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Good evening. It's Monday, April 29. 

Tonight: When Russian activist Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison in February, it was asserted over and over by the U.S. media and U.S. politicians that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered him murdered but did not mean that metaphorically—that because Putin presides over a country where dissidents are in prison, unlike the United States, it meant that he bore ultimate moral responsibility for his death. No, they meant it literally. They were asserting that Navalny died because Putin ordered his murder. 

As we reviewed at the time, none of those claims made sense. Navalny died just days after Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin in his first interview with a Western journalist in more than two years and right as the $60 billion package that Biden had requested for Ukraine appeared to be permanently stalled in the GOP-led House. Why would Vladimir Putin, in the midst of all of that, order Alexei Navalny killed while he was already incommunicado in prison? And why would he then hand the West a major propaganda weapon to use against him? But none of those questions mattered. In fact, it was claimed that only Kremlin propagandists would even ask them. 

As we have seen ever since Russia became Public Enemy Number 1 in the United States when Democrats blamed that country for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss, the U.S. government and its corporate media servants assert anything and everything about Putin without the slightest regard for whether it's true, and even more so, regardless of whether the claim even makes basic sense. That's because, again, nobody can question any claims about that country, the world's largest nuclear power, without instantly being maligned as a Kremlin apologist or a Kremlin asset. That Putin ordered Navalny’s murder was treated as an unquestionable fact by the U.S. corporate media.  

As it turns out, this claim was completely fabricated. The Wall Street Journal reported late last week that even the U.S. intelligence community now admits there is no evidence of Putin's involvement in Navalny’s death. This hoax, just the latest in a long line designed to manipulate the American public into drowning in anti-Russia animus and even wanting war with them, was exposed as Ukraine continues to retreat and Russia continues to expand its control of that country in that war that is still ongoing.

Thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent years claiming he was opposed to more aid to Ukraine until he completely changed his mind and united with the Biden White House as he did on several other issues, the U.S. is now sending another $60 billion to a war that even Ukrainians are increasingly recognizing is futile and are refusing to fight in it. The propaganda served its purpose, though, of having the U.S. prolong this war, but the steep price being paid by Ukraine and by the American people continues to grow. 

Then: Each year, the White House press corps gets dressed up in gowns and other finery to attend a gaudy, sleazy, ostentatious gala at the White House that would embarrass Marie-Antoinette. They embarrassingly hobnob and pose with celebrities and with the White House, including the president, the person who they supposedly cover so adversarial, all while they showered themselves with praise and various awards. The primary function of this spectacle is that it reveals the true role of the U.S. press corps. They are eager members of the royal court, courtiers of it. This year was no different, and we will show you the lowlights that were particularly revealing about our current press corps. 

Finally: we have an update on the report we did last Thursday night regarding the nationwide crackdown on free speech and political protest all over college campuses in the United States, all to shield Israel from criticism and activism against its war. Columbia University today warned students that unless they immediately cease protesting the war in Gaza at the encampment that they created, they will be formally suspended from the school starting today and subject to arrest by the New York Police Department. All this despite there being no reports of any physical violence or physical assault that emanate from that campus. We will tell you about the latest in analyzing implications.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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Good evening. It's Thursday, April 25. 

As many of you undoubtedly noticed, we have not had a new show since last Thursday —a full week. That is because last week I contracted a lovely and chic and glamorous mosquito-borne virus called Dengue that is really quite debilitating. Only yesterday did I begin feeling vaguely human again, and it's been killing me not to be able to report on and analyze the numerous significant events over the last week. So, I am thrilled to be back, even if not yet fully 100%, in order to delve into as much of it as we can.

Beginning with tonight: the last seven months in the United States from October 7 until now, ranks among the greatest and most successful periods for the pro-censorship movement of any era in the United States. In years between the bipartisan ban or forced sale of TikTok, a topic we will cover another night, and the massive nationwide and long-planned crackdown on-campus political speech and protest in the name of protecting Israel. It is almost impossible to overstate how sustained and damaging this coordinated attack on core free speech rights has become. 

Supporters of Israel decided years ago that they must focus on American college campuses. One of the few prominent sectors of American life where Israel criticism and pro-Palestinian activism have been permitted to thrive. It also, by the way, thrives on TikTok, which is by all accounts a major reason that this ban, which has been lingering in Washington for years, suddenly picked up so much bipartisan support and has now been signed into law by President Biden. The reason that this country's most fanatical Israel supporters, the Ben Shapiros and Barry Weisses of the world, have been so obsessed for years with college students and college campuses is not that they are impassioned in genuine free speech activists—that's just the branding—and any lingering doubt about that should have been permanently dispelled since October 7. 

Instead, their obsessive focus on colleges is because the pro-Israel movement has understood that the greatest threat to pro-Israel consensus in the United States emanates from college campuses, in particular, their grave fear that the call to boycott and divest from Israel or to sanction it will have the same type of success as enjoyed by the movement of the 1980s on which it was based: activism to force divestment from South Africa as a means of weakening that apartheid regime. 

The desire to gain control of the range of permissible speech in American academia, and particularly the effort to ban Israel criticisms as anti-Semitic racism has long been brewing. October 7th was merely the much-awaited accelerant. As a result, one now sees Israel supporters of all types—neocons, Republicans, conservatives, pro-Israel, and Democrats—foaming at the mouth to weaponize racism accusations and police powers to silence Israel's critics. All of the most tawdry neocon tactics are on full display, including the equating of war critics with being “pro-Hamas”—and that has been fused with the embrace by much of the pro-Israel right of all the classic laughable theories of censorship over the last decade, namely, claiming that protests against Israel's wars have veered into racist hate speech, that words and slogans are themselves violence, and that they make Jewish students feel unsafe and thus must be forcibly silenced and punished. Never mind that Jewish students themselves compose a non-trivial, often significant segment of these pro-Palestinian protests on virtually every major American campus where they are found.

At bottom, this is not a complex question. If the First Amendment's free speech guarantees anything, it protects the right to protest and denounce the American government's decision to finance a foreign country's military and then arm and finance its highly destructive war. And it is precisely that right that is now under sustained and serious assault.

Then: there has been much that has been said about the protests taking place at campuses all across the country, particularly this week at Columbia University in New York. Tonight, we will speak to two of the students who have been actively participating in and helping to organize these protests: Jon Ben-Menachem, a Jewish PhD student, and an undergraduate student, Mohammad Hemeida, both of whom have been among the early leaders and organizers of the protest. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

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