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Good evening. It's Tuesday, November 21.
Tonight: The U.S. government and the EU are finally coming to grips with the fact that their Ukraine war project has failed. Or to put it more accurately, the objectives they claim they were attempting to achieve, namely the expulsion of all Russian troops from Ukrainian soil, including from Crimea, is simply not realistic – not attainable. As a result, it is time for Zelenskyy and his Western patrons to sue for peace, basically to beg Russia to be happy with keeping 18% of the Ukrainian territory that they currently occupy and control.
There are so many extraordinary aspects to this event to start with. So much of this was predictable. Many of us predicted from the start that this war would not protect Ukraine and Ukrainians but would instead destroy Ukrainians and destroy Ukraine while killing huge numbers of Ukrainians without any chance of evicting Russian soldiers from Eastern Ukraine, let alone from Crimea, which Russia has occupied and controlled since 2014 when they announced that it was annexed. Yet everyone who suggested any of that at the start, namely that the Biden administration should seek a diplomatic resolution to this conflict rather than block a diplomatic solution, was instantly branded a Russian agent or a Putin sympathizer, often by the Ukrainian government itself. I have the blacklist to show you to prove it, with my name on it, often by the very same media figures now working to prepare the public to accept the need for a diplomatic solution whereby Russia will govern at least some, if not all, of the Ukrainian land and Russian speaking Ukraine that they are currently occupying, that those regions either will be annexed by Russia or won't be allowed to have autonomy or semi-autonomy from those that they hate in Kiev, namely President Zelenskyy and the pro-NATO government, that they will be allowed to be autonomous and independent.
But this is yet another case of how American wars and the media cheerleaders who manufacture support for the United States always function. At the start of every war, they jack up the emotional manipulation of Americans so high that a majority of Americans will always insist that they are now anti-intervention or anti-war, or that they regret their past support for American wars, come to believe that this time it's all different. The U.S. is on the right side – the good side – and that this time we'll end up proud of what we have done rather than ashamed. We're spreading democracy. We're fighting against the savages and the bad guys. This is America in its finest form: fueling wars not to conquer, but to make the world better.
And every time all of that proves to be false. the promises made and the vows issued turned out to be lies, the U.S. media just pretends like none of it happened – that they were skeptical all along, that they never really endorsed the maximalist vision of these words. They demanded that everyone embrace upon pain of being smeared as being a Russian agent, of being on the other side, and then they just move on to the next war as if none of it ever happened, fully ready to propagandize for the next war while demanding that nobody remember what they did in the past war. All while they insist they're never to be held accountable for anything they did or said. We'll show you how the moment that we all knew was coming, namely when the West abandoned silence in Ukraine is finally here. The rats in the media, in Washington and Brussels are stepping over one another, not just to jump off the sinking ship, but to pretend that they never boarded it in the first place.
Then: in May 2021, Daryl Cooper, writing under the Twitter name @martyrmade, wrote one of the most viral, well-read and consequential tweet essays in the history of that platform. He set out to explain the mindset of the average Trump supporter: specifically why they are so contemptuous of establishment institutions of authority – validly so – that they were even willing to endorse claims that the 2020 election was stolen, to defend the January 6th riot and to endorse a whole range of views that the media insist that it simply can't comprehend, that they're just conspiracy theories or obviously false.
At the time, we noted this was one of the most insightful and empathetic explanations of why the most loyal Trump supporters see the world the way they do and we invited them all to publish an article capturing and elaborating on that widely discussed Twitter essay, which he did on our Substack page. And since then, Cooper has gone on to create his own wildly popular Substack page, doing more of that very in-depth and independent-minded analysis and titled “The Martyr Made Substack.” He also hosts two very popular podcasts, “The Murder Made Podcast,” and then another one he co-hosts with Jocko Willink entitled “The Unraveling.”
As part of that work, Cooper, well before the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, produced and published one of the most comprehensive historical accountings yet of the founding of the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict in general. We're excited to have him back on our show to discuss the Israel-Gaza war, various political developments and debates inside the United States over that war, the war in Ukraine, the 2024 election and a lot more.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
