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!

Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

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!

In the first segment, we’ll talk about the victimhood narrative that holds that American Jews, in general, and Jewish students on college campuses in particular, are uniquely threatened, marginalized and endangered. One of the faces of this student victimhood narrative has become Eyal Yakoby, who is a vocal pro-Israel activist and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2024, he was invited by House Republicans to stand next to House Speaker Mike Johnson and he proclaimed: I do not feel safe. He said it over and over. “I do not feel safe” has kind of become the motto for his adult life. Now, he seized on those opportunities by initiating a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania seeking damages for what he said was the school's failure to fulfill its duties to keep him safe. Mind you, he was never physically attacked, never physically menaced, never physically threatened, but nonetheless claimed that the school had failed to keep him safe and told the congress in the country that he did not feel safe. 

The federal judge who is presiding over his lawsuit, who just happens to be a Jewish judge, a conservative judge, appointed by George W. Bush, not only dismissed Yakoby's lawsuit as without any basis, but really viciously mocked it, depicting his claims as a little more than petulant entitled demands from a privileged Ivy League student who wants to not be exposed to any ideas or political activism that might upset him – sort of depicting him as the Princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” Andersen’s literary fairytale about a princess who's so sensitive to anything that might concern her, that she's even unable to sleep if there's a pea buried beneath the seventeenth mattress on which she sleeps. 

This judicial decision is worth examining not only for the schadenfreude of watching one of America's whiniest pro-Israel activists be exposed as a self-interested fraud that he is, but also for what it says about the broader narrative that has been so relentlessly pushed and so endlessly exploited from so many corners, insisting that the supreme victim group of the United States is, of all people, American Jews. 

Then: speaking of extreme entitlement, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy made quite a name for himself over many years by ranting against the evils of cancel culture, championing the virtues of free speech, and viciously mocking as snowflakes and as people who are far too sensitive anyone who takes offense at jokes, offensive jokes told by comedians. That is what made it so odd – yet so telling – when this weekend we watched the very same Dave Portnoy viciously berated one of his employees for disagreeing with Portnoy's insistence that while jokes about everyone and every group continue to be appropriate, there must now be one exception: namely, according to Portnoy, jokes about Portnoy's own group,  American Jews,  must now be suspended and deemed too dangerous to permit. 

There have been really a lot of radical and fundamental changes, first on the political culture and then in our legal landscape as a result of the attack on October 7, and particularly the desire of the United States – by both parties – to arm the Israelis, to fund the Israelis, to protect the Israelis as they went about and destroyed Gaza. 

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!

Tonight, we have somebody who is in the middle of two of the biggest news stories on Capitol Hill. One, because he's become the primary opponent of the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill that President Trump has been advocating and was also one of the leading, if not the leading Republican opponents of President Trump's terror proposals and I'm talking, of course, about Senator Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky who often defends President Trump, but also, just like his father, has very strong principles that they've held for many years, that they refuse to bend or break in order to appease anybody or placate anybody, including in this case, even President Donald Trump. 

As a result of Paul's opposition to Trump's bill that he's trying to get passed, Trump posted some very Trumpian tweets earlier today, attacking Rand Paul, saying he doesn't understand the bill, suggesting that he ought to be out of Congress. Very possible that two weeks from now, Paul will be a very vocal defender of something Trump cares about, and he'll post something saying Rand Paul is one of the greatest politicians Kentucky has ever had. But it's very Rand Paul type of politics, which I think is commendable, and we want to talk to him about not only the reasons that he's opposing this bill, the reason is pretty straightforward it massively increases the debt, which is something that Senator Paul believes is dangerous for the United States, but also how he sees his role, whether his loyalty is supposed to be to the president who just got elected with a broad mandate in the United States or whether it's the people of Kentucky or his own principles and what happens when those collide. 

We've covered a lot of other issues with him as well, including the neocon push for war in Iran and how that might affect both foreign policy, the budget, the overall foreign policy direction in the United States and whether under President Trump it really is signifying a break from prior administrations. 

We talked a lot about the war in Ukraine and then finally the free speech assault that has been underway for almost five months now, since the Trump administration began, in the name of protecting Israel. Senator Paul gave a very stirring defense to the First Amendment last month in opposition to a new bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act that would have expanded the types of ideas about Israel that you are now prohibited from saying in colleges. 

As always, Senator Paul is a very good guest because he speaks his mind, you know that whatever he's saying whether you disagree or not, he believes in, and here is our interview with Senator Paul. Enjoy.