but they're not blocking the microphone.
Can we have some sort of tutorial about how we can prevent all of our shit from being collected?
The Facebook Cambridge Analytica thing, I feel like everyone missed the boat of what that story was.
You heard about that, right?
The Cambridge Analytica, they're data mining all your shit.
It's like, yeah, if you're on Facebook, everything's being taken and data mined.
That's very obvious.
But what wasn't really investigated, I think Channel 4 did this crazy investigation where they pretended like they were a patron trying to hire Cambridge Analytica, some billionaire dude.
And they put them all on camera.
It's all recorded.
The guys are basically like...
It's basically like a private intelligence firm, almost like a Blackwater where you can hire mercenaries to set up honeypots with prostitutes, take down politicians, spy on them.
They set up shell companies with the MI6, Mossad.
It's all just untraceable shit.
They just ghost out.
They said they can ghost in and out of countries.
They literally said that they staged the entire Kenyan election.
And like the Bannonites and the Breitbart people are...
How many other companies are there like this?
I always think, yeah, while we're all focused on Russian trolls, 14 Russian trolls in St. Petersburg, how many companies like Cambridge Analytica, like Blackwater, like all these things are operating around the world doing all this?
Someone asked me the other day, they said, you know, you have to admit that you wouldn't rather live anywhere in the world other than here.
And I said, I would because I can't have a kid here because I don't have maternity leave and I don't have any help.
I was like, so no, I stay here because I have to and I have to fight.
It's not about me and it's not about myself.
It's about the greater good.
And it's about putting this information out there because especially in the Trump era, I feel like no one is really criticizing him in the correct way and putting it in the proper context of the U.S. Empire.
And I feel like I need to do that.
And I don't get sick of it.
And I don't think that, you know, even if you do get burnt out and you get tired, you just have to keep going because this is you don't have to you don't do it for recognition.
You don't do it to be on a magazine cover because you're never going to be rewarded in the system that we live in.
We're going to always live on the margins and we're going to always fight on the margins.
I want to instruct people about how history has shaped our reality today and how we can use it to learn and prevent similar atrocities from continuing.
I mean, I just hope that we can evolve to the point where we can do that.
Yeah, no, I think that, well, I'm not beholden to anyone because I don't really have anyone telling me what to do.
Like in Venezuela, I was interviewing the defense minister.
No one vetted my questions.
I was confronting him about all this crazy shit.
I mean, no one in corporate media would be allowed to do that with our government.
But yeah, to your point, I think that we've just gotten to a place with journalism and media where...
That's the way it is.
You have to invest in the journalists that you want to support and that's just the way that the world works because media is not a sustainable business if you want it to be holding power to account.
But it seems like that's not the worst thing in the world to have something like Patreon or some similar type of situation where people can just donate.
And I have that on Media Roots and on my podcast, Media Roots Radio.
I do have a Patreon there.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, to do investigative journalism, it's hard.
And to do documentaries, it takes a lot of money and time.
And I think that's probably where it'll end up if we keep going down the road that we are, which is, you know, whether it be RT or Telesur, this fear campaign against state media and against the Russian propaganda.
No, I think that if I have a family, things might change where I might not put my life on the line so often.
Yeah, I would imagine so.
Someone's got to keep poking holes in this bullshit because it just keeps happening and we keep getting duped and someone has to be out there countering the narrative and telling these stories from marginalized and oppressed people who have not been given those platforms and I have to keep doing that part.