Glenn Greenwald
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After RNC: Which Part of the Party Will Trump Embrace? The Dem Party's Growing Civil War; Scandal at WaPo Involving Neocon Max Boot and his Accused Spy-Wife
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July 22, 2024
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Good evening. It's Friday, July 19. 

Tonight: The four-day Republican National Convention concluded last night with a quite lengthy and sometimes genuinely emotional speech by the former president and current Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Typically, the purpose of a convention is to present a clear, unified and coherent vision of America and the policies that will facilitate it to the public – sometimes it is the genuine policy and ideological preference of that party, and sometimes that is simply the image the party wants the public to hear – but either way, there is usually a highly coordinated, scripted and tightly controlled message that the party wants the public to hear and on which the party intends to campaign. 

As was true for the first term of the Trump presidency, there were many clearly expressed views and perspectives that we heard during the Republican National Convention, but they were anything but tightly coordinated. In fact, there were often very contradictory speakers from one night to the next, or even from one speaker to the next. Trump's choice for vice president, JD Vance, for example, delivered a very populist anti-Wall Street message only for many traditional members of the Republican Party, from the more traditional wing, to demand the standard, subservient policies of the GOP when it comes to serving large corporate interests. Several speakers gave rousing and sometimes rather radical denunciations of U.S. support of the war in Ukraine, such as Tucker Carlson and David Sacks and even JD Vance alluded to that, while others were brought onto the platform in order to invade prominent speaking spots to urge the traditional hawkish GOP view about the war in Ukraine and about foreign policy in general. People like Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton, those worlds and those views could not have been further apart. And yet both of them are accommodated within the Republican Party. That incoherence was one of the biggest mistakes of the first Trump presidency, in my view. Trump won in 2016 on a clear platform of rejecting Bush-Cheney war policies, but then empowered people on the highest level of his government such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who are classic neocons who are pursuing exactly the opposite goals of the ones Trump won the campaign on. 

Given that Trump, by all accounts, has a very good chance of winning the 2024 election, it is very worthwhile and, I think, very important to examine what kind of presidency Trump will have this time around, or more to the point with which faction of the Republican Party he will align.

Then: the Democratic Party, by contrast, is embroiled in what can only be described, without hyperbole, as an embittered civil war, the likes of which we really haven't seen inside a major party for several decades. On the one hand, a huge segment of the Democratic Party leadership is using cowardly, anonymous leaks, highly coordinated ones, to make increasingly clear that they want Joe Biden out of the race as soon as possible and are doing everything and will continue to do everything possible to force his hand. While other members of the party and the party's base, as well as those closest to Joe Biden and the White House, are making equally clear still that they have no intention of withdrawing, but instead are quite enraged by the efforts of people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and now Barack Obama to attempt to force Joe Biden out of the race. 

For a while, it seemed Biden was almost certain not to leave. Then it started to look like the momentum for his expulsion was growing so much, and the league started claiming that he was on the verge of softening up and almost agreeing to leave. Now, it's hard to know if those leaks were just further designed to pressure him, and they were just lies, or whether they were real. But either way, we're now back to a situation of utter lack of clarity and even growing enmity within the party over these conflicting leaks. We will look at where everything is regarding the viability of Joe Biden's ongoing candidacy as the Democratic Party nominee. 

And then finally, we have a journalistic scandal that is just almost too good to be true. It just brings me so much pleasure to be able to report and talk about all of this. The fanatical neocon and Washington Post columnist, Max Boot, has been basically making a living over the past several decades, recklessly accusing anyone he disagrees with of being a clandestine agent of some foreign power, usually Russia. He is the author, for example, of endless screeds in the Washington Post claiming, obviously falsely, that Donald Trump secretly works for or is subservient to the Kremlin. He certainly says the same thing of anyone who has questioned the war in Ukraine and spent much of the War on Terror accusing the people who disagreed with him of being on the side of Saddam, secretly working for al-Qaida or Assad or Gaddafi, etc. He used that accusation of foreign disloyalty or secretly serving a foreign power any time anyone questioned the Bush-Cheney and then the Obama War on Terror policy that he supported. 

Yet now, in a turn of fate so karmically perfect that I can barely believe it's happening – you rarely get karmic justice this sweet and perfectly constructed – Max Boot's wife, a former CIA agent named Sue Mi Terri was just indicted by the Biden Justice Department for criminally serving as an undisclosed agent of the South Korean government and helping that government infiltrate the U.S. with South Korean spies, all without disclosing any of this. To make matters much worse for The Washington Post and for Max Boot, the duo often coauthored op-eds in The Washington Post that were not only about South Korea but also, according to the DOJ, were written after Sue Mi Terri explicitly requested instructions from her paymasters in Seoul on what she should say. In other words, many articles published by The Washington Post and even the New York Times about South Korea, written to advance the interests of the South Korean government, were being published in her name and her husband's name at the same time, according to the Justice Department, those articles were specifically constructed not to express a genuine opinion, but to advance the interests of a foreign government that, unbeknownst to any of the readers or perhaps to these papers, was paying her not only to do that but to help it contaminate the U.S. government with its spies. We'll examine the implications and the fallout of this delicious but highly revealing journalistic scandal. 

Next week I will be traveling on a family vacation for the next 8 or 9 days or so, but we will not be off the air. We will have at least one guest host, perhaps two, at least one of whom will be here in the studio. We'll have our Tuesday and Thursday aftershow as normal and everything else perfectly normal, except somebody else will be sitting in this very spot, so we hope you'll watch. I think it'll be people who obviously will have a slightly different view than I on a variety of issues. Nobody, I think, sees everything the way that I see them. That's very rare to find and this isn't MSNBC or CNN where everyone is forced to agree to the same things but, certainly, there are people who have compatible fundamental approaches to how to think about politics and journalism. I think the show will benefit from an injection of something a little bit different but, obviously, we'll be back right after that week and we will resume the show regularly. 

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

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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 Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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