Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Atlantic Leak Reveals Trump Admin's Foreign Policy Mindset; Appeals Court Extremely Skeptical of Trump's El Salvador Deportation Powers; Israel's Horrific Crimes in the Last 24 Hours | System Update 428
System Update #428
March 27, 2025
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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On this show:

First, Trump national security officials planned the granular details of the U.S. bombing campaign of Yemen, not on official classified channels, but rather on the popular messaging app Signal. Before they began planning that bombing attack on that platform, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, for some reason, added to their group one of the journalists most responsible for the most frauds of the last 20 years, as well as some of the most baseless attacks on Donald Trump himself, the editor in chief of the Atlantic and former IDF prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg. We'll look at what we know from these chats to gain insight into the foreign policy ideology and mindset dominating Trump's thus far quite militaristic foreign policy. 

Then: In the oral argument held this afternoon, the appellate judges in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, generally considered the highest appeals court right below the Supreme Court, were openly hostile – aggressively hostile at times – to most, if not all of the Trump's lawyers' reasons as to why no due process is required before shipping  Venezuelans and other foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador, to spend the rest of their lives in prison. We'll report on that hearing and the broader legal and Constitutional issues arrayed by this increasingly acrimonious fight over the Constitution and due process. 

Finally: over the past 24 hours, they somehow outdid themselves and reached new lows. First, Israel targeted and then slaughtered two young Palestinian journalists who have been among the most effective in showing the world the realities of Gaza over the last 15 months – reporting they continued to do quite bravely despite an endless stream of death threats from the IDF, meaning they would be killed if they continued to speak out. Then, perhaps even more shockingly, the producer of the documentary on Israel and Palestine that just won an Oscar at last month's Academy Award ceremony was attacked and almost fatally lynched by Israeli settlers, not in Gaza but in the West Bank, settlements that the entire world considers to be illegally occupying that land and as the ambulance sped to a hospital to try and save this Oscar-winning filmmaker, the IDF dragged him from the ambulance and then arrested him – they did not arrest the settlers who beat him nearly to death but the Oscar-winning filmmaker who had just been near-fatally beaten. 

There are simply no limits or standards of law and morality the Israeli government recognizes at this point and if you're an American citizen, you are absolutely responsible for everything that is being done because it's being done with your money, your resources, your arms and weapons and your diplomatic protection without which Israel cannot carry out these atrocities. 

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A major reason I found myself interested in and even seeing potential in the Trump movement as it has evolved over the last eight years is that they had adopted and begun to advocate a foreign policy that they were describing as both anti-war and anti-intervention, including critiques that the United States has involved itself in far too many wars, especially in the Middle East, including ones where our direct interest and security were not really at state. 

Donald Trump prided himself on the fact that he did not involve the U.S. in any new wars in his first term and said he was determined to continue that and it was in his second term that he wanted to be remembered by history as a peacemaker, not somebody who started wars, but as someone who ended them. He talked often about ending the war in Ukraine and Russia. He patted himself on the back quite a bit for the cease-fire deal in Gaza that he engineered before he was inaugurated. 

Yet, over the past two months, we have seen a very bellicose, very militaristic, and at times war-creating foreign policy. They're definitely trying to stop the war in Ukraine and Russia. I just believe they deserve a lot of credit for that – I've given them a lot of credit for it – but, at the same time, they not only stood by and gave the green light, but encouraged Israel to restart the destruction of Gaza, even though there's very little left in Gaza to destroy. 

In other words, they unraveled their own cease-fire deal that they themselves negotiated and facilitated by demanding that Hamas and the Gazans abandon it and release all hostages immediately instead of following the schedule set out in that cease-fire. 

Even the most pro-Israel voices in the U.S. and Israel have acknowledged that Netanyahu told his right-wing cabinet members from the beginning, don't worry about this cease-fire, we're only going to do the first stage and once we get some hostages back, we're going to resume the war and to get rid of the Gazans out of Gaza entirely. And that's exactly what he set out to do and is now doing. 

And then of course you have the Trump administration's new war – you really could call it a new war because it had stopped finally under Biden, once he was on his way out during the transition which was the bombing campaign that Biden carried out throughout all of 2024, constantly dropping weapons and bombs on the Houthis in Yemen. Trump criticized Joe Biden for it, often doing so every day, saying there's no need to drop bombs on Yemen. Yet, early this month, the Trump administration announced very proudly, very publicly, that they were not only bombing Yemen but doing so in a very aggressive way, in a sustained campaign. And that's what they're doing. 

They're carrying out massive bombing campaigns all throughout Yemen, killing many civilians and targeting Houthis and the like. Exactly the policy that Biden carried out for the same reasons, with the same exact rationale. Although as we've gone over before, and we've read you the accounts, at least Biden had the excuse when he was doing it – when Trump was criticizing him – that the Houthis were attacking American ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere. 

Once there was a cease-fire deal and Israel was no longer bombing Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks: they said they would and they did. Only once the Israelis blockaded humanitarian aid from entering Gaza as the agreement called for, did they say, “We're going to attack Israeli ships,” Israel-flagged ships only until they allow the humanitarian aid into Gaza as required by that agreement.” So, they weren't even attacking American ships at the time this bombing campaign was initiated. I agreed with Trump's criticism of Biden, but at least Biden had an argument, whereas Trump doesn't. 

Earlier today, Jeffrey Goldberg, the longtime editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, which has been one of the most anti-Trump magazines in the country, ground zero during the Russiagate hysteria, who, during the 2020 election, claimed anonymously that Trump had disparaged the soldiers who died fighting as losers and suckers, then, in this election, he was the one who kept quoting General Milley and General Kelly claiming that Trump had said he admired Hitler and was a fascist – so, he’s not one of the most unscrupulous operatives in D.C. over the last 20 to 25 years but also one of the most vociferously anti-Trump ones – Goldberg wrote an article earlier today in The Atlantic, which by the way, is owned by the billionaire heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who inherited his billions and became a major donor to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:

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This is shocking. It's not just one of a standard classified conversation – all conversations in Washington are “classified” – this is as sensitive as it gets. They are talking here about a surprise attack on a country that the United States was not bombing, and they were talking about the most precise detailed operational aspects of this bombing campaign: where they were going to bomb, exactly what time they were going to start bombing, which military weapons they were going to use to bomb. 

Obviously, anybody who gets this information and leaks it could sabotage the attack or put service members who are carrying it out in obvious danger. If the Houthis knew exactly where planes were coming from and what targets they were going to use, they could do all sorts of things to sabotage it. To put Jeffrey Goldberg into a top-secret meeting, even though he has no top-secret security clearance – seemingly by mistake, but who knows? – that is incompetence on a security breach of the most extreme kind you can imagine. 

But that's something for other people to worry about, I'm not particularly concerned with national security breaches like that. I think way too much is classified. Although even I, generally on the far end of absolutism when it comes to state and government transparency recognize and I've always said that, of course, some things ought to be secret, some things ought to be hidden. Well, one of those is troop movements. 

This would be like if you planned D-Day and accidentally included Nazi sympathizing or communist sympathizing or anti-American journalists in your planning meeting and they learned the details in advance of the invasion of Normandy. I mean it's on that level of breach. 

But I'll let others worry about that, what I'm more interested in is the debate that ensued, the conversation about the bombing attack and who said what, to get a glimpse into the mindset of Trump's national security team. 

So, here's what Goldberg wrote:

[…] At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

On the one hand, this is not a very vehement objection, he wasn't pounding the table and saying, “This is wrong and we cannot do this.” You have to remember that JD Vance has a potentially purely empty and symbolic role in the Trump administration. He's the vice president. He really has no official duties. Whatever duties he gets, whatever influence he has, is solely because Trump gives it to him. Therefore, he's always being quite careful not to seem like he's a radical dissident to the Trump agenda. 

Nonetheless, he and he alone did stand up and say, “I think this is a mistake” because there are no real U.S. interests involved here. We have a tiny amount of shipping that goes to the Suez. It's the Europeans who have enormous amounts and why are we out there demanding that Europe take responsibility for its own defense and that we not bear the brunt of it anymore? Here we are about to do exactly that in a way that the public won't understand. 

I guess you might consider it a coincidence – I don't – that the position of the Houthis under Trump has been not that we're going to attack American ships, but that we are only going to attack Israeli ships. To me, this is much more a bombing campaign designed to protect Israel than to protect the Europeans. No one's going to say that and no one is going to admit that, but that's the truth. And yet it was J.D. Vance, despite the extremely insignificant, almost trivial, connection to U.S. interests, who stood up and said, this is wrong, this was a mistake. 

[…] The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

So, he was essentially saying, “This is wrong, I'm against it, but at least let's wait a month so we can figure out what we're really doing here. Why the urgency? Why the immediacy?”

[HEGSETH MESSAGE]

[…] At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

In other words, they have no way to explain to the American people why bombing the Houthis is in their interest, why bombing Yemen is in their interest, so, Hegseth is saying, let's just simplify it and just avoid the real reasons and just say Biden failed even though Biden actually bombed Yemen continuously throughout 2024. 

This is always the Republican narrative: the Democrats are weak. They say Democrats and Biden were weak on Israel even though the United States under Biden paid for Israel's entire war, funded and armed that war, diplomatically protected Israel every day of the U.N. – and it was Obama who signed a deal on his way out of office with Netanyahu to give the Israelis $38 billion in military aid over 10 years. 

But of course, the Fox News Republican narrative always has to be, “Oh, the Democrats hate Israel,” etc. Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Democrat, has a book out warning of the antisemitism crisis that has engulfed America and said, “My job is to make sure the left stays pro-Israel.” The idea that Democrats are weak on Israel or the Middle East or whatever is laughable. It's a joke. But Hegseth is saying that's how we have to sell it to the public: Biden failed and let's scare them over the connection to Iran. 

[…] The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease-fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

Very ironic that Pete Hegseth is promising a 100% OPSEC operational security on this plan when they're all doing this planning in front of an anti-Trump journalist that they have no idea has been invited by the National Security Advisor into this group unwittingly or otherwise. 

Goldberg goes on:

[YEMEN BOMBINGS]

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. So, I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city. (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

Nobody is denying that the chat is authentic. When the State Department spokesperson was asked why this happened, she simply said, “We’re not commenting on it.” 

At Donald Trump's press appearance, which, to his credit, he does essentially every day in the Roosevelt Room, a reporter in a very weird, timid way asked Trump about this story and Trump denied all knowledge of it. Here's what he said. 

Video. Donald Trump, C-SPAN2. March 24, 2025.

The Atlantic article came out and everybody in Washington in the political circles was talking about it. I don't doubt actually that Trump hasn't heard about it, sometimes he doesn't follow the news cycle all that closely. But later after this, the White House put out a statement through Karoline Levitt, the White House press secretary, saying President Trump has full and complete confidence in his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, even though Mike Waltz added a journalist, a hostile journalist, to their planning for a new war – and that's illegal by the way, to transmit classified information to someone not authorized to receive it, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, others in the Trump administration have said they will have zero tolerance for leaks of classified information. 

They're lucky that Jeffrey Goldberg is obviously in favor of the bombing of Yemen because it helps Israel, whose foreign military he joined and served as a prison guard in an Israeli detention camp for Palestinians and he's been an advocate of the Iraq war, did more than anybody to spread the lie that Saddam Hussein was involved in al-Qaeda in order to justify that war. So, obviously it was safe in that sense because Jeffrey Goldberg was going to be a supporter of it. He has a very similar worldview to Mike Waltz. Both of them are standard GOP militarists and neocons. But still, a gigantic mistake at best, a huge national security breach, and had it been done with the wrong person, it could easily have put the lives of American troops in harm's way. 

And why were they using Signal? The government pays for extremely sophisticated classified networks to talk about these sorts of things. I consider Signal relatively safe among commercial apps. It's probably the safest. It's the one I use when I'm having conversations that I don't want to be easily invaded, but it's far from invulnerable. 

[…]

Here's the issue I have: aside from the fact that there's, no denying, a gigantic gap between what MAGA said they wanted Trump to do when he won. Then, Trump got into office and, less than two months later, he's bombing Yemen. Are there very many MAGA advocates, MAGA influencers and Republican conservative pundits who are denouncing this? There are some, but not many and this is the same exact thing with the free speech issue. 

Conservatives have probably been most contemptuous over the last decade of the attempt to limit free speech on campus in the name of protecting the sensibilities and creating safe spaces for various minority groups. Trump gets into office and one of his primary focuses is to eliminate antisemitism on college campuses to force Columbia to adopt a broader definition of antisemitism, such that various criticisms of Israel are outlawed in the name of making Jewish students feel safe.  I am not talking here about deporting protesters; I'm talking about forcing speech codes on Columbia and in other schools as well. You don't hear very many MAGA advocates and pundits and employers and the like object to that either, even though, they've been waiving the free speech banner incessantly for the last decade, especially when it comes to college campuses. And this is something I've seen in my journalism career every single time there's a change in party control in the White House, every single time. 

When people are out of power, they embrace values and beliefs, and they appeal to constitutional principles and whatever they use to condemn the opposite party when they're in power. Then, the minute their party gets into power, they forget about every single value they pretended to believe in, even if the president of their party is carrying on the same policies that they so vehemently denounced when carried out by the prior party. 

The first time I ever saw that was the first time there was a party change in the White House while I was a journalist – I started in 2005, condemning the War on Terror, writing every day about the due process violations of the War and Terror, the spying and privacy violations of American citizens, rendition and torture and imprisoning people with no trial – and I built up a gigantic Democrat Party and liberal audience, along with a libertarian one, but the minute the Republicans are out of the office and Barack Obama takes office in 2009, and continues to carry on many, in fact, most of the same War on Terror policies that I had spent years viciously denouncing, huge numbers of Democrats in my audience were like, “Wait a minute, I didn't really believe these things. I was just using them to attack George Bush. I don't want to hear these criticisms of Barack Obama,” and I lost a good part of my audience – and kept a good part as well, but you see it every single time there's a change of party control. They either start overlooking the things that they say they find so objectionable or start twisting themselves into pretzels to justify it because now their side is doing it. 

Trump undid his cease-fire and caused a new war in Gaza, even though there's barely anything left to destroy there – but we're paying for and arming. He restarted a Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, two different wars in the Middle East while Israel bombed Syria and Lebanon and accused part of those countries – basically have a giant Middle East war led by the United States and Israel – exactly the kind of wars that Trump for a decade has been promising to end and you barely hear protests from his followers, the people who said they believe in the MAGA vision, the MAGA mentality that he laid out, his criticism of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, the constant permanent war from the deep state – the war machine and the military-industrial complex, all that's gone, gone from the MAGA lips in order to cheer for what Trump is doing. 

I understand the temptation involved in that, I understand that if you are happy that your president is doing a lot of what you hoped he would do, you're very reluctant to criticize him. There's also a big economic factor in independent media, which is if you did build an audience based on Trump supporters, and then you turn around and start criticizing him sometimes you're going to alienate a lot of your audience, and a lot of people are afraid to do that. They get imprisoned by the audience they've created because they purposely have set out to create a partisan pro-Trump or pro-Biden or pro-Cuomo, whatever, audience, and they're there to hear praise of those people, not criticism of them. 

But if you don't want to be a fraud if you want to have any credibility in what you claim, someday there's going to be a Democratic president, you stand up again and start screaming that you're anti-war and don't want foreign wars and don' like censorship. No one's gonna take you seriously. Why would they? They just watched you do everything that you could possibly do to justify the very things you claim to denounce – and I'm not saying all MAGA supporters are doing that, I know some who aren't, I respect the ones who aren't, but there's a lot of them and the fact that we're two months into the Trump administration and the only person in the group who said, “Wait a minute, why are we bombing Yemen?” – like, what does that have to do with America First and American interests? – was JD Vance, someone who has no real authority. And because of that, they ran roughshod over him and ignored him and by the end, he was saying, “Okay, I'm on board. I won't express any disagreements publicly and I'm praying for the success of our mission.” And that gives you a real sense of the very traditionally militaristic foreign policy that a lot of these long-time establishment Republicans who Trump built his cabinet with have, and it shows that they are really getting their way. 

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It shouldn't surprise anybody that the Trump administration is deporting people who are in the country illegally and they're doing so in an aggressive manner. After all, if you had to pick one issue, one promise, that was Trump's signature issue ever since he emerged on the political scene, it would be deporting illegal aliens. That was the very first thing he talked about when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower and gave the speech that propelled him to the start of the polls. He has a democratic mandate for it, he was twice elected on that promise. Polls show that they want that. 

The reality is, though, despite all these showy controversies, these flamboyant distractions, there are no mass deportations taking place. The rate of deportations under Trump is similar to, even a little bit less than, it was under Biden for this time period. Part of the reason is that Trump has succeeded in virtually shutting the border, so there aren't a lot of people entering the country illegally over the border and that counted for a lot of the deportations Biden has done, but the numbers are nowhere near what anyone can consider mass deportation in the scope of how many illegal aliens there are in the United States. Maybe that number will increase, but it's not now. There doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency to that. 

What we're getting instead are these side shows, almost an exploitation of the promise to engage in mass deportations. The first one was going to Colombia and targeting for deportation, not people who were in the United States illegally, but people who are in the United States very legally, with student visas, with work visas, even with green cards, which are considered permanent resident status. And they started deporting those people for the crime of protesting, you'll never guess which country, the one that half of the things we talk about as a nation end up focusing on, which is Israel. 

So, there's been a lot of deportation controversy surrounding deporting people in the U.S. legally, which has nothing to do with Trump's mass deportation promise and then you have a controversy that has been created, not because Trump deported illegal aliens because the deportation of illegal aliens is always meant, not just in the United States, but essentially every country in the democratic world, taking people inside the country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin, meaning where they're a citizen. So, if you deport Guatemalans, they get deported back to Guatemala, if you deport illegal aliens who are Chinese, you deport them back to China, etc. That's how deportation works, that deportation means. 

As we know, and we reported this last week at length, that's not what the Trump administration is doing. Over the weekend, last weekend, they took 237 Venezuelans, who are not citizens of El Salvador, who have never been citizens of El Salvador, probably in every case, certainly most of them have never been to El Salvador or have nothing to do with El Salvador, and they didn't deport them just to go back to their countries; they purposely deported them to a third-party country that they have nothing to do with and paid the El Salvadoran government to put them into one of the world's worst, most notorious, and abusive prisons, from where the El Salvadoran president, essentially the dictator of El Salvador, said they very well may never leave. That's what that prison is for, it's intended to completely strip people of their humanity and ignore human rights or principles concerning prisons. 

The argument of the Trump administration as to why they sent them to prison was because they were all members of a violent Venezuelan drug gang, Tren de Aragua. The problem with that claim is that they were accusing people of severe criminality without any kind of evidentiary hearing where they were going to present the evidence demonstrating this accusation was true and giving the accused the opportunity to contest it. 

So, the Trump administration comes in and says, “Oh, look, he has a tattoo that is associated with this gang” and the person accused can say, “No, actually, this is a tattoo of my favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” that is worldwide known and the ICE agents misinterpreted it, which is exactly what happened, at least in one case. 

So, the problem here is not the Trump Administration deporting illegal aliens, the problem is the Trump Administration sending people to life in prison with zero due process, zero opportunity for them to contest the accusations against them. As a result, all we’re left to do is to piece together whatever evidence emerges in the media, or from their families, or from the lawyers, and say, wait a minute, there's at least serious doubt about this person, and this person and this person and this person. It seems very unlikely that they're actually in Tren del Agua. Unfortunately, the government didn't have to prove anything, and they didn't have a chance to disprove it. They were just swept onto a plane and thrown into that prison where now no U.S. court can even order them released because the El Salvadoran government can obviously ignore U.S. court orders. 

The Trump administration's response to all of this was once a judge, a federal district court judge, who as a reminder is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, ordered an injunction against this program – in fact, ordered those detainees not to be taken to El Salvador – they took them to El Salvador anyway. And the judge as a result extended his injunction on this program saying, “You cannot deport people to life in prison without some kind of a hearing, without some opportunity for them to go to court and argue that they're being wrongfully accused.” 

There's been a major Trump White House media war and a MAGA social media war on the particular judge who ruled this way, calling him a far-left judge, even though he has so many hearings, some of which have been in favor of decisions which are far from left, some of which have been against the Mueller investigation, some of which had been in favor of Trump. But the way our legal system works is that if you want to sue the government, you can't go right to the Supreme Court, you can't go to an appellate court. You have to go to a federal district court judge. That's where essentially, with very few exceptions, every legal case originates. Federal district court judges absolutely have the power to enjoin the federal government from doing something – in fact, conservatives constantly went into federal court under the Clinton administration, under the Obama administration and under the Biden administration to ask a district court judge to issue and often succeeded in getting a district court judges to issue an injunction blocking what the Biden administration wanted to do, not just for that district, but nationwide. 

This idea that federal district court judges have no power or authority to enjoin the federal government from violating the law or the Constitution, nobody has ever thought this before. This is always how our court system has worked at least since Marbury v. Madison, which resolved the question of who interprets the Constitution – the courts did and ever since that has been how our legal system has worked and both sides have fully taken advantage of that by getting the other party's president's policies invalidated or declared unconstitutional. And yet, there's outrage over this injunction. 

From AP:

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President Donald Trump on Monday questioned the impartiality of the federal judge who blocked his plans to deport Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, leveling his criticism only hours before his administration will ask an appeals court to lift the judge’s order.

Just after midnight, Trump posted a social media message calling for Chief Judge James Boasberg to be disbarred. Trump reposted an article about Boasberg’s attendance at a legal conference that purportedly featured “anti-Trump speakers.”

The judge, meanwhile, refused Monday to throw out his original order before an appeals court hearing for the case. Boasberg ruled that the immigrants facing deportation must get an opportunity to challenge their designations as alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. He said there is “a strong public interest in preventing the mistaken deportation of people based on categories they have no right to challenge.” (AP News. March 24, 2025.)

That's all he's saying is before you can put someone in prison based on the government say-so that these people are members of this violent gang that you've declared a terrorist organization, they have to have an opportunity to disprove that accusation. 

That decision was appealed by the Trump Justice Department, to the D.C. Court of Appeals. We have 13 different appellate courts in the United States. The D.C. Court Of Appeals is for D.C. It typically rules on federal government action. It's considered the most prestigious court of all the Court of Appeals courts right below the Supreme Court. One of the three judges who sat on the panel, one of them was a Trump appointee, Justin Walker. 

 I’ve attended a lot of oral arguments; I've participated in a lot of oral arguments as a lawyer and I've covered a lot of oral arguments as a journalist. Honestly, I’m serious here, I don't recall an oral argument where the judges on the panel were so blatantly and glaringly opposed to everything the government lawyers were saying. 

Oftentimes, they'll try tough questions for each side and a lot of times you walk away not really knowing how they're going to rule. Sometimes you walk away knowing how they’re going to rule because they were somewhat more assertive with one side than the other. In this hearing, they just badgered the DOJ lawyer, rejecting aggressively everything that he was saying. Then, when the immigrant's lawyers from the ACLU and elsewhere stood up to speak, they basically kept saying, “We already agree with you, you don't really need to keep saying this.” 

Here is just one of the exchanges, courtesy of C-SPAN, which broadcast the hearing, that's where I listened to it, of this Trump appointee, Justin Walker, as he essentially sides with the Venezuelans about the right to due process. And by the way, this is one of the lawyers for the Venezuelan immigrants who are describing why due process is so urgent here. Then you'll hear the judge interject

Video. Hon. Justin Walker, C-SPAN. March 24, 2025.

This is the crux of the case. Their only argument is look, we don't dispute the government's right to deport people in the country illegally, we don't even dispute their right to imprison people if they're part of a criminal gang or an organization designated as a terrorist organization. What we're arguing is that the people accused before they get thrown away into a foreign country and disappear forever in one of the worst prison systems in the world, for life, or indefinitely, have to have the right before they're put there to appeal to a court and say, “We want a hearing to demonstrate that the accusation against us is false.” And the judge on the panel, who's a Trump appointee, interjected and said, “I don't know why you keep talking about this because there's no dispute from this bench that every single person that they propose to deport to El Salvador has the right to an Article III hearing before they're deported where the evidence has to be considered.” 

Just by the way, last week, my friends Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, the co-host of “Breaking Points,” had a quite vociferous debate, twice in fact, about this issue with Krystal arguing against these deportations to El Salvador and Saagar arguing in favor. I listened to both, I went and talked to Saagar, and explained to him my reasons why I thought he was wrong.

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To his immense credit, he asked me to come on the show, where I could basically yell at him and tell him why he's wrong and he actually during the conversation we had, even before, was starting to say, “You know what, maybe I'm being convinced, I'm understanding these arguments better now,” he kind of said. I am very emotional about illegal immigration like a lot of people are and I just want the problem solved but it is true we can't violate the Constitution or basically process the right to do it and to his great credit, he invited me on, to the playful title that Breaking Point put up was Glenn Greenwald's schools Saagar on deportation. 

A lot of people thought that that was the staff passive-aggressively rebelling against Saagar. In fact, he was the one who wrote it, knowing that that would bring a lot of traffic to the segment, but we did hash it out. Ryan Graham was there as well for about 25 minutes and kind of at the end, Saagar said, “You know what, I feel like I'm probably wrong on this issue. I'm starting to understand why this can't be that you can just throw people into an El Salvadorean prison with no opportunity for them to say that I've been wrongly accused of being part of a drug gang.” Otherwise, the president could just pick up anybody. 

Anyway, I recommend the “Breaking Points” debate I did earlier today because a lot of these issues are really hashed out.

[…]

I see a lot of Trump supporters arguing that district court judges should not have the power to make decisions that bind the entire federal government, the president, the executive branch; nobody elected them, etc., etc. As I said earlier, the Trump supporters, the conservative movement, frequently went into federal court under every democratic administration for decades, including Joe Biden's, and asked a single federal judge in a single federal district to enjoin, to stop Biden’s policy, not for just one district, but for the entire country and they often succeeded in getting it. No conservative back then ever said, “Oh, federal district court judges don't have the right to stop U.S. government policy” because, again, if you want to sue the U.S. government and get an injunction, stop them from doing something you believe is illegal or unconstitutional, you have to go to a federal district court. That's the only one that can rule in the first instance. If the government thinks that the injunction is wrong, the solution is not to ignore it but to appeal. That's how the rule of law functions. 

There's this other narrative that the judges who are ruling against the Trump administration are all left-wing judges. They're all leftists carrying out a political agenda and a political war against Trump. So, this is the On Data and Democracy, which compiled data that reveals:

Measured Resistance: Data Reveals Cross-Ideological Judicial Opposition to Trump Administration

The cross-ideological judicial pushback challenging Trump’s narrative. (On Data and Democracy. March 20, 2025.)

They have both liberal and conservative judges ruling against Trump, two of the four judges targeted for impeachment are actually right of center. You will see a lot of these people for Trump here, conservatives for Trump, who have been ruling against him and you'll see Judge Boasberg, who again is being called a far-leftist, even though his judicial history doesn't remotely suggest anything like that, other judges as well, who are more to the conservative side. The percentage ruling against Trump by judicial ideology. So, this is by no means a far-left attack on the Trump administration. This is something that the judiciary is reacting to. 

Remember, the Trump administration, the Trump movement, and this is part of what I liked about it, vowed that they were going to go in and completely break the way things are being done. So, it is, I think, expected that judges are going to be giving more scrutiny to brand new ways of doing things. 

[…]

Here is David Sacks, who I know very well and have a lot of respect for. He's been a very knowledgeable, important and influential opponent of the war in Ukraine, among other things. I think he's really been influenced by a lot of the voices that we have on our show, Professor Mearsheimer and that kind of realist school that is opposed to intervention. But he is now part of the Trump administration. He's Trump's czar for crypto and artificial intelligence. And he said this on X earlier today:

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I just told you Trump celebrating a federal district court judge doing exactly that, invalidating an executive branch action, but remember the case that we talked about a lot where the Biden administration was coercing and pressuring Big Tech to censor dissent on a whole range of issues, including COVID? And the Biden Administration lost in the federal court, district court level. Conservative attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana went and by the administration and asked the federal district court judge to enjoin that program, preventing the government from doing what they were doing with coercing Big Tech. The same David Sacks who just said the government would collapse if federal district court judges can override executive policy, the country would fall apart, was celebrating this because, like myself, he found the censorship regime to be so offensive to the Constitution and American values. 

Here's what he posted on X in July 2023:

A screenshot of a social media postAI-generated content may be incorrect.

 

Conservatives constantly got federal support judges to enjoin democratic administrations. 

I understand there are more such injunctions now, but that's because there are more Trump executive orders now. And Trump is not a status quo president. He's a status-quo-breaking president in a lot of ways. But if you want to complain, complain about the number. The principle cannot be challenged, which is that a federal district court judge has the right to issue nationwide injunctions, stopping a presidential policy. They always have had that power, both sides have used that power and celebrated it repeatedly. And now suddenly they want to create a new principle that federal district court judges should not have this power because it's Donald Trump now in office and they don't want to see him constrained in any way. That is anything but a principled or a constitutional-based argument. 

Watch this segment here.

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We could spend literally everyday documenting and announcing new Israeli atrocities in Gaza. There are all kinds of reporters who have covered wars for 30 years and aid organizations that have done so as well, who have said they have never seen destruction and indiscriminate killing of the kind that Israel has been doing in Gaza, you know all the statistics about the tens of thousands of children killed, 92% of all buildings destroyed or rendered completely compromised. It's essentially just turning Gaza into a parking lot, which a lot of Israelis at the beginning said and I was told, “Oh, don't listen to them. They're fringe voices, they're nothing but fringe voices.” That's exactly what the Israeli government planned to do, while at the same time they were cutting off food, water, electricity and medicine. So that things like amputations or surgeries without anesthesia on children became necessary because of those blockades, as well as malnutrition and mass starvation. 

Earlier today, the Israeli military targeted and then killed two young journalists in separate attacks in Gaza. Here from ANTIWAR.COM:

Israeli Military Kills Two More Journalists in Separate Attacks in Gaza

Israeli strikes killed Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera, and Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today TV (ANTIWAR.COM. March 24, 2025.)

We've had a young Palestinian journalist on our program who is a correspondent for Drop Site News, the outlet founded by my former colleagues and my friends Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill that has been doing excellent coverage on the war in Gaza. He's Abubaker Abed, who you probably remember. He's 22, speaks fluent English and wanted to go into journalism before this whole thing started because he wanted to report on his favorite sport, which is soccer, only to have watched many, if not most members of the Palestinian soccer team killed over the last year and a half or so. And three days ago, or two days ago, he disappeared from the internet. People got very worried. It turns out he was suffering from severe malnutrition. 

There's no death worse than when your body starts shutting down because of hunger, starving to death is the most painful death there is. I was so impressed by him, he knows the danger of what he's doing. He continues to do it anyway. 

But another journalist, a young journalist, who's 24 Hossam Shabat is somebody I've been following very closely over the last 15 months to get the news about what's happening in Gaza. There are no foreign journalists allowed in. So, we have to rely on Gaza and Palestinian journalists where we have no idea what's taking place in Gaza, except what the IDF would tell us, which is the opposite of reliable. 

Hossam Shabat, the 24-year-old journalist who's been reporting every day on the destruction in Gaza was driving the car today, the IDF targeted his car, dropped a bomb on it or a drone pulled up the car and killed him instantly. And he was also a colleague of Drop Site. He had written messages at Drop Site, and he knew his life was in danger. Everyone in Gaza is in danger. It's a country of 2 million people and at least 60,000 have died, at least – every organization that says that's an undercount. So, about 3%, 4%, or 5% of the population extinguished with no end in sight. 

Being a journalist, in particular, has been extra dangerous because Israel targets journalists because they are dangerous to Israel: they show the world what the Israelis are doing. And so, Hossam had prepared a message, I don't know exactly when, but that he had asked his colleagues and his family to post if he was killed. And because he was killed, they now posted it. Here's what it says:

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Western journalists love to herald themselves as brave and heroic. Jim Acosta wrote that notorious book where he depicted himself as some sort of martyr constantly in danger because telling the truth in the air about Trump was so dangerous and the only thing that ever happened to him in his entire career was Trump said a few insulting side remarks about him. 

This is actual courage: you're 24 years old, you have a stream of death threats from the IDF saying if you continue to do this reporting, we're going to kill you, you've seen hundreds of journalists in Gaza be targeted with death, and yet you continue do the work knowing that it's so likely that you're going to be targeted with death that you actually prepare a statement ahead of time knowing that it is likely to be released in the event that you are killed. 

I don't even need to tell you what Israel's defense is: “These are all terrorists and Hamas operatives.” As we see with everything in Columbia, if you protest the Israeli war in Gaza, if you denounce it, if you're an effective critic of Israel, automatically you're a terrorist and you're pro-Hamas. That's what those terms mean. 

Here was the IDF October 23, 2024, just about five months ago: “Documents Expose 6 Al Jazeera Journalists as Terrorists in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad Terror Organizations” (Israel Defense Forces. October 23, 2024.)

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And one of the people they listed was Hossam Shabat. There you see the six journalist and he is in the lower left-hand corner. 

There have been very few Western journalistic outlets objecting to any of this, even though in every other instance they would, you may remember that a Wall Street Journal reporter was detained in Russia for about nine months and they never stopped talking about it, and I don't blame them for that. That’s their duty, especially the Wall Street Journal’s, and he was released. Tuck Carlson went to interview Putin and spent the last 10 minutes of the interview badgering Putin to release him. 

Journalists do that. They stand up for other journalists. Very few though have stood up for the Gazan journalists who have been targeted and killed by Israel for obvious reasons. People are very afraid to criticize Israel in the United States. The Committee to Protect Journalists, though, has done so somewhat and here is what they released today:

Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war

As of March 24, 2025, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 173 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992. (Committee to Protect Journalists. March 24, 2025.)

So, more journalists killed in this conflict since 1992 – since they've been counting. 

Tammy Bruce is the spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, replacing Matthew Miller, though sounding awful like him, especially when it comes to Israel, and we have the video where she was asked today about the killing of these two journalists. Essentially, every time Israel does something horrific – kills aid workers, foreign aid workers, people with the U.N. and this is going back to the Biden administration as well – the State Department will say, “Oh yeah, we really regretted it. It's absolutely terrible. It's so tragic. Yes, it's being done with our money and our weapons.” But even though Israel is the one who keeps killing these people, it's all the fault somehow of Hamas. Here's what she said today: 

Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 24, 2025.

I think one of the most repulsive things that I hear when I see the U.S. government under Biden and now Trump, justifying every single thing Israel does by appealing to this “never again” slogan, is that they seem to think that ‘never again’ means, or that the war crimes conventions created after World War II mean and cover only Jews; that from now on you can't touch a hair on the head of a Jew because Never Again means that will never happen and war crimes were created only to protect Jews from what happened in the Holocaust. 

If you go back and look at the Nuremberg trials where they punished and killed Nazi war criminals, all the prosecutors in the United States and from other allied countries, the judges all said, “What we're doing here will only matter, will only be just if the principles we're creating apply to every single country in the future, including the ones who are part of the prosecution.” 

This did not mean that any violence against Jews suddenly invoked the horrors of the Holocaust. Other people can impose war criminality and mass slaughter, not just people who do so to Jews, and actually a Jewish state can do that as well. 

The idea that, “Oh, everything was so nice and wonderful and peaceful in this region until Hamas attacked on October 7,” killing 800 civilians and the rest of IDF soldiers and armed agents of the state, if that's the thing that you focus, that one-day killing of 800 civilians versus the 60,000 who have died in Gaza at least, the targeting of journalists, the slaughter of children, the destruction of all of the infrastructure, that you only go back to that one-day because everything was so peaceful when Hamas attacked when in reality Israel had bombed Gaza repeatedly throughout 2023, before October 7, just like they did in 2022, and 2021, and 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014  on a remarkable level, – not what competes with this, but the Israelis have been bombing the crap out of the Palestinians for decades, blockading them, keeping them tracked in Gaza brutally occupying the West Bank. Believing that this war started on October 7 is like propaganda, like the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 when the Russians invaded, and nothing ever happened of any kind of hostility before that. 

But to stand there and “Hey, you just killed two young journalists by targeting them.” Isn't that a war crime? Say, “All I care about is October 7” and that whatever Israel does, they can go and slaughter as many babies as they want, we're gonna blame Hamas and we're gonna keep paying for Israel's war, we're going to keep arming them to do all of this.

I don't know what happened to America First, by the way. You would think America First would mean like, hey, we're not going to give billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel, we’ll instead spend it at home on our own citizens. Remember all of that? And they're cutting aid to every foreign country they can find except for Israel. It sounds like anything but America First to me. 

Besides what they did in Gaza with these two young journalists, in the West Bank, where there has been an amount of violence and destruction – burning people's homes down, expelling them from their land – while the whole world recognizes the West Bank not as Israel, but as belonging to the Palestinians, but obviously Israel doesn't care about international law because it has the largest, richest, and most powerful country and history in the United States fully in captive to it, fully paying for it, fully arming it, fully protecting it, why would they have to worry? 

They have been open about the fact that they're looking not just to expel Palestinians from Gaza, but also from the West Bank. They want that land for themselves. They already occupy larger and larger parts of Syria and Lebanon. It's just a layman's realm that they are seeking. 

In the West Bank, as you probably know, there was a film that was produced by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian living in the West Bank that was designed to document the apartheid treatment of the West Bank by illustrating the vastly different rights that this Israeli Jew has versus this Palestinian in the west bank. 

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It was a documentary, “The Other Land,” that won the Oscar just a couple of months ago for Best Documentary. It hasn't found American distribution because theaters are afraid to show it when a theater in Miami Beach said that they were going to show it, the mayor tried to cancel the lease of the theater as punishment for showing this film even though it won an Oscar because it reflects poorly on Israel. Israel hates this film. Obviously, the Israeli who produced it has done something very courageous, but so has the Palestinian producer, knowing how Israel would react. 

One of the producers of this film today – who actually won the award itself because when a documentary wins the Academy Award, the producers of the films are the ones who actually get the Oscar, so he's the one who got the Oscar – was attacked brutally and practically lynched by Israeli settlers who have just occupied land that doesn't belong to them and they keep occupying it with the encouragement and protection of the Israeli government and the Israeli military and he was essentially very close to being killed. I think his life is still at risk. 

So, the idea that this Palestinian who just won an Oscar for a film critical of Israel ended up getting attacked by Israeli settlers and then, in the ambulance, the IDF dragged him out and arrested him and he disappeared is the level where we're at with Israel. 

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I just want to make one last point, which is that RFK Jr., who I had on my show when he was a candidate running for the Democratic primary, and whose health agenda I was largely supportive of, got into office, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I was a strong advocate for his confirmation, and he had an agenda called “Make America Healthy Again.” There was a long list of important and impressive but difficult achievements he hoped to accomplish, things like combating chronic disease among Americans and child obesity, waging war on the regulatory capture by Big Pharma and Big Ag, forcing the removal of dangerous additives in the American food supply that don't exist anywhere else, re-examining and subjecting to much greater scrutiny certain medications that have been approved by a process that was sketchy because of how the pharmaceutical company, Big Pharma. 

Here's what RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, posted earlier this month:

A screenshot of a computer screenAI-generated content may be incorrect.

Such an Orwellian post because of the way the Trump administration is dealing with what they call antisemitism on college campuses, trying to eliminate bigotry, as though that can be done just like Democrats tried to eliminate racism, and are doing so by forcing universities to implement much more rigid speech codes, much more expanded definitions of antisemitism that outlaw a whole variety of common critiques of Israel.

For RFK Jr. to define that as an advancement of free speech and battling censorship on college campuses when it actually is censorship on college campuses was unbelievably ironic. But the fact that the first, one of the first public announcements he made as Secretary of Health and Human Services had nothing to do with the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda that I just described, spoke volumes. 

And then he went back to X earlier today to make an announcement, again, not about childhood obesity or chronic disease or Big Ag or Big Pharma, or anything. This is what he said instead:

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One of the things Columbia was forced to agree to was to adopt a radically expanded definition of antisemitism, the kind that they already have adopted in the EU that prevents you from saying Israel is a racist endeavor. You can say that about the United States, China, Peru or any other country in the world, just not about Israel. You're not allowed to observe that certain American Jews like, say, Ben Shapiro or Bari Weiss, just to pick two random examples, seem to have greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. That's one of the things that's now barred as antisemitism to say. You're not allowed to criticize Israel in a way that suggests you're applying a double standard to it, meaning you criticize Israel, but don't hold other countries to that same, that too is antisemitism. 

You're not allowed to compare what the Israeli government is doing to the crimes of the Nazis, even though the whole purpose of the Nuremberg trials was to use that as a historical precedent to blow the whistle and to alert people to similar crimes. That is not allowed. 

You can say that about the United States, you can say the United States are acting like Nazis, you can say the Russians are, you can say the Ukrainians are, or you can say the British are. Pick whatever country you want and say that about them. Feel free. Have a party calling it racist, comparing it to not just not this one country – that you are not allowed to do because now the Trump administration is demanding the application of more rigid speech codes to protect a particular minority and to eliminate bigotry after mocking the left and Democrats and liberals for doing exactly that for every other single minority group for a full decade. 

It just shows you the obsession of the U.S. government with this single foreign country. I mean, it's one thing for Marco Rubio to do it, or Elise Stefanik to do it, or National Security officials to do it. It's still kind of weird that they're so obsessed with Israel, but at least they're talking about their actual jobs. RFK is the Health and Human Services Secretary; he excited so many people based on an agenda having to do with American health. However, twice now, the very few public pronouncements he's made, it's both been about antisemitism on college campuses, the need to curb it, and the October 7 holocaust. 

At some point, I mean, it's already happening, but at some point, Americans are going to really start asking, why does Israel play such a vital central role? Why is the U.S. government constantly talking about it? Why is it sending billions of dollars a year to that foreign country? Why are they making special rules just for this one group of people and just of those foreign countries? 

If you're worried about antisemitism, this is what's going to fuel it. Telling people that they're now outlawed from criticizing Israel, telling them that they are not allowed to talk about Israel, that every criticism they raise is antisemitic, telling them they have to send billions and billions of dollars a year to Israel, even after the Trump administration and the MAGA movement was all about let's stop giving our money to foreign countries and keep it here and spend it on our own country's welfare, at some point that's going to be realized. 

It already is. The approval rating for Israel is at its lowest point ever in the history of Gallup polling and we showed you that two weeks ago. Watching even these kinds of ancillary cabinet members in the Trump administration, with nothing to do with foreign policy, continuously make pronouncements to serve Israel and show how concerned they are about it, is just further fueling the fire that's going to lead to people, rightfully so, asking why this foreign country has such a grave hold on our politics on a bipartisan basis and why it is that even every day you turn the internet, you see them blowing up children, blowing up journalists, blowing up buildings, destroying all of society, occupying multiple countries, bombing multiple countries all with American weapons and American money. Why it is that the United States is so blindly devoted to this foreign country and why do American politicians seem to have a much greater willingness to criticize our own government than this foreign government on the other side of the world? 

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Hi glenn!
I'm so very very confused about what is going on rn in regards to Garcia and el Salvador. Did the USC decide 9-0 for him to be returned or that demanding trump return him was beyond the ability of a district court to demand? Does facilitate his return merely mean allow him to come through the border? Was he ordered to be deported in 2019? Does the order of holding get canceled if trump declares m16 a terrorist organization? Is a US president a coequal with the US SC or is one more powerful than the other?
Too much contradictory information for me! What is true? What isnt??

Glenn, as always I appreciate all of your diligent work and your attempt to reach the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to Harvard nobly resisting becoming a tool of the federal government, I find this humorous. The first thing you would have to do to make this in any way reasonable is to demonstrate that they are currently not beholding to other donors and that the money these donors give does not influence their curriculum, the people they hire in either the bureaucratic or the educational departments in the university. If you cannot prove if, or if such an investigation shows that they are influenced by other big money, then all Harvard is doing is choosing one controlling interest over another. And the students receive a slanted education, which of course they perceive as truth. Whether they believe so or not, they have little choice. Rebellion and resistance can easily masquerade as freedom of thought when they are, in fact, a form of conformism to another special interest. ...

April 16, 2025

Dear Glenn.

First of all, and most importantly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful courage and your profound intellectual honesty. I love Tucker and I enjoy Jimmy Dore and the GreyZone; but, you are the only one for whom I make an effort to watch every single show. And, your shows are uniformly magnificent. Such a joy to get my news from such a trusted source.

Among the many issues that you’ve addressed with a lovely integrity is the genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis. And, Trump’s sociopathic approach to the topic has been quite disturbing.

Since the moment Trump came down the “golden escalator,” I’ve liked the guy. And, since I met him a year later in a small gathering and realized that “he’s not the guy he plays on TV” (I SWEAR Bill Maher stole my line), I’ve been completely in his camp and - for better or worse - have been dumped by some formerly very dear friends because of it. So, it’s sad to come to the ...

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

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 a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
System Update #437

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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For various reasons, we had our Q&A show on this show rather than Friday night. The questions that we received cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare in this so-called democratic world to ban anti-establishment candidates from the ballot to some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariffs policies, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

AD_4nXcdRzr6sZ9KQq3FHxTXYeAVEqeMpChh786AVQXcqgjXiqJtr6YhmTYfhOScFrEEFWtOe4YyJHpW3_rQgE-hF98iqyAj_D3vt545whwTcGWMk7q8L17MXlubkN60Ij37-Lu7eRd3T4eRNVJ1dvmGskg?key=raEjNIDONd4zGJ8N9tomIcvGI do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 

It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

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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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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