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It's Thursday, October 3rd. 

Tonight: Ever since Israel began bombing Gaza after the October 7 attack, one of the most pressing questions has been whether this would lead to a broader regional war expanding not only beyond Gaza to Lebanon, but to the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, and, most dangerously, to Iran. That is no longer a question. By every metric, regional war has indeed broken out in the Middle East. 

There still are questions about the extent to which this escalation will deepen but that regional war has now begun is beyond question. Nor is it a question whether the United States will be drawn into this conflict. It already has been. The Biden administration, whatever that means these days, has been steadily increasing the amount of U.S. military assets and service members deployed to that region with the explicit goal of protecting Israel from the start of this war and from the start of that other war that the U.S. has been arming, funding and fueling the one in Ukraine against Russia. Remember that one? There has been no more prescient and informed analyst than the good friend of our show, University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer. 

Among other works, he was the coauthor along with Harvard professor Stephen Walt of the 2006 book “The Israel Lobby,” which documented the extensive pro-Israel factions in the United States that ensure that American policy continues to align with and promote the interests of Israel. 

We'll spend the show discussing every aspect of this multi-front war in the Middle East, the U.S. role in it now and what might be in the future, the latest developments in Ukraine, of which there are many, how the 2024 election is impacted by all of this and how it might impact these policies in the future, and much more. Professor Mearsheimer is always one of the most popular guests that we invite on, for good and self-evident reasons, and we are very happy to have him back with us tonight to analyze all of these complex and highly consequential issues. 

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Wednesday, October 2. 

Tonight: Democrats have been increasingly embracing a regime of censorship for years now, ever since the emergence of Donald Trump. And that's not news. We've covered that at least as much as any other topic. In last night's vice presidential debate, Kamala Harris’ running mate, Democratic Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, offered a spirited and vibrant defense of the virtues and the constitutionality of state-run censorship. It was far from the first time he had done that. In this case, Governor Walz invoked one of the worst and most deceitful cliches used by censorship advocates throughout the democratic world. Quote, “One can't yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater.” That's the same as the censorship we're doing. This is the moronic battle cry of wannabe tyrants around the world. 

Meanwhile, to ensure that conservatives don't become high and mighty upon hearing all this, the post-October 7 censorship orgy that has also emerged in the United States, all to protect the foreign country of Israel continues apace. The University of Maryland, a state school under the direction of the state's Democratic governor, Wes Moore, banned a group of students from holding an interfaith vigil on October 7 to commemorate those killed in Gaza. The school reasoned that it was too insensitive to allow a pro-Palestinian protest on October 7, even though the students chose that date because that was when the bombing of Gaza began. Thankfully, a federal court today rejected the university's attempt to ban this student group's event, holding something that once barely needed to be explained: that the First Amendment's free speech clause is violated when the state attempts to ban protests based on viewpoints. Governor Moore decried this ruling because the once-bedrock and virtually instinctive defense of free speech in the United States continues to crumble.

Then: One of the most inspiring moments in some time took place as the now-free Julian Assange traveled with his wife and their two young children from Australia, where they live, to Strasbourg, France for Assange to address the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe about the ordeal he suffered and the issues that emerged from it. We'll show you key excerpts of Assange's remarks, as well as report on the vote of that body to declare Assange to have been a prisoner of conscience or a political prisoner at the hands of the U.S. and the UK. 

And then finally: For the vice presidential debate, we sent our now familiar dynamic duo, the intrepid independent reporter Michael Tracey, as well as a producer on our show, Megan O'Rourke, to the after-debate “spin room.” There they were able to interview a wide range of surrogates, including members of Congress from both parties, a leading fundraiser of the Trump campaign, as well as the chairman of the DNC, Jamie Harrison. As always, when we send those two to such events, the resulting interviews are equally entertaining and revealing, and we will show you some of the key highlights.

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Friday, September 27. 

Tonight: Massive Israeli airstrikes are taking place in Beirut, as they have been for the last week. The IDF by air continues to flatten one apartment building after the next, large high-rise apartment buildings, where, by the IDF's own admission, numerous civilians live. Just today, 700 people are estimated dead from a series of airstrikes that Israel launched on Beirut that they claimed was targeted to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime head of the Lebanese group Hezbollah. They also claim that the reason they had to flatten those residential buildings was that Hezbollah had built its headquarters underneath, the same excuse the Israelis always use whenever they blow things up in Gaza or in the West Bank. The excuse always is it's because the people we were trying to kill are cowardly hiding behind it and the question, of course, is, is there any limit at all on what the Israelis can do, even if it's the case that they're aiming at a particular legitimate military target? 

Meanwhile, the Lebanese military announced today that it was substantially fortifying and cordoning off through a very large number of streets the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. There are two questions that emerge for all of this. First of all, even if we assume that everything the IDF says is true – which is generally a very precarious thing to do but let's for the moment assume that everything the IDF says is true about today's destruction of these residential buildings – the question arises when it comes to a, quote-unquote, “moral army” or the laws of war. Is there any limit at all on the number of civilians a country or a military group can kill to get to a legitimate military target? Can they kill 700 people who are civilians to get at one target? Can they kill 7000, 70,000, 700,000? Is there any limit at all? And of course, if we apply it to the United States, which we should always do when we're creating some sort of moral framework or legal framework for other countries, the question then would become, if you look at any of the countries that the United States has bombed over the last 20 years – not just Iraq and Afghanistan, which we invaded, occupied, but numerous other ones that we bombed – if they were able to identify a military commander responsible for the bombing of their country, for the killing of civilians in their country, and he happened to be, say, at a baseball game, or if he lived in a high rise residential tower in New York or Chicago, would it be permissible to bomb the baseball game and kill, say, a thousand civilians in order to kill him as well? Would it be permissible to explode to bomb the 80-story high residential tower, kill thousands of people in it to kill that one legitimate military target? That's the question that you always have to ask whenever you're imposing standards on what other militaries can do. 

Secondly, why is it that the U.S. embassy needs much greater protection if it is Israel that's doing the bombing? I understand why the Israeli embassy in Beirut would need protection, but why the U.S. embassy in Beirut? Of course, the answer is obvious. It's because the whole world knows –outside the United States, that is – the whole world knows that this is at least as much of a U.S. war as it is an Israeli war, because it's the United States that pays for these bombings of residential towers, and it's American bombs that are furnished from the United States to Israel that are used in order to do it. And yet again, we see how much threat, how much cost, how much danger, how much undermining of our country's interest we constantly incur to protect this one foreign country. 

And then, finally: Shabbos Kestenbaum is a self-described “Jewish American activist.” He came to public prominence as one of the leading voices accusing Harvard, the school he attends, and other Ivy League universities of being pervasively antisemitic since October 7, and also for failing to protect its Jewish students. In July, Just a couple of months ago, he delivered a primetime address at the Republican National Convention, where he raised many of these issues in order to explain why he was at that convention, even though he's a registered Democrat, and then subsequently endorsed Donald Trump based on them. He's also now a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking monetary damages, suing Harvard, his school, in a lawsuit brought in a federal court in Massachusetts alleging that Harvard, quote, “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment and that college administrators failed to fulfill their duty of care to keep Jewish students safe.” We will have him here tonight to talk about all of this in an interview that we recorded right before the show and that I think is very illuminating, not just about his particular advocacy, but about the general narrative that people have tried to perpetrate in the United States since October 7, that Jewish students and Jewish people, in general, are a unique victim group that needs special protection here in the United States. 

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