We are pleased to send you a summary of the key stories we covered last week. These are written versions of the reporting and analysis we did on last week's episodes of SYSTEM UPDATE.
—Glenn Greenwald
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24 - SYSTEM UPDATE 215
Trump Wins New Hampshire & Utterly Shames the Establishment—Again, w/ Michael Tracey LIVE From NH
Biden’s Bombing Campaign Spreads Across Middle East w/ Expert Erik Sperling
Trump easily wins the New Hampshire primary, devastating the establishment’s desperate hope for a Nikki victory—with Michael Tracey; As the U.S. continues to escalate its illegal bombing campaign in the Middle East, Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy joins to explain why congressional assent in matters of war is so critical.
Donald Trump scored his second consecutive, decisive victory on the road to determining who will be the 2024 presidential nominee for the Republican Party. Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, his last remaining competitor—using a very generously broad definition of that term—by a margin of 12 points: 56-44. The only reason it was even that close is because New Hampshire is an open primary, meaning that all voters—not just Republicans—have the right to vote in whatever primary they choose. Enough left-leaning independents and even Democratic Party voters answered the call of Democratic Party leaders to vote for Haley that it made the real gap seem less humiliating.
According to exit polls, Trump won 3 out of every 4 Republican voters, which means that had only Republicans been allowed to vote—as happens in many states—the margin of victory would have been 50 points, not 12. Trump's control of the Republican Party is historically massive and no longer in question. Haley—clearly addicted to the lavish media praise she has been getting, as well as the dreams of how much she can monetize her candidacy—is so committed to moving the GOP towards a more pro-establishment position that she's willing to go next to South Carolina, where she's certain to lose to Trump by a wide margin despite that being her state. Even the person Haley herself anointed to be a U.S. Senator—Tim Scott—endorsed Trump as soon as he dropped out of the race, as have many of the most prominent South Carolina office holders.
The fact that Trump's victories in these primaries are predicted and expected is causing the extraordinary nature of his victories to be overlooked. It is virtually impossible to overstate how much has been done by virtually every major center of power in the United States to sabotage Trump's candidacy, destroy his reputation, and all but force voters to choose someone else. They have not only poured massive sums of money into that effort, and have not only had almost every major media corporation devote 7 years to depicting him as a literal Hitler figure, but they are trying to bar him from the ballot and even making history by becoming the first party in power to use their control over the judiciary to prosecute and imprison their leading opponent. Yet, he just keeps winning.
The collapse of establishment power and credibility as illustrated by Trump's resilience and all-but-inevitable victory continues, in our view, to be a story of historic significance, and we will do everything possible to examine all facets of that tonight, including even having on yet again the intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracey, joining us from New Hampshire, where he has spent the last week or so reporting.
PLUS: Even if it's not being reported this way, the Biden administration has heavily involved the U.S. not in 2 new major wars, but in 3 new major wars. It has financed and armed the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. It is financing and arming Israel's now-three-month-old war in Gaza. And it is absolutely involved in a new regional war that involves bombing Syria, Iraq and especially Yemen—a country that they have bombed at least six times in the last two weeks, with vows from the White House to continue.
As we have been reporting, none of this has been done without the slightest whiff of Congressional debate, let alone Congressional approval. And the warnings we issued after the first bombing of Yemen are now more visible than ever—when a President starts new wars without involving Congress, it is not just a technical violation of the Constitution but also dangerous in its own right, as it can easily lead to the type of endless war we are now seeing with no strategic plans, no metrics for success, no exit plans, and no weighing of benefits versus the risks of regional escalation and full-scale war. We'll examine the latest in what can only be called this new Middle East war, and we'll speak with Erik Sperling, the Executive Director of the DC advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, one of the few DC advocacy groups that applies its principles and values without the slightest regard for which party it helps or hurts. And they have been leading the way in arguing why it is so vital that Biden, if he's going to continue to expand this Middle East war, at least seek the approval of Congress so that a public debate is had.
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 25 - SYSTEM UPDATE 216
Massive Media Layoffs Expose Collapse in Public Trust, w/ Hannah Cox
New Video Deepens Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Mystery, w/ Darren Beattie
The liberal, mainstream sector of the press is in free fall, as massive layoffs follow a well-deserved collapse in public trust, with Hannah Cox.; PLUS: Darren Beattie with the latest from the Jan 6 pipe bomb mystery.
It is not an exaggeration to say that major parts of the liberal corporate media are in complete free fall. Just in the past few weeks, some of the most recognizable media brands have suffered massive layoffs or even been brought to the brink of collapse, including the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and Business Insider. BuzzFeed months ago completely abolished their news division. Just this week, the LA Times laid off 23% of its already-decimated newsroom in just one day. In wake of just seven months ago, it laid off 13% of its workforce. Thus, laying off well over a third of their newsroom in under a year.
It is hard to put into words just how extreme and complete is the implosion of Brooklyn-based liberal digital media over the last several years. Given the difficulty, I am forced to rely upon one of the giants of American journalism, a prophet of digital media, and a true pioneer in how to report on teenage influencer TikTok houses: the Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz, who in a video this week said: "Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out." Indeed, it has. There is no doubting the truth of that statement.
But what is missing—so conspicuously and revealingly—from all of these discussions by these failing journalists about the collapse of the industry around them is what role they themselves have played in generating this massive failure. They love to whine and cry in public when their jobs disappear. They are very adept in blaming others for why nobody cares about what they write and say. They are passionate in condemning and heaping scorn on the sectors of the media that are actually growing and thriving: namely, independent media where free discourse and political heterodoxy are permitted. But the one thing they will never, ever do is look in the mirror and ask what they did to contribute to the destruction of this large sector of media.
And it is hard to blame them for refusing. If your face were covered with unsightly boils and open wounds and oozing infections and unidentified unsightly growths, you, too, would be reluctant to gaze upon your visage in the mirror. But the irrefutable truth is that with the exception of a few media giants—such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—most of the liberal corporate media is in full-scale collapse. The public hates them to the extent they care about them at all. The American mainstream media is held in lower esteem than just about any other group with the possible exception of pedophiles and phone marketers—and even there, they are just barely ahead.
I try hard not to take personal pleasure in other people's misery and suffering. It is, in my view, unhealthy for one's own soul to do so. But I do take pleasure in the destruction of industries and companies that I regard as deeply harmful and toxic, and that absolutely includes the vast majority of these failing media outlets, which are little more than servants of establishment power and deliberate disseminators of disinformation for partisan ends. And the collapse of trust and faith in mainstream journalism is an important development in American political life, and one that is worthy of examination.
And so that is what we will do, and to help us we will be joined by the media analyst and commentator Hannah Cox, whose response to Lorenz's State of the Media address was both scathingly hilarious and deeply illuminating.
PLUS: The journalist who has done among the most important work in exposing many of the lies and deceits surrounding the mythology of January 6 has been Darren Beattie, the political scientist from Duke, former Trump speechwriter, and founder of the site Revolver News. From the beginning, Darren has exposed all sorts of inconsistencies and unproven claims in the state's narrative about January 6—from the FBI's role to the mysterious involvement or Ray Epps and, especially, the still-unsolved case of the alleged domestic terrorist who is said to have planted pipe bombs near Kamala Harris, one of the central allegations that made January 6 seem far scarier and more menacing.
Newly discovered video evidence has enabled Beattie to break down much of what we were told about these pipe bombs, and has raised serious questions about who it is who planted those, and why. We will talk to Beattie about this, and about the latest in the January 6 investigations.
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FRIDAY, JANUARY 26 - SYSTEM UPDATE 217
Biden & McConnell Fail to Get $60B More for Ukraine
Is Biden Risking Re-election Over Israel?
Plus: Israeli Knesset Member Ofer Cassif, Staunch War Critic
After weeks of negotiations, no deal was reached to send another $60 billion to Ukraine–an exceedingly rare setback for the military-industrial complex. Biden campaign hemorrhages support over Israel posture–Will it cost him the election? Interview with Israeli lawmaker and staunch Israelcritic, Ofer Cassif.
Two political figures in Washington have been united in a desperate effort to obtain another $60 billion in American resources for Ukraine: the Democratic President Joe Biden, and GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The two of them have been the most fanatical supporters of Ukraine from the start, and yet have now encountered a serious problem in getting Ukraine tens of billions more: namely, Trump and his GOP House supporters—along with increasing numbers of Americans—are vehemently opposed to further aid to Ukraine. And while they seemed willing at first to provide it in exchange for meaningful concessions from the Biden White House to fortify border security, it now appears that such a deal cannot be reached, seriously jeopardizing Biden and McConnell's push for more Ukraine aid. There are some fascinating and revealing dynamics at play here, and we will review them.
PLUS: The premise of the Democratic Party and their allies in the corporate media is that literally nothing is more vital than defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 election. And yet poll after poll has revealed that—on top of all of the other unavoidable, serious vulnerabilities that Joe Biden has in his re-election bid: from perceptions that he's far too old and affirmed to complete a second term to widespread dissatisfaction his management of the economy, inflation, and the border crisis—one of Biden's most important policies is producing a serious risk of infuriating and permanently alienating his own base voters to the point that they will simply refuse to vote for him, no matter how much they are convinced to fear a second term of Donald Trump.
The policy that has enraged many of Biden's key voting constituencies is his steadfast, unlimited, and ongoing support for Israel—both generally and in its destruction of Yemen. Extraordinarily high percentages of young voters, liberal voters, and Arab/Muslim voters believe not only that Biden's career-long defense of Israel is wrong, but that it now constitutes support for genocide. And once someone believes that about an incumbent president—that they are guilty of enabling and arming and protecting a genocide—it is going to be very difficult to convince those same people to go and vote for the very person they have spent months accusing of genocide. Biden officials are now finally recognizing the seriousness of this danger.
On some level, one might say there's something admirable about it: namely, that Biden has been one of Israel's most ardent and steadfast defenders of Israel for so long that he seems willing to follow through on his convictions even if it risks costing him votes he desperately needs for his re-election. In the age of Trump, the one thing Democrats have been able to count on is the blind and unstinting loyalty of all types of Democratic voters to fall into line in the name of stopping Trump. Is Biden's extreme support for Israel and his financing and arming of its war in Gaza really something that could risk alienating his core voting base? Possibly, and we'll take a look at that.
FINALLY: Ofer Cassif is—at least for now—an elected member of the Israeli Knesset. He was on our show just a couple of weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack on his country and, while he vehemently denounced what Hamas did, he warned then that Israel was preparing to unleash a level of destruction and violence against Gaza and its civilian life that would be virtually unparalleled in modern warfare. He also issued very grave warnings about the rapid erosion of core civil liberties in Israel, with critics of Netanyahu and his war—such as Cassif—facing various types of reprisals and threats.
Three months later, we’re sitting down for an interview with him to explore how the war has progressed, the serious threats he now faces to be removed from his elected position in the Knesset as a result of his support for South Africa's charge of genocide against Israel, what the perception is in Israel of Biden's support for the Israeli war effort, and much more. As a prelude to that interview, we will fill you in on some of the latest developments in this war, including a preliminary decision today by the International Court of Justice on the case brought by South Africa, as well as a harrowing video of the murder of Palestinian civilians in front of a British news crew that underscores what exactly the U.S. has been supporting.
As always, we know that there are differing views among our audience about this war. But given that this is now an American war as much as it is an Israeli one—the U.S. is not only financing and arming the war but paying an increasingly higher price for it—we regard it as a journalistic duty and a journalistic value to continue to present views and facts that are not readily available elsewhere so that you can continue to make your own decisions about how you feel about U.S. support for this war, that has not only already escalated in the Middle East but has no end in sight.
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