Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Twitter Faltering on Free Speech Promise? New CEO Pushes Strict Content Moderation & “Civic Integrity Teams.” Plus: Michael Tracey on Trump Indictment, Ukraine, & More
Video Transcript
August 18, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, August 17.  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: Twitter executives, led by its new CEO Linda Yaccarino, have been unveiling what they are describing as their new content moderation policies. This week, they even announced the hiring of what they are touting as their election-year "civic integrity" team. At first glance, that sounds like something Yoel Roth could return to do. 

Ever since it was announced that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter accompanied by vows to restore free speech to the platform, I've made no secret of the fact that I was rooting for that to succeed. The primary reason I moved my platform from Substack to Rumble and Locals last year -- agreeing to produce a nightly live show, something I've never done before and that is quite labor-intensive – is because I really believe that fortifying as many platforms as possible truly devoted to resisting censorship demands from corporate media and the U.S. Security State is of the highest priority, the key to preserving the possibility of free internet and, more broadly, free speech in the West. To be clear, I am convinced of Substack's devotion to that cause, but see Rumble as one of the few platforms capable of reaching a mass audience while remaining fully devoted to resisting censorship demands even if it means sacrificing its own self-interest.

It is hard to overstate the positive impact that would come from Twitter's long-term devotion to that cause. The mavens of corporate media and the Democratic Party certainly recognize how important that is, which is why there has been a non-stop assault on Musk and his reputation ever since he vowed to restore free speech to Twitter and remove it from the control of those power centers. And it is precisely due to the importance of that cause that it is vital to report honestly on what is happening at Twitter and whether they are adhering to those commitments. I would not be honest if I did not say that these recent developments are disturbing, and we will explain and analyze why this is the case. I do so primarily in the hope of having Twitter continue to fulfill the vision and promise that Musk laid out when he first took over the platform.

Then: we will talk to the independent journalist Michael Tracey about several topics, including the harsh critiques he has been voicing about the latest indictment of Donald Trump – his fourth! – this one in Georgia; the most recent developments in the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, including the admissions by one of Congress' most steadfast war supporters – Republican Congressman Andy Harris, of Maryland, who has been the co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus. He today said that it was time to accept that the vaunted offensive in Ukraine, the one that we've all been told we should wait for because it will transform the dynamics of the war has seemed to fail and that the U.S. as a result needs to start seriously reconsidering the policy that it has announced of endlessly financing this war. Given what he says is the growing likelihood that all of that would be futile. 

As a programming note, we are a little bit pressured by the time tonight because I have committed to being on a panel starting at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight convened by the Democratic presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to discuss both state and corporate censorship of the Internet and in particular, the perils of uniting state and corporate power. Participating in this panel does not in any way mean that I have support for his candidacy, it just indicates my interest in this topic and my conviction about its importance. That discussion can be viewed live on RFK’s Channel right here on Rumble, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, so, essentially, immediately following the conclusion of our live program. That's a channel he began on Rumble for the same reason so many people with large and mid-size audiences are now migrating to Rumble, namely, how often and aggressively he was being censored by Google and YouTube. 

As a reminder, We’re encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app–on your phone and/or smart TV – and enable notifications. It’s not only a great app that provides an even better viewing experience, but it will also let you know when exactly our show – and any other shows you follow on Rumble – are live.

Next week, for example, we will be in Milwaukee to cover the Republican presidential debate, live, and hope to have a bunch of interviews in connection with it. So, there may be times when we're live on Rumble outside of our normal viewing hours. So, the app will immediately notify you. It's something we really encourage you to do. It helps this show and whatever other shows you want to watch on Rumble, and it helps the platform itself. 

Finally, as a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. Each episode is available 12 hours after we first air them, live, here, on Rumble. And if you review the show, it helps spread the visibility of our program.

We would normally have our live Locals aftershow, given that it is Thursday, we have it every Tuesday and Thursday, but we're doing the event with RFK, Jr. on censorship, at 8 p.m. and, therefore, we won't be able to have our Locals aftershow tonight, but we will be back at our regular times next week every Tuesday and Thursday, depending on the programming relating to our coverage of the debate. And we will keep you notified of that.

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

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Trump Declares the War in Iran to Be His Own; Journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's War Plans, DC Dems, and More
System Update #470

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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Ever since the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. In one sense, that concern is understandable. Many of them believe Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the U.S. out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East, and they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. 

But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching and coordinating of this war. Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today, as the President issued a series of tweets – one more unhinged and war-drunk than the next – proclaiming that we – "we" meaning the United States – now dominate and control the skies over Tehran. He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign, threatening them with serious devastation if they refused. 

We’ll also talk to the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who breaks many stories, genuinely breaking stories on his Substack, where he went after wisely deciding to quit the Intercept last year. He receives many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community – not the official and authorized leaks: those are for Barack Ravid at Axios – but he gets the unauthorized ones from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. Government. 

Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him, regarding the Israelis and the Americans' designs on Iran. We’ll discuss that as well as a variety of other issues concerning this brand-new war, various happenings in Washington, and more. 

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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

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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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