Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Media Gloats Over Trump Indictment—Ignoring Dangers, Blinken Rejects Australia Demands to FreeAssange, & Worst Pro-Iraq War Journalist Promoted (Again), w/ Michael Tracey
Video Transcript
August 04, 2023
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, August 2. 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. 

Before getting into the topics of tonight's show, we have a couple of programming notes. First of all, we are really starting to encourage our audience here on Rumble, here on System Update, to download the Rumble app, which is of great quality and will enable you to follow our program there and to turn on notifications. And that will in turn let the show directly notify you or email you exactly when our live broadcast is beginning so you don't have to wait. You will always be reminded. We are really thrilled, by the way, with the way this program has grown in a very short nine months. Our audience is really growing rapidly. Yet to the very large size. We are climbing the podcasting charts as well. But we do want to do more to promote the show, to spread the show. So, in addition to downloading the app and making sure you're notified, you can encourage others to do the same. 

Secondly, we are going to start introducing new features where we will begin much more frequently interacting with the commenters and the live chat feature that is here on Rumble, interacting with our audience and my readership has always been a very important part of how I've done journalism. We do have the live interactive aftershow every Tuesday and Thursday night that is devoted exclusively to interacting with comments, taking feedback and suggestions but we're going to start incorporating a lot more of that into the live program here on Rumble as well very shortly. 

For now, we just wanted to make a note that sometimes people go into the live chat and impersonate me by using various formulations of my name, and you should know that if it seems like I'm participating in the chat at the same time that I am speaking and reporting, live, here on the program, you should assume what probably is the obvious conclusion that that person is not me and is an impersonator. We've seen a few people falling for that. Don't fall for that, that is not me. But when we increase the interactive features of the chat, we will have a way for me to participate directly there, to interact on screen. We're really looking forward to that. 

And then, finally, as a programming note, although I'm not yet authorized to talk about the details, you may notice that I have here this secret new device, this device bequeathed to me great, great power. And you'll see it on my desk. You'll see me using it. As I said, I'm not authorized to speak about it. I don't want to have an indictment of the kind that Donald Trump got from Mar-a-Lago. But it is here, and I'm very ready to use it. 

For tonight's show, the fallout from Donald Trump's latest criminal indictment. His third so far, his third nightmare continues to unfold. Having had far more opportunity today than yesterday to delve into the substance of each aspect of the indictment, the frivolousness of these charges, as well as their dangers, have become much more manifest to me. But over the past 36 hours, since the indictment was unveiled, most of the corporate media, unsurprisingly, devoted very little to no time to examining or even allowing their audience to hear or read any of the criticisms of the indictment. Instead, they were in full-on gloating mode, barely trying to hide their utter glee and ecstasy over the fact that Joe Biden's principal political opponent and the man they long ago decided was the gravest threat to American democracies in decades – if not ever – was once again charged with crimes, this time in connection with an event they now regard as sacred, as having quasi-religious overtones: the “insurrection” of January 6. Some of the reactions were corrupt, but some of them are downright embarrassing when it came to the melodramatic pronouncements they were issuing about the sacredness and importance of this event. We’ll highlight both key dangers of this latest indictment, as well as the corporate media and the party they threw for itself in lieu of doing any actual criminal reporting on it. 

For that part of the show, we will talk to the supremely independent reporter, Michael Tracey, about this newest Trump indictment, about the political pressures that led to it and other topics as well, including the latest in the war in Ukraine. 

And then, Australia's Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has spent the year publicly denouncing the Biden administration for what appears to be the United States' real determination to proceed with the extradition and prosecution of Australians. That is in Julian Assange and a series of comments that have become increasingly strident over the year. Prime Minister Albanese reflecting growing resentment among Australians over what even many Assange critics there perceived to be the now abusive and excessive persecution of him by the United States, has urged the U.S. government and the Biden administration specifically to withdraw the prosecution. “Enough is enough,” he proclaimed, in May. The Biden administration’s refusal to heed this request from an allied government and a friendly government at a center-left government is beginning to generate real tensions with this vital American ally. In a visit to the country over the weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointedly refused to consider dropping the charges, telling reporters in Australia that Assange stands accused of “very serious criminal conduct,” mainly journalism. In response, the Australian prime Minister, again, told reporters “This has gone on for too long, far too long. Enough is enough.” He accused the U.S. of using double standards in its treatment of Assange and prompting some rare but rather intense negative media coverage in Australia towards the United States. We'll report on these latest developments.

Then, America's corporate media loves to depict itself as the bulwark against disinformation, the heroic vanguards that keep you from being exposed to things that might deceive you. And yet, those who thrive and are most rewarded within these same media corporations are the people who lie most aggressively and casually, as long as they're lying on behalf of the U.S. security state and its agenda. The journalist who did more than any single American to convince Americans of the vital lie that Saddam Hussein personally participated in the planning of 9/11 – that lie was crucial to get Americans to support the invasion of Iraq, which ended up killing around a million people. That person is Jeffrey Goldberg. And for those lies that he told, he was promoted from the liberal journal The New Yorker, where he won journalism prizes for those articles in 2002 linking Iraq to al-Qaida, and then, became the editor-in-chief of the liberal journal The Atlantic. He should have been scorned out of decent society forever, and yet he became the editor of one of America's most influential liberal magazines funded by Steve Jobs’ widow. And, again, today, he's been promoted along with the remaining editor of The Atlantic. He'll now be the new host of PBS's Washington Week. It cannot be emphasized enough, while the corporate media endlessly warns of the dangers of disinformation to the point of demanding the power to censor the Internet to protect you from it, nobody spreads and rewards serial destructive lying more than these media corporations do. 

Finally, we have spent months telling you and reporting on the growing censorship regime in Brazil, both because it matters unto itself, given how huge Brazil is and how influential it is in our hemisphere, but also because Brazil is plainly being used as a laboratory by the EU, Canada and the U.S. to see how far Internet censorship can go. Today, Brazil's Supreme Court judge, who is the person largely responsible for the entire censorship regime, took another truly disturbing step in destroying the life and work of the podcaster who until two years ago, just two years ago, was Brazil's most popular and influential podcast host, regularly called the Joe Rogan of Brazil. His name is Monarch. We had him on the show in January to report on a censorship order that targeted him and other Big Tech platforms, including senators and Congress members who supported President Bolsonaro. And the court today opened a criminal investigation into Monarch, barred him entirely from using the Internet and find him 300,000 reais, the equivalent of $75,000 or so, entirely based on a claim that has never been tested in court, that has never been the subject of a trial, that he was spreading disinformation. That's the only allegation against him. They've now turned him into a criminal. And completely wrecked his life. It is disturbing and alarming in the extreme. And we'll show you where the censorship regime in the West is headed by looking at how despotic Brazil has become. And we are not that far away from it in the United States and certainly not in the U.S. where there are no First Amendment protections. 

As another reminder, System Update is available in podcast form as well. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are posted 12 hours after they first air, live, here on Rumble and you can rate and review each episode which helps us spread the visibility of the program.

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

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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 going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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