We are pleased to summarize the key stories we covered last week on SYSTEM UPDATE.
—Glenn Greenwald
MONDAY, JUNE 3 - SYSTEM UPDATE 276
Dr. Fauci Coddled by Democrats During COVID Testimony While He’s Grilled by GOP
PLUS: Interview with Russia/Ukraine Expert Prof. Ivan Katchanovski on Ukraine’s Growing Problems
Dems praised Dr. Fauci during his Congressional COVID hearing while GOP members pressed him on lab-leak theory cover-up efforts. Russia/Ukraine expert Prof. Ivan Katchanovski warns about Ukraine’s growing draft resistance and the realities of the war ignored by Western media.
The COVID pandemic was unquestionably one of the most significant events of our lifetime. Entire populations, countries, and communities were shut down for almost two years. Children were forcibly masked, vaccinated with an experimental medication, and prevented from attending schools for months at a time. People were trained to acquiesce to a level of control previously unthinkable: from being arrested for certain kinds of political protests, to standing six feet apart from one another in public, to obeying curfews and lockdowns. Questioning many of the pronouncements and policy decisions of health care and other political officials were banned through online censorship.
Yet, for a variety of reasons, there has been no accountability for these acts and very little transparency about the government’s decision-making. In part, that is because COVID turned into a partisan culture war issue in which the defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO became a virtually religious duty. Any criticisms or even questioning of his decisions and judgments were off-limits and deemed as right-wing attacks on science. Thus, liberal elites and most Democratic Party members and followers insist that Dr. Fauci is a hero and that any inquiry should begin and end there. They insist that all those other questions, debates, and controversies should be left alone and unresolved.
We should be thankful that some members of Congress and some members of the media — mostly the independent media — refused to allow such a momentous moment in history to go unexamined. Over the last year, there has finally been some reporting that makes undeniably clear that many of the statements made by health policy elites were highly dubious, if not outright deliberately false. But establishment sectors have implicitly decided that there is no benefit in re-examining any of what happened during that period — almost all of which they vigorously endorsed. I have many criticisms of the House Republicans — particularly with respect to their support for the Biden administration's foreign policy in Ukraine, Israel, and most other places — but they have done a commendable job in taking their oversight responsibilities concerning the Executive Branch.
Monday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — something I can guarantee would not exist if the Democrats were in control of the House — held a hearing at which Dr. Fauci testified. One Democrat after the next expressed outrage that Dr. Fauci was even being questioned at all and instead used their time to heap unfettered and obsequious praise on him, much like they do when officials from the U.S. Security State appear before Congress. Fauci was grilled by GOP members on a wide range of issues, including his statements and decisions regarding the origins of COVID-19, mask mandates, vaccine efficacy and harm, and far more. Many of these exchanges were quite revealing — of Fauci's borderline-pathological willingness to lie and about the substantive issues themselves — and we will report on the key highlights.
Then: Disturbing scenes of Ukrainian men violently resisting efforts to force them to the front lines in the war against Russia — men refusing to serve as cannon fodder for this futile NATO war against Russia — have become increasingly common. In general, they know what everyone not named Zelenskyy or Lindsey Graham has long ago recognized: there is no way NATO can achieve its definition of "victory."
Prof. Katchanovski has been one of the most reliable sources of news and analysis since the start of this war. A scholar in Russian studies and that region, Professor Katchanovski now teaches at the School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. We are thrilled to welcome him to discuss the latest defeats and problems for Ukraine and the West, the serious and growing challenges of Ukrainian recruitment, and the causes that led to this conflict in the first place.
READ THE FULL STORY
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW
WATCH THE EPISODE
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 - SYSTEM UPDATE 277
INTERVIEW: Sen. Rand Paul on COVID Cover-Ups, Ukraine, and More
PLUS: Israel's Disinformation Campaign in the U.S. Revealed and Hunter Biden Laptop Story Vindicated
Senator Rand Paul returns to talk about COVID-19 cover-ups, U.S.-backed wars, and Trump’s conviction. Israeli influence campaign in the U.S. revealed, just as Hunter Biden’s laptop — once deemed “Russian disinformation” — authenticated by an FBI agent.
We speak to Sen. Rand Paul, the thrice-elected Senator from the state of Kentucky, about a wide range of issues. Among them are the key revelations from Dr. Fauci’s testimony at a House hearing on COVID, efforts to censor dissidents and people like Sen. Paul from questioning Dr. Fauci’s claims, and remaining questions about COVID. Plus, we speak to him about the ongoing futile and failing war in Ukraine and why the U.S. Government continues to fund it.
But before we get to our interview with Senator Paul, both the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the New York Times reported Wednesday, based on the research and journalism of the journalism watchdog site entitled "Fake Reporting," that Israel has launched a large-scale disinformation campaign aimed at Americans — mostly black Americans and progressives — designed to manipulate them into having more positive views of Israel and its war in Gaza. Many of the tactics used involved fake accounts, inorganic messages, and attempts to deceive people about the identity of those making various claims.
For the same reasons I long scoffed about the grave attack on American democracy caused by Russian and Chinese messaging campaigns aimed at Americans, I am not going to claim I regard this as some massive threat to our liberty. But it does raise the question of why these revelations are treated so differently from similar campaigns involving other nations. For years, we have heard from the top levels of our government that few things threaten American democracy more than influence campaigns from Russia and China. That rationale was even the basis for the banning or forced sale of TikTok recently and the basis of four years of Russiagate hysteria.
If those foreign influence campaigns are such an affront to our sovereignty and such a grave threat to our democracy, why aren't the ones that Israel has clandestinely launched against our citizenry considered to be similarly menacing? Why do all of the claimed beliefs and values of so many people instantly dissipate when it comes to this one foreign country? We will have the details on this Israeli influence campaign and remind you of what U.S. officials previously said about such projects when coming from other foreign nations.
Then: We will briefly report on an infuriating but unsurprising development in the prosecution of the President's son, Hunter Biden. In order to prosecute Hunter Biden, the FBI and DOJ need to rely on documents taken from his laptop. And to use such documents, the FBI has to testify that they concluded that the laptop and the documents found on it were both authentic and unaltered, and that is exactly what the FBI just testified to under oath.
That claim, while provably true, is the exact opposite of the claim that was continuously circulated by a union of the CIA, the corporate media, and the Democratic Party: namely, that no reporting based on documents taken from the laptop could be trusted because the laptop was not authentic but rather "Russian disinformation." This claim was long disproven — including by the very media outlets that first spread the original lie. To see an admission this ironclad from the FBI — made under oath during Hunter Biden’s prosecution — is yet another reminder of the severity of the media/intelligence community fraud before the 2020 election.
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THURSDAY, JUNE 6 - SYSTEM UPDATE 278
Steve Bannon's Contempt Charges Reveal Historic Double Standard
Interview with RFK Jr.'s Running Mate Nicole Shanahan on the 2024 Election and More
A historical weaponization of the legal system by the Biden DOJ as Steve Bannon is sent to jail. Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate, speaks on running as an Independent, money in politics, foreign affairs, and more.
Steve Bannon — one of President Trump's top White House advisers in the first part of his presidency, and currently one of his closest allies — was ordered to surrender to a federal prison on July 1, three weeks from now. Bannon had been out on bail pending appeal of his 2022 conviction on charges of disobeying a Congressional subpoena to testify about the events of January 6. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison.
In addition to President Trump — who was just convicted of 34 felonies on obviously dubious and, no pun intended, trumped-up charges — Bannon is not the first top Trump aide to be jailed for an alleged violation of a Congressional subpoena. In March of this year, Peter Navarro, President Trump's trade advisor, reported to a federal prison to serve a four-month sentence on similar charges. A large group of key Trump officials and allies — including Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone — also faced unprecedented prosecutions in American history.
Indeed, Congress often issues subpoenas to Washington officials that are ignored or violated in one way or the other. Rarely, does that result in anything like what has been done to Navarro and now Bannon. We'll go through the relevant history to illustrate how, yet again, the Biden DOJ and Democratic prosecutors are so transparently weaponizing the legal and judicial system against their political enemies for partisan ends.
In general, as I learned firsthand when I started writing about politics in the second term of the Bush administration and then into the Obama administration, the consensus in Washington politics and media has long been that only banana republic countries prosecute their political enemies and the prior administration. I never agreed with that consensus — I wrote countless articles and even a 2011 book arguing against it — but these prosecutions do not represent an abandonment of that Washington rule. Like so many other things, it represents merely a temporary suspension for one Washington official: Donald Trump.
Then: We will speak to Nicole Shanahan, now officially the Vice Presidential running mate of RFK, Jr. If polls hold up at all, that ticket will be one of the most successful third-party candidacies in decades.
Bobby Kennedy's choice baffled a lot of people. While Shanahan is reasonably well-known in Silicon Valley — in part for accumulating a net worth estimated at $1 billion as a result of her marriage to one of the world's richest billionaires, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and in part for her accomplishments and initiatives — many American citizens had never heard of Shanahan since she never held elected office of any kind.
That does not mean that she has been uninterested in politics. She has donated a reasonably large amount of money to Democratic Party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, the 2020 campaign of Joe Biden, as well as more left-wing candidates and causes. This raises a lot of questions about her current political views, her past political trajectory, and the role of big money in our politics. We'll talk to her about that, as well as her views on current U.S.-financed wars, the issue of online censorship, whistleblowers, and more.
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FRIDAY, JUNE 7 - SYSTEM UPDATE 279
Briahna Joy Gray on her Firing from The Hill and Free Speech Double Standards
Leighton Woodhouse on his Reporting About Dr. Fauci’s Dog Experiments
Briahna Joy Gray talks about her firing from The Hill, her viral “eye roll” moment, and corporate media’s history of censoring Israel’s critics. Leighton Woodhouse reveals the truth about Dr. Fauci’s dog experiment cover-up and The Washington Post’s role in spinning facts into "conspiracies."
There's no doubt that certain forms of right-wing speech have been targeted with censorship over the last decade: in academia, in media, and online. But it is equally true that in the United States, Israel's critics have been frequent targets of viewpoint-based firings, censorship, and other forms of sanctions. One could spend all night documenting how many people have been fired or censored for criticizing this one foreign country and still not be close to comprehensively documenting all of them.
Since Oct. 7, this always-potent censorship framework has exploded. There are at least dozens of cases of media figures, political officials, and academics who have been fired for saying the wrong thing about Israel. As we have repeatedly reported: laws have been enacted to expand the legal definition of "antisemitism" to include a wide range of commonly expressed oppositions to Israel; fanatically pro-Israel governors have issued Executive Orders purporting to ban antisemitism – though no other form of bigotry – in their states; and there have been countless attempts to punish students who express opposition to Israel.
The long list of Americans being fired for expressing views about Israel deemed over the line or even bigoted now has a new member: she is Briahna Joy Gray, my former colleague at The Intercept, the Press Secretary of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, and, until yesterday, the very popular host of The Hill’s news show called "Rising." After Briahna became a major target of indignation by pro-Israel activists over the last several weeks, The Hill sent her an email firing her yesterday.
Then: when Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress last week, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him about gruesome and morally repugnant experiments that had been conducted on dogs – specifically beagles, who were chosen because of their particularly trusting and human-loving nature. Democratic partisans and others in the media immediately mocked her for spreading a deranged conspiracy theory, in part because news outlets – particularly the Washington Post – had gone to great lengths to depict this connection as a right-wing lie.
But it is far from a lie.
Earlier today, the independent journalist Leighton Woodhouse – with whom I have done extensive reporting over the years on the cause of mistreatment of animals – published a detailed and amply documented report on our Locals site that laid out all the facts that Fauci and the NIH have tried to conceal. Those facts make clear the connection between the U.S. Government and these dog experiments.
Roughly at the same time that we published Leighton's article, the Washington Post fact-checker, notorious for being extremely partisan in favor of Democrats, published his own analysis of Congresswoman's Greene accusations and Fauci's denial. The Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, began with a confession: "When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic."
But he ultimately concluded that the facts cast grave doubt on the denials of both Fauci and the NIH. We will speak to Leighton Woodhouse about what he discovered and reported.
READ THE FULL STORY MONDAY
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READ LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE’S ORIGINAL REPORTING
