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.

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Tulsi Gabbard appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee today – a committee specifically constructed to feature only blind supporters of the US Security State – and she was unsurprisingly, relentlessly pummeled by members of both political parties as part of her confirmation process to become Director of National Intelligence. I don’t want to make any predictions – the vote will be held after a secret session – but there is a real chance that some Senate Republicans will defect and her nomination could be in serious jeopardy. 

What matters is the reason these committee members were so enraged by her. They focused almost the entire session for hours in public on two and only two issues: 1) Tulsi has expressed support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, heralding him as a courageous whistleblower, and 2) she has expressed opposition to laws – specifically Section 702 of FISA – which allows the FBI and NSA to spy on American citizens without the warrants required by law. In other words, these committee members were furious with Tulsi Gabbard for having opposed the U.S. government's abuse of its spying power and their lies about it to the American public. 

So much of this hearing today so vividly illustrated exactly what is so destructive, grotesque and deceitful about the bipartisan DC establishment – what Donald Trump has so aptly referred to for eight years now as The Swamp. I can't think of a day that more viscerally demonstrated who these people are and why their dogma has been so damaging. 

We’re going to take the show tonight to really break down what happened today. There are so many components to it, so many dimensions that are really worth analyzing and because it was bipartisan, it says so much about the real way Washington works. 

Yesterday, I sat through almost the entire confirmation hearing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary where he was relentlessly attacked, as we covered and reported last night, by multiple members of that committee. The same exact thing happened today with Tulsi Gabbard in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee although she was attacked by members of both political parties, not just one. It also happened in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Kash Patel appeared for his confirmation hearing to become director of the FBI.

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!

If you told someone that Trump would appoint a lifelong pro-choice Democratic Party environmental lawyer to lead our country's health agencies and that Democrats would then unite and enrage opposition to him, you would likely be very surprised, especially if you heard that – just a week ago – all those Democrats unanimously united to vote to make Marco Rubio secretary of state. This is exactly what is happening: Democrats led by people like Ron Wyden, Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders, were quite vicious and scathing in maligning virtually every aspect of RFK Jr.'s character, repeatedly portraying him as a corrupted sell-out, a science denier and opponent of vaccines who will directly kill huge numbers of children with his policies. 

For months now, Israel supporters have been looking for a way to criminalize both protests against the Israeli war in Gaza and, even more menacingly, speech that is critical of the foreign government that they revere. That effort to destroy the First Amendment to protect this foreign country received a major boost today when President Trump announced an executive order for the deportation of anyone legally in the U.S. on a student visa, but who participated in protests against the Israeli destruction of Gaza. This is a pure speech-based order, by which I mean that if you're a foreign student legally in the U.S. and you protest in favor of Israel, even if you commit crimes while doing so, you're perfectly fine: no worries at all. You're a foreign student; you're allowed to protest in defense of Israel and your visa will not be jeopardized even if you break the law. This order only threatens those who protest against Israel: a classically unconstitutional assault on free speech, which is purely viewpoint-based. 

In our third segment, we’ll talk to Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research fellow in the democratizing foreign policy unit of the Quincy Institute. He has been producing some very interesting and important reports on exactly who is behind the most influential think tanks in Washington and how that funding shapes their influence over our government. 

I just want to show you a couple of clips from RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearing today that took place before the Senate Finance Committee because it was really something that was far more virulent, I think, than a lot of people expected. 

Obviously, Democrats in large numbers were going to be opposed, although some suggested they might be open to it, and yet the venom that they used to treat RFK Jr., a lifelong Democrat, a pro-choice environmental lawyer whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the health agencies was something that was really quite remarkable. They really tried to do everything possible, not just to suggest he was unqualified for the position or dangerous in it, but really to destroy his character in every way. 

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!

 It has long been forgotten by many, but it was completely prohibited during the first year of the COVID pandemic, even to question the virus's origins. That's because Anthony Fauci had his various minions issue a decree in The Lancet in a now notorious proclamation at the very start of the pandemic, announcing – falsely – that it was already scientifically proven that COVID began with an organic, natural zoonotic leap, from animal species to humans. As a result, they proclaimed, any discussion of the possibility that the virus leaked from the coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, was deceitful disinformation, racism and an attack on science.

Since then, the FBI and the elite scientific unit of the Department of Energy under Joe Biden rejected that certainty and concluded that it is more likely than not that the virus came from a lab leak, not from a zoonotic animal-to-human leap. The CIA this week announced findings of an investigation conducted under the Biden administration that concluded the same thing: it is the agency's official position now that COVID came from a leak in the Wuhan lab. 

It goes without saying that the mere fact that these agencies believe this to be true does not prove that it is in fact true: they often lie. But the issue here is not that they made mistakes, but that they prevented those mistakes from being examined by asserting a certainty as a basis for censoring discussion of what they were claiming. 

CNN’s Jim Acosta was told that he could stay at the network only if he agreed to host a show in the middle of the night. Nobody watches CNN in prime time - imagine how lonely it would be to host a show at 1 a.m. As a result, he announced on the network that he was leaving CNN, making clear he was doing so because he did not want to be relegated to the bewitching hours. He took the opportunity – needless to say – to once again depict himself as a singularly and shockingly brave reporter who has become the Conscience of the Nation through his relentless and noble bravery in standing up to power whatever the cost. 

Liberals and other assorted democratic partizans are – for totally understandable reasons – lamenting Acosta's departure. In fact, they're indignant about it. If you were them, wouldn't you be? He was a 24-hour-a-day propaganda machine for the Democratic Party masquerading as a journalist. But given that he has in fact been held up by some, including his own colleagues, as some sort of model of American journalism, it is well worth using his portrayal and now his forced resignation to examine the vital questions of what has been meant by the words “journalist” and “journalism” inside these corporate news outlets, and to see how they are possibly changing.