Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Dems Desperately Revive Russian Interference Hysteria Ahead of Election; French Politics Analyst Arnaud Bertrand On Macron's Refusal To Accept Election Results
Video Transcript
September 06, 2024
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Good evening everybody. It is Wednesday, September 4. As you can see, we are still not in our regular studio. That's because I continue to be traveling concerning some work, and each time I get to a new place, we seem to have a little bit of technical issues trying to make sure it works. Hopefully, it is now working because there's a lot to talk about tonight, including a guest that I'm really interested in talking to. So, let's roll the dice and see what it is that we can do. It's interesting. I was on Megan Kelly's program for two full hours today using exactly this setup, and it worked perfectly. So, let's try and give it a go. 

So, for tonight: Whenever a Democrat is nearby and encounter someone or something that they dislike, one thing is certain: they will start ranting and raving about Russia and accusing whatever or whoever is bothering them of being controlled by or being subservient to the Kremlin. The list of their targets since 2016 is too long to count but today – with the election just two months away – they resurrected yet again this old, crusty, cliched, tired Cold War script to try to claim that Vladimir Putin yet again – while running Russia, overseeing a war in Ukraine, managing his country's complex oil economy – is, in his spare time, also trying to propagandize the American citizenry through all sorts of covert influence campaigns. 

Earlier this morning, the Biden administration leaked to many of its favorite reporters that it was about to make a major announcement accusing the Kremlin of trying to interfere in the 2024 election, exactly what they did in 2016 and 2020 and many times before. Who could have ever guessed that? With the election just two months away, Democrats would start talking about Russia. But that, of course, is exactly what they're doing. Hours later, the DOJ issued a lengthy indictment of various Russians and the state-owned RT purporting to detail how these influence operations are being carried out. The indictment very deliberately and purposely named without naming a wide range of conservative influencers who they accuse of either knowingly or unwittingly having accepted Russian money to deliver pro-Kremlin messaging. 

While this document, like all indictments, is filled with nothing but unproven accusations, they're being treated as gospel facts. And as a side note, this is something I've seen many times. The Justice Department issues an indictment based on allegations that come from the U.S. security state and it's almost like nobody questions it. Whatever the DOJ said is what happened ends up being accepted as true. To do that in general is misguided but to do it about a highly politicized document just two months away from a national election, when Democrats do exactly this almost reflexively, now seems to me like madness. But even if every single claim in this indictment is true, even if it ends up being proven to be true, the magnitude of this so-called influence campaign run by the Kremlin is laughably tiny. It barely even rises to the level where it wasn't being called trivial. It's just clearly yet another act of standard Democratic Party reflex to scream Russia whenever they feel endangered. So, we're going to examine this indictment because of the historical context surrounding it and what the implications are. 

Then: two separate elections were held in France over the past several months. One was an election for France's seats to the EU, and that election was won by Marine Le Pen's right-wing party. Following that, President Emmanuel Macron called new elections to have a vote to determine who should compose the French legislature, and that election was won by a coalition of left-wing parties. One of the major messages, obvious messages, of both of those votes, was a rejection of the Macron government, which won neither of those seats. 

We covered these elections, both of them extensively. At the time, we've had analysts on our show to talk about not only what drove the outcomes but also what the impact on French politics would be in general and, specifically, how it would change the French government. I mean, that's the idea of democracy is you have a vote not just to be a symbolic expression of people's beliefs but in order to let them determine the composition of their own government. And yet, as it turns out, absolutely nothing has changed in France or with the French government since those votes and that's because President Emmanuel Macron, his party and his government, have basically pretended that the election never even happened. Even Macron's protégé – Prime Minister Gabriel Attal – continues in office even though his party lost a majority, and even though he tendered his resignation immediately after the election, only for Macron to refuse it. He continues to be the prime minister overseeing the legislators until this very day. 

One of the guests we had on to evaluate the election results was the political analyst, Arnaud Bertrand, and he will be here to join us tonight to talk about, among other things, the bizarre spectacle of a country that bombastically claims to be one of the leaders of the democratic world, simply ignoring a national election because it doesn't like the outcome.

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

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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.  

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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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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Federal Court Dismisses & Mocks Lawsuit Brought by Pro-Israel UPenn Student; Dave Portnoy, Crusader Against Cancel Culture, Demands No More Jokes About Jews; Trump's Push to Ban Flag Burning
System Update #466

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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In the first segment, we’ll talk about the victimhood narrative that holds that American Jews, in general, and Jewish students on college campuses in particular, are uniquely threatened, marginalized and endangered. One of the faces of this student victimhood narrative has become Eyal Yakoby, who is a vocal pro-Israel activist and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2024, he was invited by House Republicans to stand next to House Speaker Mike Johnson and he proclaimed: I do not feel safe. He said it over and over. “I do not feel safe” has kind of become the motto for his adult life. Now, he seized on those opportunities by initiating a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania seeking damages for what he said was the school's failure to fulfill its duties to keep him safe. Mind you, he was never physically attacked, never physically menaced, never physically threatened, but nonetheless claimed that the school had failed to keep him safe and told the congress in the country that he did not feel safe. 

The federal judge who is presiding over his lawsuit, who just happens to be a Jewish judge, a conservative judge, appointed by George W. Bush, not only dismissed Yakoby's lawsuit as without any basis, but really viciously mocked it, depicting his claims as a little more than petulant entitled demands from a privileged Ivy League student who wants to not be exposed to any ideas or political activism that might upset him – sort of depicting him as the Princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” Andersen’s literary fairytale about a princess who's so sensitive to anything that might concern her, that she's even unable to sleep if there's a pea buried beneath the seventeenth mattress on which she sleeps. 

This judicial decision is worth examining not only for the schadenfreude of watching one of America's whiniest pro-Israel activists be exposed as a self-interested fraud that he is, but also for what it says about the broader narrative that has been so relentlessly pushed and so endlessly exploited from so many corners, insisting that the supreme victim group of the United States is, of all people, American Jews. 

Then: speaking of extreme entitlement, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy made quite a name for himself over many years by ranting against the evils of cancel culture, championing the virtues of free speech, and viciously mocking as snowflakes and as people who are far too sensitive anyone who takes offense at jokes, offensive jokes told by comedians. That is what made it so odd – yet so telling – when this weekend we watched the very same Dave Portnoy viciously berated one of his employees for disagreeing with Portnoy's insistence that while jokes about everyone and every group continue to be appropriate, there must now be one exception: namely, according to Portnoy, jokes about Portnoy's own group,  American Jews,  must now be suspended and deemed too dangerous to permit. 

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There have been really a lot of radical and fundamental changes, first on the political culture and then in our legal landscape as a result of the attack on October 7, and particularly the desire of the United States – by both parties – to arm the Israelis, to fund the Israelis, to protect the Israelis as they went about and destroyed Gaza. 

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