Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Trump’s Latest Interviews Reveal A More Focused Vision
System Update #379, Part 1/3
December 18, 2024
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The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. 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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Since his election victory, Donald Trump has given two major, lengthy interviews about his intentions for his second term in the presidency and one can't help but notice that the version of Trump that we are seeing is a much different one, at least in some key respects, than the one we saw during the campaign. 

Trump's constrained demeanor and the content of what he is saying are all quite striking. It is a very calm, sober, focused and one might even say thoughtful Trump that we are seeing. And what he is saying aligns in many cases with how he is saying it: it's a more cogent and consistent Trump, one who has a clearly defined worldview on many issues accompanied by an obvious desire to be less polarizing and alarming to those who did not vote for him, one might even say a more moderated and serious Trump. That doesn't mean he's compromising on every or even most issue – though he is on some – only that he's avoiding gratuitous flailing. We'll look at this ethos but more so at the substance of what he is saying as perhaps a window into what the second term will be.

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A More Moderate Side

One of the many reasons why I think that the media campaign and the Democratic Party campaign to make people afraid of Donald Trump’s character, to depict him as Adolf Hitler, to claim that he's a white supremacist seeking to impose a Nazi dictatorship on the United States, failed – and there were many – but one of the reasons it definitely failed was because it's easy to do that to somebody that the public doesn't know where fearmongering has space to grow. However, for someone who is known to the American public – and he was very well known to the public before 2016 when he first ran and, after, basically dominated our political lives over the last eight years, being president for four years. Americans already know Donald Trump so well that they really don't need the media to try to fill in the gap for them. They have their own perceptions of who he is, how he conducts himself, of how he acts in power. So, the media just was unable to scare people who weren't already scared of Trump based on what they had seen. That's why I have to say Donald Trump as a character has been pretty consistent. I don't think he's been aligned at all with the caricature that has been manufactured for him by the media outlets most hostile to him. He has been fairly consistent in his behavior, his character and how he responds to certain events – and I say that as somebody who lived in New York City for a long time, beginning in the early 1990s, when Trump was a larger-than-life figure, all the way back then, and people had a good understanding of who he was then, he was very much in the media. 

That's why I think these two major post-election interviews that he did, one with “Meet the Press” and Kristen Welker, the host of that program about two weeks ago, two weekends ago, and then today, a new one that was published with Time Magazine after it named him Person of the Year and put him on the cover, obviously much to his delight. It's actually quite striking because there are some palpable changes in the way he speaks and the tone he's using to speak in what I think is the remarkable cogency of how he's articulating his views. There's no rambling, there's not a lot of stopping and starting. He's being more articulate than usual and I think that's one of his failures as a politician. He has a great amount of charisma, he's hilarious to most people who are willing to see it, he draws a lot of attention to himself and he understands instinctively how to communicate with people, but I don't think he's a great order at all. A lot of times in debates or interviews, you kind of almost have to know what he's trying to say to really understand it because he just doesn't fully articulate. I think a lot of that has changed. 

It is possible, I think one might even say likely, that the two attempts to take his life, particularly the first one that came about a centimeter away from blowing his head off would have to change even the most fixed-in-own-ways person. By all accounts, people close to Trump speaking off the record, or on the record, say they noticed visible changes in Trump in what he values and how he speaks after those incidents. No matter how cynical you are, in general, about Donald Trump, I think it'd be very hard to reject that out of hand. In fact, it would be much more surprising to me, if someone didn't change after two incidents like that, particularly the first one. But it's also the case that, if you look at these interviews, it just seems a different Donald Trump. It's the same Donald Trump in a lot of ways. I'm not saying there's a radical transformation or departure from what he's always been, but it seems like it's a much more content Donald Trump, a much more secure Donald Trump. Someone who no longer is desperate to win the election because, remember, winning the election was really his only way out of staying out of prison. Not only did he win this time, but there's no one questioning his win, no one claiming it's illegitimate, and no one claiming it's because of Putin. It was a pretty sweeping victory. We knew he was going to win almost by eleven o’clock at night, certainly confirmed by one in the morning, which is pretty early for American politics. It was a pretty sweeping vindication of who he insists he's been and what he's been. 

I think this is appearing in interviews and one of the things substantively that is appearing as well is that he is clearly attempting to be less provocative. He's not only avoiding making statements that may play into the worst smears about him or his character, but he's going out of his way to try to be reassuring in a way that I find convincing because it does seem to me more consistent with his worldview than what one might do during a campaign. That's true of all politicians. 

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So, let's look at Time Magazine, released today, and there you see him on the cover. The article reads:

For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months. In many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not. (TIME. December 12, 2024)

It's hard to argue with that. I don't really care who Time chooses, I'm more interested in the interview. But given what they said, I think it's very, very difficult to argue there was anybody who shaped political culture or political life, not just in the United States, but through the democratic world more than Donald Trump did over this past year. The fact that he came back from being impeached twice, from being indicted four times and then he rolled to victory in the GOP nomination against a lot of credible opponents – well-funded, credible opponents. He brought a lot of other people to his side. Clearly, he's reshaped political life in the United States in ways that no one else can compare and even, therefore, globally agree that the U.S. is still the largest, most powerful country in the world. 

The magazine published a transcript with Trump, a pretty lengthy, detailed transcript and I want to give you a sense of what I mean when I said all the things I said about how Trump appears to me. As you know, during the campaign, an ad that the Trump campaign ran and ran and ran and ran over and over and over that was quite effective, was one that focused not so much on the issue of transgender people. It was really more focused on something Kamala Harris had said in 2019 when responding to a questionnaire by the ACLU and running for office, where she said in response to the ACLU question that she does support having U.S. government funding the sex reassignment surgery and another treatment, even to people who are in prison or who are illegally detained. I don't really think the reason why that ad works so well, showing Kamala Harris saying that and concluding with that famous phrase, therefore, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” I don't even think the reason it resonated so much is because people think much about that issue, whether the government should pay for sex reassignment surgeries or treatments for prisoners and illegal detainees. I think that became a proxy for trying to say, look at how out of touch the Democrats are with your lives, that's the reason that you're suffering under their government, they don't care about you at all. They have these lofty radical issues and factions that they please, but they don't think about things that you're going through and that's what the commercial is about – not let's go stop the evil of transgenderism but more you need people in Washington who care about you and your lives. And so, I thought it was so interesting what Trump said when he was asked about this issue in general, but also the specific issue of whether the first ever member of Congress who is transgender, Sarah McBride, who was elected from the state of Delaware in the Democratic Party, should be able to use the women's bathroom. That has become a controversy in Washington among some people, and they asked him about that as well. I think his answer was surprising, at least to me. It's what I would expect him to say, I guess what was surprising was that he's just willing to say it, even if it means alienating a lot of people who are on his side, especially on this issue. So here was the exchange:

Can I shift to the transgender issue? Obviously, sort of a major issue during the campaign. In 2016, you said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they chose. Do you still feel that way?

I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country, so they'll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees.

But on that note, there’s a big fight on this in Congress now. The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should all be focused on more important issues. Do you agree?

I do agree with that. On that – absolutely. As I was saying, it's a small number of people. (TIME December 12, 2024)

So, what he's saying is: look, this issue of transgender people using the bathroom is not an issue we should be focused on. 

As I said, I know there are a lot of conservatives, a lot of Trump supporters who disagree with that, who think that is an issue on which we should be focused. There are a lot of people who are focused on that issue, which is what I think is so notable about the fact that Trump didn't choose to demagogue this issue, he didn't choose to exploit the polarization in genders. In fact, he said, yeah, I agree with the newly elected trans member of Congress when she says we shouldn’t be focused on the question of which bathroom people use, but instead on far more important issues facing the country. 

Here is Donald Trump in 2016. I think it's really worth remembering that when Trump announced he was running, he was extremely emphatic on the issue of immigration but Trump has never been a hard-core conservative on any social issues to put that mildly, and it's pretty easy to understand why. He's been a Manhattan billionaire for his entire adult life, he was a star in Hollywood on his own show. Obviously, he's coming into contact with gay people all the time, constantly, in Manhattan, in Hollywood. He himself is on his third marriage. Those three women to whom he was married, were not the only women with whom he has had sex. He doesn't live a life focused on this, he never cared about social issues before and he's giving checks to the Democratic Party. What motivated him was immigration, trade and economics. That clearly was what gave him the most passion but obviously, during a campaign, you have to focus on the things that will get your votes. I always knew that Trump's heart is not in social issues. And you saw him quite calculatedly in this election afraid of what the abortion issue could do to his campaign and backing off a lot of hard-core pro-life stances that were once the requirement of the Republican Party, including saying he doesn't believe in a national abortion ban. 

Here is Trump in 2016, addressing kind of briefly when asked the question of trans people in bathrooms: 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. April 21, 2016.

That's something we talked about last week. That it is true that, for a long time, the trans issue was never anything that anybody bothered with. It only became a source of controversy when it got pushed into areas that were predictably designed to provoke a lot of conflicts, one involving trans women in sports, biological males who transition to women in women's sports, and especially the question of administering treatment to children, to preadolescence to stop their puberty or give them hormones, cross-sex hormones, as we talked about that last week. I think Trump is very representative of most people: this is not the issue that's driving me. Live and let live. This is not something that he newly unveiled. It's something he's been saying for a long time. 

During the campaign, Trump did talk about trans issues and I remember seeing the first time he did it. He basically said in a kind of ironic way: “Wow, you mention the trans issue, people go wild, I don't know why people care about this so much, but they do. Every time I mentioned it in my rally, they go insane.” So, being a politician wanting to win, he definitely did raise it and talk about it. But even when he saw the benefit, it was bringing it to him politically he never quite understood why this was something so important to other people, since it wasn't to him. Here's one example, at a rally in June of 2023:

 Video. Donald Trump. Newsmax. June 10, 2023.

He was basically mocking the audience that gave him a standing ovation. He said, yeah, “I talk about tax cuts and the economy, well, yeah, okay, I care about that a little. But if you mention trans…” I mean, the audience there in North Carolina where he was speaking, gave him a standing ovation, a prolonged applause. So Trump is obviously subtly, at least being confounded by, if not criticizing the audience for prioritizing this issue to such an extent because he does not. There you see in this article today where they basically ask him about whether he agrees that this is not the issue that we should be focused on. He said, yeah, this is in fact a tiny number of people. And he even went on to say, look, I mean, what the majority wants matters, but so do minority rights. And I want to make sure we're treating everybody justly and fairly not only was there no hostility to trans people, but there was also compassion and empathy towards them of the kind you saw in that clip going all the way back to 2016 – and I think that is who Trump consistently is. 

Another thing that I found very interesting in this article is that there's a lot of confusion among some people on what exactly Trump wants in Ukraine. In part because so many people whom he's chosen for very key positions in the foreign policy part of his administration are people who have been critical of Joe Biden for not having done more, not having done more and sooner, including allowing American long-range missiles to be used to bomb Russia, which is what Joe Biden just about three weeks ago announced he would do. And so the reporter asked him the following:

 … the question people want to know is, Would you abandon Ukraine?

And I had a meeting recently with a group of people from the government, where they come in and brief me, and I'm not speaking out of turn, the numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are numbers that are staggering, both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. You know, I know they like to say they weren't, but they're fairly equal, but the numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It's crazy what's taking place. It's crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We're just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. (TIME. December 12, 2024)

I know there are people in both parties who disagree with Trump on this saying “I don't want to escalate this war,” “It's crazy to allow the Ukrainians to use American missiles and probably personnel to shoot deep inside Russia, bomb deep inside Russia. Why are we doing that?” He's speaking kind of from the heart in terms of what he really thinks. I've made this point actually once before, a couple of months ago when I was on Fox, I think it was with Laura Ingraham. She had played a clip of Trump talking about the war in Ukraine and he was basically saying what he said there, which was like “this war has ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, young people. What is the point of this, the sense of all this bloodshed?” And I remarked that it's very rare to hear a politician talking about war in that way. That is the only way, or at least the primary way to talk about war. That is war. It's spilling blood, it's ending people's lives, it's extinguishing their existence – young people who don't even want to be in the war, and don't know why they're there. It doesn't mean war is always unjustified. It means that one of the reasons why it should be an absolute last resort, only done when absolutely necessary, which is not the case for this war is because, as he often puts it, so many people are bleeding and dying and losing their lives and it's tragic. Most people in Washington in both parties talk about it as a geostrategic issue. “We can't let Russia expand.” They almost never talk about the human cost of war, in part because it doesn't really come to American soil. We haven't had a war where people are drafted since Vietnam. And so most people in the United States see war as kind of a game, as an abstract issue. It's not fought on our soil, and it's not fought with most of their families. But when Trump talks about it, he talks about it always in this very humanistic way, which is why I also do believe that, at least to some extent, there's authenticity to his desire to avoid war. Along with, as I talked about before, what is an obvious fear of nuclear weapons, which he talks about a lot. 

One of the reasons why this was so interesting – that he so adamantly said he opposes the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine – is that a lot of people who are going to be in his cabinet and who are supporters of his have said the exact opposite. Just a couple of weeks ago, General Keith Kellogg was on Fox News, and here's what he had to say on that same exact issue. 

Video. Keith Kellogg. Fox News. November 27, 2024.

That's Trump’s former national security adviser and that is the representative view of the establishment wing of the Republican Party, people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik and others whom he's chosen, whose criticism of the Biden policy toward Ukraine is not that we've gotten too involved, that we've fueled that war, that we've risked escalation too much, but that we haven't done it enough. And so, for Trump to just come out and say “This is crazy, to send that kind of missiles there,” I think is indicative of why I say we need to wait to see what the Trump administration is and not judge based on the people he's choosing because it seems a very engaged Trump, a very determined Trump to make sure that this time his policies are the ones who end up shaping his administration and not people who are supposed to work for him. 

TIME Magazine also asked Trump about the war in Israel and Gaza and here's what Trump had to say about that. 

You mentioned the Palestinian people. In your first term, your administration put forward the most comprehensive plan for a two-state solution in a long time. Do you still support that plan?

I support a plan of peace, and it can take different forms.

Do you still support a two-state solution?

I support whatever solution we can do to get peace. There are other ideas other than two states, but I support whatever, whatever is necessary to get not just peace, but a lasting peace.

The real question at the heart of this, sir, is, do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?

So what I want is a deal where there's going to be peace and where the killing stops.

Would you tell Israel—that Bibi tried last time and you stopped him. Would you do it again this time? 

We’ll see what happens. Yeah, I did. I stopped him.

Do you trust Netanyahu?

I don’t trust anybody. 

 (TIME. December 12, 2024)

That is not the answer that most of the people who are working for Trump, whom he's chosen, would give. None of them is saying, in fact, oh yeah, we want peace. They're saying we want to unleash the Israelis even further and we'll see what happens in the administration. That's the area where I am least optimistic and hopeful, given the people who funded Trump's campaign and who he surrounded himself with. But I do think Trump prides himself on ending wars. And there again you're seeing his view that the priority has to be ending wars. He has no reason at this point, unlike two months ago, to say things he doesn't believe because he's never going to face the electorate again. 

When Trump was on “Meet the Press,” one of the issues he was asked about was whether he would allow RFK Jr. to ban childhood vaccines, or to otherwise codify the idea that vaccines cause autism and here's what Trump said about that. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So, here he's saying, look, I'm not asserting that childhood vaccines cause autism, but I do want to know why autism has skyrocketed. She keeps saying scientists say it's because we identify it better as if he's just supposed to swallow that and say, well, there's no longer any need to research, like, do all scientists think that? Is it possible scientists are wrong like they were in so many instances with COVID? And this is a very, again, reasonable, non-dogmatic way of looking at it. I want to study these causes. I want to work with drug companies. If somebody wants to ban all toddler vaccines like the polio one, that's going to be pretty difficult for them to get me to do. So, again, you're seeing this kind of image of Trump that if you were to believe what you've been hearing about him for the last year, you would not recognize this person. 

Here's one particularly good example. I think this not only surprised a lot of his supporters but even angered them. He was asked about whether he would really intend to deport every single person illegally in the country, all 11 million, including the so-called Dreamers, the people who came here very, very young, who have studied here, who went to school here, who have integrated into the society. She asked him, would you even deport them? And here's what he said about that. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So again, here's the person we were supposed to believe hates all Brown people, wants them all extinguished and wants them gone and sent to concentration camps and here he's asked about dreamers – and again, I know this made a lot of supporters of Donald Trump angry, who don't think anyone in the country, including Dreamers, should be able to stay – and he said, “Yeah, I want them to stay. Of course they have to stay. We need to get something worked out.” He even criticized Joe Biden and the Democrats, for not having done it when they had full power. 

I have to say this again: all of this is very cogent. Do you see how easy it is to understand, to listen to him, to follow the logical train of thought that he is asking us to travel with him on? It's a very relaxed Trump. It's not that hyper-combative defense of Trump. And again, I think that comes from the security of having just won an election that nobody can challenge the legitimacy of. Remember when he ran in 2016, it was instantly delegitimized as the byproduct of Russian interference. No one could do that this time, and so he's just extremely secure when he's talking to anybody and that makes him, I think, a more effective communicator and a more effective speaker. I know I'm being pretty positive and I'm praising a lot of aspects of what I see of Trump and this is just what I'm seeing and I'm showing you the reasons. 

One of the superpowers of Trump has always been that he is extremely funny and so often the things he said that were funny and clearly intended as jokes, the media just could not comprehend or intend it humorously. A lot of times they purposely distorted it, other times they simply were confused. I think the time that I really became radicalized when it came to media lying about not just Russiagate but Trump in 2016 was that time he stood at a press conference and was asked about Russia – they were obsessed with Russia and Russian hacking into the DNC – and he said, “I don't know about that, but Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can find Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, the ones that she had deleted.” Trump was obviously making a joke. Hey, you want to know about Russian hacking? Maybe the Russians can find Hillary Clinton's emails! And they decided to pretend that Trump was standing up in front of the world and earnestly placing a request to the Kremlin about what they should go hack. And they took that as proof that he obviously was in collusion with Putin in the Kremlin since he was specifically requesting that they go hack in a way that was politically advantageous for him. The stupidity of this was so self-evident. If Trump was in collusion with the Kremlin, why would he stand in front of cameras and submit his hacking requests to them? It was such an obvious joke and they decided to take it seriously and it made them look like idiots – like deranged, hysterical idiots. 

Trump is still funny. And I want to show you this one clip just to underscore that while he does seem to be sort of more sober and serious communicator, it's also the case that he has retained that, especially that kind of bitter, sardonic humor that comes from certain kinds of resentments. Here's what he said when he talked about the first debate he did with Joe Biden. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So, he says, yeah, I mean, it's one thing to debate one person, just Joe Biden. That's pretty easy, he said, but to debate three people, actually that's pretty easy too, to be honest. 

Again, I think that I don't have any reason to believe this is a contrived Trump. What is most striking to me is the engagement and focus and confidence he shows now, because I think that's what was missing more than anything in the first term. I don't think he was that focused, he was not engaged, he was more focused on the vendettas he had, with Russiagate and the like, and he just allowed all these other people to do policy in a way that contradicted not only what he ran on, but what I think is his worldview. 

I am still skeptical of whether that will change in the second term, despite how many people close to Trump insist it will, that he's aware of that, that they're aware that that's the priority. But this Trump, someone very clearly focused on policy, speaking about it in an informed way, feeling strongly about it, but not so strongly that it becomes just this inflexible obsession, but still not compromising on the core worldview. That's a Trump that I think has the best chance to correct that fundamental problem that happened in his first administration when he simply didn't know enough or cared enough, wasn't competent enough and was more focused on criticisms of himself. This Trump, I think, has the best chance of actually being a Trump that can align his actual worldview and ideology, regardless of whether it appeared in the campaign, with what administration policy actually is. It remains to be seen, but this is what we have to go on. And I think it's very interesting how he appeared in both interviews. 

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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.  

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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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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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 not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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