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!

There's a lot to talk about because a cold-blooded murder happened last night on the streets of Washington, D.C., as a gunman apparently targeted people associated with an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, and he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Free Palestine,” once he was arrested. 

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases, regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it. But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly. We'll look at all the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas. 

Then, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States. All of this comes as the Irish rap band Kneecaps has been formally charged with terrorism crimes by the U.K. government – terrorism crimes – for featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show. As global public opinion grows against Israel, threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state", the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel's criticisms become more severe and more desperate every day. 

What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearance it seems as though somebody very committed to the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza decided that, even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands that the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel – based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that he thought it was justified and helpful – to randomly gun down too young Americans with ties to Israel although he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it. 

It was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Isreal, had often gone there but when she would go there, she would work on with the groups that try to bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialog between the two, to try to encourage peaceful coexistence. 

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 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.

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: 

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 Israeli government is finally recognizing that the world is becoming repulsed by what it is doing. Indeed, long-time supporters of Israel, media, politics and government, are now denouncing that state's atrocities. As a result, the Israeli government today announced that it would allow some humanitarian aid to enter Gaza – though when doing so, it said explicitly that the amount of food they allow in will be minimal, and that they are only doing it, this is their words, because the world won't allow them to proceed to their final solution, destroying all of Gaza and then expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip or putting them into camps. 

Then, when it comes to an attack on Iran, there have long been two camps inside the Trump administration: one that does not want a deal with Iran but rather wants a war, and the other that wants a deal to avert a war. Given how many times Trump has made clear that he is determined to get a deal, the strategy of the war hawks is never to simply come right out and oppose a deal because that would make Trump feel alienated. Their strategy, instead, is to put conditions on the deal. 

And then, finally, Joe Biden's team issued a statement yesterday announcing that he has advanced an aggressive prostate cancer that has already metastasized to his bones. Democrats are despicable, exploiting the announcement of that illness to demand that everyone immediately stop talking about the 2024 cover-up that they perpetrated on the nation, because it's in bad taste to pursue that scandal now that   Biden is sick. We'll examine all that and tell you about the latest. 

Something extremely cynical and I would even say repugnant is currently going on with Israel's war on Gaza. Now that's been true for quite some time, but every now and then they go an extra distance to be morally repellent in a way that you previously didn't expect that they would do and that's certainly been the case for the events of yesterday. 

The Israeli government has seen a reversal in all sorts of prior allies, people who have long supported Israel and everything they've done, who have defended the war in Gaza, are now suddenly saying, “Wait a minute, this has gone way too far. I don't want to be associated with this anymore” and suddenly, they are even admitting things like, “Oh, I made a mistake in supporting it.” Major Western outlets and Western governments, even people inside the Trump administration, are now saying that, “Sorry, but mass famine, deliberate starvation of two million people, half of whom are children, that's not something we're going to stand by and watch.”