Glenn Greenwald
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CNN—And Their Govt Sources—Admit Ukraine Counteroffensive “Not Meeting Expectations.” Plus: Ignorant Liberals Praise Benevolent CIA for "Securing Brazil's Election"
Video Transcript
June 23, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, June 22. 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: American support for the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine continues to wane. Now, almost a year and a half into this war – a year and a half – it's clearer than ever that this has become yet another endless war for the U.S. to pour its resources and weapons into. Somehow, just six months after the last full-scale war of the War on Terror was over – when the United States withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 years, incinerating a family of ten people, including eight children on the way out, then lied about whom they killed, then watched the Taliban waltz right back into power as if nothing had happened: the perfect avatar for U.S. foreign policy over the last two decades – a new war magically appeared that required that U.S. taxpayer dollars be yet again transferred to the arms industry. The military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower so memorably called it, with no end in sight. 

How can the US Government and its media loyalists continue to justify to the American people that they should sacrifice and spend and risk escalation over the question of who rules provinces in Eastern Ukraine? This was the same problem the U.S. Government had in 2007 regarding the War in Iraq, one which neocons promised would be won in a matter of months and yet was instead dragging into its fourth year. The solution then was to invent a new tactic called the "Surge," which we were told would reverse American losses in Iraq and finally enable us to win – as long as we kept pouring money and arms and Americans into that war and be patient. Fifteen years later, the same people who created and sold The Surge as a way to convince Americans to stay in Iraq have invented a virtually identical tactic to justify staying in the war in Ukraine – the only difference is that it has a new title, as most sequels do: The Counteroffensive, rather than the Surge.

How is this vaunted long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive doing? Is this a case where neocons in the U.S. security state finally told Americans the truth? To ask the question is to ridicule it. And we'll examine the latest developments and put all of it into its key historical and political context as this war drags on that is so dangerous that even the president prosecuting it, Joe Biden, has said that it has brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 

Then: a new report from Financial Times this week describes what it calls the "very unusual" efforts of the Biden CIA, State Department and Pentagon to involve itself in Brazil's internal political affairs as the 2022 presidential election approached. The Biden administration was openly cheering for the former two-term President, Lula da Silva, over Jair Bolsonaro, and Lula was declared the winner of the election by less than 2 points. 

We know for sure that the CIA and State Department expended extraordinary efforts to have an active presence in Brazil last year. One liberal magazine, the American Prospect, celebrated this outcome under the headline: "How Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders Helped Lula Win." But what exactly did the CIA do in Brazil, and with what motives? After this Financial Times article was released and we noted it, I was inundated with attacks from left-liberals – both in the US and in Brazil - insisting that the CIA did nothing untoward, that their motives were pure: to protect Brazilian democracy from attacks by President Bolsonaro and even from a military coup.

Is that claim even one that can pass the laugh test? Of course not, but it illustrates a very dangerous trend that we have often reported: Western liberals and the mainstream strain of the left now view the CIA and the U.S. Security State as benevolent, trustworthy, and well-motivated actors. It is not irrational that they think this – given that the CIA and related agencies have proven to be allies of American and Western liberals – but the consequences of this newfound trust and faith in the CIA are beyond dangerous, and the premises on which it relies are beyond laughably false. We'll examine the reaction to the story.

 Finally, as you know, we devoted the last night’s System Update to the numerous false statements, contradictory claims, politicized propaganda and authoritarian decrees issued by Professor Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. over the last several years, as he spent his time on MSNBC, CNN and TMZ being treated like a heroic genius too noble and elevated even to be questioned about his highly dubious claims at the urging of employees of media corporations. This week, Dr. Hotez rejected the request of Joe Rogan to appear on Rogan's program, as he had done twice before, but this time to debate RFK, Jr. about the many critiques Kennedy has of Hotez, his statements and conduct. 

By coincidence, Hotez is in Brazil this week. We didn't know that when we did the show last night about him, but we learned it today, and so, we took the opportunity to invite him onto this show where, we assured him, he would be treated with civility and given an opportunity to speak. And we'll show you the results of that invitation and whether this courageous and consequential expert is prepared to be questioned by journalists rather than simply lavished by them with praise. 

As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done here with our show on Rumble, we'll move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback. To obtain access to our aftershow, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community. The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page and that also gives you access to the transcripts of each show that we post as well as our exclusive written journalism. 

As a reminder System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every major podcasting platform where you can follow the program: each episode is posted 12 hours after it first broadcasts here, live, on Rumble and you can rate and review the show, which helps the program's visibility. 

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

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U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
System Update #469

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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The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

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If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

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U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

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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Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

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Federal Court Dismisses & Mocks Lawsuit Brought by Pro-Israel UPenn Student; Dave Portnoy, Crusader Against Cancel Culture, Demands No More Jokes About Jews; Trump's Push to Ban Flag Burning
System Update #466

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.  

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In the first segment, we’ll talk about the victimhood narrative that holds that American Jews, in general, and Jewish students on college campuses in particular, are uniquely threatened, marginalized and endangered. One of the faces of this student victimhood narrative has become Eyal Yakoby, who is a vocal pro-Israel activist and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2024, he was invited by House Republicans to stand next to House Speaker Mike Johnson and he proclaimed: I do not feel safe. He said it over and over. “I do not feel safe” has kind of become the motto for his adult life. Now, he seized on those opportunities by initiating a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania seeking damages for what he said was the school's failure to fulfill its duties to keep him safe. Mind you, he was never physically attacked, never physically menaced, never physically threatened, but nonetheless claimed that the school had failed to keep him safe and told the congress in the country that he did not feel safe. 

The federal judge who is presiding over his lawsuit, who just happens to be a Jewish judge, a conservative judge, appointed by George W. Bush, not only dismissed Yakoby's lawsuit as without any basis, but really viciously mocked it, depicting his claims as a little more than petulant entitled demands from a privileged Ivy League student who wants to not be exposed to any ideas or political activism that might upset him – sort of depicting him as the Princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” Andersen’s literary fairytale about a princess who's so sensitive to anything that might concern her, that she's even unable to sleep if there's a pea buried beneath the seventeenth mattress on which she sleeps. 

This judicial decision is worth examining not only for the schadenfreude of watching one of America's whiniest pro-Israel activists be exposed as a self-interested fraud that he is, but also for what it says about the broader narrative that has been so relentlessly pushed and so endlessly exploited from so many corners, insisting that the supreme victim group of the United States is, of all people, American Jews. 

Then: speaking of extreme entitlement, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy made quite a name for himself over many years by ranting against the evils of cancel culture, championing the virtues of free speech, and viciously mocking as snowflakes and as people who are far too sensitive anyone who takes offense at jokes, offensive jokes told by comedians. That is what made it so odd – yet so telling – when this weekend we watched the very same Dave Portnoy viciously berated one of his employees for disagreeing with Portnoy's insistence that while jokes about everyone and every group continue to be appropriate, there must now be one exception: namely, according to Portnoy, jokes about Portnoy's own group,  American Jews,  must now be suspended and deemed too dangerous to permit. 

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There have been really a lot of radical and fundamental changes, first on the political culture and then in our legal landscape as a result of the attack on October 7, and particularly the desire of the United States – by both parties – to arm the Israelis, to fund the Israelis, to protect the Israelis as they went about and destroyed Gaza. 

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