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.
