Glenn Greenwald
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JD Vance: Does SCOTUS Have the Power to Reject the Majority's Will?; The Lingering Epstein Question: Did he Work with Foreign Intel Agencies?; Key Zelenskyy Opponent Murdered in Spain and More
System Update #458
May 23, 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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We want to cover multiple stories in a more rapid-fire style than we normally do, beginning with comments that Vice President JD Vance made today in an interview with the NYT's Ross Douthat. When asked about rulings that courts have been issuing against the Trump administration, placing limits on the administration's actions regarding immigration, Vance accused courts of seeking to impede what most Americans said they favored during the election.

In our second story, the current FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, surprised many people, in a recent interview on Fox stating in the most matter of fact and I would say awkward way that they are 100% certain that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact commit suicide in prison, that nobody killed him. Okay, that's possible. However, the far bigger and still unanswered question about this entire Epstein matter remains oddly unanswered, namely, did Jeffrey Epstein work for or with any foreign intelligence agencies? Why can't we know the answers to that, given the administration has promised full transparency on the Epstein files? 

Then, Jake Tapper continues his humiliation tour, trying to justify how he and others like him in the media can still possibly pretend that they did not know about Biden's cognitive decline, even while most Americans do. We also have several short items regarding Brazil, including the testimony that Mark Rubio gave today in Congress, which are as hilarious and pathetic as they are consequential. We wanted to share those with you.

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All right, so there's been, of course, a series of judicial rulings which have been adverse to the administration almost from the very beginning, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, first coming from federal district courts, then appellate courts, and after that, from even the Supreme Court. While the narrative has been that these are all leftist activists, judges trying to commandeer American policy independent of the election, the reality is that a lot of the judges who have ruled against the Trump administration aren't just conservative judges, but Trump-appointed judges in many cases. 

The Supreme Court twice ruled 9-0 against the Trump Administration: one in the question of whether people being deported under the Alien Enemies Act have the right of habeas corpus – all nine justices in the Supreme Court said they did – and then also on the Abrego Garcia case where the government admitted that they accidentally or mistakenly deported him given the immigration hold that had been placed on him and the Supreme Court said, the government must do everything it can to facilitate his release and that's going back to the court, based on the apparent decision by the Trump administration to do nothing to try to facilitate it.

It's not true that these are left-wing judges. Many of them are the most beloved conservative judges and the most beloved Trump-appointed justices throughout the federal system. A Trump-appointed district court judge ruled that Trump can't even invoke the Alien Enemies Act, to begin with, because we're not at war, as the statute envisioned it. That has been upheld by an appellate court, too. 

Vice President JD Vance gave an interview, published today, to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. They talk about a lot of things, including the new Pope, Catholicism. I always think JD Vance is a very smart and interesting figure. We'll see that even more, I think, once he is no longer the Vice President but will presumably run for president on his own, and then he's not as bound by the Trump administration and their policies. Obviously, no vice president can come out and contradict the president; it's really not their job to do that, but still, he does speak openly and often expresses his ideas very coherently. 

He said something today with Ross Douthat about these court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, that I think is very notable because it's a very tendentious argument, if not a false argument, about how our American founding, how the system of government was created. JD Vance went to Yale Law School. He understands the law extremely well. So, let's just take a look at this part of the conversation: 

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LAST-MINUTE CHANGE: Ask Questions for Today's Mailbag on System Update!

Norm Finkelstein will be joining us tomorrow for the whole show, so please post all of your questions here. There’s a lot to discuss: Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate report, Columbia’s settlement with the Trump Administration, the new censorship bill working through Congress, and more!

Glenn, will you please break down the functional ways that public dissent has brought about real change in the US? When people are upset about a given issue, and there is strong resistance inside the government to changing the issue, what are the effective methods that have brought positive meaningful change? This is something not only applicable to Epstein but to every major issue where the public is left wondering "What can be done?". Voting and "calling your rep" doesn't solve these problems. So what has historically worked? What are comparable issues to the ones we are facing today? What are similar examples where bringing change failed, and why?

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Just watched like 5 minutes of that Mehdi Hasan debating 20 far right conservatives video and it’s so unbearably retarded. People talking over each other like it’s Piers Morgan on steroids. And Mehdi’s promoting it like it’s some big dunk on the right when it’s pretty much just Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro debating deranged college leftists turned around.

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World Finally Horrified by Israel's Atrocities in Gaza; Mass Starvation Expert Warns of Spiraling Crisis in Gaza; AOC Votes to Fund Israel's Iron Dome
System Update #489

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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The atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza have become continuously more horrifying and more inhumane over the last 21 months. Even when one thinks that Israel could do nothing worse, they always seem to manage to do exactly that. That there is mass starvation and even mass famine in Gaza is beyond any reasonable dispute. The scenes from Gaza are really the stuff of horror films, of the greatest historical evils, of classic genocide and it's all paid for and armed by the U.S. and the West generally – in case you're wondering why you should care about this more than something else. 

We'll review all of the latest atrocities and then speak with Alex de Waal, the British executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He has a lot to say about where the Israeli-imposed famine in Gaza ranks among all the other famines he's had to witness. 

We’ll also note that not everyone is being passive or silent about these horrors in Gaza. Late last week, the Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a bill to cut off all American funding for Israel's Iron Dome, simply arguing that what she called a nuclear-armed Israel – something that everyone knows is true, but you're not allowed to say, and yet she said it on the House floor –  is more than capable of paying for its own defense. Why should American workers be forced to subsidize Israelis' defense? 

Her bill was supported by her fellow genuine America First Republican, Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, as well as four Democrats: Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Al Green and Summer Lee. But one very conspicuous YES vote on having American workers continue to fund a key part of Israel's military arsenal was a New York congresswoman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even her most stalwart fans, who are extremely reluctant to criticize her, erupted with anger over not just her vote but also the explanation she provided, which made the situation much worse. This really says a lot about the emerging political dynamic around Israel and the United States and that's the part that I think merits the greatest attention. 

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One of the struggles of covering what the Israelis are doing to Gaza and have been doing for the last 21 months is that so many times you get to this point of despair where you feel like no words are sufficient any longer to explain, describe and express the level of utter sadism and sociopathic cruelty and war criminality that you're watching unfold every day, and not just unfold, but get worse and worse the more it goes. It's been a gradual, inexorable, but horrific destruction of all civilian life in Gaza; constant, indiscriminate slaughter of innocent Palestinians, including untold numbers, but certainly tens of thousands of children who have been shot in the head by snipers, blown up into little bits and pieces. 

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Congress Again Dictates Curriculum & Faculty at Private Universities; How UnitedHealth Group Silences its Critics: With NYT Reporter David Enrich
System Update #488

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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The desire to micromanage universities does not extend to all issues but seemingly just to one, namely, what can and cannot be said about Israel and about Jewish individuals in particular. As they have done countless times over the past 18 months, the House yesterday held a hearing on antisemitism in America's universities, hauling three more college presidents before them to interrogate them on why they allow certain people to teach or certain opinions about Israel or American foreign policy to be expressed. This is all accompanied by a growing trend, a rapidly growing trend of forcing these universities to implement radically expanded "hate speech" codes with the purpose of outlawing what can and cannot be said about Israel. We'll report on the latest House hearing and how it is directly assaulting the free speech and academic freedom rights of Americans. 

 Our guest was reporter David Enrich, who published an extremely well-reported and important article last week detailing the means that UnitedHealth Care is using to silence critics.

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Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene are two members of the House, both Republicans, who have often noted how often the House meets in order to discuss matters pertaining not to the lives of the American people, but to Israel or to combating criticism of Israel or to investigating the alleged epidemic of bigotry not against every minority group, but against only American Jews, notoriously, excluded from centers of power in the United States. It's like an obsession. They do it all the time. Every time I turn around, there's another hearing about antisemitism or about criticism of Israel being organized by the Republican-led House and Senate.

 Yesterday was no exception. The Committee on Education and Workforce, which is chaired by House member Virginia Foxx, a Republican of South Carolina who oftentimes has no idea where she is, it was entitled – and it sounds like a kind of woke thesis from one of these universities that they're so interested in:

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Trump Promises More Weapons for Ukraine; Trump Again Accuses Dems of Fabricating Epstein Files
System Update #487

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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Tonight, President Trump campaigned repeatedly on denouncing Joe Biden's policy of arming Ukraine in its war with Russia and vowing to end the war as soon as he got into office. Like so many of his promises, none of this happened, and now Trump, rather than ending Biden's war policy, is doubling down on it. With the NATO chief in the White House today, the supreme militarist Mark Rutte, Trump announced a new plan to arm Ukraine by sending the weapons through NATO, which he claims will pay for them. We'll see. A report in the Financial Times today also says Trump told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy to try to use missiles to strike the key Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Imagine if Russia had told a proxy of theirs, “We'll give you weapons, and we want you to strike New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.” This came after Joe Biden and his transition out of the White House for the first time authorized Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. Trump's policies are wrong and dangerous for the exact same reasons Biden's policy was in Ukraine, as we went over many times when he was president, and it's crucial to examine why that is and what Trump is doing. 

Also, when Trump first addressed the anger among his own supporters for having announced that he was closing the Epstein investigation with zero disclosures forthcoming, he did so by waving his hand and instructing everyone that this topic was far too trivial and insignificant to merit any attention, and he thus directed everyone to move on and simply stop talking about it. Some obeyed Trump, of course, but many did not, and he was thus compelled to return several times to address the obvious 180 his administration has done with regard to whether the various issues in this case would be investigated and whether the documents suitable for publication would be disclosed. 

But each time Trump has tried to calm his angry base with additional statements, he has only made things worse. How long can this charade go on? We'll examine the latest. 

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One of the most significant policies of the Biden administration was the decision unanimously supported by every single member of the Democratic Congress, but also a majority of members of the establishment Republicans as well, to arm and fund the war in Ukraine. There were a lot of reasons why people objected to that, especially people on the right-wing populist faction who were supporting Trump. One of them was a cost issue, but another was just how dangerous it was. 

Why was Russia our enemy? Why are we making them our enemy? Why are they claiming that the war in Ukraine, which is about who governs the various provinces in the east of Ukraine, has anything to do with the lives of American citizens? And also, Russia is a nuclear power, which has made clear that they regard this war as existential to their national security. Something that the CIA has long said all the way back to the Bush administration, when Victoria Nuland and Condoleezza Rice wanted to put Ukraine in NATO. The head of the CIA under Obama, Bill Burns, who was in the Bush administration as well, wrote a memo that ended up being leaked by WikiLeaks, which basically said, Ukraine and NATO is a red line for Russia, not just for Putin and his supporters, but for even liberal anti-Putin critics, everyone in the entire political spectrum in Russia regards any NATO influence or presence in this country on the other side of its border – that was twice used to invade Russia in the 20th century, killing tens of millions of Russians in two world wars – obviously a very sensitive part of their border that they consider it existential, whereas the West does not. 

Putin was asking that the U.S. and NATO agree that Ukraine will never be a NATO member and the U.S. under Biden refused. And that was at least part of the reason why Putin then went into Ukraine. There were others. We've been over these many times, but Donald Trump had been steadfast in his opposition to Biden's policy of arming the war in Ukraine and promising repeatedly that as soon as he got into office, he would just tell each of them to cut it out, would threaten each or hold sanctions over their heads or whatever he had to do and the war would end very, very quickly. None of that has happened. Trump has increasingly come to blame Vladimir Putin principally for that, despite the flamboyant conflict he had in the White House with Zelenskyy. 

He's now done a 180 on the question of Ukraine as well. He is now announcing a massive influx of weapons from the United States to Ukraine that he intends to put through NATO, claiming that NATO countries are going to buy it from the U.S. through some unknown mechanism. NATO countries are already saying, “We're not going to wait for these weapons to get here. We're just going to send them to Ukraine, knowing that the U.S. is going to replenish our stockpile.” 

For all the talk about how Trump was splitting with Western Europe and questioning the value of NATO, here is the NATO chief, Mark Rutte, in the White House today. He's one of those EU maniacs who just want war in every way. When Trump went to the NATO summit a couple of weeks ago, Mark Rutte was so grateful that Trump had signaled that he was going to start funding and arming Ukraine again that he actually sat there and flattered Trump in the way that Trump loves them most. He actually called him daddy – you're kind of like a daddy. Sometimes, if the two sides aren't doing what you want, the daddy has to come and impose discipline, calling Trump daddy in front of the cameras. But of course, knowing that, although pretty embarrassing, that's how you can flatter and ingratiate yourself and then start influencing Trump. 

Today, the NATO chief was at the White House next to Trump and that's when Trump announced this new policy. Here it is. 

Video. Donald Trump, Mark Rutte, White House. July 14, 2025.

This claim that NATO agreed to 5% is through accounting smoke and mirrors. All they did was expand the definition of what “defense spending” includes. So it includes, in large part, the amount of money they've been pouring into the war in Russia, that they've been sending to Ukraine, but it also includes things like they can build infrastructure and, as long as they can demonstrate it has some connection to the military, that gets counted as military spending. 

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