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Good evening. It's Tuesday, August 8. 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, the fact that many of us are immersed in the daily news cycle can mean on the one hand that we're more informed but on the other, this intense immersion sometimes results in extraordinary situations becoming rapidly normalized. In the digital era, a news cycle of three weeks can feel like it's a full year, which means that our ability to take a step back and contemplatively evaluate events with in-depth analysis can be easily compromised. To invoke a horrid cliché – one that applies here, though – the speed of the flow of information and the intensity of the 24-7 news cycle can easily cause us to focus on individual trees at the expense of seeing the entire forest. Such is the case with the fact that there are now three separate criminal indictments and likely more to come brought against the former president and current frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump. Two of those are federal indictments, which means they have been filed by an agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, that works under the authority and power of the sitting American President, Joe Biden, who only narrowly defeated Trump in certified Electoral College results of 2020 despite a wide array of obstacles that could not have been any more unfavorable to an incumbent president, starting with the COVID pandemic and all the resulting economic harm that it fostered. Trump is, no matter how you cut it, a direct political threat to the ability of Joe Biden to remain in political power. The fact that Trump is now being prosecuted by the administration of Joe Biden and not for classic or easily recognized crimes such as murder or bribery, extortion or other forms of political corruption, but instead on charges that depend upon novel and dubious interpretations of law. That is an extraordinary set of events that has become and quickly normalized as the result of a dissent-free media that treats these accusations as unquestionably valid and treats Trump as an already proven criminal.
An op-ed published today, remarkably with The New York Times, does one of the best jobs yet in illuminating how destabilizing and dangerous these indictments are likely to be. Its author is a vocal Trump critic, Jack Goldsmith, who is a high-ranking official in the Bush Justice Department and is a long-time professor at Harvard Law. He writes,
There is no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party’s probable nominee.
We'll examine Professor Goldsmith's arguments and the broader historical and political context whereby the D.C. ruling class has eagerly and recklessly abandoned their long-standing view that only "banana republics" prosecute former presidents and opposition leaders for crimes of a political nature.
Then: the most unhinged arrange an evidence-free conspiracy theory in the last 20 years – the worst – since Jeffrey Goldberg used the pages of The New Yorker in 2002 to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had a secret alliance with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden came not from boomer pages on Facebook, nor from the bowels of Fortune. It came instead from the largest and most powerful media corporations. For years, they recited as gospel, a deranged script that was cooked up by the CIA, that maintained that Russia had seized control of the levers of American power through various forms of sexual, personal and financial blackmail held over the head of Donald Trump, which Moscow used to force Trump to do Putin's bidding at the expense of the interests of the United States. They continued to insist on this conspiracy, even in the face of Trump's attacking the most vital Russian interests, such as when he reversed President Obama's decision and sent lethal arms to Ukraine, in 2017, or then spent years badgering Germany to abandon Nord Stream 2. Those are the most vital components of future Russian plans for economic growth, and Trump did everything in his power to sabotage them. And the defenders of this conspiracy theory barely blinked – let alone apologize and issued retractions – when their Jack Smith of 2018, former Bush-Cheney FBI Director Robert Mueller closed his 18-month investigation without even mentioning, let alone vindicating, this laughable and paranoid McCarthyite tale. In Newsweek, today, political science professor Max Abrams asked a provocative question, only half tongue in cheek. His article appears under the headline “Does Ukraine have kompromat on Joe Biden?”
I always find it so amusing whenever our media class takes what are very common practices: it uses the Russian term for that as though the Russians invented that by calling blackmail kompromat. But that's the media just discourse. In this article, Professor Abrams argues with obviously compelling evidence that the case for suspecting Ukraine's leverage over Biden is far more credible than the fever-swamp dream that Trump was controlled with sexual and financial blackmail by Putin. Professor Abrams examines the multiple evidentiary basis for concluding that Joe Biden is vulnerable to all sorts of leverage that the Ukrainian government could wield over him, in large part due to the various ways that his son, Hunter Biden, profited enormously by selling at least a perception, if not the reality, of his father's influence in that country. Abrams reviews the evidence now lost under a pile of intense partisan media dials that Biden's interference in Kyiv, whereby he boasted of having a prosecutor fired, directly benefited the gas company Burisma, which was paying Biden's son roughly $80,000 a month. We'll speak to Professor Abrams tonight about his argument and how, as is so often the case, the Biden administration is the living, breathing embodiment of what Democrats breathlessly accused Trump and his administration of being.
So much of this points to a vital but often overlooked fact. One of the central questions in American political life, if not the central question, is not whether someone is now on the right or the left in the sense of how those terms have been traditionally understood. What is often more determinative is whether one sees this widespread, intense and deep distrust of America's leading institutions of authority and believes that that distrust is valid and deserved. In other words, the defining metric for placing someone on the political spectrum is not so much liberal versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican but instead is whether one is pro-establishment or anti-establishment when it comes to the most powerful political and financial actors in this country.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
