Our Q&A discussions are a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to everyone who submits their questions. If you missed any of our live shows, the full streams are available here on Substack.

This week’s Q&A is tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern on our Substack and YouTube pages. We recommend dropping your questions in the comments as soon as you have them. (Questions submitted during the live show are less likely to be seen.) We look forward to reading them!

Our Q&A discussions are a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to everyone who submits their questions. If you missed any of our live shows, the full streams are available here on Substack.

This week’s Q&A is tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern on our Substack and YouTube pages. We recommend dropping your questions in the comments as soon as you have them. (Questions submitted during the live show are less likely to be seen.) We look forward to reading them!

Despite how dark and grim all of this is, their effort had not just a happy ending but also a rather inspirational one. Dramatic footage of these activists being violently attacked by police as well as private security hired by Ridglan went viral, and brought widespread attention to the systematized abuses of dogs by Ridglan. That, in turn, engendered one of the most trans-ideological and bipartisan coalitions – composed of political officials, media figures, and ordinary citizens from every political camp – uniting to demand that Ridglan be shut down and the beagles released. I wrote in detail about this remarkable public reaction last week.

The public pressure and spotlight brought to bear by these activists finally became too much for Ridglan to sustain. They were forced to release the beagles to various dog rescue groups as part of a “sale,” and the internet is now replete with viral videos of Ridglan dogs finding loving homes. Ridglan has agreed to relinquish its operational license on July 1.

There are still roughly 500 beagles left at Ridglan, and legal proceedings are underway to prevent the corporation from killing them before its July 1 closure. And many other facilities continue to engage in similar behavior. But as a result of this Ridglan rescue mission, there is now far more awareness of, and public anger about, this dog experimentation industry and the government funds that enable these hideous but gratuitous experiments.

The activists who produced this stunning victory are not the kind who just show up to a protest one day and stay for a few hours, mulling around with some banal signs. These are among the most dedicated, courageous, and sophisticated devotees to a noble cause one could ever meet. Even though it was Ridglan which systematically violated federal and state law prohibiting animal abuse, it has been these activists who have been repeatedly prosecuted for attempting to shine a light on and to put an end to Ridglan’s crimes of animal abuse. Indeed, several of these leading activists are being prosecuted for multiple felony charges for the April 18 rescue.

My long-time colleague, the documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse, was with one group of these activists as they planned and trained for their rescue operation, and then finally arrived at Ridglan to carry it out. He filmed it all and has produced an exclusive short film that offers an inside look at this very risky yet ultimately wildly successful mission.

Leighton Woodhouse’s work can be found at his Substack page, “Social Studies,” which I highly recommend.

Our previous Q&A discussions were a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to everyone who submitted questions. If you missed any of the live shows, the full streams are available here on Substack.

This week’s Q&A is tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern on our Substack page. Normally, these are slated for Thursday nights, but Glenn is celebrating a family member’s birthday tonight — and those things can’t be missed! We recommend dropping your questions in the comments as soon as you have them (questions submitted during the live show are less likely to be seen). We look forward to reading them!

P.S. Glenn appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Watch his debate here:

Our Q&A discussions are a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to everyone who submits their questions. If you missed any of our live shows, the full streams are available here on Substack.

This week’s Q&A is tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern on our Substack and YouTube pages. We recommend dropping your questions in the comments as soon as you have them. (Questions submitted during the live show are less likely to be seen.) We look forward to reading them!

One of the year’s best feel-good news stories materialized late last month when Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin was forced to release more than 1,500 beagles who had been bred by the corporation to be sold into gruesome, sadistic government-funded experiments, only to be unceremoniously killed thereafter. I first reported on these industrialized dog abuses at Ridglan and by other corporations like it back in 2018. The horrific conditions into which the dogs are bred, and the monstrosity of the government-funded experiments to which they were subjected, remain vivid to this day.

That 2018 article was enabled by activists long opposed to the industrialized abuses of dogs and other animals. They worked against Ridglan Farms for over eight years to make last week’s inspiring victories possible, often risking their liberty to do so. And one major factor in their success — arguably the most indispensable one — was that they took an issue long associated with left-wing activism (animal rights) and found a way to form coalitions and partnerships with all sorts of politicians and media figures who reside far from left-wing politics, including many in the conservative movement and on the broader American right.

Much of this transformative progress was due to the deliberate portrayal of this cause as appealing to values found both on the right and the left. The campaign from White Coat Waste Project, for instance, emphasized not only the horrors of industrialized dog abuse and experimentation but also the wasteful government funds that sustain it, including horrifying dog experiments funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Activists with the animal rescue group DxE deliberately courted right-wing dog lovers and, in doing so, catapulted their cause from a once-perceived ideological or partisan fringe issue into one that commands mainstream support from a remarkably wide range of individuals.

All of this devotion to assembling a trans-ideological, nonpartisan coalition against hideous dog experimentation paid off. In the weeks leading up to the liberation of those 1,500 Ridglan Farms beagles, the cause had been taken up and promoted by not only numerous left-wing animal rights activists and local liberal politicians, but also prominent MAGA influencers and institutions, such as Lara Trump, Tomi Lahren, Laura Loomer, Megyn Kelly, Fox News, and by all sorts of right-wing members of Congress, including Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY).

The reason so many left-wing animal activists sought ways to form partnerships and coalitions with people on the right is extremely obvious: because that’s what people do when they actually care about a cause and care about realizing the goals to which they claim to be devoted.

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If one begins with the premise that an unholy combination of U.S. government health bureaucracies and large corporations is funding morally grotesque, sociopathic, and gratuitous dog experiments, as well as subjecting billions of animals to systemized industrial torture in factory farms, then one will do whatever is possible to stop it or at least curb and reform it. That certainly includes forming majoritarian coalitions across partisan, ideological, and demographic lines, which is exactly what these activists did to achieve these ongoing and inspiring successes.

Then there are people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her liberal followers. They love to posture and parade as so deeply concerned and morally righteous, devoted to the most noble, compassionate causes for the most benevolent and selfless of reasons.

But in stark contrast to the aforementioned animal activists, who maintain a genuine devotion to achieving their stated goals and thus creating a positive impact, AOC Liberals are extremely picky, selective, and deeply judgmental of those with whom they would be willing to work to create majoritarian, issue-by-issue coalitions that would succeed. Their own political branding and sense of moral superiority are infinitely more important than stopping policies that they insist so deeply offend their elevated sense of right and wrong.

AOC, now a favorite of the Democratic establishment, and for good reason, appeared at the University of Chicago on Friday night. It was for a regular event entitled “In Conversation With David Axelrod,” hosted by Obama’s long-time chief political strategist. During the Q-and-A portion of the event, a student asked AOC whether she was now more open to partnering with Republicans to pursue bipartisan policy goals than her previous comments suggested. He specifically recalled that she at one point said bipartisanship was close to impossible, given that the GOP is filled with “white nationalists,” yet he noted that one of her allies in the fight to eliminate congressional stock trading is Rep. Tim Burchett (R-KY), whom liberals have accused of anti-black racism.

In response to the question, the progressive star claimed that she will occasionally work with Republicans, if the goal is important enough, but that for many key issues — including the opportunity to work with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) against the Iran War, against the American financing and arming of Israel, and for the rights of Palestinians to self-determination — she would never deign to work with someone like Greene because, under AOC’s verdict, she’s “a bigot and an antisemite.”

Think about what AOC is saying here. She has said — albeit under sustained pressure from activists — that Israel’s U.S.-funded attacks in Gaza constitute “genocide.” She has called the Israeli-American war on Iran a “catastrophic” war of “aggression.” One would think that anyone who actually believes those claims — that the U.S. is financing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and that the Iran War is “catastrophic” for the world — would do anything to stop these dangerous evils.

But AOC is here to say that she will absolutely not do anything to stop what she believes is a “genocide” and a “catastrophic war of choice.” She would apparently prefer to fall short of her supposed goals to stop these crimes than win if it means having to work with conservatives whose views she regards as “bigoted” and “antisemitic.”

AOC’s comments about refusing to work with people like MTG on Israel and Iran provoked an intense debate among anti-war advocates, opponents of the U.S. financing of Israel, and DNC-loyal liberals. And that debate reveals a great deal about not just modern-day AOC-style liberalism, but also a great deal about each of those separate political factions.

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So much of AOC-led liberal politics is geared toward one’s efforts to proclaim one’s own moral superiority, and preserving one’s own self-righteous branding as uniquely virtuous, compassionate, and caring. Posturing as a vehement, morally outraged opponent of Israeli-led genocide and war with Iran is vital to sustaining that public image and self-perception.

But actually stopping said genocide and war is largely irrelevant to that image. That is why AOC and her followers devote themselves with such fervor to the performative and theatrical parts of their politics but will not deign to do the things necessary to actually achieve something.

Behold the noble principles that define AOC and her supporters: they would rather let Americans be forced to pay for Israel’s military and wars, and let Palestinians be bombed, and have Iran destroyed, if the alternative is to talk to or build majorities with gauche and morally inferior “bigots.” What matters — truly matters — is getting to prance around at events filled solely with like-minded, already converted people and be cheered for your elevated tastes and feel good about how untarnished you are, all while calling everyone a racist and a misogynist and a bigot and an antisemite so you signal to the world that you are not any of those things. That, for them, is the real goal of politics.

It is particularly ironic that AOC’s example of someone too evil and villainous to work with was MTG. Last year, MTG introduced an amendment that would have stripped all U.S. funding for Israel from the American budget. Democrats who have genuine convictions about their opposition to Israeli aggression, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), voted for MTG’s amendment. AOC, however, did not. With ambitions of New York politics dancing in her head, AOC voted “no,” then justifying it by insisting that Americans must continue to pay for Israel’s “defensive weapons” and accusing MTG of being motivated solely by antisemitism.

As MTG herself put it in response to AOC’s refusal to work with her: “AOC refused to vote for my amendment to strip funding for Israel. She can run her mouth all she wants, but votes are the only thing that matters, not a bunch of words and nasty name-calling.” MTG believes that “votes are the only thing that matters, not a bunch of words and nasty name-calling,” because she’s not a member in good standing with decent, liberal politics.

The left-wing flank of the Democratic Party has spent almost three years now insisting that the worst moral crime is the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza. Yet, when a Republican who wants to cut off all funding to Israel is seated next to a Democrat who wants to force Americans to pay for Israeli weapons (like AOC), these liberal frauds somehow side with the one who wants to fund Israel. (That AOC finally changed her mind just last month and now fully embraces MTG’s position only serves to further highlight the absurdity of all this.)

Beyond all that, MTG has repeatedly shown that she will risk her own political career in order to condemn destructive war policies, whether they’re carried out by the other party or by her own. She did so by not only opposing and denouncing Trump’s financing and arming of Israel, but also the panoply of D.C. bipartisan war policies. MTG thus denounced Trump’s bombing of Yemen (after he spent 2024 criticizing Biden for bombing Yemen), his bombing of Iran last year with Israel, and Trump’s new war with Iran.

AOC, by rather stark contrast, is a partisan hack, nothing more than a glorified Nancy Pelosi Jr. She will criticize the policies of a Democratic president only in the most muted and deferential tones. As she told me when she was first running for Congress against Democratic House leadership official Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), she was elected on a vow to overturn and wage war against the Democratic establishment. Instead, she has become one of its most valued partisan tools.

In fact, AOC is such an unprincipled, craven, partisan apparatchik that she was not just willing but very eager to be used at the 2024 DNC Convention to blatantly lie about who Kamala Harris is and what she was doing. While Israeli officials boasted that the Biden administration never once pressured them into a ceasefire in Gaza, AOC looked into the camera and told millions of Americans that Kamala was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” there:

But, ultimately, this comparison of MTG and AOC, and the strange attempt to determine who is better — which somehow became the centerpiece of this weekend’s debate — is completely irrelevant to everything. In response to AOC’s pronouncement, nobody was arguing that liberals should vote for MTG to be the Democratic nominee for president or even agitate to have her hired as host of The View or some new MS NOW show. MTG is not asking to be “let into” the DNC’s left-liberal treehouse — why would anyone want that? — and nobody is arguing that she should be, because nothing could be more irrelevant.

The only germane point is that anyone who is actually serious and genuine in their purported anti-war convictions and in their determination to end U.S. financing of Israel — as opposed to someone who likes to parade as such for self-esteem, branding benefits, and admiration — would immediately and eagerly work with anyone to build a majority against these destructive war-promoting and militaristic policies. But AOC made a point of announcing that she would never work with MTG on issues relating to Israel and war, despite the fact (or, more so, because of it) that MTG has displayed more courage and principle on that issue than AOC ever would. AOC lied to protect her party’s leaders as they financed Israel’s war, whereas MTG loudly denounced her party’s leaders as they continue to do so, being forced out of Congress as a result (the same risk taken by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)).

None of this should be remotely surprising to anyone who has paid attention to mainstream, DNC-loyal liberal politics. Caring about outcomes is very low on their list of priorities, if it appears on it at all.

There are all sorts of self-involved priorities that one finds far higher up than changing policy or stopping destructive wars. One key goal among AOC-style liberalism is to ensure rigid adherence to a binary left-right or Dem-GOP framework, so that the world can only be understood through that dreary, distortive, reductive prism. That prism is so vital to them because it is the guarantor of their moral superiority (impotent and inconsequential though it may be).

It is by clinging to this binary prism that they can declare that the only good, sincere, and compassionate people are those in their party (the Democratic Party) or ideological camp (left-liberalism). Anyone without credentialed membership in their politics club is inherently a bad person, someone with evil or, at the very least, opportunistic motives. If, therefore, someone like Kamala Harris or AOC utters a few clichés about Palestinians or Iran, it is proof that they are compassionate and good. If someone like Joe Biden finances, arms, and diplomatically protects various Israeli wars, he is doing so only because he is politically forced to or has been misled, not because he’s a bad person who has lost the right to have their vote and their support.

But if some dirty conservative or other strain of non-liberal like MTG (or Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Thomas Massie) speaks out against these wars, there cannot possibly be anything sincere or constructive about it, even when it comes at great cost to them. It must be an accident or, more so, the byproduct of something malevolent. Perhaps, this partisan reasoning holds, they only oppose American support for Israel because they are racists and antisemitic, or they oppose the Trump-Netanyahu attack on Iran because they believe they will attract larger and younger audiences. Whatever else is true, no non-liberal or non-Democrat can ever have a genuine or commendable thought or impulse.

The priority with all of this is the preservation of their identity as good and morally superior people while remaining on a pedestal to show that they are non-racist and deeply egalitarian by calling everyone else with divergent views racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, etc. That is the only real framework of pro-DNC, left-liberal politics: the politics of self-indulgent branding. Everything else is just costumes and dressing.

When it comes to stopping endless wars and stopping U.S. financing of Israel, the most important positive change over the last decade — the change that gives hope for success one day — has been the rapid decline of support among people across the political spectrum, most notably among younger conservatives. That happened in large part due to the willingness of people actually devoted to those causes to reject imprisonment in the left-right binary, to seek dialogue, and to find allies in all political factions.

That is how all meaningful political persuasion occurs: by seeking dialogue, cooperation, and interaction with those who do not share your ideological beliefs across every issue. As these activists against dog experimentation and animal abuse just demonstrated, along with countless other successful movements, actual success comes from finding common ground with other people as humans, not by remaining captive to and insular in your own little group of like-minded ideologues that make you feel good and noble.

This is exactly why this latest incident involving AOC and her fan base illustrates so vividly what has long been clear about them. Of course, AOC and her followers would not work with or want anything to do with Marjorie Taylor Greene — or Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, Megyn Kelly, or whoever else can effectuate positive influence but does not share their ideological outlook. Where would the fun be if they did?

Sure, working with them might increase both the number and type of people willing to work for the causes to which they claim to be so devoted. But it would also dilute their specialness, their brand of virtuousness and personal superiority, their addiction to denouncing everyone as racist and bigoted, so that they can feel that they are not those things. In AOC’s world of DNC-loyal, left-liberal politics, those are the real goals. And no cause is worth losing that.

Our last two Q&A discussions were a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to everyone who submitted questions. If you missed either of the live shows, the full streams are available here on Substack.

This week’s Q&A is tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern on our Substack page. We recommend dropping your questions in the comments as soon as you have them. (Questions submitted during the live show are less likely to be seen.) We look forward to reading them!

As occurs with every act or attempted act of political violence in the U.S., many have attempted to blame the rhetoric of their political adversaries for “inspiring” or “provoking” violence through their words. In the case of the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel, many Trump supporters are seeking to heap blame not only — or even principally — on the attacker whom President Trump described as a “lone wolf.” Instead, under a theory long used by liberals against the American Right, blame is being widely assigned to President Trump’s more vocal critics for allegedly “inspiring” violence against him.

This theory alleges that by demonizing Trump with some of the worst accusations (saying he is a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a war criminal, etc.), liberals and other Trump critics are endangering his safety and implicitly, or even explicitly, offering justifications for trying to kill him.

While this framework of culpability may be understandable or appealing at first glance, it has an ugly and dangerous history. Every political faction has used it in an attempt to silence what are otherwise constitutionally protected ideas by conflating them with violence (“words are violence”). I wrote at length here about one similar effort, when liberals and various Democrats tried to blame leading conservatives for the 2022 Buffalo massacre due to their anti-immigration views, which were cited by the shooter as his motive. That article documented why this blame-shifting theory is so misguided and dangerous.

That Buffalo attack followed similar ones around the country. On May 14, 2022, an avowed white supremacist and anti-immigration extremist entered a Tops Friendly Market in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Buffalo and slaughtered ten Black Americans. The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, left a long manifesto identifying those he regarded as heroic and who inspired him (principally other mass shooters who targeted immigrants, Black people, and Muslims), and explained his reasons for deliberately targeting non-white people (focusing on “The Great Replacement Theory”).

In its wake, elected liberals and their media allies instantly — meaning: before the bodies were even removed — blamed the massacre on prominent conservatives who were opposed to mass immigration. Because these conservatives expressed views about immigration that were featured as galvanizing motives in the shooter’s manifesto, so this reasoning went, the “rhetoric” of those conservatives “inspired” the shooting, and they thus had blood on their hands.

There were countless examples of this tactic from prominent liberals. One who spelled out the underlying mentality most explicitly was Jamelle Bouie in a New York Times op-ed. In a column titled “The Slaughter in Buffalo Hasn’t Quieted the Great Replacement Caucus,” Bouie insisted (while denying that he was doing so) that leading figures on the American Right — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), then-Senate candidates J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Blake Masters (R-AZ), and Tucker Carlson — had blood on their hands. In particular, Bouie pointed to what he claimed were extensive similarities in rhetoric between “mainstream conservatives” and the shooter’s manifesto regarding immigrants and “replacement” theories:

Make no mistake: The idea that apparently inspired a white supremacist who is accused of killing and injuring more than a dozen people last Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo — that nefarious elites are using immigration to “replace” white Americans with pliant foreigners — is virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Republican rhetoric.

“This administration wants complete open borders,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in an interview last month. “And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it really [that] they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?”

“The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall,” said J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, in a campaign ad. “They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country”….

Republican politicians aside, there’s also Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News program is a direct conduit for white nationalist ideas, including the idea of “the great replacement.” There are more than 400 episodes of his show, according to a recent Times investigation, in which Carlson has either amplified or promoted the theory that Democrats and other members of the liberal elite (like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros) are using immigration to replace the native-born majority with a new, foreign-born electorate. . . . They have chosen to swim in the same ideological waters as the people responsible for these shootings and have chosen to amplify the “great replacement” theory to the world even as it poisoned minds and produced violence….

It’s not as if this comes out of nowhere. It would not be the first time in this country’s history that reactionaries fanned violence in order to win a favorable settlement for themselves.

[There is one major irony worth noting here. Despite Bouie’s accusations, none of the figures he named even appeared in the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. There was no evidence at all that the shooter even liked the GOP or had even watched or heard of Tucker Carlson. Yet Bouie still blamed them.

By contrast, Saturday night’s WHCD shooter not only read the postings of Bouie himself and many other partisan Democrats (such as Will Stancil, Ken “Popehat” White, and Aaron Rupar), but he also “liked” several of their social media postings, including those that denounced Trump in harsh terms. In other words, there was a greater demonstrated nexus between those liberals and the WHCD shooter than there was between the Buffalo shooter and mainstream conservatives.]

Similarly, many prominent Democrats in elected politics and media demanded that Special Counsel Jack Smith prosecute Trump for the violence that occurred on January 6 at the Capitol, based on the theory that Trump’s claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election, as well as his pre-riot speech on the same day, “inspired” that violence. As I often argued back then, such a prosecution of Trump on those grounds would not only violate the First Amendment by holding a citizen liable for constitutionally protected speech, but it would also destroy the vital separation between one’s words and the violent acts of others.

After that 2022 wave of attempts to pin the blame for the Buffalo shooting on others, I wrote at length about why that theory is not only fallacious but also how it poses a genuine threat to core concepts of free speech. There is basically no political or ideological faction that does not, at one point or another, spawn violent lunatics. But words are not violence. The difference between political rhetoric (even aggressive or accusatory rhetoric) and violent acts is a crucial one to ridigly maintain.

I will refrain from repeating the arguments in that 2022 article about the Buffalo massacre, but those who wish to read them can find them here. Suffice it to say, that article reviews the key reasons, the relevant cultural norms, and all the judicial precedents illustrating why it is so vital to heap blame solely on those who commit violence — rather than on those who express views, no matter how extreme, that are constitutionally protected and constitute a vital part of our political traditions of free speech and harsh criticism of political leaders.

As a result of that article I wrote attacking this liberal blame-shifting framework following the Buffalo massacre, I was widely accused in liberal tabloids like Salon (“Why is Glenn Greenwald defending Tucker Carlson and the ‘great replacement’?”) and elsewhere of defending the Great Replacement Theory and white supremacy. Obviously, I was doing nothing of the sort. I was opposing the attempt to blame people — legally, ethically, or politically — who use rhetoric and arguments for the violent acts of others. And I am doing the same thing now.

This blame matrix is no more noble or persuasive when used by the Right, which is precisely what is happening now. That the rhetoric of American liberals about Trump is responsible for the WHCD shooting is pervasive among Trump’s most ardent supporters, and it relies on exactly the same rationale invoked by Bouie and his ilk.

The pro-Trump journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon said on Sunday that “Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats.” As a result, she wrote, “it’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting.” Long-time conservative reporter Byron York wrote that the “gunman’s manifesto is anti-Trump social media come to life. Key declaration is straight out of Bluesky.”

The Trump official Richard Grenell argued that “the attempted assassin literally uses the exact language that CNN and their Democrat allies use every day to describe President Trump.” And the official White House social media accounts today posted this decree from Trump himself: “I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats is…. very dangerous. I really think it’s dangerous for the country.”

It is perfectly accurate to note that many of the denunciations of Trump found in the shooter’s manifesto are, indeed, often heard in mainstream liberal discourse. But what does this prove? It proves nothing beyond what was proven by the fact that many of the ideas contained in the manifesto of the Buffalo murderer are ones often heard in mainstream conservative discourse. None of that makes anyone responsible for violence by virtue of the fact that their expressed views overlap with some violent lunatic’s manifesto.

I fully realize that, especially in the wake of violent political attacks and the emotions they provoke, it is extremely important for whatever side or group feels targeted to believe that they are uniquely victimized by violent and hateful political rhetoric from their opponents or enemies. It thus makes people genuinely angry if one suggests that their party or ideological camp also uses hateful invective.

And, in the case of this weekend’s attempted assassination, it is of course true that many in left-liberal spheres employ hateful and aggressive rhetoric against Trump, his allies, and his supporters. But pretending that it is liberals who do that uniquely, whereas conservatives are typically restrained, sober, and cautious in their negative rhetoric about Democratic presidents and liberal politicians is, to put it mildly, not sustainable.

In many ways, Trump himself has gone as far as anyone when it comes to provocative and extremist rhetoric about his political opponents. The primary objection from conservatives over the last 48 hours seems to be that Democrats compare Trump to Hitler, which, they claim, is uniquely suited to provoking violence.

Liberals do, in fact, make Trump-Hitler comparisons, but they are by no means alone in the use of Nazi rhetoric. Indeed, in 2024, Trump told his donors that then-President Biden was running a “Gestapo administration.” Tea Party activists put up billboards in 2010 equating Obama with Hitler. In 2015, conservative Texas Congressman Randy Weber (R-TX) suggested that, at least in some respects, Obama was worse than Hitler. Biden, for his part, also accused Trump of using Nazi rhetoric.

In 2024, Trump called Democrats who attack him “the enemy within,” and even “more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” And Trump spent years accusing Obama of being a fraudulent and illegitimate president by claiming that he was really born in Kenya but produced falsified documentation to prove he was born in the U.S. and was thus eligible for the presidency.

Rush Limbaugh and other leading conservative voices of the 1990s accused the Clintons of the most heinous crimes imaginable, from murdering numerous people (including Hillary’s “hit” on Vince Foster) to Bill Clinton’s alleged drug trafficking. Limbaugh also insisted that Obama was "America's number one national security threat" and posed more of a danger to Americans than any foreign country — accusations that could easily lead someone to conclude it was justified, even necessary, to eliminate that threat.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) warned then-President Clinton in 1994 that he was so hated on military bases that “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” (Helms subsequently apologized.) At a political rally in 2011, a man stood up for Tea Party favorite Rep. Paul Braun (R-GA) and asked, “Who is going to shoot President Obama?” Braun had himself repeatedly warned that Obama would usher in a Marxist dictatorship, while Obama, in the midst of all this vituperative rhetoric, had been the target of several serious assassination plots, including one disrupted by the Bush FBI.

The question is not whether one side’s rhetoric and accusations are true or false. That is irrelevant to the point here. Similarly irrelevant is the question of which side, at any given point, uses more caustic or demonizing rhetoric. The question is whether one is to be held responsible — not just criminally but morally — if one’s contemptuous rhetoric about and accusations against an American president or against an ideology coincides with the views that an assassin or would-be shooter cites among their motives for resorting to violence. The answer in all cases should be “no.”

It is a long-standing American tradition that politics entails harsh rhetoric and extreme accusations (true or otherwise) against leading American politicians, especially against presidents or presidential candidates. The more power someone wields — and nobody wields more political power than the President of the United States — the more permissive society should be of the use of the harshest rhetoric when condemning those political leaders. That sort of rhetoric is hardly a new or recent invention in American politics.

On CNN on Sunday, Dana Bash suggested to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) that liberal rhetoric about Trump may be spawning violence against him. When Raskin asked what rhetoric she meant, Bash replied: “that he’s terrible for the country and so forth.” Of course Americans have the right to argue that a president is “terrible for the country” or even more extreme criticisms. And we should never accept a standard that dictates that we must be muted and deferential when criticizing a powerful politician, lest we stand accused of having blood on our hands if someone tries to attack them.

There is no doubt that left-liberal politics in the U.S. has become more explicitly tolerant and even supportive of violent rhetoric in the Trump era. That has been true throughout the recent history of many other groups, including the American Right. There have been plenty of violent attacks that are at least adjacent to right-wing sentiments, from the 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, to several plots against President Obama, to recent massacres aimed at Black people, Muslims, Latinos, and immigrants.

But within the U.S. judicial system and in American political culture more broadly, those who are culpable and held responsible for violent acts in the name of a political end are those who perpetrate the violence. To erode that vital principle by blaming or even criminalizing otherwise protected speech is to chart a course that subjects every political view and faction to various forms of guilt, even though they did nothing beyond expressing constitutionally protected views.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is on a crusade. He is determined to pass a three-year, reform-free renewal of the notorious FISA law that authorizes the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens, on U.S. soil, without warrants of any kind.

Immediately prior to the last (unsuccessful) attempt by Johnson to pass a new reform-free renewal of this spying law — just two weeks ago — I wrote about the bizarre and deeply bipartisan history of FISA domestic spying and how the U.S. somehow became a country that authorizes its surveillance state to target American citizens, all without warrants.

I will not recount all of that here, except to note that — like the 2001 Patriot Act — the original law empowering the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants was such a self-evident departure from American tradition that passage was only possible by portraying it as a mere temporary emergency measure. Yet those spying powers have now become one of the many such “temporary” and “emergency” measures that have seamlessly become a quasi-permanent fixture of the U.S. government. This upcoming week in the House will determine whether it becomes genuinely permanent and, worse, forever immune to reforms.

The FISA bill that permits warrantless NSA spying on American citizens was first enacted by Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2008, then signed into law by President Bush. The law provided for those powers to expire four years later, unless Congress approved renewal.

The law was first renewed in 2012 with the support of the Obama White House, this time for five years, without any reforms. When that five-year renewal was set to expire in 2018, Congress, this time backed by the Trump White House, passed a six-year reform-free renewal, requiring a new vote in 2024.

For the 2018 renewal, there was a mountain of evidence demonstrating abuse, which in turn gave rise to steadfast opposition to such a renewal from dozens of members of both parties (who were demanding, among other reforms, the addition of a warrant requirement for spying on Americans). As a result, then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was forced to rely on dozens of Democratic representatives to secure FISA renewal.

Ryan accomplished this by working in close tandem with three key California Democrats: then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). That liberal trio led 65 House Democrats alongside 191 Republicans to vote to endow a President they were calling a Hitler-type fascist with virtually unlimited power to spy on Americans without warrants.

The last time the FISA bill was renewed was four years after that 2018 vote: in April, 2024, with the support of the Biden White House and the key support of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. That time, Congress was only willing to extend it only for two years, meaning the bill was scheduled to lapse on April 17, 2026, unless it was renewed again.

That is why Mike Johnson is now tasked with securing a new multi-year renewal of FISA with no reforms. On April 17 — last week — Johnson’s first attempt to renew the spying law for 18 more months failed to secure the necessary votes in the House for renewal He was thus forced to desperately plead with the chamber for a short 10-day extension to give more time to pressure the 20 House GOP holdouts to change their minds, and to try to induce more Democratic defections.

Once Congress agreed to that short 10-day extension, it set the new expiration date to April 30: this upcoming Thursday. Johnson, working at the direction of the Trump White House and in close partnership with the Democratic ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), is now scurrying for more votes in both parties to extend this domestic spying law with no reforms.

Among the key reforms Johnson and Himes are trying to block is one that would amend the law to require a warrant before the NSA can spy on the communications of American citizens. It is remarkable that it a proposal to require warrants before the NSA can spy on Americans is even controversial at all, given that this has been a linchip on the American conception of liberty since the country’s founding.

That House vote is now expected on Monday or Tuesday. The outcome is very much in doubt. But as someone who has been reporting on this law since its enactment fifteen years ago, it is very difficult to bet against the U.S. surveillance state, which virtually always gets its way in Washington.

That is especially true since elected officials who purport to oppose domestic warrantless spying when the other party is in the White House typically change their minds once their party is in power. And those who posture as opponents of this law often end up voting for it if their votes are needed for renewal. Worse, as Trump, Mike Johnson, Nancy Pelosi, and so many others have proven, their steadfast opposition magically transforms into vehement support once they ascend to power.

Still, many obstacles remain for Johnson to overcome if he is to get the necessary votes by Monday or Tuesday. The key factor is whether enough of those 20 House Republicans will continue to oppose it, despite intense White House pressure, and whether the Democratic caucus will remain united in their opposition, despite their long history of lending enough votes for FISA renewal to ensure its reform-free passage and despite the vigorous support of Rep. Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Mike Johnson has proven himself to be a particularly shameless huckster when it comes to Americans’ constitutional privacy rights. A constitutional lawyer who was a long-time and vehement opponent of FISA and reform-free renewal while back-benching in the House GOP caucus, he performed a 180-degree reversal as soon as he became House Speaker in October 2023. Shortly thereafter, he led the push to defeat all FISA reforms and secure the 2024 two-year “clean” renewal of the spying law, and is now, in 2026, dutifully performing the same function to force a “clean” renewal.

Johnson’s history on this issue is nothing short of strange. I happened to interview Johnson just months before he was surprisingly elevated to the Speakership as a compromise candidate when all other candidates failed to obtain a majority. I asked him to come on my show precisely because he had become such an impassioned and knowledgeable critic of the U.S. surveillance state and, more broadly, a steadfast opponent of the unconstrained powers vested in U.S. security agencies.

When I spoke to him on SYSTEM UPDATE, he was particularly fixated on the urgent need to reform FISA spying by adding a warrant requirement for the surveillance of Americans’ communications. In fact, he melodramatically told me that the U.S. government’s warrantless power to spy on Americans’ communications is what “keeps [him] up at night.”

When Johnson was chosen as Speaker in October 2023, I assumed that would be good news for the cause of privacy and reining in the Surveillance State. Instead, he instantly — and I mean instantly — converted from a stalwart opponent of this domestic spying law into its most enthusiastic and influential cheerleader. He vowed to lead the effort to renew FISA in 2024 and to block all proposed reforms to the law.

When asked to reconcile this sudden, radical reversal on an issue he had made central to his political identity, the new House Speaker explained that he was taken into a secret briefing room and shown information that “convinced” him to argue that this spying law was not only vital but that no reforms could be permitted. I have no doubt he was indeed taken into a secret room. What was said to Johnson in that secret room remains a mystery, but whatever it was, it was clearly “persuasive.”

For the 2024 renewal, Johnson expected easy approval for a multi-year, reform-free extension, and for good reason. There were more than enough House Republicans

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Last week’s Q-and-A discussion was a great (re)start, and we’re thankful for everyone who was able to submit their questions over the preceding two weeks. For those who missed the live show, it can be found on YouTube and on Substack. It covered a wide range of topics, including pushback against the arguments made here about the Trump administration’s Iran policy, Brazil’s next election, free speech and the CIA, political violence, and more.

This week the Q-and-A will be on Friday at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. We recommend commenting here with your questions as soon as you have them—comments submitted closer to the live show are less likely to be seen. We look forward to reading them tomorrow.

Last Friday, President Trump posted a series of announcements on Truth Social, claiming that Iran had given him everything he wanted in exchange for nothing. The President asserted that Iran had agreed to hand over what he called their “nuclear dust” (the enriched uranium buried under ground from last June’s American air attack); to stop funding Hezbollah and Hamas; and to open the Strait of Hormuz and never close it again. Many of Trump’s pro-war supporters declared victory, reveling in their triumphalism.

While that was a feel-good story, there were many obvious problems with it, starting with the fact that Iran never confirmed any of it and would never realistically surrender, given its perception of the massive leverage it continues to possess. Sure enough, Iran later that day denied having agreed to anything beyond opening the Strait during the cease-fire negotiations. But after Israel continued to bomb Lebanon, despite Trump’s announcement that he had “PROHIBITED” Israel from doing so, which he followed by announcing a full military blockade of the Strait to prevent Iran from selling oil, it was clear that a deal to end the war was very far away.

During his flurry of victory claims, Trump set Wednesday — tomorrow — as the deadline for Iran to agree to a comprehensive deal, after which he said he would begin obliterating the country. He announced that he was sending Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff (with J.D. Vance being added later) to Islamabad to meet with the Iranians. In response, Iran announced that it would refuse to attend any negotiations while the U.S. was blockading the Strait. As a result, Trump’s deadline will come and go tomorrow, presumably without a deal.

As he has done before, Trump’s response to the lapse of his deadline is not to follow through on his threats (thankfully), but instead to announce an extension of the deadline. Today, he did exactly that, though notably, his extension came without any new deadline: it is just an indefinite suspension of hostilities pending an agreement. All of this raises a question that has lurked since the start of this: what is the purpose of this war, and how can it end? We examine those questions in the above 30-minute video.

On April 4, we announced the resumption of the weekly live Q-and-A session we did every Friday night during our SYSTEM UPDATE program when it was on Rumble. Those segments were often the most popular among our viewers and subscribers. As it turned out, I was traveling throughout the U.S. over the last couple of weeks for several events, including an ext…

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In August 2013 — in the wake of our Snowden reporting, which revealed the NSA’s mass warrantless domestic spying on Americans — an extraordinary bipartisan bill emerged. Jointly sponsored by one of the most liberal House members (Michigan Democrat John Conyers) and one of his most libertarian-conservative counterparts (Michigan Republican Justin Amash), the bill would have reined in the NSA’s domestic spying powers by imposing serious limits on how such powers can be exercised when aimed at American citizens.

When the Conyers-Amash bill was first introduced, “Official Washington” did not take it seriously. But the Snowden revelations were causing serious public anger about NSA spying, and many members of Congress shared that anger because they were not told that the NSA had implemented a system of mass warrantless surveillance aimed, in part, at Americans. As a result, support for the bill quickly picked up bipartisan steam, seemingly heading toward certain passage — until Barack Obama called Nancy Pelosi.

Despite running for President as a constitutional law professor who vowed to end the civil liberties abuses of the War on Terror, Obama had become an enthusiastic supporter — and user — of the NSA’s domestic spying system. He thus instructed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic House votes to kill the bill. She did as she was told, and the bill — which initially appeared on its way to approval — was defeated 205-217 (94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for the reform bill; 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against it). Official Washington heralded Pelosi as the heroine who saved NSA warrantless spying on Americans:

It is hard to overstate how significant the passage of this bill would have been. It would have been the first time in two decades that the U.S. Congress limited rather than increased the domestic powers of the U.S. security state. The era of the Patriot Act would finally have been confronted, or at least diluted. But Obama and Pelosi joined hands with the likes of GOP pro-spying members such as Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, and Kristi Noem to block any limits on the NSA’s power to spy on Americans without warrants.

Now, Donald Trump is on the verge of doing what Obama and Pelosi did back then. Despite running in 2024 by vowing to “KILL FISA,” based on his (quite valid) claim that spying powers had been abused against him for political ends in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump on Monday demanded that FISA be fully renewed: yet again, with no reforms, safeguards, or limits of any kind.

Congress this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday, will vote on a renewal of Section 702 of FISA, which grants the NSA the power to spy on certain communications of American citizens without a warrant. Although it appeared that there was bipartisan support for finally imposing some limits and safeguards in the wake of years of documented abuses, Trump’s demand on Tuesday — that all House Republicans unite to renew the spying powers with no limits — raises serious doubts about whether any reform is now possible.

Section 702 of FISA has a nefarious genesis. And since its enactment in 2008, it has had a truly bizarre history of being renewed by Congress and the White House in the most confounding yet revealing ways.

After 9/11, the Bush administration — for the first time in American history — ordered the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens without the warrants required by the law and the Constitution. They did so by eliminating the requirement that forces the NSA, when spying on foreign nationals, to immediately stop spying once it becomes apparent that they were listening to Americans on phone calls or reading their emails.

Instead, Bush-Cheney — in secret, and in violation of the clear terms of the law — ordered the NSA to keep listening and keep reading even if they knew they were spying on Americans without warrants. (Warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. A core purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to require warrants before the government can spy on American citizens.)

The FISA Act was first enacted in 1978, and a core purpose was to require warrants for all NSA spying on American citizens after the Church Committee revealed extensive spying abuses aimed at Americans. During the War on Terror, several NSA whistleblowers — including Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and others — came forward when they discovered that the NSA had violated what they were taught was the core taboo of the U.S. deep state: not directing its vast power on foreign adversaries but instead turning its power inward on Americans.

(I wrote my first book in 2006, devoted exclusively to the Bush-Cheney NSA scandal and the illegality of this warrantless domestic spying, and wrote another book in 2013 on my work with Snowden, showing how NSA spying had become virtually ubiquitous under Obama. The attack on core constitutional privacy has been a focus of mine for two decades precisely because of the severity of its erosons.)

The revelations of this post-9/11 NSA domestic spying program in 2005 caused a major public scandal, presaging the much more extensive revelations from the Snowden archive. Americans are taught from a young age that a defining trait of our government is that it cannot spy on us — on our actions, our papers, our conversations, our emails — without warrants.

But rather than punish those who spied on Americans with no warrants, Congress instead acted to retroactively legalize this warrantless domestic spying in 2008 by enacting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (when doing so, Congress also, for good measure, voted to retroactively immunize the large telecom companies that had allowed the U.S. government to illegally spy on Americans; at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, I covered a party that AT&T lobbyists threw for the “Blue Dog Democrats” to thank them for this retroactive immunity). Section 702 basically permitted the NSA to continue spying on Americans’ conversations when talking to targeted foreign nationals, even when no warrants were obtained.

So controversial were the Section 702 spying powers that, in 2008, Congress…

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