Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435
April 09, 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.  

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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SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
01:07:46
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

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

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

I share your views on the sanctity of human life. I go a step further And believe In the sanctity of all life. The problem that America has is one of constructed distraction. The whole left/right conflict is the Distraction. The powerful are very good at keeping the public sight off of them. When the sites do get turned on them as it did when Luigi Mangione shot a CEO whose company caused endless suffering, (allegedly) they absolutely lose their minds. Keep the sights on them. We are fighting ourselves otherwise, distracted, as these powerful sociopaths pillage the last scraps of wealth from America before it completely collapses and then retreat to their luxury bunkers in Hawaii or Brazil (😬) or their summer Estate in New Zealand.

Also, I think the term “sanctity of life“ is too closely linked to the church. This term needs a rebranding in my opinion.

I also believe that Charlie Kirk was wearing body armour and the bullet hit centre mass and deflected into his neck. I think the ...

RE: Charlie Kirk ... I appreciated Glenn's comments tonight. It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven: "Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have."
That thing "he's gonna have" might be a change of mind about something you disagreed with him about. I just thought it was important that Glenn emphasized the point that we are all much more than our opinion about any one particular issue and even our opinion on that issue will often change over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aPs9HFX0Cs

It appears that someone in the crowd knew, in the least, that there was a shooter - he saw him - that was about to commit the premediated murder of Charlie Kirk. And after the person in the crowd turned around and saw that Charlie Kirk wasn’t there he cheered as if it were a sporting event.

I came across this from sweetmojo at the duran locals page. An important find in bringing the murderer to justice.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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