Welcome to a new year of System Update!

While you adjust to our show’s first (full) week back from the many end-of-year holidays, we understand some of you may have missed last week’s episodes, and so we’re back with another Weekly Update to give you every link to all of Glenn’s best moments from Thursday to Friday. The new year is here, and so are System Update’s ambitions. As we say in Brazil, “Feliz ano novo!”

Daily Updates

THURSDAY: Terror Attacks & Liz Cheney’s Firing Squad

In this episode, we talked about…

1. The narrative exploitation of terror attacks;

2. And the ill-deserved presidential commendations of Liz Cheney;

FRIDAY: The Trump Administration’s Key Issues in 2025 

In this episode, we examined the…

3. Trump Administration’s most pressing issues in 2025;

4. System Pupdate: Meeting Nico!

About those question submissions: They’re LIVE!

We noticed that many of you didn’t submit recorded questions, possibly because the process was unclear. Regardless, we’re here to announce that our submission feature is now LIVE. Simply follow the Rumble Studio link included in our Tuesday and Thursday Locals after-show announcements to record your questions, share praise for our editors, or comment on current events.

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That’s it for this edition of the Weekly Update! 

We’ll see you next week…

“Nothing is over until we say it is!’ But... this week’s Weekly Update is, well, over…"

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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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On January 1, two violent attacks took place in two iconic American cities. The only connection between these two alleged attackers is that they both served many years in the U.S. Army. Indeed, they seemed to have served simultaneously at the same military base for some time but thus far at least, there is no evidence that they coordinated the attacks or even that they knew each other. Despite these facts that are now clearly established, we were subjected to an avalanche, as typically happens, of claims, narratives and attempts to exploit these attacks even though those claims and those exploitations bore no resemblance to what actually happened here. 

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.

System Update is an independent show that is 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!

CNN's foreign correspondent, Clarissa Ward, produced and broadcast an extremely strange and very melodramatic video of her and her CNN crew magically discovering a previously undetected prisoner in Syria lying motionless under a blanket. Ward had previously admitted in her book that she stopped being a journalist when it came to Syria and was enraged that the U.S. had not done more to help remove Assad from power. Many people have raised questions about this bizarre video – whether it was staged by CNN and/or its Syrian handlers – and while we certainly don't purport to know the answer, what we do now is that extreme skepticism of such propaganda is very warranted given how often the U.S. Government and its media have blatantly lied, essentially always, when it comes to wars and coups that are important to Washington.

Strange Stories

A very moving, emotional and deeply melodramatic segment was aired this week on CNN when the foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward, who has gone to Syria in the wake of the ouster of long-time Syrian President Bashar Assad, purported to have entered one of the notorious Syrian prisons and discovered to her great shock that there was a single prisoner who was there under a blanket, who had not been discovered in the emptying of all the other prisoners. It gave her the opportunity to comfort him, hug him and show how oppressed these heroes are.

One of the interesting things about the emptying of these prisons and the liberation of prisoners is no one seems to be questioning whether any of these people deserve to be in prison. It is certainly true there are a lot of political prisoners. The Assad regime tortured people. When we wanted to torture people in interrogations, as part of the War on Terror, the U.S. sent people that we kidnapped from Europe to Egypt and Syria, both Mubarak and Assad were our allies at the time. There is a lot of torture, there's a lot of political persecution under Assad but there are other people who were in prison because they committed violent crimes or egregious crimes. There seems to be an assumption, though, that every person in a Syrian prison is an unjustly persecuted person there simply because of their dissent. Into that, we embrace them all, we free them all and they're all evidence of Assad's tyranny. 

So, here is what CNN claims is what happened in real-time, as they discovered along with you. 

Video. CNN.

There's one guy alone in a cell. He was very dramatic to give a suspense. He wasn't just sitting there; he was under a blanket perfectly in a way that you couldn't even tell if there was a human being there. So, we're all waiting with bated breath to see what would happen when the blanket is removed, and it turns out there's a very seemingly clean and well-cared-for person under a blanket. He puts his hands up and they've discovered a prisoner, one of the very few who have not been released and CNN did it! CNN is about to rescue him with their Syrian handlers and here's what happens. 

Video. CNN.

I just need to show you some of the acting that was done here, that I didn't catch the first time I watched it but, as you saw, Clarissa Ward of CNN was in the room. She was speaking English to him. “I'm a civilian.” I'm not sure why she was speaking English then, but that’s what she was doing. And then when he gets up, she goes behind the door. She leaves the cell for just a moment. She needs a moment to compose herself. She puts her hand on her heart. There you see her hands on her chest. Oh My God. She's, she's so emotional about what they just discovered. A guy in a prison under a blanket. 

A lot of people had a lot of questions about this. No idea, at all, why he was there. Obviously, the Syrian handlers are people who are rebels, who want to show the world how vicious and brutal the Assad regime is or was. And so, I'm certainly not suggesting that CNN staged this. I don't know if the Syrian handlers did, but a lot of people did close-ups of the hands of this prisoner, he had very well-manicured, very clean hands. There was no one else in the prison with him. The other prison cells we've seen were overcrowded. Huge numbers of people came out when the doors were open. There doesn't seem to be any human waste in the prison. So, a lot of people were thinking this might have been staged as propaganda so that CNN could not just interview a prisoner, but actually participate in the rescue of a Syrian prisoner or someone in an Assad dungeon. 

The reason I found it so notable that Clarissa Ward, in particular, is participating in this story is because she had previously admitted that she was basically somebody who gave up on any pretense of journalistic neutrality or journalistic distance when it comes to Syria. She admitted that she was, in fact, a hardened advocate of the U.S. policy to remove Bashar Assad from power. In fact, she was sending deranged voicemails and emails to Obama White House officials because they didn't do more to remove Bashar Assad in 2021. She did a podcast entitled Intelligence Matters, which is hosted by the former acting director of the CIA under President Obama, Michael Morell, one of the people who accused Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton and, needless to say, was one of the people who signed the letter, the notorious letter of 51 intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the markings of Russian disinformation. She was on his podcast. She's a journalist on the podcast, chatting, very friendly with the former head of the CIA, because that's, of course, the loyalties that she has. And she was asked about Syria, and this is what she said. 

Author and war correspondent Clarissa Ward on reporting from conflict zones - "Intelligence Matters"

I will cop to the fact that I think I crossed the line in Syria. I became so emotionally involved and I was crushed by the U.S. response and the U.S. policy… I felt that there wasn't really a strong U.S. policy, that we had said 'Assad must go' and then we had done nothing to make him go. We had said chemical weapons were a red line and then that red line was crossed and there wasn't really anything in terms of real repercussions.

And I wrote Ben Rhodes an email to his official White House account. And I said, 'Dear Ben, I hope you're sleeping soundly as Aleppo burns. At least we have the Russians to sort it out. Best wishes, Clarissa.' (CBS News. June 2, 2021)

So, I don't think I ever need to prove but this is somebody who is a longtime activist for U.S. policy removing Bashar Assad and for putting in whoever these rebels are, because she herself admitted that “I crossed the line.” She's sending these, like, angry, enraged emails to Obama officials, sarcastic and embittered. It's not a journalist, it’s fine if people go around wanting to advocate for Obama doing more to remove Assad beyond giving the CIA $1 billion a year as he was doing, to fight along alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda. But to be a journalist covering Syria and at the same time berating the government for not unleashing the CIA even more to do regime change in a country? Obviously, that's crossing the line journalistically. But also, it's a good reason why we ought to be skeptical when then she starts putting out this kind of propaganda that is highly questionable. 

Here she is previously in what became controversial in October of 2023, showed herself on CNN avoiding what she said was rocket fire. Here's what happened:

Video. CNN. October 9, 2023.

She was on the ground out of breath, in Israel, on October 9, 2023, talking about these primitive crude rockets that Hamas was sending when Israel was sending 2,000-pound bombs and one thousand-pound bombs to destroy Gaza. She was there to convey the drama of being in Israel and the dangers of that. 

I'm just offering these facts about what we know. As I said, I'm not here to assert that CNN staged that very melodramatic and convenient prison rescue. If I had to bet, I'd say it's likelier that the Syrian handlers for rebels did it for CNN. But they don't even know that it could be just this huge coincidence that CNN stumbled into some forgotten prisoner, and he grabbed her by the arm, even though she's speaking English to him and he has perfectly manicured nails and he's holding onto her arm and she's saying, “Get water, get water.” She gives him the water, and he just drinks it out of great thirst. That could be a very excellent stroke of luck for CNN and for Clarissa Ward, who is a strong advocate, as she said, of this policy to remove Assad. But I think that it's very worth remembering – and I want to be as emphatic as I can be about how I phrase this because every single time there's a major geopolitical event that the United States cares about, extreme, deliberate, blatant material lies come spewing forth both before and afterward to influence public opinion and the way that Washington wants it to be, they disseminate those lies themselves or through their media. It happens all the time.