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!

President Trump's 3-country trip to the Persian Gulf States this week, as well as a foreign policy address he delivered while in Saudi Arabia, has many people believing that the President laid out a radically new foreign policy vision that sharply departs from the bipartisan dogma of the last 60 years. And it's not just his words, but his actions that have many people believing this: from Ukraine and Iran to Syria and Israel. How real is this new foreign policy vision, how new and how concrete is it? 

We really can't think of many people better to explore this with than Curt Mills. He's the Executive Director of the journal The American Conservative – long identified with the paleoconservative tradition and the non-interventionist wing of the American right. He has been one of the most vocal voices from that wing on Trump's foreign policy and the urgent need to move the U.S. away from its bipartisan foreign policy of fighting endless wars all over the world that have no benefit to the American people or its country, but much harm to the country and the world. 

Every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions from our Locals members and do our best to answer as many as we can. As is usually the case, the quality of the questions is quite high and the range is far-reaching, so we look forward to doing our best to discuss the questions raised by our members. 

Curt Mills is the Executive Director of The American Conservative and has long been one of the most informative voices on foreign policy, especially the paleoconservative version of it, the non-interventionist version of that. Just as a side note, the American Conservative happens to be the first magazine ever to pay me to publish an article. That was back in 2005, maybe 2006, right when I was just starting. They asked me to write about the dangers of the Bush-Cheney assault in the name of the War on Terror. I ended up writing several other articles for them over the next few years against the War on Terror and the wars that it entailed. So, there's been a lot of alignment between me and that magazine, not fully, but a lot of alignment because they come from this part of the Republican Party, that I do happen to have a lot in common with, and we're very excited to have Curt with us. He's a really interesting thinker who ponders these questions quite a bit. And so, we have a lot to talk to him about tonight. 

G. Greenwald: Curt, good evening. Welcome to the show. It's great to see you. 

Curt Mills: Good evening. Thanks. It's an honor. 

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 "interim" President of Syria was known until about five months ago by his terrorist’s name, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, but now he has undergone a major western transformation by which he traded his military, tunic and pants combo for Armani suits and ties. He has even been given a new, less threatening name: Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, President of Syria. As recently as December, the Justice Department on its site branded him a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist and offered a $5 million reward for any information leading to his capture. I know where he is, he's right there, he's ruling over Syria and Damascus. 

What a difference a few months make. This monstrous al-Qaeda terrorist is now a respected world leader because the U.S., Israel and the EU countries decided, for whatever reasons, that they want him to rule Syria. 

President Trump met with Jolani, or the Syrian President, on Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he shook his hand, posed for pictures, and then gushed about how handsome and tough he is. All that was preceded by a state visit to France, where President Macron welcomed him by standing in front of the storied presidential palace in Paris, as al-Jolani pulled up in his black chauffeured car. 

Remember, we fought a 20-year war against al-Qaeda. 

How can someone almost literally overnight go from a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist monster to someone the West unifies to embrace as a world leader? All of this leads to many important questions, starting with: does this very term "terrorist" have any real or fixed meaning at all? Or is it just a propaganda term that gets applied arbitrarily? 

In our second segment, Emma Camp, associate editor of Reason Magazine, joins us to discuss the ban announced by Greg Monforte, the governor of Montana, on lab-grown meat. She has written extensively about this topic. It's just a very strange thing to watch the state ban people from wanting to consume food that has been approved and that they want to eat. You don't have to like lab-grown meat; the solution is just don't buy it and don't consume it, but don't try to ban other people who want to. 

So, there is this very strange phenomenon that I've actually been talking about and writing about for a long time, which is how malleable and empty this term terrorism seems to be in terms of the way it's applied. It's an extremely central term. In fact, we fought a war for 20 years after 9/11 in multiple different countries in the name of stopping terrorism. 

We constantly kill people or imprison them based on accusations that they're terrorists. Yet, there's that old saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. So often, we take people whom we don't like, and we call them terrorists. Then, when we decide that they're actually of use to us and we say, “Oh, that term doesn't apply anymore.” That leads to the question of the origin of this term. Where did it come from? Doesn’t it actually mean anything? 

In The New York Times, on May 14, which was yesterday, there was an article with an interesting headline. It says: “Trump Meets Former Militant Who Now Leads Syria” 

That word, militant, is a very nice word. It's very benign. One can be militant about anything. I can be a militant wanting to cure cancer, I can be a militant wanting to feed children. Doesn't really scare anyone. 

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!