Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Week in Review: Kremlin Bombing “False Flag” Allegation, Fox/Tucker Fallout, & Dems Rig Election for Biden, w/ Michael Tracey
Video Transcript
May 12, 2023
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Good evening. It's May 5. 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, we have a week-in-review show, one we regularly do on Friday night, where we examine several of the most important stories of the week to extract their overlooked significance. And we'll be joined by a frequent guest, the very and sometimes maddeningly independent journalist Michael Tracey, to help us do it. 

We'll begin with what was undoubtedly the most important event of the week, the explosion that took place over the Kremlin during the middle of the night, Moscow time, on Wednesday. Russian officials insist that the attack was an attempted assassination aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin and that it was orchestrated by the United States and its proxy in Kyiv. The U.S., for its part, not only vehemently denies that accusation, but just as is true when the Russian German Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in March, has media outlets throughout the West strongly suggesting that – for some unknown reason – the culprit behind the attack on Russia was Russia. Apparently, according to our very responsible media, which combats disinformation, Russia first blew up its own critical natural gas infrastructure and now bombed itself. 

Then, despite early polling showing that almost 20% of Democratic voters prefer Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, with another 8% supporting Marianne Williamson – in other words, almost one out of every three Democratic voters are making clear that they want to vote for a candidate other than Joe Biden – Democratic Party apparatchiks are emphasizing that there will be no debates, no fair process, basically no opportunity to have an election of any kind. Joe Biden is the nominee and that is the end of the story, whether Democrats like it or not. 

The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, the leader of the country of which Julian Assange is and always has been a citizen, has expressed his most assertive frustration yet at the refusal of the Biden administration to cease its attempts to prosecute and extradite the groundbreaking journalist. “Enough is enough,” said the Prime Minister of Australia about the Biden persecution of the Australian citizen, Julian Assange. Will this matter? 

And finally, Fox News’s one-sided war on Tucker Carlson continues, as does the collapse of Fox News's primetime ratings. We'll examine whether this really spells the genuine demise of Fox's three-decade dominance of cable news primetime, or whether its loyal viewers will forgive the network for what it's doing to the most popular host in the history of cable news and return to the network. We’ll also look at what this reveals about ongoing ideological divisions within the Republican Party and the American right. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. The show post 12 hours after our live broadcast here on Rumble. You can follow us on all major podcasting platforms, including Spotify, Apple and others. Simply rate and review the show, which helps the visibility of the program.

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


 

As our government and media tell it, something very strange is happening in the war in Ukraine. For some very unclear reason, Russia continuously does the job of Ukraine and of the United States and NATO attacking itself, constantly destroying its most vital resources and bombing its most critical infrastructure. 

Back in March, as you likely remember, the pipeline that connects Russia to Germany – the most vital interest to the Russians, it is a permit for Russia to sell cheap natural gas to Western Europe through Germany – exploded and it was one of the most devastating environmental disasters in the history of humanity. For some reason, people who claim that climate catastrophes are the most existential threat we face cared very little about this episode or who did it. And almost immediately, Western officials dispatched Western media to announce that the most likely candidate for bombing the Russian pipeline was… the Kremlin. And for days, in fact, weeks, this claim that this was a false flag operation, that it was the Russians who actually blew up their own pipeline, persisted even as the United States had for months explicitly and openly threatened that it would do exactly that if the Russians invaded Ukraine. And even as the United States celebrated the explosion of the pipeline, Western media outlets, and American media outlets as well, continued to try and convince you that the Russians were the ones who did it. 

Now we're seeing exactly the same thing happen with this drone attack on the Kremlin. On Wednesday night, we showed you the video right on the day that it happened, where you could see the explosion right above the Kremlin. It's an obviously dangerous thing to detonate a bomb from a drone in the middle of Moscow where government buildings and government officials reside, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. That's exactly what happened. The Russians did what you would expect them to do – what I think all-natural, rational people would assume – which is accuse the country with whom they're at war, Ukraine, of having attacked the explicit direction of the paymasters of the war for Kyiv, which is the United States government. The U.S. government vehemently denied those allegations, and again, Western media outlets are insisting that the most likely suspect for having detonated a bomb in the skies above Moscow was Russia – not rogue elements, anti-Putin elements within Russia – but the Russian government itself attacked itself. 

Here are just a couple of examples here. First, from Fox News, we have it with Bill Hemmer, on May 4. Listen to what it is that they want you to believe. This is with General Jack Keane. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: Well, it has the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. And keep in mind […] 

 

Let me just stop there for one second. That phrase triggers me. “Hallmarks of a Russian operation.” That was exactly the phrase that these same people, the people inside the U.S. intelligence community invoked when they tried, before the 2020 election, to convince you to ignore the revelations based on the Hunter Biden laptop because, according to the letter that 51 former intelligence officials signed – which we now know was initiated by former Obama CIA Director Mike Morrell – that had “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” They weren't even willing to say that it was Russian disinformation. They left it to the media to do that, and the media promptly did. But they used that exact phrase. It's a way of being able to assert things without having to present any evidence. It kind of looks like the kind of thing Russia would do. Russia often attacks itself. They constantly blow up their own infrastructure. This is a very Russian thing to do. This is how they try and phrase it. So, let's listen to this explanation. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: Well, it has the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. And keep in mind, that's for a couple of reasons. One, the Russians just launched a massive drone attack on civilians in Ukraine, and they've been roundly criticized for it. 

 

So, another point worth noting here about this idea that these are the hallmarks of the Russian government is this attack was carried out by a drone, which is a hallmark, as I understand it, of another country, not Russia, trying to think of the country…. Oh, right. The United States – that during the Obama administration attacked eight different countries using drones, and since then, under the Trump administration, attacked several more and continues to attack at will using drones whenever it wants. I think, in fact, that if one sees a drone dropping a bomb in the middle of the night, in another country, one might say it is a hallmark of the behavior of a particular country. I would not, though, say that it's a hallmark of Russia, but instead, the country that uses drones to bomb other countries more than any other by far, which is the United States. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: […] And I think this is maybe their way of trying to say, oh, no, the Ukrainians did this to us as well. Number two, it's inconsistent with the way Ukraine has fought the war so far. I mean, Ukraine could engage in guerilla activity in Moscow and other major Russian cities. It has not done so. It's had limited attacks on the Russian Federation, just limited to power stations on the border, which, again, they deny. So, this is inconsistent with how Ukraine has fought the war. And number three, if they're trying to make a splash and hit the Kremlin or assassinate Vladimir Putin, this – based on the photos that we're watching – it's a small drone with a small conventional charge and the Kremlin is a massive facility for those. You know, you've been there, Bill. It's a massive facility. Hitting it with a small drone with a limited conventional charge wasn't going to kill Vladimir Putin or do any real damage to the Kremlin. So, it's hard to believe that the Ukrainians would risk the backlash of that sort of attack. So, I would take this, as one time where I'll agree with Secretary Blinken, that you can take this with a grain of salt from the Russians. 

 

First of all, the suggestion that it's “somehow unusual” – there's an agreement between the Biden administration and these militaries from the Republican Party who often appear on Fox. It is a joke. They have complete agreement on most major foreign policy issues, including the war in Ukraine itself and the U.S. support for it. It's not oh, “this is the one time I'm going to go ahead and agree with Secretary Blinken.” But here they are in full agreement constantly on all these questions all the time. There is one hour on Fox where there was disagreement expressed at this war that was called The Tucker Carlson Show or Tucker Carlson Tonight, which no longer exists. There are still a couple of pockets here and there. A Jesse Morton show and Laura Ingraham Show. But by and large, Fox News during the day, the kind of people they put on are in full agreement with the Biden administration, just like the Republican Party establishment is in full agreement as well. But here they are just trying to look into the camera like it's the most normal thing in the world, like the most obvious explanation here, so obvious, is that Russia attacked itself. They're not saying that maybe we should investigate that possibility. Hold open. They're saying, obviously, that this is what it is. All signs point to Russia attacking itself. 

Here on CNN, the same thing is taking place with the former Obama CIA Director, Leon Panetta. It's not just the Republican and Democratic Party that come together and offer the same messaging we could show you 15, 20, 30 of these videos from Fox, MSNBC, CNN, from the news outlets in print in NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, all of which will just constantly bombard you with the same messaging over and over and over. They print whatever the U.S. security state feeds them. The language, when they tried to tell you that the Russians pulled up their own Pipeline back in March, was virtually identical and now, just with no evidence whatsoever, it just floods the airwaves and floods the pages of our mainstream media outlets with this notion that it was most likely the Russians who blew up this pipeline. 

I'm about to bring Michael Tracey on. Before we do, let me show you this video from Jake Tapper so you can hear what was said on CNN and how identical it was to what was said on Fox and almost every other network and former CIA. 

 

(Video. “The Lead”. CNN. May 4, 2023)

 

J. Tapper: Secretary Panetta, sources tell CNN that U.S. officials had no warning that an attack like this was coming and that the Ukrainians assure them privately they had nothing to do with it. What's your take? 

 

Secretary Panetta: I think this really does smell like a false flag operation on the part of the Russians. A diversion, if you will. And if somebody was really trying to make an effort at an assassination attempt, it was pretty far-fetched. I've been to the Kremlin. The Kremlin is a fortress, and Putin doesn't exactly take walks around the Kremlin. There's no Rose Garden at the Kremlin. So, this is clearly an allegation that is false. I don't think there's a lot of truth to it and, at most, it probably is one of these diversionary things that kind of marks the beginning of the spring offensives that we're going to see pretty soon. 



Do you see who is constantly on these networks telling you what to think about world events on the news? Former heads of the CIA, former generals, senior officials at the Pentagon. These are the people in the United States who have commandeered control of our major news outlets and who constantly are telling you what it is that you should think, how it is that you should understand world events, like the most natural thing in the world: “In order to understand what happened, let's bring on the former CIA director and he's going to tell you who really is behind this.” And with no evidence at all, they just use this phrase “false flag” that if you use in any other context to suggest that maybe the United States government is responsible for an attack, that they're blaming on others, you will be instantly relegated to the fringes of conspiracy, as a conspiracy theorist. You will have your career destroyed for even suggesting there may be such a thing as a false flag operation when carried out by the United States government. But look at how casually they assert that when it comes to Russia. 

I'm going to show you a couple of examples here before we bring on the increasingly agitated Michael Tracey, whom I see in my peripheral vision getting all irritated because he has so much more important things to say and he can't believe I'm talking so long while he has to wait here.

 For example, from Newsweek, in February 2023, they compiled an entire long list of all the times that our media accused Russia of “planning ‘false flag’ attacks on the eve of the Ukraine war anniversary.” 

From The New York Post, in November 2022, the headline “Russia planning false Flag Attacks on ally Belarus to drag it into war: Ukraine Intel.” So, Ukrainian Intelligence officials told The New York Post that Russia was going to attack Belarus, pretending Ukraine did it to drag them into the war and then it makes the media and they treat it as something serious. 

The Daily Beast in October 2022, “Russia’s ‘Dirty Bomb’ Warnings Slammed as ‘False Flag’.” An entire article says that Russia is preparing the world to attack itself with a radiological weapon that they will blame on Ukraine but, in reality, it will actually come from Russia. 

And then finally here, from the Associated Press, February 2022, “U.S. says new intel shows Russia plotting false flag attack.” 

So, it's just a constant barrage of allegations that Russia is preparing to attack itself, has attacked itself, destroying its own infrastructure but, of course, any kind of even implication or questioning or suggestion that the United States might do that will destroy your career and has destroyed many people's careers for having suggested that as well. 


 

 

All right. It's time to bring Michael Tracey on. I can see that he's not doing well over there, off-camera. 

 

G. Greenwald: Michael, thank you so much for joining us. It's always great to see you. 

 

Michael Tracey: Well, thank you so much, Glenn, for needling me while I was hamstrung from responding. That really helped me. 

 

G. Greenwald: That's the best part of having your own show. I mean, if I didn't do that, I'd be squandering the main value. So let me ask you. 

 

Michael Tracey: I'm envious of that. 

 

G. Greenwald: We just listened to CNN bring on senior national security officials who act like – it's just awesome – to raise it basically, like the most obvious explanation is Russia attacked itself just like they did with the pipeline. What do you make of this explosion that happened over the Kremlin on Wednesday night? 

 

Michael Tracey: Well, it wasn't even just the pipeline. I mean, there's been a litany of accusations thrust out into the information space, making this claim that Russia was imminently on the verge of carrying out some sort of “false flag” attack. Remember, there was an utter conviction on the part of people that Russia was shelling the nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia that its own forces were occupying. So, it was shelling a unit of its own military in order to, I don't know, kill them via radiation poisoning or something. And then, lo and behold, a couple of months later, the Times of London, for whatever reason – before that, I guess – they gave a fairly exhaustive firsthand account of how “No, there was no Russian kind of deception in that they decided to bomb themselves. It was a Ukraine offensive where there was a Ukraine combat mission to strike the nuclear plant.” But anyway, I had to respond to that or had to address Robert O'Brien. I hadn't heard that particular clip. Robert O'Brien, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump, is either lying or is so wildly misinformed that he should probably consider a career change, where he's not running around bandying about the title of former national security adviser. I should advise it like Tiddledy Winks or Hopscotch or something a little bit more within his wheelhouse because I just pulled up the New York Times from December of 2022, as I was listening to that, just to make sure I had this 100% right. Does Robert O'Brien not read The New York Times? You know, you kind of have to do it on occasion if you want to get some information that otherwise you may not be privy to, because they are the recipients of tons of these leaks and so forth. But this one wasn't even a leak. This was just The New York Times in a news article, which is – and this is rare for them – saying “Ukraine executed its most brazen attack into Russian territory in the nine-month war on Monday, targeting two military bases hundreds of miles inside the country with drones.” Robert O'Brien said, oh, yeah, they might do a few attacks here and there on the border, which, by the way, would also contravene the assurances that have been given by the Biden administration as to whether the U.S. was going to countenance attacks inside territorial Russia. But leaving that aside, it's just demonstrably false in the most straightforward possible ways that we have it on record and U.S. officials confirm this – that Ukraine has committed very long-range strikes in Russia. 

 

G. Greenwald: Not only that. Well, let me just interject there, just to give you a couple of other examples as well. Just a month ago, a leading pro-war nationalist journalist was killed, was murdered, when a bomb that was handed to him detonated in a cafe in St Petersburg, a completely civilian infrastructure, and blew up and killed him and injured 17 other people. The Ukrainians openly celebrated it. Several months earlier, there was a terrorist attack on a car carried out, with the target being a similar type of nationalist, pro-war, influential journalist inside Russia. His car was blown up. He was not in the car. His daughter was. The Ukrainians celebrated that as well. So, the idea that it's somehow out of character for the Ukrainians to try and carry out attacks on Russian soil as part of this war is, as you say, just an absolute brazen lie. And yet it was the linchpin of his argument on [CNN] about why we should believe that it's most likely Ukraine or the Russians who did this attack while Bill Hemmer sat there and just nodded mindlessly. 

 

Michael Tracey: And that attack on the daughter of Dugin, so Dugina was the daughter's name, 26 or 27, in her twenties, blown up, blown to bits in a car by a car-bomb assassination in the outskirts of Moscow. Initially, Ukraine government officials vociferously denied that they carried out that attack. One of them said that Ukraine is not a terrorist state, therefore, how could you possibly ever believe that we might have carried out this attack? A few weeks later, the New York Times receives a leak from anonymous sources, which you got to take with a grain of salt but this was an admission against interest, right? Because what the anonymous sources were desperately pleading with The New York Times to disseminate was effectively a warning that the United States had concluded or that the intelligence services had concluded that factions of the Ukraine state actually carried out that assassination car bombing, which its public representatives in Ukraine had denounced the idea that they could be accused of doing because it would mean that they were a terrorist state. And this goes on and on and on. Before the invasion was launched in February of last year, there was an amazing clip – I don't know if you remember this – Matt Leigh, the Associated Press journalist, was questioning, I think it was Ned Price. 

 

G. Greenwald: Ned Price. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. 

 

Michael Tracey: And Matt Leigh, I'm paraphrasing, said something like, “You know, you're making this extremely jarring allegation about Russia being on the verge of committing a false flag attack and you're not providing any evidence for it. So how are we as journalists supposed to process this information and report on it with any semblance of like epistemic scruples?” And Lee even characterized the claims at that point coming out of the Biden administration as verging on “Alex Jones territory” because it is true that by and large, before 2022, people who are serious journalists or pundits or think tankers or whatever wouldn't get caught dead uttering the phrase ‘false flag’ because it was […] 

 

G. Greenwald: It is a staple of Alex Jones’ program. I mean, it's also something that radicals on the left and the right who are very critical of U.S. foreign policy, frequently accuse the United States of doing in order to create a just cause for some sort of, you know, use of chemical weapons in Syria that might provoke the United States government or justify the United States government to bomb Assad even further, and then become their surfaced allegations that it's likely the United States that are behind it. And anyone who dares suggest that the United States government, the CIA, would ever do a false flag operation to advance its own interests is immediately and permanently discredited as a crazed conspiracy theorist, the mere utterance of that phrase, as you say, was the providence of Alex Jones, and people who were kind of extremists on the left and the right who get booted off every mainstream platform. And here these people are with the most, I mean, brazen and casual posture, asserting that this is so – even though Michael, we showed this last night, I don't know if you've seen this – the Ukrainians commissioned a stamp commemorating the attack with a Ukrainian soldier sticking his middle finger up at the Kremlin while it's on fire. You would think if the Ukrainians were really eager to avoid the perception that they were behind the attack on the Kremlin, they would not be issuing commemorative stamps celebrating this attack. But none of this gets included in the discourse. 

 

Michael Tracey: Here's what I think is the most critical point. That question that was posed by Matt Lee to Ned Price in February 2022, a few weeks before the invasion commenced – he was referring to claims that were then being pumped out into the media about some imminent Russian false flag. Those claims proved false. There was no Russian false flag, as was being alleged at the time by U.S. government officials and as was being then transmitted across the informational landscape, as though it were some sort of established fact or as though it had enough credibility to just be incredulously propagated. I'm not aware of a single instance in which U.S. government officials, think tankers, or people who feel like they have some sort of amateur intelligence and analysis expertise, that any single time that these allegations have been made since the beginning of last year, have they actually been borne out and has Russia committed the false flag attack that we're being told they are sure to be on the verge of coming out – just hasn't happened. For better or worse, probably worse if you're not fond of the war having started, but Putin didn't engineer some kind of phony pretext to launch the war. He laid out his rationale for why he felt the war was justified. And it wasn't as though some sort of, like staged atrocity needed to be, you know, confabulated or something. And this happens over and over and over. And one of the main sources of this constant peddling of false flag allegations is the Institute for the Study of War, which is the think tank in Washington, D.C., founded in 2007, specifically to furnish to the George W. Bush administration an intellectual underpinning for them carrying out the surge, meaning the escalation of the Iraq war in 2006-2007. 

 

G. Greenwald: [Let’s] explain that for a little bit. So, in 2006, there was a very growing sentiment against the war in Iraq because the promise was it would last weeks. That was Bill Kristol's promise. That was the promise of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and all those people at the time. And 2006 was, you know, three, three and a half full years of hardcore, heavy combat, and a serious insurgency that had trapped the United States inside Iraq, we were nowhere near close to achieving our goals. There were thousands of U.S. soldiers being killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis being killed. And the Democrats successfully won the 2006 midterm election by promising to cut off funding for the Iraq war, which, of course, they promptly abandoned the minute that Nancy Pelosi ascended to the speakership. When the Democrats won that mid-term election. 

 

Michael Tracey: Glenn! Quickly parallel there to what the Republicans are doing under Kevin McCarthy. 

 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Kevin McCarthy, before the midterm, tried to send out signals to convince his base that he was going to impose some limits on Biden's funding of the war in Ukraine. And the minute the Republicans squeaked by and won that election and then Kevin McCarthy got enough votes just barely to become speaker, he basically turned around and said, “Of course, I didn't believe any of that. Of course, I've always been a hardcore supporter of the war in Ukraine, and I intend to fully fund Joe Biden's war and proxy war in Ukraine exactly the way Nancy Pelosi funded it in 2006.” Although Pelosi really was against the war – she voted against it from the start, arguing against it – but they wanted the war to continue because they wanted to be able to run against the war in 2008 because they knew it would help them win, which it did. That was a major reason why Obama was able to beat John McCain, which is almost more cynical and disgusting. But the argument that year before the Surge was the answer of the foreign policy establishment and the neoconservatives to say, “We know you hate this war, we know you're sick of it, we know you think that we can't win but we have this theory now, it's called The Surge, we're going to just send – I don't know how many it was – 70,000-80,000 more soldiers into Iraq. They're going to, you know, just kind of amplify the force to such an extent that we're going to destroy the insurgency and finally install the democratic regime in Iraq, that had long been promised, and the think tank that was created to create, as you say, the intellectual underpinning for that strategy. So, tell us about who this think tank is. They're still around and they're now fueling the war in Ukraine with the same kind of theoretical justification. So, tell us a little bit about that think tank and what they're doing. 

 

Michael Tracey: Right. And it's not that they're just still around, they're probably more prominent than ever. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, certainly. Yeah, 

 

Michael Tracey: Of course, David Petraeus was the general who was appointed by Bush to execute that so-called Surge in Iraq. And guess who sits on the board as we speak of the Institute for the Study of War? That's right! David Petraeus, along with Bill Kristol, along with Jack Keane, along with Joe Lieberman, I mean, some of the most […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Michael, just a word on David Petraeus as well. David Petraeus’s career ended because he took – I don't just mean classified documents, I don't mean top secret documents of the kind this Discord leaker leaked, like just ordinary top secret documents – I mean, like the genuinely most sensitive documents in the United States pantheon, top secret documents, and handed it to his mistress to allow her to write a hagiography of him and got caught doing it, got a slap on the wrist, didn't spend a single day in prison, and is now on all these boards and the faculty of Harvard making enormous sums of money. Even though the leaks and the breaches of classified information that he was responsible for were infinitely more serious than all of these people who go to prison for years at a time. You're provoking me with all this history. But I think it's important to remember this because is the case that, as you get older, you realize that what you think is common knowledge because you lived through it. Increasingly, every year that goes by, there are more and more people who don't know about it and didn't live through it. And therefore, it's really worth revisiting. But go ahead with this thing. 

 

Michael Tracey: Somebody who's like 24 years old today, who wouldn't have necessarily known that Petraeus had resigned from the CIA when he was director for these classified information breaches. If you're 23 today and you're 24 today, you would've been like, you know, 13 […]

 

G. Greenwald: Let alone all the stuff about the Iraq war, you know, which is now 20 years old.

 

Michael Tracey: Right. This is a slight tangent, but I'll make it brief. David Petraeus told me personally recently – and maybe I shouldn't divulge this, but I can't restrain myself because I was going to be saving it for something – that he is functioning as a conduit of the Biden administration, because he's a former official, to issue statements as a quasi-administration figure, because oftentimes those who are in government actively cannot be quite as fulsome in what they want to put out there in the public domain. And so, if you recall or if you don't recall this, you should go look it up, in October of last year, David Petraeus was on the ABC Sunday Show and made a shocking statement, which is that if, he warned, if Russia commits any kind of nuclear attack inside Ukraine, even if it doesn't intend, on any NATO member state, even if it's a small the smallest of tactical nuclear weapons, I'm saying that that wouldn't be a catastrophe, probably but this is what he was emphasizing. It doesn't matter the scale of the attack, what will happen straight away, according to Petraeus. And he was just saying this as fact, as though he was reciting a formal policy document. He was saying that the U.S. will launch a massive kinetic strike on the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea, on all their force presences in Ukraine, and basically – eventually start World War III. That's what David Petraeus was saying had been relayed to Putin by U.S. government officials as to what the consequence would be in the event of some sort of incident in Ukraine. And so, David Petraeus, a decade before, got booted out of the CIA as a director because he was so careless with his possession of classified material, and yet, I'm pretty sure that whatever he was communicating in public probably had its genesis in some rather classified material. 

 

G. Greenwald: Right. Although probably dispatched to deliver this message. 

Now, this is what I need to know. I want to get to the think tank and just create the context for it, because that's where we were started and we kind of got off on multiple tangents. I would say the fall was 70% yours, 30% mine, maybe 80/20. But the think tank itself is so notable because like […] 

 

Michael Tracey: I’m going to poll your viewers and see if they agree with that. 

 

G. Greenwald: I got excited by the Surge and not by David Petraeus. I think one of the things that are so vital to realize is that all those people responsible for all of those horrific abuses and policy disasters that followed the 9/11 attack for years were the people who had abandoned themselves largely to the Republican Party. A lot of them were very cooperative with the Democrats. There were all kinds of Democrats, obviously, on board with the war in Iraq – Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, the most prominent Democrats, in fact, there were people who were supportive of all these classified programs that became so controversial, like Guantanamo and torture and NSA spying and the rest. But it was largely the Republican Party that was the primary vessel for carrying out these policies. They got completely discredited. The election of Obama was facilitated in large part based on a promise to uproot all of these promises of the War on Terror, none of which happened. But the people responsible, these neocons, these hard-core militaries did get sufficiently discredited to the point where they haven't won another election since. In 2016, Trump ran by running opposition to them, by condemning them, and that's what drove them back into the Democratic Party, which is where they now reside and where they continue, as you said, to exert more influence than ever. They just switched parties to the party that became more hospitable to them so that no matter who they vote for, they thought they were voting for Obama to get rid of these people. And yet, under Obama, the person who was running Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, who first worked for Hillary Clinton's State Department and then for John Kerry’s State Department, even though she was Cheney's senior adviser for the war in Iraq. So, what is the relationship of this think tank to the new Victoria Nuland and to the entire neocon world? 

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Hi glenn!
I'm so very very confused about what is going on rn in regards to Garcia and el Salvador. Did the USC decide 9-0 for him to be returned or that demanding trump return him was beyond the ability of a district court to demand? Does facilitate his return merely mean allow him to come through the border? Was he ordered to be deported in 2019? Does the order of holding get canceled if trump declares m16 a terrorist organization? Is a US president a coequal with the US SC or is one more powerful than the other?
Too much contradictory information for me! What is true? What isnt??

Glenn, as always I appreciate all of your diligent work and your attempt to reach the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to Harvard nobly resisting becoming a tool of the federal government, I find this humorous. The first thing you would have to do to make this in any way reasonable is to demonstrate that they are currently not beholding to other donors and that the money these donors give does not influence their curriculum, the people they hire in either the bureaucratic or the educational departments in the university. If you cannot prove if, or if such an investigation shows that they are influenced by other big money, then all Harvard is doing is choosing one controlling interest over another. And the students receive a slanted education, which of course they perceive as truth. Whether they believe so or not, they have little choice. Rebellion and resistance can easily masquerade as freedom of thought when they are, in fact, a form of conformism to another special interest. ...

April 16, 2025

Dear Glenn.

First of all, and most importantly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful courage and your profound intellectual honesty. I love Tucker and I enjoy Jimmy Dore and the GreyZone; but, you are the only one for whom I make an effort to watch every single show. And, your shows are uniformly magnificent. Such a joy to get my news from such a trusted source.

Among the many issues that you’ve addressed with a lovely integrity is the genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis. And, Trump’s sociopathic approach to the topic has been quite disturbing.

Since the moment Trump came down the “golden escalator,” I’ve liked the guy. And, since I met him a year later in a small gathering and realized that “he’s not the guy he plays on TV” (I SWEAR Bill Maher stole my line), I’ve been completely in his camp and - for better or worse - have been dumped by some formerly very dear friends because of it. So, it’s sad to come to the ...

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

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 a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
System Update #437

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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For various reasons, we had our Q&A show on this show rather than Friday night. The questions that we received cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare in this so-called democratic world to ban anti-establishment candidates from the ballot to some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariffs policies, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

AD_4nXcdRzr6sZ9KQq3FHxTXYeAVEqeMpChh786AVQXcqgjXiqJtr6YhmTYfhOScFrEEFWtOe4YyJHpW3_rQgE-hF98iqyAj_D3vt545whwTcGWMk7q8L17MXlubkN60Ij37-Lu7eRd3T4eRNVJ1dvmGskg?key=raEjNIDONd4zGJ8N9tomIcvGI do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 

It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

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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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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