Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Who Radicalized the Nashville Shooter? Plus: New “Anti-TikTok” Law Could Censor ALL Social Media
Video Transcript: System Update #61
March 31, 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. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

Police have identified the suspect who carried out a gruesome mass shooting spree at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The massacre resulted in the deaths of six people, including three young children. Police say the likely killer, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, attended the school as a biological female and now identifies as a transgender male. We have repeatedly condemned the now pervasive media practice of leaping to instant conclusions before the bodies are even cold about the motives of killings of this type in order to heap blame on their political opponents, always by claiming that right-wing ideology inspired the shooter to act. We will do the same tonight - condemn that. But in order to illustrate how rotted this tactic is and in the hope that one day it will cease being used, we will apply that framework to this massacre in order to ask the following questions: who and what radicalized this shooter in Nashville to carry out such an atrocity? What ideology was responsible for it? And which advocates of that ideology tonight have blood on their hands? 

Then we'll revisit the topic we reported on last week, the Biden administration's demand that it be vested with the power to ban the social media app TikTok. We won't repeat the various arguments for and against that ban, but we will instead urge you to really consider the implications of the actual law that they are trying to enact, one that extends far, far beyond TikTok, as well as to look at the possible First Amendment implications of banning an app which 150 million Americans are voluntarily choosing to use. 

We'll also examine MSNBC's bizarre exploitation of antisemitism last week as a means of barring discussion of George Soros’ very ample political donations, as well as look at a highly revealing new video from 2014 from Jen Psaki, when she was the State Department spokesperson, about the role of the U.S. in facilitating regime change in Ukraine. 

As a reminder, every episode of System Update is now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. In order to listen to it in that forum, which airs 12 hours after our show airs live here on Rumble, simply follow us on those podcast platforms.

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


 

There was a truly horrific attack today carried out at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee. The facts are still emerging, but what is known is the following. There were six people, innocent people who were murdered by the mass shooter, three of them young children, two of them nine years old, the other eight years old, as well as three employees of the school including a custodian and a substitute teacher and apparently one of the heads of the school. According to the Nashville Police Department, they know who the killer is – who died as part of the police operation. 

From the local newspaper, The Tennessean, you have the headline, “Nashville School Shooting Updates: shooting suspect identified.” The article reads:

 

Metro Nashville police say a former student carrying two assault rifles and a handgun killed three students and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville, Monday, March 23. The suspect, who police have identified as a 28-year-old transgender man, entered the school through a side entrance and began shooting. Shortly before 10:30 a.m., police responded to the school and were able to locate the suspect on the second floor of the school in a lobby where they fatally shot him (The Tennessean. March 27, 2023).

 

We have a video we want to show you from the chief of police of the Nashville Police Department talking about the episode, and whom they identify as the person responsible for this incredibly tragic massacre. 

 

(Video)

Nashville PD: Yes, we have identified the suspect as a 28-year-old female white, actually a Nashvillian [or who] lives in the Nashville area. We have an ongoing investigation as it pertains to her. 

 

Reporter: [Have you] located her place, where she lived? Do you have officers there?

 

Nashville PD: We have. We have.

 

Reporter: Was she wearing body armor? 

 

Nashville PD: I can’t say that far into the investigation. I don't remember saying it, but I can't say for certain if she had body armor or not. 

 

Reporter: Does she have any connection to the church?  

 

Nashville PD: From my initial findings – is that at one point she was a student at that school but unsure what year, all of that. But that's what I've been told so far. 

 

Reporter: Did she have any social media or has her media been examined at this point? 

 

Nashville PD: The investigations are still ongoing at this point. Our federal partners, our state partners, we're all looking into that to see exactly. This is still fluid at the time, but we're looking at everything. 

 

 

You notice in that clip, the police chief repeatedly referred to the killer as she and her. That appears to be what is commonly known as misgendering, because later in the press conference, the police chief acknowledged that the shooter identifies as a male, identifies as a trans male, numerous social media postings and other profiles from the person who is the shooter also identifies himself as a trans man. 

One of the most despicable media practices, which we have very often, is that every single time there's a shooting of this type, the media instantly seeks to politicize it in accordance with their own agenda. And that means one of two things happens. If there is some way to suggest that the shooter is in any way an adhering to or a believer in conservative political ideology before anything is even known about the motive, the media narrative will instantly arise that it isn't just the killer, but also people who identify or who advocate that ideology who are the people to blame for the massacre. This has happened over and over and over again to the point that we have written about it many times before. 

Here is the article – back in May of last year, you probably remember – that a white shooter went to a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he knew that there was a large population of black people and walked into a grocery store and shot up the grocery store and killed several innocent people and overnight, or even before the night was over, the media had decided that the person to blame was not only the shooter but also Tucker Carlson, the Fox host, as well as a variety of other conservatives who have expressed concerns about immigration in the United States and the levels of it. And the argument, the rationale that they used was the shooter had left the manifesto in which he invoked what he referred to as “the great replacement theory”, namely the concern in his view that the United States was being radically and purposely, fundamentally altered because there was an attempt to import into the United States nonwhite immigrants in order to replace the white population. And since he believes that there is no such thing as a legitimate nonwhite American citizen, he believes he was justified in murdering those that he regards as illegitimately in the United States, namely all nonwhite people. 

What was so despicable about the attempt to keep the blame on people like Tucker Carlson and those who have expressed concerns about immigration in the past, or even people who have noted the truthful observation that Democratic Party strategists have long celebrated the fact that immigration was demographically changing the United States in the favor of the Democratic Party, as they perceived it because nonwhite voters were more likely to vote for Democrats. That was the argument of Democratic strategists. They wrote books about it.  Immigrants were replacing the prior demographic makeup of the United States, and that would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. Anybody who noted that was what Democrats were saying they wanted to do was instantly blamed for that shooting in Buffalo, even though the killer in Buffalo left a manifesto identifying by name the people who he said had influenced him in his worldview that caused him to go and do that shooting. And it was a very long list. Not one person on Fox News or any conservative in mainstream American conservative politics was on the list. The only mention of Fox News in that manifesto was one that criticized and blamed Fox for being part of the establishment, the killer in Buffalo thought was responsible for all of those problems. But none of that mattered. There was at least a weeklong coverage of an attempt to say that Tucker Carlson and those who thought like him were the actual murderers because he and those like him had radicalized the Buffalo shooter. 

So, we wrote this article, “The Demented – and Selective – Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents for Mass Shootings”. And the subheadline there says, “All ideologies spawn psychopaths who kill innocents of its name. Yet only some are blamed for their violent adherents: by opportunists cravenly exploiting the corpses while they still lie on the ground”. Because that's exactly what happened in Buffalo and it's what happened in many other cases. 

The reason I said it was selective is that every political faction produces people who carry out violent acts. I reviewed the case of James Hodgkinson, who, in 2017, went and deliberately shot as many Republican members of this Congress as he could, almost murdering Steve Scalise. And it turned out he was an ardent fan of Rachel Maddow and of Bernie Sanders and carried out those attacks explicitly in the name of the arguments, which both regularly advanced, that the Republican Party is racist and fascist and a white supremacist party and is connected to Russia. He left all kinds of documents

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SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
01:07:46
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!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
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

Beautiful (short) essay by Eli Steele from Substack:
https://substack.com/@manofsteele/note/c-155213389

LOCALS MAILBAG: Send in your questions for Glenn!

Any questions that you’ve posted either here today or in our feed across the week are considered!

September 10, 2025

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.

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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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