MAILBAG: Glenn on Tearing Down the Military Industrial Complex, Exposing Pro-Israel Indoctrination ...

Glenn Greenwald

Politics • Culture • Writing

MAILBAG: Glenn on Tearing Down the Military Industrial Complex, Exposing Pro-Israel Indoctrination and More

System Update #411

February 24, 2025

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!

Welcome to a new episode of our Mailbag, which is a new segment where we take questions from the members of our Locals community and answer them here live on our Rumble program.

If you want to be one of the people who can ask questions, you can do it by text or audio or video – and soon we're going to have a call-in opportunity while we're live on the air and we will have that kind of interaction. All you have to do is click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and that will take you directly to the Locals community.

We have a lot of great questions as we often do from our Locals members.

The first one is from @THEMILLMAN:

Do you have any specific personal stories or stories you've heard that you can share about what Israel does to indoctrinate American Jews from a young age, and generally Americans? Maybe there are some examples from “The Holocaust Industry” [the book by Norman Finkelstein] (which I have not yet read)?

I watched “Israelism: The Awakening of Young American Jews”, a documentary that examines the indoctrination techniques Israel uses on American Jews, including free trips to Israel, dehumanization of Palestinians, the equating of Judaism with Israel, etc.

It's a great question and it's really interesting because if you grow up as an American Jew, which I did, in a largely American Jewish culture, my school was predominantly Jewish, most of my friends were Jewish who went to that school, my family is a hundred percent Jewish, so, I certainly have a lot of personal experience about that as well.

Everyone understands exactly what happens with this kind of indoctrination and it's almost like something that everybody agrees not to talk about because it sheds so much light on why there's so much Jewish American loyalty toward Israel. It's because this is something that is drummed into people's heads from basically the moment that they're born, not just a Jewish identity which is very common – Christians have a Christian identity, Italians have an Italian identity, etc., etc. – but it's specifically about the vital role of this foreign country.

My parents weren't very religious and that's true of a lot of American Jews who are secular – it's true of Israeli Jews as well. They're not overwhelmingly religious, a lot of them, necessarily, but it still is a central part of the identity of American Jews. My father grew up in Brooklyn, my mother grew up in the Bronx and they were both part of one hundred percent Jewish families. So, it was a central part of our family's identity. It was always, “We are a Jewish family” and even though my family wasn't religious my maternal grandmother was an immigrant from Germany. She was one of the two siblings of 11, her and her younger sister, who left Germany to come to the United States in the late 1930s to escape the persecution of Jews in Germany. She spoke with a heavy German accent her whole life and she thought it was extremely important that we have Jewish upbringing and Jewish traditions and even Jewish religion and so sent both my brother and me to a Jewish summer camp every year for I think five or six years.

So, I spent two months during the summer in the middle of Florida somewhere, in Ocala, sometimes, in southern Georgia, in Jewish camps and there was all kinds of indoctrination, religious indoctrination where you learn Jewish prayers, but also constant talk about Israel, the history of the Jewish people and the persecution that Jews face, we know all about the Holocaust and we were indoctrinated with the idea that Israel is a place that guarantees the safety of Jews uniquely and, without Israel, American Jews around the world could never be safe.

You're talking about the long thousands of years of persecution but obviously culminating in the Holocaust. So, from childhood, from adolescence, this is constantly reinforced in people that your identity is as a Jew, this makes you different from other people and you need to have a sense of devotion and loyalty to Israel, and it's fostered in all kinds of ways.

I think almost every friend that I have who I grew up with who is Jewish went on birthright trips to Israel which are trips that you can go on where it will be free. The Israelis do have extremely sophisticated propaganda programs that are catered to all sorts of specific kinds of people. For example, they have an LGBT propaganda tour for gay politicians from all around the world to go to Israel. They take them to gay bars in Tel Aviv and to the gay culture around Israel, they teach them about the freedom of gay people in Israel and compare them to the treatment of gay people in the West Bank, in particular, Gaza, under Hamas. I've seen left-wing politicians who go on these trips – they're often paid by Israel – who come back and, out of nowhere, are, suddenly, fanatically pro-Israeli. They start to believe that Israel is an important project to defend. You see it with people like Richie Torres who went on those kinds of propaganda tours. There's one for American teenagers as well and you go to Israel and they indoctrinate you with love of and support for Israel and these are very like I said sophisticated programs where they play on your emotions of the most primal and visceral kind. Your fears, your identity, your place in the world. It's very, very powerful. Propaganda is a very sophisticated science. We tend to think of it as just some messaging that people do but it's actually been studied in many fields of discipline: psychology, sociology, anthropology. Techniques have become increasingly powerful in terms of how people are propagandized.

One of these things that really struck me, and I think I talked about this before, is that I have a friend who I've been friends with almost my entire life and he's Jewish, he grew up in a typically Jewish tradition not overwhelmingly religious, but going to synagogue for Bar Mitzvah, just had the Jewish identity always reinforced. He was largely apolitical, didn't particularly feel that strongly about Israel and didn't talk about Israel much, certainly knowing that I'm a vocal critic of Israel and have been for a long time. It was never a topic of conversation between us, let alone any sort of thing that might impede our friendship. He was always pretty apolitical about it, pretty neutral about it, and yet, after October 7 – and I just didn't see this in him, I saw this in so many Jews that I had known who were similarly neutral, even a little bit critical of Israel – this very primal notion that Jews were now under attack just awakened in them and they were enraged by what had happened. October 7 deeply radicalized them and they began defending what Israel was doing and expressing contempt for those who were critical of it. This lifelong system of indoctrination which could be latent, at some points, might just be lurking. It's very present there.

I have to say more broadly that I think this is the sort of propaganda with which we're all inculcated not just about Israel, but about a whole range of topics including the United States. I can remember very vividly when I was six years old, in the first or second grade, we had civics classes, and I remember the teacher that I had she was this older woman obviously I'd lived through the Cold War, by then she was probably 60 or 70, certainly lived through that 20th century, and I remember every day her teaching us that the United States was the greatest country in the world, that we stood for freedom, that we fought against tyranny, that the Soviet Union was the opposite, it was our enemy.

We're very tribal animals, we evolved for thousands of years as part of a tribe, we needed to be part of a tribe and we had to maintain our tribal good standing because if you're ostracized or expelled from your tribe it would mean typically, for a long time, that you would wither away and die, you couldn't survive without a tribe. So, we're very tribal and to have these tribal instincts constantly stimulated from birth – the United States is the greatest country in the world, it fights for freedom, it fights for democracy, these other countries are the bad countries – these are things that are deeply embedded in our thought process and how we understand the world subconsciously and consciously. Once you're an adult, it takes a concerted effort to say wait, I want to uproot all the things that I was indoctrinated with, maybe some of them are correct, maybe some of them aren't and I want to reevaluate the world and see what is inside me that was put there for whatever purposes and what actually is my own ideas. It's not easy to do it, for any of us, no matter how much you try. These formations that shape us for years when we don't have any defenses against them, when we're children or adolescents, these are very, very powerful and the experience of seeing, not even the full panoply of pro-Israel indoctrination as an American Jew, but certainly a lot of it, and seeing the full range of it in a lot of my friends and then see how this plays out and manifest in adulthood it is incredibly enlightening. So, you look at how many American Jews there are in media or politics and it's very difficult to find ones who position themselves as Israel critics.

The Norman Finkelsteins of the world are known precisely because of how rare they are. Why is it that, overwhelmingly, people who grow up Jewish are taught to have Judaism or being Jewish as a part of their identity and end up on this polarizing question that divides the entire world so radically and fanatically and aggressively pro-Israel? Obviously, it's because it's a byproduct of what they've been indoctrinated with. They were taught from birth to love Israel, they become adults, and they love Israel. There's never any critical reevaluation at any point of whether that's something that they actually want to continue to believe.

I think that project of – not just with Israel, but with everything – of re-evaluating what it is that we were taught to believe, with which we were indoctrinated, and re-evaluating and uprooting it and then kind of reconstituting our belief system is one of the prerequisites to being an adult, to being an autonomous person, a free person: to make certain that the ideas and the values and the emotional reactions that shape who you are and how you think actually are coming from you and not from external sources that have been implanted in you when you had no idea that this was even being done.

So, for sure it is a very powerful system of propaganda. It is overt, it is engineered, it's not just through absorption. The Israelis understand the importance of it, there are lots of them and there's a lot of money spent on this sort of thing. They have them for evangelicals, they have them as I said for gay people, they have them for Americans, they have very different propaganda projects for all kinds of different people in the world, they're experts at it and it succeeds in lots of ways and people who really surprised me by how radicalized they were in favor of Israel after October 7 were kind of testaments to how much that worked.

All right, the next question is from @THEREAL_AF:

Hi Glenn! It's fascinating to watch the success of DOGE, what's being exposed with USAID, etc., and two of Trump's most controversial pics, Tulsi and RFK, being confirmed. It does seem like we're headed for some sort of renaissance or course correction, long overdue. I'm curious about your take on Chris Hedges’ recent remarks about the empire self-destructing, which is the alternate way of viewing these events.
Here is his first paragraph:
“The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of the state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.”

I do – without all of that invective that he put there and I'm not sure why that's there, just leaving that question to the side for the moment – I do think that a lot of what's happening is through necessity. The reality is that this American empire is unsustainable. I'm not somebody who thinks the minute the United States government has a deficit or even debt that's kind of apocalyptic. It is not the same and I've never accepted the analogy that just like a family has to balance their budgets so too do governments. Governments can use debt financing for lots of different reasons but that doesn't mean there aren't limits on them.

If you look at the debt of the United States and what is required to be serviced, just the interest payments alone and you lay on top of that the trillions and trillions of dollars that we've spent on foreign wars all over the place, it is obvious that that needs to be reined in: even if you're morally supportive of it, even if you think it's strategically advantageous, it's simply not sustainable.

The United States cannot sustain this level of debt and the policies that generate it. So, I think a lot of what Trump is reacting to and a lot of what Elon Musk is doing is almost an inevitable recognition that there has to be a radical course correction.

At the same time, I think it's an important course correction. I do not think that the American empire has been good for the world. Often the argument is “Well, even if it wasn't good for the world the alternatives would be worse.” We don't have to live under a single superpower or a single empire. In fact, most of world history has not been a unipolar world. There is a benefit from balancing powers and yes that was tried in the 18th and 19th centuries and it often produced wars, this idea that we were gonna have a balance of powers and no one would be dominant.

It just simply is the fact that – if you look at how many wars the United States has started, how many of the wars the United States has fueled, how many wars the United States has fought, how many of the proxy wars the United States fuels – much of the world's violence emanates from the United States. There have been empires in the past that would use wars to conquest, take land, take assets and for a while that can be fed but, ultimately, even those empires collapsed because they just became so sprawling and so unmanageable. So, I think that part of what is happening is this late-stage empire that Trump is reacting to and the recognition that most people in Washington have but have been unwilling or afraid to express that this cannot be sustained for much longer that this needs to all be reined in.

I also think in the case of Trump there is a real ideological conviction that most of what the United States does in the world when it comes to interfering in foreign countries – trying to control foreign countries, trying to start wars – is very bad for the United States, very bad for American citizens. I believe there's an ideological conviction there. If you're on the left and you believe that that impulse comes from a more paleo-conservative, right-wing, or isolationist impulse, maybe you can find it disturbing even if you think a left-wing version of that would be good, I guess, if you're really intent on, not just demanding radical change, but demanding it in exactly the way that you want it, based on the exact premises that you want it – I don't really have that demand.

I want to see the National Endowment for democracy defunded and shut down, I want to see the CIA, and the NSA, and the FBI severely limited in the role that they play in the world. I want to see U.S. foreign policy far more oriented toward getting along with other countries rather than dominating them and manipulating them and exploiting them. I want to see the military-industrial complex radically reduced so that it doesn't have an incentive as its only profit and power mechanism to constantly start and fuel wars and whether this comes from this kind of an ideological perspective or that is far less important to me than the fact that it happens. And so, when I see it happening, I'm going to be encouraged by it, I'm going to applaud it, I don't have a need to call the people doing it deviants or psychopaths or whatever.

In fact, the first thing that we saw from Donald Trump was the imposition of a cease-fire and that ended at least for some time these single worst expression of state violence I've seen in my lifetime which is the absolutely nauseating complete destruction of the society of Gaza and the lives of 2.2 million people by Israel funded by the United States, that came to an end because of Donald Trump. You want to call people psychopaths and deviants and monsters, call it the people who funded those things which are the Democrats and the Biden administration, who certainly didn't have opposition from the Republicans, but they were still the ones who did it and who stood up every day and defended it and financed it.

To me, the way that you judge a person is by the outcomes they produce. So far, the primary outcome that Donald Trump has produced has been a cease-fire in Gaza along with a serious attempt to end the war in Ukraine that has put the United States on a path to clearly resolving that war sooner rather than later. And then, at the same time, expressing a worldview that I think is very healthy and long overdue about the way in which the United States has tried to bully the world. Elon Musk said, “The United States has been bullying the world, has been interfering in other countries and we should start minding our own business.”

So, whatever you think of the people who are doing it, and whatever you think of their motives or whatever you think of the impulses that are driving it, seeing these things being done and hearing these things being said are things that I regard as extremely positive. All along, from the very beginning when I was far less negative about Trump and the emergence of Trump and the Trump movement than most people who had been associated with the left, the reason for that is that I could hear and see this realignment.

And so could neocons. Neocons left the Trump movement and were petrified and did everything to sabotage it because they understood what I understood as well which is that their project was endangered by a Trump-led Republican party. And it was for exactly that reason, the reason that neocons hated him that I found potential value in Trump and in the Trump movement and in the realignment that he could usher in, knowing that the Democratic party would never deliver any of those things, that reforming the Democratic party or trying to work within it or whatever was a fool's game. That was something I believed for a while and then saw the futility of it for so many reasons. Then, with the emergence of Trump, it got even worse because they became defenders of establishment dogma and the institutions of authority and so, all the things that made the Democratic party irrevocably rotted intensified a great deal and I think you're seeing the wisdom of that view being vindicated in just the first weeks of the Trump administration.

All right. Next question from @IFTRUTHBETOLD:

Hi Glenn. I am a longtime fan of your show. I have a question about your segment on the OAS visiting Brazil to “audit” Alexandre de Moraes and the STF. [That's the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who has become notorious for censoring; the STF is the Brazilian Supreme Court.]
It was an interesting juxtaposition with your segment on USAID, which highlighted the damage caused by foreign interference in other countries by groups like AID. The OAS has traditionally been a tool of US influence, intervention and “democracy spreading” in Latin America (and incidentally receives USAID funding).
Why do you think viewing OAS interfering in internal Brazilian matters is laudatory in this case (however awful I agree de Moraes’ actions are) but other instances of U.S. and other foreign influences are bad? How do you make this distinction? Wouldn't it be better if resistance to censorship in Brazil surged organically from domestic elements? Also, I strongly suspect the OAS visit to Brazil is not motivated by a dedication to free speech, but an effort by the Bolsonaristas (who are close to the Trump administration) to weaken Lula and tilt Brazilian politics back in their favor, but I welcome your views on this and your broader thoughts on how to make normative judgments on when intervention by either foreign governments or international orgs are good or bad.

Excellent question, absolutely a very smart question. Not easy to answer, I think; it does point to some tensions that are important to try to navigate and resolve. So, I will begin by saying this: the Organization of American States is a member organization that only has jurisdiction in countries where the countries voluntarily join that organization. Brazil is a member state of the OAS because Brazil joined it at its founding and therefore submitted as, say, a member state of the U.N. do to its charter, to its processes, to its rules, to its values, to its investigations.

Brazil has requested OAS investigations of other member states before endorsing the idea that this is a legitimate role of the OAS, including Lula's government, the first two terms, have done that. They've requested it with Venezuela, and they've requested it with right-wing countries, with allegations of human rights repression, but it is true the OAS has largely been dominated by the United States unsurprising that an organization of American states would be dominated by the richest and most powerful country on the planet. So, I agree that OAS has been an imperialist tool and you have to be very careful about cheering the interference of or the use of international organizations in a foreign country even if the outcome is one that you applaud or hope is brought about. So, I take that critique. As I said, I do distinguish OAS from say USAID. USAID just intervenes in any other country regardless of whether they've submitted to the jurisdiction or not, whereas at least there's some voluntary submission on the part of Brazil to the OAS given how Brazil joined it and could leave it at any time. So, there is that aspect.

It is true and I'm not comfortable – and I want to make this clear as well – I think the premise might have overstated the extent to which I'm happy about the fact that the OAS is in Brazil and investigating and I also share your concerns about the motive, the politicization of it. I don't think there's any pure concern about free speech. I do think that the Trump administration allied with the Bolsonaristas to influence the OAS to do this. So, it's not some pure concern for free expression and I am not necessarily thrilled that the OAS is there to conduct a politicized investigation, even if I do think Alexandre de Moraes and the censorship regime in Brazil are extremely dangerous and oppressive for reasons I've said before.

So, by highlighting this, I'm really attempting to simply bring the censorship regime in Brazil to light and I do want Brazilians to feel as though there is some international cost in their standing if they completely abandon free speech. Sometimes, the only way rights can be protected is with international attention.

I do agree there is tension between acknowledging that and then at the same time wanting the U.S. to stop interfering in other countries or other organizations like the EU to do. I absolutely prefer that opposition to the censorship regime emerged domestically. But the nature of repression domestically is oftentimes that it's very difficult to challenge precisely because any challenge to it becomes criminalized, they imprison those who challenge it, they censor those who challenge it, they silence those who challenge it. And so, perhaps I'm a little more comfortable with the OAS doing what it's doing simply because Brazil is a member of the organization and chose to be and can choose not to be at any time but that is not my preferred way for censorship in Brazil to end.

I have talked a lot before about how the OAS has been a tool of American interference, I will say interestingly that, although throughout the Cold War, the U.S. Security State the CIA, etc. were almost always supportive of right-wing governments especially in Latin America and opposed to left-wing governments, over the past decade the U.S. Security State has adopted the position that the most dangerous movement is right-wing populism. They're way more afraid at this point of right-wing populism than of left-wing governments, especially moderate left-wing governments like Lula, Lula is not Fidel Castro, he's not Nicolas Maduro, he never has been. Brazil is a capitalist country, corporations thrive, the market thrives and there's economic growth under Lula, especially in his first two terms. The United States can live with Lula. What they really fear is right-wing populism and, under Biden, the CIA visited Brazil several times, so did Anthony Blinken, so did Jake Sullivan, and aggressively told Bolsonaro that there will be severe consequences if he tried to challenge the integrity or the accuracy of the 2022 election. They were hoping that Lula would win, and Europeans were hoping that Lula would win. It is a big change from the U.S. posture, but the reality is that the U.S. Security State works mostly against right-wing populist movements no longer against left-wing governments. I'm sure they prefer some nice center-right, pro-capitalist government. Between those two choices, especially a moderate left-wing government that has long done business with the United States of the kind Brazil has under Lula and a populist right movement of the kind that Brazil had with Bolsonaro, you see their preference. That's why the U.S. Security State sabotaged Trump. They prefer the Democrats, the neoliberals and the militarists of the Democratic Party to right-wing populism.

So, I think we have to be very careful about those premises but, of course, the OAS visit is politicized and I did try to be careful about not cheering it too much. I was just kind of rubbing it in the face of de Moraes and his supporters that Brazil is now perceived and increasingly being perceived as a state that relies on online censorship and political repression because I think that they do. But I absolutely want the end of that to come from internal Brazilian politics, from domestic sentiment, and not from outside organizations that are obviously controlled by the United States.

All right, so those are all the questions for this episode.

I hope you'll continue to submit them using our Locals platform for next Friday!

Join the Glenn Greenwald Community

To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today

What else you may like…

Videos

Podcasts

Posts

Articles

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 18, 2026

Lindsey Graham: Senator from Tel Aviv

New video: Glenn discusses Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) extreme devotion to Israel.

00:18:06

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 17, 2026

The NYT Performs Loyal Stenography—Masquerading as Journalism—to Protect AOC

The New York Times dutifully protected AOC after her disastrous interview flop at the Munich Security Conference, watch Glenn's reaction here:

00:31:25

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 14, 2026

AOC Makes Her Big Foreign Policy Debut, Falls Flat on Her Face

00:23:22

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

January 09, 2023

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 19, 2026

Good news about your Locals membership and our move to Substack

Dear Locals members:

We have good and exciting news about your Locals membership. It concerns your ability to easily convert your Locals membership to SYSTEM UPDATE into a Substack subscription for our new page, with no additional cost or work required.

As most of you know, on February 6, we announced the end of our SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble, or at least an end to the format we’ve used for the last 3 years: as a live, nightly news program aired exclusively on Rumble.

With the end of our show, we also announced that we were very excited to be moving back to Substack as the base for our journalism. Such a move, we explained, would enable us not only to continue to produce the kind of in-depth video segments, interviews, and reports you’ve grown accustomed to on SYSTEM UPDATE, but would also far better enable me to devote substantial time to long-form investigations and written articles. Our ability at Subtack to combine all those forms of journalism will enable (indeed, already is enabling) us to ...

TruSeaer@TruSeaer

1 hour ago

GNC_2022Now@GNC_2022Now

February 21, 2026

Super article, one of his best. Excellently persuasive. Thanks Glenn!

I am going to pick a quotation that has a pivotal focus for the reading:

”(oil is often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy)”

There is another argument that states that it is to prevent Iran from selling oil to China. So then there is the question, that if Iran only agreed to not sell oil to China, would we still be on the brink of a new war with Iran?

There is also the question of how much money does it cost simply to transport all that military hardware to that region in order to “persuade” Iran and then if Trump decides to return all that military hardware back to home base how much is that cost in addition to the departure journey?

https://open.substack.com/pub/greenwald/p/the-us-is-on-the-brink-of-a-major?r=onv0m&utm_medium=ios

OPEN.SUBSTACK.COM

The US is on the brink of a major new war that Trump has not even bothered explaining

Eight months after Trump insisted that Operation Midnight Hammer "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, he has deployed the largest military presence in the Middle East since the

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 08, 2026

NEW: Message from Glenn to Locals Members About Substack, System Update, and Subscriptions

Hello Locals members:

I wanted to make sure you are updated on what I regard as the exciting changes we announced on Friday night’s program, as well as the status of your current membership.

As most of you likely know, we announced on our Friday night show that that SYSTEM UPDATE episode would be the last one under the show’s current format (if you would like to watch it, you can do so here). As I explained when announcing these changes, producing and hosting a nightly video-based show has been exhilarating and fulfilling, but it also at times has been a bit draining and, most importantly, an impediment to doing other types of work that have always formed the core of my journalism: namely, longer-form written articles and deep investigations.

We have produced three full years of SYSTEM UPDATE episodes on Rumble (our premiere show was December 10, 2022). And while we will continue to produce video content similar to the kinds of segments that composed the show, they won’t be airing live every night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, but instead will be posted periodically throughout the week (as we have been doing over the last couple of months both on Rumble and on our YouTube channel here).

To enlarge the scope of my work, I am returning to Substack as the central hub for my journalism, which is where I was prior to launching SYSTEM UPDATE on Rumble. In addition to long-form articles, Substack enables a wide array of community-based features, including shorter-form written items that can be posted throughout the day to stimulate conversation among members, a page for guest writers, and new podcast and video features. You can find our redesigned Substack here; it is launching with new content on Monday.

For our current Locals subscribers, you can continue to stay at Locals or move to Substack, whichever you prefer. For any video content and long-form articles that we publish for paying Substack members, we will cross-post them here on Locals (for members only), meaning that your Locals subscription will continue to give you full access to our journalism.

When I was last at Substack, we published some articles without a paywall in order to ensure the widest possible reach. My expectation is that we will do something similar, though there will be a substantial amount of exclusive content solely for our subscribers.

We are working on other options to convert your Locals membership into a Substack membership, depending on your preference. But either way, your Locals membership will continue to provide full access to the articles and videos we will publish on both platforms.

Although I will miss producing SYSTEM UPDATE on a (more or less) nightly basis, I really believe that these changes will enable the expansion of my journalism, both in terms of quality and reach. We are very grateful to our Locals members who have played such a vital role over the last three years in supporting our work, and we hope to continue to provide you with true independent journalism into the future.

— Glenn Greenwald

Read full Article

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 16, 2026

The Epstein Files: The Blackmail of Billionaire Leon Black and Epstein's Role in It

Black's downfall — despite paying tens of millions in extortion demands — illustrates how potent and valuable intimate secrets are in Epstein's world of oligarchs and billionaires.

One of the towering questions hovering over the Epstein saga was whether the illicit sexual activities of the world’s most powerful people were used as blackmail by Epstein or by intelligence agencies with whom (or for whom) he worked. The Trump administration now insists that no such blackmail occurred.

Top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration — such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — spent years vehemently denouncing the Biden administration for hiding Epstein’s “client list,” as well as concealing details about Epstein’s global blackmail operations. Yet last June, these exact same officials suddenly announced, in the words of their joint DOJ-FBI statement, that their “exhaustive review” found no “client list” nor any “credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” They also assured the public that they were certain, beyond any doubt, that Epstein killed himself.

There are still many files that remain heavily and inexplicably redacted. But, from the files that have been made public, we know one thing for certain. One of Epstein’s two key benefactors — the hedge fund billionaire Leon Black, who paid Epstein at least $158 million from 2012 through 2017 — was aggressively blackmailed over his sexual conduct. (Epstein’s second most-important benefactor was the billionaire Les Wexner, a major pro-Israel donor who cut off ties in 2008 after Epstein repaid Wexner $100 million for money Wexner alleged Epstein had stolen from him.)

Despite that $100 million repayment in 2008 to Wexner, Epstein had accumulated so much wealth through his involvement with Wexner that it barely made a dent. He was able to successfully “pilfer” such a mind-boggling amount of money because he had been given virtually unconstrained access to, and power over, every aspect of Wexner’s life. Wexner even gave Epstein power of attorney and had him oversee his children’s trusts. And Epstein, several years later, created a similar role with Leon Black, one of the richest hedge fund billionaires of his generation.

Epstein’s 2008 conviction and imprisonment due to his guilty plea on a charge of “soliciting a minor for prostitution” began mildly hindering his access to the world’s billionaires. It was at this time that he lost Wexner as his font of wealth due to Wexner’s belief that Epstein stole from him.

But Epstein’s world was salvaged, and ultimately thrived more than ever, as a result of the seemingly full-scale dependence that Leon Black developed on Epstein. As he did with Wexner, Epstein insinuated himself into every aspect of the billionaire’s life — financial, political, and personal — and, in doing so, obtained innate, immense power over Black.

The recently released Epstein files depict the blackmail and extortion schemes to which Black was subjected. One of the most vicious and protracted arose out of a six-year affair he carried on with a young Russian model, who then threatened in 2015 to expose everything to Black’s wife and family, and “ruin his life,” unless he paid her $100 million. But Epstein himself also implicitly, if not overtly, threatened Black in order to extract millions more in payments after Black, in 2016, sought to terminate their relationship.

While the sordid matter of Black’s affair has been previously reported — essentially because the woman, Guzel Ganieva, went public and sued Black, accusing him of “rape and assault,” even after he paid her more than $9 million out of a $21 million deal he made with her to stay silent — the newly released emails provide very vivid and invasive details about how desperately Black worked to avoid public disclosure of his sex life. The broad outlines of these events were laid out in a Bloomberg report on Sunday, but the text of emails provide a crucial look into how these blackmail schemes in Epstein World operated.

Epstein was central to all of this. That is why the emails describing all of this in detail are now publicly available: because they were all sent by Black or his lawyers to Epstein, and are thus now part of the Epstein Files.

Once Ganieva began blackmailing and extorting Black with her demands for $100 million — which she repeatedly said was her final, non-negotiable offer — Black turned to Epstein to tell him how to navigate this. (Black’s other key advisor was Brad Karp, who was forced to resign last week as head of the powerful Paul, Weiss law firm due to his extensive involvement with Epstein).

From the start of Ganieva’s increasingly unhinged threats against Black, Epstein became a vital advisor. In 2015, Epstein drafted a script for what he thought Black should tell his mistress, and emailed that script to himself.

Epstein included an explicit threat that Black would have Russian intelligence — the Federal Security Service (FSB) — murder Ganieva, because, Epstein argued, failure to resolve this matter with an American businessman important to the Russian economy would make her an “enemy of the state” in the eyes of the Russian government. Part of Epstein’s suggested script for Black is as follows (spelling and grammatical errors maintained from the original correspondents):

you should also know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in FSB, and I though did not give them your name. They explained to me in no uncertain terms that especially now , when Russia is trying to bring in outside investors , as you know the economy sucks, and desperately investment that a person that would attempt to blackmail a us businessman would immeditaly become in the 21 century, what they terms . vrag naroda meant in the 20th they translated it for me as the enemy of the people, and would e dealt with extremely harshly , as it threatened the economies of teh country. So i expect never ever to hear a threat from you again.

In a separate email to Karp, Black’s lawyer, Epstein instructs him to order surveillance on the woman’s whereabouts by using the services of Nardello & Co., a private spy and intelligence agency used by the world’s richest people.

Black’s utter desperation for Ganieva not to reveal their affair is viscerally apparent from the transcripts of multiple lunches he had with her throughout 2015, which he secretly tape-recorded. His law firm, Paul, Weiss, had those recordings transcribed, and those were sent to Epstein.

To describe these negotiations as torturous would be an understatement. But it is worth taking a glimpse to see how easily and casually blackmail and extortion were used in this world.

Leon Black is a man worth $13 billion, yet his life appears utterly consumed by having to deal constantly with all sorts of people (including Epstein) demanding huge sums of money from him, accompanied by threats of various kinds. Epstein was central to helping him navigate through all of this blackmail and extortion, and thus, he was obviously fully privy to all of Black’s darkest secrets.

At their first taped meeting on August 14, 2015, Black repeatedly offered his mistress a payment package of $1 million per year for the next 12 years, plus an up-front investment fund of £2 million for her to obtain a visa to live with her minor son in the UK. But Ganieva repeatedly rejected those offers, instead demanding a lump sum of no less than $100 million, threatening him over and over that she would destroy his life if he did not pay all of it.

Black was both astounded and irritated that she thought a payment package of $15 million was somehow abusive and insulting. He emphasized that he was willing to negotiate it upward, but she was adamant that it had to be $100 million or nothing, an amount Black insisted he could not and would not pay.

When pressed to explain where she derived that number, Ganieva argued that she considered the two to be married (even though Black was long married to another woman), thereby entitling her to half of what he earned during those years. Whenever Black pointed out that they only had sex once a month or so for five or six years in an apartment he rented for her, and that they never even lived together, she became offended and enraged and repeatedly hardened her stance.

Over and over, they went in circles for hours across multiple meetings. Many times, Black tried flattery: telling her how much he cared for her and assuring her that he considered her brilliant and beautiful. Everything he tried seemed to backfire and to solidify her $100 million blackmail price tag. (In the transcripts, “JD” refers to “John Doe,” the name the law firm used for Black; the redacted initials are for Ganieva):

On other occasions during their meetings, Ganieva insisted that she was entitled to $100 million because Black had “ruined” her life. He invariably pointed out how much money he had given her over the years, to say nothing of the $15 million he was now offering her, and expressed bafflement at how she could see it that way.

In response, Ganieva would insist that a “cabal” of Black’s billionaire friends — led by Michael Bloomberg, Mort Zuckerman, and Len Blavatnik — had conspired with Black to ruin her reputation. Other times, she blamed Black for speaking disparagingly of her to destroy her life. Other times, she claimed that people in multiple cities — New York, London, Moscow — were monitoring and following her and trying to kill her. This is but a fraction of the exchanges they had, as he alternated between threatening her with prison and flattering her with praise, while she kept saying she did not care about the consequences and would ruin his life unless she was paid the full amount:

By their last taped meeting in October, Ganieva appeared more willing to negotiate the amount of the payment. The duo agreed to a payment package in return for her silence; it included Black’s payments to her of $100,000 per month for the next 12 years (or $1.2 million per year for 12 years), as well as other benefits that exceeded a value of $5 million. They signed a contract formalizing what they called a “non-disclosure agreement,” and he made the payments to her for several years on time. The ultimate total value to be paid was $21 million.

Unfortunately for Black, these hours of misery, and the many millions paid to her, were all for naught. In March, 2021, Ganieva — despite Black’s paying the required amounts — took to Twitter to publicly accuse Black of “raping and assaulting” her, and further claimed that he “trafficked” her to Epstein in Miami without her consent, to force her to have sex with Epstein.

As part of these public accusations, Ganieva spilled all the beans on the years-long affair the two had: exactly what Black had paid her millions of dollars to keep quiet. When Black denied her accusations, she sued him for both defamation and assault. Her case was ultimately dismissed, and she sacrificed all the remaining millions she was to receive in an attempt to destroy his life.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Black was forced out of the hedge fund that made him a billionaire and which he had co-founded, Apollo Global Management, as a result of extensive public disclosures about his close ties to Epstein, who, two years earlier, had been arrested, became a notorious household name, and then died in prison. As a result of all that, and the disclosures from his mistress, Black — just like his ex-mistress — came to believe he was the victim of a “cabal.” He sued his co-founder at Apollo, the billionaire Josh Harris, as well as Ganieva and a leading P.R. firm on RICO charges, alleging that they all conspired to destroy his reputation and drive him out of Apollo. Black’s RICO case was dismissed.

Black’s fear that these disclosures would permanently destroy his reputation and standing in society proved to be prescient. An independent law firm was retained by Apollo to investigate his relationship with Epstein. Despite the report’s conclusion that Black had done nothing illegal, he has been forced off multiple boards that he spent tens of millions of dollars to obtain, including the highly prestigious post of Chair of the Museum of Modern Art, which he received after compiling one of the world’s largest and most expensive collections, only to lose that position due to Epstein associations.

So destroyed is Leon Black’s reputation from these disclosures that a business relationship between Apollo and the company Lifetouch — an 80-year-old company that captures photos of young school children — resulted in many school districts this week cancelling photo shoots involving this company, even though the company never appeared once in the Epstein files. But any remote association with Black — once a pillar of global high society — is now deemed so toxic that it can contaminate anything, no matter how removed from Epstein.

None of this definitively proves anything like a global blackmail ring overseen by Epstein and/or intelligence agencies. But it does leave little doubt that Epstein was not only very aware of the valuable leverage such sexual secrets gave him, but also that he used it when he needed to, including with Leon Black. Epstein witnessed up close how many millions Black was willing to pay to prevent public disclosure in a desperate attempt to preserve his reputation and marriage.

In October, The New York Times published a long examination of what was known at the time about the years-long relationship between Black and Epstein. In 2016, Black seemingly wanted to stop paying Epstein the tens of millions each year he had been paying him. But Epstein was having none of it.

Far from speaking to Black as if Epstein were an employee or paid advisor, he spoke to the billionaire in threatening, menacing, highly demanding, and insulting terms:

Jeffrey Epstein was furious. For years, he had relied on the billionaire Leon Black as his primary source of income, advising him on everything from taxes to his world-class art collection. But by 2016, Mr. Black seemed to be reluctant to keep paying him tens of millions of dollars a year.
So Mr. Epstein threw a tantrum.
One of Mr. Black’s other financial advisers had created “a really dangerous mess,” Mr. Epstein wrote in an email to Mr. Black. Another was “a waste of money and space.” He even attacked Mr. Black’s children as “retarded” for supposedly making a mess of his estate.
The typo-strewn tirade was one of dozens of previously unreported emails reviewed by The New York Times in which Mr. Epstein hectored Mr. Black, at times demanding tens of millions of dollars beyond the $150 million he had already been paid.
The pressure campaign appeared to work. Mr. Black, who for decades was one of the richest and highest-profile figures on Wall Street, continued to fork over tens of millions of dollars in fees and loans, albeit less than Mr. Epstein had been seeking.

The mind-bogglingly massive size of Black’s payments to Epstein over the years for “tax advice” made no rational sense. Billionaires like Black are not exactly known for easily or willingly parting with money that they do not have to pay. They cling to money, which is how many become billionaires in the first place.

As the Times article put it, Black’s explanation for these payments to Epstein “puzzled many on Wall Street, who have asked why one of the country’s richest men would pay Mr. Epstein, a college dropout, so much more than what prestigious law firms would charge for similar services.”

Beyond Black’s payments to Epstein himself, he also “wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein.” And all of this led to Epstein speaking to Black not the way one would speak to one’s most valuable client or to one’s boss, but rather spoke to him in terms of non-negotiable ultimatums, notably similar to the tone used by Black’s mistress-turned-blackmailer:

Email from Jeffrey Epstein to Leon Black, dated November 2, 2015.

When Black did not relent, Epstein’s demands only grew more aggressive. In one email, he told Black: “I think you should pay the 25 [million] that you did not for this year. For next year it's the same 40 [million] as always, paid 20 [million] in jan and 20 [million] in july, and then we are done.” At one point, Epstein responded to Black’s complaints about a cash crunch (a grievance Black also tried using with his mistress) with offers to take payment from Black in the form of real estate, art, or financing for Epstein’s plane:

Email from Jeffrey Epstein to Leon Black, dated March 16, 2016.

With whatever motives, Black succumbed to Epstein’s pressure and kept paying him massive sums, including $20 million at the start of 2017, and then another $8 million just a few months later, in April.

Epstein had access to virtually every part of Black’s life, as he had with Wexner before that. He was in possession of all sorts of private information about their intimate lives, which would and could have destroyed them if he disclosed it, as evidenced by the reputational destruction each has suffered just from the limited disclosures about their relationship with Epstein, to say nothing of whatever else Epstein knew.

Leon Black was most definitely the target of extreme and aggressive blackmail and extortion over his sex life in at least one instance we know of, and Epstein was at the center of that, directing him. While Wall Street may have been baffled that Wexner and Black paid such sums to Epstein over the years, including after Black wanted to cut him off, it is quite easy to understand why they did so. That is particularly so as Epstein became angrier and more threatening, and as he began reminding Black of all the threats from which Epstein had long protected him. Epstein watched those exact tactics work for Black’s mistress.

The DOJ continues to insist it has no evidence of Epstein using his access to the most embarrassing parts of the private and sexual lives of the world’s richest and most powerful people for blackmail purposes. But we know for certain that blackmail was used in this world, and that Epstein was not only well aware of highly valuable secrets but was also paid enormous, seemingly irrational sums by billionaires whose lives he knew intimately.

Read full Article

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 13, 2026

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.

The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs.

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.

Amazon’s Super Bowl ad for Ring and its “Search Party” feature.

Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.

Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”

Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.

Guthrie, however, did not pay Google for a subscription for those cameras, instead solely using the cameras for real-time monitoring. As CBS News explained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.” Even professional privacy advocates have understood that customers who use Nest without a subscription will not have their cameras connected to Google’s data servers, meaning that no recordings will be stored or available for any period beyond a few hours.

For that reason, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced early on “that there was no video available in part because Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the company.” Many people, for obvious reasons, prefer to avoid permanently storing comprehensive daily video reports with Google of when they leave and return to their own home, or who visits them at their home, when, and for how long.

Despite all this, FBI investigators on the case were somehow magically able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s camera many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was essentially forced to admit this when he released still images of what appears to be the masked perpetrator who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agreement, which few users read, does protect the company by stating that images may be stored even in the absence of a subscription.)

While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”

Image obtained through Nancy Guthrie’s unsubscribed Google Nest camera and released by the FBI.

It is rather remarkable that Americans are being led, more or less willingly, into a state-corporate, Panopticon-like domestic surveillance state with relatively little resistance, though the widespread reaction to Amazon’s Ring ad is encouraging. Much of that muted reaction may be due to a lack of realization about the severity of the evolving privacy threat. Beyond that, privacy and other core rights can seem abstract and less of a priority than more material concerns, at least until they are gone.

It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

These recent events emerge in a broader context of this new Silicon Valley-driven destruction of individual privacy. Palantir’s federal contracts for domestic surveillance and domestic data management continue to expand rapidly, with more and more intrusive data about Americans consolidated under the control of this one sinister corporation.

Facial recognition technology — now fully in use for an array of purposes from Customs and Border Protection at airports to ICE’s patrolling of American streets — means that fully tracking one’s movements in public spaces is easier than ever, and is becoming easier by the day. It was only three years ago that we interviewed New York Timesreporter Kashmir Hill about her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us.” The warnings she issued about the dangers of this proliferating technology have not only come true with startling speed but also appear already beyond what even she envisioned.

On top of all this are advances in AI. Its effects on privacy cannot yet be quantified, but they will not be good. I have tried most AI programs simply to remain abreast of how they function.

After just a few weeks, I had to stop my use of Google’s Gemini because it was compiling not just segregated data about me, but also a wide array of information to form what could reasonably be described as a dossier on my life, including information I had not wittingly provided it. It would answer questions I asked it with creepy, unrelated references to the far-too-complete picture it had managed to create of many aspects of my life (at one point, it commented, somewhat judgmentally or out of feigned “concern,” about the late hours I was keeping while working, a topic I never raised).

Many of these unnerving developments have happened without much public notice because we are often distracted by what appear to be more immediate and proximate events in the news cycle. The lack of sufficient attention to these privacy dangers over the last couple of years, including at times from me, should not obscure how consequential they are.

All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden. Although most of our reporting focused on state surveillance, one of the first stories featured the joint state-corporate spying framework built in conjunction with the U.S. security state and Silicon Valley giants.

The Snowden stories sparked years of anger, attempts at reform, changes in diplomatic relations, and even genuine (albeit forced) improvements in Big Tech’s user privacy. But the calculation of the U.S. security state and Big Tech was that at some point, attention to privacy concerns would disperse and then virtually evaporate, enabling the state-corporate surveillance state to march on without much notice or resistance. At least as of now, the calculation seems to have been vindicated.

Read full Article

Available on mobile and TV devices