Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Matt Taibbi Squares Off w/ House Dems Over TwitterFiles
Video Transcript: System Update #52
March 13, 2023
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New reporting from the journalist Matt Taibbi using the still-rich Twitter Files sheds all new light on the scam disinformation industry: the nefarious network of government-funded groups with benign-sounding names that claim to protect you from disinformation all while working hand in hand with the U.S. Security State and Big Tech to disseminate their own disinformation campaigns and to censor dissent from the Internet. 

Most of the day was consumed by Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee hurling invective and vitriol at the two journalists who broke most of those stories, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, in large part because this reporting has exposed the corruption of Big Tech and the U.S. Security State, the two entities the Democratic Party most passionately and aggressively serves. They're enraged that this reporting sheds light on how these agencies, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security and FBI are working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to censor dissent from the Internet because Democrats rely on this censorship regime for their own interests. We'll show you the key aspects of this hearing that really got quite rambunctious and ugly today. 

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


Monologue

 

Earlier today, there was a rambunctious and quite ugly hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in which journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were invited to appear before this committee to share with not just the Congress but the American people the reporting that they've been able to do on what is the censorship regime that has been constructed to police the Internet and how this censorship regime has been constructed to allow the U.S. Security State, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, to have a direct channel into the control room, as it were, of our Big Tech platforms, to instruct them on what views should and should not be permitted. And we're going to show you many of the key highlights from that hearing, really better described as lowlights, as Democratic members of Congress spent the day assaulting the integrity and character of those two journalists because those Democrats are enraged that their allies in the U.S. Security State and Big Tech have been exposed. 

Remember for four years during the presidency of Donald Trump, we heard that any time a mean thing was said about Jim Acosta or Wolf Blitzer, there was some kind of grave crisis where our free press was under assault? Jim Acosta actually wrote a bestselling book depicting him as being in grave danger for telling the truth. This grave danger means that occasionally Donald Trump and other Republican politicians said critical things about him. What happened today in the House before the House Judiciary Committee is in a different universe as Democratic members of Congress didn't just criticize these two journalists, but tried to invade their relationship with sources, tried to impugn the motives why this journalism was done, to claim that these journalists were directly threatening people who are citizens with different views, really trying to gin up hatred and even violence against these journalists. If even 1/10 of this were done to Jim Acosta or Taylor Lorenz or anyone on MSNBC, there would be weeping and all sorts of segments about the trauma these journalists are suffering. And yet none of the Democratic-aligned parts of the corporate media had a peep of protest as Democratic Party members of Congress threw rocks, figuratively, at these two journalists for the crime of exposing the FBI, the CIA, and Big Tech. It's really incredible some of these passages, and we're really looking forward to showing those to you because they shed a lot of light on what the Democratic Party is, what their true agenda is, and what their real values are. 

But before we do that, by design or otherwise, Taibbi, this morning, posted to Twitter a new installment of the Twitter Files that contain some of the most important revelations yet. In particular, the object of his reporting is the thing that I have spent a great deal of time reporting on as part of my own written journalism, as part of this show, which is this scam disinformation industry, this network of groups that are funded either by the U.S. and Western intelligence agencies or by the same two liberal billionaires, namely George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. They all bear very benign-sounding names like the Alliance for Securing Democracy or The Atlantic Council or the Center for Combating Extremism. And what they claim they are intending to do is to identify disinformation and combat it when, in reality, all they're really doing is trying to disguise a very politicized agenda – a politicized censorship agenda – as some sort of science. So, these are experts who have somehow become experts in identifying disinformation, and therefore, these are the people whom Big Tech should rely upon when deciding what views are and are not permitted on the Internet. Taibbi’s revelations that come right from the bowels of Twitter shine a great deal of light on how this network functions and specifically on how to identify them. So, let's take a look, before we get to the hearing, at what he was able to show today. 

Here we see the first tweet, which he entitled “Twitter File's statement to Congress”, and he calls it “the censorship-industrial complex”, which is really what it is. It's an industry that ten years ago did not exist, after the 2016 election when the Democrats were humiliated by losing to essentially a host of a game show on television – because they ran the most unpopular presidential candidate in two generations, Hillary Clinton – instead of accepting responsibility for their defeat, they sought out villains and culprits to explain why they lost. And along with the long list of villains – the Russians, James Comey, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein, and the media – they really concluded that free speech on the Internet was something they could no longer tolerate. They needed to find a way to pretty up and beautify and disguise what their real intention and their agenda became – not an ancillary agenda, but central to their tactics – which was to start censoring and policing the Internet. And they knew, given the values of free speech with which Americans were all inculcated from childhood, that they couldn't just be blunt about it. They couldn't just say we're censoring the Internet because we want to exclude people who are challenging our agenda from being heard. So, what they instead set out to do was to finance and concoct a brand new expertise that is a complete fraud – people who suddenly proclaim themselves disinformation experts. And then, they got their allied billionaires, like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, or sometimes just the U.S. Security State itself, or MI6, to finance directly or indirectly, through the National Endowment for Democracy and quasi-government agencies like those, a whole variety of groups that purported to employ disinformation experts whose goal was to identify disinformation. In all cases, the disinformation they identify is always views or ideas, or stories that undermine global neoliberal institutions of power. The Democratic Party narrative is propagated by the large media, the corporate media in the United States and throughout the West. It's a political movement that pretends to be based on science. It's funded by the same people, by the government, and their goal is basically explicit: to encourage and pressure and coerce Big Tech to censor from the Internet any dissent to the Democratic Party, to the U.S. Security State and to neoliberal institutions, international neoliberal institutions, not by admitting that they're censoring dissent, but by claiming that they're only censoring what they have identified as disinformation. And so often what they claim is disinformation is actually completely true – what they claim is true is actually disinformation. 

These are the same people who told you that the reporting of Joe Biden's business activities in Ukraine and China, right before the election, should be ignored because it was Russian disinformation. They're the people who told you that it was disinformation to wonder whether the coronavirus came from a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They're the same people who claimed it was disinformation to question the U.S. and NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Whatever subverts or undermines their agenda and the agenda of those that finance them gets labeled disinformation, mostly so that they can censor the Internet and propagate their own disinformation without being challenged. 

So, this is what Taibbi calls it, after having spent a lot of time looking through the files. And he gives an example here in which they are acknowledging that some of what they want censored is not even information they consider disinformation. It's information they acknowledge is true, but that has bad consequences in their view. 

So, one example here and you can see it on the screen, it's called, “True content, which might promote vaccine hesitancy”. This is part of what they wanted censored – information that was true, but that could make people more hesitant to take the COVID vaccine. And examples were, “Viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy or stories of true vaccine side effects; true posts which could fuel hesitancy such as individual countries banning certain vaccines”. 

These were all things they wanted censored, things they admitted were true, but that undermine their agenda. That's a major revelation that these groups were acknowledging that they were trying to get things censored, that not even they were pretending was disinformation. 

Here in the next tweet, he writes, “Twitter was more like a partner to the government. With other tech firms Twitter held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even the local police”. 

Here you see a variety of emails where those – not just the U.S. Security State agencies like Homeland Security and the NSA, but the Treasury Department and the Health and Human Services Department – were sending requests, slash demands to Twitter saying, “here are all the posts we want removed”. They had an open channel to do that. It was disguised as a Twitter censorship program that in reality was being directed by government agencies. These are all things we've known before. These are all things that have been reported before. It's the reason so many Democrats hate Matt Taibbi and the other journalists who worked on these files for the crime of exposing a censorship regime they support and the role of these agencies that they revere in this censorship regime. But what he today focused on and expanded the lens to include is this industry of “disinformation experts”, which I use scare quotes for. 

I'm at the point where I genuinely believe it's not hyperbole that any individual identifying themselves as a disinformation expert or an anti-misinformation activist or any groups that label themselves as having among their mission the combating of disinformation, those groups should be held with extreme amounts of suspicion. In almost every case, those groups are the groups that want to disseminate disinformation, not combat it. And their attempt to censor is an attempt to shield their disinformation campaigns from being questioned and challenged in a meaningful way. I personally, when I see somebody identifying as a “disinformation expert” or a journalist claiming they work on the disinformation beat, I automatically assume that they're frauds, in large part, because there is no such thing as a “disinformation expertise”. That is fake expertise. Where did that come from? You can study cardiology, you can study how to be a pilot, you can study to be an aeronautical engineer. These are all real expertise. These are actually things that you can go and learn and have a greater capability than people who haven't studied, in how to do it. But there is no such thing as a person trained in an apolitical way to recognize disinformation. These groups aren't financed by the U.S. government and liberal billionaires because these liberal billionaires and the U.S. government just want a world filled with greater truth. 

You're going to see a Democratic congressman who defended at this House hearing this censorship regime by claiming what I just mockingly said with a straight face – that our friends in the U.S. Security State just want to protect us from disinformation, and that's why they're participating in censorship. And he told Matt Taibbi that he should have a tin foil hat on if he believes otherwise. 

So here you see the evidence of how this disinformation industry works. Here are more emails that Taibbi included in this tweet that just email after email after email from government agencies with a long list of Twitter users or tweets they want banned or removed. 

Here, for example, is one of the FBI agents whose name is Elvis Chan, who was apparently responsible for being the go-between the FBI and Twitter because he was almost on a daily basis sending to Yoel Roth and to other Twitter executives things that he wanted censored. And here's his list of issues on which he wanted censorship to take place. He said, “Please forward to whomever you deem appropriate”. It's about an FBI meeting with Twitter instated. The email date is July 30, 2020. So, just a few months before the 2020 election. They were very active in trying to get information censored off Twitter. The U.S. government, the Security State, was interfering in our political discourse very directly and actively. Here you see they had issues of censorship they wanted with regard to Russia, China and “Global Status” – this includes Iran, Venezuela and North Korea – and “Planning for the election”. 

So, the FBI was explicitly meeting with Twitter to direct them on how to censor in anticipation of the coming 2020 election. 

Now, here is where Taibbi expands the scope to include these private disinformation groups. He says, 

 

We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center, along with, “NGOs that aren't academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media, as the Censorship-Industrial Complex (Twitter Files. March 9, 2023)

 

They constantly are writing to Twitter and Facebook and Google, pressuring them to censor information that they think violates the terms of service of these platforms. Imagine being a journalist, someone who goes into journalism and then having as your function, being a leader, a leading agitator for demanding that political content be removed from the Internet. And yet that's what so many of these journalists, these corporate journalists, have as their primary function. 

Here in the next tweet, Taibbi writes – this is basically a who's who in the censorship-industrial complex. “Twitter, in 2020, helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. It included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council's DFRLab and Hamilton 68 creators, the Alliance for Securing Democracy”. And here you see the list where Twitter essentially was debating which group should be included in these meetings, and which group should be allowed to have a megaphone to tell Twitter what to censor. And on this group, you see things like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is the group of neocons and Democrats that had former members of the FBI on it and CIA on it, led by Bill Kristol, a former aide to Marco Rubio, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, leading this group. They were the inventor of that scam, Hamilton 68 dashboard, that purported to identify who was influenced by the Kremlin and who wasn't. Here you see the Atlantic Council, which gets a great deal of funding from Western security agencies. And if you go and look at the online profiles of any of these groups, every one of them – let’s go look at one in particular, Jared Holt. Jared Holt. He worked for the Atlantic Council. He's become very popular online and has a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers. He's exactly what I'm talking about. He claims to be an “expert in disinformation”. His only purpose, on behalf of the Atlantic Council – which is in bed with Big Tech in the U.S. Security State, getting funding from them – is to censor the Internet. And that's why his fan base are liberals – because liberals, more than anybody else in the United States, by which I mean the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, not only tolerate this censorship regime but cheer it, approve of it, crave it, want it strengthened because they know how crucial it is for their political interest. So, if you go and look at Jared Holt’s profile, who works for the Atlantic Council, you will see exactly the kind of person I'm describing. When I say a person who should be ignored or held in a great deal of suspicion for proclaiming himself to be a “disinformation agent” while he dedicates himself to this censorship-industrial complex type. 

Taibbi goes on: 

The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same experts (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos) funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel (March 9, 2023). 

 

It's exactly right. If you see a panel anywhere in the West on disinformation, on how to keep misinformation off the Internet, it's the same exact people, funded by the same exact entities, who appear at every one of these conferences, and every journalist like Margaret Sullivan, of the Washington Post, and Brandy Zadrozny, Ben Collins at NBC News, have anointed themselves “Disinformation activists” –, people who are journalists, whose only goal in life is to censor your views from the Internet if your views deviate from theirs, that's the only purpose and function that this has.Taibbi goes on: 

 

The Twitter Files (#TwitterFiles) repeatedly show media acting as a proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don't nix accounts. Here, the Financial Times gives Twitter until the end of the day to provide a “steer” on whether RFK, Jr, and other vax offenders will be zapped (March 9, 2023).  

 

This is the main way that the tech reporters of The New York Times, like Mike Isaac and the entire tech team – as well as NBC News and The Washington Post – this is how they coerce Big Tech to censor. They write to them and they say, here's an account that's endorsing views that we regard as disinformation and we are going to write a story on your refusal to remove this content unless by the end of the day you tell us that you're going to remove it. And so often that's how these media outlets pressure these organizations, these Big Tech companies, to remove the content that they want – by basically writing stories, accusing these executives of having blood on their hands for their refusal to censor. 

So, we have been following this industry for a long time. Digging into who finances it, who these people are, and how they function is something to which we devoted a lot of our journalistic attention and will continue to. Taibbi’s reporting today is yet another important step in unmasking all of this. 

That sets the perfect stage for today's hearing, in which, as I told you, they treated Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger basically like traitors. It's extraordinary. They treated them as criminals. And to Democratic members of Congress, they are criminals. And the reason they're criminals is that they exposed the crimes of the most important allies of the Democratic Party, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, and Big Tech in the mission that the Democratic Party considers central to their future viability, namely the power to censor the Internet. And it is the U.S. government that is acting as the key agent in coercing this. And they know this is unconstitutional. They know that the U.S. government cannot indirectly, through pressure, censor in a way the constitution would forbid them from censoring directly under the First Amendment. They know that Americans would find all of this objectionable and dangerous, that the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security, which were told are here to protect us from foreign threats, instead are directly involved in our politics by deciding for American citizens which viewpoints we can and can't hear or who will and will not be permitted to have a platform online. So, they wanted this all in secret. It's the same reason why Julian Assange is in a prison. Why Edward Snowden's in exile. Why Daniel Ellsberg almost spent his life in prison. Anyone who exposes the secret crimes of the U.S. Security State becomes the enemy of politicians because politicians support these agencies and want this hidden and not exposed. And what Taibbi did was expose it. And that's why this rage that we're about to show you that got directed at him, all day, only from Democrats - that’s where it comes from. That they want all of this hidden is what accounts for the behavior we saw today. 

Let's take a look at this first video here, this is from Stacey Plaskett. She, for some reason, is the ranking member of this committee, even though she's not even really a member of Congress. She's a delegate from the Virgin Islands. She's not even officially a member of Congress. She can't vote on any bills. There's barely anything she can do except sit in committees like this and pontificate. And she spent the day lecturing Taibbi, accusing him of all sorts of things while barely letting him speak all while liberal idiots in the media – like Aaron Rupar and others – cheered as though she had done something courageous and brave. Imagine standing up on a podium where the only power you have, as a delegate from the Virgin Islands, is that you get to use the 7 minutes you get however you want, and you use it to basically accuse journalists of being the liars and threats and fraudsters. And then, when they go and try and defend themselves, you interrupt them and say, “You do not speak”. You just sit there while I berate you and Hector you and try and ruin your reputation. Imagine reporting something this abusive, this pathetic and cowardly. But that's what happened all day. So, let's listen to why they're so enraged with these journalists. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Mr. Chairman, I'm not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them. 

 

She said that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are “direct threats” to people who oppose them. Do you remember for four years we would hear that anyone criticizing Jim Acosta or Taylor Lorenz were putting these people in danger? What is this doing to Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – having this delegate who looks and tries to act as if she's a member of Congress, labeling these journalists a direct threat to those people who oppose them? And in what conceivable way are they “direct threats”? What did they do other than expose the U.S. Security State and Big Tech, the most powerful actors in the country? But this was the tenor of the entire hearing. Let's look at another clip from this delegate from the Virgin Islands. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): And to praise him for his work. This isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us. Now, there are many legitimate questions about where Musk got the financing to buy Twitter. We know for a fact that foreign countries like to talk. […]

 

First of all, she's trying to imply that he did something nefarious because he got funding from foreign sources. She obviously doesn't know – I really would be shocked if she knew – sometimes when people lie, you wonder if they actually know and are lying on purpose or if they're just too ignorant to have known. I'd bet any amount of money in her case, it's the latter. She has no idea that long before Elon Musk bought Twitter, some of the biggest shareholders in Twitter were Saudis and other foreign investors and foreign financiers. The second largest shareholder of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, after Jack Dorsey, was a Saudi billionaire. No one pretended to be concerned about that then. Now that Elon Musk is allowing free speech and refusing to censor, on behalf of the Democratic Party, she wants to impugn Elon Musk, too. 

But do you notice how she called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, “so-called journalists”, not real journalists, “so-called journalists?” Now I'm about to show you Taibbi’s answer, which was actually quite humble, about why he should not be called a “so-called journalist”, but in fact, a journalist. But the ironic part about all of this is that she is a “so-called member of Congress”. She's not a member of Congress, actually. She has no constitutional standing to do anything. The Congress decided to give them fake representation – the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, and a couple of other places – and now she sits up there lecturing journalists, trying to incite violence against journalists, even though she is not even a real member of Congress. She's a so-called member of Congress. Here was Taibbi's response: 

 

Matt Taibbi: Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a “so-called journalist”. I've won the National Magazine Award. They have still an award for independent journalism. And I've written ten books, including four New York Times best-sellers. 

 

In other words, Matt Taibbi spent years as the star investigative reporter at Rolling Stone. He uncovered some of the worst abuses of the derivatives fraud that led to the 2008 financial crisis. He has won all of the most prestigious awards in magazine writing, including the National Magazine Award, and he's written ten books on news and politics. In other words, he has so many more accomplishments than she has votes to even sit there and yet she spent the day trying to impugn his integrity, having no interest in what he reported. And yet you see as well how after she got done deriding him when he was finally given a chance to respond – not by her, but by Jim Jordan, the chair of the committee – she just ignored him. How infantile is that? You throw insults at somebody in public and then when they try, in a very civil manner, substantive and civil manner, far better than she deserved, to explain to you why the insult that you hurled is inaccurate, you turn away and look at your phone and you chatter with the lawyer who's telling you what to say. But that's how this hearing was conducted. 

Now, let's look at some of the substantive attacks on these journalists from Democrats, to the extent you can call any of them that. Here again, is delegate Plaskett talking to Taibbi. 

Actually, just to set this up. What's important about this is many Democrats, not just delegate Plaskett, spent the day demanding to know Matt Taibbi’s sources and whenever he tried to say, “I'm a journalist, I don't reveal my sources”, they continued to berate and demand that he revealed the source of the Twitter Files, the specific individuals who gave him access, who provided these documents. Again, calling Jim Acosta an idiot or a liar, a grave First Amendment Crisis, merits a book about how Jim Acosta is in grave danger. But Democratic members of Congress or fake members of Congress demanding a journalist give up their stories for no reason in the fun of it? None of these fake free press advocates have a word to utter about it because they were never interested in a free press. They were interested in protecting their friends in the media for purely political reasons. So, let's watch this. 

 


Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the email? 

 

Matt Taibbi: Well, the attribution for my story is sourced at Twitter, and that's what I'm going to refer to. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Okay. Did Mr. Musk contact you, Mr. Taibbi? 

 

Matt Taibbi: Again, the attribution for my story is sourced on Twitter. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Mr. Shellenberger, did Mr. Musk contact you? 

 

Michael Shellenberger: Actually, no. I was brought in by my friend Bari Weiss. And so, this story, there's been a lot of misinformation. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Mr. Weiss. Mr. Taibbi. Ms. Weiss, thank you. Mr. Taibbi, have you had conversations with Elon Musk? 

 

Matt Taibbi:  I have. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Okay. Mr. Taibbi, did Mr. Musk place any conditions on […] 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  {One second…} ?

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): As long as my time is not used. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  Are you trying to get journalists {to tell their sources}? 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): No, I'm not talking. No, I'm not. I am. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  {It sure sounds like it}. 

 

 

She has spent the last 45 seconds demanding to know the identity of Matt Taibbi’s sources. And then when asked, ”Are you trying to get a journalist’s sources?” she said, “No, I'm not.” In this case, is she lying? Is she too dumb to understand what she's saying? Honestly, in this case, I don't know. I can't actually imagine that anyone is too dumb to realize that after spending a full minute demanding to know the identity of someone's source, when they didn't, then, turn around and deny that they're doing exactly that which they've just spent the last minute doing – I don't believe there's any human brain incapable of understanding the lie there. 

But let's look at the next exchange. This is from one of the newest members of Congress, Dan Goldman. He was elected from Manhattan, the richest borough in New York City. He ran against a long group of people of color, leftist activists, of leftist officeholders in New York, and he crushed all of them. He received the endorsement of The New York Times. And to me, Dan Goldman is the perfect avatar, an expression of what the Democratic Party is. I'm glad he won. He should win because it's a very clear expression of what the Democratic Party is. 

Dan Goldman is one of the richest members of Congress. He has a net worth of $250 million, but not because he earned any of it. He was born into the billionaire family that created Levi Strauss. His great-grandfather was the founder of Levi Strauss, and therefore, he is the heir to that fortune. So, he's worth a quarter of $1 billion despite having not earned any of it. He was educated at one of the most expensive private schools in the United States, Sidwell Friends, in Washington – I believe that's where Matthew Lacy went to – where most of the D.C. elite are educated. It's something like $60,000 or $70,000 a year to go there. Imagine spending 60,000 or $70,000 a year to educate your child in third grade. But that's where he was educated. He then went to Harvard and then Stanford Law School. The reason he was so popular among the wealthy white liberals who voted for the member of Congress in Manhattan is that he spent the last three years as a lead lawyer in the Mueller investigation – which ended up concluding that there was no evidence for the Central Democratic Party claim that the Trump campaign had criminally colluded with the Kremlin to hack the emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign. 

So, that’s Dan Goldman. And here he is defending this censorship regime and essentially denying that there was any censorship at all that came from the U.S. government, even though we have reported example after example after example from the Twitter Files that show exactly that and you'll see an example shoved in his face while he insists that there is none. 

 

Rep. Dan Goldman: Now, Twitter, Twitter, and even with Twitter, you cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship of any lawful speech. And when I say lawful, I mean non-criminal speech, because plenty […]

 

Rep. Jim Jordan: I'll give you one. I'd ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the following email from Clarke Humphry, Executive Office of the Presidency, White House Office, January 23, 2021. That's the Biden administration. 4:39 a.m.. “Hey, folks”. This goes to Twitter. “Hey, folks, wanted to use the term, Mister. They used the term Mr.. Goldman just use one and to flag the below tweet and then wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed asap. That is. 

 

So that's three days into the Biden administration. It's somebody from the Biden White House directly demanding that Twitter remove a specific tweet that the Biden administration wanted. Three days into the Biden presidency. They're wasting no time controlling what can and should be heard on the internet. The very thing that Daniel Goldman, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, just ended up denying ever happened. He said there was no example of that ever happening. There's hundreds, if not thousands that have been revealed through this reporting. But Jim Jordan gave him one. So, then the only little wiggle room that he has, he being a lawyer for the wiggle room was to say, well, no, I said there's no examples of the government demanding this censorship of legal speech. Maybe they wanted removed criminal or illegal speech, but not legal speech. So, the only space that he has left is to demand to know the content of the tweet that the Biden White House was demanding be censored. So, watch what happens. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan: […] the below tweet. And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre, that would be great”. This is a tweet on the very issue that […] 

 

Rep. Dan Goldman: Can you read the fullness of the record. Can you read the – because I've not seen this. Can you read the tweet that it's referencing?

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  I don't have the tweet with me, but the gentleman was […]. Try to tell Twitter to take that. to explicitly remove something. And […]

 

Rep. Dan Goldman: No, I said just remove lawful speech. Lawful speech. We're going to conflate. The First Amendment is not absolute. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  This is something from Robert Kennedy Jr. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Point of order, Mr. Chair. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  Because Robert Kennedy, Jr,  senator […] 

(Overlapping of speeches)

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Mr. Goldman, Mr. Chair…

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  All I'm saying is in no time did the government explicitly say to take a tweet down. Here we have it, right here. They knew they couldn't even wait two days, two days into this administration. They were asked – Twitter – to take something down. And we will get you the underlying tweet. 

 

Stacey Plaskett (D-VI): Thank you […] Will you place it into the record as well, sir? The underlying tweet. 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan:  Robert Kennedy Jr. is talking about… He's talking about Hank Aaron's death after he received the vaccine. 

 

 

So that was the tweet that the Biden White House wanted removed. It was a tweet from Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of RFK, who is not a criminal. At least he's never been charged with crimes. And the tweet was suggesting or implying that there may have been a relationship between the premature death of Hank Aaron, the baseball star, and the fact that he got the COVID vaccine. Maybe you agree with that. Maybe you don't. Maybe you think that's an interesting topic. Maybe you think it's absurd. One thing it's not – even conceivably – is illegal – to suggest that there's a relationship between Hank Aaron's death and the COVID vaccine. And that three days in the Biden White House, there was that explicit email coming from a senior Biden official right to Twitter saying, we want this tweet removed. Exactly what Dan Goldman denied had happened. That's how it went all day. 

That is exactly what has been happening: we have a First Amendment that bars the U.S. government from censoring speech, so, instead of going and taking it down themselves through laws, through executive action, they write to their friends at Twitter, and they say, take this down for us. There's no question that's unconstitutional. At some point that will be tested in court. 

But whatever else is true, the only reason we know about it is because Elon Musk opened up the files of Twitter and allowed real journalists to come in and look through it all and tell us what's in there. While imposing no conditions of any kind on what can and can't be reported. I had Taibbi on my show. I have Shellenberger on my show. I've had Lee Fang on my show and David Zweig on my show, all of whom did the reporting on the Twitter Files and all of whom stated emphatically that there was no limitations or conditions of any kind on what they could report. The only reason we know about this is because Taibbi and his colleagues journalistically reported it, and that is what makes Democrats so angry. They wanted all of this hidden. And if you don't believe me, let's listen to Colin Allred, who is a Texas Democrat look at Matt Taibbi, refused to allow him to speak and give a very eloquent and moving and passionate defense of the censorship regime that we know about only because the Twitter Files exposed it. 

 

Rep. Colin Allred:  We live in an information age where malign actors do want to use social media to influence our elections both big, once you've spent a long time talking about and small, like mine. This should be a bipartisan goal […]

 

Matt Taibbi:  Mr. Congressman […] 

 

Rep. Colin Allred:  Now, you don't get to ask questions here. It should be a bipartisan goal to ensure that Americans and only Americans determine the outcome of our elections, not fear-mongering. And I think I hope that you can actually take this with you, because I honestly hope that you will grapple with this. That it may be possible if we can take off the tinfoil hat, that there's not a vast conspiracy but that ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy undermined. And to the very right, do you think they're trying to undermine? They may be trying to protect. 

 

So that's the Democratic Party for you right there, summed up perfectly. There is not a single member of the Democratic Party in Congress – not Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries. Not AOC or Ilhan Omar or Bernie Sanders – who would disagree with a word of what was said? That is the perfect expression of the core view of the Democratic Party, namely that the CIA, the FBI and the NSA are not malevolent actors at all but, instead, are benevolent actors. And that not only should we trust those U.S. Security State agencies to censor for us, but we should be grateful to them for it. Because they're just trying to help. That's censoring for any nefarious purposes. Since when is the CIA or the FBI or the NSA or Homeland Security? When are they nefarious? Since when do we distrust them? They're the good guys. We want them censoring information because, as he said, all they're trying to do is to protect us from speech that harms us or that undermines democracy. Everyone knows that's what the CIA and the FBI are for. And the only way that you could possibly believe that it might be dangerous to allow these agencies to do that is if you're a kooky conspiracy theorist, exactly what they said. 

You'll recall from yesterday's show about people who believed or wanted to hear more about whether the COVID virus came from a leak in the Wuhan lab. You were called a conspiracy theorist by the establishment for thinking that. The people who say that stuff are always lying and are always trying to discredit and malign those who are onto them. It's not a conspiracy theory when you hold the evidence in your hands of what's happening. And the reason we have this evidence in our hands is that these journalists did what journalists are supposed to do, which is not agitate for censorship, not disseminate the propaganda from the FBI and the CIA and Wall Street, not defend the Democratic Party, but instead reveal the secrets of these most secretive agencies that the U.S. public has the right to know. And that is the reason these Democrats heaped hatred and invective and vitriol on Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger all day because this was the last thing they wanted was for this censorship regime to be out in the public. And now that it is, they're forced to defend it. 

I think we should be very grateful to Colin Allred for offering that one-minute passionate defense while he told Matt Taibbi to sit in the corner and shut up and just listen because that really is how the Democratic Party thinks about the FBI, the CIA, Big Tech values of free speech, and the virtues of censoring the Internet and keeping the truth from you. That is the core goal of the Democratic Party. 

 


Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope to see you back here tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble. 

 

Have a great evening, everybody. 

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@ggreenwald Glenn, can you please look into the 6 deaths of AfD party members in the German region of Westphalia?
What's going on? The German authorities are claiming that 3 of them died of natural causes, one died by suicide, one by heart attack and the other by something else. They've all died within the last 2 weeks, there is an election in that area on September 14th and 4 of the deceased were on the ballot standing for election that day.
Can you please comment on this? I have a sick feeling something really sinister is happening over there.

A Question About Your Approach to Journalism

Hi, Glenn! Djordje here, from Serbia.

I have been following your work for years now, and as someone who followed your evolution online, I had a question regarding your views on journalism. Namely, I noticed that for a while now, you tend to talk about different actors openly, such as "X is a blatant liar" or "Y is a blithering idiot".

This approach is not common in journalism, so I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. I'm not necessarily against or for it, nor do I believe that the approach has compromised your work. I'm just curious because I believe that I don't know another big-profile journalist approaching things this way.

All the best

I really appreciated your episode on the Minneapolis shooter, in which you correctly pointed out that anyone who points a gun at a small child and shoots them suffers from a deep spiritual depravity (sorry if I misquoted the exact words, I am working from memory).

I am wondering what this means in the context of the IDF, where numerous witness, victims, and doctors report Israeli soldiers shooting small children and even toddlers with sniper rifles and drones; weapon systems where they clearly identify they are aiming at a child and then shoot them. And what does it mean for the communities (some in the United States) that these child-shooters return to?

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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 not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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Israeli Official Caught in Pedophile Sting Operation Allowed to Flee; Israeli Data: 83% of the Dead in Gaza are Civilians; Ukrainian Man Arrested over Nord Stream Explosions
System Update #503

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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A top official of Israel's cyberwarfare unit was arrested in Nevada on Monday night after police say he tried to lure what he thought was an underage child to have sex with him. The Israeli, Tom Alexandrovich, was let out of jail on bail and then – rather strangely – had no measures imposed on him to ensure that he did not simply flee the country and go back to Israel. As a result, the accused pedophile did exactly that – after telling the FBI that he intended to get on a plane to go back to Israel, that is what he predictably did. 

Why were no measures undertaken to prevent that, whether it be the seizure of his passport or wearing an ankle bracelet, or monitoring? We'll examine the latest about this increasingly strange case, as well as one of the officials, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who has her own background. 

Then: a harrowing report from Israel's own intelligence units’ documents that an astonishing 83% of the people the IDF has killed in Gaza are civilians, all this revealed today, as Bari Weiss' Free Press continues to engage in some of the most brazen atrocity and genocide denialism imaginable in service of the foreign government to which they are loyal. We'll examine these latest revelations and what they mean for U.S. policy. 

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