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 Russiagate fraud is receiving all sorts of new attention and scrutiny thanks to documents first declassified and then released by Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. As we reported at length last week, these documents were quite incriminating for various Obama officials, such as former CIA Director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as they reveal what was a deliberate attempt to weaponize intelligence findings for purely partisan and political ends in 2016, namely, to manipulate the American electorate into voting for their former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton as president, and more importantly, defeating Donald Trump, and then repeatedly lying about it to Congress and the American people. 

Yesterday, it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi is not only investigating, which is kind of meaningless, but what's not meaningless is that she's also apparently empaneling a grand jury to investigate whether there was prosecutable criminality at the highest levels of the Obama administration. We'll examine that obviously important question. 

Then, we’ll examine what's driving all his complex escalation of Trump’s decision for 50% tariffs on Brazilian products and what's at stake, and the potential consequences for all sides. 

I believe it's been obvious, pretty much from the very beginning of the Russiagate hoax, the Russiagate fraud, which I'll remind you, again, was driven by the core conspiracy claim that the Trump campaign officials collaborated and colluded and conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC email server as well as John Podesta's email and disseminate those emails to WikiLeaks and by the broader conspiracy theory that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with sexual material, compromising financial information, personal blackmail as well, and that therefore the Kremlin was basically, once Trump got elected running the country, was a completely unhinged and deranged conspiracy theory from the start for which there was no evidence. 

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!

That the U.S. government and multiple state governments are devoutly loyal to Israel is hardly a secret. Anyone who pays even minimal attention to American politics knows that. The Trump administration has severely escalated this framework. The administration does not just send billions of dollars and massive amounts of arms to Israel, but they go much further: they have been routinely punishing American citizens and jeopardizing American interests to serve and protect Israeli interests. 

Our guest is Melissa Witte. Last week, I praised her work and independent journalism. Mel Witte is a strong believer in the America First ideology that was sold by Donald Trump, whose candidacy and MAGA movement she has supported. But unlike many, if not most, Trump supporters, she actually took seriously the core promises of America First, and she has been scathing in her denunciation of the Trump administration for deviating so brazenly from them, but also quite relentless and meticulous and detail-oriented and evidence-based in her reporting on all of these matters. We have wanted her on our show for some time and she is our guest for this show. 

I don't think people realize how many policies there are already in place in the United States that punish American citizens and deprive American citizens of certain benefits and certain rights if they'd refuse to either sign a loyalty oath to Israel, where they agree never to boycott the state of Israel, even though they're allowed to boycott every other country on the planet, even other American states, you just can't boycott Israel. 

There are also many programs that will dismantle crucial programs beneficial to American interests in order to shield Israel from criticism or to claim that, by allowing protest against Israel, an institution is being antisemitic. And it doesn't matter how valuable these programs are, if they're associated with an institution that Israel supporters dislike for having allowed some protests against Israel, they will dismantle and defund the program. Let's start with the second policy that happened on Friday night as an example, just to illustrate how extreme this has become. 

Here's Paul Graham, a very successful investor in Silicon Valley, who has been very supportive of Republican and conservative policies, but also quite outspoken about the Trump administration's financing of Israel. On August 3, 2025, he said this:

 Terrence Tao is probably the most important and accomplished mathematician on the planet. Maybe there are two or three people who compete with him. He's an Australian American citizen. He works inside the United States, on research programs funded by the U.S. government, which the government funds because applied mathematics is one of the most crucial fields to all sorts of programs that the United States needs to compete with China, from AI and cryptography to detecting financial fraud or managing financial transactions. 

The Allies were able to break Nazi codes using cryptography because of mathematicians during World War II. That's the equivalent of who this person is and what this program does. Yet, the Trump administration just announced that they're defunding it, not because they say that it's wasteful or that it's not producing benefits. And it's no part of some broader attempt to defund research programs at universities. The Trump administration is funding all sorts of research. Instituting programs at universities is something the U.S. government has always done for its own benefit. 

The only programs they're defunding are ones that they claim are attached to institutions like UCLA, which they claimed are antisemitic. They claim that about Harvard, filled with Jewish students and Jewish administrators, five of the last seven presidents of Harvard are Jewish, yet somehow the Trump administration decided that's an antisemitic institution because they allowed protests against Israel. Same with UCLA. Anyone who knows UCLA knows how robustly represented Jewish students and Jewish faculty members are. 

Read here what Terence Tao said on his social media account about why this was done. This was on August 1. 

 Again, this is so ironic. The conservative movement spent a full decade mocking claims of racism, mocking claims that people on college campuses need anti-discrimination protection, then the Trump administration gets in and makes it one of their very top priorities to declare that there's a racism epidemic in the United States, but only against one group. There's only one genuinely marginalized, true victim group in the United States, and that's American Jews and the Trump administration has been doing everything, no matter how much it harms American citizens or American interests, to purge the world of this one form of bigotry that it claims has pervaded all American institutions. And it will sacrifice anything to do so. This is not new. This is just how extreme these things can get in the framework of American politics. 

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 as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast platform.  

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!

One of President Trump's most powerful advisers, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called "patently false" statements about the Trump administration’s policy. Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out – and documented, as I've done many times – that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded "hate speech" code that outlawed a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals and, even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded "hate speech" code on campuses to restrict the free speech rights, not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators and American students. It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses. 

I also pointed out – as I have covered here many times – that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel. All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true. Yet after I pointed them out yesterday, and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them to convince them that my claims weren't true. When that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials – Stephen Miller – to label my claims “patently false." 

The policies in question, adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely, since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities, and the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated. So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight. 

Then: The emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party. All of that, in turn, led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as to all new voices and perspectives. One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight: he's Sohrab Ahmari, one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now the U.S. editor for the online journal UnHerd. We’ll talk about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more. 

Sometimes, government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents, sometimes legal documents, that have a great deal of complexity to them. 

Oftentimes, when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try to confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing are untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevances or false claims. A lot of people don't know what to make of it. They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that. Especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, “Oh, that's a lie. Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that. That's not actually what we're doing.”

Yet when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth. And that is what happened last night. 

I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas. 

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas. 

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds. 

That's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing. What they said they believed in, Donald Trump, in his inauguration and other times, was that he wanted to restore free speech. Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views. And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing. 

I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing.