The interview: Dyab Abou Jahjah 

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!

Three stories this January 13:

First of all: now that the 2024 election is over and Joe Biden is on his way out, it's becoming acceptable in previously silent sectors of the media to document what a complete disaster Biden's Israel-Gaza policy really has been not just for Gaza but for the United States. “60 Minutes” – which has been solidly pro-Israel for many years – presented a decent segment on Sunday night detailing just how disastrous this has been and how it's an open secret in Washington that the Israelis are acting both criminally and adversarial to the United States and its interests. We’ll show you this important sea change.

Also: today Joe Biden announced that he was christening a new American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as the George W. Bush aircraft carrier, an aircraft carrier George W. Bush gave his notorious speech in which he declared “mission accomplished” about a month into the Iraq war. These are all the same people George Bush, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, whom Democrats just a couple of decades ago, really even just a decade ago, were calling all the things they now call Trump: a fascist, a Nazi, a war criminal, etc., etc. This is not just morally twisted but very illuminating about the character and ideology of the modern-day Democrats. 

In our last segment: there's a bizarre yet revealing tennis in the world of women's professional tennis. I know this seems like the sort of thing that we would not normally cover – and it isn't: this is not exactly a sports show – but the whole thing is really indicative of a certain kind of liberal cultural identity-ism that ends up patronizing women and treating them like fragile children in the name of protecting them. So, I want to tell you about this scandal. It's a really fascinating one to see the dynamics at play. 

There's a big sea change with a lot of different issues and how they're being discussed in mainstream American discourse. Now that the election is over, there's no longer a need to work so hard to try to defeat Donald Trump or to help push two lame candidates, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, over the finish line.

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!

 One of the most notable aspects of Donald Trump's array of nominees to serve in his key cabinet positions is that most of them have provoked zero opposition from Democratic members of Congress or their allies in the corporate media. Indeed, Democrats like Liz Warren and various CNN personalities have heaped praise on many of Trump's choices, such as Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik, for Ambassador to the U.N., and Scott Benson for Treasury Secretary. That's because those are all people who have long-standing loyalties to bipartisan D.C. establishment dogma and thus, Democrats are not just accepting but are happy about those choices. 

Tulsi Gabbard has generated by far the most anger with people like Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling her a Russian agent last month on MSNBC and Republican senators as well, indicating their widespread reluctance to vote for her. But today it is being reported - with on-the-record quotes from Republican senators – that Gabbard's nomination is in deep trouble. The only way Republican senators, many of them like Tom Cotton, have said they will even consider voting for her is if she renounces and reverses her longtime opposition to mass warrantless NSA and FBI domestic spying, and they're demanding that even to be considered, she must instead join the bipartisan consensus in favor of those long-time surveillance powers. 

Gabbard, in a last-ditch effort to win confirmation, is reportedly now reversing herself and promising to support those powers. This incident, like so many others like it, shows how Washington really works: the only way to ascend to power or to remain there is if you endorse fully and completely the U.S. Security state's agenda. 

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?