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It's Wednesday, September 18. 

Tonight: For the second consecutive day, Israel attacked not just Hezbollah, but the Lebanese people in civilian areas in unprecedented and quite dastardly ways. Unlike yesterday, when Israel dubiously claimed to have targeted mobile phones ordered and used exclusively by Hezbollah, a claim we deconstructed on last night's show, today's new destruction was clearly more indiscriminate with booby-trapped walkie talkies exploding all at the same time with much greater force, not only in civilian areas but in civilian infrastructure like apartment buildings and even in stores that sell – not to Hezbollah but to the public – the devices that Israel implanted with bombs and exploded in the stores. At least 20 more people were killed and another 400 were injured.

From the start of the October 7 attack, it seemed highly likely that Israeli citizens and their American supporters would embrace exactly the same mentality, premises and grave self-destructive mistakes that the U.S. and Americans made in response to the September 11 attacks: mistakes that wrought so much erosion of previously observed taboos of our national credibility and values, and which featured all sorts of dramatic victories that ultimately achieved nothing other than undermining our own interests – as evidenced by the Taliban's instant return to power as the United States left Afghanistan, their country, after 20 years. 

To understand this mindset of random vengeance and then dehumanization that drove so much of the American War on Terror abuses that we're now seeing in the response to October 7, not just in Gaza now, but in Lebanon as well, it is useful to dive in a very visceral way to what happened to understand what enabled it not just to describe it, but we produced a video using one of the best videographers that we know to try and give a real sense of what that climate was like for those who had lived through it or those of you have forgotten a lot of it. 

We're coming up on the anniversary of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which, coming so soon after the 9/11 attack, laid the groundwork for so much of what was to come, particularly since it was falsely blamed on Iraq. We want to take you somewhat back to that period in a very illustrative way to understand how similar it is to what is taking place all around Israel's violence and aggression today. 

Then: while the ACLU has become an increasingly partisan organization so radically advancing the values that once defined it and made it so great – in fact, so partisan that it has even retreated now from its defining absolutist defense of free speech – another group, thankfully, has rapidly taken its place as a completely apolitical and nonpartisan, yet vehement defender of free speech. No matter whose speech is under attack and who the perpetrators of that attack are or what the cause in whose name the attackers of free speech are, that organization is FIRE.org, which we talked before about to a rather significant extent, and we are thrilled to speak to its executive vice president, Nico Perrino, about so many of the attacks on queer free expression, rapidly appearing more and more in America's key institutions, including academic campuses and increasingly in federal and state law, as well as a major victory that FIRE just achieved in response to a government attacking a Citizens First Amendment right in such a blatant way, as well as other victories that they piled up in fortifying the right of free expression for all of us. 

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Tuesday, September 17. 

Tonight: Israel severely injured more than 4000 people and killed at least 12 today in the suburbs of Beirut, including an eight-year-old girl. Perhaps more notable than the casualty number itself, which is obviously quite high, is the means Israel used to gravely injure and kill so many people, namely the Mossad, somehow intercepted the supply chain used by Hezbollah and others to purchase wireless pagers. After intercepting those devices, Israel apparently installed bombs in thousands of them and then programmed the bombs so that Israel could detonate them remotely all at once, whether in people's pockets, in their hands, or wherever they might be. Earlier today, East Coast time, that is exactly what Israel did, where thousands of mobile pagers and the like instantaneously exploded as people walked in shopping areas, cafes, restaurants, shops, pedestrian-heavy streets, and anywhere else those devices happened to be. This was not on a battlefield. This was in the suburbs of Beirut. 

Israel and its loyal supporters of the U.S. claim – as they always do, no matter what the conduct in question is – that the Israeli attack was not only justified as a means of attacking Hezbollah but was also extremely calibrated to avoid civilian armies because the IDF is the most moral army in the world, they hate killing civilians. 

I suppose one could say that this attack today was, quote, “targeted” by comparing it to the utterly indiscriminate mass bombings and killings that Israel has carried out in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank over the last year, utterly destroying all civilian infrastructure in Gaza, flattening apartment buildings of entire neighborhoods and killing tens of thousands of people, but blowing things up remotely without having any idea where those devices are and knowing full well that many of them are almost certain to be used in many civilian areas is the opposite of targeted bombing. We'll explore the claim of Israel's supporters that this attack was legitimate and targeted self-defense, or whether this is more akin to terrorism, which is clearly what it would be called if carried out by any other nation.

Then: Jordan Chariton has been one of the independent journalists who most uses classic shoe leather investigative journalism and on-the-ground reporting to inform Americans of issues that few others are covering so in depth. For years – going back to the Obama years – Chariton made numerous sustained visits to Flint, Michigan, to cover the years-long poisoning of that community's water supply and the government's apparent utter indifference. He has a new book based on that reporting and titled "We the Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans."  We will talk about that as well as speak to him about the extensive unseen reporting he has been doing this year in Michigan, speaking to the crucial Arab and Muslim voters in that state about how the Biden-Harris administration's full-scale funding and arming of the Israeli war in Gaza may affect their voting decision and, with it, the 2024 election. 

And finally: Hillary Clinton went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program last night and I can barely express how challenging and adversarial the interview was. I'm sure you can imagine if you haven't seen it. Hillary, almost in passing, vehemently advocated that Americans whom she believes are spreading disinformation and propaganda should not only be civilly sued by the government but also criminally prosecuted and put in prison. If that dystopic authoritarian vision were ever to be implemented in the U.S. as Hillary wants, the very first people who should be sharing a jail cell are Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow, who drowned our country and its political system in one false conspiracy theory after the next: from the Steele Dossier to the secret Alfa Bank server Trump used, to many other demented debunked lies. We'll show you what Hillary said and what the implications would be – though we may not have time because I will be on Jesse Water's Fox show live right after 8 p.m. EST, so if we run out of time, we will do that segment on our Locals platform right after that Fox appearance.

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Monday, September 16. 

Tonight: For the second time in the last two months, Donald Trump was the target of an evidently serious attempted assassination. Unlike last time, the attempted assassin was not able to shoot Trump, but he came within a few hundred yards of him on the former president's golf course, packed with an AK 15 and other armaments. Unlike the first shooter, in Pennsylvania, who was strangely depicted as an utterly apolitical loner with no Internet footprint who simply acted out a mental illness, this shooter, identified as 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, has expressed all sorts of clear political statements over the year, including increasing levels of animosity toward Donald Trump. His principal political project over the last two years has been a fanatical devotion to supporting Ukraine to the point that he went to Ukraine and tried to position himself as some sort of leading American coordinator of foreign volunteer upon foreign volunteer troops and repeatedly pledged that he would die for Ukraine against Russia if necessary. 

Just five months ago, in April, he begged Joe Biden on Twitter to please win the 2024 elections. Echoing the standard liberal pundit view that, quote, “democracy is on the ballot and Trump is a grave threat to it,” he sounded like anyone on MSNBC does. We'll examine what we know about this attempted assassin of Trump, the reality versus widespread media claims about him. 

And then beyond that: it is very common for Trump supporters to be accused of having incited violence through their political rhetoric. I still remember when Tucker Carlson was widely blamed by consensus for the white nationalist shooter in Buffalo who killed ten African Americans, despite literally no evidence that the shooter even knew who Tucker Carlson was, let alone that he was inspired by anything he said. Moreover, even if he had listened to Tucker Carlson, this theory that that would make somebody expressing political views responsible for the violent acts of those who hear them is extremely dubious, I'd argue even dangerous. 

And yet every time someone acts in the name of a common, identifiable liberal ideology with the goal of attempting violence against someone on the right, the whole dynamic reverses: not only can liberals never stand accused of so-called stochastic terrorism – the theory the protected speech can incite violence, rendering the speaker responsible for the acts of others – but somehow, at least in this case, there is a widespread media narrative that Trump and his rhetoric are to blame for having incited two murder attempts against himself in the last two months and that the only way to solve it is for Trump to lower the temperature and change his rhetoric. We'll examine all of this. When there are two political attempted assassinations of a leading political candidate, and a former president, within the scope of two months, there are a lot of important things to analyze. 

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