Glenn Greenwald critiques the media frenzy surrounding Gaza, comparing it to post-9/11 hysteria and exposing how elites exploit crises for authoritarian ends. He details the CIA's false narratives regarding Russian election interference and condemns Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians, noting the U.S. provides unmatched foreign aid while banning debate under anti-Semitism accusations. Greenwald contrasts post-9/11 neoconservatism with isolationism, highlighting Republican hypocrisy in demanding FBI investigations into dissent after previously opposing war. Ultimately, he warns that America's $30 trillion debt and cultural fractures make its reckless "axis of evil" rhetoric dangerously volatile amidst global nuclear threats. [Automatically generated summary]
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Manipulation and Empire Enemies00:15:09
Fill her up.
You're listening to the gas digital move.
We need to roll back the state.
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If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am very excited for this episode.
Very quickly, before we get started, a quick reminder.
I'm headed out to Europe in a few days, doing some stand-up shows with Louis J. Gomez, Rob Bernstein, and Zach Amico.
London, Belfast, Glasgow, Amsterdam.
Some tickets still available.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all those.
All right, let's get into the show today.
I'm thrilled to have our guest on the program today, who I consider to be absolutely one of the best journalists of the 21st century.
I put him right up there with Julian Assange and people who have really helped to inform me about what's going on in the world.
So I have found his work to be invaluable.
Of course, I am talking about Glenn Greenwald.
He is the host of System Update, a phenomenal show.
If you want to know what's going on in the world, go check that out.
It is exclusive on Rumble.
Clips are available on YouTube as well.
But if you want the whole thing, you got to go over to the free speech platform.
Mr. Greenwald, how are you, sir?
It's great to see you.
Thank you for those very nice words.
And thank you for having me on your show.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Very excited to talk to you, especially right now in the moment that we're in, because we are in the middle of a storm, a sort of frenzy.
We have these moments every now and then.
I always like to, I like to talk about these moments even when we're outside of them, but it's really something when you're living through one.
I use this example a lot.
My audience is probably tired of hearing me use this.
This was not one of the biggest storms, but I always like the example of, as I'm sure you remember well, a few years ago when Donald Trump talked about pulling the remaining troops out of Syria.
He had talked about doing this several times, never actually did it.
But one of the times that he discussed the idea, there was a media frenzy about the Kurds.
And we were all supposed to be like, oh my God, the Turks are about to slaughter the Kurds with the Syrians and we can't abandon the Kurds because we care so much about them.
This was a thing for about two weeks.
Since then, nobody in the corporate press has mentioned the Kurds.
I don't think anyone's checked in on them.
I don't know.
I'll be confess, I don't know what happened to the Kurds, but I know the Turks didn't move in and slaughter them as we were told they were inevitably going to.
Anyway, there are these moments where people create these storms where all types of rational thought go out the window.
But this has been one of the biggest ones I've experienced in my life.
I really, I compare it to the aftermath of 9-11, the kind of atmosphere that there was in the media at the time.
I'd compare it to March of 2020 with the kind of COVID hysteria, but we got the policy right in both of those occasions.
So I assume you're very confident we're going to get the policy right again, again, this time.
Yeah, we have an establishment that has such a proven track record for great integrity and great competence that all you have to do is just kind of sit back and be comfortable knowing that they're always going to choose the right course as they've done our entire lifetime.
You know, it is interesting what you were saying.
I was talking to some colleagues of mine who work on my show who are younger than I am.
So young, in fact, that they either weren't born during 9-11 or had, you know, been far too young to experience it with any kind of firsthand memory or first-hand knowledge.
And I was telling them this, you no longer have to wonder what 9-11 was like.
don't have to actually go and read history books to try and understand what it was like and the culture that emerged.
You're now living through it.
I do agree with the premise of your question, which is that this is following, namely this war in Gaza and Israel that was triggered most proximately by the massacre of civilians in Israel by Hamas, but obviously the war itself is decades old.
It has a lot of different complicated component parts to it.
But the emotions that were provoked were so intense that it immediately drowned out any kind of space, not only for dissent, but even sober, contemplative analysis about what we ought to do in terms of what actions or consequences might be produced by the choices that we make.
It was this kind of immediate, very primal quest for vengeance and for the blood to be spilled of not only the people who perpetrated the attack, but anybody who was perceived to be in their vicinity or somehow close to them.
And I agree that the only real comparable event in our lifetimes is the 9-11 attack.
I was thinking a lot, of course, about what that was like because it's now been 22 years.
And I still remember, though, like it was yesterday because I lived in Manhattan.
I worked in Manhattan.
I was in Manhattan on 9-11.
And I remember feeling that same kind of righteous rage, this desire for vengeance.
Everywhere you went, you could smell the aftermath of the attack.
On every street corner, there were street lamps with hundreds of signs from desperate families hoping against hope to be able to find their, quote, missing loved ones.
And I thought one of the lessons we had learned from 9-11 is that if you follow your rage and your desire for vengeance, it leads you down paths that are either counterproductive at best or morally shameful at worst.
And so I do think in terms of magnitude, 9-11 is the only real reference point.
But I think, as you said, every crisis now is exploited this way.
I remember when Russia invaded Ukraine, I went back and looked at a couple of the shows we did in the immediate aftermath of that.
I was obviously a skeptic from the beginning about U.S. involvement in that war, but I didn't immediately start jumping up and down and saying, we provoked this war or there are Nazi elements inside Ukraine that we have to be very careful not to arm or things of that nature.
The risk of escalation with the new Quran power in Russia is so high that it's not worth it.
What I was trying to do instead was to say, we've been fed all of these very inflammatory videos about seeing Ukrainian women weeping over their lost sons or their exploded homes.
And that creates a kind of primal emotion in us that we have to be very careful not to let that be exploited to lead us to do things that we end up regretting.
And I think although 9-11 is the only comparable example to this in terms of intensity and magnitude, and I think it's worth asking, why is a war in Israel of such great importance to Americans well, very far away from Israel on the other side of the world?
I think what you said is right, that we're seeing this example and this dynamic repeat itself over and over because establishment centers of power and neoliberal elites are purposely exploiting every crisis, COVID and the war in Ukraine and Russia gate and the election of Donald Trump and this claim of misinformation to induce the population to give them more and more authoritarian powers.
And that's what's really concerning me, among other things about this new war as well.
Yeah, right.
So I completely agree with all of that.
And it's kind of like it's this manipulation tactic that you have to kind of learn to recognize.
And one of the sinister things about it is that it does, they play on the decency of people.
So of course, like when you see like the horrific attacks and when you see dead bodies or you see, you know, bodies of dead children, the natural human reaction, if you're a decent person, is to like have your heart broken over this and want whoever did this to be held to account.
But you also, if you can in these moments, be sober and try to like look at the bigger picture, it's hard to ignore the fact that it seems to be very convenient where the corporate press focuses their humanitarian impulses and where they don't.
And so, you know, like there's all of the people, you know, our entire political class, our entire media class, even the Hollywood class, they were so appalled over the humanitarian crisis when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And like, hey, fair enough.
It's horrible what's happening in Ukraine.
And like, you should feel that way.
But sitting here watching all of them, and there's a few exceptions to this, but the vast majority of them had nothing to say about what was going on in Yemen over the last eight years, which was easily a bigger humanitarian crisis.
That never seemed to be a concern.
There was tremendous concern about the potential humanitarian crisis in 2010 in Libya, when Gaddafi was about to go genocidal, even though he had been in power for decades and there was no real evidence to suggest he was about to go genocidal.
And yet since Gaddafi was overthrown, the humanitarian crisis in Libya has been far worse than it ever was under him.
And we don't hear a peep about this from the media.
I mean, and look, if you're, if we're in the continent of Africa and you're looking for a humanitarian crisis, like throw a dart, you're going to find a really awful one.
And so it's just, it's, it does seem to be convenient that the ones that are focused on always seem to be the ones that would lead toward damaging who are already the enemies of the American empire.
And it, yeah, it's just like you want people to at least like wake up to the idea that your emotional, as soon as you're having an emotional response, that means that you're in a place where you can be manipulated by somebody.
Absolutely.
And I mean, we're never going to get away from that.
We are emotional beings.
We do have an emotional component to us that not only can't we eliminate, we shouldn't want to eliminate it.
It's an important part of life.
It's how we navigate the world and experience the world.
And we want to feel passion and we want to feel empathy and we want to be moved by injustices.
Those are important things.
We don't want to become mechanized beings that just operate as purely rational entities.
The problem is, though, it's exactly what you're saying.
I think one of the times that when we focus on manipulation by the media or the ways in which corporate media propagandizes, we often focus on the things they disseminate that are just false, that are just outright lies.
Things like the Russians had seized control of the United States when Donald Trump was president because they had sexual blackmail films that they were able to exploit to force him to do Russia's bidding.
Even though Robert Mueller looked and looked and looked and concluded he couldn't find evidence for any of that.
And so much of what Trump did from trying to undermine Nord Stream 2 to arming the Ukrainians with lethal weapons, which he did, were directly against the vital interest of Moscow.
So it was so obvious that this was an insane conspiracy theory cooked up in the bowels of the CIA.
And so that's an example where they're actually disseminating false information or in order to manipulate the 2020 election, they told everybody to ignore the reporting that we're now hearing about the way the Biden family exploited their influence and power in order to prevent Americans from thinking about that by inventing this lie that came from the CIA that the media endorsed.
Oh, ignore all that.
That's just Russian disinformation.
And of course, those documents were authentic all along.
So there are cases where the media does lie and we focus a lot on that.
Oftentimes, though, the way they propagandize is more subtle and therefore more insidious.
And it's not so much that what they're telling us is false.
It is true that there are people in Ukraine who are suffering gravely by the Russian invasion, just like there are people suffering in every war.
And there are Israeli families who suffered horrific tragedies and are devastated and destroyed.
And if you look as a normal, healthy person, you're going to sympathize with them.
You're going to empathize with them.
But so often what's done is not so much what is shown, but what is not shown.
You know, I had this experience once.
It was a little bit of an epiphany on this question.
By coincidence, I was in Canada when I believe it was 2015, there were two terrorist attacks consecutively, or at least they were called terrorist attacks, where two Muslims who lived in Canada ran over in a parking lot in a suburb of Toronto, two Canadian soldiers and killed one of them.
And then three days later, there was a attack on the Canadian parliament by a Muslim who was armed with knives and guns and he ended up killing one person.
Some of it was one person.
He killed a security guard who was stationed outside of the parliament.
And during that week in Canada, there was an endless array of ceremonies and media stories that focused on this 24-year-old security guard who was killed.
We heard about his life dreams that had been extinguished as a result of this violence.
We heard from his weeping mother and his grieving family members, which was all appropriate.
He actually did die.
It was tragic and it was a news story.
But what made me realize what I thought about at the time was Canada is a country like the United States that had been very active during the war on terror.
It bombed countries, including Syria and Iraq.
It participated in the war in Afghanistan.
How many times during the entire war on terror did they as Canadians or we as Americans ever hear about the victims of our bombs, the people who were innocent at wedding parties that we would drone bomb, the people who during shock and all when we went through Baghdad exploding huge amounts of munitions in a densely packed city who ended up losing their lives and all of these countries that we bombed, we don't know the name of a single one of our victims.
We concentrate incessantly on our victims, meaning the victims, people who are Americans, but not the people who we kill.
And so it creates this misconception, even though what we're being told isn't false, that the only real victims are the people on our side.
The only perpetrators of horrific violence are people on the other side.
And it constantly leads us to believe we have to go and avenge these deaths.
And that is the way that manipulation happens.
So as you said, if you are a healthy, balanced, normal person of any decency, by definition, you're going to be enraged at what you see when you're shown what happened when Hamas went and did what they did in Israel.
But how often are we seeing or hearing from the families of people in Gaza, not just now, but for decades who have been dying under this avalanche of Israeli bombs or people who can't leave Gaza for their entire lives?
The Boycott Misconception Trap00:17:05
They're trapped inside.
And I think, you know, we're very tribal beings and our media is tribal too.
And they often report what's in alignment with the U.S. security state and our perceptions, even if we want to think we're critically minded people, end up being shaped and manipulated by the media and the things, not just that they show us, but that they don't.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
You know, I remember a good friend of mine who's also a brilliant historian, has a great podcast, Tom Woods.
Check out the Tom Woods show, everybody, if you haven't already.
But I remember he made this point.
And this was, it was in, it was in regard to Bill Weld when he was the vice presidential candidate for Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party.
I'm inside the world of libertarian party politics.
But so he was making the point that so Bill Weld had acknowledged, I guess, publicly that his support for the war in Iraq was a mistake.
And Tom Woods was just making the point, like he, he was saying, well, imagine, imagine the war in Iraq had been in Chicago or San Francisco or something like that.
And you just killed hundreds of thousands of people in some American city.
Would we just like let you off the hook with like, whoopsie, my bad.
I was wrong about that one, but I'd like to be in a position of power again.
I think the response then would be that you are, if you're not going to prison, you're certainly never going anywhere near power again.
And there is no question that the underlying view there is just that their lives are not as valuable as ours.
And that was something that I remember being very, very in the forefront in the wake of 9-11 and in the wars, the subsequent wars that followed.
That has really been one of the most alarming things that I've seen over the last week or so is how many people are just, you know, the people who are cheering on this war.
It's like these people are savages.
Yep.
It's just what it's a totally acceptable cost of this is that innocent Palestinian women and children are going to die.
That's just that.
We've got no other option.
And, you know, like there's, it's really very disturbing.
And it's amazing the symmetry that there is on both sides.
Like I've seen several people, several very prominent people argue that because Hamas was elected in 2005 or whatever it was when they were elected, that because the people of Gaza elected Hamas, they for now have, they're as guilty as their government is.
And it's like you see that and you're like, okay, this is the exact line of logic that Osama bin Laden had.
This was literally his argument was that American civilians are fair game because they have elections and they voted in these policies.
And so you're as responsible as they are.
There's this really crazy, like similar thinking on both sides.
And you see where there's an event where a bunch of innocent people die in Israel and the immediate response is like, well, we got to go kill a whole bunch of people over there.
And it just seems to me that that seems to be very similar to the mindset of Hamas that innocent people have been dying over here.
And so of course we've got to go do something.
We've got to take a military action, but they don't have a military.
So their weapon is terrorism.
It's just, it's wild to see this all happening again.
Well, and I think one of the things that's also very important to emphasize is regardless of what you think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, everyone understands, everybody has already acknowledged that there is a gigantic problem, namely that you have millions of Palestinians living in a space that they don't self-govern.
The Israelis, it is true in 2005, withdrew their troops from Gaza, not from the West Bank, which they continue to occupy, but they withdrew their troops from Gaza.
They still, however, control the airspace and the sea lanes and the land borders of Gaza, with the exception that Egypt has a shared border with Gaza that they also keep closed.
So Israel controls what goes into Gaza, what comes out of Gaza.
They bombed the Gazan airport, the only airport in Gaza City, which means that, again, there are millions of people, 2.2 million people who live in the Gaza Strip who cannot leave.
These people are 20 and 25 years old.
They have dreams of going to visit places and they are trapped physically inside.
They cannot leave Gaza.
And then you have the people on the West Bank who are also numbering the millions who are occupied.
And just last month, not, you know, Angela Davis or, you know, Noam Chomsky, but the former head of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, said that Israel is now essentially the equivalent of an apartheid state the way that South Africa was, because you have millions and millions of people who live in the same territory who have no political rights.
This is not, again, some left-wing anti-Israeli activists saying it.
And other Israeli officials have warned of this as well.
So the question then becomes, well, if you're Palestinian and you want self-governance, how do you fight against that?
I think we can all agree that going into civilian territories and civilian events that you know are civilians to just gunning people down and massacring civilians, not as collateral damage, but deliberately, has to be morally indefensible in all cases.
You have to have that line.
The interesting thing, though, Dave, is prior to this attack, they've tried many other things.
For example, they wanted to do what South African, black South Africans did to get political rights, which was to inspire and to call upon a worldwide boycott of Israel as a way of pressuring Israel to end the occupation.
And you know what happened?
People in the West, almost in every mainstream political party, not only denounced that boycott movement as anti-Semitic, but actually enacted laws that made it illegal to boycott, to support a boycott of Israel on the grounds that it was anti-Semitic.
So that was a case of a nonviolent protest, a nonviolent resistance movement that was deemed not just bigoted, but illegal.
There are red states in the United States that enacted laws saying if you want to have a contract with the government, with the United States government or with the state of Texas, you have to sign a vow that you do not support a boycott of Israel.
You're free to support a boycott of any other country.
You're even free to support a boycott of other American states.
Andrew Cuomo also was in favor of this law.
He said, if you boycott Israel, we're going to boycott you.
Meaning, if you're a supporter of the boycott of Israel, you will not get a job with the state of New York.
And yet Andrew Cuomo led a boycott of Indiana and North Carolina on the grounds that the laws they enacted that required people to use the bathrooms matching or corresponding to the sex that they were born with is bigoted.
So you're permitted to boycott Peru or South Korea.
You're permitted to boycott Mississippi or Idaho.
You just can't boycott Israel.
So they made, they banished the nonviolent attempts to change the situation there and restore political rights to Palestinians.
And now there's, of course, saying violence is also unacceptable.
The point, though, that you raise, I think is the crucial one, which is this dehumanization.
You know, one of the, obviously there's been a lot of accusations about my own political trajectory and the fact that a lot of people on the left or American liberals think I'm more sympathetic to Donald Trump than they think is warranted.
In fact, they think he's Adolf Hitler.
It's kind of a litmus test for them, how you feel about Donald Trump, which is why all of those neocons who actually ushered in the Iraq war, one of the greatest political crimes of our lifetime, are not just tolerated, but welcomed and celebrated.
I mean, half the people on MSNBC are people who worked for George Bush's administration or who were in the media at the time leading the way to invade Iraq or to institute a torture regime.
All of that is forgotten.
But one of the reasons why I do think that there are praiseworthy components of Donald Trump's presidency is because he not only ran in 2016 on the promise to eliminate wars that the United States fights and accept as a last resort when our country is being attacked, which is how normal countries think about war as a resort as a measure of last resort that you use if you're being attacked.
He actually did it.
Donald Trump is the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
That's just a historical fact that can never be denied.
He inherited bombing campaigns against ISIS that he escalated as he promised he would, but he did not start a new war, the first American president in decades.
Now, the reason why I think that's so crucial is because what happens in war is all of these instincts that we do have within us as human animals, this kind of savagery and barbarism that we needed to survive over thousands of years always are lurking within us.
And nothing stimulates it more easily and more alarmingly than war.
And what you're seeing now is the proof of that, this kind of dehumanization that instantaneously emerges.
You know, if you go back and you look at the Vietnam War, there's these infamous videos of General William Us Marlin, who was the chief commander in Vietnam, who was trying to tell Americans who were horrified by the number of deaths of Vietnamese civilians for which we were responsible in that war.
There were several videos where he would say things like, you don't understand the Asian mind.
You don't understand the Asian makeup.
They don't feel lost the way we feel lost.
They don't mourn and grieve their loved ones the way that we do.
There's always this attempt to suggest that whoever we are going to kill is not really human.
And you are absolutely seeing that now.
Some of the rhetoric, not from fringe places, but mainstream ones about how Palestinians are animals.
The Israelis are cutting off their access to clean drinking water and to food, starving and keeping water away from them to death in order to force them to submit this kind of collective punishment that the Nuremberg trials prohibited.
This kind of dehumanization of saying that all Palestinian lives are of lesser value than Western lives.
There is few things more dangerous than that.
And yet that is absolutely the prevailing sentiment right now.
And ordinarily the capacity to reason that we would embrace to avoid that is being drowned out by the intensity of these emotions that are being deliberately stoked and nurtured and strengthened all the time.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And there's something that's just very the broad and like I'm Jewish and my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor.
My mother lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a while.
And so I'm like very familiar with the pro-Israeli perspective or propaganda, however you want to put it.
But it's almost something that like it's really remarkable the way they're able to the way Israel is talked about.
This is what I was thinking when you're using this example of the pushback against the boycott movement and where you can boycott other states, but you can't boycott them.
The way that there are these talking points that are just repeated, even though they have no connection to reality.
So I was doing a, I debated Ben Dominic the other day on Fox News on this topic.
Yes.
And so I debated him.
Will Kane hosted it.
And by the way, he was very fair.
He is actually.
No, Ben's a, I think Ben's a great guy.
I think he operates always in good faith.
No, Ben wasn't bad, but Will Kane, who moderated it, was like very fair with me too.
But he said at one point, Will said this, he was moderating it.
And this is just, I know this because this is just one of the talking points, but they go, look, Dave, you know, say whatever you will about Israel, but the difference between them and Hamas is that they don't target innocent civilians.
And I was like, yeah, but that's just not true.
I know that's the talking point.
That's what you say.
It's like, you know, a land for people, a land without people, for a people without land or whatever.
But I know that's what they say, but that's completely removed from reality.
And I go, you're literally telling me they don't target children where as we speak, or they don't target innocent civilians, where as we speak, they have cut off water and medical supplies to over a million children.
How would you describe that as anything other than targeting civilians?
And of course, then there's also lots of other examples where they do target civilians, but there's something about the relationship between the United States and Israel.
And frankly, I think this leads to a lot of kind of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories where there is just a different dynamic with Israel, where even a lot of politicians who will talk about a lot of very other controversial things, like when it comes to Israel, they fall in line.
And it almost seems to be like this contest of who can suck up to them the most, who can prove they're the most loyal to Israel.
A lot of the people who kind of rail against wokeism become the wokest of anyone when it comes to Israel.
You know, I think of Ron DeSantis is a great example of that.
His whole like political thing is that he's the anti-woke candidate.
But as soon as it comes to Israel, man, you are a Jew hater if you have one bad thing to say about the policy of a government.
And it's very strange.
I'll be honest.
I know there's a powerful lobby.
I know there's some other things involved, but I don't exactly understand it.
No, it's, I mean, first of all, it's a very important point because Israel receives more aid from the United States over the last several decades than any other country on the planet.
I mean, during certain events like right now with Ukraine or with Afghanistan, there are moments in time when one country might be receiving more.
But as a matter of regular aid that flows, Israel has received more money by far than any other country in terms of foreign aid.
And it's not one party or the other responsible for that.
Barack Obama was constantly accused of being anti-Israeli, even though one of the last things he did before leaving office was signed a 10-year deal with Benjamin Netanyahu to provide Israel with close to $4 billion a year in aid that just just gets transferred from the American treasury to the Israeli treasury,
even though many Israeli citizens have a higher standard of living and access to more social benefits and state benefits than Americans do, whether it be certain kinds of opportunities for free college or for health care.
And of course, not only because of the financial component, but also militarily, of course we have to ask why this is.
There are American generals, including David Betraeus, who acknowledge the obvious, which is that one of the reasons why Americans, American soldiers and American infrastructure and American interest are so threatened in the Middle East is because of the perception,
the obviously accurate perception in that part of the world that when Israel drops a bomb on a home or a heavily, a highly dense area of civilians and kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians, as they've been doing for a long time, those bombs come from the United States.
The United States pays for those bombs or furnishes those bombs.
And so the anger and hatred that gets directed toward Israel as a result of their conflicts also gets directed to the United States.
So there's a major national security risk that also comes from being the prime sponsor of Israel in the way that the entire world knows that we are.
There may be benefits as well, but there's a lot of risk.
And so we should have the right to debate this.
And yet, as you undoubtedly know, debate is the one thing that we're not allowed to do when it comes to Israel.
Taboo Speech and National Security00:05:34
Do you know, and I have very similar backgrounds to you in case anybody needs my bona fides.
I have family who lives in Israel right as we speak.
All of my family is Jewish.
My grandmother was an immigrant who came from Germany in the late 1930s, along with her younger sister and the rest of her family that remained behind were all killed in World War II by the Nazis, including in camps.
And so I understand very well the kinds of cultural and educational and political indoctrination to which most Jewish Americans are subjected from the time that we're born.
So you do have to try and ask yourself, why is it that there's this huge exception when it comes to Israel that no other country receives the benefit of?
If, you know, there's this attempt underway to kind of use the left liberal rhetorical framework of grievance and victimhood to try and claim that American Jews are some uniquely persecuted group of people.
And the amazing thing is that, you know, I've spent a lot of time in the past three to four years engaged in very vitriolic dispute and confrontation with a lot of people on the left, with a lot of liberals, not just in the United States, but in Brazil where I live and Europe, about the question of censorship or identity politics.
And the American right loves to mock narratives of grievance and victimhood.
They love to express rage that debate is shut down by accusing your opponent of being racist or white nationalist or misogynistic or transphobic.
And I'm on their side with that.
Go on the internet at any moment now and criticize France for making it illegal to have pro-Palestinian protests.
You're allowed to have pro-Israel protests.
You're allowed to protest and call for the destruction and obliteration of every last human being in Gaza.
That's totally legal, but you're not allowed to have a protest where you express solidarity with or defense of the Palestinian people or to argue that Israel is being excessive or illegal in their use of force against civilians.
The French have just banned one side of the debate.
If you go and criticize that, as I have many times in the last week since France did it, you will hear from people on the right who sound like Ibram Kendry or Robin D'Angelo.
They will appear and they will say, no, these aren't ideas.
This incites violence.
This is hateful to a minor, a marginalized and vulnerable minority group.
This is speech that's over the line.
And then if you insist, they'll just call you anti-Semitic.
They say what's actually motivating you is that you hate Jews in exactly the same way that not five seconds will elapse if you argue with an American liberal or someone on the left about affirmative action or immigration or whatever or transphobia.
You know it's coming, that accusation, it's exactly the same thing.
Obviously, there is a huge amount of passion. that a lot of Americans feel when the topic is Israel that they don't even feel when it comes to their own country's wars and their own country's problems.
And obviously, and I know you're not supposed to say this, and I just want to make one point about this taboo point.
Obviously, a major part of it is because there are a lot of American Jews, as we both know, who have been inculcated since birth to have a huge amount of personal affinity toward Israel.
So it's not like only American Jews have that.
People who are Irish have that for Ireland or people who are Roman Catholic have that for Italy or people who are Muslim have it for whatever countries they hail from.
But there is a huge component of American Jewry that looks at a foreign country and Israel is a foreign country the way they look at their own country or sometimes even more.
There's on top of that a huge group of evangelical Christian voters who have at least as much of a passionate devotion to Israel because they believe that Israel has to be united, by which they mean Israel, they mean the West Bank and Gaza, the entire land under the command of Jews in order for Jesus to return.
Once he returns, he's going to banish all the Jews to hell.
So it's a little bit anti-Semitic, but it serves and benefits the cause of Israel politically.
And then you have the kind of neocon and militarists who value Israel because there's just been this very tight linkage between the United States and Israel working in unison for our goals to dominate the Middle East for oil and for other resources.
So there are very influential camps that insist upon complete and blind devotion to Israel.
Do you know, you know, we always hear about how the two parties can't agree on anything.
Go and look at the vote totals every time there's a vote to be had on Israel.
I'm talking about resolutions taking Israel's side in whatever conflicts they have or bills to give Israel more money, because on top of the $4 billion, we give them money for the Iron Dome.
We are now feeding them the weapons that they're going to use in this war.
They want another $10 billion.
The votes are like 412 to seven.
These lopsided votes that don't exist on any other topic.
And the reason is, is because most political power in the United States, close to all of it, is on the side of the pro-Israel perspective, even at the same time that people like Barry Weiss and Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro try and claim that Jews are this uniquely persecuted group.
The reality is, is that in the United States, it's virtually a requirement to remain in decent society that you embrace and fully support the pro-Israel perspective.
Magnesium Breakthrough for Sleep00:02:15
Yeah, that absolutely.
And I know, you know, a lot of these topics are kind of taboo.
But, you know, I think one of the, I mean, look, the main reason why I talk about this stuff is because I like, I don't know, if we're going to be in this space where we're talking about like politics and world events, like what's the point of being here unless we're going to talk about what's actually going on.
But on top of that, you know, it's like if reasonable people will not cover this, then we cede that ground only to like white nationalists and people like that who want to talk about this stuff, who do have a whole lot of bad ideas wrapped up in there.
So, you know, it's like you want to have at least some reasonable people having this conversation.
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Political Shifts Since Bush Years00:16:05
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I wanted to touch on kind of, and this will get into a little bit of what you were just saying with some of those guys, because it has been, it's been really fascinating to watch guys like Ben Shapiro, who again, made his bones off opposing identity politics and cancel culture and cancel, right?
All of these things.
And it's, there is really something, it's amazing the contradiction between being opposed to identity politics and being a Zionist.
It's, I don't know how exactly you can square that circle.
It's the most identitarian political like, you know, thing you could be.
But so as you mentioned earlier, you kind of alluded to the fact that people have, and I've kind of watched this, you know, I was 18 when 9-11 happened.
So the Bush years, and then ultimately I found Ron Paul's presidential campaign and then I was converted to being a libertarian.
But those the post 9-11 years were kind of my coming of age.
And so I've been following this stuff since since that time.
And I know that, you know, it was interesting to follow you from around that time through kind of all through the Trump years and everything.
And the accusation that a lot of these liberals would make is that you've become a right winger or something like that.
Meanwhile, you seem to have changed none of your core views and you're still kind of reporting on all the same stuff that you would have been back then.
And it always seems for anyone who actually has followed your career, it seems pretty obvious that had Trump been saying, you know, we need like a no-fly zone in Syria and we need to start all these other wars and Hillary Clinton had been saying we need to pull back and bring all the troops home that you would have given her credit for saying the right thing there.
It just happened to be that the parties kind of flipped, at least since the Bush years to the Trump years.
But it's been just, there has been this massive realignment, say, say from the Bush years to last week, where the right wing in America seemed to be much more anti-war than the left wing.
And under the George W. Bush administration, there are huge protests with hundreds of thousands of people.
There was real energy opposing the war in Iraq, opposing the Patriot Act and things like that.
That all completely vanished really during Obama.
And things kind of shifted when I think Trump, I would personally argue that's kind of the seeds were planted with the Ron Paul campaign, but it really changed when Donald Trump stood up and kind of gave right-wingers permission to be against these wars and kind of won them over.
Maybe some of them were already moving in that direction.
But now we have this interesting dynamic where there's kind of a split now amongst like the right half of America.
What have you like, you know, like obviously you talked about the Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro and guys like that, but I know you did a video that I just watched.
It was very interesting on one of your recent episodes about the Tucker Carlson Ben Shapiro split.
So what's your sense of like where the right wing is at?
Because those are two of the biggest right wing kind of political pundits and they seem diametrically opposed on this issue.
What do you think?
Do you think that like some of that anti-war stuff stays with the right or is it like, oh man, they're snapping right back into George W. Bush years?
You know, on some level, I do feel like American conservatives all walked into a time machine that they had just discovered abruptly and someone entered 2002 and they got catapulted back in time and the door opened and they all exited and they all sound to me exactly like the American right sounded to me in the days and in the weeks and months and even years following 9-11.
It's amazing how this one issue is so transformative in terms of worldview.
You would think that the United States itself was attacked.
And let's remind us ourselves again that the United States was not attacked.
This other country named Israel was attacked.
And yet you wouldn't really know that from the way in which this discourse is unfolding.
You know, I think, I do think it's fascinating.
You know, this, I think what happened was for people who came of age in the war on terror, the idea of militarism and war and neoconservatives got very associated with the Republican Party because it was led by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, who ended up then empowering neocons, the Weekly Standard and Bill Kristol.
David Frum was a White House speechwriter.
You had people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife, long-term neocons in the Republican Party.
But the reality is that there has always been a strain on the American right that was more isolationist and more anti-war.
You mentioned Ron Paul.
For me, he's kind of the avatar of this.
But even if you just go back a little bit when World War II happened, the only people raising the question of, wait, why exactly are we going to take this war in Europe and take it on as our own were really coming from the right, from the isolationist right.
And I think that ended up discrediting that view because most people ended up believing that the American involvement in World War II was both just and necessary.
But even going beyond that, if you go back and look at the 2000 presidential race between George Bush and Al Gore, the 90s were a series of wars that were largely fought as wars of choice,
things like invading and or rather involving ourselves in the extremely contentious breakup of Yugoslavia and the bombing campaign we did against Serbia and the idea that we had to go and fight for the independence of Kosovo things that had no effect whatsoever on American national security or the American homeland.
It was kind of the birth of liberal interventionism.
It was that, you know, kind of exchange that captured so much of what our politics back then was, which was when Colin Powell, who was actually in the military, was saying to Madeline Albright, we can't just go around involving ourselves in wars where we have no national security and no exit plan, no objective.
You can't just use the military as this kind of like feel-good NGO.
Like, oh, we're going to help the people who need it.
That's not what militaries are for.
And then she responded, and this has been confirmed many times.
What's the point of having this big, expensive, shiny military if we're not going to use it?
And this was this kind of sense.
This is like the tradition out of which Hillary Clinton emerged and Susan Rice and Samantha Power, which is, no, actually, we want to fight wars a lot because wars are how we advance liberal ideas.
It's how we spread our values that are so noble and righteous.
And so when George Bush ran for president in 2000, he wasn't running on that traditional Nixon-Goldwater. critique of the Democratic Party that they're too weak, that they're not willing to fight wars enough.
Much to the contrary, he was saying we're way too casual about how we fight wars.
We fight wars when our national security is not at stake.
And what he called for was a quote, more humble foreign policy, this idea that it's not our place in the world to go around attacking other countries just because we decide that we don't like their leaders or their government.
That's not what wars are for.
Obviously, 9-11, when we were actually attacked, transformed that for a time.
But I do think if you look, in order to understand contemporary American politics in the Trump age, you absolutely have to look at Ron Paul.
He's a pivotal figure because he went into the deepest, reddest parts of the country as a Republican presidential candidate in 2008, 2012, to Iowa, to South Carolina, to New Hampshire.
And he said a whole bunch of things that were heretical within the Republican Party.
He talked about the racist war on drugs and how it's a failure, how we have no right to be imprisoning people for substances they ingest in their body.
He had all kinds of views like that.
But his main argument, the thrust of his view was that neocons have destroyed our country.
He was obviously against trade policies that de-industrialized the middle of the country.
But neocons in particular were a major focus of what he was running against because he said that they had sacrificed American interests for these wars that were serving other countries' interests or other institutional interests that had nothing to do with the lives of the American citizens.
Once Trump arrived, he was looking at a Republican Party and an American citizenry that already had a great deal of growing anger and skepticism toward the national security state and what it was doing.
There was this kind of suspicion that had been long lurking on the American right that these wars are being fought, but not for my interests, for the interests of somebody else.
And Trump being this charismatic salesman that Ron Paul never was.
I mean, I love Ron Paul in a lot of ways, but one thing he wasn't was a great order.
But Trump has that, you know, entertainers ability.
He was a star on television.
He always has been able to connect to the ordinary American, ordinary American because he comes out of this kind of Queens borough with this resentment toward the Manhattan elite that he was able to channel.
And that's very authentic.
And he transformed the Republican Party by saying, I'm running against Bush, Cheney, Ian, even Reagan orthodoxies on foreign policy.
And he obviously created for the first time in my lifetime, this space to say the CIA, the NSA, the FBI are not these patriotic institutions that merit reverence.
Much to the contrary, they're actually deeply corrupt.
They are threats to democracy.
They lie constantly.
They interfere in our politics.
And that did obviously, in many ways, transform the American right in this country, which is why every time I would go on Fox News over the last four years, so many of the hosts, not just Tucker Carlson, would say to me, you know what?
I used to think you were crazy.
I used to think you hated America.
I used to think you were conspiratorial.
And now I realize that you were right.
Right just two weeks before this war started in Israel.
Matt Taibbi went on on Greg Gutfeld's show and he produced like a musical number apologizing to Matt Taibbi on the same ground.
What is amazing, though, is it just took one appearance by Israel in our discourse to unravel all of that.
And that gets back to this point that it seems like, at least for some on the American right, the idea of American wars doesn't really excite them much.
But when Israel is attacked or Israel is involved in a war, that's when everything suddenly changes.
Barry Weiss interviewed Condoleezza Rice.
Barry Weiss interviewed Condoleezza Rice and basically said to her, tell us what the right course of action is when something like 9-11 happens.
You were the one who showed us the way.
And Condoleezza Rice said, you're absolutely right.
Well, so we're now back to conservatives who have spent the last six years apologizing for the poor choices they made after 9-11 and the bad policies they pursued, at least some of them again, saying explicitly, no, actually, what we did after 9-11 was righteous.
We probably should have even bombed more countries.
And this is the path we now have to follow in the wake of this attack on Israel.
Yeah, it's very interesting because I've had a lot of experiences.
By the way, as you mentioned, Greg Gutfeld, there was one clip once when he was on his show, The Five, where he mentioned by name both me and you, where he was like, I thought these guys were completely nuts when they would be telling us that like, oh, the Patriot Act could be turned against you in order to.
Or the NSA and the CIA.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, so like, and one of the things that I appreciate about Trump, I also think, you know, I think Trump, in a lot of ways, his rhetoric was better on a lot of these things than his actual policies.
And he certainly got rolled by his own, you know, appointees many times or his own, you know, intelligence agencies and things like that.
But he did create this space where all of the sudden, when you went on Fox News, you could talk about a lot of the stuff that like me and you would have wanted to talk about that would have been very hostile before that.
But now all of a sudden it wasn't.
It was, you were allowed to say this because people weren't being asked to like give up their entire identity in order to kind of agree with you that.
And look, I mean, if you support the president and the CIA is and the FBI is currently framing him for treason, it makes it a little bit more easy to go like, yeah, screw the CIA and the FBI, right?
So there was that.
One of the things that I find, and I've, I've speculated about this, like kind of during this realignment, where I'd always go, and I don't exactly know, but I'd be like, I wonder who on the right wing is really legit.
And I wonder who's just riding this wave.
And I always said, I go, I know, I think Tucker is legit.
And like, I think Tucker is really was, did once support the war in Iraq and is greatly ashamed that he did and really has kind of woken up to how like evil the neocon agenda is.
I was like, Sean Hannity is one bomb exploding away from going right back.
I always knew that is like one, one big loud noise and Sean Hannity is in 2003 again.
Laura Ingram, I was like, I think she's going to go with Sean Hannity.
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
So it's kind of, I've always kind of like had this like, oh, I'm putting bets on who's legit.
And one of the things that at least is like a silver lining about this that I kind of appreciate is that it's almost like this was a stress test to find out what's been real in this realignment, who's really been converted, who's really kind of understood this lesson and who was just kind of like maybe somewhat thought they understood the lesson and somewhat were just kind of like putting their finger to the wind and going like, all right, well, it seems to be popular to go over there right now.
So I'll kind of go along with them.
And certainly, you know, like Ben Shapiro types and Dave Rubin and guys like this, who probably, if you had pressed them on it a few weeks ago, would have acknowledged that all of these, you know, the response to 9-11 was just a complete catastrophe.
I mean, how could you not acknowledge that?
But yeah, it's interesting to learn where they really stand.
Yeah, you know, well, first of all, one of the examples that we didn't mention that I think is probably, if not the most egregious, one of the most egregious was Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, went online this week and said, I want the FBI to go and investigate people who seem to be too pro-Palestinian.
And, you know, the rhetorical tactic that's being used is to try and conflate the handful of losers and idiots who actually praised Hamas, the guy from DSA who said, oh, there were just some hipsters who are abducted.
Who cares?
I mean, the reason why they focus so much on people who are completely obscure, whose names nobody knew, is precisely because virtually nobody with a mainstream platform or position actually defended Hamas.
But what they're trying to do is to conflate concern over Palestinian lives or criticism of Israel with being pro-Hamas in exactly the same way that anybody who asked questions or expressed concerns about the government's reaction to the Patriot Act or Guantanamo or the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 were accused of being pro-terrorist or people who oppose the war in Ukraine are accused of being pro-Putin.
That's the rhetorical game that's being played is to accuse people of being pro-Hamas.
But Josh Hawley went and said, I want the FBI to investigate domestic dissent.
And the Republican Party has spent four years arguing, defund the FBI, or at the very least, expressing grave concern about the weaponization of our security forces and our security agencies for domestic political purposes.
And on a dime, some of those people shifted that way.
Now, I agree with you that, you know, on one level, as a journalist, as a citizen, sometimes I don't really care about the question of, well, who's really motivated by authentic convictions versus who's being motivated by, say, concerns about political self-interest.
Nuclear Risks in Proxy Wars00:14:25
Because at the end of the day, if somebody opposes the war in Ukraine, if they're doing that because their constituents demand it or because they really believe it, it's ultimately kind of the same thing.
The reason it does matter, though, is because if they're not operating on actual convictions, if it's just, oh, well, we're going to oppose censorship only when our side is targeted, but we're going to cheer it when it's the other side, or we're going to object to the abuse of the FBI to investigate domestic dissent when it's Trump followers, but not when it's Palestinian activists.
The reason why you do have to care about that is because, as you said, the moment a stress test happens where now they're on the side of establishment power, they're going to start abandoning all of those principles that they claim for so long to believe in.
You know, I think there has been this divide before we were kind of talking about the history of the Republican Party.
There were some spaces on the American right, by the way, that opposed the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq.
They were kind of called paleoconservatives.
They were led by people like Pat Buchanan.
I do kind of think Laura Ingram came out of that tradition.
I just, by coincidence, I was on her podcast earlier today and we spent most of the time talking about Israel and Palestine and all the...
How is she?
What's her position on it?
I, you know, before I went on, I was wondering, because what happens a lot is, you know, people on the right who have me on a lot will have me on, but then they'll either not ask me about the things that they know I'm going to make their audience uncomfortable with, or they'll just kind of not invite me on for a week or two until they can have me on to talk about something else.
So I was wondering what that was going to be like.
It's not Fox.
It's her podcast, but still it's her podcast and there are people who listen to it.
And not only did she devote most of the discussion to the question of Israel and Palestine and more so the question of free speech and cancel culture, more so than the substance of the war itself, she definitely was on the side of the people who are deeply concerned about censorship.
She talked about the split between Candace Owen and Vivek Ramaswamy on the one hand, and then like Megan Kelly and Dave Rubin and then Shapiro on the other, these people, the latter of whom are supporting censorship.
And she clearly was being critical of this latter group and saying that it seems to her like the right is violating their own principles by trying to shut down debate when it comes to Israel.
It kind of surprised me how far she was willing to go.
And she also has been a pretty steadfast opponent of the U.S. war in Ukraine.
And that's the other thing is this division already existed in the Republican Party.
Although there are a lot of, you know, populists and right-wing Trump supporters like Matt Gates and Marjorie Keller Greene, who have been opposed to the war and the U.S. war in Ukraine, let's remember that the vast majority of Republican Party elected officials, the kind of Republican establishment has been totally and fully supportive of Joe Biden's policy.
They want all of those weapons being sent to the Ukrainians.
If anything, they're criticizing Biden for not sending more.
So you already saw this split, right?
You would have like Tucker on at eight o'clock at night over and over denouncing the American involvement in Ukraine.
And then Sean Hannity would come on with a lapel pin of the CIA and he would welcome John Bolton on and, you know, who knows all the other people to support the war in Ukraine.
And then you would have Laura back on kind of in a much more muted way than Tucker, but still expressing this opposition.
I'm glad this division exists within the Republican Party and on the American right.
It's crucial that it be maintained and fostered.
It definitely is suffering some setbacks this week, but I still see some signs of people who are like, wait a minute, I'm not going back to 2002 and 2003, but the pressure when it comes to Israel is so much higher than it is for any other issue that anybody concerned with their own career is going to be thinking twice before they do that.
Yeah, I think it's definitely not a coincidence that Tucker is, you know, off of Fox News now and is just on Twitter where there seems to be the freedom to talk about these things.
And so he can kind of go further.
Although, to be fair, he did go further than anybody even when he was on Fox News.
Right, but Joe Mitchell, sorry, I just interjected with you.
No, no, no, no.
That is a great example because I don't recall an instance.
Maybe there was one, but I don't think so.
But I certainly don't recall one.
And if there was, there was, it was very rare where Tucker ever talked about Israel and Palestine or really Israel while he was on Fox.
And I think one of the things I realized when I clicked the intercept where I really did believe that I was fully free and where it's true, nobody ever interfered with anything I wanted to say until that time when they did.
And then I quit was that being part of an organization like subliminally imposes limitations on the kind of things you feel free saying.
So that it's very liberating once you leave.
And I think you are seeing a freer and more liberated Tucker than what we saw at Fox, even though he pushed many, many limits on Fox, which is why he's no longer there.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think I noticed, even though he was pushing many limits, I noticed the difference immediately when he was over to Twitter or X, whatever.
None of us are ever going to stop calling it Twitter.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
There's an interesting, there are a couple of things that statements that were said yesterday and today that I thought were interesting before we wrap up that I wanted to get your thoughts on.
So Joe Biden, in a recent interview, I imagine you saw this clip where he was asked, you know, can America really handle, you know, we already got this thing going on in Ukraine.
Can we handle another war here?
Can we really, and he goes, yeah, this is the United States of America.
Of course.
We're the most powerful country in the history of the world.
Of course we can handle this.
And then, of course, there was Netanyahu who came out.
And I just tweeted right before we started.
I genuinely cannot believe that they didn't even have a PR person who goes, maybe don't use the phrase axis of evil.
Like maybe just pick another phrase to use.
But Netanyahu uses the phrase axis of evil.
And of course, the axis of evil, as you could guess, is Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
And he is openly calling for the international community to support his war against this axis of evil.
So you're looking at a situation now where, okay, we've are involved in a proxy war, if not a direct war with Russia.
We've certainly been saber-rattling about a war with China and taking pretty provocative, aggressive military actions toward them, including the president of the United States committing, at least verbally, that we would directly fight a war with China over Taiwan.
We're now clearly going to be supporting Israel's war against Palestine.
What exactly that does in the region, what the response from Hezbollah or Iran is going to be, it does seem to be getting to a point where I've, you know, there's been some reckless, insane American foreign policy over the last couple decades and for decades before that.
But it does seem like this is almost, it's cartoonish at this point, the position we're putting ourselves in to attempt to be at a time when we are $30 plus trillion dollars in debt.
Our currency has been incredibly devalued over the last few years.
Our country has been rattled over the last three years by all of the COVID restrictions and all of this.
We have certainly the biggest cultural divides of my lifetime that we've had internally.
And now we're flirting with what?
I can't even count how many serious wars, some of which have nuclear weapons, some of which we just pretend have nuclear weapons.
But I don't know.
What are your, before we wrap, this will be the last question, but what do you think of the prospects of all of this?
And where do you think we go from here?
It's insanity.
You know, one of the things that Trump has been saying, and, you know, you touched on it earlier, and of course I agree with it, is that there are a lot of things he continuously said or things he vowed to do that he ended up not doing, whether it's because the establishment in Washington is so powerful, as Dwight Eisenhower warned 50 years ago that it was even more powerful than the American president, that even if you want to as the president, you can't get it done.
There were times when they ignored his orders or thwarted him.
And then also he has a lot of personality flaws that make him very subject to manipulation by people who just flatter him and he hands them power, even though they're so obviously the kind of people who believe in things he said he would uproot.
So there's a lot of things he did not get done that he said he would.
But I think one of the things that he has been warning about is he obviously got a lot of briefings is that when we think about nuclear weapons or we talk about nuclear weapons, it's not even the same kind of thing that we're talking about as happened in Japan 70 years ago.
The kind of weapons we're talking about now are infinitely more powerful than the ones we dropped, the two bombs we dropped to end World War II, that these are weapons that will instantly destroy the world in the most horrific ways.
They will end human life as a species.
And it amazes me how blasé and casual we are about the risk of something like that happening, because it isn't just that someone might turn overnight into a psychopath and decide to end the human race, although that is possible.
It's that the real risk comes from miscommunication, misperception.
The United States and the Soviet Union did come very close on two occasions at least.
I'm talking about a half an hour or 45 minutes away from a full-scale nuclear apocalypse that happened because there was a misperception about the intentions of the other country.
We're still on those hair trigger, archaic systems of alert that we had from the Cold War.
So we already have this one very dangerous war that isn't so dangerous to the United States, but to Russia, it's taking place right on not just the other side of their border, but the most sensitive part of their border, the border with Ukraine that was twice used in the 20th century to invade Russia from the West that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russian citizens, both in World War I and World War II.
Imagine if there was some gigantic war happening right on our southern border or northern border in Canada or Mexico, how frightened and alarmed that would make us.
And of course, that is an existential threat in the perception of a lot of people in Russia who have nuclear weapons.
So you're already trifling with that.
And then you're talking about a new war, as you said, with another country that has nuclear weapons, which is Israel, that has a lot of religious fanaticism, but also a valid sense that they have existential threats posed to their existence as well in terms of these deeply tribal and long-standing religious conflicts.
There are American conservatives openly talking about the desire to go bomb Iran, including people like Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
And although Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, they are a country with a very serious military.
They have three times the size of Iraq.
And then at the same time, there's virtually a consensus among the entire establishment of Washington that what Biden is doing in militarily encircling China, which is also a nuclear power, is the right thing to do.
In fact, Biden's criticized for being insufficiently antagonistic toward Beijing.
If you look at a map, we have China militarily encircled with bases in South Korea and the Philippines and Japan and Australia and a lot of those islands in the Pacific.
And so this party that went from talking about finally getting rid of the neocons and the neoliberal obsession with wars and with regime change affairs and with interventions seems in their rhetoric and sometimes in their policy to be almost eager to provoke wars or talk happily about wars that are not with countries like Iraq or Libya that don't really have militaries, but with very serious countries.
And I think, you know, there was a time in American history, briefly, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, which is what we discussed when there really was the United States really was the sole superpower in the world and nobody else could even get close to competing.
People were petrified at the United States.
The United States ruled the world through its military force.
A lot of countries remember that and have a lot of resentment toward the United States for doing so.
But now the world order has changed.
The United States is a weaker country economically.
There are other countries that have risen in terms of their military strength, especially China that is leading this BRICS alliance and feeding on a lot of this resentment.
And the world is in a lot of ways outside of Western Europe unifying against the United States that is fed by all these wars.
And I think we are entering an extremely dangerous moment.
And the thing I am most concerned about is the thing you alluded to earlier, which is the possibility that reconnecting to this post-9-11 energy.
And the Israelis are doing this on purpose.
You know, you said that Netanyahu used the axis of evil phrase, which came, was written by David Frum that George Bush delivered right after World War II, but after 9-11, but also the IDF, the Israeli defense forces on their social media account are posting memes that explicitly say, either you stand with Israel or you stand with the terrorists, which is what Bush said after 9-11.
Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.
I think this is being deliberately revitalized at an extremely dangerous moment.
Dangerous Moments on Social Media00:01:37
And the number of people willing to stand up and object is much fewer than I wish it were because of the attacks that you immediately are subjected to.
And I'm hoping with a little bit more time, more space opens up.
And that's why I'm really appreciative of your willingness to do this under your platform, because I think it's crucial.
Every person who does it encourages or at least permits others to do it as well.
Yeah, I think, I think that's right.
And like at least at the very least, we have things that we didn't have in 2002, let's say, as the war propaganda for Iraq was being laid down.
We didn't have these platforms.
We didn't have social media.
We didn't have guys like Tucker Carlson and yourself having their like own platform.
I mean, you were writing at the time, but it wasn't the same thing where people could like watch your show and hear your voice constantly.
We have like Joe Rogan's podcast and a lot of these things where, you know, I think important voices can get out.
So at least we have we have that going for us because yeah, the prospects if people don't speak out about this seem awfully bleak.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really enjoyed it.
And thank you for all of the great work you do.
People, go check out System Update if you don't already.
And where else, you're not on Substack anymore, right?
Where can they read your audience?
Yeah, I do my written journalism on locals, but as you probably know, doing a daily show is extremely time consuming.
So most of the work gets funneled into the live show we do on Rumble, which is nightly.
You can see clips on YouTube that we post as well.
And then, of course, I'm active like every rotted addict on Twitter.