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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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
WEEKLY WEIGH-IN: Another Week Another News Cycle

What’s happening in politics that you want to talk about? Are there any burning topics you think Glenn needs to cover? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

This post will be pinned to our profile for the remainder of this week, so comment below anytime with your questions, insights, future topic ideas/guest recommendations, etc. Let’s get a conversation going!

Glenn will respond to a few comments here—and may even address some on our next supporters-only After Show.

Thank you so much for your continued support through another week of SYSTEM UPDATE with Glenn Greenwald!

🏆Dog-of-the-Week:

Dog-of-the-Week goes to… Zeus! Our adorable puppy friend has returned (and grown)! Also happy to see him is Zuma as they share some brotherly love while Glenn gets to some aftershow questions.

Member of the Month [March]

We are excited to introduce a new segment on Locals: Member of the Month!

This post allows the SYSTEM UPDATE team to properly recognize our valued and conversation-provoking supporters. We thought this to be long overdue—as week by week, so many of you provide vital input, engaging conversations, and gripping questions.

Member of the Month: @BookWench

Thank you so much for your contribution to this community. Your questions, conversations, and ideas are so appreciated.

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Fallout From Terrorist Attack on Moscow

On Friday, March 22 at the Moscow Concert Hall, one of the deadliest attacks on Russia in decades took place: several gunmen killed 137 and wounded more than 100 people.

U.S. officials claim the group is ISIS-K, while Russia suspects it was Western-backed Ukrainians.

What are your thoughts?

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Texas Gov. Abbot Mandates “Safe Space” Exception for Jewish Students. Ben Shapiro’s Mental Gymnastics to Justify Candace Owens’ Firing
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Good evening. It's Thursday, March 28. 

Tonight: Few ideas have been mocked more viciously over the last decade than the notion of "safe spaces." Whenever various minority groups—marginalized groups as we now call them—have justified the need for censorship and other speech codes on college campuses, that phrase was invariably invoked: unless vulnerable college students—who are adults—are protected from ideas that upset them or make them feel threatened, then they won't feel safe. Not just conservative pundits but also self-styled free speech champions have created a virtual cottage industry—a very lucrative one at that—of mocking the idea that college students—in particular, certain called minority groups—need safe spaces.

Yesterday, Texas's Republican Governor Greg Abbott issued an Executive Order that applies to all universities in his state. What did he say was the purpose of this executive order? To create "safe spaces"- not for all students on Texas campuses, but only for one minority group in particular: Texas Jewish students. This is merely the latest in a long line of legal measures and other forms of special privileges created largely by red states and Republican Governors in the name of fighting racism, bigotry and other forms of prejudice by protecting members of a minority group from certain views. If it sounds like the exact left-liberal culture war mindset that conservatives generally mock rather than embrace, you would be exactly correct, with the only difference being which groups are protected by each side using this mentality. 

All of this points to the lurking contradictions that have long plagued conservative politics because of their claimed principles and the willingness of many of them to abandon them in the name of protecting Israel – that have finally emerged in plain daylight since October 7. We will examine this Executive Order issued by Governor Abbott yesterday as well as the reaction to it.

Then: Speaking of the irreconcilable inconsistencies in right-wing politics when it comes to Israel, Ben Shapiro yesterday sat down to speak with Dave Rubin. These two have a lot in common. They have both become extremely wealthy men by championing the cause of free speech and free discourse and opposing cancel culture. They are both among the nation's most fanatical supporters of a foreign country, Israel, and they each embody exactly the burning, consuming contradictions I just described when it comes to their claimed principles on the one hand and their willingness to do anything to protect the country of Israel on the other.

One of the topics both of them discussed is why the Daily Wire – the right-wing free speech outlet founded by Shapiro in 2015 – parted ways with its very popular host Candace Owens over her views about Israel. Within this discussion resides a great deal of insight about how many conservatives have been struggling with issues of free speech and other basic civil rights since October 7 and well before that. The discussion is worth examining for that reason.

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

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Lee Fang Exposes 60 Minutes’ Disinfo “Expert” as Partisan Hack. PLUS: The Atlantic Targets Pro-Palestine Stanford Students with Nepo Baby Theo Baker
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, March 27. 

Tonight: There is a group of people in the United States who have become convinced that they are qualified to decree what is true and what is false—not in any one particular area of expertise that they have spent a lot of years studying, say, cardiology or archeology or physics, but they believe they are somehow competent to identify truth and falsity in general. And more than just being somehow qualified to identity truth and falsity in general, they believe they are entitled to have their judgments be binding on others, that if they pronounce something to be false or inaccurate, then it should no longer be permitted to be expressed or to be heard.

Such people now call themselves "disinformation experts." This is a completely fraudulent credential. It was invented out of whole cloth following the dual 2016 disasters of Brexit in the UK and Trump's victory over Hillary in the U.S. Seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, there descended upon the United States this creepy new group of self-anointed experts who proclaimed to the world that they were able to identify falsity and deceit where nobody else could. As a result of this unique insight they insist that they and they alone possess, they have demanded the power to dictate the limits of our political debate, and have purported to impose on the largest tech companies in the West the obligation to enforce their pronouncements. 

It should be—and would be—very easy to scoff at such people and dismiss them the way one laughs at people who materialize and proclaim themselves the Messiah and demand that everyone obey and follow them. Yet these people are often financed by the most powerful and politically interventionist billionaires in the West. The country's largest media outlets routinely treat them as the prophets they claim to be. Often, they’re backed by the U.S. intelligence agencies and increasingly, in the West, the force of law is being wielded to bestow upon their judgments an unquestioning shield of truth. 

Over the weekend, the television program “60 Minutes” featured a woman named Kate Starbird, and she was presented as one of our nation's most important and prestigious disinformation experts. “60 Minutes” found it quite scandalous – as did Starbird herself – that X and other platforms have failed in many instances to remove political speech that Starbird believes is false and should be removed. This “60 Minutes” segment really shines a light on how these people think. And since Starbird herself has worked with some of the most menacing state and private-sector institutions attempting to police our political discourse, understanding her is vital to understanding the institutional weapons being unleashed to control political speech online.

One of the journalists who has done the best work on all of this is the independent reporter, Lee Fang. He was not only one of the lead journalists working on the Twitter Files that exposed many of these institutional relationships but has reported specifically on Starbird and the organizations that employ her. He'll join us to talk about what makes her and all of this—this whole system—so truly threatening to our core freedoms. 

Then: the term tattletale journalism is a phrase I first used back in 2021 to describe a new and deeply rooted mentality that now dominates much of corporate journalism. Rather than focus journalistic resources on investigating and exposing institutions of authority and individuals that wield actual power—which is always my understanding of what journalism was supposed to be— instead, the nation's largest media corporations often focus on targeting private citizens who have little to no power, and then drag them into the public light for shaming and even reputational destruction, all as punishment for their having, in the eyes of these media figures, bad political opinions. 

Last night, The Atlantic, which is a magazine owned and funded by one of the richest people on the planet, Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs used its vast resources not to target the CIA or Wall Street or the Pentagon, but instead, 22-year-old college students at Stanford who have made what the magazine considers to be intemperate remarks about Israel and their war in Gaza. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF, as a prison guard overseeing prisons that held Palestinian prisoners. For this article, he commissioned the 19-year-old son of Peter Baker, who is the New York Times Washington bureau chief, as well as Susan Glasser, the long-time writer at Politico and The New Yorker, where she befriended Goldberg, who then hired her college son to write this article attempting to destroy the reputation of several students at Stanford for the crime of criticism of Israel. 

In so many ways, this article reveals the rot at the heart of American corporate journalism and so, with great reluctance, we will wade into it for that reason. 

For now. Welcome to a new episode of System Updates, starting right now. 

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Assange Wins Very Partial Victory in UK Court, w/ Stella Assange. New Film Shows Mass Israeli Extremism, w/ Journalist Jeremy Loffredo
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Good evening. It's Tuesday, March 26. 

Tonight, the latest in the ongoing effort of the U.S. government—now in its fifth full year—to extradite Julian Assange from the high-security British prison where he's being held to the United States to stand trial on espionage charges. 

Earlier today, the British High Court issued a ruling that is actually a partial victory for Assange, his first in the British judiciary since 2021. The High Court, which was the last court possible to hear his appeal, overturned the U.S. government's victory in the lower court. That court had rejected all of Assange’s arguments for resisting extradition to the United States and accepted all of the government's arguments for why Assange should be extradited immediately. But the court today accepted three of Assange's objections for why extradition might be illegal under both British law and various human rights conventions to which the United Kingdom is bound. 

The ruling tonight does not mean that the U.S. is barred from extraditing Assange, nor, unfortunately, does it mean that the charges will be dropped or that Assange will be released from prison. Instead, the court simply identified several problems with the American extradition request that, perhaps, according to the court and even plausibly according to the court, make it illegal to accept under British and European law, and it gave the United States government until April 16 to try to resolve these problems through all sorts of legal maneuvers. 

It is very possible that the Justice Department will be able to resolve all these problems through a combination of promises and other assurances, though it's not actually entirely clear that they will be able to. Meanwhile, reports of negotiations between the U.S. government, on the one hand, and Assange's lawyers on the other continue to circulate. According to these reports, it would call for Assange to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count in exchange for his release from prison, which would get him out of prison, but might actually set a bad precedent and would prevent his exoneration. We will review today's ruling and all of its implications, and we'll also speak with Julian Assange’s wife, the human rights lawyer Stella Assange. We actually sat down with her just a few minutes ago, shortly before the show began, about her reaction to today's ruling, how Julian himself is doing in his fifth year in prison, what his reaction was to the ruling and what this ruling means for their family and all of us.

Then: that Gaza is now on the brink of mass famine, with many Palestinian children and adults already dying of hunger, the worst way a human being can die beyond dispute, is well documented by multiple aid organizations. What Israel supporters in the West attempt to dispute is not that there's a famine, but that the reason for the famine is that Israel is blocking food and water from entering that territory, exactly what Israel's defense minister at the start of the war vowed that Israel would do, namely blockade Gaza and prevent food and water from entering. 

Jeremy Alfredo is an independent journalist who went to the West Bank and met with and then traveled to the Gaza border with numerous Israeli activists and settlers in the West Bank. He interviewed them about why it is that they have spent weeks organizing physical blockades of trucks bringing food and water into Gaza. 

Here in the West, we constantly hear that Palestinians are full of hatred and violence toward Israelis and that they are taught to think this way from birth, that they're indoctrinated with an ideology of violence and hatred. And yet, if one looks at the Israeli government, it is very clear that this same mentality dominates many of their policies. And we will hear directly from Alfredo and hear directly from the Israelis, with whom he spent a great deal of time. And they will explain in their own words why they are trying hard to cause mass famine and mass starvation, not just for Hamas, but for all Gazans. 

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

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