Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Marjorie Taylor Greene on Ukraine, Speakership Fallout, Big Tech, CIA/FBI and More
Video Transcript: System Update #33
February 02, 2023
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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 Wednesday, February 1, 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 #33 Here on Rumble.

Virtually everything that can be said about our guest tonight, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been said, often without the slightest regard for whether or not it is true. But whatever one's views of her may be, there is no denying that in a very short period of time – she is just now entering her second term in Congress – she has become one of the most prominent, influential and popular politicians in America. 

As The New York Times recounted in an article on her complex history with current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, when Democrats were plotting to strip her of all of her Committee assignments due to controversial comments she made on the Internet before she was even elected to Congress, she “stormed into Mr. McCarthy's office in the Capitol late one night, in February 2021, and handed him a letter signed by local Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on committees. They had received “countless messages”, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.” 

Many things interest me about the Republican Congresswoman representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District – her strident opposition to bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington, the still escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine, her opposition to the evils of the U.S. Security State and Big Tech: all of which we'll talk about – but one often overlooked aspect of her quick rise to prominence is the Founders’ aspiration to have a country free of a professionalized political class, but instead one that would be governed by “citizen-legislators” – people who have other jobs and professions beyond “politician” and who go to Washington for a few years after a lot of experience elsewhere to serve in the model of public service and then go back to their regular lives. 

Anyone who was able to construct a prominent political profile without decades of striving for political power, without drearily climbing the career ladder from low-level political office and trying to take a step up every few years, without the benefit of a famous political parent or a famous family name – in other words, a self-made person in Washington – is automatically someone who will be of greater interest to me than people who seemingly popped out of the womb dreaming of one day being in the U.S. Senate. Whatever else one might think of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, that's true of her, and it's at least equally true of Congresswoman Greene. 

Look at the two most senior politicians who lead their respective parties in the Senate. Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been a senator since 1985 – for almost 40 years. Other than a few years in the early 1970s when he worked as a lawyer, McConnell has never had any job outside of being a politician. The Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, was elected to the New York State Assembly at the age of 24. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1980 at the age of 30, and then to the U.S. Senate in 1999. He's been in Congress for 43 years. It's impossible to find people more insular and insulated and aberrational than they – their lives bear not even the slightest resemblance to those whom they pretend to represent. 

When AOC first ran for Congress, in 2018, almost nobody paid attention to her primary race, in large part because nobody had even heard of her opponent, Joe Crowley. That was the case, even though Crowley was one of the most powerful members of Congress: entrenched in House Democratic leadership and touted as the likely successor to Nancy Pelosi. 

But almost nobody in his district even knew who he was. He barely visited Queens, the district he nominally represented. There was no such thing as a “Joe Crowley supporter”. His extremely significant power had nothing to do with any popular support – he had none – and it has everything to do with his ability to navigate the backrooms of Congress, where a lobbyist for Google and Raytheon lurk, telling party leadership, both parties, what they want, as they hand over massive checks to build their war chests. That's the reality of how Washington works and has worked for decades in both parties. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene's power comes exclusively from popular support. Her relevance depends only upon one thing: the fact that, whether you like it or not, millions of Americans trust her, support her and will stand behind her. And that's what should matter. 

Regardless of what you think about her causes and her ideology – and she is, needless to say, a deeply polarizing figure, as is almost everyone who holds genuinely passionate convictions as a matter of principle – I think one could say without much controversy that she's the most organic and authentic representation in Congress of the MAGA movement that attracted the support of tens of millions of Americans from every walk of life, from every racial and ethnic group and from every part of the country. And that just has to matter in politics. The fact that someone actually has large amounts of popular support. In Washington, for those who know how to wield it – and she has learned a lot about how to do so in the past two years – that's real power. 

There was a reason that “citizen-legislators”, rather than a professionalized political class, was what the Founders envisioned. By definition, people have lived most of their lives without political power and political office has far more in common with those they are supposed to represent. They tend to be far more willing to learn, to grow, to evolve – not as the result of calculating careerist decisions, but simply because people who arrive in Washington afresh are not yet dependent upon it. They typically end up seeing things and learning things about how the country really works, and that, in turn, makes them less captive to party and dogma and more open to growth and change. 

Congresswoman Greene is no ordinary member of Congress, and she's no ordinary Republican either. Many of her most passionately held views are ones that were utterly anathema to the Republican Party until Donald Trump came along in 2016 and became the Republican nominee for president not by affirming and validating long standing Republican orthodoxies – voters already had Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio if they wanted that – but instead, by denouncing and vowing to uproot his own party's establishment orthodoxies. 

For that reason, Greene often inspires more anger and contempt in establishment Republican circles than she does among American liberals. Many of her views, her worldview, and her approach to politics, are a threat to subvert the GOP establishment and they know that. And that's why many of them despise her. But conservative voters also know that she's a threat to subvert the GOP establishment and that's why so many of them trust and support her. 

There are a lot more views I have to share about Congresswoman Greene but rather than take more time for me to express those, I'd rather spend our time letting her speak for herself. I'm thrilled that she's here tonight to do just that. 


G. Greenwald: Congresswoman, good evening. It's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Rep. Greene: Hi, Glenn. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, I was just talking about one of the things that I find interesting about your rise to prominence in such a short period of time, which is the pre-political trajectory you had, you didn't spend a lot of time plotting how to get elected to politics. You never ran for office. Previously, you had what I would describe as a life that has a lot in common with ordinary Americans. Talk about just in general, what your life was before you became Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and how that shapes the work you do in Washington. 

Rep. Greene:  Well, I am just a regular American. I've never been in politics before, never held political office. I never even went to a meeting. As a matter of fact, I'm a business owner. Very proud mom, that's the best part of my life. And I just became angry over time with the failures that I saw in Washington, D.C., that regular Americans were able to get done every single day in our and our normal lives. Being a business owner and growing up in a family business, serving our customers was the most important thing we could do. I was raised with the belief that the customer is king, and I see the American taxpayer as the customer of the federal government. But I see complete failure from our federal government. We're basically on the brink of falling apart. So, I decided that instead of complaining on Facebook or social media or to my friends, I thought, okay, I'll step up to the plate and take a swing at this and see if I can do a better job. 

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SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
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Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

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In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

I share your views on the sanctity of human life. I go a step further And believe In the sanctity of all life. The problem that America has is one of constructed distraction. The whole left/right conflict is the Distraction. The powerful are very good at keeping the public sight off of them. When the sites do get turned on them as it did when Luigi Mangione shot a CEO whose company caused endless suffering, (allegedly) they absolutely lose their minds. Keep the sights on them. We are fighting ourselves otherwise, distracted, as these powerful sociopaths pillage the last scraps of wealth from America before it completely collapses and then retreat to their luxury bunkers in Hawaii or Brazil (😬) or their summer Estate in New Zealand.

Also, I think the term “sanctity of life“ is too closely linked to the church. This term needs a rebranding in my opinion.

I also believe that Charlie Kirk was wearing body armour and the bullet hit centre mass and deflected into his neck. I think the ...

RE: Charlie Kirk ... I appreciated Glenn's comments tonight. It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven: "Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have."
That thing "he's gonna have" might be a change of mind about something you disagreed with him about. I just thought it was important that Glenn emphasized the point that we are all much more than our opinion about any one particular issue and even our opinion on that issue will often change over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aPs9HFX0Cs

It appears that someone in the crowd knew, in the least, that there was a shooter - he saw him - that was about to commit the premediated murder of Charlie Kirk. And after the person in the crowd turned around and saw that Charlie Kirk wasn’t there he cheered as if it were a sporting event.

I came across this from sweetmojo at the duran locals page. An important find in bringing the murderer to justice.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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