Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Biden Withdrawal Reaction; Kamala Harris: The Reality VS The Image
Video Transcript
July 23, 2024
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Good evening everybody. It is July 22. 

Tonight: We have a very special guest on System Update and I'm excited to announce who he is. That special guest is me! As I think many of you know, I announced it on Friday, I'm actually on vacation. I was taking a vacation starting on Saturday for the next ten days or so, and I announced that we would have, at least one, maybe a series of guest hosts to cover the show. We are going to be on there every night while I'm traveling, but obviously there was no way for me to simply disappear and not comment on an event as momentous, as historic, as bizarre, and as meaningful as Joe Biden's so-called decision to no longer seek the Democratic nomination for president, despite the fact that as recently as 24 hours before his announcement on Sunday, he and everybody close to him were continuing to insist that there was no chance at all that he was going to withdraw from the race. He continued to vow that he was staying in the race until the end, no matter what. He even said that he had campaign events scheduled for this upcoming week and that he didn't care how many Democratic elites, officeholders, or donors continue to try to pressure him out of the race. He believed, I think, somewhat validly, that he was the voters' choice to be the Democratic nominee for 2024. As weird, bizarre and manipulated that 2024 vote was, that was still the Democratic Party's process for choosing a nominee “democratically,” he was its choice, and he said he was never leaving. 

Yet out of the blue, in a huge surprise to pretty much everybody other than that, about three people, in his home in, Delaware, where he is self-isolating due to COVID. He announced on Saturday night, or at least under his Twitter name was announced, a decision in a letter written on his personal stationery and reportedly signed by him that he had decided that he was going to leave the race after all. And then very shortly thereafter, there was an actual tweet, not a signed letter, but just a tweet under the Joe Biden account announcing that not only was he leaving, but that he was endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become the nominee in his place as the president's nominee for the Democratic Party. 

There's a lot to say about this. And because I'm on vacation, I'm going to limit some of what I say. I'll probably have a lot more to say when I get back. If there are other major news events while I’m traveling, I will certainly do my best to weigh in but only in that case – my kids will kill me if I do it too often but I wanted to share a few thoughts about what happened because, as I said, it is a big event of massive proportions, of historic proportions, that I think provokes a lot of questions that really still haven't been answered. 

So, first of all, let us just note that, for eight years now, we have heard from the Democratic Party – its defenders, its media allies, and pretty much everyone who admits they support the Democratic Party or hides the fact that they support this Democratic Party – the same message repetitively offered over and over, which is that democracy, American democracy, is imperiled, the survival of American democracy is in danger. The only way it can be saved is if you vote for the Democratic Party. That was their message in 2016. That was their message in 2020. It's their message again this year. But if you look at their behavior as a party, I would say they are the strangest guardians of democracy you could ever possibly find. Look at how they've conducted themselves in their last three so-called primaries. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton and he did far better than anyone expected – she was supposed to have a cakewalk to a coronation – the DNC intervened and cheated. And in the words, not of me, but of Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile, the former Democratic chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party “rigged” the vote to ensure that Hillary Clinton would win and that Bernie would lose. As you probably recall, Wikileaks leaked a large amount of documents that revealed specifically how the DNC was cheating and, as a result, right before the Democratic Convention, top officials of the Democratic National Committee, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and all of her minions, were forced to resign because of the embarrassment of how anti-democratic that race was, how manipulated it was, how rigged it was, how much cheating the DNC did to deny the voters of the Democratic Party the right to choose their nominee democratically because they were scared that the voters would choose wrong, that they would choose Bernie Sanders, and they cheated to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination.

In 2020, after Bernie won the first three primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially in Nevada, where he crushed the field, Barack Obama, by all accounts, in one day making secret phone calls, forced three other establishment candidates out of the race, including Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, who up until that point were getting a significant vote total from people who liked the Democratic establishment knowing that Barack Obama did that, they were taking away the votes from Joe Biden, the only two candidates left. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were allowed to stay in the race past Super Tuesday, even though Warren's candidacy was a complete debacle. She was loved by a lot of Democratic elites and was funded by a dark money PAC by a Silicon Valley fan of hers but other than that – I mean, she even came third place in her own state – she had no chance. The only reason Obama wanted her and let her stay in the race was because she was at least trying to take away votes from Bernie Sanders. And that is how Joe Biden became the nominee. In fact, when Joe Biden, over the course of the last month, since the debate, began ranting and raving about the quote-unquote “Democratic elites” trying to force him from the race, a lot of those Democratic elites went on television quite angry to say, I think Joe Biden is the last person who ought to be ranting and raving about Democratic elites, given that it was we, the Democratic elites, who, in 2020, ensured that he would win by doing exactly what I explained. And then, in 2024 – we showed you this video many times – they had Symone Sanders who used to be a high-level staffer in the White House working for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, on television, and when asked how would the Democratic Party primary going to work – two candidates were running against Biden so far, JFK, Jr. and Marianne Williamson – she announced on behalf of the DNC that there would be no primaries, period. We have a sitting president who is a Democrat, he says he wants to run for reelection. That's the end of the story. She said the DNC will not allow any debates. It will not, in her words, “facilitate a primary.”

 

(Video. Symone Sanders. MSNBC. May 4, 2024) 

 

Symone Sanders: I really think that the mealy-mouthed Democrats, as I like to call them, and some of my progressive friends who would like to live in a fantasy land, they need to come back to reality. And the reality is this the sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat, a Democrat that would like to run for reelection. So much so that he has declared a reelection campaign. In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate the primary process. There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else. 

 

Joe Scarborough: So, we're going to have another Bobby Kennedy in an empty chair in the debate. Right?

 

Symone Sanders: There will be no debate, no debate. The Democratic National Committee administers the debates, and they're not going to set up a primary process for debates, for someone to challenge the head of the Democratic Party. 

 

The people of opposition like Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, who eventually left the Democratic Party and ran to join the Independents because there was no fair opportunity to run against Joe Biden. The DNC foreclosed any opportunity to choose any other candidate democratically. So, that's been the very anti-democratic means by which the Democratic Party has chosen so many in the last three primary races. And then when they decided, after that debate, that they could no longer abide in the public and pretend that Joe Biden was cognitive and capable – after spending months of accusing everybody who is raising questions or doubts about Biden's cognitive ability, accusing those who did that of spreading misinformation and fake news and being far-right operatives – on a dime, they did a 180 and said yes, not only is Joe Biden cognitively disabled, as we've been denying for months and years, in fact, he’s so cognitively disabled that we want to force him from the race. 

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Trump Declares the War in Iran to Be His Own; Journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's War Plans, DC Dems, and More
System Update #470

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!

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Ever since the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. In one sense, that concern is understandable. Many of them believe Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the U.S. out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East, and they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. 

But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching and coordinating of this war. Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today, as the President issued a series of tweets – one more unhinged and war-drunk than the next – proclaiming that we – "we" meaning the United States – now dominate and control the skies over Tehran. He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign, threatening them with serious devastation if they refused. 

We’ll also talk to the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who breaks many stories, genuinely breaking stories on his Substack, where he went after wisely deciding to quit the Intercept last year. He receives many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community – not the official and authorized leaks: those are for Barack Ravid at Axios – but he gets the unauthorized ones from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. Government. 

Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him, regarding the Israelis and the Americans' designs on Iran. We’ll discuss that as well as a variety of other issues concerning this brand-new war, various happenings in Washington, and more. 

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U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
System Update #469

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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The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

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If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

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U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

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!

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Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

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