Coleman Hughes and Glenn Greenwald Debate Israel’s Influence on Washington

28:14Coleman Hughes:Like, as I said to Dave Smith, the entire pro-Israel lobby, not just AIPAC, the entire pro-Israel lobby was outspent in terms of lobbying Congress during the Obama years by the dentistry lobby. And it's approximately, you know, we're talking one 1.5 % of the dollar spent lobbying Congress as the lobbies we really think of as big, like big pharma, big oil, big tobacco. Relatively small. It can get things at the state level. It's not nearly powerful enough to get us involved in all these wars that people like to blame on it. And that's basically how I see the issue. issue. So let me just, you know, in terms of the last point about APAC, I mean, I think we are going to frame it as binaries, like either APAC is all powerful and omnipotent and every single time they snap their fingers and want something, they instantly get all of it.

29:09Or the alternative is APAC is really kind of weak. And I think it's kind of a disservice to the discussion. I think the truth lies in the middle, but far, far closer to the end of the spectrum where they're extremely powerful. And I want to just note two things about this. One is to just talk about AIPAC is to omit huge influences on our political system with people who are aligned not just with the agenda of AIPAC, but the agenda of the Israeli government, a foreign government. So I'll just, you know, one example, one obvious example is Miriam Adelson spent a hundred, a hundred million dollars on Trump's re-election campaign in 2024.

30:00Throughout that whole campaign, Trump was appearing at events with Miriam Adelson. And he was saying things like, I'm going to make, my presidency is going to be about making America great again and making Israel great again. He received massive amounts of money from the Adelsons in 2016 as well. And he himself said that by far the people who visited the White House more than anybody else, other than people who worked there, were the Adelsons. Sheldon Adelsons was alive at the time. Mary Madelson, who was an Israeli citizen who naturalized when she married him later in life, would accompany him.

30:38And Trump himself said they would come in. They would not ask for anything about Americans. They wouldn't ask for anything for the United States. They would only ask for things for Israel. And I gave them every single thing that they asked for, including things that he said, I even went further than they thought I could go. Like they raised with me the issue of the Golan Heights. I didn't know what that was. So I called in my advisor, David Friedman, a longtime extremist pro-Israel Zionist. he gave me a five-minute tutorial on the Golan Heights. And afterwards, I said, give the Golan Heights to Israel.

31:11And then we did. So Trump himself has talked about the extreme power of not AIPAC, but pro-Israel, the pro-Israel lobby. And I should also add to this, sometimes I think people trying to pick this view about the pro-Israel lobby being extremely powerful as some kind of weird fringe conspiracy theory on the internet, similar to like 9-11 theories or JFK things where people just debate in this conspiracy world. I can show you statements from endless numbers of people who ran the government, like American presidents or people who got very close, who talked, I mean, there are all kinds of tapes with Richard Nixon talking about how the Jewish lobby in the United States is trying to dictate and often does dictate his foreign policy.

31:56He said the same once he left in interviews. Barry Goldwater, who was the conservative hero who was nominated in 1964, in an interview in 1988, basically went on and on and on. And he was Jewish, Barry Goldwater, about how Israel and its loyalists in the United States run American foreign policy. These are people at the highest levels of government who have had all kinds of experience in running foreign policy. And they understand very well that the influence of this lobby is unlike any others. Now, there are a lot of other very powerful lobbies. You name several of them, like the pharmaceutical lobby, obviously Wall Street.

32:32These are extremely powerful lobbies. They write bills. The difference, though, is that this is a lobby devoted to the interest of a foreign country. And there's nothing that remotely competes with the power of the pro-Israel lobby in terms of lobbies that come from other countries. And that's the reason why it gets so much attention. It's just such a bizarre phenomenon of American political life, such a unique phenomenon that politicians in both parties so frequently travel there, talk about it, pledge loyalty to it, talk about how important it is that it remains a staple. We hear all the time that Republicans, Democrats can't agree on anything.

33:07Go look at pro-Israel resolutions and how they fare. Marjorie Taylor Greene talked about this, Thomas Massey. Every other week, they're voting on Israel. When those votes come up, it's like 413 to eight. For decades, it's been like that. One of the only issues that doesn't produce polarization in Washington. And that's beyond getting to the question of why we entered the war in Iran and what Joe Kent said, what Marco Rubio said, what a lot of it, even leaving that aside, I'm just telling you that this is a view that has been expressed by the most mainstream American politicians for a long, long time.

33:40And I think it's safe to presume that it's not based on nothing. Yeah.

33:44Coleman Hughes:So we'll get to Iran in a second, but I want to provide a counterpoint to this because, okay, so let's, let's talk about Trump and then let's talk about the Israel lobby in general. So Trump, my model of Trump is that he, this is a president who got famous firing people on television. He basically tells anyone who's pushing him in a direction he doesn't already want to go to fuck off. It's why he has the highest, he must have the highest turnover rate of any cabinet in recent memory. and um and and so his reasons for being like by far the most aggressively pro-israel president in in history i think he's uh you know quite often how lobbies work is they they take someone who basically already agrees with the issue and then they they give you a nudge right that which is why the nra can't successfully lobby the democratic party with all their money much more than the Israel lobby spends to become like pro-gun, right?

34:46Coleman Hughes:Because what they do is they nudge Republicans that are pretty much already agree with them to be on the margin more amenable to their policy preferences. So there's one place to stand to just understand what lobbying can do and what lobbying can't do. Even the mega lobbies like the tobacco lobby outspent the Israel lobby 10x during the first George Bush presidency, but they couldn't even prevent the smoke-free laws from going into effect. And so then let's step back. Like, think about the Golan Heights. You mentioned Trump recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. This is something that any U.S.

35:30Coleman Hughes:president could have done at any point, you know, for almost 40 years prior to Trump. Like, five presidents in a row could have woken up one day and said, I'm going to recognize, said the magic words with no input from Congress. They would have unilateral authority to do it. And they didn't. And the Israel lobby couldn't secure that victory, though it would have meant a lot to Israel and wouldn't have meant that much to a U.S. president, right? Why was Trump the one to do it? Is it because the lobby has more influence over him? Or is it because Trump is a singular figure who he likes to do these really risky, bold things?

36:14Coleman Hughes:I think he likes Israel for a lot of reasons that just have to do with his own beliefs. And he's certainly not the there's no evidence that he is uniquely susceptible to this pressure from the Israel lobby that isn't circular. right? If you're going to say, okay, he does all this stuff that the Israel lobby views as beneficial to Israel, well, Trump also views it as beneficial to America. You can disagree with that. You can say, I hate Trump's wars. I hate that he did that. But in Trump's mind, there's no evidence that he doesn't view these policies as a win-win. You look back - How did the Wallen Heights help the US?

36:54Coleman Hughes:Well, I don't know. But there's a very important distinction between you and I might not think it helps the U.S., but Trump likes what it signals for whatever reason. He likes to back winners. He's a really weird guy in a lot of ways, right? But let me back up. And we have to include in the data set of this analysis all the times where the Israel lobby or pro-Israel interests have wanted something very strongly and not gotten it. The Golan Heights is only one example, and there was very low barrier to any president doing that, and they weren't able to secure it. Another example is in 2002, Condoleezza Rice writes in her memoir, Bush gave his famous Palestine speech, not that famous, but 2002.

37:41Coleman Hughes:And they sent the Israelis a courtesy copy. And he was going to call for two states, which they didn't have a problem with, but he was going to call the new state Palestine, which they did have a problem with. So they call Condoleezza Rice, say, you can't do this. And Condoleezza's like, what do you mean we can't do this? Fuck off. and then say, okay, okay, just add one word to the speech, please. Just call it New Palestine instead of Palestine. And Condoleezza was like, what are you talking about? We're not giving it to you for approval. I'm giving it to you as a courtesy. They couldn't even get the president to add one word to his speech, but we're supposed to believe they can get us into multiple wars.

38:17Coleman Hughes:They wanted us to bomb Syria's nuclear reactor. Bush didn't want to, so he said no. And so JCPOA is obviously the biggest example. The lobby pulled out the full force of their alleged power to stop the JCPOA, but they couldn't do it. And so you have to include all of these in the data set of your assessment of the lobby's supposed power. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the first discussion that we had about censorship and in order to shield Israel, where you presented counter examples. And, you know, they were quite isolated examples. And I said, look, if I were arguing that, you know, there is an absolute bar on criticizing Israel, those would be good counter examples.

38:58but just it would be like someone says, hey, there's a lot of censorship of COVID dissidents going on, which there clearly was. And then I would say, no, there aren't. Here's a YouTube channel that I can find where people are saying that Fauci is a criminal and they're not being censored. And here's a newspaper that ran an editorial once that said that the World Health Organization seems to be politically motivated in abandoning the science and they didn't get punished. So what censorship are you talking about? And these things are not either or binary, yes or no. So let's just take that trajectory that you pointed out.

39:32I do agree that the Iran deal that Obama signed is a counterexample where an American president did something that the bulk of the Israel lobby and certainly Israel opposed. So I'm certainly not arguing that AIPAC or the pro-Israel lobby is omnipotent. But look at President Obama as an excellent example, because you want to isolate Trump as kind of idiosyncratic or, you know, just kind of his own thing. You know, as I said, you can go back and see all sorts of figures, you know, including Richard Dixon and Barry Goldwater and even Harry Truman talking about the pressures of what had been the Jewish lobby is now a much bigger lobby for Israel because it includes a ton of evangelicals as well have been convinced that the Bible directs them to support the Netanyahu government or whatever the government of the modern state of Israel is.

40:22So you have this kind of joining now. But Obama is an excellent example because even though he did sign the Iran deal, he also is his signature on the 10-year memorandum of understanding that obligates the United States to send a minimum of$4 billion every year to Israel. And while a good chunk of that is required to be spent on American defense contractors, so it's basically like a gift certificate that the American taxpayer and American worker give to Israel and say, hey, go shopping on our dime at Boeing and General Dynamics and whatever. Not anywhere near all of it is. And then on top of those costs, you have every time that the United States deploys troops in the Middle East to protect Israel, whenever it gets involved in one of its many wars, its endless wars with its neighbors.

41:09We also finance countries in the immediate vicinity of Israel to make sure that the governments and dictatorships that are there stay there because they don't really pick fights with Israel, including Egypt and Jordan, which are billions of dollars more to be added to the list, by far the biggest recipient, by far, by far the biggest recipient of foreign aid over the last 30 years is Israel. And the largesse that we constantly give to them, as I said, the obsession that American politicians have with Israel, the fact that in the recesses, they don't even go back to their own constituencies. They go back to Israel and meet with Netanyahu.

41:51And on a bipartisan basis, constantly are doing this. There's no other country that's even remotely closed. You can have countries that get a lot of American aid in spurts like Ukraine did because of the bipartisan support for their war effort against Russia. But over the last several decades, Israel stands alone on a completely different universe than any other country by far when it comes to the forced support of American taxpayers for this foreign country. Now, I agree with you entirely that even the most powerful lobbies, and again, I'm disputing this quantitative analysis you're bringing because it excludes a lot of different ways that Israel deserves influence besides just APAC or even what's called the pro-Israel lobby, but even the most powerful lobbies don't always get what they want.

42:33The tobacco company, as you just said, public opinion just got too hostile and too antagonistic to the tobacco lobby and the tobacco industry for American politicians to continue to protect it, but they had done so for decades.

42:50The ability, for example, of the gun control lobby of the NRA only to have influence in the Republican Party, that's because there are very, very well-funded gun control lobbies that shower the Democratic Party with benefits. And this is what I was getting to when I was talking about the imbalance in power. Even on American college campuses, of course, American college campuses, faculties tend to be more left-wing. And if you analyze it from that perspective, I agree with you entirely. Being a conservative on American college campuses in a lot of ways is often and significantly more difficult than being a left-wing student.

43:29But if you look at how American colleges and universities are governed, how they're funded, You know, look at Harvard, like of the last 35 years, 25 of them have been, have had Jewish presidents who have been very supportive of Israel. People like Larry Summers on the donor level, you're talking about people like Bill Ackman and all kinds of Leon Black and all kinds of hardcore pro-Israel lobbyists. And that's why, you know, in the wake of October 7th, we thought three presidents of three different Ivy League schools, actually four, fired over this issue of Israel of being insufficiently pro-Israel or not protective of enough of Jewish and Israeli students, something that you barely ever see.

44:12I mean, being a president of an Ivy League school is like life tenure. And yet you saw one after the next just fall after October 7th. There's no similar pro-Palestinian lobbying group or anti-Israel lobbying group that even remotely competes on the same level as the pro-Israel lobby does. And yes, you can definitely point to examples where Israel didn't get everything that it wanted. There were times that they were just asking for things that were a bridge too far for American presidents. But on the whole, our bipartisan government, both parties equally, are steadfastly pro-Israel. They go to speak at AIPAC.

44:46They don't speak at Palestinian groups. The aid packages reflect this. The laws that get passed, I don't want to be too dismissive of these anti-BDS laws, which you said were at the state level. yeah, like 34 or 36 states have this like shocking law that has been enforced and has affected a lot of people. And so on the whole, I think it's impossible to deny. And again, not just me or Dave Smith or like some guy on the internet, but the top people in our government for decades have all said that the Jewish lobby in the United States, now the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is incredibly powerful.

45:22Okay.

45:22Coleman Hughes:So a couple of points to make in response to this. So if I were an America first, you know, foreign policy, if I was taking the position that basically we spend too much around the world, we should be spending all that money at home, we're not getting enough in return for it. I would point out, yeah, we spend three, $3-4 billion a year default on Israel and more during wars. We spend$3-4 billion a year on our deployments in South Korea for a war that mostly hasn't been hot since 1952, halfway around the world. We spend$3-4 billion a year on our troop deployments in Europe as basically like a vestige of the Cold War for European countries that spend 1 % on their own defense.

46:15Coleman Hughes:And we're basically subsidizing their defense for them. All told, we spend, what,$60 billion to$100 billion a year on our military bases all around the world, which, you know, like if we wound them down, you can make an argument, would that money be better spent at home? Totally, you can make that argument. But I don't actually see people do that. What I see is people focusing only on the$4 billion that goes to Israel. Like a thousand to one, right? Which suggests to me it's not like a neutral concern about our financing adventurism and militarism abroad. There's something, there's some unique bias whereby people are way more obsessed with Israel than they are about the fact that we have 30 ,000 troops deployed at expense, at billion dollar expense yearly in, say, South Korea and Europe, et cetera.

47:09Coleman Hughes:And so you could critique the whole system, And I think that would be consistent. But the fact that it's a thousand one Israel makes me think something here is bespeaks of a psychological bias. And so, you know, beyond that, we can talk about the aid, obviously, four billion dollars a year. I think something like 80 percent of it comes back to American and they have to spend it in U.S. defense companies. That's a industry that employs a million Americans. We do get certain benefits from the U.S.-Israel close military ties. we get, they have, you know, besides the CIA and MI6, Mossad is one of the best intel intelligence agencies in the world.

47:47Coleman Hughes:If they detect an attack, a planned attack on the American homeland, they tell us that, right? And attacks have been thwarted as a result. They have the best missile defense in the world. We benefit from that. We benefit from that insanely good missile defense, rocket defense tech that China and Russia, therefore, doesn't get to benefit from. That's, Again, like you might not like projections of American military power, but that does enhance it. And so all told, it seems to me that the narrative that like we 0.05 % of our budget every year is so galling. And only in this one particular case, right?

48:33Coleman Hughes:No one ever talks about South Korea, Europe. That to me bespeaks that there's a huge bias underlying this argument, and it's not coming from a place of kind of neutral concern for militarism and spending abroad. All right. I have a lot to say about that. Just a few points, rather. But before I do, I just want to get clarity on what you're saying. When you use this term several times, the people who are focused on or expressing concerns about American largesse to Israel have a kind of bias is one of the words you said, a psychological bias. Like, can you, what do you mean by that? Is that like a euphemism for people are bigoted and anti-Semitic who talk about Israel or what is, what do you mean by that?

49:13Coleman Hughes:If I thought they were bigoted against Jews, I would say, I would just say that openly. I think obviously there are, like, I consider Nick Fuentes an anti-Semite, right? Because he'll literally say like anti-Semitic stuff, but you can be biased against a particular country without necessarily being bigoted against that. There's a lot of reasons you can have a cognitive bias in life. So what are the reasons besides anti-Semitism by why people are biased against Israel? I would argue, if you want my theory of it, my theory is that it has a lot to do with the sense that Israel is a country that is a part of the white Western world, and that therefore its activities in the Middle East should be judged through the prism of white people oppressing people of color, and that that is a powerful biasing lens.

50:11Coleman Hughes:It's an ideological bias. it's not i'm not accusing people of racism um but that to me explains why there would be so much more focus on israel uh that it's really like about us exercising our past demons in the western world in this sense that like whiteness and western dominance has been horrible and israel becomes representative of that that's what i mean but one of the counter examples that you gave is that we have military bases in europe especially in germany very large military bases and that these people only care about the ones in Israel, but not in Europe. If it were an issue of people being anti-white, wouldn't they be at least as concerned and angry about, if not more so, since Europeans are clearly white in a way that Jews aren't necessarily?

50:56Coleman Hughes:No, because it has to do with Israel is viewed as like an outpost of whiteness in a sea of what is like indigenous brown land that belongs to brown people, whereas Europe is where white people are from so it doesn't trigger the same psychological effect in Westerners. All right. So let me just, I'm not sure that Jews are considered white. Certainly there have been times in history, very recent history when they haven't been, including the United States. So I think people who are focused on whiteness would focus on Europe. But in any event, let me, you know, these are just theories about reading people's intentions.

51:35As far as your numbers are concerned, like you're really conflating two extremely different things by trying to compare the cost of our military bases in South Korea to the aid that we give to Israel. We're not talking about a military base in Israel. We don't have a military base in Israel. We have a military base in South Korea, and that costs money because we have to pay for the upkeep of the bases, for the payment to the troops, for whatever it is that they need. These are two completely different things. We're talking here about military aid to Israel. Automatically, every year,$4 billion goes into the coffers of the Israeli treasury.

52:07And yes, a lot of it, but not all of it is spent on American defense contractors. I don't know why the American taxpayer is forced to empty their pockets to give a gift certificate to Israel to go shopping in Boeing. But also this$4 billion is not in any sense the actual amount of money that we spend in defense of Israel. In 2024 alone, and obviously this was in large part because the Biden administration financed the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the United States Congress, on top of the$4 billion, allocated another$18 billion directly to Israel. So now you're talking about$22 billion. On top of that, the Biden administration and the Trump administration deployed massive amounts of military assets to the Middle East in order to protect Israel, including when we were shooting down ballistic missiles in the times when Iran and Israel were we're in conflict.

53:02We keep permanent military bases in the Middle East, a lot of which goes to protecting Israel. This is billions and billions of dollars more. We've lost American lives in that region, at least you could say in conjunction with Israel. I would certainly say, and a lot of other people would as well, in order to defend Israel. So the amount of money that we spend on Israel for Israel is way above$4 billion. That's like the absolute minimum number that we give automatically every year, but it doesn't include countless other costs, including the costs, like I said, for propping up dictatorships in the region that used to be anti-Israel, but now are very neutral or even pro-Israel, like Egypt and like Jordan.

53:42We pay those dictatorships and keep them propped up because they keep the peace with Israel in that region. That same with the entire Persian Gulf. We prop up those tyrannies and dictatorships as well and are encouraging them and actually have already fostered more positive relations between those tyrannies that we support in Israel. So the amount of money we spend, not just the Middle East, but on Israel, you cannot compare it to the amount of money for bases in Germany or South Korea. There are a lot of people who question, why are we, including Trump, by the way, who question, why are we have these bases in Germany?

54:18There's no real direct threat to Western Europe. Why do we need to spend all this money on Germany or on South Korea? But the Israel issue is a much different issue because the amount of the money when you add it all up is vastly different because we're ending up in a lot of wars in the Middle East, but not on behalf of Europe and not on behalf of South Korea. And so people are obviously attentive to that extremely high cost as well. And then, you know, there have been people who, like David Petraeus and a lot of other people throughout the years, including people in the Bush 41 administration, even the Bush 43 administration, certainly the Obama administration, who have said that one of the main reasons why we pay such a high cost in the Middle East, where we could do a lot of business, where we could do a lot of entrepreneurial adventures, where we could do a lot of commercial partnerships, but have been impeded from doing so because there's so much intense anti-American sentiment in that region.

55:13A major reason for that is because of the perception, obviously, the accurate perception, that we're the ones who finance and arm Israel's aggression against its neighbors and Israel's suppression of Palestinian statehood and Palestinian rights, which you also have to put into the cost of cost to the United States from having being tied at the hip to Israel in a way that like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned, we should never do. We shouldn't have these enduring alliances with foreign countries. So when you add up all the costs. And then on top of that, there's no South Korean lobby to speak of that compares with the pro-Israel lobby.

55:46There's no pro-German lobby to speak of. They're not forcing the U.S. government to keep those military bases there. The pro-Israel lobby is so visible. And just let me add one more point about why the pro-Israel lobby is so terrifying to people in Congress. It's because they have demonstrated a unique ability to remove people from Congress in a way that almost no other lobby has been able to do or has tried to do. We have reelection rates in Congress, as I'm sure you know, that compared to like the old Soviet, you know, style elections from like the early 70s under Brezhnev, like 97, 98 % reelection rate.

56:26These people stay in office for 30 years. But AIPAC has repeatedly demonstrated their ability to remove people from Congress who are too pro-Israel. They pour insane amounts of money, like incomparable amounts of money to defeat Cori Bush or Jamal Bowman and they like run these, you know, cynically recruited candidates who supposedly never, who never talked about Israel, even though that's what they're there for. And Israel has done that repeatedly is, is, is ruined the careers of all kinds of politicians for not being supposed, not being pro-Israel enough. So these things don't compare. There's so many factors to the U S's relationship that certainly aren't present for Korea, South Korea or Germany or even Europe as a whole.

57:05Coleman Hughes:Okay, you made many points there. I want to see if I can get to all of them. So first of all, if you're talking about Farah, South Korea does spend a lot of money lobbying Congress, like 200 or 300 million over the past 10 years. There was a scandal in the 70s where they were bribing Congress people precisely in their own interests. Like this happens, there are tons of lobbies. they all lobby for their own interests. It's a dirty world. You still have to prove that actually the lobbying is getting results and that there aren't simpler explanations for why people do things. When you draw this comparison between the point you made about military bases versus direct military aid, from my point of view, from the point of view of a US taxpayer, it's all dollars going out of my pocket.

57:57Coleman Hughes:I'm not sure there's a huge distinction to be made. And in fact, you can make it in the other direction. You could argue, not only does it cost us$4 billion out of U.S. taxpayer pockets to maintain 30 ,000 troops in South Korea, but it's also the troops themselves. We actually have personnel there that are in principle threatened and in peril by any kind of breakout of hostilities between North Korea and South Korea. We don't have any troops in Israel. Israel's never asked us to put our troops there. And if they did, if we did have a military base with 30 ,000 people deployed in Israel, I'm pretty sure that many people who share your viewpoint would cite that as like an escalation of our commitment.

58:41Coleman Hughes:So it can't be at the same time true that our commitment to Israel is bigger because we don't have a military base there, even though we spend the same amount of money. And again, it's worth reiterating that like something like 80 % of that money comes back to U.S. soil, either profits to weapons companies, income to the million Americans that work for weapon companies or tax on that income and that profit that goes back into the coffers. You made another point about Jordan and Egypt and how in facilitating those peace treaties, which I view those peace treaties as a good thing for the Middle East, for regional stability and so forth, that we ended up essentially paying both sides as a sweetener to help get them to sign on the dotted line there.

59:29Coleman Hughes:To me, to reframe that as like all that money is going to Israel's benefit as opposed to all of the sides, like Egypt did not benefit from its wars with Israel. Like it was it really suffered a great deal in its wars with Israel. And to get both sides to sign on the dotted line and make peace, we're actually paying for regional stability, not paying just for Israel's interests. We're paying for Egypt's interests as well. we're paying for our interest insofar as we equate our interest to stability, right? And so I think there's a way in which that gets that framing gets distorted as like yet more payments that are going to Israel's interest, which I would disagree with.

1:00:17Coleman Hughes:You may have made some other points there that I'm missing, but I do you can respond to anything you want to respond. I do, before you leave and want to get to Iran, and whether and why you think that this Iran war is fought at Israel's influence. You can put it in your own words. Yeah. By the way, I just want to say I totally empathize with what you said at the start, that when you have your own show and you invite a guest on and you kind of want to debate, it is difficult because you're playing kind of the both roles and you have to give your guests more time than you might otherwise if you're debating.

1:00:49But I think you're doing an incredibly fair job and take as much time as you want when you're responding. I'm happy about that. Just a couple of points that I just wanted to make that I didn't make earlier. On this issue of Israel and the benefits that we get, I'm not saying we don't get any benefits from that relationship, but we also pay a lot of costs from behavior that is not typically the behavior of allies. When we were doing the Snowden reporting about NSA spying, NSA documents, There were documents, and we reported on these and published them, that talked about how we give more intelligence tech and surveillance data, including about Americans, to Israel than any other government in the world.

1:01:33And yet, documents that say who are the greatest spying threats to the United States, who spies us the most, the most invasively, the most dangerously, number one on the list of surveillance threats and spying threats to the United States was Israel. we have the big case of Jonathan Pollard who spied for Israel and got extremely sensitive documents. And yet people who claim to be America first Patriots, like Mike Huckabee, and others go and meet with Jonathan Pollard and treat him like he's some sort of respectable figure or even some kind of like heroic figure, the way he's seen to be in Israel, even though he stole American secrets, some of our most sensitive ones, and gave them to a government.

1:02:16And, you know, we can debate Middle East policy and how it is in our interest to prop up dictatorships in Egypt and Jordan. I would actually argue that our tendency to prop up dictatorships is a major reason why there's so much animosity to us in that region and not just in that region, but other regions, including in Iran. But at the end of the day, Egypt and Jordan, who we give billions of dollars to to keep those sick tyrannies in place, are Israel's neighbors. They don't threaten the United States. Egypt and Jordan can't threaten the United States, but they can threaten Israel. And I'm not saying it's the only reason why we send billions to those regimes to keep peace with Israel, but it's certainly a major factor.

1:02:54Yeah.

1:02:54Coleman Hughes:So as far as the spying is concerned, yeah, I mean, the Pollard case was terrible. But this is another one of those scenarios where if I were like an intellectually honest person concerned about allies spying on allies, I would say, OK, you go looking for evidence, you will find super credible confirmed reports and leaked documents proving that France spies on us. Israel spies on us. We spy quite a bit on Japan. We spy on South Korea. All of these things are, and yeah, I guess you could debate the extent of it, right? Which the better spy agencies are going to spy better. Like the Mossad is really good at what it does and the CIA is really good and so forth.

1:03:39Coleman Hughes:And so, but the question once again occurs to me is why is it that all of this evidence for allies spying on allies in this dirty world of espionage exists. And yet I have never heard a single person ever, literally ever complain about an example of it, except for Israel spying on America. Because of how much money we give them. But what about, again, what about South Korea? South Korea has spied on us. South Korea has absolutely done this. And we're losing$4 billion a year. I mean, I showed you what the NSA document said, but you know, that, that Israel spies in this way more aggressively. There's never been a case of some like French spy in the, or spy American spy in the, in the Pentagon or the NSA handing secret documents to the, to the French on the scale that Jonathan Pollard, it's, it's just a much bigger and different scale.

1:04:32And I think the anger comes from the fact that we, we go to, we, we go to war for these country, this country, we, we deploy our military to defend Israel almost every year, billions and civilians out the door and then they steal our secrets. It's just not the behavior of an ally. There's a big difference between spying on a country and stealing its secrets.

1:04:50Coleman Hughes:Okay. Can we get to this claim that we go to war for Israel? Because this is obviously at the core of our disagreement and a lot of anger on this issue. But before we get to it, can I just clarify very quickly? When I just said we go to war for Israel, what I meant, and I do want to talk about whether we went to war for Israel in Iran and Iraq, But all I meant was when Israel has a war, we put our military in that region to defend Israel and put our service members in harm's way for Israel. I mean, that's not in dispute. That's what I was referring to there. Okay, so let's talk about the Iran war since it's what's happening now.

1:05:28Coleman Hughes:You know, I haven't actually seen you talk too much about it. I guess, I think you had a recent Tucker, but can you make the case for me based on actual evidence that we're fighting the Iran war because of Israeli influence of some kind? Yeah. So my view is not that the only reason Trump went and fought a war with Iran and attacked Iran is because of Israel, but that that was a very significant factor. And I'll start with the fact that Iran has been Israel's primary adversary in that region for decades. It has been number one on the wish list of Benjamin Netanyahu, going all the way back to the war on terror and before to lure the United States into a regime change war in Iran because of Israel's understanding that the main bulwark of resistance against its total and complete domination of that region is Iran.

1:06:22That is their only counterweight to power. It is in a lot of the eyes of a lot of Israelis an existential threat to Israel. I don't think it is, but a lot of Israelis believe it is. And if you believe it is, you're going to prioritize that as a war. I don't think anyone thinks Iran is an existential threat to the United States. You have the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to the United States last year seven times, obviously to talk about the American war against Iran that he was trying to lure the president into fighting. Of course, we did attack Iran last year in conjunction with Israel.

1:06:58We supposedly, quote, totally and completely obliterated their nuclear program in a way that we were told would mean that we wouldn't have to attack them again because that problem had been solved for a long time for the foreseeable future. And yet now, after seven visits from Netanyahu, the United States is back in a war against not our country that can existentially threaten the United States, not a country that has ever attacked our homeland. We have had terrorist attacks over the past 25 years, some very significant ones. None of them have come from Iranian terrorists or Shia terrorists. They've all come from our best friends in that region, the Sunnis and the Saudis and people who hail from that particular strain of geopolitics and religion.

1:07:43So Iran has not attacked the United States, can't attack the United States in a meaningful way. And then you have the fact, of course, that even on the question of timing and this, I think, you know, people are debating what Marco Rubio said, what Trump said, what Tom Cotton and Mike Johnson said. Everyone said in the people I just named and others that we had to go to war with Iran. When asked what the imminent threat was, the imminent threat we were told was, well, Israel was going to go to war with Iran. And they told us they're going to go to war with Iran. And we believe that once Israel did that, the Iranians would attack our military bases because of the support we give to Israel.

1:08:16And so we had to also attack preventively because of what Israel was going to do. So they, in their narrative, talk about the centrality of Israel and what it was intending to do as a major reason, at least in terms of the timing, if not the decision itself.

1:08:32Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Okay. So a few points. I think I believe in the principle of parsimony, which is to say, if there's a simple explanation for something, go for the simple explanation. Don't go for the complicated explanation with dubious evidence. You know, Donald Trump, lifelong aggressive posture towards Iran for decades, long before he was even president. He believes, as he stated on Andrew Schultz podcast. Now, I'm not saying I believe this because I haven't seen the evidence, but Trump believes that the Iranians were behind the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt that nearly killed him. And then recently we have the conviction of Asif Merchant, the Pakistani man, who is, according to what came out when the jury convicted, backed by Iran.

1:09:24Coleman Hughes:Assassination attempt that was probably targeted at Trump, potentially Nikki Haley or Joe Biden. So Trump, for sure, what we know is Trump believes Iran tried to kill him and got very close, maybe multiple times. Trump being an incredibly and unusually vindictive personality, to me, that sufficiently explains his very aggressive posture towards Iran. You combine that with the fact that he built a whole identity in the 2010s around opposing not only being a great dealmaker, obviously. He's had this identity as being a great dealmaker his whole life, but around opposing the nuclear deal, right? So he wants to get some nuclear deal that's like significantly, significantly stronger, like a zero nuclear deal with Iran, which they're not going to go for.

1:10:14Coleman Hughes:and uh that that is sufficient to explain why trump wants to take why trump sees aggressive action towards iran to um hamper not only their nuclear capabilities but their conventional missile arsenal so that they can't become strong enough to have a deterrent from us um hitting their nuclear programs in the future um all of that is like a pretty simple explanation that makes a lot of sense. It conserves a lot of the facts we know about Donald Trump's psychology and U.S. foreign policy in the past several decades. And to sort of drive right past that stop on the highway and say this is about Israel because even Marco Rubio's statement had nothing to do with the influence of the Israel lobby, right?

1:11:01Coleman Hughes:Like, let's say Marco Rubio was telling the truth there. He obviously walked it back right after, but who knows, maybe, who knows which one was a lie, right? Let's say the second one was a lie and he was telling the truth. He was not providing evidence of Israel's leverage or ability to, like, strong arm in any way Donald Trump's decision making, who was the commander in chief. He was saying, basically, we felt Israel was about to attack. We have bases in the Middle East. At that moment, it became in our interest to attack as well. That's not a point about how much Israel controls us. um and and again like i guess the framing i would also question the framing of that all of our bases in gulf states in the middle east are for israel's benefit um the you know there's one thing you could say is that they benefit israel okay well that's one fact a lot of things there's many win wins in the world there's many scenarios of mutual benefit but the gulf states that we have military bases there.

1:12:08Coleman Hughes:This is a win-win for at least in the perception of whoever in the Gulf state made those choices. It's a win-win for them too, right? So you could argue we're there for their benefit as well, right? And again, you can disagree with all of those decisions. You can say, in fact, it's not in our benefit to have all these military bases around the world. That's a totally valid claim, and you can argue for that. But what I don't think you can say is because I don't think it's in the U.S. benefit for us to have a military base in such and such a Gulf state, therefore, it must be the case that Israel is the reason why their influence in our government is the reason why we're there.

1:12:52I mean, I presume Benjamin Netanyahu got on a plane seven times last year to fly to Washington, even though he has all sorts of extremely pressing matters at home, including a major corruption scandal where he's criminally indicted, as well as numerous wars still ongoing. I presume he went to Washington seven times for a reason. And that reason was that he knew that he's going there would be able to persuade President Trump to do what Benjamin Netanyahu has been urging the United States to do for many decades in Israel's interest, which is go and commit regime change war in Iran, even though the last time we changed the regime of Iran in 1953 resulted in an absolute horror show.

1:13:32That was the reason why Iran became so anti-American in the first place, why they held our diplomats hostage when the revolution happened, because we had imposed on them a savage tyranny in the form of the Shah of Iran. And so this idea that we're going to go and repeat our same mistakes that we've been making for the last 60 years all around the world that has produced so much anti-American sentiment and so much anger and so much animosity toward us, and that it's just a coincidence that Netanyahu came seven times and that Miriam Adelson was Trump's second largest donor and all these other pro-Israel billionaires who jumped on the train at the last minute with Trump weren't pressuring him.

1:14:12I think you can never prove for certain what was in Trump's mind, but looking at all the evidence, we're now in a war that Netanyahu has wanted for decades in Israel's interest against It's a country that cannot threaten American citizens in the United States, but can certainly threaten Israel and has threatened Israel. Even the issue of ballistic missiles. You know, Trump last year in that 12-day war said that Israel was getting absolutely pummeled by Iranian ballistic missiles. So I understand from an Israeli perspective why you would want to destroy all Iranian ballistic missiles and their conventional arsenal, but they've never shot ballistic missiles at the United States.

1:14:49There's questions about whether or not they even could. and, you know, nuclear deterrence works around the world. And this, I think, is one of the main issues that we have to really consider, which is, you know, war is supposed to be a last resort. So this idea like, oh, Iran tried to kill Trump. You know, I heard that in the Iraq war. President Bush said Saddam Hussein tried to kill my dad. This is, you know, it was obvious when these claims were being circulated in 2024 that they would have the effect of trying to convince Trump, hey, look, they tried to kill you. You should go in and attack Iran.

1:15:23And apparently, I'm sure that did play a factor. But even there, why does Iran have so much animosity toward the United States? Why does Iran want to attack our military bases of the United States? Is it just because they're irrational and an apocalyptic cult and hate anybody who doesn't share their religious views? Or is it because the people in that leadership have anti-American sentiment for the same reason that people have anti-American sentiment all over the world in every continent, in every region, because we've meddled for so long in their country, we've overthrown their governments, we've imposed dictatorships on them, or maybe because Trump assassinated one of their most important military generals, one of the most beloved and well-regarded military generals in his first term, and they saw that as a fair retaliation.

1:16:08So we have to constantly ask, you know, why is all this happening? And then you'd look at the fact, I'm sure you recall this, you know, where I'm just a few years older than you, like two or three, but, you know, going back to like the first Obama administration, we were hearing from the U S security establishment from the Western security establishment, that the most important thing is that we have to extricate ourselves from the middle East and pivot to China that pivot to Asia because China is our number one competitor or adversary or enemy, depending on how you look at that. And yet, not only haven't we pivoted to Asia, we can't extricate ourselves from the Middle East.

1:16:47We're actually removing anti-missile batteries that were incredibly controversial when we put in South Korea in order to bring them over now in order to protect Israel and to protect American bases in this new Middle East war. Why can't we extricate ourselves from the Middle East, Coleman? What is it that's there that is so crucial? We're a net exporter of oil. We don't need oil from the Middle East. As Trump said, we don't use the Strait of Hormuz. All those countries would happily sell us whatever oil we wanted to buy from them, including Iran. They would love to be able to sell us oil. So it's not oil.

1:17:19There is no vital interest in the Middle East left for the United States other than Israel. And I would submit that's one of the main reasons we haven't been able to extricate ourselves from the Middle East and why, despite a president who spent decades and certainly the last 10 years running for president, vowing never to involve the United States in more regime change wars or more Middle East wars, were now involved in what arguably is the most dangerous one of them all. Trump could just end it quickly. It could end up spiraling into an escalation that he can't control. It's an extremely dangerous situation.

1:17:50And so obviously, Netanyahu thinks that his visits to Washington play a major role. The pro-Israel lobby that gave Trump so much money thinks that they're playing an influential role on behalf of Israel. And I think if you look at the kind of overall geopolitics of why we consider the Middle East so important, clearly Israel is a major factor.

1:18:15Coleman Hughes:Okay, so a couple points to make. I mean, it seems to me a lot of the evidence you're marshalling is like, it's not evidence that Netanyahu's visits actually caused a change in thinking. It's like, obviously, when foreign leaders visit America, they're always hoping to influence And they're going to, if they have a 10 % chance of influence, they're going to visit. We're the global superpower. You're still, all your work is ahead of you in proving that those visits actually did cause the influence that you're alleging they did. A mere coincidence, I mean, this is like part, I think, the core of a lot of my disagreements with what you're saying conceptually.

1:18:54Coleman Hughes:The mere coincidence of two heads of state, you know, doing something or the coincidence of, you know, Saudi Arabia came out right now and said, oh, we are so happy that Trump is finally doing this regime change in Iran. You know, we've been visiting this X many times a year. We spend, you know, whatever it is,$50 million a year on Farah lobbying Congress to be harsher on Iran. Well, all of that would be equally evidence, just as much evidence of Saudi influence behind this decision as the various points of data points you're pointing to about Israelis, right? Like, it's like, so you're still, all your work is ahead of you when you point out a coincidence of motives and goals.

1:19:49Coleman Hughes:It's really, it's like the notion of a common enemy, right? Iran has had this revolutionary government. They hate America. Let's, I'll just like grant you, I'll grant you the reason they hate America is the 1953 coup. But, okay, we agree they hate America. They also hate Israel. One is the great Satan. One is the little Satan. This is their ideology. They chant it. They teach it to schoolchildren, etc. Well, we're in a situation now where they have admitted openly, it's not like sketchy CIA intelligence and some uranium African mine or an Italian journalist. It's not like Iraq war stuff. It's like Iran has come out and said, we've enriched kilograms of uranium to 60%.

1:20:35Coleman Hughes:The IAEA, which is the neutral UN body that looks into nuclear proliferation, not an interested party like the CIA or MI6 that can be overzealous or whatever, has said, yep, the Iranians are telling the truth. They have enriched kilograms of uranium to 60%. They come out and say it on state TV in Iran. Pretty much everyone agrees, including the Iranians, that they've done this. They brag about it. there are zero examples in the history of nuclear proliferation of a state that has enriched kilograms of uranium to 60 % and then not gone on to get a bomb. There are literally zero. So if this were like India or Pakistan claiming we're at 60 and we've got kilograms, I wouldn't even believe that they didn't want a bomb.

1:21:23Coleman Hughes:Obviously, they're angling for a bomb, right? And so then the question becomes, you know, is it in the U.S. interest for Iran to go nuclear? I would argue since they're self-identified as our adversaries, it's clearly not in the U.S. interest for us to allow them to get a bomb. And if that's true, then it becomes a matter of, you know, when do you time the intervention, right? It's like, if they're at the 90-yard line, do we wait till we detect them sprinting towards the finish to weaponize a bomb? I don't think that makes sense. I mean, obviously, Americans are traumatized by the Iraq war experience where we were told there was going to be WMD Iraq.

1:22:06Coleman Hughes:We sent our boys to die, and we spent all this money, and bam, there's no WMD. It's like this was actually, I consider, a kind of psychological trauma to the American psyche. But if you actually look at the whole history of the CIA's efforts to keep tabs on nuclear proliferation around the world, they far more often have made the opposite mistake. They thought, CIA thought the Soviet Union would get a bomb in the mid-1950s. They were five years ahead of schedule. They got it in 49. The CIA was surprised in 1964 when China got a nuclear weapon. The CIA, Israel was ahead of the CIA schedule when they got a bomb in 1967.

1:22:47Coleman Hughes:India's nuclear test in the mid-70s surprised the CIA. You know, South Africa hid their entire nuclear arsenal from the CIA for 14 years successfully. That's South Africa. And obviously, the most important example was after the Gulf War, 1991, where we discover that Saddam Hussein, his nuclear program is way further advanced than any intelligence estimate had it before the Gulf War. And then in 1998, once again, the Indians tested a nuclear bomb totally surprised the CIA, right? So there are just far more examples of the CIA underestimating and not being aware that countries have made the final sprint towards a nuclear bomb.

1:23:30Coleman Hughes:We can't wait for that. okay uh so first of all you mentioned iraq and of course that does shape people's perceptions as it should because we relied into a war in the middle east based on exactly the same arguments that are being made now about iran by exactly the same people by exactly the same ideologies and so obviously it's like fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me and so people are saying, rightly so, and most Americans oppose the war, I think in large part for this reason, we don't see Iran as a real threat. And it's because not just the experience in Iraq, we've been lied to into wars by our governments continually, including in Vietnam, when we were told the Gulf of Tonkin was an incident where the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships.

1:24:20None of that turned out to be true. We were told that in Libya, that it wasn't a regime change war, it was just to protect people in Nagazi, and it turned into a regime change war that destroyed that country. There's a lot of reasons why Americans are extremely skeptical about what the U.S. government is telling them. And there's a lot of good reasons to be. As far as like evidence for Israel's role and the decision to go to war, you know, again, I mean, other than a confession in secret by Trump, where he doesn't realize he's being taped, but actually is. And I can show you a recording where Trump admits to Melania, you know what, I'm going to war, even though I don't want to, but I'm doing it for Israel.

1:24:50I can't show you smoking gun proof. It doesn't exist. But there's some pretty strong evidence. And beyond what I, everything I just said, like the Joe Kent, who was appointed by President Trump to one of the most sensitive positions in the entire U.S. government. He was the director of National Counterterrorism Center with the highest top secret clearance, resigned just last week and said Iran was never an imminent threat to us. We went to war because of Israeli influence. You can talk to people in the Pentagon up and down the U.S. government who will tell you the same thing. I'm not saying it means they're telling the truth, but it's certainly strong evidence when people at the highest levels of our government who have the most sensitive access, the most sensitive data are coming and saying that this is a war for Israel and that Iran posed no imminent threat.

1:25:36You have to at least count that as evidence. As far as Netanyahu's visits, yes, Trump and the American president will meet with leaders. You don't meet with a leader seven times. It's so off the charts. It's kind of like USA to Israel. Trump didn't meet with any other leader more than twice. And the reason is, is because Netanyahu was coming and his mission, and it's not just last year, it's been for decades. You know, you can go back to 2003 and 2004 when we were in Iraq and there were a lot of neocons saying, once we're done with Baghdad, we're moving on to Tehran. This has been at the top of the pro-Israel agenda, the Israeli agenda for many decades.

1:26:15And let me just finally address the nuclear issue because, you know, everything you said about the nuclear issue and Iran, you know, I think is very contestable. For example, Iran has the absolute right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium up to all sorts of amounts that they've never exceeded. Israel doesn't even belong to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. You want to talk about a country that has a secret nuclear weapons stash that has never been inspected, you know, start with Israel. Iran is a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and all of the inspection that entails, they agreed to massive, more intrusive inspection as part of the Iran deal where the IAA was all over the place in Iran, certifying that they weren't crossing the nuclear threshold.

1:27:03Unfortunately, that all went away once President Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal. But as far as the nuclear program is concerned, two months before Trump bombed with huge bunker busters, all three of their nuclear facilities last year, Tulsi Gabbard went to the Senate under oath and said the consensus of the intelligence community, the consensus of the intelligence community that she leads is that Iran has not tried to pursue a nuclear weapon. They're not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. There's been no decision by the government to pursue a nuclear weapon. Two months later, when Trump went and bombed those facilities and he was asked, but your own director of national intelligence said they're not even trying to get a nuclear weapon.

1:27:40He said, I don't care what she says. Okay, maybe Iran was, even though Tulsi Gabbard didn't know about it, even though she leads all the intelligences. Trump himself said, and you can go on the White House site right now, that that operation completely and totally obliterated Iran's entire nuclear program. So even if they were headed toward this danger zone before that, the US government itself, Trump himself said exactly that. It's still up on the website. And when journalists said to him, okay, so we've completely and totally obliterated their nuclear program. So that means like six months from now or a year from now, you're not going to come back and say, oh, we have to go attack Iran again because maybe we didn't totally and completely obliterated.

1:28:23He accused the people of raising that question of disrespecting our pilots and their bravery. He called it fake news. On the White House website, it still says it's fake news. Anyone who questions whether Iran has any residual nuclear capability. So suddenly out of the blue, we're going to now go again and have a war with Iran over this nuclear program that we were told eight months ago, the United States completely and totally obliterated. I mean, that's one of the reasons why a lot of people think Israel has such a significant role here because none of the government's claims beyond Israel as to why we had to go start a major war with Iran make any sense.

1:28:59And then the last issue I will say like proliferation is a big concern. All these countries have gotten nuclear weapons, including North Korea. And to me, you know, Coleman, this is like the hub of the issue. This is really the key of the issue is when the United States got nuclear weapons and then the Soviet Union got nuclear weapons and then France and the UK got nuclear weapons and looked like Brazil and Argentina wanted nuclear weapons because of the tensions between them. And it became a huge issue. We decided there's a world that we wanted to make non-proliferation a major goal of humanity.

1:29:30And that's why the nuclear non-proliferation treaty was created. Unfortunately, Israel didn't sign on to it. But I agree with you completely. It is dangerous. But this is the problem, is that we, the United States, along with Israel, but mostly the United States, has sent a signal to the world that if you are a rational leader that wants to protect your country, the only rational choice you have is to try and get nuclear weapons. Because we've created a world where if you don't have nuclear weapons, we can attack you at any time. We can invade your country and nab your president and say we had the right to arrest him like we did in Venezuela.

1:30:07We can attack you in Iraq or Libya or Syria or all over the world. But if you do have nuclear weapons, no matter how crazy you are, like North Korea, we will never mess with you. We will never, ever mess with you. And I don't blame. I think Iran made a mistake in not getting nuclear weapons and not actually making the decision, as the intelligence community said, to get nuclear weapons. So if we're worried about this threat that Iran poses, we should be asking, why is it that they supposedly pose a threat to us. And especially since war is a last resort, we should be asking that question. And there's no need for Iran to be a threat to the United States.

1:30:41I don't even think they are. And so, yes, this is not definitive proof that we did it for Israel, but it's not a coincidence that we're at war with Israel's greatest enemy and the enemy that Israel has wanted the United States to go and take out for many decades.

1:30:56Coleman Hughes:Okay, I want to address point by point. Um, you started by citing Joe Kent as, as, you know, basically the extent of the actual evidence that exists, uh, on, on Trump's motives in these actions. Joe Kent resigned. He made these allegations that Trump was influenced by the Israel lobby and so forth. Joe Kent went on Tucker Carlson in the aftermath of that and speculated that Israel was the one that tried to kill Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Now, to understand how absolutely stupid and insane that conspiracy theory is, you just have to consider what we talked about earlier of how aggressively pro-Israel Trump has been.

1:31:44Coleman Hughes:Like, he is singular in that respect. He is, is there's a town in Israel named after Trump. They like Trump much more than they like Netanyahu in Israel. They like Trump. They might damn near like Trump more than they like Ben-Gurion at this point. So the idea that Israel would have tried to kill Trump on the campaign trail, to me, tells me that something is going seriously wrong in Joe Kent's mind. I don't know if it's mental illness or something like that, some kind of paranoid tendency. but I, for that reason, I do not view him as a credible source of information alone. You add on top of that, I know damn well if I was resigning from counterterrorism, I was that high up in power and I was saying, I know for a fact that the United States president was influenced by lobbyists, that statement would be followed by a whole bunch of receipts.

1:32:42Coleman Hughes:I was in this meeting and this is the name of the lobbyist who said this, you know, Zero receipts we've gotten from Joe Ken. It's the, um, it's impossible for me to think that he has all this evidence and he's withholding it. And that in combination with, with his weird conspiracy theories makes me just totally discredit him as a source. Um, so as far as I'm concerned, there is zero credible evidence at this point that Trump made this decision because of Israel. And as an evidence-based person, I have to be like, show me the evidence. So secondly, you referenced the Tulsi Gabbard testimony last year about Iran, where she said that Iran has not made the decision to get a nuclear bomb.

1:33:24Coleman Hughes:I noticed, though, that you left out the sentence she said literally right after that, which is she said two things right after that. One, she said that Iran has the highest level of uranium enrichment in its history and that its level of enriched uranium is, quote, direct quote, unprecedented for a country without nuclear weapons. In other words, there is no purpose to have this amount of uranium enriched at this level unless you have a medium or long-term goal to get a nuke, right? And then the other thing she said, again, like within 30 seconds of the part you quoted of her testimony, is that in recent years, the taboo in Iranian politics on openly discussing pursuing nukes has weakened, which makes the pursuit of a nuke more likely.

1:34:17Coleman Hughes:And so when you put all of her comments in context, it seems like what she's saying is Iran is on the 10-yard line. They have not yet made the decision to sprint to the end zone, which is very different than saying Iran is in general not angling for a nuke, right? Right. So another thing I would say that's, I think, really important to keep in mind about Iran is, I guess, I guess two things. One is I very much question the rationality of the Iranian regime. There are many data points I can bring up. I have no reason to disbelieve the Asif Merchant jury conviction, which found that Iran supported an attempt to assassinate Trump or Joe Biden or Nikki Haley around 2024 or whenever it was.

1:35:14That's an extremely stupid decision to make,

1:35:20Coleman Hughes:purely from a rational self-preservation point of view, because, you know, successfully killing Trump potentially could have led to a regime change war that could have led to the deaths of everyone at the top of, you know, there's like a definitely non-zero chance America would have responded eventually with overwhelming force. You look at some of the other decisions the Iranian regime has made over the years. 2018, Iran has one of its own diplomats in Vienna smuggle bombs into Paris at this rally that has like 100 ,000 people at it and British members of parliament and try to detonate a bomb, right?

1:35:58Coleman Hughes:That could have killed 100 people. It could have killed a British diplomat. I mean, that's the sort of thing that rather backfired on ISIS when they did it in France, which led the world to form a coalition and take all of, you know, much of ISIS's territory in Iraq and Syria. You know, you add to that the example from 2011, when the Iranians hatched a plan to, you know, murder for hire plot in Washington, D.C. to kill this Saudi diplomat by blowing up a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Now, again, I put myself up in the IRGC. I'm an Iranian loyalist. I love Iran, whatever. But I'm being rational.

1:36:41Coleman Hughes:What do I say when I'm in that room. Hold on, guys. Are you really telling me we're going to blow up a restaurant in the capital of the United States in order to kill one Saudi diplomat and kill who knows how many American civilians? Don't you think this could backfire? Don't you think this could lead to all of us dying? This is not a regime. I mean, and then finally, the sum total of the Iranians' actions have led to like half of the regime leaders being killed recently, right? So if you're talking about deterrence and the psychology of whether like heads of state or regimes are rational, rationally interested in their own self-preservation.

1:37:20Coleman Hughes:I really don't see that as being true of the Iranian regime. All right. A few things about this. I actually come to start with the last point, but I'll just go in order. So, so I don't forget things. You said, look, Trump is singularly pro-Israel. So it makes, so it makes sense that he kind of stands out that there's streets named after him in Israel. And to that point, I would say you're absolutely right. The Israelis absolutely worship Trump. There are signs all over Israel, venerating him, saying that he's the greatest friend Israel has ever had. They want to give him awards that aren't even supposed to go to non-Israelis, but they're so enamored of how dedicated he has been to Israel.

1:38:06And I don't blame them. If I were Israeli, I would also love Trump. Now, he's not nearly as loved in the country that he's supposed to be representing among the population whose interests he's supposed to be serving because he has been very devoted to the interests of Israel and to Israelis. And I don't blame him. Now, I would say I don't blame them for loving Trump. Now, I will say that it is kind of odd because back in 2016, when this whole never Trump movement emerged among lifelong Republicans, if you go and look at what the catalyst for it was, Trump had made several statements about Israel and Palestine that really disturbed the hardcore pro-Israel neocons who became the never-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and David Frum and that whole crowd.

1:38:52And he was saying things like, we've been way too pro-Israel. We have to be more even-handed in the relationship between Israel and Palestine because otherwise we can't arbitrate a two-state solution, which is in our interest. That's what really alarmed these neocons. And Trump learned, especially when he was running for president in 2024, when he wasn't just running for president, he was basically running to stay out of prison for life. If Trump had lost that election, the Democrats had won. Trump was going to prison for life. He needed to do whatever he could to curry favor with the pro-Israel crowd.

1:39:22And he did. And that's why so many of them were so devoted to him, even though they began by backing Ron DeSantis, who they viewed as a much more natural ally. And so Trump sold himself to the Israel lobby. He was desperate to win that election, not just because he wanted to be president, but because he wanted to stay out of jail. And from the start, you look at this agenda. You know, we go back to what we're talking about. Instituting speech codes on American universities to protect Israel. Task force to combat anti-Semitism. This and this and this for Israel. Meeting with Netanyahu more times than anybody else.

1:39:55Bombing Iran twice in conjunction with Israel. It has been an extremely pro-Israel agenda, which is precisely why there are signs in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv that say, thank you, Trump, for making Israel great again, because they understand how devoted to their interests he's been. Let me just say something about Joe Kent, because like I said, I don't think Joe Kent's statement should be taken as gospel. They're not dispositive. The idea that he's supposed to present evidence, I think, is a bit unreasonable because whatever evidence he could present by definition would be top secret. and they're already looking to imprison him the way they do with every whistleblower from Daniel Osberg to Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and anyone who has ever been in government who reveals government wrongdoing or government secrets that they don't want the public to know, they try and destroy and imprison them.

1:40:42Excuse me. So I don't blame Joe Kent, who's already under FBI investigation for not showing us all the top secret documents that he pilfered from the government when he left. But as I said, this is somebody who devoted his entire life to defending America. He went and fought in all of these wars that the people who are now attacking him and demonizing him wanted to happen, but wouldn't put themselves or their own kids or their own family in harm's way. He went and fought in these wars. He lost his wife in these wars. He then went to work because Trump appointed him at the highest levels of the federal government.

1:41:15The minute he says something about Israel, now we're supposed to say he's mentally ill. He's a sick person. He has some kind of dark heart and all these other attacks. You go back and look at what has been said about every American whistleblower. They immediately, when Daniel Alsberg revealed that the US government was lying about the war in Vietnam, said he's a Kremlin agent. They broke into a psychoanalyst's office because they wanted to present him as some degenerate who is psychosexually twisted. This is the playbook on every single whistleblower. And I'm going to need a lot more before I conclude that Joe Kent is mentally ill, before I completely discount what he says.

1:41:51And like I said, Coleman, he is not the only one who has been saying that America goes to war for Israel, that American foreign policy is dominated by Israel. American politicians at the highest level, including presidents, have been saying that for decades. Scholars have written books on this. This is not something that Joe Kent woke up and invented one day. And I think these kind of character talks on him as a way of disproving what he has said are a bit ugly. Let me just address the final point, which is about the irrationality of Iran, because this is something that we've been told forever.

1:42:20Iran is like this religiously fanatical, doomsday, apocalyptic cult. They don't really care about their own lives. They're willing to sacrifice their own lives because they believe in the afterlife is much better and that they become martyrs and they're willing to engage in mass suicide. I personally haven't seen any evidence of that. In fact, if you go and talk to foreign policy experts throughout the West or even military strategists now, they will tell you how smart and strategic and cunning and pragmatic Iran has been, not irrational and suicidal. When the Israelis assassinated people on their own soil that they invited to Iran for their inauguration, and then when Israel bombed their consulate in Syria and blew the whole thing up, their response was incredibly restrained.

1:43:08They used their slowest missiles, their oldest missiles. They didn't punish Israel in the way they did during the 12-day war, and that they're doing now, they purposely held back because they didn't want to spiral up the escalation ladder. You look at who's been fighting wars and bombing people throughout the Middle East. It's not Iran starting wars. It's been Israel starting wars. It's been the United States starting wars. We invaded a country right on the Iranian border. And all this stuff about, oh, Iran wanted to use violence here. I mean, are you kidding? You know the history of the CIA. I don't need to go through all that.

1:43:38And not just the distant history of the CIA or of the Mossad. We've blown things up all the time. Israel began as a country through classic acts of terrorism. They blew up the King David Hotel, led by Menachem Begin, who became prime minister of that country, and killed dozens of British people and all sorts of innocent Palestinians as well because they were engaged in classic acts of terrorism. We funded groups all over the world that engage in exactly these kinds of tactics of blowing things up, of killing people, the Contras in Nicaragua. We were even on Al-Qaeda and ISIS's side in the dirty war that we waged against Syria.

1:44:11This is not evidence of a rationality. This is evidence of a country willing to use violence, but there's no way you can be an American citizen and point to some other country and be like, look at how much violence they use. Look at how irrational they are when everything that you've said about Iran is something the United States and Israel has done a thousand times over and even far worse. I don't think Iran is an irrational country. I don't think they want to be nuked off the face of the earth. I think even if they got nuclear weapons, which again, if they were rational, they would have gotten nuclear weapons.

1:44:44I think the one irrational thing they've done is they didn't get nuclear weapons and as a result are left defenseless. But if they had nuclear weapons, the idea that they would commit mass suicide instantaneously by using it against Israel or the United States, knowing it would ensure their complete obliteration, there's nothing in the Iranian behavior that suggests that they're eager to die in mass like that. This is what we were told about Iraq, they would pass nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda because they don't care about their lives. And then even if the United States retaliated and destroyed all of Iraq, they wouldn't care.

1:45:13This is the kind of fear mongering and warmongering rhetoric that we've been subjected to for a long time. And it merits extreme amounts of skepticism.

1:45:21Coleman Hughes:Okay, so first off, my point about Joe Kent, not really a character attack, but like, I don't know what he's like personally. But But if I hear anyone say that they think Israel tried to kill Donald Trump, immediately, my opinion of their intellect and sanity and the degree to which they're in touch with reality would go down. And I'm not saying that because I don't have sympathy for whistleblowers. I actually do have a lot of sympathy for whistleblowers. If they blow the whistle responsibly on government overreach, I'm totally for that. And I'm against characterist assassinations. I'm against what they try to do to Ellsberg.

1:46:02Coleman Hughes:So don't let me in with that motive. What I'm saying is anyone who says something as insanely illogical as Israel tried to get Trump killed, clearly there is something going on making that person irrational. Right. So that's my point about Joe Kent. It's not like a character assassination per se. Right. Um, when, when my point about, you know, Iran is irrational, well, yeah, they are. I'm not, I'm not making a moral point. I'm not saying that. So like, for instance, um, if Mike Tyson goes up to a guy in a bar and picks a fight, that's not necessarily irrational because he's Mike Tyson, right? If I, all five foot seven of me, no training in martial arts, go and pick a fight with a guy in a bar, that's incredibly irrational of me vis-a-vis my own self-preservation.

1:46:49Coleman Hughes:So my point in pointing out all of the terror attacks that Iran backs all over the world is not to say that we haven't done bad things. My point is irrationality from the point of view of the person. Right. The head of MI5 recently said Iran has tried to consummate like 20 terror attacks on UK soil in the past three years. I mean, this is extremely optional behavior, to put it mildly. Most countries around the world that are in Iran's position in the global dominance hierarchy would not dream of doing such things because it would be so irrational of them to pursue given the backlash it would yield.

1:47:30Coleman Hughes:And again, I would submit to you the very fact that the sum total of the Iranian regime's actions has led to so many of them being killed basically for doing all of this extremely optional behavior, backing terror attacks all around the world, funding and arming proxies all over the Middle East, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, when they're like not the richest country to be able to do this thing, to do all this to begin with, it all speaks of a level, a certain level of irrationality that actually most regimes around the world don't exhibit. North Korea doesn't exhibit that level of irrationality.

1:48:11Coleman Hughes:I don't think we can let that have a bomb. And a final point I'll make, and I've taken a lot of your time so we can wind down to a conclusion. And I have one question to ask you before I let you go, and I'll give you the last word, but I, you know, like forget the point about, are they a jihadish death cult for a moment and just focus on the point of command and control and nuclear proliferation, right? You and I both know, and I've heard you talk about during the Cold War, there were extremely close calls between America and the Soviet Union, where we almost went to nuclear war by accident, right?

1:48:49Coleman Hughes:And those were the modern, most advanced countries in the world. with redundant systems of warning, really tightly knit command and control operations. Look, that's happened. There was the event in Hawaii a couple years ago where a systems operator in Hawaii thought that he was seeing a missile launch from North Korea to Hawaii. And that ended up working out because we have so many redundant systems of warning. I absolutely do not trust the Iranian regime, even from the point of view of accidental firings, accidental signals to not accidentally start a nuclear war. If the U.S. and Soviet Union could come that close, obviously Iran can.

1:49:37Coleman Hughes:And from the U.S. point of view, like I agree with you, it's in the Iranians' regime's self-interest. It's in any of our adversaries' self-interest for regime preservation, for them to snap their fingers and have a nuclear weapon and insulate the regime. It's not in the U.S. interest for, as an American, it is not in our interest for nuclear weapons to proliferate to our adversaries or even to our allies. It would be better if Israel didn't have a nuclear weapon. And, you know, we persuade South Korea and Japan not to go nuclear because they're under our umbrella. From my point of view, the fewer potential points of contact between nuclear states, basically the better.

1:50:19Coleman Hughes:And so it absolutely is in the American interest to prevent this from happening. And I just don't think that we can trust. There's no ideal time to do it. And I don't even know if it has a high odds of success. So from that point of view, I'm not a cheerleader for it. But I do think that overall, that's my view of it. And so respond to that. And then I'll ask you one more question and give you another chance to respond and then let you go. Okay, great. Right. I'll try and be brief, but I do, since it's the last point, I do, I do want to make just one point in general, but just quickly on a couple of things that we've been talking about.

1:50:54As far as Joe Kennedy's concerned, I mean, I listened to a Stucker interview. I, I, maybe I just didn't hear it. And I tried Googling it while, while you were talking to see if I could find it, where he suggested that Israel was behind the assassination of Trump and Butler. Maybe he did. I know he's insinuated or said that he wasn't allowed to investigate whether Israel was involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was a very, very outspoken critic of - I'll double check it, and if I'm wrong, I'll cut it out. So anyway, I just, but I'm not denying it. I'm just saying I didn't hear that, and I couldn't find it.

1:51:29The other thing I would say is, you know, there are a lot of people who spout a lot of crazy conspiracy theories who are very respected and platformed constantly and treated those credible experts in our discourse, the people who said that Saddam Hussein was in bed with Osama bin Laden, that he would give nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda, that he had weapons of mass destruction, the people who said that Trump and Russia colluded in order to hack into the DNC emails, which turned out to be a complete fantasy, all the people who lied about COVID, lots of crazy conspiracy theories that go around and some end up being disqualifying and others, for whatever reasons, don't.

1:52:06And that is one of the double standards that has long concerned me. Um, about Iran and this idea that they're irrational because look, they just did something that resulted in a bunch of their leaders being killed. I don't think rationality means that you engage in full scale submission and surrender to whoever happens to be stronger than you. And I do think this has become kind of an American ethos recently that, oh, anyone, The only rational course is just to avoid conflict and stay alive and never fight with anybody as strong as you. That's why we only go to war with weaker countries. But the American founding was based on this idea that we were going to go to war with the most powerful empire in the world, which was an incredibly risky thing.

1:52:51A lot of American revolutionary fighters died in that war, and they started that war knowing they were going to die because the ethos is captured by Patrick Henry, which is give me liberty or give me death. Iran is an extremely proud culture. The Persian cult civilization has been around for thousands of years, basically where they are. And this idea that, oh, because the United States is stronger or Israel is stronger and can attack them, they have to swallow whatever they're given. They have swallowed a lot. I mentioned a few examples, but I don't think the fact that they're defending themselves and they're not on their knees begging for surrender is proof that they're irrational.

1:53:25I mean, some of the most heroic and noble acts in history have been from people who were willing to give up their own lives for a cause that they believed in. And Persian sovereignty and Iranian sovereignty is a cause that a lot of Iranian leaders believe in and have given their life for. And I don't think that makes them irrational. The final point I want to make, Coleman, is just on foreign policy in general. I do think one of the biggest problems we have as Americans is that we naturally see the world through an American prism, which is true of every country. And as a result, we often don't see ourselves in the way that is the rest of the world sees us.

1:54:01And that is real. A lot of the violence and aggression and evil in the world just has come from the United States. I mean, Martin Luther King said in his famous 1967 speech in the Vietnam War, he said the United States is, quote, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. And it's the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. I just want to leave you with one point about why countries feel a need to get a nuclear weapon, why we end up in so many wars. There's this woman named Fiona Hill, who's like a longtime Washington foreign policy advisor, she also British, very, very hawkish on Russia, on China.

1:54:38And she gave a speech to the EU in 2023 or 2024, where she said China is rapidly increasing its influence in places where Europe and the United States have long exclusively dominated, like in Africa and Latin America, all over the world, basically. China has not fought a war since 1979. That's 47 years that China has emerged as this massive military power with influence all over the world where their interests are protected. And they don't go and fight wars. They don't see wars as an important part of their national survival or self-interest. And I think that model has proven correct. And what she said was the reason so many countries prefer now to go to China, to deal with China and away from the United States and their servants in Europe is because they perceive that we are a bully country, that we believe in might is right, that we go around the world attacking people at will.

1:55:31We don't care about international law. We don't care about anything other than the fact that if we can do it and we're stronger, we can attack you at any time. And nobody wants to live in a world with a country that is dominating the world that has that mentality. And I think with this Iran war and the idea that we pay lip service to, that war is the last resort, we ought to think about what we ourselves are spawning and whether or not a lot of these quote unquote threats that come from anti-American sentiment could easily be eradicated if we stop the aggression that spawns it in the first place.

1:56:00Coleman Hughes:Okay. So I'm going to ask you one last question and you can have the last word. And I want to thank you again for, you know, being civil that we can have like civil and but but strong disagreements is something that I think is is increasingly lost. Totally agree. In the in like the shouting match orgy of of of of what media has has become. Or maybe it's always been that. I want to ask you about your relationship with Tucker Carlson. so i i i i uh I watched all of your recent episodes in preparation for this, and I know you as a journalist, and I've seen you say many times, that you believe a journalist's job, at least one of a journalist's jobs, is to hold powerful people to account.

1:56:51Coleman Hughes:In my view, Tucker Carlson is a fairly powerful person in the following sense. He is close to power. He seems to have J.D. Vance on speed dial, right, and probably many other members of the administration. Polymarket right now has him like neck and neck with Ron DeSantis to be the next Republican nominee for president, right? So is he the most powerful guy in the country? No, but he's a hell of a lot more powerful than you and I. Um, and routinely in the past five years, I've heard him say and promulgate lies to an extent that is really shocking to me. Like, whether it's 2020 election was stolen, or in his words, Pizzagate is basically real.

1:57:49Coleman Hughes:Um, alien entities live underwater, and they're spiritual beings, and they've been here for 50 ,000 years, and the government has been covering it up. Alex Jones is a supernatural prophet who predicted 9-11. Now, these are not jokes, by the way. Like, these could be made as funny jokes by a comic, and I would have no problem with it, but he's saying these things with a furrowed brow as totally true, not hyperbole, not jokes. And so, do you as a journalist feel that you have a responsibility to hold him accountable for the lies that he's promulgating to millions in his audience. So I won't dispute any of the examples, except to say that on the Alex Jones one, you go back and look what Alex Jones was saying in the 90s, and there's a documentary about him that's fantastic by Alex Lee Moyer that documents his work in the 1990s.

1:58:48And I'm not saying he predicted 9-11 like in some clairvoyant sense or with a Ouija board. But the conflict that ended up resulting, he predicted with extreme precision in a way that I think anybody who listened to it with an open mind would give him credit for having done, which doesn't take away from all the other things that he's done. I would also say that we really pick and choose like when we, I mean, we talked before about what kinds of people who remain in good standing in the discourse who have spouted the most insane conspiracy theories, but because they serve the U.S. foreign policy interest or agenda or the U.S.

1:59:23security state or some other powerful interests, we don't consider them disqualified. I gave a bunch of examples. And yet then when we pick and choose, like, oh, look, this person has said something that seems unproven or weird or conspiratorial. Suddenly we're supposed to denounce them and kick them out of the public discourse or at least announce them for that particular lie. You know, our country is founded on the idea that there's a lot of truths that are unknown, that we can't prove, that are supernatural, that come from God, that aren't visible, that are unexplainable by science. We have lived in a country that has been the byproduct of serious conspiracy theories, not just imaginary ones that has caused people to lose trust and faith in the government.

2:00:05And I do think you can go too far on a spectrum where you're too cynical about the US government and start disbelieving everything it says. But I think there's far less of that. And it's far less dangerous than the other side of the spectrum where people just recite U.S. government claims as gospel and believe everything they're being told by the government because that's proven to be far more dangerous. In Tucker's case, if you go and ask Tucker, he will tell you that for a long time, I was his harshest critic. He said I wrote the meanest things about him. Um, but I actually, in the last decade, absolutely consider Tucker to be an overall force for good.

2:00:44I mean, obviously if you're opposed to the Iran war is as most Americans are, um, Tucker's efforts to stop this war were Herculean and he sacrificed his relationship with president Trump who ended up denouncing him publicly. He did not get his way that that war did start. There's been many other instances where, where Tucker did not get his way. Um, and president Trump, you know, Most people would not jeopardize a relationship with President Trump for a cause because of how valuable that relationship is. Tucker has repeatedly done so. I'm not saying everything Tucker has said has been in agreement with me.

2:01:17I'm not saying it hasn't deviated from the facts. I'm not saying that he doesn't occasionally wander into the conspiracy theory. I think that's true of a lot of people. In fact, most people. But I don't feel a particular, you know, my reporting, my journalism has focused on the people who can start wars, like the U.S. security state, and the people who can spy on us, like the NSA, and the people who go around the world killing people, like the CIA, and the president who can start wars and has, in every instance of my lifetime except Trump's first term, started wars all over the world. That's my focus.

2:01:51There are a lot of people who say crazy things in our culture and in the environment. But until people can show me that Tucker Carlson is responsible for wars and death. You know, this is, I actually, when, when someone asked me why I interviewed Nick Fontes on my show, I was on Piers Morgan show and that question came up and I, you know, I said, look how many people you interview who, who have actually have huge amounts of blood on their hands. People who supported the Israeli destruction of Gaza or the invasion of Iraq or all these assassinations around the world or coups and funding of, of horrific militias.

2:02:25Because I'm going to, in that list of priorities, suddenly decide that Tucker Carlson, who I do think has done far more good than harm on free speech, on foreign policy, on wars, on economic populism, that's going to be the target of the person I'm going to bicker with about things that he said that I'm going to disagree with. No, he's not even close to the top of my list. The fact that I consider him a personal friend probably weighs into that as well. It's one of the reasons why I try and keep a distance from political and media circles, and living in Brazil has helped me with that. But the much bigger factor is on my list of things that I think need checking, there's no shortage of people attacking Tucker Carlson every single day.

2:03:01But there's a shortage of people attacking all the other institutions, the much more damaging and powerful ones that I listed.

2:03:09Coleman Hughes:Okay, Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for doing the show. And is your show still called Systems Update or are you doing something else now? I basically stopped that nightly show. It was just too much. You probably empathize with how many shows you do. So we're back at Substack. But yeah, I do want to just take time to thank you, Coleman. It's always been a pleasure to talk to you. We definitely have disagreed more than agreed in the last couple of years. But I anticipated this would be a good civil and yet very spirited conversation, as you said, and it was. And I'm always really happy to talk to you whenever you want.