Daily Updates

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!

The questions below were sent by our Locals supporters. If you would like to send your question, you can join our Locals community.

I've always believed that, unlike in the past, when journalists spoke in a monologue – they spoke on a kind of mountaintop, they issued their copy, people read it, and nobody had any outlet against it – the most important innovation of digital era journalism is that it has completely reversed: now all the time, if you write something, you are certain to hear many different directions criticisms and questions and critiques and challenges to everything that you've written. That's been part of what I've loved and, maybe because my journalism career was born in the internet age where that was already the case, to me, it's an obligation of journalism. If you're trying to have an impact on the public discourse, you have to not just open and disseminate it but answer and be accountable. 

The interactive Aftershow that we created every Tuesday and Thursday was designed to do that on Locals, where our community of subscribers is. We take questions or respond to feedback and critiques and hear suggestions for future shows. It was incredibly constructive. The problem that we have found – and we've been announcing that we're trying to retool this aftershow – is that every Tuesday and Thursday night we would end the show on Rumble and it would typically take 20, 25 minutes for us to set up the Locals show, it is in a different part of the studio, it has a different format, we have to wind down the Rumble stream and then have to boot up the Locals stream. A lot of people understandably don't want to wait around for dead air waiting for that Locals show. 

As many of you know, the Aftershow is available only for members of our Locals community, which is a really important part of the independent journalism that we do here. It's actually what enables us to do the independent journalism here. So, if you want to support our journalism and be part of the Locals community, you can just click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community. 

What we decided to do is instead of these aftershows that have this big-time interval, every Friday, we're going to have what we are calling a Mailbag. I know that's an incredibly creative term. Nobody else has ever described this type of show that way before. But essentially what we want to do is elevate the questions, the comments, the critiques and the challenges from the aftershow, where only members hear it, to the live Rumble show and use Friday night, assuming that there's no major breaking news event that prevents it, and that way we can have a kind of back and forth. Other Rumble features are coming to enable it to be even more interactive, including a call-in feature where you can call in live and we can have a conversation. 

We've always gotten some amazingly provocative, interesting and entertaining questions from our viewers. Just as a note, the only people who will be able to submit questions or comments for Friday Mailbag are members of our Locals community.  

Here is video question number one in our debut Mailbag on Friday's evening System Update on Rumble and it is from Kevin Kotwas: 

So, I know that you speak a lot about the dangers of tech censorship and the importance of a free, open internet. But my question is whether or not we could truly have a free and open internet when all of these platforms are owned and centrally controlled by tech billionaires and exist within the top-down model of capitalism. I think, you know, the fact that this kind of decentralized blockchain, whatever platform doesn't exist yet, but isn't that sort of a cop-out? And shouldn't we start building these alternative systems that are, so we don't have to rely on the whims of billionaires for free speech? 

You know, that's a really great question. It's actually at the center of so many of the things that we cover. For those of you who aren't familiar with the terminology, what he's essentially saying is that one of the reasons why censorship on the internet has been such a problem is that you have these very identifiable figureheads who make all the decisions, who kind of sit there with the permit and delete buttons right on their desk. Mark Zuckerberg gets to decide what is and isn't permissible on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and Google, on YouTube and all of their platforms and pre-Elon on that Twitter regime and now Elon himself on Twitter. And what the argument is saying is that even if you get somebody who is vehemently dedicated to the concept of free speech and opposed to online censorship, somebody like Elon Musk said he was, somebody like Rumble and its CEO, Chris Pavlovski, definitely are, but I have to say, even Jack Dorsey – I know he gets a lot of criticism, rightfully so, for the censorship Twitter did but he was never somebody who believed in internet censorship. If you listen to the reasons he says Twitter ended up censoring so much, you'll find that it's not because he was a believer in that. Quite the contrary. And the problem is that as long as you have an identifiable central decision maker, you're always going to be able to bring pressure to bear on these people. The government can threaten them, the government can put pressure on them, media outlets can try and shame them, “Oh, if you don't censor this, there's going to be blood on your hands.” But what you also often have is a workforce that these companies rely on and have recruited from Stanford and other colleges that have become pretty left-wing in terms of culture wars and believe in censorship and so, you get these internal pressures as well from your own work force saying we can't allow this kind of content. And so even the most stalwart free speech defenders like Elon ended up picking a war in Brazil that I think did a lot of good was really important he refused to censor a bunch of unjust censorship demands coming from this tyrannical judge, but then Brazil booted X, banned X from Brazil, which is a huge market, and Elon Musk had to retreat and now, he is censoring in accordance with those demands. Obviously, in China and India, all these company platforms do the same. Rumble has been an exception in that it has decided it would rather lose access to big markets, including Brazil and France than censor but at the end of the day, that is an ideal because you want these media outlets in every part of the world. 

One of the people who has advocated most the solution that's embedded in the question is the idea that we can't have any more centralized social media where there's a company or one person who sits at the helm and has the ability to censor or not censor because as long as that's the case, there will always be major vulnerability points to induce internet censorship. People like Jack Dorsey have very vocally argued that the only way out of that, no matter how well-intentioned the executives are, is through what Kevin, in that question asked, which is a kind of blockchain technology that decentralizes these social media outlets. So, in a sense, and I'm not an expert on this, technologically, but everybody has their own protocol of the social media outlet, and they can interact with one another. There was a site, Mastodon, you might remember, that liberals tried to flee when Elon bought Twitter and ended up realizing that didn't work. And there are other social media companies that don't rely on this centralized censorship, that do rely on these protocols. The problem right now is that these kinds of protocols, these kinds of blockchain sites are far too difficult to use. They're far too confusing. If you don't know a lot of computer code if you don't have an in-depth understanding of how protocols of blockchain work, it's just not user-friendly. And as long as it's not user-friendly, it's a huge entry into using them. And what we're seeing is that social media outlets to be meaningful and influential rely on scale. You need huge numbers of people on there. Otherwise, what's being said there makes no impact. 

But that can easily happen. I remember very well when the Snowden reporting happened, when Edward Snowden first started contacting me and was demanding that we use very highly sophisticated forms of encryption because he obviously felt unsafe, for good reason, talking to us about the stuff that he had taken unless we had the most military-grade encryption. But at the time, almost nobody, certainly media,, had that kind of encryption because it was extremely technologically complex to use. If you weren't well-versed in code, it would be very hard to do it. Snowden took hours and hours walking me through it. And now just six, seven, eight years later, that encryption is everywhere. It's very user-friendly. You don't need to do anything in order to have your communication encrypted. 

So, I do think there's validity to the view that as long as we have centralized social media where there's an executive or a set of executives and officials at the top, it's always going to be a vulnerability point to force internet censorship. Rumble is trying to prove that you can have a company that doesn't succumb to that but again, they've thus far been inaccessible to multiple key outlets. And you don't want that. You want Rumble and its free speech values to be in those countries. Blockchain may be the only solution. The problem is right now, and I think in the foreseeable future, it's unlikely to be sufficiently user-friendly to permit people on a very large scale to be able to actually use it. But it's a great question. It's an important development to watch out for. I hope those technologies get more user-friendly for precisely the reason that the questioner said. 

All right, let's go to question 2, from one of our longtime Locals members, Alan Smith. 

Greetings to the show's host. I'm sure it's been a long day for you, so I'll confine my questions to human subordinance. Glenn, I was wondering if there have been any developments in your ongoing feud with that Brazilian judge, and have you game down strategy in the event that you're tortured? Having Michael Tracy on is good practice and suggests that you have a high pain threshold but I recommend adopting the chunk method, just start talking, confess to everything and try to filibuster. 

Now, on a more serious note, more serious than your imminent torture, last week you seemed to suggest that you're younger than me. What you kind of understood at the time is that I am among the most accredited disinformation experts in the world. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that's just a made-up title that I've arbitrarily bestowed on myself, but we're not talking about that. The important thing to remember is that, aside from the obvious prestige this title affords me, it also enables me to issue disinformation warnings. 

So, let me address a couple of things. The serious question is about what my current condition is, my current status here in Brazil given the fact that I have been extremely critical of the most tyrannical official, I'd argue, in the democratic world, which is the Supreme Court Judge Alexander de Moraes, who was the one who had that war with Elon Musk, is the one who ordered X banned from all of Brazil, has put critics of his in prison, ordered searches and seizure of them, put political opponents in a form of lawfare and abuse of the justice system that makes what the Democratic Party did look tame by comparison. And there are a lot of people in prison and there are a lot of people exiled for having done that because he threatened to imprison them or has imprisoned them. And it's a really repressive environment. 

It isn't that I have just been a vocal critic of his. It's also that six months or so ago I got my hands on a massive archive that came right from his chambers. We've talked about this before. We were able to report; I partnered on purpose with the largest newspaper in Brazil, Folha de São Paulo, where we published on the front page more than a dozen articles showing all kinds of improprieties and irregularities and how his chambers were conducted. And in response, as you can imagine, he did not appreciate that, he opened a criminal inquiry. There were all kinds of threats emanating from Brasilia. But I've had this before. I obviously have this with the Snowden file and with Wikileaks and with the first reporting that we did in Brazil about Lula da Silva and the corruption force. As I always say, if you want to go into journalism and you want to actually do a good job with it, you're going to get threatened. You're going to get attacked. If you're not, it's a sign you're not bothering anybody in power. 

That said, I do think the questioner raised an important point, which is that I've known Michael Tracey for many years now. I've had many different kinds of interactions with him. I've had endless debates with him where he insists upon a certain myopic view or a more ample and substantive view and will pursue it endlessly until the end of time. You have to hang up on him, and even if you do, he'll call you 20 minutes later and continue or write you a long email about it. We've had Michael here in the studio. So, it is true that all those dealings with Michael Tracey have made me, I think, extremely well prepared to endure whatever forms of torture or other horrific suffering governments might actually try to impose as a result of their anger toward their critics. 

So, this is something that gives me a lot of hope. I think one of the things that's important – two things that are important actually – is and I've talked a lot about this with Julian Assange over the years and with Edward Snowden over the years, I talked about it with Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, is that if you're going to try to do something that you know is dangerous, you're going to take on a power center, there's nothing that undermines the courageousness of it or the nobility of it if you start planning how to protect yourself against the worst consequences. You don't want to sacrifice the work; you don't want to run away and retreat. There's nothing noble about that. But if you devise strategies to try to minimize your vulnerability and minimize their ability to attack you, I think that's very wise. One of the tactics we've used in the Snowden story, with Wikileaks, with the first reporting we did in Brazil, is we just partner with large newspapers and commandeer them and get them on our side. It's obviously a lot more difficult for the government to try to prosecute you if you're publishing the leaked or classified documents that incriminate them and you're just doing it on your own website and they could say, you're just a blogger, you're an information broker, you're at theft. The things Obama administration officials tried to do with us with the Snowden story to justify our surveillance and imprisonment. But if you're partnering with The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Globo and Folha – with Snowden, we partnered with media outlets around the world – then it becomes much more difficult. Then, it basically would mean that they have to put not only you but the editors in Folha and the journalists in Folha in that same criminal process as well. 

It doesn't always work out that way. Julian Assange partnered with the New York Times, The Guardian and El Pais to publish that 2010 classified information, and yet, still the Trump administration found a way to only prosecute Julian Assange and not those other newspapers. Even though the Obama administration has said there's no way to prosecute Julian Assange without also prosecuting the newspapers with whom he worked and who published the same information. When I was indicted in Brazil in 2020, I was the only one indicted, even though I was working with the largest newspaper in the country. 

So, it's not a guarantee, but it's a strategy that you can take. And look, at the end of the day, you have a lot of different options in life, and I don't think some are better than others. I think there are times in your life when you don't want to pursue a risky career project because you're just not at the point in your life when that's your priority or you're ready for it. But in general, especially in journalism, I think if you're somebody who believes in journalism, if you want to go into journalism for the right reasons – to take on power centers – if you're not prepared for and expecting these kinds of retaliations, and it goes back to what we're talking about with establishment centers of power earlier than that is simply not the right profession for you. Thanks for that question. 

Here are some text questions. That’s what we've been doing on the Aftershow for a long time. This is from @stephenpw:

It's, I think, something that is hard to say. You know, I was thinking today about the fact that I remember in the ‘80s when Ronald Reagan ran, he ran on a platform of abolishing three major cabinet positions, including the Department of Education, I believe the Department of Health and Human Services and maybe the Department of Interior. I'll check on those last two. It doesn't really matter; I don't remember for sure, but definitely the Department of Education. 

Reagan was an incredibly popular president. He won in 1984 with a massive landslide. He campaigned on it and people voted for it and he just never did it because the institutional inertia in Washington was too great to effectuate changes that radical. And I think one of the things that Democrats are looking at and feeling almost jealous about and resentful toward is that their leaders have often run on platforms and when they get into office, they make all kinds of excuses why those things are impossible to do. 

The reality is that we're not supposed to have parts of our government that operate unto themselves free of democratic accountability. Like USAID saying, “How dare you White House that got elected come in interfering in our operations and trying to find out what we're doing? We have the right to exist separately.” Why? the government funds you!

And so, I think one of the things that Elon Musk is doing, I think one of the things that a lot of people who helped prepare Donald Trump for what would happen if he won and you've got to give those people credit independently of the merits. They were not playing around; they were extremely serious about doing the things they said they were going to do. They had plans for it, they had executive orders written, they had all kinds of powers that their lawyers told them they could exercise, they're not playing around, which is what you would want in a president who campaigns on dismantling a massive institution of the deep state, administrative state. You don't want them making a few symbolic gestures toward it and then just letting it stand as is. This is, I think, something that is commendable, independent of your views of these agencies, because Donald Trump ran on a platform of doing this, the people of the United States democratically ratified it, and now he's going about doing it. 

These agencies are not going away lightly. This is now the third question when we're talking about the kind of instinct and incentive of establishment institutions. They don't just give up lightly because somebody is at their gate knocking on the door or even going in. This is a staple of American imperialistic foreign policy since the end of World War II. You think these people, these military-industrial complex people are just going to give all this up lightly? But right now, Donald Trump and Elon Musk and his team are steamrolling over opposition. The Democrats are still completely befuddled by what happened in the 2024 election, even more so by what they stand for. Nobody cares about the corporate media anymore. So, they're not a bulwark to anything, and every day they just keep rolling over these agencies. 

I don't want to be too rosy-eyed about it; we'll see what ends up replacing them, we'll see what people who are doing this actually intend with these agencies but these agencies, USAID and others like them, have been these behemoths that have run our country and run our foreign policy and run much of the world and they are completely impervious to democratic elections. Nobody has any idea of what they're doing. They purposely keep it that way. They're sinister, they interfere in other countries, other countries hate them, they have kicked them out, they've expelled them, they have a massive budget, and they do what they want with it. And so, to watch them being targeted and to watch all of this transparency, selective, though it may be emerging, I've always believed that this was the value of Donald Trump, no matter all my disagreements of various policy positions of his. 

We played you this video before where Seymour Hersh, the legendary journalist, said that he was always been associated with the left, has said that “You can vote Democrat, you can vote Republican for decades and the foreign policy establishment continues as is. Nothing can ever change and it's disastrous and corrupted.” Donald Trump, he said, is the only one with the capacity to be what he called a circuit breaker. And my former intercept colleague Jeremy Scahill, who's clearly on the left, went on Breaking News and said that he doubted that and I think that's exactly right. I think Donald Trump is a circuit breaker. And circuit breakers are a blunt instrument. They just turn all the lights off. But sometimes when the system is flowing, and nobody can stop it because it's too big and has been going on for too long and it's creating too many destructive results and results that we don't even know, you need a circuit breaker. You need to break it and then say, okay, what is this? What has it been and how do we rebuild it? And I'm not saying there are no dangers from it. I'm not saying there are no valid questions about Elon Musk's role or the role of people he's hiring to do these things but I don't think you can deny that having people rampage through these unaccountable industrial administrative state and deep state agencies in Washington is so long overdue, and I'm thrilled to see it. 

This is from @charlie747_- 

Well, let me just say that USAID was created in 1961. We had by Mike Benz on the show, he explained and I think in a very cohesive and accurate way, the reason they needed USAID, they already had a CIA, they already had a State Department. Why do you need a USAID to carry out the same foreign policies? It's because the CIA and the State Department can't go into places and say, “Hi, I'm from the U.S. government, I'm from the State Department, I'm an arm of the CIA and I'm here to involve myself in your internal activities.” USAID was a way of pretending “Oh no, we're not the CIA, we're not the State Department, we're just here to help, we want to fund your nice programs, we’re going to get involved in your civic society, we want to help people.” The reality is that that was the goal. The U.S. government did not fund USAID in these massive numbers to go around helping people because we're really nice, we were concerned for people. Sometimes they did end up helping people because one way to get soft power in a country is by going in and saying, “Oh look, we're saving your babies. Don't you love us instead of China?” 

Massive amounts of this budget, though, were about subverting elections, overthrowing elections, manipulating the outcome of elections to get the leaders that we wanted sowing discord and division, trying to transform other societies into ours and our vision of left-wing culture war ideology, because we thought that that would make these countries more amenable to our it's just a completely unnecessary part of the federal government, very, very sinister and creates a lot of anti-American rage, even though it's called USAID. Who could be against an aid agency that just wants to help? And finally, that narrative is being destroyed because transparency is what brings the truth to everything. 

Last question from @RTDidd:

Lots of good points there.  I absolutely agree with the point that the real ethnic cleansing came before Trump. But this is perfect bipartisan foreign policy. Joe Biden oversees the destruction of Gaza for 15 months by giving Israel the arms and enemies and money to destroy it all with no limitations and then Trump comes in and says, “Oh look, Netanyahu and Biden destroyed all of Gaza; I have to do something about it.”

It is absolutely true and we've been saying this for many years now – not just in the last couple of weeks – that Gaza has been completely destroyed and made uninhabitable. The civilian infrastructure of Gaza was obliterated on purpose – water, sewage, buildings, the health care system, and the educational system. There's nothing there. And I wouldn't even say it's such a malicious idea that, hey, look, these people can't stay there while they're renovating. I mean, I don't know if you've ever renovated the homes, you live in. It's horrific. And there the structure is not collapsed. It's just that there's so much going on that on some level, for your safety, sometimes even you have to leave the house. And here I don't even like that comparison, I just want to make the point but it is a much vaster scale. 

The problem is twofold. One is that you can rebuild Gaza without moving out 1.8 million Gazans. You rebuild this area, you move the people temporarily out, you move them back in, all within Gaza. Trump is giving the Israelis what they've always wanted, which is the cleansing ethnically of Gaza from all Arabs. But the other problem is you have to leave it to the Palestinians to decide what they want. You can't decide for them what's best. “Oh. it's better for them to just leave and not sit in the rubble.” Let them decide that right now, they're all saying “We just survive 15 months because we don't want to leave this land. This is sacred land to us. This is our land. We will fight to the death to preserve it.” 

So, if I were making a decision and somebody were saying to me, hey, you can live in this rubble that Israel just obliterated for 15 months, or you can move somewhere where there's at least some semblance of civilian life, my choice might be different than the people of Gaza who have strong religious and cultural and political reasons that probably has got reinforced over the last 15 months about why they will never, ever leave.

The other problem is, it's not just these neutral countries suggesting it to them. It's the United States and Israel. He sat next to Netanyahu. Everyone in Palestine and everyone in the world knows that the people who destroyed Gaza are the two countries sitting there, the United States and Israel. And they're the last two that people in Gaza are going to trust to move out. 

The solution to the Middle East is have the United States stop paying for Israel's military, and all of its wars and protect them diplomatically and everything they do, because then they will have an incentive to place limits on their behavior and to try to find a way to get along with their neighbors and then at the same time give the Palestinians some degree of sovereignty and dignity the way everyone else in this world would demand. I don't think there's another group of people on the planet that would tolerate and withstand a foreign military, especially the ones that kicked him out of their original homeland, putting them through humiliating checkpoints, killing them whenever they feel like it, flattening their society, cutting off food, going on for decades, who wouldn't fight back. 

There's a famous film in in Hollywood made in 1984 called Red Dawn, about how the Russians invaded and occupied the United States and all the heroic Americans, not the military, civilians, took up arms and engaged in terrorist attacks against the Russians to drive them out. That's everyone's right. Everybody, every population would use violence if foreign militaries were occupying the land. So, the solution is to solve the root of the problem. 

I do agree with people, and I think, you know, I heard this critique and I'm willing to even give it a little bit of validity that, especially in the first day when I heard this, I overreacted to it rather than caveating in the fact that it could be a negotiating ploy, which I think in part it might have been. Nonetheless, I think the very idea of even musing about ethnic cleansing – and that is what it is if you're talking about the forceful transfer of a population of a certain ethnicity out of a land, that, by definition, is ethnic cleansing and if that's not, nothing is – while he was sitting next to the smirking leader of the country that actually destroyed it. Think about the imagery that is sent around that region of the world. The unrest that can create in that region, the anti-American rage that it can create, the impossibility of normalizing relations in the Middle East while Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are sitting there talking about turning Gaza into some sort of American-owned or American-Israeli partnership real estate project when the whole point of that conflict is that the people there feel thousands of years of very deep religious, cultural and now identity-based connection to the land. 

All right. This is a great exercise. I really love this. The questions were great tonight. We'll continue to grow, get better, get more diverse and everything. That's what we're hoping. 

A longtime supporter sent the following e-mail about the dismantling of USAID. We are sharing it, as well as Glenn's response below, in case anyone else finds it interesting.

From Supporter:

PS on not opposing Trump -- or anyone -- reflexively: What most came to mind there for me was Bush and PEPFAR. I'm not a fan of Bush to put it mildly - - I'll never forgive him for lying us into war for starters. But still I have no problem giving him props for PEPFAR which saved millions of lives from AIDS. Of course he just deserves part of the credit -- I'd also want to be sure to remember the late Paul Farmer, who unlike Bush was a genuinely good and decent man throughout (I had the good fortune to meet him a few times) -- but it wouldn't have happened without Bush's buy-in. "Compassionate conservatism" was mostly bullshit, but this was a very prominent exception that massively changed the world for the better.

But I guess you're on the other side of this? I see you celebrating the shut down of USAID. I'm all for praising Trump if and when he does something good, but in my opinion this ain't it. For one, is this even legal the way they are going about it? I am not a lawyer, and won't pretend to have a well-informed take, but it seems pretty questionable. Even if you want to argue it's legal, I really struggle to understand celebrating the world's richest man suddenly shutting down aid for some of the world's poorest. I get the argument that USAID has sometimes been used as cover for the CIA or whatever. The first thing that comes to mind was using a more or less fake vaccination program to catch Bin Laden (though googling, that one doesn't seem to have involved USAID. But do you think shutting down USAID is really going to materially undermine the CIA? They'll find the cover somewhere else. And to the extent aid continues, this will make it less independent of political concerns, bringing it under direct control of the State Department. Not sure if you followed the similar move in the UK where DID -- a formerly independent agency in the UK, widely seen as the best major national aid agency - was brought under the Foreign Office and more political control. At least there, they did it in an orderly way (and in fairness, from what I've heard, while clearly negative for the quality of decision making wasn't nearly the sea change critics feared, at least so far).

 

From: Glenn

It's a bit reductive to dichotomize the debate to Keep USAID or Abolish USAID, at least in terms of how I see it. I have zero doubt that there are USAID programs that save lives and do a great deal of good for the neediest.

But this is not the primary objective of SAID and it never was. The primary objective is to bolster US imperialism and the power to interfere in other countries. They fund countless propaganda rags around the world; programs that destabilize regions; and campaigns to manipulate foreign elections. Most of the most vicious "independent" Ukrainian press - the kind that routinely smears Americans as being Kremlin agents for questioning NATO narratives (I've been on many of those) -- are USAID funded. They do that in Russia, Cuba, everywhere.

The whole issue with Trump comes down to this clip where Jeremy Scahill describes how Seymour Hersh sees Trump. We have this gigantic part of our government that operates in secret, completely on its own, with zero accountability, designed to foster failed bipartisan US foreign policy. Nothing and nobody has had the ability to shake or subvert it other than Trump, for whatever reasons and with whatever motives. Absent him, it just not only continues but expands and becomes more sinister.

Of course they'll find other ways to do much of this. But the reason USAID was created in the first place is because it's so much easier to access and manipulate other countries when there's a pretense of humanitarianism to it rather than an explicit CIA or State Dept program. I wish there were someone viable proposing surgical and precise cuts to the stuff that should be excised, but there's not. So absent that, I prefer a more blunt assault than just allowing the status quo to continue and fester unmolested.

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!

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of System Update. The reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, for Gaza and for resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza. At the time that we had gone on air, however, he had only revealed a partial aspect of this plan. He gave his press conference in the Oval Office, he then met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office as well, answered questions and basically said that his plan and his vision for Gaza was to remove everybody who lives there, the 1.8 million people – and we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment – clean it all up, rebuild it into something beautiful, and then basically allow some of them back in. 

We talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer – the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving; they don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society – to say you'll just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back, obviously, they were expelled from what they consider their homeland, which is now Israel, in 1948, and never came back, through generations they've been waiting to do so. They're never going to leave voluntarily. But it was really only after that press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Trump gave another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. And he didn't just speak off the cuff. 

He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including in Netanyahu’s government, wanted to do, but that the United States would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions, and having a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. 

When he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution, he basically said: “Well, I think they will leave because they wouldn’t want to say there, and if they don't, they're going to have to.” Meaning we're going to go make them. He also very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. We're going to clear out the rubble. We're going to disarm that ordnance that is there. We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. So, obviously, if the Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave – which they're not – then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? How are they going to leave? Who's going to force them to leave? And President Trump was making very clear that he would. He would do what's necessary to make them leave. 

So, the plan is essentially two weeks into the Trump administration not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation, although, obviously, things are being done about that. But now somehow the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs and forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up and rebuild the society there because it used to be there but it has now been destroyed, over the past 15 months. 

That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America First foreign policy ideology President Trump has long advocated, which he ran in this campaign. It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of regime change or nation-building, which is exactly what he was describing last night, and you already see a lot of Republicans, like Mike Johnson – who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel – as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, we're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. 

So, I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama but, at the same time, underscoring the seriousness not only of the plan itself – which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy – but even the discussion of this can have a lot of serious implications. The whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do out a negotiating strategy if you don't get what you want, then of course, you have to follow through and do that because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. If you say either you give us X, Y and Z, or we're going to do A, B and C, and you don't get X, Y and Z, and then you don't do A, B and C, no one's going to trust your negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that that's a bluff. 

Setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of Gaza and we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for, as he calls it, “the people in the region” – just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. So, let's talk about a few parts of this. 

First of all, the Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both Canada and Mexico – he didn't just talk about it but implemented it. People went ballistic and now it turns out that he ended up not doing it, in part because he got some concessions – you can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not but that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy: to say that he's going to do things. So, the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it, forcibly remove the population, doesn’t, in fact, mean that's going to happen. So, I do want to concede that point. Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. 

If you think it's a terrible idea – and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've laid out last night – but an even worse idea, now that I know the details of this plan. When I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically, morally, legally to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over, after all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building. 

The whole point is when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up; not when they're already going to do it, but now so that the administration understands that there are a lot of people who are opposed to it. Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, “Look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best, he clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going” – No, that's not the way democracy works. The president's not a father figure. You don't trust in him that he knows best. You make yourself heard, especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. 

The entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza. Even if he can get those people out and he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. He said, “Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East,” which there is because of oil, and it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent the popular will from being expressed, those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. That's where all that money that Trump is very enamored of is. He loves the Saudis. He loves the Emirates, Jordan. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals in those regions because there's so much money there and Trump obviously thinks that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. 

The problem is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land, that it's sort of like if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, “You know what? It's too cold here, I'm getting older and I don't really like the conditions here any longer, it's not conducive to my quality of life, I'm just going to go to Florida and Arizona. They have great developments there. They have new golf courses and nice homes, and the government's going to move there. What's the difference? I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin.” That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. 

The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now and a lot longer before that but really 70 years since the formation of the state of Israel is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land and the Palestinians believe the same thing. This land is holy. And both Judaism and Islam – as well as Christianity. The Palestinians have endured so much. Years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts and blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country on the planet and they've never left. They've never been driven out. 

This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. This is not something Donald Trump invented. Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting, quote-unquote, “refugees” temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe corridor to leave Gaza and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians. And they knew that no one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes especially if the plan was not just to go there until the bombing ended but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the time frame to clear out the rubble and to detonate the unstable and structurally compromised buildings. 

Nobody in Gaza, virtually nobody, is going to give up that land to Donald Trump knowing that he has Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner, people who are in bed with the Israelis – in the case of Miriam Adelson, she is an Israeli. It's basically turning over the land to Israel. If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. They're never going to do that. The only way this plan would work is if somebody is willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. We just watched the IDF for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out – and it failed. They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that cease-fire was in effect. 

If you think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people and if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? Do you want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again this time to secure their biggest dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the layman's realm at once or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? It's never going to happen. There's no possibility that that can happen and that's what Trump is proposing. 

Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the Gazans have someplace to go and the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships that care a lot about their unstable population. We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population which can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. King Abdullah, of Jordan, has a large population of Palestinians already in his country and the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. So, they're saying “We're not going to take any “refugees”,” but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. We give Jordan a ton of money. Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. I think he thinks he has the leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans but, again, even if they do, and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave even if their society has been reduced to rubble? 

Then you have the issue of these other countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, and Qatar, and Jordan. Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second is to facilitate normalization between all those countries and Israel, isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons – he talked about that today – and then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. That's part of what his legacy is (in his mind that’s what he wants it to be). 

The problem is that the governments that I just named have been vehement and adamant, from the beginning, that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interests of the United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome to their own state, basically. And it's not because these dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. Maybe some do, but it's not that. It's that even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry and feels like they're being too disregarded. 

If the population of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or even Lebanon, watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing and population transfer of Gazans out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even handed over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia as part of normalization, the population would never tolerate that. There would be a conflagration, an uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it, can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. 

But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again and Republicans are right on board, is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building – as always there's a gigantic Israel exception. To so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech as we've gone over many times. Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. Collective punishment, population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics and, if you care about it, by international law and there's no question about what Trump is promising. 

The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters questioned the State Department, questioned the White House and would say, we're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. They're destroying everything. They're carpet-bombing it. They're flattening Gaza. And the U.S. government was saying, “No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating. They're being very targeted. They're only bombing where Hamas is. This isn't carpet bombing. This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. They're being humanitarian about it. This is the world's most moral army.” 

Now that the cease-fire is in effect – and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that cease-fire; he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring Netanyahu to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan – now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite: “Look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. It's apocalyptic, everything is rubble. There's no civilian infrastructure, there's no sewage, there's no water, there's disease. Nobody can live like this.”

This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration were denying this is happening as well as the Israelis. Now, suddenly, the cease-fire is taking place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. Suddenly, now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan: to drive those people out so that Israel could take over Gaza. 

Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told were going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? Of course not. This is serving Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating because it's Israel's wet dream along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. This is Israel's wet dream: to have the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. The Israelis tried it and failed and, out of frustration, reduced all Gaza to rubble. 

The other thing that I want to note – and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting, it's not just a mistake off the cuff – pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 million people. Definitely in excess of 2 million people. Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. He says, “We need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million” and he said that figure several times. Clearly, that's the figure he was given. 

If I've got a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. So, I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. I have no doubt that the official death numbers that we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. There are people who are missing. There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medical deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up, shot and killed, who never were accounted for. So, you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and the current population. 

But to me, the bigger question is: is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed and every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement at the altar of yet again serving Israel or making sure Israel can expand? Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small and a very small country when asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. This would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. 

On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists. Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return, not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Miriam Adelson and a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. This is supposed to be the holy land that unites under the Jews and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. And also that's what Israel wants too; Israel wants to control these lands. It wants it to be greater Israel not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. 

I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. They deserve credit, we saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. We don't want to replace American workers with foreigners; we want to do the opposite and there was a huge debate and conflict within the movement over that. This is exactly the same thing. I mean, Trump, since 2015, has been railing against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation-building and engagements in the Middle East overseas. How disastrous that has been. And now he turns around and proposes something like this that not only has that dimension but also this massively criminal dimension, acts that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. 

There has been some walk back today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press but if you look at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, “Is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully?” She said: “President Trump has not endorsed military force yet.” 

Again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump: he keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. but it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan and there's no way that can be done short of war. And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need: another war to serve this foreign government in Tel Aviv and its interests. It would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. 

So, I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump statements do because they're not intended to necessarily predict what will happen but it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition so the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation-building – not even for the United States interest to be served, but for the state of Israel to be served and that is exactly what's happening here. 

All right. So, I wanted to respond quickly. I watched that press briefing today. I've seen this unfold today. I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first war, and he's been overtly threatening. I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want this kind of war. They don't want to send their kids to these kinds of wars. They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars. We've done enough to serve the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States and something like this would be in an entirely different universe which makes it utterly unacceptable.