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!

Over the last 15 months, this blatant censorship – the punishment of dissent in almost every sector of American life – has rapidly and aggressively intensified. This time, though, its targets are not primarily conservative voices, instead, they have been overwhelmingly those people who have either criticized aggressively Israel and its destruction of Gaza and/or those who support the Palestinian cause, both of which, as I understand it, falls squarely within the protection of the First Amendment's guarantee and right of free speech. 

There is no Israel exception in the First Amendment – nor is there in any other amendment. We’ll tell you about the latest abridgment of Americans’ free speech rights in one of its most influential academic institutions – Harvard. 

At Columbia University, in New York, Professor Catherine Franke, a long-time prominent faculty member, was inundated with multiple formal complaints and investigations, several filed by fellow faculty members: the kind of free speech witch hunts on campus that conservatives in the United States have been for years vocally condemning and pretending to oppose, though not notably in this case, where many of them are silent and some are outright supportive. 

There is a very bizarre dynamic when it comes to Israel and the United States that no matter how many times I see it, it never seeks to amaze me. Joe Biden has prided himself on the 60 years that he has been in public life as a senator, a vice president, and as a president over the last four years, in being one of the most stalwart, vocal and unyielding supporters of Israel, of the Israeli government, and not only a supporter of everything it does but also an unrelenting defender of the need and justification of the United States subsidizing the Israeli state, of paying for their military, paying for their wars. 

There are dozens, if not hundreds of speeches that he gave in the Senate saying things like, “Israel is the most important ally to us,” “If there were no Israel, we would have to invent an Israel,” “The billions of dollars we give to them each year are the greatest investment we've ever made” – you cannot find a more pro-Israel stalwart in Washington than Joe Biden over the course of his career. 

The minute October 7 happened, Biden immediately got on a plane – the first foreign leader to go to Israel and stand by Netanyahu's side – and he made a commitment to Netanyahu that the United States would pay for the entire war that they now had to undertake in Gaza and not only pay for it but give them all the arms they asked for, needed and wanted – that our government and our taxpayers and workers would pay for it as well on top of the $4 billion we give to them every year by virtue of an agreement negotiated by Barack Obama with Benjamin Netanyahu when Obama was way out the door in 2016. Also, he would have the United States diplomatically impede any attempt at the U.N. to bring a halt to or impose limits on the Israeli destruction of Gaza. 

Biden made good on every single one of those promises and every time the world – and I mean the entire world – was in consensus about some effort to try to limit or stop Israel in this unprecedented level of violence and destruction against a helpless population, Joe Biden dispatched his diplomats to the U.N. to stand against the entire world and isolate the United States, to veto the resolution or otherwise vote no and defend the state of Israel, no matter how much power and standing in the world the United States had to sacrifice to do it. 

It's hard to imagine, short of literally transferring the control of the United States Treasury formally to Benjamin Netanyahu or just making him Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the United States, what possibly Biden could have done more for the state of Israel, other than everything he has spent the last 15 months doing.  Obviously, it's not a coincidence that a cease-fire deal was reached only when Donald Trump won the election, and he got very heavily and aggressively involved in forging one because Joe Biden had no interest in trying to end the war. He was fueling it, paying for it and defending it up until his very last day in office. 

The Republican critique of Joe Biden, however, is not that he forced American workers to subsidize the state of Israel, even though Israeli citizens have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, or that he involved the United States in a war that isn't ours to fight. 

Instead, it was that, somehow, he was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, that he didn't do enough for Israel.

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!

Donald Trump was inaugurated at the US Capitol - changed to an indoor venue at the last minute to avoid the extreme cold – and most of official Washington, along with his horde of new big tech billionaire supporters – attended and were featured central stage and played a critical role. Trump's speech was quite heavy on specifics, unlike most inaugural addresses, at least when it came to principles and goals and even several policies. Dozens of pre-planned executive orders were signed by Trump almost immediately upon arriving in the White House, most of which are intended to implement those policies that he laid out today but also throughout the campaign, even if some of those orders were of questionable legal validity, it almost certainly will make it through the courts. 

Joe Biden, who weeks ago pardoned his convicted son, Hunter, after spending all of the campaign vowing that he would never do so, today, went much, much farther by first issuing sweeping preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and more, all people who served his political agenda. 

Also, we sent our intrepid roving independent reporter, Michael Tracey, to Washington this weekend for the inaugural festivities, where he has conducted some remarkable and quite amusing interviews with very various D.C. luminaries in the way that only Michael Tracey can. We'll show you some of those and put the rest of them on our Locals platform. 

Donald Trump is now officially the 47th president of the United States, as well as the 45th. J.D. Vance was sworn in today as the vice president of the United States. That means Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are officially out of government. The entire ceremony in Washington is, on the one hand, a bit over-the-top and a bit melodramatic, but also has a sort of important tradition in the U.S. to signify the passing of this very important power that has been accomplished through the decisions and autonomy of the American electorate. So, I don't want to be too cynical about it. However, a lot was going on at this inauguration, beginning with the speech Donald Trump gave, which typically was designed to set the tone of what his next administration is going to be, what he wants the American people to understand about it and what to expect. 

On the one hand, Trump really evoked the standard themes that he campaigned on throughout the second term of his campaign. There weren't a lot of surprises but I think one of the things that surprised a lot of people – maybe even me – was that he really avoided the sort of bromides and cliches of inaugural addresses about unity and all of that; he unflinchingly identified the people that he believes were the cause of America's woes, even though most of them were sitting right behind him, inches away in the frame of the camera as he spoke. 

Due to the cold weather, they were in this very tight, almost claustrophobic setting up on the stage and so all the ex-presidents – Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and also the current sitting vice president, Kamala Harris – were extremely close to where Trump was speaking. They were sitting just inches away from him, off to his left and you could see them the entire time. What was so amazing about it was that most of Trump's speech was devoted to unflinchingly and without any real politeness to soften it, condemning the entire bipartisan political class over the past 20 years that has essentially, in his view, come close to destroying America due to not just ineptitude, but even more so to corruption, to moral and ethical failings, where they elevated the interest of their donors and themselves at the expense of everybody else in the society. And they all had to sit there while he issued vicious condemnations not only of their own policies and actions but really of their character. 

That produced a lot of amusing moments, the most amusing of which I think came right at the beginning, when Trump followed tradition by reading the names of all of the presidents who were in attendance as well as the vice president, the only one was Kamala Harris who was there, but then right after he read all their names to make clear that they were present, this is what he said immediately after reading their names: 

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!

One of the most dangerous things, in Gaza, over the last 15 months has been to be a journalist. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 166 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israeli bombing and invasion, at least some of them, if not most, were deliberately targeted due to their vital work, especially with no Western journalists being permitted to enter unless embedded with the IDF. And the people who are chosen to embed with the IDF were chosen precisely because – to put it mildly – they have no interest in reporting on Gaza, only mimicking Israeli propaganda. 

One of the journalists who has gained prominence for his courageous work over the last 15 months is Abubaker Abed, who is only 22 years old. He has used his fluent, actually quite eloquent English to become one of the most important voices telling and showing the rest of the world what is actually happening in his homeland. Originally intending to be a sports journalist covering Palestinian and global soccer, his life was upended when Gaza started to be destroyed, and he directed his journalistic skills and passion to tell that story. We spoke to him a bit earlier today in a recorded interview about life in Gaza over the past 15 months, whether they now have hope for a cessation of these attacks, re-building their society, and a return to some segment of normal life. We talked about the view of Israelis in Gaza and how they understand their broader struggle for freedom, as well as their view of the United States. All I can really say, I could summarize it further, but what I can really say is that Abubaker is an extraordinary person. It's one of the reasons why he's gained so much prominence of attention and affection. 

In the U.S., the long-time independent journalist Sam Husseini was physically dragged out of a State Department briefing yesterday for the crime of directing adversarial questions – the only kind journalists are supposed to ask – to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He did so rather than waiting for permission to raise his hand, knowing he would never be called on because he doesn't work for a large corporate media outlet. Sam is with us tonight to talk about why he found the questions he posed to Secretary Blinken about Gaza so vital and couldn't wait until he was given permission to raise his hand. He also talked to us about why he rejects this incestuous and friendly deference that most corporate journalists give to top U.S. officials like Blinken and to these pompous protocols they establish. And most of all, what all of this says about the U.S. corporate media generally and its coverage of the U.S. government's Israel and Gaza policies specifically. 

Two great interviews.

Interview: Abubaker Abed

G. Greenwald: Abubaker, it's really great to see you. It's great to speak with you. We're so thrilled to have you on. I've been really admiring your courageous and important journalism throughout these entire 15 months under the most difficult of circumstances. So, I really think there's nobody better to talk to about where we are in Gaza, what the likely future of Gaza and everything that's going on there than you. So, let me begin by asking how you're doing. I think a lot about people in Gaza, especially the people who have survived and what they've gone through over the 15 months and how it's probably impossible to imagine it. But how are you doing personally at this moment? Like, what has your life been like? 

Abubaker Abed: Well, it's been literally nightmarish every single day, really hot hell, so much pain, so much suffering, but yeah we really managed to go through all of that and survive and hopefully the cease-fire will continue until Gaza is rebuilt again. But every single day, every single day, we felt that we were alone. We felt we went to what was unimaginable, what was unbearable. We had to go through starvation many times, we had to shed tears over our loved ones, over our friends and family members even, and every day we really felt that we were stripped of our humanity. We were stripped of, you know, the human values of anybody because that is what the world accepted and tolerated to happen to us over the course of the past 15 months.