Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Fox Launches Massive Character Assassination Campaign Against Tucker Plus: Drone Hits Kremlin Renewing Fears of Escalation
Video Transcript
May 09, 2023
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, May 3rd. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. eastern. Exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

 Tonight, it was shocking enough when Fox News, with no warning whatsoever, unceremoniously announced last Monday that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, would no longer appear on the network, despite the fact that Carlson had cultivated millions of fans over the six years he hosted the 8 p.m. show and despite the fact that Carlson led them to six consecutive years of ratings win, Fox made no effort to explain to his loyal viewers why the show's last day was to be the Friday night show before the announcement was made, just no effort at all to accommodate or express the slightest interest in the anger and confusion of their loyal audience. But Fox's strange behavior has now become contemptible. While Tucker released a two-minute video last week that contained not a single word of criticism for Fox or his colleagues or any of its executives, Fox has been launching a vicious, one-sided, and seemingly still escalating war, with the apparent goal of permanently destroying Tucker Carlson's character and reputation. 

Just today, The New York Times published an article that purported to describe the thought process of Fox's board of directors, which includes, among others, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and it also contained a leaked text that was designed, obviously, to make Tucker look like a racist – a narrative that the Fox leakers aggressively cultivated, using The New York Times as their partners, as one of the reasons why they decided to fire him. What is Fox's goal in this one-sided war of character destruction, and why are they seemingly indifferent, even eager to permanently alienate Carlson's most loyal viewers, especially as they watch their prime time ratings decline rapidly since Carlson's unexplained departure, especially among younger viewers? We’ll examine this strange and increasingly disturbing episode. 

Then, a drone attack last night appears to have targeted the Kremlin, where video footage captured explosions near the government buildings in Moscow, including the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin was unhurt in the attack, but Russia is unsurprisingly vowing aggressive and escalatory retaliation against Ukraine, whom they naturally blame for the attack. While Kyiv denies any involvement, Ukrainian elements, including their postal service, were seen officially celebrating the attack. And as is true for the U.S. and NATO regarding the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline, Ukraine is obviously going to be the most likely suspect in the eyes of the Russians. All of this once again raises the question, why is the United States so eager, so willing to incur the vastly increasing risks of this extremely dangerous war? For what interests and for whose? 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms. We post the episodes 12 hours after they are first broadcast here, live, on Rumble. You can follow us there. Find us,  rate us, and review us, that helps the visibility of the show.

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


 

One of the most unexplained, bizarre and unexpected developments in cable news took place last week when Fox, in a very cursory statement, unceremoniously announced that the Tucker Carlson program, which was not only the highest-rated program currently on Fox but the highest-rated program in the history of cable news – the history of the medium – as of Friday night before, would no longer appear on the program. It was terminated. Fox was done with Tucker Carlson and his program. They added insult to injury by issuing the most stinting and ungenerous statement possible, the stingiest words imaginable, essentially saying we thank Tucker for his service to our network and wish him luck in his future endeavors. No attempt at all to explain to the millions of people that Fox has spent tons of money cultivating over the years to watch Tucker’s show. Why it is that their favorite host, the person whom they most trust, has just simply disappeared from the Fox airwaves? No respect for the viewers, nothing but contempt for them – actually, just announced in a short note that he was gone and then asked Brian Kilmeade, the host of “Fox & Friends”, who was in a very difficult position, to guest-host the show Monday evening. And they gave him about 12 seconds at the start of the show for him to say, essentially, “You probably heard Fox and Tucker have parted ways and Tucker's a friend of mine and always will be. And now on to the news.” 

So, the entire episode has been shrouded in mystery because Fox has said nothing about why this has happened and Tucker issued a two-minute video in which he essentially vowed that he will continue to always tell the truth. He said that if you do tell the truth, you pay a price, you will end up suffering, which is absolutely true. But there wasn't a single hint of criticism of any Fox executive or Fox News itself in that video. Almost immediately following that video, Fox began leaking to the media that it had compiled a dossier on Tucker that it was prepared to unleash a nuclear war arsenal against him if Tucker goes nuclear on Fox. And that makes sense. 

When I left The Intercept, I not only announced I was leaving, but I condemned them in very vehement terms because I felt an obligation to my readers not just to announce in a cursory note that I was leaving but, given the media outlet was founded on my name and I had been defending it since 2013, I felt an obligation to explain what I thought had gone so wrong inside that institution that I felt compelled to leave. And as a result, The Intercept then turned around and attacked me and my character and made allegations against me, which I completely expected and thought was fair – if I was going to attack them, I thought it was totally expected that they would attack me back. And they did. And I never minded and I thought that was fine. But in this case, Tucker left or was fired and didn't utter a word of criticism. He didn't tell his audience not to watch Fox. He didn't tell his audience or anybody else that this was Fox selling out or trying to appease liberal public opinion. He just issued a two-minute video after three days of silence, basically saying, I'm not going anywhere, I'll let you know what it is that I'm doing. That was it. And ever since, there has been an avalanche of leaks clearly coming from the highest levels of Fox News that are not designed to shed light on why Fox fired Tucker. They're designed to destroy Tucker Carlson's character and reputation forever by branding him a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, and a liar. And to do so, they are partnering with the very liberal media outlets that have been most bent on Fox's destruction for years, starting with The New York Times. 

So, let's look today at this incredibly new escalation, this significant escalation, and Fox's attack on the person who until about two weeks ago, by all appearances, has been somebody beloved by the Murdoch family, because he made them so much money and because Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son who runs Fox, believed that Tucker was a very respectable face for the network. I have tried doing a lot of reporting on finding out the real reason why Fox fired Tucker. I obviously know a lot of people at Fox. I know Tucker well. He's become a friend of mine over the years. I know other people at Fox who are at Fox, who have been at Fox. Nobody knows the real reason. People can speculate, there are little clues here and there but the real story of why Fox decided to fire its top-rated host and risk what has happened and what everyone knew happened, which is a radical decline in their ratings and prime time – maybe they'll recover, maybe they won't – is a story that no one seems to know. And it is amazing to watch this war now being waged on Tucker's character by the people for whom he has loyally worked for the last six years. So, let's look at what they did today. 

Here is The New York Times article. The headline is “Carlson's Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: It's Not How White Men Fight.”  You can tell from the headline that The New York Times is reporting not to have gotten a hold of attacks that makes Tucker look bad, although they did. That could have come from anywhere. That could have come from a lower-level Fox person. It could have come from someone inside Dominion's law firm or Fox's law firm or – who knows – when there's litigation of this kind between Dominion and Fox and emails are flying around, anyone can get access to emails and link them. It's impossible to say for sure who did it. What is so amazing about this New York Times article is it is purporting to describe insight into how the Fox board of directors viewed this text and the thought process that led them to fire Tucker, which could have only come from the board of directors itself. No one else will have the ability to convince The New York Times to publish claims about what the Fox board of directors is thinking other than people on the board of directors of Fox or at the highest levels of Fox News – Fox Management Suzanne Scott or Lachlan Murdoch himself, or someone on the board. That is where this story came from. That is what is so amazing about it. It is confirmation that Fox is on this warpath against him. There is the subheading “The discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson's firing.” It's a story by three different New York Times reporters – Jeremy Peters, Michael Schmidt, and Jim Rutenberg. Let's take a look at what it says. 

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race. 

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson's firing. The text alarmed the Fox board […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

How would they know that that text alarmed the Fox board unless someone on the Fox board told The New York Times? This is what alarmed us. 

 

The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).



Let me just stop here and explain why this makes no sense to me. So first of all, it is far from clear why a private text that we're about to show you that Tucker Carlson wrote, that was intended to be private, where he actually talks about him watching a video of three white Trump supporters ganging up on an Antifa protester and beating him to a pulp and the feelings that he had watching that, including the fact that he was at first biting himself, rooting for the Antifa person to have the crap kicked out of him. And then he realizes that's not how he wants to go through life, feeling that that's not a humanitarian sensation, that even this Antifa person, despite hating his politics and maybe even him, has a family, has a mother, has a father, has siblings who all of whom would be in deep mourning and grief if he were actually killed. And he said to himself by succumbing to these temptations, I will be as bad as him. He also said in there that ganging up on people this way is a dishonorable thing to do. It's not how white people fight. That's what made the text so inflammatory. Why would this text possibly be admissible in a lawsuit that Dominion brought against Fox claiming defamation regarding Fox allegations by some host or the airing of some claims that Dominion voting machines were used to defraud the election? It's extremely unlikely that this text would be admissible. The idea that they fear that this text would emerge as part of the trial is extremely unbelievable to me. But even if it were the case that they feared that this email might emerge during the trial, they settled the lawsuit with Dominion. There was no trial and they fired him after that. So, when they fired him, there was no concern that this would emerge as part of the trial. This version makes no sense. Maybe they feared this would come out in some other way but, ironically, it came out because someone at Fox clearly gave it to The New York Times. And why would you do that? Again, you can only get that if the board went to the New York Times and said, “Let us tell you why we decided to fire Tucker because we discovered he's an unreconstructed racist. We didn't know that before. We only learned it in the past couple of weeks. When we learned it, we decided to fire him.” That's what Fox is saying to the public about Tucker Carlson through The New York Times. 

 

The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson's conduct. The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company's leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

Again, those are people inside Fox at high levels of Fox News. This leak would not be happening without the authorization of Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the highest levels of Fox. Why – If you're going to leak this – do you go to the New York Times to do it? 

 

In other messages, [Tucker] had referred to women – including a senior Fox executive – in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company's decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case. 

The text message came to the attention of Fox's board of directors and even some senior executives only last month, on the Sunday before the trial was set to begin, according to two people with knowledge of Fox's internal deliberations. At the time, Fox negotiators were entering discussions about an out-of-court settlement ahead of the swearing-in of what was shaping up to be a diverse jury. 

The next day, the board told Fox's leadership about its plan to have the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz to investigate Mr. Carlson. That disclosure set up the possibility that there could be a continuing investigation into what was behind Mr. Carlson's messages at the same time as a trial, and as he was serving as its top host in prime time. 

Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond an initial statement announcing that they agreed to “part ways” and thanking “him for his service.” It did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday on the contents of Mr. Carlson's redacted message. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

Look at this lie. This is the game they play. “Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond that initial statement.” Everything I just read you was Fox commenting, just doing it, in the slimiest way possible, anonymously, into the New York Times but, of course, everything that I just read to you came from Fox. It's borderline lying to say that ‘Fox hasn't commented on this’, ‘Fox wouldn't comment when asked’ when they know that all of this came from Fox. 

 

It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive text written by Mr. Carlson. Fox's lawyers had produced attacks as part of the discovery process and were involved in the redactions. Mr. Carlson had even been asked about it during a deposition, according to several people who have read the unredacted transcripts of his deposition. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

So, the whole timeline doesn't make sense either. This text was produced as part of the litigation many, many, many months ago. The way that documents get produced in litigation is that the principles – people like Tucker Carlson, or anyone involved in the lawsuit who are required to turn over information, go through their emails, and turn them over to Fox's lawyers; Fox's lawyers go through them, read through them carefully, decide which are privileged, which ones are it, and which ones need to be turned over and then turn them over – so, of course, Fox News's lawyers have seen this. And if it's true that it was going to be used by Dominion and, again, according to the New York Times article, Dominion's lawyers asked Tucker about it in his deposition many months ago, it strains credulity beyond all breaking points that Fox only learned about this within the last ten days, and that was the reason for his firing. It makes absolutely no sense – beyond the fact that how long now have people like The New York Times and liberal media outlets been accusing every Fox News personality of being a racist and a white supremacist, going back to Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. Everyone who works at Fox is instantly and inherently referred to as a white supremacist. Now, suddenly, they're so worried about that. I believe we have the text itself, which we need to show you. It's pretty much what I described, but I nonetheless want to go over and read it to you. It's the text that just became public today. It's the reason Fox is saying – or a major reason Fox is saying – why they fired Tucker Carlson. It seems like Fox not only talked to The New York Times, but also The Washington Post. They have an article as well. There you see the headlines. “Tucker Carlson's Text on How “White Men Fight” Alarmed Fox Board Members. The lawsuit, a countermove against John Paul Mac Isaac escalates the legal battle.” And here again, you see: 

 

But in the most startling passage, Carlson asserted flatly that” jumping a guy like that is obvious is dishonorable. It's not how white men fight. 

After seeing the message, the board alerted Fox executives that it planned to retain a law firm to investigate Carlson's behavior, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

 

People inside Fox – of the highest levels – also spoke to The Washington Post to give them the same story about how this email or how this text played a crucial role in the decision-making process. Now, listen to the other reason The Washington Post says Fox fired Tucker. 

The Washington Post reported last week that network co-founder Rupert Murdoch had also grown concerned about Carlson's increasingly far-right commentary, including his disparagement of U.S. support for Ukraine, and that executives had noted that his harsh critiques of Fox management and his private communications, including some sexist and vulgar language aimed at a female executive. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

 

Is opposing U.S. proxy wars fought through the CIA and Raytheon now a “far-right” position? And if it is true that part of the reason Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker Carlson off the air was that he was one of the only people in media with a show vocally opposing the war in Ukraine – Laura Ingraham has put guests on and questioned it and so did Jesse Watters, but nowhere near, with the level of vitriol and devotion that Tucker has. It's been a crusade of his, from the start, to keep the U.S. out of this war. So first of all, when did it become right-wing to oppose U.S. proxy wars? There are left-wing leaders all over the world, like here in Brazil, Lula da Silva, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, who also oppose what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine, and many others. How is that a far-right position? And beyond that, even if it were, since when does Rupert Murdoch care about having his media outlets air far-right views? That's what they do. That's what they're for – from the New York Post to the Daily Mail to every other right-wing tabloid. 

I do believe – and there was a report from the new start-up Semafor that I believe we showed you, or maybe we didn’t, so I'll tell you about it. It's a new start-up by Ben Smith, who is the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and used to work at Politico, then he became the media columnist for The New York Times. He now has a startup journalistic outlet called Semafor, it has people like Dave Weigel, who was The Washington Post’s political reporter, and many other experienced reporters. And several days ago, they reported that, shortly before Fox and the Murdochs fired Tucker, they had a call with President Zelenskyy that included Zelenskyy's concerns or anger about Tucker's views on the war in Ukraine and Semafor strongly implied that there was a causal connection between the Murdochs calling Zelenskyy on the one hand and the decision to fire Tucker on the other. They didn't really have the reporting to prove that connection or to assert it explicitly but they clearly implied it. And here's The Washington Post strongly suggesting the same: part of why Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker off the air was because of his opposition to the U.S. role in Ukraine. 

So, even if you're somebody who's in doubt about the role of the U.S. in the war in Ukraine or even if you're somebody who supports the U.S. role, isn’t this extremely disturbing? There was one person in all of the media, corporate media, who was a vocal, continuous, devoted critic of the Biden administration's war policy. That person is now off the air. That show no longer exists and, according to reporting from The Washington Post and Semafor, especially The Washington Post, at least in part, his opposition to Biden's war policies in Ukraine is part of why he got fired. Is it not incredibly concerning that we cannot, in our corporate media, accommodate dissent to U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to a war that Joe Biden himself has said has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? 

Many of you probably don't remember this, but in 2002 and 2003, when there was a very repressive atmosphere for dissent over the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, there was only one person on all of cable news who had a show who was vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq. The Fox hosts were in favor. People on CNN were in favor. There was one person, on MSNBC, who was as adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, as Tucker Carlson has been to the U.S. role in Ukraine. His name was Phil Donahue, the longtime daytime talk show host who was known as kind of a left-liberal. He was given his own MSNBC show. It was the beginning of MSNBC's growth. He didn't have a very big audience, but it was bigger than everybody else's on MSNBC, it was the highest-rated MSNBC host, and he was fired in the middle of 2002, or early 2003. And a memo surfaced very shortly after saying the reason he got fired was because MSNBC did not want to be associated with his opposition to the war. It was too inflammatory at the time, and I remember very well I was reading blogs at this point, getting ready to start writing myself, this was a cause of extreme outrage among American progressives and liberals, and the left, that we can't have one host of one TV show who's opposed to this war. We need a 24-hour drumbeat in favor of the invasion of Iraq. No debate or dissent can be permitted? That is the same as what happened here. Where are those voices angrily objecting? Even if you hate Tucker Carlson and everything else he stands for that. What Fox really seems to have done, at least in part, is remove Tucker Carlson from the air because of his heterodox view that conflicts with the majority of Republican establishment lawmakers who support Joe Biden's war policy, including Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the two Republican leaders of the House and Senate. At least in part, that seems to have been the motive for Rupert Murdoch removing Tucker from the air. That is incredibly disturbing for anyone who values dissent and free media. 

Let me put Tucker's text on the air. I'm going to read the whole thing to you. I think if we're going to talk about it, we should see it. So, this is from January 7, 2021. Here's the text printed by The New York Times. There's no text before it. There's no indication to whom he's speaking or to what he's responding. It says, 

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? (Tucker Carlson. Jan 7, 2021).

 

Overall, this is a very kind of thoughtful, contemplative, humanistic pondering on his part. That's the sort of thing we want people to do. We have these human impulses – part of it is our instinct, part of it is our primitive I.D. – and we expect people to evaluate what's taking place inside of our brains and decide whether or not those are positive impulses and to restrain them and we decide that they're not as he did. Obviously, the problematic part of this post is when he says that ganging up three against one or four against one is not how white people fight. Presumably, it's how other racial groups fight – Latinos, Black people or Muslims, or whoever – but it's not how white people fight. 

If you ask me, looking at this text in isolation, what I think of that sentence, I will tell you without the slightest hesitation that I find it problematic in the extreme. One of the reasons I've always defended Tucker – and one of the reasons I will still always defend Tucker – is that I do believe that his prism is free of racial analysis. He judges people by individuals and not by their race. And obviously, this is inconsistent with that. He's making a statement about how white people fight versus how black people and Latinos fight. So, do I like this comment? I do not like this comment. What I will, though, say is that I believe that you can go through everybody's private text – these are private texts – where people are speaking freely to friends or colleagues in a rushed way, not being the slightest bit careful, and you can find problematic things in what everybody has said in private, at some point, if you go through enough of their texts for enough time – and even worse when you decontextualized a passage. So, you have no idea what the tenor of this conversation was, whether there was humor involved, what he was responding to whom, what the subtext was – it's very difficult to evaluate on its own. Evaluating on its own makes it problematic. There is no doubt about it. That's why Fox gave it to The New York Times because they knew how this would make Tucker look. But to take the facts that Tucker provided to Fox's lawyers, assuming that they were his lawyers, too, and to now start leaking them selectively as part of a war to destroy Tucker Carlson is despicable. I assume Tucker will answer this and explain what he meant in due course – I have no doubt that he will – but to start leaking things like this, torn out of their context, without any opportunity for him to explain himself – because he's constrained in all sorts of ways as he negotiates how he's leaving – I find it reprehensible what Fox is doing to Tucker. 

The consequences of all of this are predictable, and I want to show them to you. Tucker was not just the most-watched host on cable news, but the highest-rated host among even young Democrats who watch cable. He had a much younger and more diverse audience than almost anyone in cable – and the largest audience. The cable news audience itself is very old, its audience. If you look at, for example, MSNBC or CNN's ratings, their overall audiences might be 800,000 or 900,000 for a show on MSNBC, and 400,000 - 500,000 for CNN. But if you look at the only people who matter in cable news economics, which is what's called the demo, people who are between 25 and 54 are the ones who are most desired by advertisers because they're the ones who are consumers. Maybe 10% of the overall audience is under 55. So, Anderson Cooper will have 500,000-600,000 people watching, but he'll have 80,000 people under the age of 55. Chris Hayes will have an audience of a million people, but barely 100,000 of them – 10% – will be under 55. They're all old. Cable news is dying as a medium. Tucker was one of the few, the only one really keeping it afloat with his extremely large and loyal audience that was far younger and more diverse than almost any other show on cable in history. And yet here is the ratings for Friday night, April 28. 

Friday night is always a little bit aberrational because people watch less, but it's comparative. So here you see someone on Twitter analyzing the ratings that came out that Friday night. So, four or five days after Tucker’s show is off the air and he says:

 

Holy Christ, young people have abandoned Fox News in prime time with Hannity now below 100,000 in the demo. And Tucker's all-time slot losing more than 70% of its young audience. Catastrophic.(@a_newsman May 1, 2023).

 

And he's absolutely right. So here you look at the cable ratings for people who are 25 to 54, which is the demographic that matters the most. The number one show is “The Five”, which is on at 5 p.m. That is not a prime time. A show that had 240,000 people under the age of 54. The next show is “Gutfeld!”. It's on at 11 p.m. That is also not prime time. He had 154,000 people watching under the age of 54. That was followed by a “Special Report with Brett Bayer”, also not a prime time show, at 6 p.m., 150,000. “America's Newsroom” with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer. He's been on Fox forever. He used to be on CNN. That's a 9 a.m. show. That's also not a prime time show. Then, “America Reports” with Smith and Roberts at 2 p.m. Do you see? There are no prime time shows in the top five or six outnumbered at noon. “The Faulkner Focus” at 11 a.m., “Fox and Friends” at 8 a.m., “America's Newsroom” with Perino and Hemmer at 10 a.m. MSNBC is a 4:00 p.m. show with Nicolle Wallace beating every Fox prime-time show in the demo since Tucker left. Then there's Neil Cavuto, “Fox and Friend,” and only at number 13 you finally get to Jesse Watters, at 7 p.m. He had 116,000 people under the age of 54 watching. Then you have to go down to... it was a disaster for Fox! America Reports with Smith and Roberts. That's Tucker's old slot. It comes in at number 16 with 111,000 people, barely ahead of “Erin Burnett.” And then afternoon MSNBC shows including Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, “Morning Joe” and only then, it’s number 26, you get Sean Hannity who has under 100,000 people watching, under the age of 54, and the “Laura Ingraham Show”, at 28, at 10 p.m., also at 91,000.  

Again, Fox has slightly recovered from these ratings in the last week, but it is hard to overstate what a huge collapse this is for the demo. Almost always Tucker would be number one, followed by Hannity, “The Five”, “Gutfeld!”, Laura Ingraham, all occupying the top four or five. It seems like a huge portion of Fox's young audience departed when they realized the Tucker show was no longer on the air. So, what is the strategy here? Attacking the person whom these people obviously trust so much that they won't watch Fox without him, perhaps they want to destroy his reputation so that he can't ever again host a show that will compete with Fox? Perhaps it's that they want to win back his audience by making Tucker so radioactive that no one wants to have anything to do with him anymore. They'll pry away his loyal fans from him by convincing everyone he's an unreconstructed racist and a misogynist that, even to Fox, it's a bridge too far. Maybe they want to destroy his credibility so that if he does criticize Fox, the criticisms will be less significant. Whatever it is, they are out to destroy his reputation. And there's only so long Tucker is going to sit by silently and allow them to do that. They seem to be provoking on purpose some kind of a response, which I presume will be forthcoming, but this is despicable behavior by Fox. It just is. To have someone who works for you for six years with great success, who was a loyal employee by every report and the minute he’s out the door because you fired him under very bizarre circumstances, you not only try to destroy his reputation, but you go to The New York Times to do it.  

Somebody has also been leaking to Media Matters videos of Tucker that they think are embarrassing. I'll just show you a couple of these. These may not even be high-level Fox people doing it, but you can see a couple of these that Media Matters got a hold of and is now reveling in. Here's one. 

 

Tucker Carlson (on the phone): Nobody is going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. I’d really like to just dump the whole thing on YouTube. […] Anyway, that’s just my view. I’m just frustrated with…it’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they are not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. They are making like lifetime movies but they don’t work on the infrastructure of the site? Like WHAT? It’s crazy and it’s driving me crazy. We’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it? It’s unbelievable, actually. I don’t know who runs that site […] (Video. Leaked audios of T. Carlson. Media Matters. May 3, 2023)

 

Well, I hope Media Matters has cleared a space on the shelf for the Pulitzer they're going to win for obtaining this incriminating footage. 

There's another one of somebody inside Fox. Obviously, this one is a tape from Fox News when he's in front of the camera when the show isn’t on but the cameras are rolling – leaking to Media Matters of all people, not The New York Times and The Washington Post, this time to Media Matters. 

Inappropriate Tucker Comments (BTS) - Media Matters

So, I have to say, I mean, I am incredibly disturbed by this. I think this is really despicable behavior. There are people who host Fox shows whom I respect. I've been on a lot of those shows many times. I've been on Laura Ingraham many times, I've been on Jesse Watters not quite as many, but a lot. I've been on Howie Kurtz’s Sunday show quite a bit. Several others as well. I've never been on Sean Hannity’s show. He invited me on a couple of times, maybe five years ago, but never again. That's not a show that really aligns with what I do. I don't want to revel in Fox's demise. I don't want to hope for them to fail. I think they serve an important function of airing at least some dissent within the corporate media to what is otherwise a lockstep neoliberal consensus on economic policy, foreign policy, the culture war, and everything else. But I don't know whether I would accept an invitation to go on Fox right now, given their corporate behavior concerning the person who has done more to build up Fox and I think has performed a more important function in media than almost anybody else on television if not anybody else on television over the last six years. The space that he's created for dissent, for a different kind of way of looking at politics, for critiquing the GOP establishment from within and the Democratic establishment, in showing how they're a uniparty, for reporting on the abuses of the U.S. security state in a way that has almost never been done before in corporate television – to take this person who has built a huge audience of people who previously were not open to those ideas, an opening to them, and not just trying to justify why they fired him, but trying to destroy him permanently, forever using all the standard tropes that the liberal media typically uses against Fox and everybody else that they dislike is the behavior I find unforgivable. Unforgivable. And whether that means I'll go on Fox at some point or not, I don't know. But this has left a disgusting taste in my mouth. I think they ought to stop this immediately, and I think they're going to jeopardize their audience that is going to watch them do this. They're going to keep the 75 and 80 and 85-year-old hardcore Republicans who have been watching Fox for 30 years and always will. They're going to have that. I just showed you how small that audience can be. But I don't think they're going to be able to recover the audience that Tucker brought in when people see what it is that they do to those who are most loyal to them.

 

 

We'll see what Tucker does. I have high hopes that his next step will fortify the part of the media I think is most important, the part where I am currently, the independent part, the part where there are no corporate constraints, where there is no Rupert Murdoch to pull the plug if you get too critical of Joe Biden's war policy. I hope – I have very high hopes – that Tucker will come to a place like this – if not this place. But I do believe that Fox needed Tucker more than Tucker needed Fox and that whatever he does, he will thrive. But he will forever have this cloud hanging over his head. And I don't think this is anywhere near the end of what they intend to unleash on him. And I can't think of a justifiable reason for doing this. Not even one that is remotely within the realm of what is ethically justifiable. It is despicable what Fox has done to Tucker and the people with whom they've chosen to do it. And I guess that's all I have to say about that, other than I hope to see Tucker back on the air. I hope to see him defending himself from these attacks, explaining things like that text. And I expect we'll be hearing from him shortly because it's unsustainable to sit by while you get pummeled by your old employer through The New York Times and every other media outlet that has long hated you and remain silent. They've kind of forced his hand into not only responding, but I think responding in kind. And we'll see where that leads. My guess is the audience will end up siding with Tucker and not with Fox. That's certainly where my loyalties would lie.


 

So, we're going to move now to a second story, which is the latest developments in the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

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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.  

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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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TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

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:

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

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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