Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Absurd Media Struggles to Discern Who Is Worst: Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or Literal Hitler. Plus: Obscene Double Standards for Russian/Belarusian Athletes on Ukraine War
Video Transcript
May 31, 2023
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Good evening. It's Monday, May 29. Happy Memorial Day and 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:  Was Hitler really so bad after all? That seems to be the question being continuously posed, at least implicitly, sometimes explicitly, by the U.S. corporate media. Ever since Trump's presidential campaign began to be viable in early 2016, equating Trump to Hitler has become increasingly common, even obligatory, despite the small fact that Trump has never actually done nor advocated any of the things that have made us understand Hitler to be a singularly evil historical actor. Things like attempting to exterminate entire races of people until eliminating any forms of even minimal dissent to launching an aggressive war of conquest that led to the Second World War; the deaths of tens of millions of people, indiscriminate air bombing of civilians in large metropolitan areas, and little things that are Hitler's signature as acts and ultimately the use of the first nuclear weapons in Japan. Those are little things that are Hitler's signature acts that Trump never stated or implied that he favored, let alone actually did, during four years in power. Nonetheless, that Trump is “literally Hitler” became a very common theme in the most mainstream sectors of liberal corporate media, far more than I actually even recalled as I realized on the compared material for this evening's program.

The tactical problem for the media in branding Trump a white supremacist and then a fascist and even the new Hitler was obvious at the time. The latest Republican presidential candidate always must be described as worse than the prior one, the worst in history – hence the rehabilitation of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in order to declare Trump an unprecedented evil. As Jeff Zeleny put it today, regarding a clip from an MSNBC show that convened a panel to announce that DeSantis is even more dangerous than Trump, i.e., the new Hitler,  “Think about many of what is shown like entertainment instead of education. The sequel has to be scarier than the original. Why else would people watch?” 

But once you've branded someone “the new Hitler” where do you go from there when it's time to say that they are even worse now than before, or that their successor is worse? The media is giving us its answer. These new people are literally worse than Hitler. Or the converse must also be true: Hitler is better, more moral, and less evil than the 2024 version of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and anyone else liberal media employees seek to demonize, including Vladimir Putin. They can't help themselves, and as a result, they are doing something that Jewish groups formed after the Holocaust have always regarded as uniquely dangerous – they are trivializing the threat of Hitler and of Nazis by elevating him and them from a singular evil into just another ordinary bad guy, someone who actually deserves credit sometimes for not going as far as Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or whomever they need to villainize. 

Some of this is just the deranged mentality of failing TV and newspaper outlets desperate for ratings and clicks. If you're just in an ordinary political battle, that's not very interesting; if you're fighting to protect the country from “New Hitler,” that's exciting. But it also captures a vital truth about the liberal intelligentsia in the United States: they do not believe they are engaged in their ordinary political battle, but rather in a world-historic, unprecedented fight against a singular worse-than-evil Hitler. And for that reason, they have come to believe – often explicitly stated – that anything and everything they do in the name of advancing their cause is justified by the indisputably noble and morally paramount nature of their battle. And that mentality is another defining characteristic of Adolf Hitler. 

Then there is a brand new standard being created for Russian and Belarusian professional athletes, namely that they are morally responsible for the acts of their own governments to the point that they should be banned from competing in athletic competitions or are required to issue statements denouncing their own government as a condition for earning their livelihood or – as is now happening right this minute at the French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament held in Paris – they can play but not have their nationality mentioned or their national flag displayed. The International Soccer League, FIFA, banned Russia from global competition and continue to ban them to this day. To call this a double standard is to be unfair to double standards. American and British athletes have traveled the world for decades, including when their governments were engaged in some of the most egregious and destructive wars of aggression from the invasion of Iraq to bombing multiple countries under President Obama and were never banned from any athletic competition nor told they bore responsibility for those acts or were required to denounce them. That China is currently engaged in genocide against the Uyghurs or that the Saudi regime was responsible for the brutal murder of a journalist is the gospel in the West. Yet Chinese and Saudi athletes are free to play and play under their own flag with no similar obligations imposed. It's particularly bizarre to simultaneously assert, on the one hand, that Russia and Belarus are totalitarian regimes or that any dissidents are instantly murdered or imprisoned, and then on the other, tell individual athletes from those countries that they somehow bear responsibility for their government's actions as though they live in a democracy or have the responsibility to denounce it, even while they and their family continue to live in that country. There's a lot more than about tennis or athletes or professional sport. It's about how the Western press manufactures propaganda in seemingly innocuous ways. It's about how so many propagandistic precepts are absorbed, even by those of us seeking to be critically minded, because it's made to be pervasive in the culture and in the ether. And it raises very profound questions about how we see ourselves and our own obligations to abide by the moral obligations we so joyously and self-righteously and endlessly seek to impose on others. 

 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. Simply follow us there, and you can also rate and review the show, which really does help our program's visibility. We are climbing the charts and have been on both Spotify and Apple, getting near the top, and the higher we go, the more that this show will be heard and seen by more people. 

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


 

For decades since really the end of World War II, one of the central missions of Jewish groups and other groups dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring that it never repeated was to avoid what they called a trivialization of both Adolf Hitler and Nazism, on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. And yet, over the last several decades, we've seen this trivialization happening. Often while all those groups cheered, in all sorts of ways, anti-Semitism has often become a tool that is attached to the foreheads of anybody who expresses ideas that the liberal elite sectors in media and politics disagree with, including by and only criticism of Israel making that term that used to be and should be a very serious accusation, become less and less credible, the more casually and manipulatively – and cynically – it's tossed about. 

But the same is true for Nazism and Adolf Hitler. We had been taught since childhood that Adolf Hitler was not just another bad dictator, not just another immoral leader who initiated a war of aggression, that he was a singular evil, that he was somebody who had reached a new level of villainy, somebody whom we were supposed to regard as existing essentially in a category unto himself. And it wasn't hard to see why, given the historical consensus – one of the central products projects of Adolf Hitler was not only to launch an international war of conquest but to exterminate an entire race of people from the planet. And yet it has been truly stunning to watch that long-standing convention be aggressively eroded in the name of first, stopping Donald Trump, and now, stopping essentially anybody who comes into the radar screen and becomes a target of the liberal media discourse. That Trump is essentially or not even essentially, but literally, the new incarnation of Adolf Hitler, as bad as Hitler, essentially the same as Hitler, became a theme so pervasive in liberal media that it is almost impossible to overstate. As I said, I had actually forgotten how commonplace this assertion became once it became clear that Trump stood a real chance to become president. And then, after he was elected, to say that Trump was Hitler, Trump is Hitler, Trump is Hitler, over and over and over again, was something that became so commonplace – I think that's the reason I had forgotten how common it was – that we became inured to hearing it because it was everywhere. Even though, as I said, kind of seems important that Trump never actually engaged in or even advocated all of the defining evils of Adolf Hitler. And yet Democrats and liberals and establishment Republicans devoted to destroying Trump and his movement didn't care about any of that. They were more than happy to playfully use Adolf Hitler like it was their little toy – similar to the way that liberal discourse now uses terms like white supremacy or white supremacist and fascist to be applied to anybody who questions any part of liberal dogma. Even the most piecemeal or mainstream questioning of liberal orthodoxy results in those maximalist claims. If you question whether or not a seven-year-old should be taught in public schools that perhaps they're non-binary or question whether or not trans women can fairly compete in professional sports or any other dissent from liberal dogma, suddenly you are essentially somebody who advocates genocide, you are a fascist. These terms have become utterly stripped of all their meaning. And it's particularly dangerous to do that to Nazism and Adolf Hitler, not because it was intended to be shielded as a historical analog. The value of things like the Nuremberg trials and memorializing what happened during World War II was precisely that we ought to learn the lessons of history and be aware of similar dangers. That's not what's happening. It's become a plaything in liberal discourse. And the problem for them is that now that they want to essentially say that Trump is even worse than he was in 2016, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump – once you start with the premise that Trump was literally Hitler in 2016, where does that take you? It necessarily must mean if Trump is worse than he was before, when he was Hitler, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump, who is Hitler? That those figures are more dangerous than Hitler? Or to put it another way, Hitler was better than they were. There were things about Hitler that either were commendable, that isn’t true for Trump and Ron DeSantis, or that there are certain kinds of moral evils that Hitler refrained from doing and Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump actually do. We heard this explicitly at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where some of the most influential public voices in U.S. foreign policy began arguing, to the point they had to apologize, that, well, at least Adolf Hitler never did things like extinguish ethnic speaking Germans the way Putin is seeking to do to with ethnic speaking Russians. Once you put yourself into this mindset – that you are really battling the new Hitler or worse than Hitler – it not only means you become rhetorically deranged, but I think it's an extraordinarily dangerous mentality to convince yourself that you are fighting a world-historic battle against a singular, unique and unprecedented evil because what that means is that anything and everything you do – censoring dissenting voices, disseminating disinformation campaigns, hiding the truth – journalistically, all becomes justified in the name of stopping this unprecedented evil. And that's why I think this is worth discussing. Not so much because of the rhetorical embarrassment that they placed themselves in, though that is worth looking at, but because of the underlying mentality that both causes it and that it then creates. 

So let me just show you a few of the examples that, as I say, made me realize as we put the show together, that this comparison was actually much more common than I realized – maybe I realized it at the time, but that I recall it being.

 From Reuters, on September 6, 2018, the headline “Michael Moore Compares Trump to Hitler in a New Documentary.” 

 

Filmmaker Michael Moore compares U.S. President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in his provocative new documentary, “Fahrenheit 11/9” that got its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday to a sold-out audience.

The documentary examines the forces Moore believes contributed to Trump’s election victory in November 2016, drawing parallels with the rise of Hitler in 1930s Germany. (Reuters. Sept. 6, 2026). 

 

This was two years into the Trump presidency when he did this, which is even more excusable than doing it during the campaign when you're not actually certain what Trump is going to do with power. This is two years into the Trump presidency. There were no concentration camps set up. There were no efforts to exterminate entire races of people. Trump was the first American president in decades – I know so many people hate to hear it but it's nonetheless true – not to involve the United States in a new war, not to start a new war. He inherited some but he didn’t start new wars. Starting new wars, aggressive wars is kind of fundamental to Hitler being Hitler. In fact, the Nuremberg trials called aggressive war, the kingpin crime, the crime that enabled all of the other subsequent crimes that made Adolf Hitler a war criminal in the eyes of that tribunal. Donald Trump had none of that and yet Michael Moore still compared him to Adolf Hitler two years into his presidency with very little controversy, as I recall. 

But Michael Moore was by far not the only person to do that. Here in The Washington Post, in September 2016, so just a couple of months before the 2016 election, there you see the title “New York Times ‘Hitler’ Book Review sure reads like a thinly veiled Trump comparison.

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, the longtime book reviewer for The New York Times, reviewed a new book about Adolf Hitler titled “Hitler: Ascent 1889- 1939.” To many observers, though, it read like a bit more than a book review. It read like a comparison between Hitler and Donald Trump. 

It's true that the review didn't name Trump or even allude to the 2016 U.S. presidential race, but it came across to more than a few readers as an intentional point-by-point comparison of Hitler's rise and Trump's. And it's not hard to see why. From the headline – In ‘Hitler’, an Ascent from Dunderheads to Demagogue – to the conclusion 1,300 words later, nearly everything Kakutani says about Volker Ullrich’s book reflects long-standing warnings by some about how Trump shouldn't be dismissed as some sideshow, and that history shows where this can lead. (The Washington Post. Sept. 28, 2023)

 

So that's The Washington Post and The New York Times. In case you think it's only confined to marginalized clowns like Michael Moore, here from The Huffington Post, after a campaign rally where Donald Trump asked his audience to take a pledge to support him. It seems like a pretty innocuous act to me. It's very common in a political rally to urge supporters to pledge loyalty to the cause and to do everything possible to elect the leader. This is a common language unless you put a Nazi prism on it, as of course, they did. There's the headline, “This Donald Trump rally looks like a scene from Nazi Germany.” So here the comparison, of course, is not only Donald Trump being Hitler, but Trump supporters being Nazis. 

 

It is getting way too scary.

Donald Trump’s ascent to the top of the Republican presidential candidate heap has been increasingly likened to the rise of Adolf Hitler, as both men have used racist rhetoric and blamed select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems. (The Huffington Post. March 5, 2016).

 

 Is that all it takes to be Adolf Hitler these days? Using what the Huffington Post believes is racist rhetoric and blaming select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems? That is something that every politician has been doing for time immemorial – including in the United States, including in both political parties. And now suddenly that became sufficient to justify equating Donald Trump to – at least to the 20th century’s singular evil, according to a consensus of historians.

Here from ABC News, in December 2015: “Donald Trump shrugs off Hitler comparisons” is the headline there. “He prefers to cite FDR in defending his plan to bar Muslims from the United States.” As you may recall, Trump during the 2016 campaign said that there should be a ban from certain Muslim countries – not on Muslims, from certain Muslim countries – entering the United States “until we can figure out what's going on,” in his words. That became mischaracterized as a ban on all Muslims, which it never was, and then, that got used to say that this was something akin to the Holocaust. 

Donald Trump's plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States has prompted a comparison to Adolf Hitler. But that hasn't given the GOP presidential frontrunner any pause. 

 

Asked whether “increasingly being compared to Hitler” is cause for concern, Trump told ABC News George Stephanopoulos today that he instead finds comfort in what he sees as his proposal’s similarity to the work of a previous U.S. president. 

“No, because what I'm doing is no different from FDR,” Trump said during a phone interview this morning” – presumably referring to FDR, his mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II with no due process. Something that was done, not in terms of an immigration policy to govern who can and cannot come into the States from certain countries, but instead rounding up huge numbers of people inside the United States based solely on their ethnicity, American citizens, and putting them into camps during World War II. That to me seems a lot more Hitler-like than anything Donald Trump ever imagined doing now. 

Let me just show you a couple of videos so you can get a sense of just how pervasive this really was and often how unhinged there really was. 

So here is a CNN segment from July 2021. So, again, now we're into the Biden administration. You've had Trump in office for four years, no concentration camps, no wars of aggression, none of the things that we've just gone over as kind of important, being in Hitler's category. And yet, listen to what not even – I forget his name, but I don't really need to know his name. If someone in the control room knows, you can tell me and I'll say it. But it doesn't really matter. He's just some interchangeable CNN host whom nobody watches. Listen to what he said

 

(Video. CNN. July 21, 2021)

 

Pannel: In all its derangement, terror and horror.

 

Pannel: And just one more quote so people know exactly what Carl and Dan are talking about here. General Milley on The Big Lie and what Trump was saying about the election, the lies he says this is a Reichstag moment, Milley told aides, the Gospel of the Führer. The Reichstag moment refers to Adolf Hitler using the burning of the German parliament, basically, to seize all power in Germany, suspend habeas corpus, and suspend civil rights. A coup more or less. 

 

What is he even talking about? When did Trump propose suspending habeas corpus or banning all rights? And what does the Reichstag fire have to do with a three-hour riot on January 6? But this is the kind of unhinged rhetoric we get. 

I just want to add, it's possible that this reporter misstated Trump's proposed 2016 ban. The policy itself ended up banning immigrants from, I believe it was six or eight Muslim-majority countries. But maybe I'm just remembering maybe he did actually want to ban all Muslims. We're going to check on that. But even so, again, there's a gigantic universal difference between immigration policies designed to ban immigration from certain countries –we have that right now where certain countries have priority and other countries are subjected to more rigorous scrutiny – and the Holocaust. But we'll check on that just for the sake of accuracy.

Here is a video from Bill Maher where he just outright says that he thinks Trump is like Hitler. You can listen to him do that. 

 

(Video. CBSN. March 2016)

 

Bill Maher: So, I had one of Hitler's speeches translated into English, and I think this tells us a lot about where Donald Trump is getting his ideas. Look at this Hitler speech and we've translated it for you. 

(video in German) It's mangle. Thank you. We're going to make Germany great again so that I can tell you, believe me. 

 

Supporters: So, when people ask why you support Donald Trump, you just tell them. 

 

Supporters: He's going to take our economy from here to here. All right. 

 

Supporters: He's not some cautious politician. He says what I'm thinking. 

 

Supporters: I don't know what it is. I just like the guy. 

 

Supporters: A message from racists for Donald Trump. 



So again, you can see here that it wasn't just that they were comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler – this was from March 2016, but also, continuously – Trump supporters to Nazis and white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan. You saw all Trump supporters depicted there were white, notwithstanding the fact – the rather inconvenient fact – that Trump has done better with nonwhite voters than any Republican candidate in a long time. He won Texas in 2020 almost entirely because of a huge surge of support among Latino voters who apparently don't see Trump's immigration policies the same way as a lot of immigrant groups who report purport to speak on behalf of all Latinos. These are no East Coast college graduates who majored in liberal-arts-style majors and who now purport to speak on behalf of Latino working-class people who continue to vote in larger and larger numbers for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

So just to clarify, the 2016 position of Donald Trump was originally in that statement he issued to ban all Muslims from the United States. The policy he then was implementing was to ban immigrants from seven specific Muslim-majority countries. 

So, there you have it. That was just a partial sampling of how often this rhetoric was invoked of comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. 

 

Now, here we have the problem. The Washington Post, on May 24, so just a few days ago, has an article that is headlined: “The Deepening Radicalization of Donald J. Trump. Watch How the former president's positions and rhetoric have grown more confrontational and extreme as he seeks a second term.” So, if Donald Trump, in 2016, was Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump is now worse and more radical and more extreme than he was back in 2016, that must necessarily mean he's now evolved to be worse than Hitler or that Hitler is better than Donald Trump. So, Hitler's kind of rising on the chart through history, rising in the rankings, by virtue of this attempt to constantly assert that all sorts of people, as we're going to show you, are worse than Hitler. It's an extremely dangerous rhetorical device, an extremely dangerous historical framework to constantly impose. And obviously, four years now, in 2028, when there are other Republican candidates, or maybe it'll be Ron DeSantis, they're going to have to keep going and going and going because that's what they always do, to get to the point where we're going to hear that half the Republican Party or half the country is worse than Hitler. That again, conversely, Hitler is up here in terms of moral weight and ethical constraints and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Vladimir Putin and tons of other people who are on the target list of the liberal media are down here. 

The Washington Post article to support that claim reads,  

 

On this and a host of subjects, from sexual assault to foreign and domestic policy, Trump's positions have become even more extreme, his tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to our reality, According to a Washington Post review of Trump’s speeches and interviews of former aides. When he was at times ambiguous or equivocal, he's now brazenly defiant. (The Washington Post. May 24, 2023)

 

In addition to claiming that Trump is worse than before when he was equated to Adolf Hitler, we also have the increasingly common theme that Ron DeSantis is even worse than, and, specifically, more dangerous than Donald Trump. In other words, Ron DeSantis is worse than and more dangerous than Adolf Hitler. It's necessarily the logical implication of this assertion. And again, you see it all over the media.

Here from The Huffington Post, just from last week: “No one is more dangerous for the White House than Ron DeSantis – including Donald Trump.” 

 

Imagine Trump but with a stalwart dedication toward legislation that moves the country in a direction that should terrify most reasonable human beings. Enter Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (Huffpost, May 17, 2023)

 

Which legislation that Ron DeSantis has advocated or has overseen the implementation of is comparable to Nazism or what Adolf Hitler did and that should terrify citizens everywhere. I understand that people disagree with some of Ron DeSantis’s legislation. That's reasonable. There are culture war debates that the country is split on and he's on one side and of course, other people would be on the other. That's commonplace. That's true of Democratic Party candidates as well. But to say that he's more dangerous and he's terrifying. What is the basis for that? The NAACP issued an advisory warning for nonwhite people in Florida. That's how much they're trifling with these concepts. I'm not even going to make an argument for why that's preposterous. Huge numbers of black voters and Latino voters voted for Ron DeSantis, twice, for governor. And yet the ICP again, a group of East Coast elites who have very little in common with the black working class or other nonwhite members of the working class, who purport to speak on their behalf, nonetheless, are issuing statements that bear no resemblance to reality and in the process of doing so, are completely, really harming themselves. They're watering down and rendering laughable concepts that actually ought to be taken seriously. 

Here from MSNBC, April 2022, and again, they read from the same script. The headline is “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a far more dangerous politician than Donald Trump. Like Trump, DeSantis in his time in office would be marked by attempts to pit Americans against one another. But unlike Trump, DeSantis has the proven ability to follow through.” 

Pit Americans against one another? Hillary Clinton, in 2016, said that a large chunk of Trump supporters, namely 25%, 30%, or 35% of the country, were “irredeemably deplorable” – irredeemably deplorable. It is the official position of the Democratic Party that anyone who doesn't vote for them is racist and fascist and white supremacist. Joe Biden famously or notoriously told the host of “The Breakfast Club,” Charlamagne, that if he had any questions at all about whether he wanted to vote for Joe Biden, that meant ‘that Charlamagne isn't even black’. Pitting the country against one another – if that's enough to make you a terrifying Hitler figure – which politicians don't do that?

 So, from this MSNBC article:

 

Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, and quite possibly the most dangerous figure in American politics. The most dangerous figure in American politics. While it's hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump [and yes, it should be hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump], DeSantis brings something to the table that Trump lacks – his ability to translate political vindictiveness, cruelty and demagoguery into policy results. 

 

It isn't only Ron DeSantis and Trump's current iteration in 2024 that are said to be worse than the Hitlerian version of Trump in 2016. As I indicated, that also became a tactic used by lots of liberal elites to try to claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was like anything we've seen, including during World War II – was somehow vastly more dangerous than the Nazi march through Western Europe. And in order to do that, they actually started explicitly praising Adolf Hitler, which is where all of this leads. 

Here is Michael McFaul, the former Obama ambassador to Russia for the United States under President Obama, who's now become one of the most deranged and hawkish pro-war voices when it comes to Ukraine. He was on Rachel Maddow Show and listen to what he said as he tried to claim that Putin is worse than Hitler and in doing so, actually went out of his way to praise Hitler for having some constraints that Putin lacks. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. March 12, 2022)

 

Michael McFaul: One of the Russian journalists said, you know, there's one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin. Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans. He didn't kill German-speaking people. That's a very I think people need to remember that when we're talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kyiv, there are large populations there. You know, up to a third and sometimes as much to a half that are Russian speakers and are ethnic Russians. And yet Putin doesn't seem to care about that. He slaughters the very people. He said he’s come to liberate. 



First of all, it wasn't even true. Of course, there were German-speaking or I think Germans who died as a result of Hitler's advance through Czechoslovakia and through Poland and through other parts of Western Europe but even if it were true, what moral relevance does that have? And how do you not have an instinctive aversion to going out of your way to praise Hitler or to suggest that Hitler somehow had ethical constraints that Vladimir Putin lacks? Again, whatever you think of the invasion of Ukraine, it's far more comparable to the U.S. invasion of Iraq than it is to anything that made Hitler Hitler during World War II. And in fact, I would say – and I've made this argument before – that there's a big, big difference between sending your troops into a neighboring country over the border, that is the most sensitive part of your border, that the West has been very actively engaged in running and manipulating and putting weapons into and flooding with lethal arms, than packing up your entire military and going to the other part of the world all the way across the other part of the world to invade and occupy and destroy a country that has never once threatened to attack you, let alone have the ability to do so.

 I've said from the very beginning that I believe Russia's war and invasion of Ukraine are not legally or morally justified. And I had Norman Finkelstein on the show who yelled at me for that, saying the logical conclusion of observing that there were provocative acts by the West going all the way up to the Russian border with all sorts of interference on the part of the U.S. and NATO necessarily justifies the invasion, and anyone like me, or Aaron Martel, or others who's afraid to say that, and who still maintains that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is unjustifiable, as either being a coward or morally consistent. That's what Norman Finkelstein told me. I think you heard that argument, but I do actually believe that the Russian invasion was unjustified. I don't think the conditions were met ethically or legally to justify a military invasion of a sovereign country like this. But it is far more like what the Americans did – and the British and the Australians did – in Iraq, than it is to anything that you have Hitler did. And yet you have these voices so casually going out of their way to downplay Hitler's evil in order to take whomever they want to villainize and make them worse than Hitler. It is a deranged discourse. It's a historical discourse. And it's a very dangerous discourse because these are the people who really do believe that they are in power now to do anything and everything because of the nature of the enemy that they're fighting. That is the Sam Harris video that went viral that we've shown you many times. The reason it went viral is that Sam Harris annunciated what their actual mentality is when justifying the lies that were told and the censorship that was invoked around the Hunter Biden laptop and the stories and reporting that came from that right before the election, which was the evil we’re fighting is so much worse – It's a different level. It's Hitlerian. Not saying Sam Harris said that, but that's what he said conceptually, that the evil is so much worse than anything else that we could ever do to stop it, that anything we can do to stop it is morally justified and even obligatory. That is the mentality, the driving mentality, of the coalition that has emerged, the union of Power Centers that has emerged, in the name of stopping Trump – the U.S. security state, the Democratic Party, Wall Street and Silicon Valley that back the Democratic Party against Trump and his movement or anything that is perceived to be that like they just perceive Ron DeSantis for the moment. Being the corporate media, that is the access that it has assembled, and their driving impetus is that the nature of the evil they are fighting means they're justified to do anything and everything. And I think that, as I said, is a defining attribute of Adolf Hitler and it's what makes that coalition so remarkably dangerous. 


 

We're going to move on to a separate topic that may seem a little bit uncharacteristic for this show since it involves professional sports and activities and events taking place within it. To say that the show doesn’t typically report on or cover professional sports, I think is quite an understatement. I am, however, a tennis fan. I've talked about this before. I was actually going to do a documentary on someone who is one of my childhood heroes Martina Navratilova, the Czechoslovakia tennis player who escaped Czechoslovakia when she was 18, to defect to the United States – because, you know, she didn't want to live under communism – and became an outspoken dissident in all sorts of ways. It didn't end up working out. But tennis is something that has been an interest of mine since I was young. I still follow it, and that's what has kind of animated my interest in this. But it goes so far beyond tennis, so far beyond professional sports, it really provides a window into the ways in which we're propagandized, often without realizing it – because it seems trivial. “Oh, it's just about sports.” And yet it enters our brain and plays a major role by design, in shaping how we understand the world. But it also has a lot to do with the question of how we see ourselves in the world and whether we believe we're obliged to adhere to the moral tenets and the moral obligations we seek to impose on others. 

The immediate news event that raises this topic is there is currently a tennis tournament being held in Paris, called Roland Garros, or the French Open. It is one of the four grand slam tennis tournaments held every year. The Grand Slams are the most important tennis tournaments in terms of financial reward, in terms of points and rankings. The world media descends upon the four grand slams. The other is the Australian Open, at the beginning of the year; then, Wimbledon and then the U.S. Open, in September in New York. So, it's Melbourne, Australia; Paris; London and New York. So, it's designed to bring a lot of attention to the world. 

Tennis is actually the fourth most popular sport in the world. There are hundreds of millions of people who follow it, and the rule that most tournaments have adopted, including the French Open currently being played, is that Russian and Belarusian tennis players are permitted to participate in the tournament, but they are considered to be neutral players. And that really doesn't have much pragmatic effect except an absurd one, which is when they are announced their country cannot be identified in any way, nor can their flag be displayed next to the name the way it is typical for tennis tournaments because one of the appeals of professional tennis is that it has always been a global sport, an international sport. It has become increasingly globalized, increasingly international, no longer based just in Western Europe and the United States. IN Asia, it has skyrocketed in popularity; Latin America has always been a continent that has produced a lot of good tennis players, but Asia is where it's growing the most – even in Africa and the Middle East, there's a lot of growth as well. And so, part of the appeal are the different players and the cultures they're from. And it creates a lot of conflict and drama in different ways of playing tennis. And it's always been one of the things most interesting about tennis, about this new rule, is that Russian and Belarusian players are prohibited from being identified in any way as representing their countries, even though every single other country and the players that play for it are permitted to be so identified. 

 

 

So, let's just take a look at one of the ways in which this is manifested. Here is a small portion of the draw from the first round of Roland Garros. It is from the men's draw. And here you see, because some of the best players in the world are from Russia, both men and women, that has always been the case, Russia has always been a very strong country when it comes to tennis – at least over the last 30 years. So, one of the Russian players is the world’s number two player. There you see him. His name is Daniil Medvedev. He won the U.S. Open in 2022. But – notice is – while his flag is missing – so here you see a player from Brazil with whom he's playing – there's the Brazilian flag. Here's an American player, Francis Chaffee, who also has an American flag. And then here's another Russian player, and you'll see that his flag is missing. So, this seems like a kind of absurd, petty and trivial way to punish them. The same is true on their scoreboard. Their flag is not permitted to be shown. 

One of the interesting parts about that is that they are the only countries who suffered this ban because, apparently, the war in Ukraine is the only crime taking place in the world that is sufficient to justify this sort of stigma. 

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@ggreenwald Glenn, can you please look into the 6 deaths of AfD party members in the German region of Westphalia?
What's going on? The German authorities are claiming that 3 of them died of natural causes, one died by suicide, one by heart attack and the other by something else. They've all died within the last 2 weeks, there is an election in that area on September 14th and 4 of the deceased were on the ballot standing for election that day.
Can you please comment on this? I have a sick feeling something really sinister is happening over there.

A Question About Your Approach to Journalism

Hi, Glenn! Djordje here, from Serbia.

I have been following your work for years now, and as someone who followed your evolution online, I had a question regarding your views on journalism. Namely, I noticed that for a while now, you tend to talk about different actors openly, such as "X is a blatant liar" or "Y is a blithering idiot".

This approach is not common in journalism, so I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. I'm not necessarily against or for it, nor do I believe that the approach has compromised your work. I'm just curious because I believe that I don't know another big-profile journalist approaching things this way.

All the best

I really appreciated your episode on the Minneapolis shooter, in which you correctly pointed out that anyone who points a gun at a small child and shoots them suffers from a deep spiritual depravity (sorry if I misquoted the exact words, I am working from memory).

I am wondering what this means in the context of the IDF, where numerous witness, victims, and doctors report Israeli soldiers shooting small children and even toddlers with sniper rifles and drones; weapon systems where they clearly identify they are aiming at a child and then shoot them. And what does it mean for the communities (some in the United States) that these child-shooters return to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Interview: Dave Weigel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here from the Financial Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

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

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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