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 really enjoyed the interview yesterday with Taylor Lorenz. I respect you for having her on to discuss her recent article about hidden doner money going to social media influencers for political messaging despite your past criticisms of her. Likewise I respect Taylor for coming onto your show and facing questions from someone who has been an ardent critic of her knowing it will be uncomfortable. This kind of interview is why I enjoy watching your program, you have an open mind about talking to people respectfully despite differences, real or perceived, you have with one another. Which, for me, raises some questions about biases we all have. More specifically, the negative bias you have appeared to have towards Taylor’s journalism over the years. Your harshest criticisms of her have been over her perceived pro censorship positions she was taking at different times in addition to her being overly sensitive to criticisms she’s received from others. I thought she ...

Glenn, please INVITE WW onto your show and work this out. I can’t have two of my favourite journalists calling each other dishonest. Work this shit out brother!

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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

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

We are not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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

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

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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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Israeli Official Caught in Pedophile Sting Operation Allowed to Flee; Israeli Data: 83% of the Dead in Gaza are Civilians; Ukrainian Man Arrested over Nord Stream Explosions
System Update #503

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

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

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A top official of Israel's cyberwarfare unit was arrested in Nevada on Monday night after police say he tried to lure what he thought was an underage child to have sex with him. The Israeli, Tom Alexandrovich, was let out of jail on bail and then – rather strangely – had no measures imposed on him to ensure that he did not simply flee the country and go back to Israel. As a result, the accused pedophile did exactly that – after telling the FBI that he intended to get on a plane to go back to Israel, that is what he predictably did. 

Why were no measures undertaken to prevent that, whether it be the seizure of his passport or wearing an ankle bracelet, or monitoring? We'll examine the latest about this increasingly strange case, as well as one of the officials, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who has her own background. 

Then: a harrowing report from Israel's own intelligence units’ documents that an astonishing 83% of the people the IDF has killed in Gaza are civilians, all this revealed today, as Bari Weiss' Free Press continues to engage in some of the most brazen atrocity and genocide denialism imaginable in service of the foreign government to which they are loyal. We'll examine these latest revelations and what they mean for U.S. policy. 

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