Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
THE WEEKLY UPDATE: MARCH 4-8
Weekly Newsletter
March 11, 2024
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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


MONDAY, MARCH 4 - SYSTEM UPDATE 238

SCOTUS Unanimously Overturns Colorado’s Ballot Ban of Trump.

 

The Myth of a "Trump-Controlled" Amy Coney Barrett.

 

The Media’s Politicized "Experts”

The Supreme Court unanimously rejects Colorado's – and every other State's – attempt to ban Trump from the ballot, as Amy Coney Barrett disproves the widely-held notion that she is beholden to Trump.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided one of its most important cases involving the U.S. presidential election – arguably its most important such decision since its 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore ended all recounts in Florida and effectively made George W. Bush the winner over Al Gore. The Court – by a unanimous 9-0 vote – overturned the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, a court composed entirely of Democratic partisans which, in December, had banned Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot, on the ground that he was guilty of insurrection and thus ineligible to run under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. 

All 9 Justices today – including liberal judges Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotamayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – rejected that rationale, ruling that states have no power to ban candidates from federal elections, especially presidential ones. This ruling not only overturns Colorado's attempt to ban Trump from the ballot but presumably several other instances where Democratic state officials or judges banned Trump for similar reasons – the most recent being a low-level judge in Chicago. 

On one ancillary issue – whether the banning of a candidate on 14th Amendment grounds can only be decided by Congress – the court did divide along typical ideological lines. Amy Coney Barrett joined the 3 liberal judges in dissent, who argued that – once it was determined that states are barred from banning a candidate – there was no reason to decide any other questions, including whether only Congress could do so. But as Coney Barrett pointed out in her short concurring opinion: "our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home." 

We'll review today's ruling, its substance, and its implications. And we'll take a look back at how many self-described legal experts and neutral journalists were so insistent that Colorado had decided this question correctly — only for it to be completely and summarily shot down by a unanimous Supreme Court. All of this points to two of the most destructive pathologies in our media class: one is the complete lack of accountability – when journalists and their chosen experts get caught lying for partian ends, or masquerading their ideological opinions as neutral expertise – there is virtually never any accountability or even acknowledgement, making journalism and punditry among the most accountability-free professions in the country. 

THEN: Speaking of accountability-free punditry, when Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace the secular liberal saint Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an accusatory theme instantly emerged about her in liberal discourse: it was clear, they said, that Barrett has accepted a corrupt arrangement: namely, that Trump would put her on the court in exchange for her commitment to rule in his favor in case he lost the 2020 election. Since then, Justice Coney Barrett has had more than a dozen opportunities to intervene and keep Trump in power, and refrained from doing so every time. Just today, she again sided with liberal Justices – not for the first time, and clearly on principle – to try to limit a Court ruling that would have been beneficial to conservative political aims. In other words, she has proven to be the exact opposite of what establishment media liberals casually maligned her as being. Do you think there will be a single one re-considering their accusations and retracting it? To ask the question is to answer it, and to reveal so much about why our media class deserves all the distrust and contempt they have compiled.

FINALLY: There's another more subtle yet more pernicious aspect revealed by all of this: the way in which most expertise has been sacrificed at the altar of partisan agendas and ideological fever, degrading this expertise from what it should be and could be at its best – a apolitical means of understanding complex issues – and instead turning it into yet another untrustworthy political weapon completely crippled as a useful tool. It is not just what was said about Colorado's ruling that demonstrates this but several related episodes which we will cover in full.

 

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TUESDAY, MARCH 5 - SYSTEM UPDATE 239

Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland Ends Her Reign: Reviewing a Catastrophic Career Fomenting Bipartisan Wars

An in-depth review of the warmongering and monstrous career of Victoria Nuland. 

One of the most bloodthirsty and psychotic warmongers to occupy high office in Washington resigned March 5, evidently – and hopefully – bringing a shameful end to her long and destructive career in Washington. Victoria Nuland worked for every President from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden – with the sole exception that she was out of power only during the Trump presidency – announced today that she was resigning her position as Acting Deputy Secretary of State, a position to which she had just been promoted last July when the prior Deputy retired.

There is much speculation about why Nuland may have resigned now. Perhaps, it was due to her anger that the administration is not doing more to fuel the war in Ukraine against Russia, one of her pet projects for decades. Perhaps, it is anger of Biden's tepid criticism of Israel, a country which she supports as fanatically as anyone in Washington. Or perhaps – and most likely – it was due to the fact that she was just passed over to permanently become Deputy Secretary of State, the position second-in-line to ascend to her life-long ambition of becoming Secretary of State.

Whatever the reasons, and despite the horror show that will replace her, there is still much to celebrate from news of the end – at least for now – of Victoria Nuland's career in government. She served as Dick Cheney's top advisor for his disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. She then served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO when the Bush Administration, led by Condaleeza Rice and Nuland, began their attempt to expand NATO right up to the Russian border, including Ukraine – one can draw a direct line between that expansionist mentality and the decade-long war in Ukraine. She then ran Ukraine for the Obama administrations under Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, where she became one of the most extremist voices in Washington for placing the U.S. on a confrontational, provocative course with Russia. 

In 2014, a conversation she had with the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine was tape recorded and leaked – allegedly by Russia – in which they were caught plotting who should be chosen to rule Ukraine in the wake of the U.S.-supported coup that removed Ukraine's democratically elected President.

While Nuland, in one sense, is merely one of the most extremist representations of the bipartisan machine of endless war that has ruled DC for decades at the expense of ordinary Americans, she is also a singular menace. Nuland's pedigree is itself revealing: she married into the largest and most toxic neocon dynastic families. In the 1990s, she married Robert Kagan, who for decades was the principal partner of supreme neocon Bill Kristol, having worked with him in the 1990s to create the leading neocon group Americans for a New Century and having spent years before 9/11 urging the U.S. to invade Iraq and remove its government. 

According to Politico – who named the couple among the TOP 50 Most Powerful People in Washington in 2014 – the couple "fell in love ‘talking about democracy and the role of America in the world’ on one of their first dates."

That is neocon-speak for invading foreign countries and changing their governments. Kagan's father, brother, and sister-in-law are all leading neocons in Washington, sending other people's families to fight in one war after the next that they architect and sell to the American public.

Nuland's status as both a singular force for war and destruction – and her status as one of the most vivid symbols of how bipartisan and insulated from elections is her warmongering ideology – makes her particularly worthy of examination. Particularly upon her glorious resignation, understanding her trajectory is vital to understanding how Washington functions. Last August, we produced a comprehensive look at the rotted life, bloodthirsty value system, and warmongering obsessions that Nuland has pursued and implemented for decades under the rule of both parties. Given that we have an audience composed of many people who are recent arrivals, and given that her departure is a momentous occasion to take a look at what she did, we’d like to re-share that episode in full.

 

READ THE FULL STORY

WATCH THE EPISODE


THURSDAY, MARCH 7 - SYSTEM UPDATE 240

INTERVIEW: Newly-Elected, Anti-Establishment Member of UK Parliament—George Galloway—on the New Politics of the West

George Galloway has been a staunch voice in defense of common people against the rotten British establishment for years. We hear from him a few days after his resounding electoral victory to UK parliament.

George Galloway was elected to be a member of the British Parliament last week. He did not just win, but rather crushed both major political parties: the Conservative Tory party currently in power, and the Labour Party widely expected to win the Prime Ministership later this year under the tepid, vapid, and principle-free establishment symbol named Sir Keir Starmer. Galloway, running as part of a hard-to-characterize new party, received more votes than all other candidates combined.

Galloway, whatever else one might say about him, is a fascinating figure. He first came to prominence in the United States in 2003, when he voluntarily went to the American Congress – which at the time vehemently supported the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq on a widespread bipartisan basis – and he humiliated his interrogators in Congress on live national television. For those of you who never saw it, or who have not seen it in awhile, I highly recommend watching it: it was one of the most eloquent, articulate, and scathing displays of oratory I had ever seen, and he was unflinching in expressing his contempt for war-hungary Washington over its invasion of Iraq and the broader War on Terror.

At the time, Galloway was a member of the Labour Party, and had long been regarded as a man of the left. But the Labour Party in the UK – like the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden – was fully on board with the war in Iraq: its then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was internationally mocked for being George Bush's puppy dog, often offering a more vibrant and eager defense for the invasion of Iraq than Bush could ever muster. As a result of his outspoken denunciations of Blair and his role in the Iraq War, Galloway was expelled from his own party.

Since then, Galloway has twice returned to Parliament, representing three different parties and four different districts – or constituencies as they are known over there. He's like an anti-establishment zombie they think they keep killing, only for him to haunt them with his return.

But the case of George Galloway is fascinating not only because of the unique rage and contempt he induces in the political and media establishment – although it's really something to behold. He also clearly represents a new kind of politics – someone who, during the Iraq War, was universally regarded as a man of the left, only for him to adopt a series of views that put him directly at odds with left-liberal orthodoxy in the West: he vehemently opposed the U.S./NATO regime change wars in Syria and Libya; loudly opposed the U.S./UK fueling of the war in Ukraine from the start; heaps contempt on elite left-wing culture war pieties that alienate the exact working class that the left claims to represent; he defended BREXIT and resisted many COVID orthodoxies; and he opposes mass and uncontrolled immigration into Europe and the UK for the same reasons he opposes their wars: it's a boon to elite classes while the working class and ordinary people suffer.

George Galloway has changed none of his views from that era when he was expelled from the Labour party for opposing George Bush and Tony Blair's war in Iraq. But neoliberal foreign policy, centrist economics, and left-liberal culture war views have changed dramatically around him. More than anything else, George Galloway – like so many people these days – is driven by an ideology best described as anti-establishment. The reason his victory sparked such intense contempt is because that is the ideology and growing movement they fear more than any other.

We sat down with Galloway and discussed a wide range of issues. We talked about his radical and “changed” views, as well as his victory – which was very worth paying attention to. We are excited to show our conversation.

 

READ THE FULL STORY

WATCH THE EPISODE


FRIDAY, MARCH 8 - SYSTEM UPDATE 241

Biden & Trump Split on New TikTok Ban. 

 

PLUS: Briahna Joy Gray on Israel-Gaza, Dems 2024, and More

As the security state maintains its goal of banning TikTok in the U.S., Biden and Trump find themselves on opposite sides of this establishment flash point. PLUS: Friend of the show Briahna Joy Gray returns to talk about Biden's SOTU address.

For years now, Joe Biden and his White House have been advocating that the social media app TikTok be banned in the U.S., arguing that it is a tool of the Chinese government to spy on and propagandize American citizens, especially our youth. This push to ban TikTok originated with the U.S. Security State agencies – led by the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon – and now has the support of a majority of both political parties. 

This week, a bill unanimously passed a House Committee that would require TikTok to separate itself from any Chinese ownership in a set period of time or be banned – a measure the company and experts say amount to a full-on ban since it would be close to impossible to spin it off within the allotted time period. When earlier today he was asked if he supports and would sign the bill if it passed Congress, Biden — consistent with his long-standing opposition to TikTok – unequivocally said he would sign it.

Meanwhile, the almost-certain Republican nominee Donald Trump has warned of the dangers of this bill. On his Truth Social site, Trump warned that banning TikTok will, by design, drive millions of Americans into using Facebook and Google, the former of whom he blames for having "cheated in the last election." We have frequently reviewed why the arguments in favor of banning TikTok are largely fraudulent. 

The last time we covered this issue was back in November, when we examined and deconstructed every claim made by advocates of banning TikTok, and we won't repeat them here. Suffice to say, tens of millions of Americans voluntarily choose to use the social media app as their primary means of expression. It is the only major app among the Big Tech behemoths whose censorship decisions are not fully captured by the U.S. Government, meaning a ban would result in tens of millions of Americans being forced onto platforms such as Google and Facebook, platforms which – as we know from ample reporting – the U.S. Security State can coerce into censoring for them.

In many ways, China is to conservative politics what Russia is to liberal politics: an all-purpose bogeyman that can be used to explain away everything, scapegoat everything onto, and justify every new assertion of government power. We know many of you think that when Biden signs into law a ban on TikTok, it will constitute some major blow against the interests of Beijing. But as we have tried to argue previously, whenever the U.S. Government and Washington's ruling class seeks to dictate what platforms Americans can use, how they can use them, and who must control them, ample amounts of skepticism, at the very least, are required in response. That is most certainly true for this latest Biden-supported bill, and we will review the key aspects of it.

PLUS: Briahna Joy Gray is the former Press Secretary of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign; she's my former colleague at the Intercept; she's the co-host of Hill TV's news program Rising; the host of her podcast Bad Faith, and one of the sharpest and most incisive critics of the Biden administration. She will join us tonight to talk about last night's State of the Union speech by Joe Biden, his recent moves on Israel and Gaza, the likelihood that left-wing voters will abstain in significant numbers from supporting him in 2024, and much more. Briahna is always one of our favorite people to talk to – she is unfailingly honest and independent-minded – and we are excited to hear from her tonight.

 

READ THE FULL STORY MONDAY

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SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
01:07:46
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

I share your views on the sanctity of human life. I go a step further And believe In the sanctity of all life. The problem that America has is one of constructed distraction. The whole left/right conflict is the Distraction. The powerful are very good at keeping the public sight off of them. When the sites do get turned on them as it did when Luigi Mangione shot a CEO whose company caused endless suffering, (allegedly) they absolutely lose their minds. Keep the sights on them. We are fighting ourselves otherwise, distracted, as these powerful sociopaths pillage the last scraps of wealth from America before it completely collapses and then retreat to their luxury bunkers in Hawaii or Brazil (😬) or their summer Estate in New Zealand.

Also, I think the term “sanctity of life“ is too closely linked to the church. This term needs a rebranding in my opinion.

I also believe that Charlie Kirk was wearing body armour and the bullet hit centre mass and deflected into his neck. I think the ...

RE: Charlie Kirk ... I appreciated Glenn's comments tonight. It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven: "Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have."
That thing "he's gonna have" might be a change of mind about something you disagreed with him about. I just thought it was important that Glenn emphasized the point that we are all much more than our opinion about any one particular issue and even our opinion on that issue will often change over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aPs9HFX0Cs

It appears that someone in the crowd knew, in the least, that there was a shooter - he saw him - that was about to commit the premediated murder of Charlie Kirk. And after the person in the crowd turned around and saw that Charlie Kirk wasn’t there he cheered as if it were a sporting event.

I came across this from sweetmojo at the duran locals page. An important find in bringing the murderer to justice.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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