We are pleased to summarize the key stories we covered last week on SYSTEM UPDATE. 

—Glenn Greenwald

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Good evening. It's Friday, June 21. 

Tonight: It has been said for decades that American comedians have become the country's bravest, most trusted, and most reliable political commentators and analysts and that only they can be trusted to tell the real truth to the people about what is really going on. Oftentimes, this claim was most vocally promoted by the comedians themselves, who sometimes are strangely willing to proclaim themselves the new Walter Cronkite, or even some sort of new philosopher king of the middle of the modern age. One can scoff at those claims if one wishes – and I suppose I just engage a little bit of subtle scoffing myself when I said that – but it is true, undoubtedly, that many of the most beloved and influential political voices in the United States right now are some of the country's, well, most well-known comics. 

This is not a brand-new trend. Comedians in the decades, say, the 1950s to the 1980s, have as often made news for their controversial political expression as they did for their comedy. People like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and even Richard Pryor offered political observations that would have been seen as too offensive to taboo dogma to be heard anywhere outside of comedy. Yet there are also views and insights whose impact was at least as great outside the comedic world, deep into the heart of political discourse itself. 

But this view of comedians, or perhaps more accurately, the self-professed political importance of comedians, began to have a lot more cachet and arguably became far more valid and defensible in the wake of the War on Terror when the political climate that arose in the United States and the corporate media, in particular, was far more limited, repressive, homogenized, and constrained then almost any other time period in American history. Out of that stifling climate emerged voices like Jon Stewart, who became a very vocal and aggressive credit of the Bush-Cheney administration and the War on Terror in a way few people on television were willing to do. He was followed by Stephen Colbert, who, believe it or not, actually offered some edgy, informative, and quite innovative, even uncomfortable anti-establishment humor. And then the crowning achievement of this trend, this modern-day trend, was, I think, Joe Rogan, someone who had spent his entire career more or less in comedy only to somehow become the most listened to and influential voice on a wide range of some of our society's most complex and polarizing political debates. 

There are many things to say about this trend – some good and some most decisively not good – but there's no denying that the far-reaching impact of it, one that endures to this very day. There's a large sector of the American public, including a lot of young people, who do not turn at all to The New York Times or NBC or CNN or other corporate news outlets like that for their news, but rather is into Joe Rogan, someone who is able to appeal to such a large and ideologically diverse audience by basically refusing to attach himself to one partisan or ideological camp, an increasingly rare declaration of independence in our media landscape, and emerging from the behemoth that became “The Joe Rogan Show,” there is a whole new slew of comics who were at best mildly known, who have now become major names in a comedy world and beyond, in large part because of their frequent appearances on “The Joe Rogan Show.” Many of them frequently talk about politics, but in ways that very few people would suggest are insightful, inventive and very interesting. It's often just a bunch of banalities. 

Our guest tonight, Dave Smith, however, is one of those people whose career was not political journalism or analysis, but comedy. And now we always had a political bent to him, often appearing even a decade ago on political shows, largely on cable. He was almost certainly more known for his successful career that he began building step by step in the world of comedy. His political career in comedy was mostly online, as is true for a majority of successful comedians these days. But he has recently become one of the most prominent and coveted and impactful political guests in the media landscape, including mainstream media landscape as well. He recently debated former New York Governor Chris Cuomo on “The Patrick Bet-David Show” which produced many viral clips and a large audience, largely because of how obviously disconnected from reality and from his own record Cuomo was, to put that mildly. 

Since October 7, Smith has become one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of the state of Israel and the U.S., from its financing and arming of that country in that war, something which I think has surprised many people, including perhaps some of his fans or colleagues, due to the fact that, among other things, he himself is Jewish. Smith has shown no inkling or backing down. Quite the contrary, his advocacy has only become louder and more definitive, and he continues to actively seek out venues where he can debate this specific topic. I believe he was just on Candace's own show yesterday or today, where he had a debate on this very topic. 

We wanted to have him on our show for many reasons, one of which is that we really talk about this comedy sector of culture. That is because we rarely talk about it, even though it's become one of the most consequential subcultures to emerge over the last ten years. But it's also because Smith himself has demonstrated a very effective and I think, very well-informed means of communicating these ideas, as has in the process, gained a lot of new fans in the political world. 

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google

Good evening. It's Thursday, June 20. 

Tonight: AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is easily one of the most powerful, feared, and effective lobbying groups in Washington, if not the single most feared. That assertion is so well documented by now that it barely requires debate. But their power lies not only, or even primarily, in their extraordinary ability to foster close to unanimous votes in Congress for every pro-Israel resolution or bill they wish to see implemented. That is extraordinary enough. But even more amazing is their unmatched ability – and it is unmatched – to simply remove incumbent members of the U.S. Congress who are, in their eyes, insufficiently supportive of and dedicated to the foreign government of Israel. 

A perfect example illustrating how this works is the current primary challenge being launched against the two-term Democratic congressman and former middle school principal, Jamaal Bowman, who represents New York's 16th congressional district. Bowman currently faces an extraordinarily well-financed primary challenger from George Latimer, the corruption-plagued county executive in Westchester Country who, polls now show, has built a substantial lead over Bowman. And it's not hard to understand why. It's not because George Latimer is some beloved figure. It's because his campaign is being fueled by a massive amount of money that comes almost entirely from out-of-the-district funding, the vast majority of which comes from a pro-Israel PAC directed and funded by AIPAC. It's an extraordinary, even unprecedented amount that is being spent on this single primary challenge to a congressional House incumbent: $20 million and counting. 

The reason Bowman faces such a powerfully funded primary challenge is simple and obvious. He sometimes criticizes Israel and has been particularly critical of their eight-month U.S.-funded war that has destroyed much of Gaza. Voters in the district, who are being drowned in anti-Bowman ads on radio, TV, online, everywhere, have little idea that the reason for this overwhelmingly funded challenge to their congressman is due to pro-Israel groups, and that's because the ads that run against him rarely, if ever, even mention the issue of Israel, instead pretending that they are angry with Bowman for his failure to be a good Democrat, that he's not sufficiently loyal to President Biden and his agenda. 

This has been a long-standing and extremely effective tactic for punishing and even removing members of Congress for failure to support Israel with unquestioning praise. In an era where bipartisan systems ensure that congressional incumbents have even a higher reelection rate than Soviet-era members of the Russian legislature, AIPAC appears, as we will show you, to have become the one real threat to the ability of Congress members to win reelection, or even to secure their own party's nomination. 

Then: we welcome back to System Update, the three-term Republican Senator from Kentucky and medical doctor, Rand Paul. Senator Paul has been relentlessly attempting to expose the truth about what happened, specifically in the beginning months of the Covid pandemic, when Doctor Fauci and his associates falsely claimed to the world that they had confirmed that Covid originated from nature and not from a lab leak in Wuhan. That false claim of certainty ended up as intended, shaping discourse about that pandemic around the globe for the next two years and also as intended, caused a full-scale online censorship ban of any questioning or doubts about the official story of Covid's origins. Just as importantly, Dr. Paul has been attempting to demonstrate that Fauci deliberately concealed his attempts to fund what is called gain-of-function research, meaning scientific attempts in labs to manipulate viruses and other pathogens to become even more contagious or more deadly to humans, something that, if leaked, could cause a pandemic of the type that we saw with Covid. 

But now, Senator Paul is also warning about what appears to be bipartisan efforts to approve or defund the exact kind of dangerous gain-of-function research that very likely caused the worldwide Covid pandemic in the first place. I am genuinely amazed at how little interest there seems to be in investigating and finding the truth about what is easily one of the most consequential events in our lifetime, the Covid pandemic. Dr. Paul is one of the few in Washington still demanding just basic accountability and we believe that that work is extremely important and deserves as much journalistic attention as we can possibly give to it. So, we'll speak to him in just a little bit. 

And then finally: videos of Joe Biden frequently surface that confirm what Americans already know about him, as polling data demonstrates, namely, that he is aging in a way that has left him with serious cognitive impairment to the point that he sometimes barely knows where he is or what he is saying. The evidence proving that is overwhelming, from reporting to first-hand accounts to simply comparing his conduct now to what it was even five years ago. And it's worth remembering that the very first-time concerns about Biden's cognitive capabilities were expressed not by Republicans or even Bernie Sanders supporters in the 2020 cycle, it was by DNC operatives and DNC media allies, in 2019, who were very concerned that Biden would get the nomination simply because he was the most well-known candidate. They continuously warned that this was not the same Joe Biden, that he was likely not capable of sustaining the full rigors of the campaign. Once Biden got the nomination, those very same people turned around and said it was immoral to raise questions about Biden's cognitive capabilities, even though they were the ones who first cast doubt on it in the first place. 

Nonetheless, despite all that evidence, most of the U.S. corporate media, as we know, will say or do anything to ensure Trump's defeat, even if that means outright lying. They already proved that in 2016, when they spread virtually every day all sorts of false collusion conspiracy theories about Trump and the Trump campaign and Russia, and then did so again in 2021. They claimed that incriminating reporting about Biden and his family in Ukraine and China was the byproduct of what they called fake documents, meaning Russian disinformation. Now, with that same goal in mind, they insist that the video showing Biden's cognitive decline and incapacitation is somehow fake, as they hope to convince Americans to trust the media’s partisan claims, more than they trust their own eyes and their own judgment. We will examine the latest self-humiliation of the media in pursuit of manipulating another presidential election by trying to disseminate claims that are so recognizably false. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.