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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Send in your questions for Lee Fang!

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Glenn, Thanks for having Lee host the show while you were away.

Is anybody out there? The question regarding noise chaos in media etc. that prompted Rush for this piece. A song that defined the era of NAFTA, the simultaneous framing of OJ Simpson and Mark Fuhrman for political polling purposes, and the ensuing chaos is still with all of us today.

Alex Lifeson is incredible here. The descending arpeggiated chords in the beginning with it's variations and change-ups make for great composition. His studio performance is, of course, equally brilliant.

I hope the younger 21st century generation with their more fertile brains can get something out of this.

Rush | Test for Echo (song)

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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. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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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

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 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. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

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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