Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
US Continues Dangerous Escalations in Ukraine, Sprinting Toward Catastrophe. Plus: Saagar Enjeti on Ukraine, Anthrax/COVID, GOP Race, Tucker Carlson, & More
Video Transcript
May 26, 2023
post photo preview

Watch the full episode here:

placeholder

 

 Good evening. It's Tuesday, May 23. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, more major escalations in the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine as Ukrainian forces step up their incursions over the border and attacks inside of Russia. While all of this occurs, the Biden administration continues its bizarre, unstable and dangerous pattern. It first insists that it will not send a particular weapon or military system to Ukraine because doing so would be far too risky for escalating the war and dragging the U.S. further into that conflict – including risking direct military confrontation between the U.S., the country with the world's second-largest nuclear stockpile, and Russia the country with its largest – only for Biden to then turn around months later and announce that he will, in fact, send exactly that same weapons system they emphatically said they could not supply to Ukraine due to the serious dangers. They first did this with Patriot missile batteries, which Biden said at the start of the war he would never send to Ukraine, only to announce, suddenly, in December of last year, that it would send them. The same thing happened with Abrams tanks. Biden spent all of 2022 adamantly rejecting Ukraine's pleas for them only to reverse himself this year, by announcing the U.S. would send 31 tanks, just to start. And it just happened again, this time with F-16 fighter jets, which easily have the capacity to fly deep into Russia and bomb Russian targets. Biden was particularly emphatic that sending some of the U.S.'s most potent and complex fighter jets would create far too large of a risk of a major escalation, including their use to bomb Russia. Yet, last week, Biden once again reversed himself, telling President Zelenskyy those jets were coming and that the U.S. would begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them. 

This is the living, breathing embodiment of creeping out-of-control escalation. What is declared unthinkably dangerous and risky one month becomes official government war policy the next. On this path, it seems far more likely than not now the U.S. will find itself in some sort of direct military confrontation with Russia. How would the U.S. react if a neighboring country was repeatedly striking American soil using missiles, tanks and fighter jets supplied by China, Russia, or Iran? 

As has been the case since the start of this war, the question continues to be what U.S. interests or benefits possibly justify trifling with these increasingly dangerous risks, especially given Washington's position for two decades under both parties that Ukraine was never and never would be a vital interest to the United States. We'll evaluate the question once again in the context of these latest war escalations.  

Then, for our interview segment, we'll speak with one of the most impressive success stories in independent media, Saagar Enjeti, host of the wildly popular “Breaking Points” program, which successfully broke away from the corporate media outlet where it was born under a different name, The Hill, to find an even larger audience and greater influence as a fully independent program. 

We'll talk to Saagar, who got his start in journalism working with Tucker Carlson, in The Daily Caller, about Ukraine and the increasingly significant role of the U.S. in that war, the state of the GOP primary, and whether Ron DeSantis represents an ongoing breakaway from the GOP establishment or an attempt by that establishment to regain control of the party. We'll discuss the program we did here last night on the various mysteries of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the light it shines on the current attempt to determine dispositively the origins of the COVID pandemic. And we'll talk about the nature of independent media, including the recent decision by Tucker Carlson once he was fired by Fox to put his show, at least for now, onto Twitter.

This being Tuesday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour show, live, here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback, something we do every Tuesday and Thursday night. To obtain access to that aftershow where we respond to your feedback and I address criticism, simply sign up as a member of our Locals community. The red join button is right below the video player here. System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow us on every major podcasting platform, including Spotify and Apple, 12 hours after our shows are broadcast live, here on Rumble.

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


 

There is a lot to say about the war in Ukraine, particularly what has now indisputably become the U.S. proxy war with Russia using Ukraine as the sacrifice or as the platform. Observing that the U.S. was intending to use Ukraine as a proxy war with Russia was once taboo to say, anyone who said it was immediately – needless to say – branded a Russian agent, or a pro-Russian propagandist, and yet now nobody disputes that characterization. How can you? It is like every hallmark of a classic proxy war and there are some really serious escalations taking place right now as we speak, escalating numbers and types of Ukrainian attacks into Russian territory using American weapons systems, including weapons systems the Biden administration repeatedly vowed not to send, only to send them. While there are greater incursions by the Ukrainian or Ukrainian allied forces into Russia, striking Russian targets and killing Russian people with American weapons, the Biden administration reversed its most emphatic decree that it would never send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, given their capacity to strike deep into Russian territory. By having Joe Biden announce to President Zelenskyy that the F-16s are on their way and that the U.S. will begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them, I think the most striking part of this war – and we will talk about a lot of this with Saagar Enjeti when he comes on in just a little bit – is that there has been no campaign of propaganda and disinformation that even compares to the one surrounding the war in Ukraine, at least since the war in Iraq. 

We spent last night devoting our entire show to just a prong of propaganda that led to that war in Iraq. The effort to falsely and thoroughly link the Iraqi government to the anthrax attacks, which the FBI seven years later said came actually not from the Iraqi government, but from the American government, from a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, where, as it turns out, according to the FBI, the U.S. government was working with highly sophisticated, deadly strains of anthrax, something it had long claimed it never does, and something it still continues to claim it does not do. 

This propaganda is hard to overstate. There was just outright lie after outright lie after outright lie emanating from leading political figures and U.S. media outlets from the very start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year and two months ago. To underscore that, I want to show you an interview that was recently given by Jeffrey Sachs, whose establishment resume is way too long for me to recite. Basically, he became a very well-known and well-regarded economics professor at Harvard in the 1980s, where he became renowned for helping countries avoid or solve hyperinflation. He became very close to a lot of governments, including in Bolivia and Poland and then in Russia. He's been at the center of some of the most important historical events of the last 40 years. He often was hosted on the most establishment television programs. He still manages to appear on “Morning Joe”, despite the fact that he has become a real heretic when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and even the COVID pandemic, where he originally was asked to lead a COVID task force because of his views that the U.S. government mostly had it right, only to then begin questioning a lot of the core pieties. And here he is talking about the role the U.S. media has played in disseminating a level of propaganda that is at least as severe and glaring and flagrant as the propaganda that led us into Iraq. He's specifically talking about the role The Washington Post has played in that, in the context of the obvious lies that our government and our media have spread in order to avoid having Americans realize the obvious that when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, one of the worst environmental disasters in all of human history, an act of industrial terrorism – it was a pipeline that connects Russia to Germany to allow Russia to sell cheap natural gas to the Europeans, something that the United States has long wanted to terminate because it will then force the Europeans to buy natural gas in the United States – when it was blown up, it was so obvious it was done, at least, with the consent of, if not led by the American military. And yet, not only was that instantly denied by the corporate media, but they also actually tried convincing people of something so preposterous that nobody should be able to say with a straight face, namely that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline – a kind of false flag claim, a conspiracy theory that when it comes to that of the United State is completely impermissible to entertain, and yet it's constantly asserted when it comes to Russia. The same thing was said when a drone attack took place over the Kremlin at the time that President Putin was inside the Kremlin and released what appeared to be a bomb near the Kremlin and we heard, “Oh, that was just Russia launching a false flag operation against itself. They attacked itself just like they blew up its own pipeline.” 

Here's Jeffrey Sachs, again, somebody whose life has been immersed in establishment sectors, at Harvard, with economics and macroeconomics, somebody who has been given access to mainstream media outlets. We're going to have him on our show very shortly. He has an extremely interesting history. Lots of misperceptions about his ideological directory, which I'll cover. But listen to what he says about the role of mainstream media outlets in this war in Ukraine. 

I should say he's talking here to Bob Wright, who is a critic of the war in Ukraine and has a show in his Bloggingheads.tv – it's been about 15 years. It was one of the early pioneers of blogging. You're able to have people on in a split-screen format to debate each other. Listen to what Jeffrey Sachs says.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1660327241467801603

(Video. Bloggingheads.tv. May 21, 2023)

 

Jeffrey Sachs: I tell you when Nord Stream was blown up, I had a chat with a long-time friend, actually a classmate of mine from Harvard from decades ago, who was a senior reporter in one of the most important newspapers. I said, you know what? I think the U.S. did it. And he said, Of course, the U.S. did it. Who else? And I said, Humm… maybe your paper could mention something like that. It just today said the Russians did it. He said, come on, Jeff. Come on. I said, Are you kidding? Could we have a serious discussion of this? And he said to me, You know, the editors are not so interested in that. And I said – this is a friend from decades – I said, You know, when I was young, I turned to your newspaper because of Watergate, because of the Pentagon Papers, and I loved it. And he said to me, ‘That paper is so dead and gone, Jeff, you have to understand that.’ And I cannot imagine, you know, this is a really talented guy. A lead columnist, a lead journalist, I should say, and he's telling me the paper that I loved is dead and gone. If you ask me why, I really cannot figure it out why a paper doesn't want to eat the government over the head when it tells ridiculous stories like Nord Stream was blown up by six people on a boat like they tried for one day. Okay, Come on. This is... This was put up by serious media? Because it was almost a joke from the intelligence agency. Why these media are so in line with official narratives? I don't fully understand. I know all the theories – money, advertising, power and many other things – but the truth is it's dreadful compared to what it was 40 years ago. Dreadful. And it's gotten a lot worse. 

 

I think that is the key point when it comes to understanding the role of these media outlets, as he said, why are they so in line with official narratives? People often debate what is the ideology of the media. I've talked about this before. For decades, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh would insist that the media was biased in the sense that they were liberals, they were Democrats. I think that tells a part of the story when it comes to things like the culture war, for example. They're clearly biased in favor of American liberalism. These are people who went to East Coast colleges. They're no longer people who come from working-class backgrounds, primarily, it's not a working-class profession any longer at the national level. So, these are cosmopolitan people who go get educated on the East Coast. The national media live in New York; they live in Washington, so, they have the cultural views and biases of their environment. But when it comes to foreign policy, it's not really so much being biased in favor or against the Democratic Party or American liberalism. After all, it was The New York Times, and as we've shown you, Jeffrey Goldberg at The New Yorker, and so many other leading liberal institutions – foreign policy writers at liberal outlets – that took the lead role in selling the Iraq war to the American people. Their primary overarching fidelity is not to a particular political party or ideology, at least when it comes to foreign policy, that is, instead, they are completely in servitude to the U.S. security state and to the foreign policy community. That is what foreign policy and war exist for them to do: to propagate whatever these institutions tell them to say. That's where Russiagate came from. That is where so many of the frauds that we have suffocated under, including all the lies from COVID came from. This is what they exist to do, as he said, to reflect the ideology and the propaganda of establishment institutions. 

From the very beginning, there has been, as you probably recall, a series of lies told about the war in Ukraine. I would have to devote an entire show to listing them but we have a series of tweets that you may recall from the then-congressman, nominally Adam Kinzinger, who is now a CNN commentator, who from the start of the war just begun outright lying, spreading complete campaigns of disinformation. And in a way, we chose this example, because of how ridiculous it is, but in another way, because of how blatant the lie was, it was a reference to the “Ghost of Kyiv,” some supposedly heroic Ukrainian fighter jet pilot who had managed courageously to shoot down a huge number of Russian planes all by himself and he got turned into this hero called the “Ghost of Kyiv.” 

Here you see Adam Kinzinger's tweet in February 2020 right at the start of the war where he falls for an Internet scam. This is a picture of somebody who is constantly used for all sorts of Internet fake, Sam Hide, and Adam Kinzinger fell for it like the idiot that he is. 

 

The #ghostofkyiv has a name and he has absolutely OWNED the Russian air force. Godspeed and more kills, Samuyil! (@Adam Kinzinger. Feb. 25, 2022)

 

Samuyil Hyde is the Ukrainian version of the name for Sam Hide, who is constantly used by all right sites and other scam sites in a kind of frivolous way to create fakes that this moron fell for. But here he is, spreading it even more seriously. 

On the same day:

 

To the #ghostofkyiv, we raise a glass. Here is to even more! (@Adam Kinzinger. Feb. 25, 2022)

 

There have been fact-checks since then that there is no such thing as the ghost of Kyiv. There were similar lies told about the Russian battlefield being told to go fuck yourself by a group of very heroic Ukrainians who fought to the death on an island when in reality they were safely captured. The whole thing was a complete fairy tale. He'd spread that as well. And what amazes me is that this person – whom we know, deliberately told lies, just spread campaigns of disinformation while a member of the U.S. Congress to support a war, just like was done at the start of the Iraq war and for years after – after being exposed for spreading lies and propaganda on purpose, got hired by CNN, where he now works as a commentator. The network that incessantly tells you that they're there to combat disinformation, that you have to trust them to decree truth and falsity because you and independent media cannot be trusted to do it. 

This is not the first known liar they've hired. They got hired James Clapper, President Obama's senior national security official, after he got caught lying to Congress, three months before we began the Snowden reporting, by telling the U.S. Senate, falsely, that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans when in fact, three months later, we showed that the NSA is doing exactly that. So, there was another proven liar inside the government that CNN hired. 

Probably the most prolific chronic liar of the Trump era when it comes to media is a woman named Natasha Bertrand, who was a hardcore Russiagate or who promoted every single fraud that became part of Russiagate from Trump and the Alfa Bank to Russian bounties in Afghanistan to the Steele dossier. And every time she lied, she got promoted. She went from Business Insider to MSNBC. Then she ended up at The Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg, who's now the editor-in-chief after telling his eyes that led to the Iraq war, got promoted. Then she ended up at Politico, where she was the first to break the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. She, too, got promoted or hired to CNN after getting caught lying. These people are not getting hired by CNN, despite the fact that they're liars. They're getting hired precisely because they're liars. It's a requirement for the job. That’s what these media outlets exist to do, as Jeffrey Sachs just said. They're there to say whatever is necessary to be in alignment with and promote the agenda of the establishment, the U.S. security state, even if it means outright lying, like trying to convince you of the absurdity, the face of absurdity, that Russia blew up its own pipeline.

Let's take a look at what I referenced earlier as the overarching question here, which is why is it that the United States is willing to risk and trifle with these incredibly grave dangers with the world's largest nuclear stockpile? We're getting closer and closer to direct military confrontation. You now have Ukrainian soldiers with highly offensive weapons, highly sophisticated weapons enabled by the United States, supplied by the United States, going into Russia and bombing and killing Russians inside Russia. And they're now going to have F-16s sent in, delivered by the Biden administration, after a series of bizarre reversals that shows how unhinged this war policy is. And what is particularly bizarre about this and I want to talk to Saagar about this when he comes on, because I genuinely think it's mystifying in a way, is that, for at least a decade, in Washington, bipartisan Washington, the view of the bipartisan class in Washington and the foreign policy community was that there is no vital interest for the United States in Ukraine. This doctrine of vital interest is crucial. It says where are we willing to go to war? For what are we willing to go to war? Which countries are vital enough to our interests to risk justifying military confrontation? And there's nothing in Ukraine that has ever been considered a vital interest to the United States, to the point where, in April 2016, that very same Jeffrey Goldberg, who rose to become the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic after getting caught telling multiple lies while at The New Yorker, he was one of President Obama's favorite journalists, this neocon. Obama sat down with him to discuss what Jeffrey Goldberg titled “The Obama Doctrine - The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America's role in the world.” And one of the things Jeffrey Goldberg badgered him about was Obama's refusal to do more for Ukraine, to arm Ukraine, to punish the Russians for taking Crimea. And Jeffrey Goldberg kept saying, why didn't you do more to protect Ukraine? Why didn't you do more to arm Ukraine, to use Ukraine to hurt Russia? And here's what Obama said: 

Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. 

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” Obama said. 

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic. “It's realistic”, he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there's always going to be some ambiguity.” He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him, in order to knock it down. 

I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn't exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn't maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.” 

There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that Obama that that's how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it's really important to somebody, and it's not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” he said. There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we should consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. (Jeffrey Goldberg. May 2, 2022)

 

And Obama describes it that way because it's facially absurd that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Obama said they should speak up and be very clear about it. He wanted them to say that. These militarists in the Republican Party, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, who were attacking him for not doing more to confront Russia, he said stand up and say, if you believe it, that we should risk war with Russia over Ukraine. 

 

The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision-making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years. (Jeffrey Goldberg. May 2, 2022)



 In other words, it's so absurd that we would go to war or risk war with Russia over who rules eastern Ukraine, that Obama was daring his critics to stand up and say it because, of course, they didn't want to say they were willing to risk war with Russia over Ukraine. And yet that's exactly what U.S. policy has become. We are risking war with Russia, undoubtedly, indisputably over nothing more than the question of who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine. The reason Obama didn't go to war with Russia or didn't really take strong action against Russia when it annexed Crimea was because he knew that the people of Crimea wanted to be under Russian rule, wanted to be under Moscow rule, just like the people of Kosovo wanted independence from Serbia. And the precedent we set was that the people of this province want independence enough, they should have it. That's why Kosovo is now an independent country. And it's indisputably true that Crimea and the people in it consider themselves far more Russian than Ukrainian. It's long been true as well for the people of eastern Ukraine. And so why would we possibly continue to trifle with war with a nuclear-armed power over any of this? 

It wasn't just Barack Obama who thought this. There was a president after him, named Donald Trump, who thought the same thing. In fact, when Trump saw the Republican Party's platform when it came to Ukraine, it seemed like it was written by neocons – John McCain, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and that crowd – basically saying, We will always arm Ukraine. We will stand by Ukraine. Trump thought that was insane. Just like Trump thought it was insane that the U.S. is trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and risk confrontation there through the CIA. Trump's position was why would we try to change the government of Syria? We should cooperate with Russia and Syria to kill ISIS and al-Qaida. Why would we want to change the government of Syria? He thought the same thing about Ukraine. He expresses it in Trumpian ways but it was the same position Obama had, which was risking war with Russia or harming the United States to protect Ukraine from Russia is insanity. And so, he had the GOP platform changed and, amazingly – and this is when I really began realizing how insane the establishment become when it came to Russiagate – they used the change in that platform, which just reflected Trump's view of pragmatism in media to avoid words that weren't a direct threat to the United States, to claim that this was proof somehow that Trump was in the Kremlin's pocket. That he took the same position Obama did, which is there's nothing in Ukraine worth going to war with Russia over. 

From The Washington Post:

 

“Trump Campaign Guts GOP’s Anti-Russia Stance on Ukraine” 

 

The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won't call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington. (The Washington Post. July 18, 2016)

 

Oh, perish the thought! “Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington” have been so correct about everything you would never want to contradict them. This was a major prong of Russiagate. The fact that Trump basically adopted Obama's view against the GOP establishment, against the Democratic establishment that said Ukraine is not a vital interest to the United States. We should not risk anything, much less war with Russia to care about what happens there. What changed in Washington that we have now gone from we will never send Patriot missile batteries, we will never send Abrams tanks, we will never send F-16s to, one after the next, sending all of those? 

Back in March 2022, at the start of the war, the establishment figure, Niall Ferguson wrote an article in Bloomberg that expressed the view that at the time was considered evil, which is basically that the United States only has one goal in Ukraine, which is not to protect the Ukrainian people. The inspiring script, the moralistic narrative, the fairy tale we were fed just like we were told we were going to Iraq to deliver democracy to the Iraqi people, we were going to war in Libya to bring democracy to the Libyans, we were going to try and take out Bashar al-Assad with the CIA secret war because we wanted to help the Syrian people – we're not in Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people. Niall Ferguson said after talking to both British and American senior foreign policy officials that the real reason we're in Ukraine was the opposite. It was to sacrifice Ukraine, to destroy Ukraine, in order to bleed Russia. The country suffering the most from this war, really, the only country is Ukraine. Their entire country is being destroyed. Their people are dying in huge numbers. Their buildings are all being blown to bits, at least in the parts where this war is. And the people who are benefiting most are the elites in the West. They have a new war for their arms manufacturers, pundits get to feel Churchillian and purposeful and strong writing in favor of this war from a safe distance. But this is what Niall Ferguson said at the very beginning: the real goal was to sacrifice Ukraine and Ukrainians and not protect them. 

 

 

 

“American officials are divided on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars like the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan can be applied to the ongoing war in Ukraine.” David Sanger reported for the New York Times on Saturday. According to Sanger, who cannot have written this piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential path to de-escalation. CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials. Reading this carefully, I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, anti-tank Javelins and explosive Switchblade drones. It will keep trying to persuade other NATO governments to supply heavier defensive weaponry. (The latest U.S. proposal is for Turkey to provide Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 anti-aircraft system, which Ankara purchased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scuttled plan for Polish MiG fighters.) 

Washington will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war. I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime.” Until then, all the time Putin stays, Russia will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the UK's number one option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language.

 It helps explain, among other things, the lack of diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal. (March 22, 2022)

 

And that indeed is exactly what ended up happening. The reality is the only identifiable U.S. interest was achieved in the first month of the war, which was when the U.S. coerced Germany, and then Europe, to cut off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to start buying natural gas from the United States. Everything else after that has been trying to do to Ukraine what the United States did to Syria: leave it in ruins by bleeding out the war just long enough, in order to weaken Russia. That is what everything is about, why we're sending $100 billion in weapons, they're depleting our own stockpiles and most dangerously of all, increasingly risking all sorts of new escalations. 

We have for you the articles that show how Biden would one month declare he refuses to send the weapons system I mentioned and then months later send the rest. As I told you, the last week brought the worst reversal of all, the most severe and by no means necessarily the last one. We're right now giving them fighter jets, F-16 fighter jets. And of course, the Ukrainians are supposedly promising not to use it to strike deep into Russia. They've repeatedly violated those promises in other ways, using American weapons to strike Russian targets inside Russia. And there are few greater escalatory dangers than that. 

As always, the question becomes who is benefiting from this war? It is definitely not you, as American infrastructure crumbles, but the CIA is benefiting, arms manufacturers in the West are definitely benefiting and it's hard to tell who else beyond that. But what is for sure true is that the core doctrine of Washington, a bipartisan foreign policy in Washington, has radically changed, seemingly overnight when it comes to the question of Ukraine. And the only real explanation I can find is that the Democratic Party fed for so long an anti-Russian animus as a result of Russiagate, they really became convinced that what they regard as the greatest, the most cataclysmic event in recent U.S. history – the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the defeat of Hillary Clinton – was due to interference by Moscow. And this is payback for that. We seem to be willing to risk blowing ourselves up over the question of who rules provinces in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas, where the people of that region have always clearly had greater loyalty to Moscow than to Kyiv. And whatever the motive is, ultimately – and ultimately, it was very hard to tell the motive in Iraq: people had different motives for why we invaded that country and occupied it for over a decade – you can see what escalation is unfolding right before your eyes. Never with congressional debate, let alone debate of the American people. In fact, before the midterms, Kevin McCarthy, trying to win the speakership position in the midterm, signals that he would impose limits on the flow of money from the United States to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe. As soon as he won and the Republicans won that election and he got to be the speaker, all of that stopped, and he's now aligned with the biggest hawks and warmongers in the Republican Party saying, “I've always been on the side of Biden when it comes to the war in Ukraine, and I always will be. We stand with Ukraine until the very end.”


So, we have a great guest for you. There he is, Saagar Enjeti. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
12
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
Michael Tracey's Inauguration Day Roving Commentary

The inauguration may have been moved indoors, but the cold didn't deter enterprising MAGA merch sellers and various proselytizing religious groups from taking to the DC streets:

00:08:22
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) Falls Into Michael Tracey

You never know who you may run into at an inaugural ball...

Watch Michael Tracey's interview with Jim McGovern (D-MA) at the progressive, anti-war themed "Peace Ball":

00:06:13
Former Rep. Cori Bush's Shocking Interview on Ukraine

Former Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) told Michael Tracey that the Biden administration pressured her to vote for Ukraine funding, or else "Black and Brown bodies" would be sent to fight against Russia.

00:05:35
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
February 07, 2025

FYI Glenn, Scott Adams hosts a daily show using Rumble Studio that appears simultaneously on Rumble, YouTube, Locals and possibly X. After a typical hour long show, he somehow disconnects all streams except his Locals subscribers. It takes no more than 30 seconds to make the changeover. To me, viewing the Rumble stream, the image loses focus, the audio stops and a Locals logo appears center screen while he continues the stream with subscribers only.

His show and studio offer nothing approaching the production values of System Update and he doesn't use a different studio for his Locals program so I don't know if he can be of any help.

I can say he holds you and your work in high regard and may be able to offer suggestions how you might achieve the melding of System Update with the Tuesday/Thursday Aftershow for your Locals subscribers.

Thanks for the work you do,
James

February 07, 2025
post photo preview
February 07, 2025

🤣🤣🤣We are truly living in extraordinary times.🤣🤣🤣

post photo preview
post photo preview
Glenn Reacts to Trump's Gaza Take Over
System Update Special

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!


Good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of System Update. The reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, for Gaza and for resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza. At the time that we had gone on air, however, he had only revealed a partial aspect of this plan. He gave his press conference in the Oval Office, he then met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office as well, answered questions and basically said that his plan and his vision for Gaza was to remove everybody who lives there, the 1.8 million people – and we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment – clean it all up, rebuild it into something beautiful, and then basically allow some of them back in. 

We talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer – the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving; they don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society – to say you'll just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back, obviously, they were expelled from what they consider their homeland, which is now Israel, in 1948, and never came back, through generations they've been waiting to do so. They're never going to leave voluntarily. But it was really only after that press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Trump gave another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. And he didn't just speak off the cuff. 

He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including in Netanyahu’s government, wanted to do, but that the United States would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions, and having a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. 

When he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution, he basically said: “Well, I think they will leave because they wouldn’t want to say there, and if they don't, they're going to have to.” Meaning we're going to go make them. He also very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. We're going to clear out the rubble. We're going to disarm that ordnance that is there. We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. So, obviously, if the Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave – which they're not – then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? How are they going to leave? Who's going to force them to leave? And President Trump was making very clear that he would. He would do what's necessary to make them leave. 

So, the plan is essentially two weeks into the Trump administration not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation, although, obviously, things are being done about that. But now somehow the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs and forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up and rebuild the society there because it used to be there but it has now been destroyed, over the past 15 months. 

That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America First foreign policy ideology President Trump has long advocated, which he ran in this campaign. It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of regime change or nation-building, which is exactly what he was describing last night, and you already see a lot of Republicans, like Mike Johnson – who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel – as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, we're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. 

So, I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama but, at the same time, underscoring the seriousness not only of the plan itself – which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy – but even the discussion of this can have a lot of serious implications. The whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do out a negotiating strategy if you don't get what you want, then of course, you have to follow through and do that because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. If you say either you give us X, Y and Z, or we're going to do A, B and C, and you don't get X, Y and Z, and then you don't do A, B and C, no one's going to trust your negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that that's a bluff. 

Setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of Gaza and we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for, as he calls it, “the people in the region” – just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. So, let's talk about a few parts of this. 

First of all, the Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both Canada and Mexico – he didn't just talk about it but implemented it. People went ballistic and now it turns out that he ended up not doing it, in part because he got some concessions – you can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not but that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy: to say that he's going to do things. So, the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it, forcibly remove the population, doesn’t, in fact, mean that's going to happen. So, I do want to concede that point. Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. 

If you think it's a terrible idea – and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've laid out last night – but an even worse idea, now that I know the details of this plan. When I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically, morally, legally to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over, after all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building. 

The whole point is when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up; not when they're already going to do it, but now so that the administration understands that there are a lot of people who are opposed to it. Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, “Look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best, he clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going” – No, that's not the way democracy works. The president's not a father figure. You don't trust in him that he knows best. You make yourself heard, especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. 

The entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza. Even if he can get those people out and he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. He said, “Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East,” which there is because of oil, and it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent the popular will from being expressed, those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. That's where all that money that Trump is very enamored of is. He loves the Saudis. He loves the Emirates, Jordan. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals in those regions because there's so much money there and Trump obviously thinks that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. 

The problem is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land, that it's sort of like if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, “You know what? It's too cold here, I'm getting older and I don't really like the conditions here any longer, it's not conducive to my quality of life, I'm just going to go to Florida and Arizona. They have great developments there. They have new golf courses and nice homes, and the government's going to move there. What's the difference? I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin.” That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. 

The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now and a lot longer before that but really 70 years since the formation of the state of Israel is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land and the Palestinians believe the same thing. This land is holy. And both Judaism and Islam – as well as Christianity. The Palestinians have endured so much. Years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts and blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country on the planet and they've never left. They've never been driven out. 

This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. This is not something Donald Trump invented. Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting, quote-unquote, “refugees” temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe corridor to leave Gaza and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians. And they knew that no one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes especially if the plan was not just to go there until the bombing ended but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the time frame to clear out the rubble and to detonate the unstable and structurally compromised buildings. 

Nobody in Gaza, virtually nobody, is going to give up that land to Donald Trump knowing that he has Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner, people who are in bed with the Israelis – in the case of Miriam Adelson, she is an Israeli. It's basically turning over the land to Israel. If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. They're never going to do that. The only way this plan would work is if somebody is willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. We just watched the IDF for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out – and it failed. They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that cease-fire was in effect. 

If you think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people and if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? Do you want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again this time to secure their biggest dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the layman's realm at once or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? It's never going to happen. There's no possibility that that can happen and that's what Trump is proposing. 

Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the Gazans have someplace to go and the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships that care a lot about their unstable population. We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population which can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. King Abdullah, of Jordan, has a large population of Palestinians already in his country and the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. So, they're saying “We're not going to take any “refugees”,” but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. We give Jordan a ton of money. Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. I think he thinks he has the leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans but, again, even if they do, and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave even if their society has been reduced to rubble? 

Then you have the issue of these other countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, and Qatar, and Jordan. Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second is to facilitate normalization between all those countries and Israel, isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons – he talked about that today – and then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. That's part of what his legacy is (in his mind that’s what he wants it to be). 

The problem is that the governments that I just named have been vehement and adamant, from the beginning, that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interests of the United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome to their own state, basically. And it's not because these dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. Maybe some do, but it's not that. It's that even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry and feels like they're being too disregarded. 

If the population of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or even Lebanon, watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing and population transfer of Gazans out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even handed over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia as part of normalization, the population would never tolerate that. There would be a conflagration, an uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it, can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. 

But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again and Republicans are right on board, is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building – as always there's a gigantic Israel exception. To so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech as we've gone over many times. Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. Collective punishment, population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics and, if you care about it, by international law and there's no question about what Trump is promising. 

The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters questioned the State Department, questioned the White House and would say, we're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. They're destroying everything. They're carpet-bombing it. They're flattening Gaza. And the U.S. government was saying, “No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating. They're being very targeted. They're only bombing where Hamas is. This isn't carpet bombing. This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. They're being humanitarian about it. This is the world's most moral army.” 

Now that the cease-fire is in effect – and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that cease-fire; he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring Netanyahu to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan – now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite: “Look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. It's apocalyptic, everything is rubble. There's no civilian infrastructure, there's no sewage, there's no water, there's disease. Nobody can live like this.”

This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration were denying this is happening as well as the Israelis. Now, suddenly, the cease-fire is taking place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. Suddenly, now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan: to drive those people out so that Israel could take over Gaza. 

Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told were going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? Of course not. This is serving Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating because it's Israel's wet dream along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. This is Israel's wet dream: to have the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. The Israelis tried it and failed and, out of frustration, reduced all Gaza to rubble. 

The other thing that I want to note – and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting, it's not just a mistake off the cuff – pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 million people. Definitely in excess of 2 million people. Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. He says, “We need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million” and he said that figure several times. Clearly, that's the figure he was given. 

If I've got a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. So, I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. I have no doubt that the official death numbers that we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. There are people who are missing. There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medical deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up, shot and killed, who never were accounted for. So, you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and the current population. 

But to me, the bigger question is: is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed and every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement at the altar of yet again serving Israel or making sure Israel can expand? Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small and a very small country when asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. This would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. 

On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists. Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return, not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Miriam Adelson and a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. This is supposed to be the holy land that unites under the Jews and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. And also that's what Israel wants too; Israel wants to control these lands. It wants it to be greater Israel not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. 

I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. They deserve credit, we saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. We don't want to replace American workers with foreigners; we want to do the opposite and there was a huge debate and conflict within the movement over that. This is exactly the same thing. I mean, Trump, since 2015, has been railing against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation-building and engagements in the Middle East overseas. How disastrous that has been. And now he turns around and proposes something like this that not only has that dimension but also this massively criminal dimension, acts that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. 

There has been some walk back today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press but if you look at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, “Is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully?” She said: “President Trump has not endorsed military force yet.” 

Again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump: he keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. but it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan and there's no way that can be done short of war. And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need: another war to serve this foreign government in Tel Aviv and its interests. It would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. 

So, I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump statements do because they're not intended to necessarily predict what will happen but it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition so the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation-building – not even for the United States interest to be served, but for the state of Israel to be served and that is exactly what's happening here. 

All right. So, I wanted to respond quickly. I watched that press briefing today. I've seen this unfold today. I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first war, and he's been overtly threatening. I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want this kind of war. They don't want to send their kids to these kinds of wars. They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars. We've done enough to serve the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States and something like this would be in an entirely different universe which makes it utterly unacceptable.

Read full Article
post photo preview
Tulsi and RFK Jr. Approved by Key Senate Committees | Trump Meets Netanyahu: Wants to Cleanse Gaza | Pro-Palestinian Group Suspended at UMich
System Update #402

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!


Two of Donald Trump's most controversial nominees, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, each took a major step forward to being confirmed. 

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington today to become, unsurprisingly, the first foreign leader received by President Trump since his inauguration and Trump again stated his support for moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza, a series of events that could and should and only can be described as ethnic cleansing. 

And then, the investigative reporter Dave Boucher, will be here to talk about yet another pro-Palestinian group, this one at the University of Michigan, which was suspended as a result of their activism in speech as the ongoing assault on free speech to protect Israel in the United States continues unabated. The Students Allied for Freedom And Equality, also known as SAFE, were suspended from all campus activities for two years. 


AD_4nXfT4c5WOjc91_y2TmEytdCO-F5O18z7-sTkfOBLaE9RU1qVydgocvQ4EUVvqd3pCHHdjUG3XOFaSozsJlj-raH4WgTnAmYg0LCqZw4Uis4h7f4Pf_g3H6lBmKLhfYvbaHTSWHDcAt38TFnMm54YHNw?key=IsGBSWYOnhE8V86XjSu4h8AU

We've been extensively covering the nomination by Donald Trump to two critical positions inside the cabinet, both of whom have a long history of being heterodox thinkers and anti-establishment officials and, as a result, have created more controversy than almost any other official. We've seen people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and John Ratcliffe at CIA get approved unanimously with all Democrats voting but because both Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to make Director of National Intelligence, and RFK Jr., whom Trump wants to make Secretary of Health and Human Resources, have a history of contesting, challenging and denying a whole bunch of establishment orthodoxies, as well as condemning the corruption of the agencies that they would lead, those have created more controversy than almost any other up there – with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and, certainly, Matt Gaetz, the most controversial, who never made it to a confirmation hearing. 

Today, however, both of them had major successes, cleared major hurdles, and have substantially increased the likelihood that they will actually be confirmed by the full Senate. I don't want to say that it's 100%. It still does need to go to the Senate floor but here is the Senate Finance Committee voting today on the confirmation of RFK Jr. to become Health and Human Services Secretary. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Rubio's Shift: What is Trump's Foreign Policy? | Trump/Musk Attack CIA Fronts USAID & NED: With Mike Benz
System Update #401

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!


Ever since Donald Trump entered the White House to begin his second term, there has been – by design – a flurry of highly significant orders, policies and changes, most of which, for better or worse, were promised during the campaign. The rapidity of these changes has created the impression for some that there is no coherence behind them, that they are all just designed to appease Trump's base voters with symbolism or to impose frantic vengeance.

If one digs deeply enough, one can locate a coherent worldview, especially when it comes to Trump's foreign policy changes. When Trump began nominating a series of conventional establishment Republicans to key positions after the election, people like Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the U.N. and others – many people demanded of us that we denounce these picks, given that they signaled that Trump's pledge for a new kind of foreign policy was clearly a fraud. In response, my answer was always the same: even though I didn't like some of those picks, I never thought that one could reliably read into every one of Trump's choices some sort of tarot card about what Trump would do given that I kept hearing from Trump's closest circle for a long time now that they were determined to ensure that all of Trump's picks this time around would follow rather than subvert his vision as laid out in the campaign. 

Marco Rubio just gave an interview to Megyn Kelly late last week that strongly suggests this is true, as Rubio sounded far less like the standard GOP warmonger he has been for years and a lot more like a committed America First advocate, with a series of surprising acknowledgments, highly unusual for someone occupying a high place in U.S. government officialdom. We’ll look at that, as well as the Trump administration's foreign policy actions thus far to determine which consistent and cohesive principles can be identified. 

Then: Our guest is Mike Benz, a former State Department official during the first Trump administration who has become one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable critics of the US Security State. In the last year, he has appeared on the shows of both Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to do so. He has become a font of information about why USAID in particular is such a destructive, toxic and wasteful agency – as Democrats march to protect it - and he'll be here with us to talk about why that is.


AD_4nXc8LjVTOrUT54oEY-sMxJ54H1y1JeFiMVMZpUPVFVq1PS1ia6Ka7SBzY-dH_E4DO0u9AOAY1MgZjJUtSJvrru7d75pmutSrOqLagpqaFXC-5cjXEXj47isNl1HGOJPUJ_RMCAtgr-WIucCx-c6ypc0?key=LPyFf7LERRmriSx0PsmD51NP

Donald Trump often railed against the toxic and evil influence of neocons, particularly in American foreign policy, throughout 2023 and 2024, as he attempted to return to the White House. He seemed convinced of it and had a lot of policy initiatives designed to undermine the promises of neoconservatism and, in the process, alienated a lot of them, beginning with things like his opposition to or at least skepticism about the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, the U.S. making NATO a central part of our foreign policy, even though the original purpose which is to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, obviously no longer applies, and a whole variety of other pieties of the foreign policy establishment Donald Trump was waging a frontal assault on. 

Once Trump won the election and began choosing his national security cabinet, a lot of people immediately concluded that all of that must be a fraud because Trump was choosing people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, like Mike Waltz to be his National Security Advisor, who have a long history similar to Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley or even Liz Cheney in endorsing this sort of posture of endless war, of having the U.S. dominate the world in exactly the way that would please most neocons. 

Although, as I said, I wasn't thrilled with those picks, I wasn't the one elected, so my choices would be much different. I was very resistant to the idea that simply because Trump was choosing some, by no means all, but some politicians who have a long history of establishment dogma. Those are the ones who sped through confirmation in the Senate, of course, including with lots of Democratic support. It didn't mean that those people were going to be governing foreign policy in the Trump administration because it was clear that Donald Trump knew that he was the one who won this race and intended to impose his vision on the world and wanted loyalists around him who would carry out those visions. 

In contrast to the first term, when he had a lot of people there who were deliberately sabotaging his foreign policy, often applauded by the media, including members, by the way, of the U.S. military, which meant that the U.S. military was essentially seizing civilian control of foreign policy, seizing control from democratically elected officials and assigning it to themselves so that they would often counter or even ignore his foreign policy decisions and they would be celebrated by the press as the adult in the room. This was all something that I knew from hearing from many people inside the Trump circle, both on the show and otherwise, that they were most determined to avoid. And so, when they were picking the Marco Rubios and the Elise Stefaniks, I wasn't happy about it but I also knew that it wasn't proof that Trump was going to lead a conventional U.S. foreign policy because it was clear that they were picking people who, beyond any particular set of beliefs, was willing to be loyal to Donald Trump's worldview and his agenda, because that's what had just been ratified by the American people. 

Even The New York Times in the wake of Trump’s victory in November, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment or as a warning, but either way, they were the ones who were coming out and saying, look, these people were neocons for sure, but they've now made radical, visible and palpable changes to the way they talk about foreign policy. Here, The New York Times headline:

AD_4nXf44l2A0YETmI2chVvqcUBIZXi4-wjOaeHMhgbVdj74PH4_iuBWi_uNjwLDvBuSfkw7I0ZVm0H2WgX-uOANAbGt-6ha22THN8aMWfOfUevmZOkfuIvrvQG3Cx_Q3rqu20AKR55buT4XPniHgU3kCg?key=LPyFf7LERRmriSx0PsmD51NP

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals