Glenn Greenwald
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Rand Paul Blocks Authoritarian “Anti-TikTok” Bill. Plus: Darren Beattie on Douglass Mackey Guilty Verdict, Trump Indictment
Video Transcript: System Update #64
April 04, 2023
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The indictment of President Trump is obviously a massive story, which is why we devoted our entire show to it last night, a full 90-minute episode, but it's important that we not let it distract us from everything else the government is attempting to do, beginning with two bills in Congress that are being justified in the name of banning the social media app TikTok: one called the Data Act, the other the Restrict Act that would, in fact, do far, far more than just ban TikTok. They would empower the Biden administration and future presidents to ban any social media app or platform if they decide, in their sole discretion, that the app in some way poses a threat to national security. 

Earlier this week, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked one such bill offered by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and others that those senators hoped to fast track with bipartisan support and send to the White House with very little debate or deliberation. We'll report on the issues raised by that debate in the Senate, why Sen. Paul opposes this bill and why, even if you were eager to banish TikTok from the United States, higher levels of skepticism and scrutiny are urgent in the face of any attempts by the U.S. government to claim the power to regulate and specially to ban the Internet and entire social media platforms. 

Then, in the interview segment, we'll speak with Darren Beattie, the independent journalist at Revolver News and the former Trump White House speechwriter, about those pending bills justified in the name of banning TikTok, as well as the indictment of former President Trump obtained and the conviction by a jury just this afternoon, just a few hours ago, in a Brooklyn courthouse of the pro-Trump social media influencer Douglass Mackey, better known as Ricky Vaughn, whom prosecutors claim deliberately deceived people into not voting by use of his Twitter meme. He now faces many years in prison. 

Before we get into tonight's show: we prepared our show last night very quickly because the Trump indictment was announced only a few hours before we aired. And there, as a result, we didn't have quite the same time for preparation as we normally do. There were two statements I made that were incorrect and we wanted to correct them very prominently. First, the Stormy Daniels story that I mentioned and talked a lot about had been reported by a few websites prior to the 2016 election but was not widely known until 2018, and I suggested it was widely known before the election. Secondly, in the context of pointing out the effort by liberals to suppress any discussion of George Soros, his support for Alvin Bragg's candidacy, the D.A. who obtained Trump's indictment, I highlighted how Democrats have spent years alleging that the GOP were the puppets of the Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson, yet now, suddenly want to ban any discussion of George Soros talking about Soros’ spending as anti-Semitic. During that discussion, I said that Adelson was a citizen of both the United States and Israel. That was incorrect. He is in fact, or was, in fact, only a citizen of the United States and not Israel. So those are the two corrections from last night’s show.

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

 


 

In the world of politics, it's very easy to forget what has happened before some massive event. That's certainly the case with yesterday's indictment of President Trump which landed without much warning and obviously is a great shock. It's a historic event to have the first ever former president of the United States, and more importantly, in my view, the current frontrunner for the presidential race in 2024, criminally indicted, for the first time in American history. But it's important not to let the shock of that event and the magnitude of it let us get distracted from what was taking place and what we were focused on previously, namely a whole variety of issues but the issue that I think was getting the most attention, rightfully so, why is the argument supported by the Biden White House and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress, that it was urgent that either TikTok, the social media platform that has become the most popular among American teenagers and American youth, or one of the most popular among all Americans – according to the company's data, 150 million Americans voluntarily use that app – that it's urgent that either they be forced to sell the app to American interest or American companies, and if not to actually ban the app entirely, to banish it, to make it illegal for anyone in the United States to use it. 

Obviously, there is a major debate that we ought to be having in general over how to view China, over whether we should view China as an irredeemable enemy, as an adversary, or a competitor, and what steps we should take once we make that decision about what it is that we ought to do in response to what is clearly the second most powerful country on the planet, a nuclear power, like Russia. These are extremely important decisions and I would hope and expect that the debate does not simply consist of ‘we hate China and therefore we're going to say yes to everything the United States government wants to do in the name of stopping it’. That instead, whatever steps we take when it comes to how we treat the question of China be at least undertaken with a lot of deliberative thought, because whatever steps we take will have very serious consequences. It can have very serious economic consequences – the United States and Wall Street, in particular, are very reliant on the Chinese, and we can punish the Chinese in all sorts of ways, and the Chinese can punish American companies and the American economy in all sorts of ways – but obviously militaristically, talking about the country, which has the second most powerful military in the world and, as I said, a nuclear-armed power. And so, if we're going to undertake a decades-long Cold War with China of the kind that we had with the Soviet Union for five or six decades during the 20th century, one that led to multiple wars around the planet and the explosion of the U.S. Security State – that was all done under the Cold War – then we ought to – at least – have an open debate. I think people ought to be able to participate in that debate and question things without being accused of being puppets of China or servants of the Chinese Communist Party, like with Russiagate, people were accused of being servants of the Kremlin, or assets of the Russian government or Vladimir Putin for questioning things the government or the U.S. Security State was saying be done there. In other words, the debate itself is crucial. 

Earlier this week, we devoted an entire show to the question of whether TikTok should be banned. We did it on the day the TikTok CEO appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. We reported on some of the key exchanges that took place at that committee. We talked about the different aspects of the policy question of whether TikTok should be banned, and I don’t want to revisit that or repeat that. I want to instead, for those of you who already watched it, – and even if you didn't, you can watch that show and that's what we covered – I want to instead raise a couple of related issues that we didn't really talk much about as part of that show, in part, because there are new developments, but also because these things extend way beyond the question of whether you should ban TikTok. In other words, if you in your mind already have a position fixed about whether you want the U.S. government to ban TikTok, what's the position of the Biden administration, there's still a lot to think about in terms of the bills that are pending in Congress, because those bills do far, far more than just allow the government to ban TikTok. They empower the Biden White House and then future administrations to ban any social media platform, not just TikTok – that is owned by a foreign entity that the government deems, at its discretion, threatens national security for reasons such as interfering in our politics the way that the U.S. government Democratic Party claims Twitter and Facebook and YouTube did in the 2016 election – or any platform that is designed to serve the interest of a foreign country, which is how the U.S. government regards dissent over the U.S. proxy war in Russia. 

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U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
System Update #469

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

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

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The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

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If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

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U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

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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Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

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Federal Court Dismisses & Mocks Lawsuit Brought by Pro-Israel UPenn Student; Dave Portnoy, Crusader Against Cancel Culture, Demands No More Jokes About Jews; Trump's Push to Ban Flag Burning
System Update #466

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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In the first segment, we’ll talk about the victimhood narrative that holds that American Jews, in general, and Jewish students on college campuses in particular, are uniquely threatened, marginalized and endangered. One of the faces of this student victimhood narrative has become Eyal Yakoby, who is a vocal pro-Israel activist and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2024, he was invited by House Republicans to stand next to House Speaker Mike Johnson and he proclaimed: I do not feel safe. He said it over and over. “I do not feel safe” has kind of become the motto for his adult life. Now, he seized on those opportunities by initiating a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania seeking damages for what he said was the school's failure to fulfill its duties to keep him safe. Mind you, he was never physically attacked, never physically menaced, never physically threatened, but nonetheless claimed that the school had failed to keep him safe and told the congress in the country that he did not feel safe. 

The federal judge who is presiding over his lawsuit, who just happens to be a Jewish judge, a conservative judge, appointed by George W. Bush, not only dismissed Yakoby's lawsuit as without any basis, but really viciously mocked it, depicting his claims as a little more than petulant entitled demands from a privileged Ivy League student who wants to not be exposed to any ideas or political activism that might upset him – sort of depicting him as the Princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” Andersen’s literary fairytale about a princess who's so sensitive to anything that might concern her, that she's even unable to sleep if there's a pea buried beneath the seventeenth mattress on which she sleeps. 

This judicial decision is worth examining not only for the schadenfreude of watching one of America's whiniest pro-Israel activists be exposed as a self-interested fraud that he is, but also for what it says about the broader narrative that has been so relentlessly pushed and so endlessly exploited from so many corners, insisting that the supreme victim group of the United States is, of all people, American Jews. 

Then: speaking of extreme entitlement, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy made quite a name for himself over many years by ranting against the evils of cancel culture, championing the virtues of free speech, and viciously mocking as snowflakes and as people who are far too sensitive anyone who takes offense at jokes, offensive jokes told by comedians. That is what made it so odd – yet so telling – when this weekend we watched the very same Dave Portnoy viciously berated one of his employees for disagreeing with Portnoy's insistence that while jokes about everyone and every group continue to be appropriate, there must now be one exception: namely, according to Portnoy, jokes about Portnoy's own group,  American Jews,  must now be suspended and deemed too dangerous to permit. 

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There have been really a lot of radical and fundamental changes, first on the political culture and then in our legal landscape as a result of the attack on October 7, and particularly the desire of the United States – by both parties – to arm the Israelis, to fund the Israelis, to protect the Israelis as they went about and destroyed Gaza. 

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