5/7/26: Billionaire Says Tax The Rich Is A Slur, Epstein Alleged Final Note, Glenn Greenwald On ADL & Animal Abuse

25:31What percent truthful was he, Dean Comer? It's like, remember when Andrew Schultz interviewed Trump and Trump was like, I'm mostly truthful? Andrew was like, what do you mean mostly? Anyway. All right. What do we have standing by? Glenn Greenwald? Yeah. Let's get to it. Owning a home is full of surprises. Some wonderful, some not so much. And when something breaks, it can feel like the whole day unravels. That's why HomeServe exists. For as little as$4.99 a month, you'll always have someone to call. A trusted professional ready to help, bringing peace of mind to 4.5 million homeowners nationwide.

26:05For plans starting at just$4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com. That's homeserve.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between$4.99 to$11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. So, guys, we have a new annual report from the ADL on alleged anti-Semitic incidents. We can put E4 up on the screen. This is their audit of anti-Semitic incidents in 2025. According to them, the number has gone down since 2024, still remains elevated, and they say the number of violent incidents has increased. Joining us now to break down the import of this report is Glenn Greenwald, independent journalist and publisher of the Glenn Greenwald Substack, which, of course, we recommend you guys all subscribe to.

26:49Great to see you, Glenn. Good to see you. Great to be with you guys. Yeah, of course. So let me kick us off with this segment with Jake Tapper and Jonathan Greenblatt explaining this report and how they defined, quote-unquote, anti-Semitic incidents in this report. And then we also have our own little slideshow we can pull up of the nature of some of these alleged incidents. This is E9, guys. Let's go ahead and take a listen. How did you define an anti-Semitic act? I mean, if somebody criticizes the government of Israel, is that anti-Semitism? What was the way that you defined it? Well, the ADL has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in a systematic way, Jake, for 46 years.

27:28We have a very rigorous methodology. An anti-Semitic incident is defined by an act like harassment, vandalism, or violence directed at an individual or an institution because of its Jewish identity or connection to the Jewish people. So pro-Palestinian activism is not anti-Semitic. Criticizing the state of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic. But wishing violence against all Zionists or Israelis or Jews, that's anti-Semitism. saying Free Palestine marching down the street is not anti-Semitic. Screaming Free Palestine at elderly people walking into a synagogue is anti-Semitic. So, you know, to a certain degree, time, place and manner really is important here.

28:16But let me note, ADL looks at this and we found in 2025 that more than half of the anti-Israel demonstrations were an anti-Semitic at all. And we didn't count them. In fact, we don't count most of the things that are reported to us, only if we can ascertain with certainty that there was a motive, again, to marginalize, intimidate, or threaten people because of their faith. Your reaction, Glenn? All you have to do is look at the data set that the ADL produced as part of this report to see that everything Jonathan Greenblatt just said is basically, at best, deceitful, if not outright lying. There are all sorts of incidents where, as part of anti-Israel protests, meaning protests against what they've done in Gaza or what they're doing in Lebanon or what they do more broadly with the treatment of Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank, where if you say free Palestine, if you say from the river to the sea, if you say globalize the Intifada, that automatically goes into the category of anti-Semitic incidents no matter where you're saying it, how you're saying it, at whom you're directing it, you can just go through the data set.

29:28I think, I hope you guys have some of these. Yeah, we can pull E5 up, guys, and we can go through. I'll read off a few of these to give you guys a sense of some of the nature of the incidents here. So a Jewish public figure received anti-Semitic harassment from a user on X who accused them of being involved with the assassination of Charlie Kirk and being a foreign agent. That was one alleged incident here. An Israeli flag was moved from a locker and a, I like this, potentially anti-Semitic flag was placed across from it at Syracuse University. Let's go to the next one here that we have. At an anti-Israel rally organized by groups including Pal Auda, Indivisible, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, protesters displayed messages including Zionist F off.

30:09Let's see the next one. An individual wearing a Palestinian flag harassed people participating in a pro-Israel march saying, free America from the chains of Israel, hell, free America, and you are propaganda. I'm not sure what is the problem with that one. Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College posted a message on Instagram attacking Hillel, writing, Hillel is not a student group, as it claims, but an active participant in genocide. The post also targeted two Jewish students by name who had served and volunteered with the IDF. So those are some of the types of incidents. As you can see, there are many incidences that were reported here, some under harassment, some under vandalism, and some under overt violence.

30:50Some of them are genuinely, you know, things that are terrible, like assaults and things of that nature. Although I also have to say, because the ADL has so beclowned themselves and undermined their credibility, you have to look at those and be like, well, did this really happen? Did it really happen in the way that they're presenting it? Right. Even the assaults, which generally are what people think about when you hear about hate crimes, like anti-Semitic hate crimes, racist hate crimes. I think, you know, if you look at the bar graph, you will see the drastic number of these kinds of incidents where people are expressing political views, not aimed at Jews, aimed at the IDF, aimed at Israel, aimed at Israel defenders, aimed at the ideology of Zionism, which is not the same as Jews.

31:32There are huge numbers of Jews, huge numbers of them, who don't believe in Zionism, don't believe in the apartheid state of Israel, don't believe in the moral justice of committing genocide in Gaza or stealing land from Syria and Lebanon and the rest. So it's all done with a conflation. Now, of course, you can find some genuinely anti-Semitic incidents. And under the assaults category, even if you were to credit the ADL, which would be very foolish to do in light of what we know about them, but even if you were to credit all the assaults that they counted as actual anti-Semitic assaults, it numbers in like the low hundreds, like 160 or 200 or something like that, which, you know, I'm not saying should be dismissed, but is far from the sort of epidemic they're trying to depict.

32:14And I think the context here is so critical, which is that there is a very well documented and rather still rapidly accelerating collapse of support for Israel in the United States and throughout, more broadly, the democratic world. and the solution that they've embraced, the only one that they can really think about is to equate protest against Israel or even opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. We saw that in the encampments on college, which were all deemed basically intrinsically anti-Semitic, even though they were filled with Jews and led by Jews and all kinds of Muslims who only had a problem with Israel's destruction of Gaza.

32:52And then also the kind of more, the broader institutional imperative, these kinds of groups, If they're a group aimed at injustice acts, they have an inherent interest, an institutional interest in depicting acts as grave of a problem as possible. And that's what really is going on here. Yeah. And one case, what drives me crazy is, you know, it's one thing to label something anti-Semitic, but it's another to use the instrument of the law against them. Can we put E7 up here on the screen? This was a case, Glenn, I'm sure you're familiar with, where this Florida International University student, Gabriela Saldana, was arrested for wanting Israel's Netanyahu, what they say, to drop bombs on the school event.

33:30What it really was is a joke in a WhatsApp group of 215 students where she said, Netanyahu, if you can hear me, drop some bonbons for us Capstone students in Ocean Bank Convocation Center. In bond court, they said she also wrote, there's going to be a bomb in the Ocean Bank Center. It was going to be Jonathan's fault. In reference to another student in the chat, she appeared before a judge and was literally not only arrested, but we learned from her, according to her, she made contact with our team, that the charges have gone ahead and been filed or continue to be in the court case against her.

34:04Now, we're going to have a GoFundMe link down in the description, but this is beyond the ADL's weaponization of the term anti-Semitism, to extend it further. This is the state of Florida or many other jurisdictions across the United States using these types of incidents to weaponize the law against our own citizens. In this case, a joke, but in often cases, protests against the government of Israel. Yeah, look, I'm somebody who obviously has advocated or not obviously, but I have advocated for free speech and a pretty aggressive and robust one might even say absolutist version of free speech for decades versus a lawyer and now as a journalist.

34:40And there have been many threats unrelated to Israel or ADL, the ADL-type groups, over the years. But at the moment, far and away, the greatest threat to free speech, both in the United States and more broadly in the democratic world, are laws that are being passed designed to ban or limit or punish or even outright criminalize all kinds of criticisms about Israel by conflating those with anti-Semitism and then kind of pushing them into the hate speech laws that have been promulgated all throughout the democratic world. And this, thankfully, we have the First Amendment in the United States, which makes it more difficult.

35:17But the very first agenda item, seemingly, of the Trump administration was to figure out ways to weaponize the law, to punish Israel critics as anti-Semites, imposing broadened hate speech codes on our college campuses. And then you have all these state governors, often red state governors, but not always, who have been promulgating all sorts of laws designed to punish and limit how much you can criticize Israel in the United States. It is a grave problem from a free speech perspective. And the way in which the ADL is manipulating this report is exactly the underlying framework for how it's done.

35:52I would just quickly add, you know, this was sort of the excesses of the woke movement and the fallout of BLM and Me Too, that even a lot of its original supporters felt uncomfortable with how far it went. And the American right was apoplectic. And I thought they had legitimate grievances. And now basically the primary tactic of at least the pro-Israel faction of MAGA and the American right is to go around screaming bigotry and anti-Semite and racist and everybody who disagrees with them, and then going further and using these institutional and even legal mechanisms to punish and stifle it. It's remarkable to watch.

36:27They have no self-awareness. Well, and I think they're probably, I mean, if you really want to fuel anti-Semitism, how about we pass a bunch of suppressive authoritarian style laws and institute a government-wide crackdown on any criticism of Israel while simultaneously insisting that Israel is inextricably linked with the Jewish people and that every Jew is aligned with Israel and that attacks on Israel and attacks on all Jewish people. Like that is a surefire way to increase anti-Semitism. So I think Jonathan Greenblatt and his ilk have done more to stoke actual genuine anti-Semitism than virtually anyone else in this country.

37:05I could not agree more. You know, it's a human impulse to want to be free in terms of how what you can think and what you can say. And it's been documented over many centuries. Obviously, some cultures deprioritize it, others. But all of us have that instinct. And it's an especially American ethos. Like, I think we all just instinctively have this kind of backlash or anger effect when we're told we can't say certain things or certain topics are off limits. I do think there was backlash from the kind of excesses and free speech suppression in the name of racism or, you know, homophobia and transphobia and misogyny and the like.

37:41And I think we're seeing that now. But, you know, the irony, Crystal, is that under these new hate speech laws that the Trump administration forced our leading universities to accept this IHRA expanded definition of anti-Semitism. One of the new definitions of anti-Semitism is you can't conflate Israel and Jewish people. So if Israel does something, you can't say, oh, look, the Jews are committing genocide. That is actually anti-Semitic to attribute to all Jews with the state of Israel, the government of Israel do. And yet they do this all the time. This is the whole foundation for what they're doing is to say, if you criticize Israel, it means you're criticizing, quote unquote, the Jews.

38:20They're the ones constantly conflating it because that's a prerequisite for being able to characterize Israel criticism and anti-Israel activism as anti-Semitism. so they punish it when it's done by their adversaries or their enemies, and then they turn around and embrace exactly that formulation when it's in their interest to do so. It's so crazy. We're watching this to the government level. Can we put E2 up there on the screen? So there's this recent incident in New York City where the Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dillon, has now announced that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is going to investigate this protest that happened at a synagogue in New York City.

38:58Now, if I put it that way, it may sound bad. But when we dig a little bit further into what exactly was going on, can we put E3 up there on the screen? This was at a synagogue in New York City, the Park East Synagogue, where a person who was able to go to the event saw that there were properties that were being advertised, not necessarily for sale in that jurisdiction, but for being advertised to invite American Jews to make Aliyah to Israel where properties, in some cases, available in the West Bank were being sold or being told them that they could go and they could go and live there. A very, very different event than the way it was initially sold is just a protest against a synagogue.

39:43And in this case, Glenn, these protesters were clearly going and protesting against this advertisement of land available in the West Bank. And now the Civil Rights Division is saying protesting that, which even the New York Times and others who, when they cover this, are usually acknowledged as illegal. That's how they refer to the West Bank properties. The civil rights division of our government is going after protesters for sales of that type of land and property in the West Bank currently in Palestinian land. I mean, this is the lie at the heart of everything that this whole campaign of deceit is rest on is to pretend that people who are protesting Israel or people who are protesting stealing of land in the name of Zionism are somehow targeting Jews for being Jews.

40:33Again, this was the lie at the heart of the smear campaign against the student protesters, that these people were supposedly harassing Jewish students, not letting Jews pass, when in reality these camps were full of Jews, of Jewish organizers, of Jewish leaders who were leading in many cases and certainly participating in these anti-Israel protests. They weren't targeting Jews. They were targeting the ideology that says America should pay for and finance and arm the genocide in Gaza. I know you guys interviewed them. I interviewed tons of students on my show. At supposedly the most anti-Semitic encampment, which is at Columbia, they had Shabbat dinner every Friday night because there were so many Jews.

41:12They had, you know, dinners for every kind of religion, including Shabbat dinner every Friday night. And this is the same thing. Nobody remotely honest thinks that that protest was about targeting a synagogue because it's a synagogue. As you say, they were protesting what the U.S. government for decades under both parties has said is a direct threat to national security, which is Israel annexing more and more of the West Bank, which prevents a two state solution, which destroys America's ability to operate safely and in its interest in the region. And now as an American citizen, you can't go and protest the seizure of land, the stealing of land, the selling of land, simply because you happen to put it in a synagogue, which is exactly why they put it there, so that it looks as though they're protesting a synagogue, rather than protesting this policy of theft.

42:03Yeah, which is so disgusting, the strategy there to use a synagogue as sort of like a shield, you know. A human shield. A building shield, I guess. A religious shield. Yeah, exactly. In order to, oh, look at these mean protesters. They just hate Judaism. It's like, no, they hate that you're selling illegal stolen land. How about that? But that gets left out of almost all of the coverage or it's buried. Sagar was looking at the New York Times article and the way that, you know, in the headline in the subhead, they don't mention anything about West Bank, illegal land sales. You have to read in before they even mention it.

42:34And then they use this, you know, sort of bullshit, wishy-washy language. Oh, in most places around the world, they consider this to be illegal. So, I mean, the way that the liberal media has helped to, you know, create enough runway for this genocide against Palestinians to occur is a whole separate topic altogether. other. I want to turn to these stories, two different stories, but let's start with the bill that passed the House that's made it into the farm bill, which enforces, requires federal government mandated cruelty against pigs in particular, and could put F2 up on the screen. And Glenn, you can explain this certainly better than I can, but California, among other states, had passed some legislation saying, listen, what we do to these animals is horrific enough.

43:21at least we can require that they're in a cage large enough where they can turn around. This bill that's already passed through the House and now heads to the Senate says, no, we're not going to allow states to carve on even this level of humanity towards these highly intelligent animals. So can you give us a little bit of the background here and what this bill would actually mandate? Yeah, I read an article in 2017 for The Intercept where there was this case where animal activists went into Smithfield farms where they have tens of thousands of pigs held in the most nauseating conditions you can possibly imagine.

43:57And they rescued two little piglets who are basically on the verge of death, obviously not stealing from Smithfield in a monetary way. These pigs had no monetary value. They were going to die. But symbolically to kind of personalize the pigs and to show what their conditions were. And the FBI went on a nationwide hunt in order to find these two piglets. They went into refuge, refuges and shelters, and they like clip parts of the pig's ears to do a DNA test to try and find these two piglets and then prosecute the activists because they're working at the behest of this gigantic factory farm industry that's led by Smithfield Farms, which is owned in large part by by the Chinese.

44:36But even before that, it's a complete bastardization of farming values. They, as you were, you were showed a picture of what's called a gestation crate where the female pigs are put into this tiny crate where they cannot turn around. There's no space for them to turn around. And they live like that their whole life. They're impregnated. They have babies. The babies are taken away from them. After the minimal amount of time, they often step on them. They don't see them. They go insane. They actually start biting through the metal cages and losing all their teeth because I have a small farm with a bunch of farm animals.

45:07and pigs are as intelligent as dogs, as sentient, and probably more emotionally complex. And what they are above all else is extremely social animals. It's just like if you put a human being in prolonged isolation of solitary confinement, they're going to go crazy because you've deprived them of what they need as human beings, which is interaction with others. Same with these pigs, but it's done on a massive scale. And so a lot of states, and it's happened in Europe and elsewhere around the world, has said, no, we're not saying we're going to be vegan. We're not going to stop eating meat, but there's a level of sadism and cruelty and torture that we won't tolerate.

45:42And these states, democratically elected, it was a referendum in California, others as well. The Biden administration challenged it, tried to get the Supreme Court to overturn these animal rights, these animal abuse laws in California and elsewhere. The Supreme Court upheld it. And so now the industry is using their control over the Congress and the Senate with their money to basically ban what voters enacted, saying we don't want in our state to consume products that are a byproduct of the most sickening torture you could possibly imagine. And is really all of this, Glenn, just at the behest of corporate profit?

46:15Is that the entire drive behind it? Because it doesn't even seem fathomable, you know, that you could be against something like this, unless I guess it's what, X more sense in order to moderately care for these animals. Is that really the drive behind this entire thing? yeah yes i mean you know farming for so long has been based on organic and natural values you have free-range chickens and farm and cows and uh and and and pigs this is total industrialization of the process that disregards what the bible and religions teach is the inherent value of god created animal life the most majestic one of the most majestic things we have on the planet it's designed to take it and completely objectify it solely for corporate profits that's the only reason why they don't give pigs a little bit more space before they're slaughtered so that they can at least turn around and have like a minimally decent life on their way to the slaughterhouse it is all about corporate profits and then they have these lobbyists and unfortunately there's no countervailing lobby that is for say animal welfare the interesting thing is that this has become genuinely bipartisan i think like dogs are kind of the gateway into understanding the cruelty to our animals.

47:29And there have been now bipartisan efforts and genuine bipartisan movements to curb the worst of animal cruelty. It might run into problems in the Senate, but, you know, I've watched Congress long enough to know that you never place your bets against industry lobbyists. They always seem to get their way. Yeah. And they frame it as they call it the Save Our Bacon Act. And so they go after, you know, Americans love a bacon. Oh, bacon's going to be too expensive if we don't, you know, torture these pigs a little bit more. And so I know that's the way I remember when California was looking to pass this legislation, that was the way that they framed it, the sort of fear mongering tactics that they used, using, you know, I mean, frankly, using the like exploitation desperation of the American people and their sensitivity to prices against them in, you know, on behalf of this large industry.

48:16I also wanted to get your reaction to So we can put F4 up on the screen to the rescue of this 1 ,500 roughly beagles. I mean, these images are just like, how can you not be moved by these adorable little dogs being, you know, getting to go outside and run around after being subjected to horrific conditions and being used for tests. Glenn, give us a little bit of the backstory here, if you could, about the way activists were able to, at great cost to themselves, were able to secure the significant victory. Yeah, you know, it's such a feel-good story, but it also has so many lessons for how activism can actually succeed.

48:56I think sometimes we get jaded. I even just said like, hey, I wouldn't put my money against, you know, industry groups in Congress. But this is actually a success story, but it's so long in the making. The first time I wrote about Ridgeland Farm was 2017 or 18. And the only reason I knew was because there were these activists kind of working, on the fringes about an issue that hadn't gotten much attention. And if you looked at what happened with Ridgeland Farms, they breed dogs into the world, purposely beagles, because it's a very docile, loving, trusting breed of dogs. That's purposely what they want in their labs.

49:28And they sell them for these absolutely sadistic, gratuitous experiments to research facilities or corporations that are funded by the U.S. government. And while they're bred, they're kept in these metal cages, these just completely overcrowded metal cages. They never see the light of day. These dogs that just got released, it's the first time they went outside. It's the first time they were actually on ground. They had spent their whole lives in metal cages. And these activists, you know, there's Wayne Sung, who's with the DXA, the Direct Action Everywhere group that does civil disobedience. They're the ones who rescued those pigs that I mentioned before, they have been working to get Ridgeland Farms closed.

50:09And what finally enabled them to do it was that there's been these bipartisan groups like White Coats Waste that have said, hey, conservatives, you don't want your government money funding hideous animal experimentation that have said to the left, you love animals, you want to protect animals. And it kind of became this bipartisan movement because they weren't picky or ideologically pure about who their allies would be. They just wanted to shut this facility. And finally, it's getting shut. But it's saving thousands of these beagles who would have been destined for the most horrific animal experimentation.

50:40And they breed them into the world just for experimentation. And then they kill them after. So that's their whole lives. Ridgeland is finally being shut down. But it's still a massive industry of dog experimentation that this kind of symbolizes how to do successful activism both in this area and I think more broadly. Yeah. And, you know, just to make it bigger than animal welfare, because that's a key component of this, This fits with generally, I think if you were to ask RFK Jr. of two years ago, maybe three years ago, he would have been vehemently opposed to things like this. It fits also with some of the betrayals from the Trump administration on the Maha movement of glyphosate and of the prioritization of corporate profit, let's say here in terms of pigs and animal welfare.

51:21But generally, one of the more inspiring parts, you know, you would think originally of Maha was like, OK, let's actually take our environment seriously. What we put into our body is not just good for us, but also in terms of regenerative agriculture. Like many of these things have just not come to pass, not only not come to pass, but have been outright rejected by this administration, Glenn. And I know I'm just curious, you know, what you what you make of that. But at the same time, I do think there's more heightened awareness because of the work that you've done, activists and others on these things.

51:51I'm just curious how you're thinking about it. I mean, if you enter these facilities, which I have done, you'll obviously be shocked by the animal cruelty, but it's also physically repulsive. Like the smell, the conditions of these animals that then are fed into people's bodies. They use massive amounts of antibiotics just to kind of mass treat these animals to prevent them from dying before they can sell them. And this mass use of antibiotics has a very high risk of creating antibiotic-resistant infections that can be a gigantic threat to the human species. They dump this waste, this disgusting, repulsive, these conditions go into poor neighborhoods where they just dump enormous amounts of waste without any real studies of what the impact is.

52:32There's all kinds of psychological effects on the workers who are required to just slaughter and devalue human life. They come out with all kinds of trauma, all kinds of psychological issues. It's a multi-level sickness that this industry is producing. But of course, the problem again is, you know, our Congress operates based solely on money. And they are a very well-funded group. If I could just quickly tell you like just one short antidote, which is in places like Montana and Idaho, which typically have a kind of libertarian free market ideology, like you can do what you want, the government shouldn't tell you.

53:08They just passed bills that ban lab-grown meat, which was the alternative for people who still want to eat meat but don't want to consume animal products. And in other words, people who want to buy alternatives to factory farm meat are now banned from doing so because these industries are so powerful that they got the legislatures and the governors to ban their competitors. Even though these are free market states of consumer choice and the like, that's the level of power that we're talking about. Incredible stuff. Glenn, thank you so much. Thanks for breaking down all of these issues for us. We really appreciate it.

53:40It's great to see you. Happy to be with you guys. Thanks. Talk to you soon. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Friday show for everybody tomorrow. See you then. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.