Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop -- Falsely Called "Russian Disinformation" -- is Authentic
The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.
November 01, 2022
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President Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter Biden (L) on stage after delivering remarks in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 7, 2020. (Photo by ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

This article was originally published on Substack on Mar. 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despisedclass of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post's Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter's orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive's authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept's former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA's lie, as he insisted that laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.") I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled "The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power," in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post's archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger's book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA's now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger's book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Timespublished an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden's international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA's pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop's archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger's book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post's reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook's promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a "fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it) and authenticity (disinformation!) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film's Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today's admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in it were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country's most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

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Glenn Reacts to Breaking News: American Pope Chosen, Trump and Netanyahu Split Over War with Iran, MAHA Drama, and More
System Update #451

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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 The headline news in most countries in the world is the selection of Cardinal Robert Prevost to be the new leader of the Catholic Church, replacing the prior Pope, Francis, who died late last month. Prevost is now known as Pope Leo XIV. 

Born in Chicago, he is the first-ever American Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, though, as a fluent Spanish speaker, he has also done substantial work in the church in Latin America. He's widely viewed as a close ally of Pope Francis and, to some extent, at least likely to follow in his footsteps. 

I do think the reaction of political and media figures in the U.S. to his selection is worthy of attention. As is true for almost everything now, his life and worldview were instantly reduced to a handful of tweets, and then grinded through the ideological and political prism to instantly determine whether he's good or bad – a very strange discourse, especially for someone that nobody who was commenting on him knew anything about prior to the moment he was unveiled. We'll tell you all about it. 

Then, we have several other topics. It was a big news day including all sorts of significant movements and events taking place in the Middle East with reports of a clear split between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and thus between the U.S. and Israel and Trump's selection of the close RFK Jr. ally Casey Means as Surgeon General, which caused far more indignation and accusations than, at least, I expected. Time permitting, we will also explain the withdrawal of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Moments ago, Trump announced his new selection and that person is Jeanine Pirro, better known to Fox News viewers as Judge Jeanine. So, we'll tell you about all of that. 

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Early this morning, white smoke emitted from the Vatican, which, as most of you know, signifies that the conclave of cardinals assembled in the Vatican has chosen a new pope. The new Pope that they agreed on is the first-ever American pope. He was born in Chicago, he is fully American, he obviously speaks English in an Americanized way, which would be very strange hearing the Pope speak in Americanized English, but, obviously, that's his first language – although he speaks several others as well. 

As I said at the start, he was a close ally of Pope Francis who was regarded as a reformer or on the more progressive wing of the Catholic Church, although the progressive wing of this Catholic Church is still quite conservative, it's a very conservative institution by its very nature, by its age, by its function, by its purpose, by its dogma. But one of the things that Francis did was he was very, very outspoken about the growing income inequality in the world, the need to be humane to immigrants. He was also, I suppose I could say, a critic of the destruction of Gaza, but certainly a defender of the rights and suffering of the Palestinian people. Whether Pope Leo XIV follows some of that or all of that remains to be seen; he's been a little bit of a cryptic figure, not really seeking out those kinds of controversies. It's a little bit unclear, I think, even to Church Insiders, where he stands on them. 

Here is the scene at St. Peter's Basilica early this morning, you see the new Pope standing on the balcony with people cheering. This is his first public appearance as the new Pope. 

Video. Pope Leo XIV, St. Peter’s Basilica. May 8, 2025.

The faithful of the Catholic Church are always going to welcome a new pope with that sort of extremely happy, welcoming, loving and positive emotion, and that's what you saw today. 

I'm not a theologian, I'm by no means a historian of the Catholic Church, but the pope always does have this religious role. Obviously, he's the head of the Catholic Church, this 2,000-year-old institution, but he also typically has a political profile. I mean, he's the head of the Vatican, which in theory is an independent state inside of Italy and popes have always played a significant political role. I talked about some of Pope Francis's views. I remember growing up in the 1980s when Pope John Paul II was aligned very much with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 

There were times when the pope followed the Church's longstanding opposition to and contempt for communism, given that communism, by its dogma, seeks to eradicate religion, it's the opioid of the people, as communists see it. So, there was always a strong political alignment between some popes and conservative politicians. Then, recently, there has been a greater alignment – I don't want to say with left-wing politicians because certainly on social issues, the Church still has very positions widely considered conservative on things like abortion, which they vehemently oppose, as well as same-sex marriage which though they've softened a little bit the rhetoric about obviously they still oppose that but they also have been traditionally associated with certain I guess you could say left-wing positions. After all, if you read the gospel, the gospel is not a teaching of support for elites or for venerating the wealthy. Jesus spent his time, according to all four books of the gospel, ministering to prostitutes, lepers and the most downtrodden, so that has always been part of the church's mission: to minister to the poor, to care for the poor. 

Then, also the same position that makes them so opposed to abortion, namely the sanctity of human life and the sin of extinguishing it, has also led them to be opposed to the death penalty. That was certainly Pope Francis' position, and I believe it's Pope Leo XIV's as well. 

Here is Donald Trump's reaction, because, again, I understand why people want to put him immediately through a political prism of saying, Oh, is he like MAGA, is he like Republican, is he Democrat, is he liberal? Even though the Church really does transcend those kinds of characterizations, especially just trying to reduce someone who's been in the Church their whole life to a few tweets you found and then want to place them on the political spectrum. It almost is like a non-sequitur, but that's what a lot of people were doing. Donald Trump did not do that. He posted this:

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I saw somebody satirizing Trump by saying, “Tomorrow he's going to say, ‘Hey, there are a lot of people who are saying the reason an American pope got chosen for the first time is because of me. I don't know if it's true, but it probably is.’ That's a very Trumpian way to say it, but obviously that was satire. What I just read to you is what he said, I would say very proper and well-crafted congratulations that were appropriate for a president. 

His Vice President, JD Vance, interestingly, is somebody who this new Pope has criticized on social media, at least twice in the last six months, and here is what JD Vance said, also an appropriate statement, no acknowledgement of the fact that the Pope has criticized JD Vance personally and things he believes in and things he has said, JD Vance is Catholic and so, obviously, he is expressing the sentiments of what I would assume are the sentiments of most Catholics around the world, where he said, quote:

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 I was online when this happened. I went online, actually, when I heard that there was a new pope selected. It's a significant moment for anyone who pays attention to world events, world politics and also religion, obviously. 

There was this hour period between when the white smoke was emitted, signaling the selection of a new pope, and before the pope was announced, during which a very conservative cardinal, for whatever reason, people started assuming that that's who was selected and in the betting markets, he just skyrocketed to like 70%, 80%, and everybody else who were the favorites or dark horses started dropping. And so, people were very happy because he was a conservative choice. But then, when they unveiled the pope, it wasn't him. It was instead Robert Prevost. And at first, American politicians and pundits were celebrating the fact that we now have an American pope for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of the United States. 

Immediately, people started to find tweets. He didn't tweet often about non-Church matters. He tweeted very sporadically about the Pope, the Pope's health and just generalized kind of conventional sentiments that cardinals express in behalf of their Catholicism, but he did actually have some political tweets as well that, one after the next, every sort of 20 minutes, emerged and a lot of MAGA people, a lot of right-wing people went from celebrating this choice to immediately panicking almost, or at least denouncing the choice on the ground that this is not somebody who aligns with their political ideology. 

So, here's something he posted in February of this year, so just two months ago. The tweet that he wrote says:

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And then it links to an article that he didn't write, that's not his sentence, that's really like the headline to the article, but he's obviously endorsing it. 

What happened there was that JD Vance had given an interview where I think somebody asked him about the religious mandate, the Catholic imperative, to care for immigrants and to care for people who are expelled from the country or stateless. To defend on a religious ground why he believed in a hardline stand, JD Vance said there's a Catholic doctrine that says, first, you take care of your family, then you take of your community and then you take care of your city, your state, your country and then after that, only then, you care about the rest of the people in the world. 

There is a Catholic doctrine that was affirmed more or less that way, but it's been rejected by the Church, it's not the prevailing view of Catholicism, it doesn't really reflect Catholic action in terms of how it reacts in world and this is what the new Pope was pointing to, an article arguing why JD Vance's views of what the teachings of Catholicism are when it comes to prioritizing who you care about and who you don't is Catholic dogma. The new Pope said Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others; your love for humanity, for other human beings, is just the love of Jesus. That was his view. 

In 2015, when Donald Trump was running for the first time on a very anti-immigrant platform – not just a platform, but the way he was speaking about immigrants, it didn't sit well, apparently, with the new Pope either – because, on that date, he cited an article by Cardinal Dolan. 

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And then Laura Loomer, the quite effective influencer, I guess you could call her Trump whisperer, I mean, she's one of the few people who gets away with constantly bashing the administration of the White House. Still, the more she does it, the more her influence and credibility seem to grow with Trump. When she complains about people, they often end up being dispatched or fired in the case of some people as well, but she replied to that tweet today with this comment:

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So, I guess she thinks the Pope is both woke and Marxist. She's Jewish, but within like, I guess two hours, she was able to summarize his entire worldview based on a few tweets. And she's here to say that this Pope is both Marxist and woke. It's kind of odd for a deeply religious figure, someone who's devoted his entire life to spreading the word of Jesus, to simultaneously be a Marxist. It's sort of an incompatible doctrine, but who knows, maybe she's right. I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that, but she seems to think so. 

Here's Sean Davis, a very smart right-wing commentator and analyst who is also Catholic:

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Which, again, if you look at just these disconnected tweets, you could put those together and make a lot of leaps of reasoning and maybe assume that. But certainly, he's pro-immigrant. I mean, the Catholic Church has always been pro-immigrant, and you can go back hundreds of years and you're going to find that. 

Megyn Kelly, who is also Catholic, said after all these tweets emerged:

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That doesn't seem likely to me, to put it mildly. And again, I'm not really sure why people are finding these sentiments surprising; they seem to align extremely well with what the Catholic Church is often – I don't want to say always, but often –represented. 

Mike Cernovich, another right-wing influencer whom I also often find insightful, said:

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There has been this sense for some time – again, I’m not a theologian – but there has been this sense that the Catholic Church, since the reforms in the early '60s, has basically been sacrilegious or even satanic, not true Catholics. Those sentiments have sometimes grown among the Orthodox wing of the Catholic Church. I guess that's what's being channeled there. 

Here is Jack Posobiec. He is Catholic. He was in the Vatican, and he said this:

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And I do think that's an interesting observation because, as I said, the Pope in the modern world and actually in the ancient world going back many, many centuries to the time it began, always had this dual function of being the interpretive body that defines the meaning of God's word through Jesus Christ. But then, also obviously playing a very political role, the Church is very powerful, it's very wealthy and it influences a lot of people. It's inherently a political position as well and this is what you often hear from Catholics. If the pope says something they dislike, they're like, “That's political, that's not canon. You don't have to assume that's the word of God.” 

Amazingly, a lot of this was based on a handful of tweets that they were trying to reduce this Pope to being, oh, he's not MAGA, he is anti-Trump. They found some voting records that they claimed proved he was a Republican, so maybe he was like an anti-Trump or a never-Trumper. But then, obviously, some of them thought he was a woke Marxist as well. 

Here's Matt Walsh, who is not just Catholic but someone who speaks a lot about the Church and Catholicism. He did not react well to this attempt to reduce the Pope to nothing more than someone who you can just place on the American ideological spectrum. And he said this:

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And there were other tweets as well that we didn't include here. The new Pope retweeted a tweet from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from 2017 when Trump just got elected, where Chris Murphy was basically saying, “We need to do everything possible to fight against and resist this new authoritarianism,” so the new Pope retweeted Chris Murphy, the Democratic Senator. He also retweeted very recently, I think it was one of his last tweets, a different cardinal who was reacting to the meeting between El Salvador’s President Bukele and President Trump in the Oval Office where they kind of mocked the whole notion of court-stopping immigrants being sent to El Salvador. The cardinal reacted with horror and indignation that they seemed to be so cavalier about the fate of these people, who hadn't even been given due process, that they were just putting them into dungeons for life in a country they'd never been to and the new Pope retweeted that indignation from a cardinal in response to that policy of sending people to El Salvador. 

Again, I'm not surprised personally that the Pope is conservative on social issues, anti-abortion, opposed to same sex marriage, opposed to the death penalty, which is not a conservative view. I'm not surprised that he teaches compassion and empathy for immigrants, including people who are illegally entering countries. This seems very consistent, very compatible with the Catholic Church to me, as somebody who has not paid the closest of attention in a scholarly way, but certainly as someone who understands Catholicism to the extent I do, so, I don't really understand all this acrimony, all this kind of panic, this antagonism.

Also, when you're a cardinal or when you were within the Catholic Church, he rose pretty quickly as a result of his relationship with Francis, there's not always total freedom to express your worldview or who you are and what you believe and what your priorities are. And so, we'll see with this new Pope what he decides to make of his position and I think only then will we really know his ideology or place on the ideological spectrum if a pope can even be placed on that.  I think as Matt Walsh actually said, and I basically agree with it, in a way, the idea of the pope and the Catholic Church transcends modern political debates, even though they sometimes have an impact on it. 

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All right, let's move to the next topic, which is these reports that there has been a breach in the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. 

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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Tonight: Regardless of what you think of him or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Rufo, has had on conservative politics and state and federal policy more broadly, though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's New School from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy. He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding campus Israel protests and antisemitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position. He has become one of the most influential voices shaping the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Rufo appeared on our program once before: back in 2023, where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil, and I think, illuminating of some of the controversies surrounding his work. 

What promoted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine. Rufo saw those comments, noted them and objected to them on X. It led to a back and forth but it became rapidly apparent - at least to me - that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them: things like the core values of the American Founding, the values and views that most influenced the founders and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions. 

So, I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable for a constructive exchange and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so. 

His official biography does not really capture Rufo's influence and accomplishments, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles, the most recent of which is a lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times just last month. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “America's Cultural Revolution,” and as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. 

The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions. 


G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.

So, it's interesting, when I was thinking about how to do this, how to conduct our discussion, the issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on. 

There was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you, that I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but, to me, it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles. 

And in response, you said this:

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NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
System Update #449

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40 years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing and, in many cases, widely disliked. When many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed, he was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero/villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics. 

But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of – an ample funder of – some of the most grotesque, cruelest and pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs. And when doing these experiments on dogs which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose for beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who has spent any time with beagles will tell you, they have a particularly loving, docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them. 

Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste, is our guest to talk about the major win animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coat Lab group scored today. The National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya, under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr., announced that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles: that was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later. 

Then, Reason's magazine Matthew Petti wrote an excellent article today, a really good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded that it "would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date". He is our second guest tonight. 

Some laws are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed them, and for me, this is one. As is true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, it had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties. 

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Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that just got done heralding, explaining and it exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous, and pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically. For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals. I've long been an admirer of that group and his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight. 

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