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.
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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!
