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Good evening. It's Friday, February 2.
Tonight, we revisit the multi-pronged fraud called Russiagate. We do so in part to prevent the memory-holing of what has become one of the most extreme embarrassments to the DC political and media class: up there with the fraud of Iraqi WMDs and the decision after the 2008 financial crisis to save those who caused the crisis, the Wall Street barons with bailouts and handouts, while letting America's middle and working classes drown in foreclosures and debt. We do so in part because there has never been any accountability for the media and political elites who perpetrated these multiple hoaxes.
We do so in part because so much of what was done during Russiagate, and by whom, sheds ample light on the key dynamics shaping our politics now, especially heading into the 2024 election, and because the full extent of how deranged, unhinged and unmoored from reality or any rationality and how pathologically conspiratorial our elite class became, is something that I don't think has ever been fully appreciated. Most of all, understanding and remembering the full scope of Russiagate is vital because the damage it has done, both to our geopolitics and our central institutions of authority, continues to endure to this very day. It's not some old relic of the past, but something still ongoing now.
One of the benefits of how our show is structured is that we don't have hard time limits to how much we can broadcast, that we have the luxury of not being wedded like cable news shows, to the fleeting daily news cycle, and that we're not interrupted every seven minutes by commercial breaks, is that it gives us the unique ability to delve deeply into topics that deserve that level of deep examination. We especially like doing such episodes on Friday since viewers, we have found, have more time on Friday, and especially on the weekends, to devote the time necessary to slightly longer episodes that take a step back and are the kind necessary to deconstruct false establishment narratives to help us highlight just what an absolute fraud Russiagate was, and how much elite malice and deceit was necessary to create and perpetrate it.
We will be joined by one of the very few journalists who, from the start, were willing to pay the non-trivial career cost of objecting to the prevailing narrative, he is Aaron Maté, and despite a good career that he was building in progressive media, he did not hesitate, in 2016, to loudly and quickly express severe skepticism and, ultimately, outright disbelief at the core claims that form this fake scandal. Along the way, Aaron became one of the two or three journalists in America who, I would argue, possessed an encyclopedic level of knowledge of this ongoing scam. He had really mastered the details, and that wasn't easy, given that what we now call Russiagate was composed of so many different lies and debunked stories. It's a carousel of unhinged claims that the difficulty was keeping up with this media tsunami of falsehoods but Aaron managed better than almost anyone, and so we are delighted that he will join us to examine some of the core events that are still, in our view, the ones that compose this vital scandal.
Before we begin the broadcast, we have breaking news about Iran and the United States, namely, that the Biden administration has just a few hours ago bombed multiple sites in Syria and Iraq that it claims are places where Iran has both troops and militias that it funds, not just bombing in Syria or Iraq, but both places, multiple sites. This obviously represents what the New York Times well acknowledges was a very serious escalation of the kind the Biden administration has said since the start of the war in Israel it was eager and desperate to avoid. There was no congressional consultation, let alone congressional approval of any kind, for what is basically a new war. We haven't yet bombed targets inside Iran, but we have absolutely bombed barracks and places where Iranian troops are likely to be found. This is a real escalation, and so we are absolutely going to cover this as the new war progresses. But this was a predictable outcome. And so, on Monday night, we devoted our show to the dangers, of bombing targets in Iran, not only from the perspective that doing so without congressional approval is unconstitutional and why that is so important, but also just geopolitically, why it is insane to try and pursue a new war with China. The U.S. is already enmeshed in wars in Ukraine, wars in Gaza and Israel, wars with Yemen in the broader Middle East, and now potentially a war with Iran. But that is the decision of the Biden administration. It seems like this is just the start of what they're calling the retaliation, not the end. And so, if you want, you can consult last Monday's show where we really delved in a comprehensive way into the issues governing all of these decisions.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
