Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Rep. Dan Goldman Spews Hunter Biden Lies to Jake Tapper, Bill Kristol Sponsors Pro-Ukraine War Propaganda, & Sohrab Ahmari on Right-Wing Populism
Video Transcript
August 21, 2023
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Good evening. It's Friday, August 18. 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: when it comes to the censorship regime, the primary concept on which it all is based is that we are blessed to have major institutions of power that can be trusted to discern what is true and what is false, and we can therefore trust them to censor in order to keep us safe from other people’s disinformation – meaning that which they have decreed to be false. Among these benevolent institutions that have only our best interests at heart and are steadfastly devoted to ridding our society of the scourge of disinformation, are the nation's largest media corporations, the US Security State, Big Tech, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. These are the power centers that have united to set the bounds of what is and is not permissible speech, and, as polling data demonstrates, they have persuaded a large majority of Americans, particularly American liberals, to support their efforts to keep the Internet safe from false claims through their benevolent censorship power. 

One of the problems with this inspiring tale is that absolutely nobody lies more frequently, more glaringly and more deliberately than those very institutions. One major focus of this program System Update – and my journalism generally – is to identify and deconstruct the lies and disinformation campaigns that they routinely disseminate. Doing so is necessary precisely because they deceive so many people with that nonstop tsunami of falsehoods, but also because it is vital to understand what the real functions of these institutions are. When they lie, it is not because they have deviated from their mission or committed some sort of error. The opposite is true. They do that because they are fulfilling their mission. The reason that those who lie most withinside corporate media or the US security state are the ones who are most rewarded within those institutions is because their institutional mission, their institutional mandate, is to propagandize, deceive and thus control the thoughts and then the actions of the American population. 

Their lies are provable and clear, though sometimes they do require some time to demonstrate because oftentimes one must wait for the relevant evidence to emerge from the dark where they've hidden it in secret, as happened with the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks publications, the Snowden reporting, the Twitter Files and so many other instances where we had a sense that they were lying but couldn't yet prove it journalistically because they sufficiently hid the evidence, often making it a crime for the evidence of their lying to be disclosed. That is what classified information, or the classified law, is for. Rarely, though, is their lie so blatant and immediate that one can show it the minute it comes out of their mouths. That, however, is what happened this week when the new rising star of the Democratic Party, Congressman Daniel  Goldman, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, who is from Manhattan, who was part of the Mueller team and who got elected because his family is good friends with the Sulzberger, the other billionaire heirs who control The New York Times – and he happens to have run for Congress in the one place The New York Times endorsement still matters, which is Manhattan, and that's how he won – went on CNN this week and was interviewed by Jake Tapper. The lie that Daniel Goldman told was so obvious, is so easily provable and so undeniable that even though it's not necessarily the greatest and gravest, the most consequential lie ever, we want to begin the show by showing it to you so that you can see just how glaringly and casually they lie. And because I know for certain that nobody at CNN will ever correct or retract this lie, no matter how dispositive the proof is, no matter how many times they see it, and I know they will, yet again, illustrating that their real function and the utter fraud of their claims about who they are and what they do will become so evident. They don't lie by accident; they lie on purpose. They don't lie in isolation; they lie systematically. 

Then, a new and genuinely excellent book was released this week that illustrates the crucial ideological conflicts taking place within the Republican Party and our political system generally. It illustrates a lot of the debates taking place, the vibrant debates within Western politics generally, and it also powerfully documents the way in which corporate power is being aggressively centralized and then weaponized to both impose a very menacing form of tyranny, as well as to abuse and repress America's working class. It's written by Sohrab Amari, who is a former editor with The Wall Street Journal and who ran the op-ed page for The New York Post. And now he's the founding editor of Compact Magazine, which is designed to explore what I think is the ample common ground between political populists of all types. The book is entitled “Tyranny Inc – How Private Power Crushed American Liberty – What to Do About It.” 

The way in which corporatism, along with militarism, is becoming the defining ideology of the American ruling class, it's been that way for decades, but it's gotten so much worse in the past several years in the process, crushing both core political liberties and the American working class is easily one of the most important developments of the last couple of decades. I was excited to blurb the book when I read it, when it was first in its draft stage, and now I'm really looking forward to talking with Sohrab, whom I consider one of the most interesting and independent-minded voices around about this book and his worldview in general. 

And then finally, time permitting, we will look at a new fraudulent political activism group started by supreme neocon Bill Kristol that he is calling Republicans for Ukraine, even though Bill Kristol is not a Republican any longer. He is for good reason, a person who overwhelmingly identifies with the Democratic Party and who continues to engage in all kinds of activism for Joe Biden's reelection and the reelection of Democrats all over the world. But he still uses this branding of him being a conservative because that's what enables him to propagandize. So, “I'm a conservative, and yet I agree with liberals,” that's how he shows how powerful their view is. The purpose of this new group, which has $2 million in funding already, is to run television ads during next week's Fox News Republican primary debate, which is aimed at Republicans, who, the polls now show, are turning against Joe Biden's support for endless war in Ukraine. It's designed to make a Republican argument. It's very patronizing how it does it. With these ads, Bill Kristol thinks they will get Republicans to come back on board supporting his latest war. We will examine the question of who gave Kristol this $2 million and why they're doing that and why Democrats continue to find themselves in bed with the very same neocons who just ten years ago were regularly calling fascist and racist and bloodthirsty Nazis. 

As a programming note, next week, as I indicated, the Republican primary debate, the first of the election cycle, will be held in Milwaukee, next Wednesday. Fox News is the television outlet that has the exclusive rights to air that debate. It will be hosted by two Fox hosts, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, but Rumble has the exclusive rights to stream the debate online. That is, I think, a watershed moment for independent media and independent journalism. The fact that the Republican Party did not turn to Google or Facebook or Twitter to exclusively stream the first presidential debate but, instead, it gave it to Rumble. As part of Rumble’s coverage of that debate, we will be going to Milwaukee to cover the debate, live, both before and after. We hope to be interviewing many of the people present, the presidential candidates and others. So, look for our programming next week. It may likely mean that we will be on the air at different times or more times than we normally are. So, we hope that you will tune in for that. And that's a good segway to the fact that we are encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app, which works either on phones or smart TVs, because that way, if you enable notifications, which we hope you will, the app will notify you the minute we start broadcasting, live, on Rumble at any time. That means if we do it at a time that's out of the ordinary or if we're a little late, you don't have to wait around. It'll be directly sent to however you ask it to be sent. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow the episodes 12 hours after their first broadcast live, here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. If you rate and review the show, it helps spread the visibility of the program.

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

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“Welcome home, Charlie.” Sometimes, in the midst of all the online hate being expressed toward Charlie Kirk, there are surprising moments of grace and beauty, like Jeffree Star praising Charlie's willingness to have a “a conversation with everybody. Why did I respect him? Because he knows reality.”

Or like Chris Martin, of Coldplay, who urged a live audience to send love to Charlie Kirk's family. At one point, during Tommy Robinson's massive free speech march in London yesterday, somebody held up a large photo of Charlie Kirk and a group began chanting his name. Thousands of South Koreans held a march celebrating his life. After woke employees at a Michigan Office Depot refused to print posters of Charlie for a memorial, FedEx stepped up and printed them for free. At a rally for Charlie in Rome, people held signs saying, “Debate Shouldn't Kill.” In Prague, students marched silently in his honor. There were additional vigils held in Sydney, Germany, Spain, & Thailand.

I spotted ...

September 14, 2025

Excellent article by Matt Taibbi about the errors media outlets and people have made in their reporting on Charlie's Kirks' views.

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/an-arrest-corrections-and-pure-horror?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=pyuo0

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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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