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!

Independent journalist Lee Fang is a longtime colleague of mine. We worked together for many years at The Intercept, and he's also a friend of the show and a friend of mine. One of the reasons why I ask him to be here a lot is because he does the kind of reporting that has really become increasingly rare, including in all the places that claim that only they are professional journalists. He really has become a specialist in figuring out how to trace the flow of financial information and the flow of money through Washington, and how it shapes the ideology of various groups, how it shapes the willingness of politicians to change their mind, how it makes them go to bat for all kinds of lobbying groups that are shoveling all sorts of money to them. 

He's been particularly digging into over the past month or so both the issue of the debate that arose, the intra-conservative, the intra-right debate, among Trump coalition factions about whether or not H-1B visas should be maintained at their current levels, whether they should be increased as people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been insisting they should be or whether they should be reduced or eliminated as Trump in his first term wanted to do and as a lot of his longest-term core supporters who are true believers in the MAGA ideology actually want to do it. It seems like a very vibrant debate, a very intellectually spirited debate, which it was. But there was also a lot of lobbying, and a lot of money involved behind it, which Lee really, as usual, delved into and helped expose. 

He also was a long-time resident of California and spends a lot of time focused on politics in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles and so, there's a lot of work he's done and a lot of things he has to say about the fires that are raging throughout Los Angeles as well as the behavior of Los Angeles Mayor, Karen Bass, including the fact that she was in Ghana as the fire broke out, despite having been told, according to his reporting, that these dangers were quite imminent. 

The interview: Lee Fang

G. Greenwald:, it's great to see you, as always. Thanks for talking to us tonight. 

Lee Fang: Hey, Glenn, good to see you. 

G. Greenwald: All right. So, let's start with these fires, because it's kind of remarkable seeing these images of entire communities of a pretty iconic American city, Los Angeles, a very beautiful city, going up in flames. And who knows when this fire is going to get under control. There's been a lot of focus as there would be in this kind of an instance on officials in California, to some extent, California Governor Gavin Newsom, but especially the city's newly elected mayor, Karen Bass. She was elected in 2023, if I'm not mistaken. And she was also someone who was on the short list when Joe Biden said he was going to pick a black woman for vice president. She was one of three people with Kamala Harris, another person who was a possible vice president pick. As these fires broke out, she was nowhere to be found. She was actually on some kind of international trip to Ghana. And there's been a lot of criticism about this. You wrote an article on your Substack, which as usual I highly recommend.

Before reading your article when I first heard about this criticism of her, part of me thought, for better or worse, governors and mayors do go on these kinds of international trips. Usually, they're just opportunities to get free travel to places these people want to go but sometimes there are legitimate reasons and it was this kind of bad luck that she happened to be in Ghana at the moment these fires broke out. She couldn't have anticipated that, she came back immediately when they started to spread and so, this criticism seemed a little bit cheap and exploitative. Then I read your article which suggested that actually she probably had reason to know that she should have stayed in L.A., not necessarily that these fires happened on this day, but certainly reason to know that she had work to do that she didn't do, instead of going to Ghana. What is it that you discovered about all that? 

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!

On Monday night, we delved into great detail about the multi-prong and quite surprising announcement by Facebook founder and current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he essentially took up the banner of free speech online, waved it quite assertively, denounced not just online political censorship in general, including of the kind Facebook and Instagram have frequently engaged in, but took direct aim – probably the most consequential part of what he said – because it was so specific and so much condemnation at the so-called disinformation and fact-checking industry that has been concocted and fabricated, and that has originated after 2016 as the tip of the spear to justify the imposition of political censorship on political discourse online. 

We delved into the components of Zuckerberg's announcement, the new Meta policies that he laid out, the reasons to be skeptical of both him and those policies, and the possible holes in them but we also talked a great deal about the undeniably significant aspect of this announcement and the rage and anger and fear that it was provoking inside the United States, particularly among the disinformation groups and the fact-checkers whose credibility suffered a huge blow when Zuckerberg denounced them as being politicized and unreliable, therefore, people with whom Meta’s platforms would no longer be doing business. 

That outrage and that fear have only proliferated and gotten much more intense, not just in the United States. Remember, Meta is obviously a huge international or even global company: Instagram is extremely popular in numerous countries throughout the West and throughout the democratic world. So still too, is Facebook, if you can believe that, and Threads even has gotten a few more users over the past few months. 

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!

Our guest is Seyed Mohammed Marandi. He's a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. He has become one of the leading voices inside Iran and he is generally regarded as a supporter of the country's general foreign policy orientation and his geopolitical interests. We talked to him about a wide range of issues, including Iranian internal politics, the stability of the Iranian government, its view of the U.S.-funded Israeli war in Gaza, Iran's view of the new Syrian government, whether it has become more militarily vulnerable over the last year or so, whether it seems as though there are major differences from the Iranian perspective between Biden and Trump, as well as the nature of Iranian-Saudi relations, which have changed for the better over the past several years. 

Some people become very upset when you even talk to someone who has radically different views than the United States and the West, especially if they're deemed a supporter of one of the bad countries. For obvious reasons, the bad countries never include governments like Saudi Arabia and Egypt because they're close American allies, but most definitely do include Iran. Whatever your views on that, Professor Marandi is a scholarly and highly informed analyst, in general, and especially in that region. I found our discussion with him enlightening and provocative, and I believe you will too. 

The interview: Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi

G. Greenwald: Professor Marandi, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, we're thrilled to have you. 

Prof. Marandi: Thank you very much for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, let me begin by asking you about internal Iran politics. I just want to spend a lot of time on external affairs, including in the region but there's this growing discourse now about the possibility that the United States would work with Israel to try to engineer some sort of regime change in Iran. This has obviously been something that has been discussed for quite some time, but it seems to be picking up a little bit more steam with the incoming President Trump and his administration. Whenever people in the West imagine regime change in Iran, they're not talking about instituting elections like Iran already has, to allow Iranians to choose their leader. They already know what leader you should have and that is the offspring of the Shah of Iran, to reinstate the dynasty of the Shah. What can you tell us about how the Shah is remembered, how he's perceived, the level of support that he has inside of Iran?