Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Durham Report Obliterates FBI for Russiagate Misconduct. Major Changes at Twitter Raise Serious Questions. And Reflections on the Extraordinary Life of David Miranda
Video Transcript
May 18, 2023
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Good evening. It's Tuesday, May 16th. 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. 

As many of you know, our show has been on a brief hiatus due to the death on May 9 of my husband, David Miranda. He had been hospitalized since August 6 of last year when he was at a campaign event for his bid to be reelected to the Brazilian Congress representing Rio de Janeiro when he began experiencing severe abdominal pain. He was admitted to the ICU with the diagnosis of severe inflammation of his gastrointestinal region that had spread to multiple organs, including his kidneys, liver and lungs due to sepsis. He remained in ICU for the next nine months, fighting an extraordinary battle that allowed us to me and our children, his family and friends to share some profound moments with him as he was very awake, alert, communicative and fully present, especially over the last several months. After a personal loss this is devastating, it's very difficult to know when to go back to work. There's really no perfect time or no right way to do it. I was largely inspired in my decision to come back today by my kids, who yesterday were adamant in their insistence that they wanted to return to school. I figured it is so rare to see young teenagers all but demand to go to school, despite my concerns that it was too early for them, and then come back home and declare how gratified they were by their decision, that there must be some wisdom in that. I can't say it's easy to be here. It has often been a real struggle over the last nine months to do many of our shows, but I think it's the right thing to do for myself and our kids, and I hope for our audience as well. 

As our last segment tonight, I will share some thoughts about David's life. There was a significant public component to his work as first an activist and a journalist who played a vital role in the Snowden story, often one that was overlooked, and then in his life as an elected official. I always believed that there are some vital lessons to learn from how David lived that part of his public life. And also share a few insights that I've developed over the last nine months, and especially the last week, about gratitude and the importance of human and spiritual connection that I hope and believe is worth hearing. I'm just not a person who can speak about anything, including our political conflicts and my journalism, without speaking the most genuinely and truthfully I can. And today, at least, that requires my talking about the most difficult and challenging moment of my life in a way that I hope will be enriching for everybody who hears it. 

But before that, as our top story, we will examine the devastating revelations – I mean, the devastating revelations – from the so-called Durham Report, the final investigative document filed by special counsel John Durham, who in April 2019 was appointed and assigned by the Justice Department as someone along widely respected in Washington as an apolitical and trustworthy prosecutor, to investigate the single most scandalous aspect of Russiagate – not the fictitious and ultimately non-existent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election, and most certainly not the completely unhinged, deranged and wildly melodramatic conspiracy theory that dominated our political discourse for years, namely that the Kremlin had effectively seized control of the levers of American power through a combination of sexual, financial and personal blackmail over Donald Trump. Instead, the most scandalous part of all of this was the abuse of power, the flagrant abuse of power by the FBI and other parts of the U.S. security state to concoct a completely baseless investigation with the clear and improvable intent to interfere in and manipulate the 2016 election to ensure the defeat of Donald Trump. The 306-page report sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week is full of extremely incriminating indictments of the FBI, and its senior leadership. We’ll review the key findings and most importantly, place them in the context of the last seven years of full-scale, highly illegal and profoundly anti-democratic interference by the U.S. security state in our domestic politics and in two consecutive presidential elections. 

And then, after that: there have been several significant developments on Twitter over the last two weeks. The announcement that Tucker Carlson, now fired by Fox News, will be bringing his show to Twitter in ways that, at least to me, still appear quite unclear. The hiring of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who is currently a senior advertising executive with NBCUniversal and has a recent history of some very disturbing comments about how she believes social media should function, and then the revelation that Twitter censored the accounts of specific oppositional figures right before the presidential election in Turkey, held on Sunday, upon threat of being banned entirely from the country if it failed to comply. There are many significant implications in these events and the reaction to them, given that the battle over Twitter, whether it will become a free speech platform along the lines of Rumble or if the establishment will succeed in corralling it once again into a platform that they control is really of the highest importance. And we will examine what we think is the meaning of all of these events. 

Finally, in conjunction with the return today of System Update, we launched a long-planned campaign ad that will appear on multiple media and online platforms that conveys what we have done with this program thus far and more importantly, where we want to take it. We wanted to share this ad campaign with you, so please take a look. 

 

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So, as I said, that will appear on multiple online platforms across the Internet over the next several weeks and perhaps even longer and we hope that it will attract an even larger audience than we've been able to assemble thus far, one that is really thanks in large part due to Rumble, exceeding our expectations. 

This being Tuesday night, we ordinarily would have our live interactive show on Locals but given the need for me to ease back into my return to work this week, we will not hold that show tonight. We will be back with it as soon as possible, no later than next Tuesday. To have access to that show exclusively, just join our Locals community by clicking the join button right below the video on the Rumble page. 

As a reminder, System Update appears in podcast form as well, 12 hours after we air live here, first, on Rumble. To consume the show in podcast form on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and others, simply follow us on those platforms. You can share and rate the show, which spreads visibility as well. 

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




One of the top three or four most significant political events of the last decade in the United States was the release in April 2019 of the final report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It may be easy to forget how significant that was, and that's because there has been a very concerted effort to foster this forgetting on the part of the American public about just how dominant that scandal was. It's not an exaggeration to say that Russiagate was the leading news story from mid-2016 when it first appeared as part of a campaign ad by Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump through at least the middle of 2019 when Robert Mueller finally concluded his investigation. And the reason I say the publication of the Mueller report was such a significant event – one of the top three or four or five political events of the last decade – is because the impetus for Russiagate, the core allegation that caused so much political turmoil and that suffocated and drowned our politics, and that ultimately led to the appointment of George Bush's post-9/11 FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel, was the claim that again, emanated first from the Clinton campaign, and that was spread by media outlets all over the place, driven by leaks from the intelligence community, was that the Trump campaign had colluded – a word we heard every day for years and, then, nonsense – had colluded with the Russian government in its attempts to hack into the emails of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the personal inbox of John Podesta. And the claim was that there was a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign on the one hand, and the Russian government on the other, to use foreign power and foreign influence to interfere in our democratic election. That was the central allegation. If you go back and read contemporaneous accounts of what led to the Mueller investigation, you will find with great clarity that that was the central accusation. 

The reason I say the Mueller investigation report, the final report, was so significant is because it obliterated that accusation. It obliterated it. It concluded in extremely explicit ways that despite 18 months of an investigation that had unlimited resources, supposedly the dream team of the most aggressive and skillful prosecutors in the country in full subpoena power, they were unable to find evidence that established that core allegation, namely a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The evidence was simply nonexistent to prove that that conspiracy existed, a conspiracy that leading media outlets not only entertained but insisted had been proven true. Any questioning of that conspiracy theory – and I say this from firsthand experience – led one to be excluded and relegated to the fringes of most major liberal institutions. That is how deceitful the narrative was. And it wasn't just the narrative on the side, it was the leading narrative in our politics. Beyond that, when the Mueller investigation concluded, it meant one overarching fact would be true and would forever be true, namely, not a single American citizen, not one, not Donald Trump or his family, not senior officials of the Trump campaign or the Trump White House, not low-level Republican operatives or Trump operatives like Carter Page or anyone else, George Papadopoulos, not a single American, was indicted and accused of criminally conspiring with the Russian government. The core allegation that gave rise to the entire political controversy, let alone was anyone convicted of that accusation. The entire thing proved to be a scam, a hoax. When the Mueller investigation concluded with no indictments of that kind, and then the report explicitly concluded that they searched everywhere and yet found no evidence for the core accusation that there was collusion. 

Beyond that, if you want to say there was something even more dominant than the narrative that there was collusion was the truly deranged, unhinged, mentally unwell conspiracy theory that almost every major media outlet in this country embraced while feigning scorn for conspiracy theories and almost every major political leader in the Democratic Party – and even many in the Republican Party – affirmed to be true, namely, that the Russians had essentially seized control of the levers of American power as a result of sexual, financial and personal blackmail leverage over Donald Trump, a claim that was first put into the bloodstream of American politics by the Steele dossier and the Steele report that CNN first reported the existence of – and then BuzzFeed published the dossier itself – all while admitting that they cannot verify any, let alone all of the claims within it. 

So preposterous was this conspiracy theory that the Russians effectively controlled the United States and could force Trump to take actions against American interests and in servitude to the Kremlin, that the Mueller investigation barely even mentioned it, let alone debunked it or even bothered to discuss the evidence for it. There was no evidence. It was a gigantic fraud, one that every major leading liberal institution of power in journalism, in politics and in corporations all collectively affirmed. That is why the far more scandalous aspect of the Russiagate narrative was not Russiagate itself, but how this fraud was perpetrated on our country. Who is it that abused the power of the American government to launch an investigation based on nothing and then continuously leaked, often very illegally, the most incriminating information possible to the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News, principally, to affirm and fortify and fuel what all along was a completely fictitious narrative to the point that The Washington Post and The New York Times showered themselves with Pulitzers in 2018 for their supposedly brave and intrepid work in investigating what all along was a complete hoax? 

It was a long-time very respected prosecutor, renowned for his bipartisan respect and his reputation for apolitical independence and his doggedness as a prosecutor, John Durham, who was appointed in April 2019 by the Justice Department, the same month the Mueller investigation concluded and the Mueller report became public. He was tasked with investigating the origins of this hoax. How is it that American politics were drowned for at least three years in a completely fraudulent conspiracy theory, one that put a stranglehold on the U.S. government that distracted almost all of our attention on a daily basis, away from what mattered and on to this complete fairy tale? The investigation by John Durham lasted four years. It officially closed late last week, when the 306-page report that he authored was sent by Merrick Garland to Congress as the official report of the Durham investigation. And one of the things we find is that even in very unlikely places, including the media outlets, which most aggressively and relentlessly and single-mindedly promoted this conspiracy theory, were forced to admit that this report is devastating to the FBI and to the Russiagate narrative and highly exonerating of Donald Trump. 

So, let's just take a look at one example, which is Jake Tapper, who I suppose is probably the fairest or who attempts to be the fairest-minded host on CNN – which isn't saying very much at all, but is something that I would say for him if I were forced with a gun to my head to choose – and here's what he said about the Durham investigation. You know that every single CNN viewer, the shrinking number that they still cling to, hated to hear. It infuriated them to hear it but hear it, they did. Because in Jake Tapper's view, there was nothing else he could say after having reviewed the findings of that report. 

 

Video. CNN The Lead. May 15, 2023

Jake Tapper: Regardless, the report is now here. It has dropped and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans hoped for. It is, regardless devastating to the FBI and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump. 



And there you see the text on the screen, which typically is written in almost comically anti-Trump tones, which reads “Special Counsel Durham concludes FBI Never Should Have Launched the Trump-Russia Probe.” It was an abuse of power, this report concluded, for the investigation even to be launched at all, because they had no evidence that could possibly have justified an investigation of this type. In fact, they had ample evidence proving that it was a fraud, to begin with, and what John Durham uncovered was abundant proof that the senior leadership of the FBI – James Comey, who was the director, Andrew McCabe, who was his deputy, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, the lovers who ended up playing a crucial role in the investigation, all while talking openly about the vital need to use the FBI to sabotage the Trump campaign – that all of them had only one goal in mind when pursuing this investigation, nothing to do with legitimate law enforcement functions and everything to do with their desire to abuse the FBI and its vast powers to manipulate the 2016 election. That was where the corrupt interference came from, not from Moscow and the Kremlin, not from WikiLeaks or Jill Stein, but from the senior leadership of the FBI under President Obama, who obviously wanted his close friend and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in his party to win the 2016 election and allowed the FBI to abuse its power to do so. 

So, let's take a look at a couple of the key findings. And I want to say we have a lot to cover tonight. The report could really justify an entire 90-minute show. And my guess is we will at some point soon devote our entire program to digging deep into these findings. But I want to just show you a few of the key components of it and more importantly, place in context what these findings mean. There has been reporting over the last several days about the substance of this report I just showed you, Jake Tapper, essentially saying that it doesn't give the Republicans everything they wanted, but pretty much gave them most of what they wanted. Exonerated Trump proved the FBI should never have launched this fake investigation. But I want to put it in context that kind of take a step back and see what it means. 

So here is the letter from John Durham to Merrick Garland, where he submits his final report. And this is where he says, 

 

The office also considered as part of its investigation the government's handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016. 

That intelligence concerned the purported, “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services. (DOJ. May 12, 2023).

 

This was not an investigation that emanated from the FBI. This was a narrative, a campaign tactic, that emanated from the Clinton campaign, which obviously had all sorts of vital connections to the senior leadership of the U.S. government under President Obama, who was still president during the 2016 election. Durham goes on:

 

We've referred to that intelligence hereafter as the “Clinton plan intelligence.” DNI John Ratcliffe declassified the following information about the Clinton plan intelligence in September 2020 and conveyed it to the Senate Judiciary Committee: “In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC [Intelligence Community] does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.

According to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including “the alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” (DOJ. May 12, 2023).

 

This finding is incredibly devastating. It proves that this was not a legitimate law enforcement investigation, nor was it a legitimate intelligence investigation. It was cooked up as a campaign tactic by Hillary Clinton, and then that was briefed to President Obama and to CIA Director John Brennan, which means the highest levels of the government knew that Hillary Clinton intended to concoct this false claim linking Donald Trump to the Kremlin and to try and claim that the Trump campaign participated with or conspired with or colluded with the Kremlin and their hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's email, essentially accusing them of a crime and then using the FBI, weaponizing the FBI to go off and do an investigation, even though there was no basis under the law for launching that investigation that had only one purpose – a political one – to sabotage Trump's campaign. 

There were people inside the FBI in late October of 2016 who wanted it to be known that there was no evidence linking Donald Trump and the Russians because, by this point, it had become one of the predominant themes of the 2016 campaign. Every day – it's vital to remember – leading media outlets – The Times, The Post, CNN, NBC News – were headlining this fairy tale that came from the bowels of the Clinton campaign and then connected to the FBI. 

Here you see The New York Times – and they were vilified for this truthful article. Do you see the headline? “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees no clear Link to Russia.” 

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats and even chased a lead – which they ultimately came to doubt – about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. 

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, FBI and intelligence officials now believe was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump. (New York Times. Oct 31, 2016).

 

I can't overstate the rage and indignation that was directed at The New York Times for this article, both when it appeared and since, because the predominant view of the American elite class in politics and journalism is that there is only one valid goal in life, in politics, in journalism, and that is the destruction of Donald Trump and his political movement. And they really do believe – they have really come to believe over time – that the most significant and the most ethically obligatory mission of everybody, every relevant institution, is that single-minded goal, and that anything that deviates from that goal, that overarching paramount goal to destroy Donald Trump and his movement, anything that deviates from that mission is inherently improper, is inherently unethical, even if it means that journalists are telling the truth while they do it. That was for years the dominant ethos in American journalism that you do not tell the truth if there's any possibility it might help Donald Trump. Instead, you're required to endorse disinformation and to lie because the goal of defeating Donald Trump is so paramount that it renders everything including lying and deceit and censorship and disinformation, justified. That was what made that Sam Harris video resonate so virally, was that he was one of the few people unwittingly to be so candid in that worldview, that has corrupted almost every major liberal institution in the United States – and it continues to this very day and will continue into the 2024 campaign. 

At the time that this tactic was first unveiled, trying to link Donald Trump to the Russian government, I wrote my first article on Russiagate, which was on August 8, 2016, because I could see the emergence of this tactic. Every day I was seeing the FBI and the CIA leaking information to the Washington Post, The New York Times and NBC News designed to forward and advance this McCarthyite script that was dug up from the deepest levels of the CIA. These crusted scripts from the 1950s, trying to tie your political opponents to the Kremlin argued that you're disloyal to the United States, that you're somehow in bed with the Russians. The headline of my article was “Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History.” United States Democrats “are mimicking and echoing many of the most shameful people and tactics of the 20th century” because they really couldn't believe that something so blatantly McCarthyite, something that we were all taught to regard as one of our shameful moments in American history – the baseless accusations that a huge number of people who had no ties to the Kremlin were loyalists to the Kremlin – had been dredged up, rejuvenated by the Clinton campaign and specifically by U.S. security state agencies. 

I want to show you the very first video that the Clinton campaign launched in May 2016 that made me recoil instinctively. And I couldn't believe – I genuinely couldn't believe – that every Democrat and every liberal and especially every leftist who had been inculcated with the evils of McCarthyism were not reacting in similar ways because the script was so blatantly scummy and baseless. Let's take a look. 

Watch.

(Video. "What is Donald Trump's connection to Vladimir Putin?" 2017)

 OFF and edited TV news comments: He's been a very strong leader for Russia. / He kills journalists that don't agree with him. / At least he's a leader. / “Putin did call me a genius. He said very nice things about me.” Trump always seems to upend American foreign policy tradition in a way that benefits Vladimir Putin/ The prime objective of Putin’s foreign policy has been to destroy NATO. / NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive in the United States. / Manafort has represented a pro-Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Ukraine, Yanukovych. 

 

So, you get the gist here: this kind of sinister music playing, every kind of scummy tactic of guilt by association that this person said nice things about this person and the fact that Donald Trump was doing what should have been done a long time ago but he was really the first politician to have the courage to do, which is to stand up and question the ongoing viability of NATO, a military alliance that was created to protect Western Europe from a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. And it's something that we were pouring enormous amounts of money into way beyond what the Europeans were bearing. And even though their citizens have in many ways a better quality of life than huge numbers of Americans, questioning the viability of NATO, asking why the United States should be willing to risk a war with the world's largest nuclear-armed power over Ukraine – a country that Barack Obama repeatedly said had no vital interest for the United States – just the attempt, essentially, to equate questioning of American foreign policy with disloyalty and allegiance to Moscow, the ugliest tactics that have been used, were the ones being launched by the Clinton campaign and, then, the FBI's powers of investigation were weaponized to give credence to it. 

Let's look at a couple more passages from the Durham Report because I think it's vital to understand what it is that he concluded.

 

Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple, exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. (DOJ. May 12. 2023).

 

Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the investigation by the FBI into Trump-Moscow links. There was no evidence in their possession of collusion at the time they launched an investigation. Instead, he says, 

 

Upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately. Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump. The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information. 

Further, the FBI did so without (i) one any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence. 

Had it done so, again as set out in sections IV.A.3.b and c, the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials, nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject. In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March of 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that, at any time during the campaign, anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials. It was not until mid-September that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators received several of the Steele reports. Within days of their receipt, the unvetted and unverified Steele reports were used to support probable cause in the FBI’s FISA applications targeting [Carter] Page, a U.S. citizen, who, for a period of time, had been an advisor to Donald Trump. 

As discussed later in the report, this was done at a time when the FBI knew that the same information Steele had provided to the FBI had also been fed to the media and others in Washington. (DOJ. May 12. 2023).

 

Again, there are a huge number of highly incriminating components of this report, which we will cover in a later show, including the fact that, unlike the investigation into Trump's ties with Russia, for which there was no evidence in the FBI’s possession to justify an investigation, there was abundant evidence in the FBI's possession to justify investigating whether or not Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had received illegal foreign donations. That was where the foreign influence was coming from and yet Comey and McCabe, according to this report, squashed every attempt to investigate that. 

There are other incredibly incriminating parts of this report. We know, for example, that a senior FBI lawyer ultimately pled guilty to submitting false information to the FISA court to justify spying on Carter Page. Remember the Trump accusation that Obama spied on his campaign was not only absolutely true, but it was done by lying to the FISA court to the point where an FBI senior lawyer was forced to plead guilty to having done that. 

What I find interesting and amazing is that the prosecutor here, John Durham, is somebody who had long been talked about as being a highly respected and apolitical actor. This is not someone they can dismiss as being Clarence Thomas or some right-wing Trump appointee. John Durham has been around forever and he's always been talked about in the most respected terms. Here, for example, is The New York Times, in 2008, in an article entitled “Prosecutor Who Unraveled Corruption in Boston Turns to CIA Tapes.” And this is what they said about him at the time: 

 

Michael Clarke, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked with him for years in Connecticut, said that Mr. Durham's experience in unraveling the corrupt relationships in Massachusetts, as well as in convicting public officials in Connecticut, including former Gov. John G. Rowland, demonstrate why his methods may be well-suited to his new task. 

Mr. Clarke, now first selectman in Farmington, Conn., said that the investigation of Mr. Rowland was fraught with political pitfalls and detours. “John’s style is dogged and focused, Mr. Clarke said. “Because he is so intent on following the facts, he refused to become involved in any political dimension or detour.” He said Mr. Durham was undeterred by “certain roadblocks people wanted to put in the way”. He has been and remains, by all accounts, a man of moderation and some modesty. 

Jeffrey Meyer, a law professor at Quinnipiac University who worked as a junior prosecutor under Mr. Durham, described him as both stringent and fair in his approach to cases. Professor Meyer recalled that when he went to work in the office, he excitedly told Mr. Durham of what he thought was a strong criminal case. Mr. Durham, he said, gently disagreed and proceeded in the kindest terms to remind him of the obligation of prosecutors to consider mitigating circumstances and to use their authority carefully. (The New York Times. Jan 13, 2008).

 

So here you have and this is amazing that this is not the top dominant story in the United States – and it isn't because our media institutions are irrevocably and fundamentally corrupted. To the extent they weren't when Trump emerged, they most certainly are now. So here you have one of the most respected federal prosecutors in the country who has long been given politically fraught cases to investigate because of his reputation for being apolitical, for following the facts wherever they take him and he just issued a 306-page report that concludes with ample evidence that the powers of the FBI were radically and consistently and repeatedly abused for overtly political ends – not just for any overtly political ends, but with the specific intention of coercing an outcome in the 2016 election that the ideologically and politically motivated agents of the senior leadership of the FBI wanted. We've read Peter Strzok’s emails to Lisa Page talking about how everything must be done to ensure Donald Trump never becomes president of the United States. These were the people – Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok – who were in charge of the FBI, who steered the FBI to abuse its powers in the most extreme way, in the most corrupt way, in the most illegal way to interfere in our domestic politics. Exactly what the U.S. security state was never supposed to do. The worst sin of the U.S. security state. That is what this report by a highly respected prosecutor documents in great detail. How is this not the biggest story in the United States? It is because they have purposely encouraged people to forget how dominant this scam was for years, how affirmed it was by every institution that insists that they are the guardians against disinformation, that you have to empower them to protect you from lies because they are the owners of truth. It destroys the credibility of every media outlet, with a few exceptions, in the United States, and of the FBI and of the Obama administration that permitted this and overseeing saw it knowing that this emanated from the Clinton campaign. So, this has to be erased. It has to be dismissed as yet another nothing burger. It got some coverage for one day and now it's gone. They're counting on you to just embrace your own impotence, to decide that it's just too much corruption, that there's nothing that can be done about it. 

That's the learned helplessness they try and foster in the population and I think what is so worth realizing is that this is not an isolated case. We already knew that the 2020 election was exactly the byproduct of the same abuse of power from the same agencies – the U.S. security state. The reporting that The New York Post was able to do about Joe Biden and the pursuit of profit in Ukraine and China and elsewhere through his son and brother, had the potential to sabotage Joe Biden's campaign. Joe Biden barely was declared the winner of the 2020 election, and they were desperate to discredit that reporting by concocting another lie, not the one that they used for the 2016 election, that Trump was in bed with the Kremlin instead the lie that the Hunter Biden reporting and the laptop was Russian disinformation, which was used not only to discredit the reporting, to not only stigmatize everyone who raised it, but to censor it from Facebook and Twitter. 

And the fact that this was done by 51 former intelligence operatives was always proof that this actually was done by the CIA. There’s no such thing as former intelligence operatives. When you reach the highest level of the CIA, you can go work for NBC News or CNN, you are still an intelligence operative. Everyone knows that. But we recently discovered in case anyone had doubts about that or that more proof was required that the CIA itself was directly involved in the creation and dissemination of that lie. 

Here from the Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2023, you see the headline “Biden's CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election.” So, it's two elections in a row for the U.S. security state is intervening on behalf of the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump. There you see the subheading “The agency, not only retirees, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter.” 

 

It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials but to the Central Intelligence Agency. That's the big takeaway of this week's interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden's laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden's campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian intel information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter's influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father's path to victory. Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley. (The Wall Street Journal. May 11, 2023). 

 

 

 

I don't think it's possible to overstate the danger that these events reveal that we face in the United States. The people who prattle on about the need to protect democracy from authoritarianism are authoritarians. The media outlets and the billionaire-funded organizations that claim that they need to protect you from disinformation are the most aggressive purveyors of disinformation, spreading it constantly and with no constraints of any kind. But the most dangerous development of all in the United States is that the intelligence agencies, the security state, is fully liberated out in the open, not only to place their senior operatives at our major media outlets, as they have done but to use their investigative powers and their intelligence and surveillance mechanisms to manipulate our politics, to control the outcome of our elections, to destroy any political leader that gets in their way. 

The interview I've shown you many times of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being stupid for confronting and criticizing the intelligence community – because, as he put it, everyone in Washington knows not to do that because they have six different ways to Sunday to get back to you – is really a perfect reflection of the despotic climate that has arisen in the United States. If our intelligence agencies, vested with billions and billions of dollars of budget and the most invasive spying technologies and most aggressive law enforcement authorities, are now in the business of controlling the flow of information in the United States, of censoring the information that flows on social media, which we know they did from the Twitter Files, and of deciding which candidate they want to win and which candidate they want to lose, and then abusing those powers to ensure that that outcome is the one that happens, we really are a democracy in name only. That is the definition of a deep state, a permanent power faction that operates in the dark and with no constraints, and that has no constraints of any kind on their power. That is absolutely the reality in the United States. Anybody who denies it is inherently a disinformation agent, and I think there is no greater danger to all of our interests, to our core political values than the abuse of the U.S. security state's powers, as revealed by multiple investigations now culminating with this 306-page report. 

We will definitely the voters show in the future the granular detail and evidence because seeing the whole story matters so much but putting it in context reveals that it is far from an isolated event. It is now the way we do business in the United States, and nothing is more menacing and disturbing and anti-democratic than that. 


 

So, let’s now turn to the second story we want to do tonight, which is some recent events at Twitter that I think are worth looking into – not so much because of what they say about Twitter, but because I think a lot of the questions about Twitter are unresolved and we won't really know the answers to where it's going and what it will do until we see how things unfold, especially with the hiring of this new CEO. But some things have happened relating to Twitter and at Twitter that I think tell us a great deal, not only because of these events, but the reaction to them. So, I want to take a look at some of the recent events over the last couple of weeks and deconstruct what it means in ways that I think haven’t quite yet been done. 

One of the precipitating events that caused a lot of controversies was the fact that – as you see in The Washington Post headline from May 13, “Twitter Says it Will Restrict Access to Some Tweets Before Turkey's Election. The move comes as the country's right-wing leader, President […] Erdogan, faces a tight contest at the polls on Sunday.” 

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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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