Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
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. 

 

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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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Hey Glenn, before I get to question I just want to tell you thanks for helping me see a bigger perspective. You randomly called my smug self out on Twitter one day, and so I did some hate listening that turned into frustrated listening, that transformed into adoration for your principled stances in a time of wacky waving inflatable tube-men of ethics and morals.
Here's my question: I heard you say in passing almost at one point that you (edit): oppose overturning Citizen's United based of 1st amendment grounds, but what would be a practical fix for the open bidding that takes place for political seats anymore? It really feels like its kind of a huge part of our issues.
Thanks so much, be well!

I saw something somewhat hopeful when stumbling across the Alex Jones right (from being listed as a featured podcast on Rumble). I saw the comments on the video linked below and hope it continues to spread, hostility to Israeli supporters:

"Trump is going against his promise of free speech for AIPAC. how is that okay? That will happen to you if you protest Israel."

"Yeah, he's deporting the terrorist sympathizers on the Palestinian's side. But he's not deporting the terrorist sympathizers on the Israeli's side, let alone doing anything about the Israeli terrorist sympathizers financially manipulating our government and media. In fact, Trump ended his last term by pardoning a bunch of criminal Zionist Jews. This isn't about tolerating crime, this isn't about foreign terrorism supporters. This is about being a vassal state, and our politicians' foreign owners don't like criticism."

...

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Glenn: Are you being removed from YouTube? I just now went to look for a video you posted to YouTube a couple of days ago, but the most recent video available is from two weeks ago.

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Week in Review: Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse on Ukraine War and NYT Piece Revealing Tensions within Trump Admin; PLUS: Lee Fang Takes Audience Questions on DOGE and Big Tech
System Update #420

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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This is Lee Fang, journalist and guest host of System Update. I'm filling in for Glenn, who is out this week. It's been fantastic to be on the show the last few days. 

This episode, we'll be doing a few things. First, we'll be talking to Leighton Woodhouse. He's an Oakland-based journalist, investigative reporter and filmmaker. We collaborate on our Substacks for a kind of weekly review of politics, both national and local. We'll be talking about the news of last week and getting into it. 

Later, I'll be getting to your questions. Glenn typically does a Friday Mailbag. I'll be responding to your questions, comments and concerns, discussing some of what we've reported this week. 

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Lee Fang: Hey, Leighton. Welcome to System Update. We often do a podcast together, a video kind of thing, looking at the news, but I'm taking over System Update this week because the esteemed host, Glenn Greenwald, is off somewhere, God knows where, celebrating his birthday. I think he's like 80 or 90 years old now. I'm not sure. But in any case, since he’s gone, it makes sense for us to take over and talk about the news as we usually do. 

It's been both like a chaotic week and then also like maybe less of a newsy week compared to the other weeks. I forgot this chaos news cycle from the first administration. It just got normal eventually. And now it kind of shook me because we're back to the same old thing where everyone's like reading between the tea leaves, trying to understand [  ] what the Truth Social or Twitter posts actually mean. Is this five-dimensional chess or just Trump saw something on Fox News and is reacting to it? We're back to that. 

Leighton Woodhouse: Yeah, I love it. I mean, I don't love it for the country, but I love it for just my day-to-day entertainment. It's just so much more fun than following the Biden administration. I know we'll talk about this later, but there's no better example than the Zelenskyy summit meeting where you're just seeing this stuff out in real time and just on the table in front of you. There's no hiding it. It's amazing. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, and actually that's another kind of déjà vu from the first administration where it's like, okay, you looked at all the instant reactions from normie reporters, from liberals, from kind of conventional media types. It's like, ‘Oh, how dare they?” They ambushed Zelenskyy. This was a trap because they're all Russian moles. This was all a fake press conference to humiliate Zelenskyy because they want to do whatever Putin wants. 

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UK Pressures Apple to Break Encryption in Major Privacy Clash; How Dems Can Win Back the Working Class, with Former Bernie Sanders Campaign Manager Faiz Shakir
System Update #419

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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I’m Lee Fang and I'm your host of System Update. Glenn is away this week. 

Today on System Update, we look at a variety of issues. We’re talking to Sean Vitka about the brewing fight between Apple and the British government. The British government – in order to comply with some of its new surveillance laws – has demanded that Apple break its very strong end-to-end encryption, changing Apple products really globally by providing a back door for the government. This is a demand that has been made by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in the past. Now the British government is making it. We talk a little bit about what this means for users, what this means for encryption, and where the Trump administration stands on these issues. 

Later, I speak to Faiz Shakir. He previously managed Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. He's advised a variety of Democratic politicians, he's worked in the new media space, currently advising a more perfect union, this new media startup that lifts up working-class voices. We talk about the Democratic Party where it stands today, why it's become a party that's associated with the elites, with the billionaire class, with the kind of professional managerial elite. We talk a little bit about how the party can reconnect with everyday Americans and kind of champion the old school democratic values of a strong social safety net, of meeting the basic needs for middle class and working-class Americans. 

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I want to welcome our guest, Sean Vitka. He is the executive Director of Demand Progress, he is a tireless advocate for privacy rights, and he's fought for a very long time on these issues, fought to reform the NSA, fought to reform the FBI; he's worked with members of Congress, he's worked in other venues in the policy arena.

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Lee Fang Reacts to Trump's Speech to Congress; Will DOGE Tackle Military Waste?
SYSTEM UPDATE #418

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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Hey, this is Lee Fang. I'm your host of System Update, coming to you live from a very foggy San Francisco. Glenn Greenwald is out this week. 

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Last night, Trump gave his fifth State of the Union address. The president doubled down on tariffs, called for an end to the war in Ukraine, and touted his many executive orders, especially on DEI. And yes, there were moments of theatrics between Trump and the Democrats in the audience. 

But Trump did something special that I think deserves greater scrutiny. Unlike recent administrations, including his own, he dedicated a big part of his speech to his quest to root out wasteful spending. Let's watch a clip: 

Video. Donald Trump, Joint Address to Congress. March 4, 2025.

This is an important topic and one that really cuts across ideological and partisan lines. Or at least it should. Corruption is a soul-sucking force not only because it bloats government debt and deficits. We all suffer from waste – for every fraudulent contract, for every misallocated dollar, that's a loss of resources that could have been spent making America more educated, more secure, healthy, and prepared for the future. It's also a problem that fuels alienation. We lose faith in our elected officials, and our entire system of governance, when we can't count on basic accountability for how our tax dollars are spent. 

Where I live, in San Francisco, the government has one of the largest per capita local budgets in the world, yet problems never seem to go away, no matter how much money gets spent, housing gets more expensive, there are rampant overdose deaths, a growing homeless population despite the highest level of spending on homeless outreach programs in the nation, out of control property crime, empty storefronts, and programs that seem like a parody of municipal waste. 

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$1.7 million spent building a single toilet in Noe Valley? (The New York Times. January 24, 2024) $2 billion on a small expansion of the Muni subway, which was over budget, which blew through deadlines, and is now shutting down just after opening because of faulty construction? And the more the city spends, the more questions are raised as NGO and private contractors keep getting busted with their hands in the cookie jar – we've had repeated FBI raids of city workers and city contractors, scandal after scandal about missing funds and kickback schemes. The problems seem endless and given that so many Democratic leaders – from Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsom – got their political start in this city, it’s no wonder that many Americans question whether these Californians are fit to lead. (The San Francisco Standard. April 12, 2024.)

But as bad as the problems of San Francisco have become, the city pales in comparison to the federal government. The Government Accountability Office estimated that between 2018 and 2022, taxpayers lost somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion due to fraud. 

Much of that money was lost during the pandemic, when a gusher of nearly $2 trillion went out with little accountability. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for the lack of oversight. 

But this is not a phenomenon that is limited to the emergency actions taken around COVID-19, not even close. The most pernicious, systemic fraud can be found throughout the system, especially in health care and defense spending. 

President Donald Trump, to his credit, has made it a focal point of his administration. His new Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, helmed in part by Elon Musk, has rapidly deployed in agency after agency, slashing private contracts and cutting the workforce. In particular, he has moved to scale down the entire USAID budget. 

Like a lot of the Trump administration, it's a mix of good and bad, of bold action that no other administration would take, alongside reckless actions that could do real harm. In many cases, they're missing the window of opportunity to go after real waste embedded in our system and have instead cut self-funding agencies like the CFPB. 

First, let's talk a little bit about the good around USAID cuts. I've reported for years on USAID money going to groups that work to overthrow foreign governments, undermine democratic elections, and indeed, censor even Americans over bogus claims of "misinformation." Congressional Democrats have claimed that USAID simply, in the words of Senator Chris Murphy, "supports freedom fighters" all over the globe. 

That reality, however, is much murkier. USAID has funded the Zinc Network, an anti-disinformation contractor that has targeted reporter Max Blumenthal, politician Vivek Ramaswamy, and Congressman Andy Biggs. USAID also funded a pesticide industry public relations effort known as v-Fluence, which dug up dirt about American food journalists such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. But most troubling, the foreign assistance agency has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that Americans in favor of peace are part of a dangerous misinformation network tied to the Kremlin. 

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The controversial agency provides backdoor ways for the American government to finance propaganda against American citizens. 

In Ukraine, USAID, through its contractor Internews, supports a network of social media-focused news outlets, including the New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media, and the Institute of Mass Information. 

These news outlets have produced a series of videos and reports targeting economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Professor John Mearsheimer, as figures within a "network of Russian propaganda".

(Lee Fang. Substack. February 4, 2025.)

In other words, American taxpayers have been funding a defamatory smear campaign against other American citizens, all in order to build out support for another forever war. 

But let's not forget, USAID also helps administer global health programs which have been widely touted for saving millions of lives. USAID helps administer PEPFAR, a program to distribute HIV AIDS medications, and the agency also funds the distribution of medicine and preventative care for malaria, polio, tuberculosis, and a variety of programs for maternal and child health care in developing countries. 

There's a pause in these programs as the administration reviews them, but it seems clear that there's a real risk that they may be cut. These programs might not be perfect, but they've generally impacted the world in profound and positive ways. Given how much other waste, fraud and abuse exists in our system, these global health programs should be a low priority, if not even a not a priority at all, when it comes to cuts. 

Where should we be cutting? To prepare the segment, I just looked back at my own reporting over the last decade. I've written for years about Pentagon waste that is far beyond the dollar figure for any silly sounding science grant or health program that was discussed last night at the State of the Union. 

In 2015, a military blimp broke free from its harness in suburban Maryland and dragged a cable through homes, causing destruction and property damage. Where did this thing come from? 

Video. WMAR-2 News. November 4, 2015

The project was called JLENS, or "Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System." Produced by Raytheon at nearly $3 billion cost to the Army, the project was intended to defend against cruise missiles. Theoretically, it was supposed to track objects over an area the size of Texas. But these blimps kept getting destroyed in weather events and faced chronic technical issues. Frankly, they didn't seem to serve any useful purpose. Finally, former Joint Chief of Staff James Cartwright rescued the program, and had it deployed to Afghanistan, where it again failed to provide any real protection to U.S. troops. But Cartwright, after securing the deal, joined Raytheon's board of directors, a job that paid him nearly $900,000 a year. Inevitably JLENS ended up in Maryland, where it eventually untethered and caused random destruction. 

This phenomenon is actually not unique. There are dozens of failed missile defense and radar systems that get re-funded year after year by Congress under the influence of defense lobbyists and the allure for politicians and staff to one day become defense lobbyists. 

Let's take a look at a few quick examples. 

Ground-Based Missile Defense System Has Serious Flaws, Experts Say

 

Despite billions of dollars invested in technology development, Coyle said, the basic architectures of both anti-missile systems “are in doubt because so many parts don’t work, don’t exist, or aren’t achievable.” (AAAS. June 19, 2013)

The government has spent $40 billion on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, managed by Raytheon and Boeing. That program, which was carefully with was carefully scripted with conditions in which the system operators knew the exact location, trajectory, speed, and dimensions of test missiles, even under those conditions, the GMD intercept systems failed to consistently produce any interceptions. 

There's the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a project from North of Grumman in Raytheon, that also failed missile interception systems and was canceled after Navy officials found multiple problems, including its limited range. That program costs $1.7 billion. (Bloomberg. August 2, 2011.)

Or what about "The Multi-Object Kill Vehicle," developed by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin at a cost of $700 million. This program was canceled after military officials found that the anti-missile program faced insurmountable technical challenges. 

Or finally, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a floating radar designed to detect enemy missile launches, which failed after tests found that the radar had a limited field of vision and was highly vulnerable to corrosion at sea. The program, managed by Boeing and Raytheon, cost $2.2 billion. 

The Pentagon’s $10-billion bet gone bad Los Angeles Times

Trying to fashion a shield against a sneak missile attack, military planners gambled on costly projects that flopped, leaving a hole in U.S. homeland defense.

(Los Angeles Times. April 5, 2025.)

I could go on and on, just on the failed missile defense and radar systems. And I could spend another hour talking about faulty logistics systems, corrosive and fraudulent work on submarines that leave them completely ineffective and inoperable, billions of dollars of waste on MRAPs and tanks and the list keeps going on and on. Where's the watchdog? Who's keeping this accountable? 

There are a few champions in Congress – people like Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, who consistently call out military waste, but they are in the minority. The defense industrial lobby largely keeps Congress and any administration, Democrat or Republican, completely subdued and subservient. 

We heard reports initially that DOGE was crossing the Potomac and planning to tackle military fraud and waste. But so far, we've only heard about canceled military DEI contracts. I have no problem cutting the DEI contracts. But let's be honest, that is small potatoes compared to the big fraudulent and wasteful contracts from the defense industrial base. 

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The Interview: Danielle Brian

Project on Government Oversight is a non-profit in Washington D.C. that investigates waste, fraud, and abuse. As a journalist, I've relied on POGO's investigations for a very long time. They've investigated Pentagon waste of all types, everything from the $500 hammer that went kind of viral back in the 1980s to more recent failed radar systems, the F-22, the F-35, a lot of issues around the Abrams tanks. They've also investigated other. Federal contracts, the waste, fraud and abuse that occurred during the pandemic and a lot of those multi-billion-dollar rescue packages. They've been around for 40 years doing really vital work and since the topic du jour in Washington is waste, fraud and abuse, I thought it would be great to talk to POGO today. 

Danielle Brian is the executive director of POGO. She's an award-winning journalist really doing cutting-edge work in this guard! 

Lee Fang:  Danielle, welcome to the program. 

Danielle Brian: Thanks so much, Lee. It's lovely to be here. 

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