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!

Pete Hegseth, Trump's new Defense Secretary, traveled today to the NATO Summit, in Brussels, where he signaled that the U.S. would be realistic – finally – about the war in Ukraine and more so how it will have to end. Meanwhile, President Trump actually spoke today to Russian President Vladimir Putin – the first time Russian and American leaders have spoken in years – and began to outline a framework to diplomatically resolve the 3-year bloodbath war in Ukraine that NATO capitals have so mindlessly fueled. 

And more: Mitch McConnell fell down twice this week. An elderly gentleman who apparently is in Congress, nobody really seems to know who he is, appeared to have some brain event while speaking on the House floor, a stroke of some kind. 

Also, when Democratic leaders gathered to try to show energy in opposing Trump, some of them shook their canes as they stood next to 86-year-old Maxine Waters, all while 74-year-old Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – young for Washington – pathetically chanted “We will win we will not rest.” 

For decades Americans mocked the Soviet Union for what we used to call their gerontocracy - meaning rule by old men in their '70s. Now, old men in their '70s are considered in Washington to be young guns. Our guest is the investigative journalist Dan Boguslaw who reported today for The American Prospect that Congress has actually created a tax-payer-funded clinic specifically for dementia and other age-related brain infirmities that members of Congress are now availing themselves of because of how old they are. 

The war in Ukraine began for all intents and purposes in February 2022 which is more than three full years now. I remember very well when it started and you could see the flood of propaganda that always emerges in the wake of a war that the United States wants to convince its population to pay for or be involved in. 

From the beginning the question I always had – I had a lot of questions – but the primary question I had was in which conceivable way does involvement in this war benefit the United States? It was a war that was a border dispute between two countries that have a very long and complex history, a shared complex history, and actually been in a low-grade conflict since 2014 ever since the United States led by Victoria Newland went to Kiev and incited a coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine which constitutional term was about to end. Russia, in retaliation, then annexed Crimea which had been a part of Ukraine but had been for centuries part of Russia. It is filled with people who are Russian speaking, who are Russian, ethnic Russians, who identify as Russian and would far more want to be part of Russia than Ukraine. There has been an attempt ever since, for eight years, to try to preserve the ability of the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass and elsewhere to preserve their right to speak Russian, to preserve their culture, to be free of repression of the kind that was emanating from Kiev. 

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!

More than a week ago, President Trump surprised a lot of people when, seemingly out of nowhere, he announced that it would be a good idea to move the 1.8 million Palestinians out of Gaza and put them somewhere else. Since then, Trump has talked about this idea with great frequency, increasing passion, and more and more specificity. 

He met today in the White House with the U.S.-funded King of Jordan and made clear that his plan is for the U.S. to simply “take over Gaza and then own it while building absolutely wonderful housing elsewhere for the Palestinian population” that he intends to forcibly eject delivering to Israel its wet dream in a form far greater than it ever thought possible, namely ethnically cleansing Gaza of all Arabs. 

There are multiple questions about this plan, obviously, but one question that is seemingly unanswerable is this: What does any of this have to do with the America First ideology that Trump and his supporters have been touting for eight years? With Americans at home facing a housing crisis and repressive economic obstacles, in what conceivable way does this help any of the voters that Trump claimed to want to help? 

It's quite obvious how it helps, for example, his billionaire pro-Israel donors, like the Israeli-American Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman, and even more obvious how it helps his son-in-law, the equally pro-Israel Jared Kushner, who has long spoken openly about the great value of what it would mean to build seaside and hotels in Gaza, but what does any of this have to do with the working-class voters in the Midwest and the South and the rest of the country – remember them? – who voted for Trump because they thought his focus would be on serving them and their interests rather than the interests of those in Tel Aviv? 

All of this is happening as it seems increasingly likely that the ceasefire deal, of which Trump was so proud, justifiably so, is on the verge of completely collapsing. In fact, from the start, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly told his supporters and the extremists in his government that he had no intention of carrying through on the deal and promised that Israel would return to bombing the little that remains of Gaza and killing even more innocent people once they got some hostages back. With Trump's blessing, and with U.S. financing and arms, that is exactly what Israel is now on the precipice of doing, once again prompting the question of war and this plan to remove the Arabs from Gaza and have the U.S. takeover is remotely consistent with, or even relevant to the ideology that Trump and his supporters spent years advocating. 

If you had watched Donald Trump for the last three weeks since he was inaugurated, you would certainly see he's pursuing a lot of the policies he had promised to pursue during the campaign, but you would also be forgiven for wondering whether a major part of Donald Trump's campaign was not only to make America Great Again but to make Israel great again. In fact, one of the reasons you might wonder that is because Trump actually said exactly that during a speech he delivered where he was overseen by Miriam Adelson on whom we did an entire show before the election, the Israeli billionaire who has donated massive amounts to Trump's campaign and who, according to Trump, played a critical role in his Mideast policy during his first term. He said, “We want to make America great again, and we also want to make Israel great again” and a lot of Trump's attention in the first three weeks in office has been devoted not to the workers of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the rest of the region that had played such a critical role in voting for him, but on plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of all the Palestinians and turn it into a vision that people like Jared Kushner, his pro-Israel son-in-law, and other people in Israel have long held, which was essentially to get out the Palestinians and then rebuild it from the rubble that Israel, with the help of the United States, produced over the last 15 months. 

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!

We open the week documenting the latest revelations of more and more instances of serious abuses of USAID and analyzing how they shed significant light on this now-besieged Washington institution. 

Then, Brazil's Judge Moraes just reversed many of his harshest and most controversial censorship orders and Rumble now returns to Brazil, in what is clearly a victory for free speech, not just for this platform, but for people everywhere, and we'll tell you all about that. 

Finally, friend of the show and finance and antitrust expert Matt Stoller will be with us tonight to argue why the CFPB is a vital tool for protecting ordinary consumers, and why its elimination will help only those big financiers and big banks on Wall Street, which the MAGA movement has long vowed to want to rein in. 

Since Donald Trump was inaugurated less than three weeks ago, there has been a flurry of activity, to put it mildly, much of which has, in our view, been positive –or at least with the potential to become positive – others of which have become, I think, potentially detrimental, most particularly Trump's fixation on serving the interest of the Israeli government, something that he basically signaled during the campaign he intended to do.