Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Debate Debrief with Vivek Ramaswamy
Video Transcript
August 25, 2023
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Glenn Greenwald: So first of all, thank you for joining us. We know you're deluged after your performance last night and we appreciate your taking the time to talk to us. I want to delve a little bit into some of the topics that got raised, but not very in-depth, which is the nature of the format. First of all, the pundit expectation, the consensus was that everything was going to focus on Governor DeSantis. Everyone was going to go on stage and talk to DeSantis, given his status, apparently, as the obvious alternative to Donald Trump. That most definitely did not happen. He was essentially ignored. Instead, the focus of the attacks almost entirely was on you. I know the obvious answer is it's because ‘I'm rising in the poll,’ ‘I'm considered a threat’ but beyond that, was there something else going on that caused there to be so much hostility and focus on you from the other candidates? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit inside baseball but I think if you look at certainly what our campaign is seeing, when you're looking at actually understanding who the likeliest voters are, who tend to be the most informed, the trends are very sharp in my direction. And so, I think if the other candidates – and one thing you did teach me is that the other candidates are serious about at least trying to win, right? If they weren't serious about actually trying to win, they wouldn't have even bothered. But I think their campaigns understand what our campaign understands, which is that this is effectively a two-horse race between myself and Trump right now, the dynamics of the most informed voter base – and that's where you see a trickle-down effect for everybody else – they're coming in our direction in droves. And so, the headline poll numbers that you'll see are diluted by the fact that most people in this country didn't know who I was four months ago. Right? But of the people who do, so, I'm starting two months ago with a very low name I.D. but seeing our polling against that backdrop, that is striking and largely unseen for a very long time in politics. And so, I think that the other campaign teams have probably smart people working for them, understanding that the DeSantis is not really going to be their obstacle if you roll this to where the puck is going two months from now, and I think they tried to get a head start on that last night, I don't think that it worked out too well for them. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Right. So that's the pundit analysis, the kind of horse race analysis to see the validity to that as well. Let me share with you my hypothesis and see whether or not you agree which is there were some very sharp ideological divisions on that stage, typically involving you on the one side and all of these other candidates on the other, because all of these other candidates have a long history in the Republican Party, predating Donald Trump, going back to George Bush, the kind of Reagan economics, Bush-Cheney foreign policy against which Donald Trump successfully ran. You were the only candidate essentially espousing this kind of new form of Republicanism. I sense there was a lot of hostility for real from these other candidates. Maybe it's in part because of resentment that you haven't been around for very long, and they have, but I'm wondering whether it's actually ideological in the sense that they want to wrench the Republican Party back from the new kind of “America first” populist ideology that the Republican voters are now simply insisting on.  

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, I mean, I call the ideology absolutely “America first” nationalist ideology, and this is going to be good for our party because it is a deep ideological division within the Republican Party and it's not even limited to the Republican Party. Like, Glenn, I mean, I'm coming in from the outside. I rarely talk about Republicans and Democrats. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Because you haven't been a Republican all that long, as you've talked. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: About. Yeah, I voted Libertarian in the first election I ever voted in. I find partisan distinctions rather boring because I don't think they capture the essence of real social, political, and cultural divides in this country and even across much of the modern West. I think the real divide is between the managerial class and the citizen, between those who are skeptical of the citizenry to determine and self-determine how they sort out questions from climate change to racial injustice. There's one worldview that says the people can't quite be trusted. It has to be a small group of elites, really, in the back of palace halls, that was done for most of old world European history and then the 1776 version of this, the post-1776, the American version said, No, we the People, sought out those differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every citizen's voice and vote counts equally in a constitutional republic. That's a fundamentally different view. So historically, the Republican and Democratic Party, and the establishment wing of both, which is to say the dominant wing, at least as it relates to funding and most candidates who are propped up by it, are debating within the confines of the first view. We have one set of people that say, “Oh, well, we need higher taxes” and one people say, “We have lower taxes,” but we both agree that the people can't actually be trusted with the most important questions. My view is that the real thing we need to fight for today is the 1776 ideals, the rules of the road in the first place, it’s whatever the answer is, we the People get to determine it – not a federal administrative police state, not an ESG movement of a woke industrial cartel, but in the public and private sector, not multinational international institutions that impose that will on the sovereignty of sovereign nations. No, we the People, the citizens of nations, in the United States of America, the citizens of this nation determine that through our constitutional republic. And so that's what surfaced itself last night on the debate stage of the Republican Party but that even is too small of a description for what's really going on which is far deeper. And there's a version of this that at least should exist and I think does exist within the Democrat Party as well. That's not as much my concern right now but this is deep. It’s deep.

 

Glenn Greenwald: This conflict did play out in the 2016 election where Bernie Sanders on one side, Hillary Clinton on the other, represented, I think, that schism that you're describing. Bernie ended up getting crushed by a combination of kind of sort of cheating and rigging – that's Elizabeth Warren's words and Donna Brazile's words, not mine – and the Democrats kept hold of the establishment of the party. The Republicans didn't. They lost that with Donald Trump. They thought Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were the bulwarks. And then you look at the fact – and you've been talking about this a lot as well – that for all the kind of intense partisan discourse, we hear, where everyone's a Democrat or a Republican when you turn on cable news, and you go out into the United States, people don't care about that […] 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: They really don't. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: […] Well, lots of people said in 2016, my two favorite candidates are Trump and Bernie. Lots of people who voted for Obama twice, voted for Trump in 2016, which makes no sense from the partisan perspective if you're kind of a pro-partisan… And then you have this huge swath of people who just don't vote, a huge – millions and millions of Americans – not because they're impeded from doing so, but because they just don't think it matters. One of the arguments you're making is, look, I'm not auditioning to be Trump's vice president. I actually think I can make a better inroad into these kinds of voters than President Trump could, who did a good job in 2016 to bring in new voters. What is the reason for that confidence? Is it just generational? Do you have a specific message that resonates? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yes. So, it's not just generational. I mean, that's an element of it. I think the fact is that Trump helped air a lot of that pent-up emotion that had been suppressed – and systematically suppressed by both parties – and Bernie tapped into that, too, in some of the ways that you described. This is where I would pick at one thing you said earlier, too: populism isn't really a philosophy. Populism is a response to an emotional current but I think there's a real philosophy underlying it, absolutely coherent on its own terms, a new political ideology […] 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Where you trust the people to make decisions? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yes. And it's not one that I'm inventing. It's one that was born in 1776. And so, I think we live in a 1776 moment. But it's not just that we're going to go out with pitchforks because we're mad. It's because we're going out to revive the modern American revolution, on the principles written out in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the best operating manual for those principles, the U.S. Constitution. And so, I think what I'm aiming to do, and I believe in some ways we are already doing that – we're just getting warmed up – is leading that American revolution, that modern American revolution in our domestic policy. The only war I want to start is the war on the fourth branch of government, which should not exist. I will get in there and actually shut it down, and I think I have a deeper understanding […] 

 

Glenn Greenwald: By the fourth branch of government, you mean the regulatory […] 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: I mean the shadow government. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: […] essentially out of control, plus the deep state, the part of the government that operates in the dark with no democratic accountability. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: That's right. The people who are never elected, but who wield most of the political power in this country. That is the war I'm starting while ending a lot of the meaningless deflection wars that we either start or fuel abroad, and that's a complete inversion of the way the traditional Republican Party has been doing, it is allowing the cancerous proliferation of this administrative state because it shunts elected representatives from political accountability while creating one more deflection tool of pointless wars from Iraq now to Ukraine. That's what's going on. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: So, let me ask about two specific examples that I thought expressed most vividly this kind of difference you're describing, the first of which was Ukraine, which was incredibly obvious. Only you on that stage were willing to say emphatically, “No, our money to Ukraine is not in our interest. We have lots of stuff to do here at home, including protecting our border.” DeSantis, as you kind of mocked him for putting his finger in the air, was taking that middle ground of let's have the Europeans pay for it. 

At the beginning of the war, overwhelmingly – and I know you were against it from the beginning – a majority of Americans, a vast majority of Americans were swept up in the propaganda and wanted the US support for that war. Now, you look at polls, overwhelmingly majorities are against that. They want no more money sent there, especially Republican voters. That's an overwhelmingly clear view. We don't want any more of this money being sent. And yet, every single person on that stage beside you, or maybe Ron DeSantis, doesn't care about that, doesn't care what the voters want, doesn't care what people think about where they want their tax money spent. They want to continue to lavish the landscape with all of the money that he wants until the end of that conflict, which won't be four years from now. Why do you think that, for politicians who do pay attention to polls, if they are going to be successful, but are nonetheless so willing to ignore the sentiments of their own voters to continue to insist on this policy that people oppose? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: So that's the easier answer. There's a harder question lurking behind it. The easy answer, I can tell you from experience: donors. The donor class of the Republican Party fundamentally disapproves of the message that I delivered on that stage. And it's the one thing that's holding Ron DeSantis back, right? His campaign is run by his super PAC, which is extremely well-funded and far better funded by this campaign, even for all the checks I've personally written. And so that holds him back. But the rest of the field is completely – as I said in the stage, made a lot of people mad – bought and paid for by the donor class, frankly, some of which is bipartisan. It's the same donor class that swings in the other direction at times, too. The deeper mystery, though, Glenn, and I don't have a great answer on this, is then why the donor class […]

 

Glenn Greenwald: Right. That’s what I was about to ask. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: […] so attached to this religion. Zelenskyism. “Ukraine-ism.” It's a modern cult in the United States of America. And the tempting answer – and I quipped a little bit, had a little fun with Nikki last night about, you know, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and there's an element of the military-industrial complex – but I believe in truth. And if I'm getting to the truth of the matter, I don't think that's really what's going on, because I know countless donors that I've lost over this issue. So, I can’t imagine that they're thinking about what the value of their stockholding is in some weapons manufacturers. I don't think that's it. It's just something else. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Isn’t it that there is embedded in the Republican Party for decades now, there's this ideology about the United States and the role it plays in the world for all sorts of selfish reasons… 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: It’s embedded in both Parties. Joe Biden and Liz Cheney! What’s the difference? 

 

Glenn Greenwald: […] There's a lot more support to the Democratic Party or a lot less opposition in the Democratic Party to the war in Ukraine than in the Republican Party, which I think is interesting. They want that war going on at least as much as the Republican establishment, if not more so. I just wondering, though, whether there's this kind of genuine conviction, which sounds naive when you're talking about Washington – people with actual convictions – that this ideology has been embedded for decades, going back to the Cold War, the War on Terror, that the way we maintain our dominance in the world is through foreign military operations. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: So, I think I have good I think I have a good finger on the pulse of what's going on here. I don't think they have convictions. I think that these politicians on the stage yesterday are puppets. I'm deeply convinced of that. I mean, you interact with people, they're good people, they're fine, but they're vessels, right? Listless vessels, if we may use the power of super PACs. 

I think that some of those people, though, in that donor establishment, ironically, are people who do have convictions in what that view of American hegemony should be, some of which is tied to self-interest, but not all. It's this attachment to a sense of self-confidence that's derived from superiority over the other. And I think that once you've earned a certain amount of money, moral superiority then becomes more important than financial superiority. The marginal return of the arguing piece of paper isn't worth as much but the psychological security of knowing that you are better than your fellow man is really what I think drives – it's the sick psychology […] 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Adam Smith wrote about that in “The Wealth of Nations.” The idea that there's this sort of […]

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: He did. Good point.

 

Glenn Greenwald: […] a sense of strength and purpose that comes from reading about the conquest of your foreign armies, especially, if you watch from a safe distance. Even if that means a little higher taxes. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Especially if you are insulated from the consequence as well. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Exactly. That’s the key.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: It's not your kid that goes to fight, right?

 

Glenn Greenwald: It's neither you nor your family that's fighting. It's other people's families who are fighting […] 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: That’s a great point of Adam Smith. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: It's really – I'll show you. If you haven't seen it, I'll show you the passage it describes […] 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: It sounds familiar. It’s been years since I've read it... 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Well, yeah, it's from “The Wealth of Nations.”

Just two more questions, out of respect for your time. One is on the issue of China. Last night you described the Russia and China alliance as the greatest military threat we face. You said the only war you want to start is against this fourth branch of government, the deep state, the regulatory state, and yet, that kind of rhetoric leads people to wonder whether your opposition involving ourselves in the war in Ukraine is really about a desire instead to focus that kind of military confrontation with China, to start a new Cold War with China. What is your view of the U.S. relationship with China going forward? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: You know, look at what I've said in the recent weeks, which also was the source of some jabs that some other candidates were giving me for my views there, I want to pull Russia apart from China. I do think that China is a real threat to the United States. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: And in what sense are they a real threat? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, I think that they want to hold an economic gun over our head and ultimately exert leverage to advance geopolitical goals using the economy to do it. And so, I think the right answer is that there are a few different things. One is to declare economic independence from China. I think that we cannot live in a world in which we're dependent on an adversary for our modern way of life. We can talk about the role of India or Australia or other nations, bilateral trade relationships with other countries. I don't like the multilateral stuff because it comes with a lot of baggage and garbage about climate change but strong bilateral relationships from Japan to South Korea to India can play a role in this. Pulling Russia out of its military alliance with China by reopening relations with Russia. If we reopen economic relations with Russia. Russia doesn't have to rely economically on China. Freeze the current lines of control Korean war-style armistice agreement and end the war in Ukraine, permanent commitment for NATO not to admit Ukraine – it's a reverse maneuver of what Nixon did in 1972. He pulled Mao out of Brezhnev's little brother's arm... Well, Putin is like the new Mao. Let's pull him out of Xi Jinping's class and move from a bilateral international order today that favors China to a trilateral one where none of the three major superpowers, nuclear superpowers, are aligned. I think that's a good thing. As it relates to Taiwan, I favor moving from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity. Right now, the U.S. just does depend on Taiwan for semiconductors. Our entire modern way of life, the camera that's recording this interview to that laptop on your lap […] 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Which is the excuse as to why we need to defend Taiwan, but not Ukraine. So, the question then becomes […] 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well, no, I want to unroll this forward actually.

 

Glenn Greenwald: Let's get away from dependence on superconductors and then the question becomes does that change our relationship with China vis a vis Taiwan and in general? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yes, it does once we achieve semiconductor independence. So I'm going to lead us by the end of our first term to ensure that we have semiconductor independence in this country. And what I've said is I want to be very clear that there are a couple of reasons why China might want to go for Taiwan. But if one of them is to lord over the United States holding hostage our modern way of life, I'm not okay with that. And we will defend Taiwan. This does a couple of things. One is it makes Xi Jinping have to be a fool to invade Taiwan before we do have semiconductor independence. If he wants to fulfill the nationalistic goal from 1949 in Chiang Kai‐shek and Mao Zedong, that's a separate discussion. That's a separate discussion. But as it relates to lording over and squatting on the semiconductor supply chain, no, the answer is no. So, we'll pull Russia out of their hands. We’ll do a partnership with India, control of the Malacca Strait. We're trying to get this Middle Eastern oil supply. And then after 2028, the end of my first term, when I will lead us to semiconductor independence, our posture changes. And I think that being honest about that, as a U.S. president, to say that I'm advancing U.S. interests, that is credible. People can actually – not only people at home but even other actors on the global stage – take credible signals for that because I expect them to act in their self-interest just as they can expect me representing the United States to act in our self-interest. That is the single most effective way of deterring China from going after Taiwan while avoiding war, especially during the period that we literally depend on Taiwan for our modern way of life. And this also puts Taiwan on notice. I mean, this is a nation that's spending one point something percent of its GDP on military. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Because everyone knows it has the U.S. behind it, ready to defend it…

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: It should be at – 5% of Taiwan's GDP should be spent on its own military defense if that's what they want. They have an election in 2024. The KMT has different view Tsai Ing-wen. That's their nation's issue, to sort out democratically in terms of where they are. But this puts them on notice. Taiwan would have to be a fool not to increase its military spending as a percentage of GDP; Xi Jinping would have to be a fool to go for Taiwan before we have semiconductor independence in this country, if we move to strategic clarity. 

And then the traditional establishment came like a ton of bricks on me for this view. Oh, I mean, Nikki Haley referenced it last night, but the funniest part about this, Glenn, though, is that if we had more time in the debate I would have thrown it back in their face – and maybe I'll do it, the next debate – is this is under a status quo when the U.S. technically is espousing still the One China policy that would still drive Donald Trump for picking up a phone call from the Taiwanese president, in 2015, to congratulate him, that that broke diplomatic protocol and we embrace the One China policy. We can't say what we'll do in Taiwan, if I, as said I will defend Taiwan until we achieve semiconductor independence but as the implication that the posture could change after [...] 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Which is even kind of more hard line. From that perspective […]

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: But it's neither more nor less hard line. But it's laughable that they will point to that as being a softy position when all I'm saying is let's be honest and let's be clear, this is how nations can actually deal with one another diplomatically, if they can actually trust one another credibly that you're actually who would have ever thought following your self-interest. And that is how you avoid wars that are against the interests of the United States and if I may say it, against the interests of other nations as well. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Well, last question. I did think it was notable that people like Nikki Haley like to tout the fact that they have foreign policy experience when U.S. foreign policy over the last at least a year is a disaster for the world. I'd rather pick somebody randomly out of the phone book to run it. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: It’s the worst. I’d have a monkey running it.

 

Glenn Greenwald: Exactly. And then, any of those people who are so proud of the role they played in all of these disasters. Last question. One of the things your campaign has done that is unique and you referenced earlier, I just want to delve into it a little bit more deeply is the last question, which is you've made a point of visiting not Kiev, but parts of the United States that typically the Republican Party ignores. There's a lot of people there who don't vote, who have a tradition of voting for Democrats, not because they're excited about the Democratic Party, quite the contrary, but they think the Republican Party is against their interest in ways that are kind of bigoted or that they've been told is very hostile. And one of the arguments you're making is I want to go into those places with a message that will liberate them either from not voting or from the Democratic Party. What is that message that you have to tell these people in African American communities, in lower-income communities, that the Republican Party and voting for the Republican Party will actually make a material difference in their lives? 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: The America First movement stands for all Americans. And so, no, I haven't talked to Zelenskyy, but I did pick up the phone and call the likes of Gregory and Janet Ards two small business owners in Hawaii who tragically lost their two small businesses in their family but had a third that was still able to provide the water supply to the rest of Maui. I think that this is a moment when people from the South Side Chicago to Kensington, to Hawaii, to Maui, to Ohio, to Iowa, to New Hampshire can unite around the idea that we have a government that sells out our own interests to advance some other multilateral interests internationally. And we can unite around the fact that, yes, we do believe that the southern border needs to be sealed, that we do believe that the money that we spend, the taxpayer resources that we spend, should be spent to fund U.S. interests and not pay the salary headcount of Ukrainian government officials instead. And I think I'm already seeing that, Glenn, as I'm traveling this country, that this is not about Republicans and Democrats. I think it's a 1776 moment where the question is, do you share the basic rules of the road in common – meritocracy, the pursuit of excellence, free speech, something that is a controversial idea that […]

 

Glenn Greenwald: That didn’t come up last night that this has been a centerpiece of your campaign obviously.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Centerpiece. Absolutely. Self-Governance over aristocracy. Do we believe in three branches of government? Do we believe in the Constitution or do we believe in the other thing that we're living in today, where it's a quasi-technocratic monarchy in three-letter agencies in Washington, D.C. And I think the truth of the matter is easily 80% of this country agrees on the basic rules of the road. Maybe we will disagree on whether corporate tax rates should be high or low, but this debt. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Limit abortion or things like that. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, but these are, in the scheme of things, actually, details […]

 

Glenn Greenwald: Right. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: […] compared to the basic rules of the road. And I say 80 - 20, half of the 20 is people younger than me who never even learned those ideals in the first place, we'll teach them and bring them along too. This is the stuff of a landslide election. The single most unifying thing that a leader could deliver for this country is a moral mandate, in 2024, to revive those basic 1776 principles. And honest to God, I think I'm the only person in this race in either party who can actually do it. And as much as a lot of my policies, certainly on foreign policy on the border, otherwise do overlap heavily with that of Donald Trump – and I said on the stage last night, I do think he was an excellent president – I think this can't be a 50.1 election. We're skating on thin ice as a country. This can't be the Monday after Election Day; they slowly trot out who won the election. No. This has to be a decisive victory: bring in young people, old people, black, white, suburban, rural, urban. Doesn't matter. We're all Americans. And the America First movement puts all Americans first. And so, yeah, Does that help to be a member of a different generation? Absolutely, it does. But it's not just a generational argument. It's a vision of what actually matters in this country, what the actual divide is. It's not between Republicans and Democrats. It's the everyday citizen. The great uprising saying, “Hell, no” to the great reset and the managerial class. That's what this is about. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: So, we were covering your campaign when you were 8.2% because I had a feeling that this message was going to start to resonate. It incredibly is now. So, we're going to keep covering it as I think you're going to continue to rise in the polls, especially after last night. So, congratulations on a great debate. Thanks for joining us. 

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Thanks, Glenn. Good to see you. 


Glenn Greenwald:
Good to see you as well.

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So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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Israeli Official Caught in Pedophile Sting Operation Allowed to Flee; Israeli Data: 83% of the Dead in Gaza are Civilians; Ukrainian Man Arrested over Nord Stream Explosions
System Update #503

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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A top official of Israel's cyberwarfare unit was arrested in Nevada on Monday night after police say he tried to lure what he thought was an underage child to have sex with him. The Israeli, Tom Alexandrovich, was let out of jail on bail and then – rather strangely – had no measures imposed on him to ensure that he did not simply flee the country and go back to Israel. As a result, the accused pedophile did exactly that – after telling the FBI that he intended to get on a plane to go back to Israel, that is what he predictably did. 

Why were no measures undertaken to prevent that, whether it be the seizure of his passport or wearing an ankle bracelet, or monitoring? We'll examine the latest about this increasingly strange case, as well as one of the officials, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who has her own background. 

Then: a harrowing report from Israel's own intelligence units’ documents that an astonishing 83% of the people the IDF has killed in Gaza are civilians, all this revealed today, as Bari Weiss' Free Press continues to engage in some of the most brazen atrocity and genocide denialism imaginable in service of the foreign government to which they are loyal. We'll examine these latest revelations and what they mean for U.S. policy. 

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