Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Is Any Due Process Needed to Send Immigrants to Lifelong Prison in El Salvador? Trump Continues the Long-Standing Bipartisan Policy of Bombing Yemen
System Update #424
March 19, 2025
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Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of mass deportations of those who entered the United States illegally. They just sent 236 people to El Salvador – none of whom is from that country or has anything to do with that country – and they sent them to one of the world's worst and most repressive prisons. And all of this was done without any due process. A federal court already ordered that nobody be deported to El Salvador without a hearing, even ordering that any planes in the air on their way to El Salvador come back but the Trump Justice Department argued that the judge lacked any authority to issue such an order and thus ignored it. 

The United States government, President Trump, in his second term, just ordered a significant bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which his National Security Advisor says will be a “sustained bombing campaign.” All of this was done without any Congressional approval, let alone any declaration of war. 

As the friend of the show, Michael Tracey, put it, when this new bombing campaign in Yemen was announced, “You will seldom lose money betting on bipartisan continuity in U.S. foreign policy.” 

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Some of you know the reason why I went into journalism and started writing about politics was principally in reaction to what I had perceived to be the grave assault on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights, carried out by the Bush-Cheney administration, in the name of the War on Terror. 

There were many components to what I thought were the attacks on free speech but one of the most significant, one of the most egregious, was that the president, very broadly, under Article II, claimed the right to exercise virtually unlimited power that no court and no one in Congress could limit what he did in his prosecution of the War on Terror. He could ignore congressional statutes as the Bush administration did when it came to spying on Americans and not even courts could issue orders that constrained him in any way. 

Essentially, the president has the full, untrammeled right to carry out whatever he decides is necessary and one of the specific steps that the Bush-Cheney administration did in fact carry out, beyond spying on Americans with no warrants, that I found very alarming was creating a prison camp off of what they thought was American soil in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in Guantánamo, part of Cuba, to create a prison where people were thrown into basically black holes simply because they were accused by the president or the administration of being terrorists – but never actually needing to prove the truth of those accusations. 

These people were imprisoned oftentimes for years based solely on the say-so of the administration. They had no opportunity to have lawyers, they had no opportunity to know what the accusations against them were and they had no opportunity to contest the charges and accusations that were lodged against them. 

When people like me would stand up and say, “How do you just throw people to a black hole for eternity without at least giving them an opportunity to show that they did nothing wrong or to contest the accusations that you're making against them?”, the Bush administration's argument was, “Oh, don't worry, don't worry. All the people we're putting in Guantánamo are terrorists, trust us. We've labeled them terrorists, and they're not just terrorists, but these are the worst of the worst terrorists”, in order to convince everybody not to care about what happened to them, to even be happy about the fact that they were being imprisoned for life with no due process of any kind. 

And it was only in 2008 when the Supreme Court said, under the Constitution, everybody under the power of the U.S. government has the right to habeas corpus, which is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, basically, to go into a court and say that you're being wrongfully detained. 

And once that happened, it turned out, and even the U.S. government admitted, that not a few people, but many of the people that were detained in Guantánamo, were actually guilty of nothing. They were innocent, we're unjustly accused and never had anything to do with any terrorist organizations. Sometimes people in their community would tattle on them because they had some grudge, and the U.S. military would then pick them up based on these gossipy accusations. Many times, it was a mistaken identity. And again, that's not just me saying that, that is the U.S. government admitting it, and that's why there had been a thousand people in Guantánamo, and now, 25 years later, there's fewer than 40, because the U.S. government ended up releasing them all, obviously because they believed they were not a threat and admitted that many of them were never a threat, which is always what will happen if you put power in the hands of any human to censor people, to punish people, to imprison people, they're often going to get it wrong. 

 And so, had the Supreme Court not ruled that Guantánamo detainees had the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court and see the evidence against them, many of these innocent people would have been held for far more years than they were actually already held in Guantánamo. Some people were held there for 10 or 15 years of their lives and the U.S. government now acknowledges never had any involvement in a terrorist organization. 

 If you go to law school and study the Constitution, if you read the Bill of Rights, due process is central to everything. The idea that the government cannot punish people without giving them an opportunity for some process to know what the accusations are against them and to disprove them or contest them – and the Supreme Court said that even for non-citizens in Guantánamo because the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo was essentially under U.S. sovereignty and that anybody under U.S. sovereignty has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights, which is a document that restricts what the U.S. government can do to anybody. 

This is what we went over in the case of Mahmoud Khalil and the general effort to deport green card holders or visa holders from the United States based on their speech. They have the right to invoke the right of free protest, even though they're not U.S. citizens, which is 150 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. But it's also true of people who aren't visa holders at all, who don't have any visas, who don't have any green cards, such as Guantánamo detainees. 

President Trump indeed campaigned on a promise to initiate a program of mass deportations against people who enter the United States illegally, who cross the border with no approval of the U.S. government, who have no visa, who have no green card, no legal right to be in the United States. Usually, what deportation means is that you take the person who's in your country illegally and you just send them back to the country of origin, whatever country of which they're a citizen. In that case, the stakes aren't that high. I mean, it is for some people who have been in the United States for a long time, but in general, the reason the public ratified that is that people believe that if you enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government has the right to send you back to your country. You don't go back to prison, you just go back to your country. 

What the Trump administration is now doing is much, much different than the way deportation is carried out. 

Here, from CNN, on February 4, 2025:

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The president of El Salvador has become a kind of darling of the international populist right. There's a lot of admiration for how he eliminated violent crime by just rounding up thousands and thousands and thousands of people and putting them into some of the most repressive prisons – again, rounding them up without much due process. There are obviously a lot of people in those prisons who are violent gang members who deserve to be locked up but some people don't deserve to be locked up, which is what happens when you put people in prison without due process. 

These prisons are designed to keep people forever. They are about the worst place you could want to be, anywhere in the world. There's a maximum-security prison in El Salvador that has been built for gang members who they call terrorists. That's about the worst place you can want to be. But the El Salvadoran president has been currying favor with the Trump administration and said, “If you need a place to send illegal immigrants when you're deporting them, we don't even care if they have anything to do with El Salvador, if they've ever been to El Salvador, if they're citizens of El Salvador, just send them back to us, we will put them into these very repressive prisons and just keep them there” and that's what the United States government under the Trump administration is now doing, not deporting these people in the normal course of deportation. They're not going back to their country of origin, even though in the case of say Venezuelans: the Venezuelan government has made it very clear they will take back all their deported illegal immigrants. They've been taking them back. We're not sending El Salvadorans back to El Salvador, we're sending Venezuelans to El Salvador or any other nationality that the U.S. government decides should be there. 

In other words, we're throwing them into a black hole for life without any charges against them, without any due process. We're knowingly imprisoning people for life with no due process.

 Everything that has been said about Trump in terms of his being a threat to democracy, an autocrat, an authoritarian and someone who intends to ignore the law and replace it with his will, has been predicated on the notion that Trump will abide by no limits. I watched Trump during the first term, repeatedly, when courts invalidated his actions as unconstitutional, observe those court orders. I watched as conservatives constantly ran into federal courts to invalidate Joe Biden's actions.; conservatives went into federal court for rulings that his pressure on social media companies to censor dissent was unconstitutional and that his cancelation of loan guarantees was unconstitutional. There was actually an instance where Democrats called on him to ignore a court order. Biden effectively did that by proceeding with loan cancelations, even after the courts said that doing so needed an act of Congress and that Biden didn't have the right to just do that through a regulatory order or executive order. 

But in general, Trump has abided by judicial orders, and he was asked last month whether there was any chance that he would ignore a court order, or violate court orders, and he said, “Absolutely not. I don't violate court orders. If the court orders something, then that becomes the law, and you appeal it. That's the solution, not to violate it.” And he was very clear on that. 

Now, the way in which the White House is trying to justify these deportations to El Salvador and simultaneously argue that people being sent there to be in prison for life have no right to any hearing, no right to any due process, neither in the United States nor in El Salvador, is because they have invoked, and here you can see the White House order from today: “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua” (The White House. March 15, 2025.)

In other words, they're saying, just like in World War II, just like in other declared wars, that we've declared war on these Venezuelan drug gangs and once the president is waging a war – and the argument is we've been invaded – then essentially the courts and the Congress have no right, no role to play whatsoever in anything the president decides to do. Similar to the Bush-Cheney argument that in the War on Terror, neither courts nor Congress could limit anything that they did. 

This was the old law that was used during World War II by FDR to provide for the internment of Japanese Americans. There you see the executive order from February 1942:

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It's very difficult to argue that no matter what your view of the problem of illegal immigration is – and I think it's a huge problem; I've talked about the reasons before – it used to be a left-wing cause. When I started doing journalism it was a Bush-Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce’s goal to create amnesty for people in the country, to open up the borders more because large corporations whom Bush and Cheney served wanted a massive labor pool, not just of Americans who they have to pay a high wage to but of people who come into the country illegally who they can pay much less.

It was corporations and the party that served corporations, the Republican Party, that wanted massive migration in the United States and it was the left – people like Bernie Sanders, union leaders and African American groups – that opposed this kind of immigration because the people who would be harmed would be the American worker. It would drive down wages and take away jobs from Americans, primarily Black people and Latinos. 

I'm not contesting, I don't think many people at this point are contesting, that the flow of millions of people into the United States with no controls poses massive societal problems. However, there is no circumstance under which that can be described as a war in the way our prior wars declared by Congress have been. And that's one of the reasons why the judge stepped in.

Here from Politico, earlier today. 

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U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt efforts to remove those Venezuelan migrants until he has more time to consider whether Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of five named Venezuelan immigrants, was provisionally turned into a class action — meaning it serves as a block on the deportation of all non-citizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Trump’s proclamation invoking the rarely-used law.

Two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from an airport in Harlingen, Texas, during a break in a video hearing Boasberg conducted Saturday for the lawsuit filed by immigrant-rights advocates. According to flight tracking databases, one plane was bound for San Salvador, El Salvador, and the other for Comayagua, Honduras, and they were in the air nearing their destinations as Boasberg issued his order.

Boasberg said there are serious legal questions about Trump’s rationale for invoking the 1798 law — used only three times in American history — by labeling the criminal gang Tren de Aragua the equivalent of a foreign government. (Politico. March 15, 2025.)

 Anything that the president does that is significant and consequential, certainly, things that he does that are readily used in history are subject to the question of whether the Constitution permits the president to do that. That's why, even though it's not in the Constitution, judges review the constitutionality of the other branches' acts.

The Supreme Court, 200 years ago, said that the only way a constitution makes sense, the only way a document makes sense if you impose limits on the president or the Congress is you have somebody that adjudicates the question of whether the president or the Congress have exceeded their limits in the Constitution. If courts don't have the power to do that, if nobody has the power to do that, then the Constitution is worthless. This is why in Marbury vs. Madison, the Supreme Court, early in the 19th century, in the 1800s, said that the Supreme Court necessarily has that power to say what the law is, otherwise, there's no point in having the law. 

There are many checks on the courts. The only people who ever get to the court, the federal court, are people appointed by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. So, you already have those checks. But then, also, Congress can impeach judges for abusing their power and for acting corruptly – another check on the judiciary. It's not as though there are no checks on the judiciary. 

Congress has a lot of different ways to rearrange the judiciary, to punish the judiciary but, if you don't have a judiciary that determines whether or not the government is violating an individual's constitutional right, those constitutional rights are illusory, they're meaningless. 

Yet, it does seem, in this case, that the Trump administration decided to ignore the court order and they're basically admitting now that they did, although they're justifying why they were allowed to. 

Here, from Axios on Sunday:

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The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply, two senior officials tell Axios.

The White House welcomes that fight. "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win," a senior White House official told Axios. (Axios. March 16, 2025.)

It is possible they will win. It's possible the Supreme Court will hold that this is a constitutionally valid invocation of this war power, of this Alien Enemies Act, as applied to this case. It's, I think, quite possible that they won't win. And that's the reason the court ordered an injunction against deportations: precisely to have time to determine whether this power Donald Trump is claiming is being exercised constitutionally and legally. 

No matter how much of a supporter you are of Donald Trump, no matter how much you support the policy that he is enacting – and as I said, this isn't just about the deportation of people in the country illegally, If it were just about deportations, sending people back to their country of origin, the controversy would be far less intense – the issue is that these people who are being sent to El Salvador are being sent there purposefully because the El Salvadorian government has said that they will be immediately put into a maximum-security prison where effectively they will never leave for life. 

Just like in Guantánamo, you shouldn't trust the U.S. government when it says, “Oh, don't worry, we've decided these people are members of a violent drug gang,” because undoubtedly they're going to make mistakes, and they're going to accuse people falsely of being part of that drug gang, and they're going to spend life in prison, in some of the worst conditions, because they were never given even a small opportunity to contest or to prove that the accusations are false or to force the government to prove that they're true. 

 As is true of most things that Trump is doing, he didn't hide the fact that he intended to do this. I say most things that Trump is doing because bombing Yemen was something for which he criticized Joe Biden and now he's doing that but Trump is very open about his plan to invoke this old law that has barely been used three times in American history when we were clearly at war. That's to his credit, but that doesn't mean that the courts are powerless and play no role in determining whether the invocation of that law is actually permissible under the law itself and under the Constitution. That's the way our democracy has worked basically from the beginning as presidents engage in action, Congress passes laws and the courts determine whether those actions are constitutional and legal. It doesn't make the Judiciary supreme because there are a lot of checks on the judiciary still. 

The reason it was a 5-4 decision is not because four of the judges ruled that Guantánamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they're non-citizens. That was not their ruling. All nine of the justices agreed that the detainee status of non-citizens does not preclude their right to invoke constitutional rights. The argument of the Bush administration was, we know there are 125 years of Supreme Court precedent that says that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody within our jurisdiction, but this is Guantánamo Bay. We purposely built the prison outside of the United States to avoid this. The United States is not the sovereign power of Cuba. Cuba is the sovereign power of Cuba. So, our conduct in Cuba is not subject to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the orders of the court. And that was what the court decided on and split on five to four. 

Here, from the CBC, March 2009:

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And that was very much the climate after 9/11: who cares about legal niceties, who cares about constitutional limits? Just pick them all up and kill them all without the slightest regard for whether or not we really know that they're innocent or members of a terrorist organization. 

We were assured by the Bush government over and over and over that the only people in Guantánamo were terrorists, they had done all the necessary vetting to determine that. They weren't just terrorists, but they were “the worst of the worst.” It turns out that so much of that was untrue and the U.S. government has been admitting that over and over ever since. 

Here, from NBC News, in October 2016:

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Mohamedou Ould Slahi was sent back to his native Mauritania after 14 years of captivity, during which he was never charged with a crime.

Slahi, 45, was an engineer for technology companies; he was put in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 under suspicion of being a recruiter for al Qaeda. He'd expressed loyalty to the group in the early 1990s, but his lawyers say that was when he fought with anti-Communist mujahideen in Afghanistan. (NBC News. October 17, 2016.)

“Guantánamo Diary” was a best-selling book about his time in Guantánamo, made into a film where Jodie Foster played his lawyer. We interviewed Mohamedou back in 2021. I had met him in Amsterdam where he is now living, but that is a case where the U.S. government acknowledged that he had no ties to al-Qaeda and released him for that reason and that has been happening over and over for the last 25 years. 

One of the things that has been making me somewhat sick, going back to the first Trump administration, is that the precise people who did what I'm describing in the Bush-Cheney administration – who pioneered this radical Article II theory of executive power that the president is unlimited and can't be constrained by a court or Congress, as part of the War on Terror, that he has the right to put people in prison with no due process – have now morphed into Never Trump people and are constantly criticizing Trump and even depicting him as some unique evil for doing exactly what they did, advocated and implemented less than 20 years ago. 

Here's Bill Kristol on X:

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His fellow Bush-Cheney neocon, David Frum, said much the same:

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Again, these are the people, David Frum and Bill Kristol and all of these Bush-Cheney operatives who are now heroes of liberal punditry, who invented these theories they're now claiming are the hallmarks of autocracy. 

I wrote an article when I first started my blog, An Ideology of Lawlessness, which described how these theories of Article II executive power had been invented out of whole cloth to say that presidents had the power to do whatever they wanted and nobody, not courts or congress, could scrutinize it, or limit it in any way. The presidents had the right to ignore congressional statutes. So, if Congress passes a law saying, you're not allowed to eavesdrop on American citizens without getting a warrant first from the FISA court, Bush and Cheney violated that. They spied on Americans without getting those warrants. Afterward, their argument was, well, we had the right to. We were prosecuting the War on Terror and Congress has no power to limit anything we can do. And the same with the courts. 

 I found that theory incredibly authoritarian and alarming back then. I do not think the founders envisioned a country where a president in any circumstance could act with whatever powers he wants in violation of people's constitutional rights and neither the courts nor the Congress could stop him, including in war, where it is true, the president's powers are at their apex. 

The question here, of course, is if the United States is really at war in the sense that we've always understood that – Venezuelan drug gangs are criminal gangs, they're not a government, they're not a country. We're not at war with Venezuelan drug gangs or at least that's certainly a significant question for the courts to decide before Trump starts rounding people up and throwing them into holes in El Salvador. 

It's not just Never Trump-Bush-Cheney operatives who are condemning what they've done. There are a lot of Democrats and liberals acting as if violating a court order is the one red line that a president can't cross without destroying the entire constitutional order. Even though, as I said, President Biden arguably did that – I think he did do that when he ignored the court order on student loan cancelations – there are prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were urging Biden to ignore and violate the court order on the ground that it had no legitimacy, not to appeal it, but to just ignore it.

Video. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN. April 8, 2023

That's exactly the argument of the Trump administration now and was the Bush administration back then too: if we deem any act or any check from any other branch to be illegitimate, including courts, we’re just going to ignore them. We shouldn't agree to be bound by court rulings that we consider illegitimate. 

That's exactly what the Trump administration is arguing in court right now. In part, they're saying because it wasn't a written order, it was an oral order and having studied law, having practiced law, I can tell you that nobody ever thought that orders of the court were invalid until they were put in writing. Many judges issue orders orally and they're considered to be orders, but the bigger argument of the Trump administration is the same one AOC marshaled there, which is, that we'll obey court orders when the courts are acting within their legitimate power and since we don't think courts have the right to order us to turn planes around, then we ignore that, we're happy to and we think we were right too. 

Remember when the constitutional convention was held and Benjamin Franklin came out, a woman on the street, in Philadelphia, asked him, “What is it that you created there? He said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

They understood that despite the fact that central to their whole design was checks and balances never allowing one branch to get too powerful, never allowing one branch to operate without checks, they were counting on every branch always trying to increase their power at the expense of the other. And in this internal conflict, there would be a balance. 

Congress, however, has abdicated its role because they are controlled by Republicans and even without that, they're basically unwilling to exercise their power when it comes to things like their power to declare war. The president constantly involves the U.S. in military conflict without congressional authorization. Congress does nothing about it and, in many ways, the Supreme Court defers a great deal to executive power.

 I do think that ignoring court orders is a red line that shouldn't be crossed. I thought that when Biden did it and when liberals were calling for it and I certainly think that's true now and I also think that we can allow human power to be exercised even in a significant way as long as there's some check and limit on it. Even when it comes to people who enter the country illegally, we should not be sending people to prison for life without any chance whatsoever for them to contest the accusations against them, for them to be able to demonstrate that what they're being accused of is an error because it is certainly going to be the case that a lot of these are errors. 

Since it's not just deportation, but now you're talking about imprisonment for life in El Salvador, a country they have no connection to, the need for due process is even greater. I understand that people want illegal immigrants out of the United States, but they are still human beings and we should not empower the U.S. government to be able to imprison people for life without having some sort of hearing in court to determine whether or not that power is being exercised justly. 

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At this point, it's basically virtually a tradition, like a rite of presidential passage, that every new administration starts bombing Yemen, the Houthis in Yemen. There was bombing by the Bush administration in a limited way as part of the War on Terror in Yemen. President Obama escalated it significantly. He escalated the bombing of alleged terror targets through drones and often attacked the Houthis in Yemen, but he also worked with Saudi Arabia, which waged a full all-out war against the Houthis in Yemen. They regarded them as an arm or an extension of Iranian power, a proxy of Iran, and therefore Saudi Arabia in their competition with Iran, viewed the Houthis controlling Yemen as their enemy. 

The Obama administration worked with the Saudis, provided them with all kinds of weapons, provided them with intelligence about where to strike and the Saudis waged a barbaric war against the Houthis in Yemen creating what all human rights groups recognize was the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet. 

Yemen is the poorest country in the world and the war that Saudi Arabia with the help of the Obama administration brought to Yemen made all of those humanitarian challenges much, much worse, including mass starvation throughout Yemen. 

During the first Trump presidency, there was a bombing of the Houthis in Yemen and then when President Biden got into office, he said he was going to work with Saudi Arabia to stop the war in Yemen, but, after October 7, when the Houthis began attacking ships in protest of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, Biden ordered continuous bombing. 

There were months where there was bombing essentially every day throughout 2024 just constant never-ending bombing. Biden ended up dropping a thousand bombs on Yemen in 2024 alone. European allies dropped a large number as well in conjunction with the United States. So, the United States has been bombing Yemen, bombing the Houthis, for a long, long time. 

The Houthis are probably stronger than they've ever been, the capabilities that they've developed, including the ability to shoot long-range missiles into Israel, which they've done several times, and the success they've had in attacking and seizing ships. Their strength is higher than ever despite all of that bombing, all of that constant warfare that the United States has been waging in various forums in Yemen, going back to the Bush administration.

And this is something that President Trump criticized Joe Biden for doing during the campaign. He said, why is the United States bombing Yemen? That's not the way that you handle things. And yet, not even two months into office, Trump has restarted and seemingly escalated one of the several different wars we have in the Middle East. 

Here, from The New York Times, on March 15:

AD_4nXdH4RhbmsHa2i3VZ-FMoz_LmAwGaHDT1I4qUGTYcdTB5I5OJEtdvQC7rMQoMLT2GG_PK3wKAJZ5ehf3jWs1yo3tX2DpKdsVnUn5lRSBC3ErSCLc-m3bP_hkkXDEfo208jp5gnrv5xtHFT0BILqVAyI?key=8GjQGcqj-Yiuf-aRWCuZxnnb

We have seen from Trump that he uses threats of war against other countries to achieve the objective of avoiding war. His theory is that the country has to fear that the United States will attack them or bomb them to get them meaningfully at the negotiating table to make concessions. 

But when it comes to Iran, a country that Israel has been pushing the United States to attack and bomb for 15 years – you can go back 15 years and hear Netanyahu warning that Iran was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, that it's the United States's responsibility to go in and attack it. The Israelis did in fact bomb Iran after Iranians sent ballistic missiles into Israel, which was in turn a response to the Israeli bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus and other acts as well. So, there has been a kind of dangerous conflict, militarily, between Israel and Iran. Israel considers Iran to be its most significant threat and enemy and they've been wanting the United States to go fight that war for them or with them. 

Netanyahu urged the United States to invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, who he also considered to be one of the worst enemies of Israel. He did the same in the Obama administration, urging the United States to launch a dirty war against Bashar Assad and when it finally succeeded later last year, Netanyahu stood up and took credit for it. 

So, there are a lot of wars that have benefited Israel and the Netanyahu government the Israelis have wanted the United States to go and fight for them or with them. And Iran has always been the kind of North Star, the ultimate prize in getting the United States to go and wage war on. 

Although I do believe that Trump's real goal is to get a nuclear deal with Iran that we had with Iran, but Trump judged it to be a poor deal and therefore withdrew from it. When you're bombing very aggressively the Houthis with whom Iran has a relationship and at the same time threatening Iran that you're going to bomb them if they don't stop working with the Houthis, which they're never going to do, you're flirting with a real war that could blow up the entire Middle East. 

After a campaign that Donald Trump ran, twice now, three times really, pledging to keep the United States out of Middle East wars and specifically condemning Biden for bombing Yemen, here's what Trump posted on True Social yesterday: 

Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones.

To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE! […]

Similar language to what he used when he was threatening Gaza and Hamas.

To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!

(Donald Trump, Truth Social. March 15, 2025.) 

The Pentagon released footage of some of the U.S. strikes on Yemen. You can see some of them here. 

Video. US Strikes, Yemen. March 15, 2025.

That's a pretty heavy and destructive bomb. The Yemenis claim that at least 32 civilians were killed in these strikes. The Houthis have made that claim and there are hospitals and the like that have supported that. 

Here is Donald Trump, in June 2023.

Video. Donald Trump, Newsmax. June 24, 2023.

So, “I will be your peacemaker in less than two months in office.” 

Ever since there's been a cease-fire, those attacks on American ships have stopped and the Houthis began attacking Israeli-flagged ships, not American ones, and said they would continue to do so, in protest of the Israeli blockade of all food, electricity and other humanitarian aid entering Gaza. They said, “We're going to continue to attack until Israel lets the humanitarian aid into Gaza until the cease-fire deal that they agreed to would be honored.” 

It would have been much easier for Trump to get the Israelis to simply allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Instead, we decided to bomb the Houthis to shield the right of Israel to block the humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. We're back into fighting Middle East wars in defense really of Israel, given the current posture of what the Houthis have been doing and are saying. 

One of the ways that I often defended Trump's foreign policy of the first term was to point out that it was accurate that Trump was the first president in decades to have not involved the United States in a new war. He inherited some wars from Obama including bombing campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria which he escalated as he promised to do but he didn't involve the United States in any new wars. Trump himself, in 2024, praised himself for that. 

 

I know there are so many Trump supporters justifying Trump's bombing of the Houthis in Yemen, even though Trump himself criticized Biden for doing exactly the same thing. I'd argue Biden had more justification because, at the time, the Houthis were actually attacking American ships. And now they've said they're limiting their attacks to Israeli ships meaning that this bombing campaign is seemingly yet again in protection of Israel and not the United States. 

But to threaten Iran! In what conceivable way is threatening a war with Iran or worse, engaging in one, consistent in any meaningful sense with the America First ideology, with everything Trump has said about avoiding wars? 

There is a real question, and I know this has been taboo for a long time, about the extent of influence and control that the Israelis or those loyal to Israel exercise in the United States. There's a video, we're going to do a deep dive on the Adelsons. We did one before the election about Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the billionaire couple. She's an Israeli American citizen and he's an American citizen who have given more to the Republican Party – they have sometimes given it to other candidates, but they're the most important billionaire donors of the Republican party, and there's a video of them where they admit that their number one goal is not the United States but is Israel. In fact, Sheldon Adelson served in the military very briefly in the late 1950s and he said: I served in the military, but unfortunately it was the military of the United States and not the IDF. I wish it were the IDF. My wife had the honor and privilege of serving in the IDF. And our goal is to be good Zionist citizens. 

You see the attacks within the very beginning days of the Trump administration on the students who are protesting against Israel when the Trump administration is filled with people who regard protesting Israel as one of the worst, most offensive things you can do, claiming that these are immigration violations just coincidentally against people who protested the Israeli war in Gaza. There's an American Jewish student today who was expelled by Columbia for participating in these protests. You have this attack on anti-Israel protesters in the United States going on, you have bombing of a country that, or a group of people in Yemen who are only attacking Israeli ships because they're cutting off and blockading humanitarian aid into Gaza. And now the United States is threatening to go to war with Iran, Israel's worst enemy, a war that Israel has always wanted the United States to go to. 

It’s extra ironic because this is a movement and a president that called itself “America First.” But during the campaign, Trump spoke with Miriam Adelson there to a group of Republican Israel supporters and said, “Yes, we're going to make America great again, but we're also going to make Israel great again.” He talked about how the Adelsons were the most frequent visitors in his first term, that he would constantly give them everything they asked for Israel. He'd even give them more than they asked for sometimes, he boasted. 

If Trump ends up involving the United States in a real war in the Middle East, after everything he described, after everything he promised, after everything he said about his worldview and objectives and ideology, that really could destroy the Trump presidency single-handedly. Middle East wars can do that. And despite all this bombing, the Houthis are stronger than ever. They've learned how to have a very light presence, they can disperse their weapons, and disperse their forces easily to avoid airstrikes, they've learned how to do that after 10 years of constant warfare from the United States and from Saudi Arabia, from Israel as well. 

And there's no objective. What is the objective? We've tried to destroy the Houthis for 10 years and they're able to impede international shipping lanes in the Red Sea and to shoot long-range missiles into Israel. They seem stronger than ever. We're just going to keep dropping bombs, it's like the United States has some sort of obligation to always be at war with someone to always be bombing someone. 

I hope Donald Trump will understand that a reason for his appeal was that he promised to end these kinds of wars, to end this posture of constant bombing. If Americans understand that the reason we're doing this is not so much for the United States, but more so for Israel, I think the damage to the Trump administration will be even greater still. One thing I'm sure of is that whether there's the intention to go to war with Iran or not, these kinds of threats, historically, have been very dangerous because they often lead to war, even when that's not actually the intent. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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 are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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 are not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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!

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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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