Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Thursday, January 26, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows. 

Watch System Update Episode #29 Here on Rumble.

Good evening. It's Thursday, January 26. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, Adam Schiff is by a good distance the most casual and destructive pathological liar in Congress – and that is not an easy title to win given the intense competition. Often overlooked, though, by those who focus on his compulsive lying is that he's also almost certainly the most authoritarian member of Congress as well, seeking to censor his critics, smear journalists who question him, and various other cases of abuses of power. The decision of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to remove him from his perch on the House Intelligence Committee, where he abused his power in multiple ways, is long overdue. It would require a multi-series Netflix show to document all of Schiff's lies and authoritarian conduct, but we will highlight some of the worst in order to examine the implications of removing him from that committee and to take account of all of the damage he has genuinely done. 

For our interview segment, we'll speak to Matt Stoller, one of the country's most knowledgeable antitrust experts, about the lawsuit we reported on last night filed by the Biden DOJ against Google to break up parts of Google on antitrust grounds, one similar to the lawsuit filed against Google in 2020 by the Trump DOJ. We'll talk to Stoller about the political dynamic in Washington, as well as what it portends for the ability of the virtually unlimited power of Big Tech to finally be reined in. 

Monologue:

So before delving into our topics of the night, I just want to share with you something we did today that I'm really genuinely excited by. Earlier this afternoon, I spent an hour interviewing the German politician and member of the German parliament, Sahra Wagenknecht. She's a fascinating figure, easily one of the four or five most famous politicians in that country. She was long regarded as the heroine of the German left, its best chance to take power one day. But then something rather odd and interesting and increasingly common began to happen to her. Over the last several years her popularity began to skyrocket among many on the German right, many of those who have been voting for German right-wing political parties, especially the alternative for Deutschland, that Western media outlets are fond of calling a far-right populist or even fascist party. 

There are many reasons for Wagenknecht’s growing popularity with the German right, even as she remains popular among many on the German left. She has become one of the nation's most vocal and convincing opponents of growing involvement by Germany in the war in Ukraine, warning that when Germany and Russia find themselves in an antagonistic position over war, nothing good generally happens. Beyond that, she opposed COVID vaccine mandates; she opposes mass immigration on the longstanding left-wing ground that it's a plot by neoliberal international institutions to drive down wages for German workers; and she is particularly critical, scathingly so, of how the left has abandoned ordinary Germans and German workers in favor of becoming a party largely composed of highly educated cosmopolitan elites. It’s a problem she blames in part on the left's abandonment of class politics in favor of elite cultural agendas that are either irrelevant or hostile to the lives and value systems of ordinary Germans, especially those who are religious. 

I found this interview one of the most interesting I've ever conducted in all the years I've been doing journalism. The political dynamics she describes are clearly present in all Western democracies, including the U.S. The crossroads at which she sets is one of the primary focal points of this show and my journalism. Her analysis of the German-Russian relationship and Germany's relationship double needle in the war in Ukraine is extremely thoughtful and well-informed. This interview was conducted with a German translator and will be ready early next week. I believe you will find the interview as compelling and illuminating as I did, so please watch for it either on Monday or Tuesday, right here on our show. 

Now for tonight's topic. As a journalist, it is sometimes important, even while doing one's best to do reporting as stoically and neutrally as possible, to be honest about one's emotions. After all, journalists are people too, at least most, or some of us are. In that spirit, I want to start with a confession. I have really not been sleeping well at night over the last couple of weeks. My guess is that this is a sensation all of you have had at various points in your life and for those who have, you'll know that it is often difficult to know exactly what the source of your sleep problem is. And that was true for me. 

I've been struggling to understand what was causing this, and only within the last 24 hours, by a stroke of luck, was I able to identify the day that my sleep disturbances began. It was the day that I learned that Congressman Adam Schiff, the California Democrat, would no longer be a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the oversight body over which he has presided since 2019. For the four years prior to that, the last time Republicans were in the majority, Schiff was the ranking member of that committee, which meant he was part of the glorious Gang of Eight, the special members of Congress who received the most sensitive classified briefings from the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.  Yet, now, the new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has announced that he is not only removing Adam Schiff from his leadership position on that committee but stripping him of his membership entirely. And that means that Schiff's access to classified information and, with it, his ability to keep our nation safe, no longer exists.