Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Palantir EXPOSED: The New Deep State
System Update #465
June 11, 2025
post photo preview

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!

AD_4nXdGFCHdcCnOfBLmJbDeBRFBOtduhoee-RdgDQLHc7Sx8SifCpg9CEf6WVuWt_OoQql9bQEDk9RcIT1oigdhuQy5vkTrxsGfO7joVhJzA58-kkdsawwbDQn8OOXmFh5qOpi3sDE29L0SgOlu5yFVJ-o?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

One of the central grievances among the American Right over the last decade, a grievance I have long shared, was the grave dangers posed by the secretive “Deep State,” as well as its accompanying system of mass surveillance aimed at the American population. What had long been a core concern of the American Left for decades previously gained space and credibility among many on the American Right for multiple reasons, including the obvious weaponization of those powers for political ends and the abuse of those powers particularly to target and undermine Donald Trump, his campaigns, his administrations and his movement. As a result, overthrowing this Deep State order and/or radically reforming it was one of the top two or three promises core to the MAGA movement. 

Several of Donald Trump's early picks to lead the agencies most responsible for these powers were longtime critics of these abuses and were thus promising signs to many of his seriousness in rooting out these abuses. People like Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director and Matt Gaetz as Attorney General were all so controversial in Washington precisely because they did not emerge from these agencies and were not expected to protect and perpetuate those agencies, but rather to cleanse and reform their worst, most long-standing abuses. 

But the focus on Trump's choices to lead these federal agencies has often obscured one vital fact about the Deep State and about the Surveillance State, which it has constructed. Much of the sinister work is carried out increasingly not by public agencies, but by privatized intelligence and military contractors who not only now develop and oversee the weapons used against the American people but profit greatly from doing so. 

This is not new. That was the model warned about, of course, by Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, where he notably referred not to the dangers of the Pentagon, but to the military-complex, precisely to emphasize the vital role that privatized and corporatized interests were playing in what should be government functions. That component of that formulation, the privatization, the corporatization, has only grown exponentially in the 75 years since that warning was issued. 

As the Trump administration now takes form after several months, there is no doubt about the big winner of the sweepstakes to become the head of the new privatized Deep State. It is the firm called Palantir, first founded in 2002 by the billionaire Peter Thiel and the multibillionaire Alex Karp back then to capitalize on the opportunities of surveillance and militarization that they perceived correctly, were presented by the War on Terror, and they have now become absolutely central – one could say virtually omnipotent – within the Trump administration and its various intelligence and military apparatus. 

As a result, understanding what Palantir is, what its capabilities are and what its driving ideology has become is indispensable to understanding whether this Deep State and Surveillance State part of our government is really being reformed and constrained, or whether it is simply being privatized in a far more concentrated, technologically sophisticated, powerful and sinister way than ever before. 

AD_4nXdGFCHdcCnOfBLmJbDeBRFBOtduhoee-RdgDQLHc7Sx8SifCpg9CEf6WVuWt_OoQql9bQEDk9RcIT1oigdhuQy5vkTrxsGfO7joVhJzA58-kkdsawwbDQn8OOXmFh5qOpi3sDE29L0SgOlu5yFVJ-o?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

The sinister part of our government that has become known as the Deep State, the secretive part of our government, the Intelligence community, the Surveillance State – lots of different names for it, everyone knows, of course, what it is that we're talking about. We're talking about the part of the government that was created by Harry Truman's 1947 National Security Act that fostered, among other things, the precursor to the CIA, all kinds of new powers vested in the government under the guise of combating communism and the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, which became this kind of Frankenstein that continued to grow and grow and grow far beyond what anyone ever envisioned it would be. 

In fact, it became so powerful so quickly, that only 14 years later, in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, who, needless to say was no leftist, a five-star general and national hero, concluded that those agencies had become so secretive, so out of control and so rogue that they were becoming more powerful even than the office of the presidency. Often, they were acting without his knowledge, without his approval, even by deceiving him. 

And it wasn't just the public agencies; it was their union with the military corporations and the intelligence contractors that were forming this complex that was antidemocratic at its core. Over the decades, we've seen again and again how these powers were misused throughout the 1960s against various social justice movements, during the ‘70s, when there was finally supposed to be some reform in the form of the Church Commission, in 1977, that was really more symbolic than anything else, things like creating a Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee or the FISA Court are designed to control the way the government can spy on American citizens. 

Yet, through the '80s and the '90s, these powers only fortified; these supposed safeguards became more and more illusory. Once the War on Terror happened, all bets were off. The reliance by the Bush-Cheney administration first and then by the Obama administration led to an expansion and explosion of these powers that were previously unimaginable, even by the people warning about them in the ‘60s and the '70s, in part because – I would say primarily because – they ceased being directed outward at our adversaries, or even our allies, and instead became directed inward at American citizens in violation of the Constitution. 

The more that happened, the more acceptable it became, the more it expanded, the more it grew to the point where, by 2016, we saw very clearly how much the CIA, the FBI and the NSA were willing to interfere directly in our national elections and our domestic politics through all sorts of domestic propaganda. Concerns about this part of the government, these agencies, were primarily left-wing focused. That happened because a lot of the left-wing movements were targeted by them in the '60s and '70s. There was always kind of an anti-federal-government strain of the American right that also was deeply concerned about the NSA and the powers of federal agencies and the standing armies and law enforcement and armed agents of the state that the federal government maintained permanently, that were never supposed to be part of the design of our government but by and large, the Republican establishment, the American conservative movement, largely had been defending that until they began to see very clearly as well, principally because of how those powers were abused to spy on the Trump campaign, to spread propaganda and lies and artificial scandals like Russiagate and the lies about the Hunter Biden laptop and all sorts of other things to sabotage the Trump campaign, to sabotage the Trump presidency, just how out of control and how politicized these agencies had become, of course, culminating in the ultimate attempt to stop Donald Trump from winning in 2024 by using the ultimate lawfare against him, indicting him in four different jurisdictions for crimes that could barely even be called those. 

That created a serious sentiment among, I would say, mainstream conservatism, that the Surveillance State, the Deep State, the secretive part of our government was so out of control and that one of the top priorities of a new Trump administration was going to be, and must be, to clean that out, to rein that in, to constrain it back to what its real function is supposed to be, in the case of the FBI, doing real law enforcement against actual violent criminals, or organized gangs, or organized crime, not spying on and trying to criminalize your political opponents and your political enemies; in the case of the NSA, spying on foreign terrorist organizations, or another kind of international criminal organizations, not spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law; in the cases of the CIA, focusing on and collecting intelligence to inform the president, not interfering in and trying to manipulate and manufacture scandals for our domestic politics. This became central to what the Trump movement said it wanted, what Donald Trump and his new victory in 2024 represented. 

As I said, several of Donald Trump's choices to lead these agencies were clearly designed to send a signal that we're not going to pick people from these agencies who are indoctrinated in the ways that they exercise power, who are going to be there to simply defend the prerogatives of the agencies. We're going to choose outsiders, people who have been critical of how these powers have been abused, to go in and start cleaning them out. 

Those notably became the most controversial choices of Donald Trump's cabinet, not the people who wanted to perpetuate the status quo, not the people who were comfortable within these agencies and the powers that they exercised and the way they functioned, but the people who were designed to be outsiders to radically transform them. People like RFK Jr., when it came to Health and Human Services, but then Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel and Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, the people that were clearly there to radically root it out. That was a promising sign on the part of the Trump administration that that was something they intended to do. 

I think, though, two things got overlooked in all of that. One is the obvious tendency of people who oppose abuses of power when they're out of power, who believe that power needs to be constrained because it's exercised by their political opponents or in the hands of their political enemies and so insist that this power needs to be restrained. There's always a tendency once people get back into power to want to use the power to preserve it, even to expand it, and to believe that they're doing so in the name of something more noble, just, benevolent and less abusive, which is always one of the main challenges of using our two-party system to try to radically reform the government, namely, that people out of power have all the reason in the world to oppose and to object to certain powers inherent in the federal government, but when they get into office, there's a tendency to want to use those. That's always a danger. 

I think, however, the much bigger danger is that – and this is probably something that wasn't emphasized enough perhaps even by our show – so much of this Surveillance State, so much of the Deep State, the military and intelligence functions are overseen and manufactured, not by federal agencies as they ought to be. These are state powers, and they ought to be subject to state control by government agencies that are subject to the laws and transparency requirements, and democratic accountability, at least in theory, of being overseen by Congress and the courts. Instead, over the last couple of decades, they have been increasingly privatized, so that the actual entities that have run our military and intelligence agencies are not the NSA or the Pentagon; it is Booz Allen Hamilton, or Boeing, or Northrop Grumman, or Raytheon. Sometimes, they send their own executives into those agencies to make sure that their prerogatives are protected. Joe Biden's Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, came right from the board of Raytheon. 

So, it is a very integrated system of power, but in many ways, it's the privatized function of this system that often reigns supreme and there's always, as a result, a very intense competition, not only because of the power it bestows only, but especially because of the profits that it generates for whoever gets to be the primary contractor, the primary corporatized weapon of the Deep State. So you can reform the rules of these agencies, you can change the personnel, but as long as you have the outsourced, privatized corporations motivated to consolidate power, and especially to generate profit, which goes hand in hand, there really isn't any reform. In fact, the opposite is true. You will get continuous abuse. Maybe the names will change, maybe now it's not Booz Allen Hamilton, maybe it's now Palantir, but the system itself doesn't really change. 

We have seen signs from the White House and there's good reason to have seen this coming, a lot of people who are very closely aligned with, have been invested in and closely connected to the people who run these corporations, especially Palantir, became instrumental in financing the Trump campaign, which played a major role in the transition of Mar-a-Lago.

You could kind of see the signs that while a lot of people were railing against the old guard of the military-industrial complex, Boeing and Northrop Grumman and those types, a more technologically sophisticated kind of newer version of the corporatized Surveillance State was starting to gain power within the Trump world for all sorts of reasons that they had schemed and planned for, devoted a lot of money to Trump's campaign and I think we're now clearly seeing the fruits of that. It's time to really take a close look at exactly what is happening, principally with a corporation called Palantir at the center of it all. 

It's not just Palantir replacing other older versions of what might look like the old guard of the military-industrial complex. Palantir itself is a very extremist company in all sorts of ways, in terms of their vision of the future, in terms of the ethical constraints they do and don't believe in and, most of all, because of the ideology that their leaders,  their founders, that the people who run Palantir and now run various parts of the Surveillance State and military-industrial complex vehemently and passionately believe in and obviously are using those powers to advance those beliefs in a way that I think has gotten way too little attention. 

So, let's begin with the official starting point of when it became apparent that room was being made for new types of corporatized spying companies and militarized companies to acquire new power and new roles. 

One of them was an executive order issued by the White House and unveiled on March 20, 2025, two months after Donald Trump's inauguration. The headline of which was: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos (The White House. March 20, 2025.)

In other words, the problem, according to the new White House, is that information is not centralized enough. You have some information segregated over here, some segregated over there, some surveillance data here, some under this other agency, and they describe that as wasteful. What they want to do is to centralize it all under one authority. 

Personally, I would prefer that, to the extent the government collects data on American citizens, it remains fragmented and siloed and therefore weakened. However, the point of this executive order was to describe that as wasteful and to restructure the government to ensure its centralization, meaning its consolidated control under a handful of specific actors who would be in charge of it. 

Just let me emphasize that – and a part of this has to do with trying to empower what was known as DOGE, that the idea was we had to ensure that the DOGE team wasn't impeded in their ability to collect information, instead having access to everything. So here you see that the idea is to make certain to eliminate bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency by ensuring that there are no more barriers to federal employees accessing government data. 

Like most government programs, this could have a very benign intent, and it's described to appear benign. It's saying, “Look, there are some inefficiencies, we need to analyze all the data, unfortunately, the data is all siloed, it's all in different places and we want to make sure that we eliminate all of the barriers to accessing all of it. We want to be sure that designated entities, whether public like DOGE or private like private contractors, no longer experience impediments in collecting all the information and centralizing it all for whatever purposes they want to use that information.” 

As I said, one of the primary impetuses for this was to make sure that the team of DOGE that was designed to analyze waste and the like didn't have any further impediments to their ability to get at some of the most sensitive data about American citizens. 

Here's how CNN reported that in April 2025:

AD_4nXcuOX8NF6rmCnDCz37g_OMSMVCC4vBBNxXD17R1czzIoOcNp97wl80g3ctUiu3orTUH-l2zknxKyHk_mxZdwv9x4Oyd_4aYwVurEzARvQgjyqYZzC2dEKtg_YoQI4SNnU6XI6hh-Nujt4yKpo7jY3E?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

“They’re going to take the information we already have and put it into a system,” a Trump administration official told CNN about DOGE’s plans. “It will be able to rapidly queue information. Everyone is converting to Palantir.” (CNN. April 25, 2025.) So, that's the Trump administration's motto for what this reform is. Everyone is converting to Palantir, meaning all of this data collection, all of this data mining, all this access to information is all going to be done through Palantir, through devices and systems created by Palantir, implemented by Palantir, overseen by Palantir. 

Obviously, one reaction is to say, well, this seems like a good idea. I want the government to be able to more readily identify people who are in the country illegally; I want them to more readily identify fraud, so I have no problem with a system designed to centralize all this information to make it easier to achieve these noble ends. The problem is always how the expansion of the Surveillance State and the expansion of the Deep State are justified. They always give you a reason why they're doing it for your protection, why they are doing it for some good cause. 

All those programs ushered in in the wake of 9/11 and by the Bush-Cheney administration, the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance on American citizens, the vast elimination of barriers designed to protect the privacy rights of Americans, all of that was justified in the name of finding terrorists more easily. We didn't find terrorists on 9/11, even though we had all the reason and all the evidence and all that data in the world that should have let us find them, we failed to. So, instead of holding people accountable, instead of making sure that we're looking more closely for terrorists, instead of all sorts of other things, we’re going to claim that we didn't have enough spying powers, we didn't have enough data mining powers. We're going to tell the American people, “Look, we're going to collect information in a much more aggressive way, including about you, but don't worry, we are just doing it because we want to keep you safe from the terrorists.” 

If you look at how the Patriot Act has been used, ever since it was implemented, ever since that justification was furnished that convinced a lot of people to support it, you will find that only in a small minority of cases has the Patriot Act been invoked in connection with terrorism investigations. It has been using a wide range of other sorts of efforts to investigate the American people, to keep track of them, and to give to law enforcement. I know for the first 10 years, the percentage of cases of actual terrorism investigations that the Patriot Act was used for was extremely small, I'm talking about 10% to 12%, 15%. So, of course, they're going to offer you good reasons why Palantir needs to collect and consolidate all this information under its control. “Oh, we're looking for illegal immigrants, we're thinking of criminals,” and the ability to have all this information under one company and eliminate all the barriers that were there to keep, preserve the privacy rights of Americans from having, from living in, an omnipotent Surveillance State. Those are bothersome, those are impediments to the policy goals that we want to achieve and so don't worry, we're getting rid of all of those. We're going to have it all put under this one company called Palantir. As I said, “everyone is converting to Palantir” is the exact quote. 

This didn't get much attention at the time. In the Trump administration, there are constantly all sorts of things going on. You have wars going on, you have attempts to avoid war, like in Iran, you have all kinds of new domestic policies. There were controversies about deporting students who criticize Israel. All sorts of things are just constantly going around. And so, when the Trump Administration says, everything is going through Palantir, not enough people really paid much attention to that. Now people are starting to wonder, “Wait a minute, what exactly is the role of Palantir? Who is Palantir and what do they intend to do?” The New York Times ran a story just a couple of weeks ago, May 30, the title of which was: “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans.”

This is one of the things that I recall during the Snowden controversy and the reporting and the debates that it spawned, this extreme irony that we were able to reveal how invasive, how sweeping, how limitless the information was that the NSA, unbeknownst to everybody, was collecting on American citizens without the warrants required by the constitutional law. I remember very well, one day, the NSA kind of trying to scope around for different excuses, said, “Oh, don't worry, we're very, very vigilant in the security measures that we use, we keep your data very, very safe, you don't have to worry.” 

Of course, one of the reasons that was not a very satisfactory answer was that the concern was that the NSA itself was going to abuse that information and had done so. But also, it was very hard to say that “Oh, don't worry, these security systems are so unbreakable, so reliable” when Edward Snowden had just right under their noses taking enormous amounts of that data without having any slight idea on the part of the NSA that he had done so. So, so much of this sounds familiar. “Oh, don't worry, we are centralizing all data about you in an unprecedented way.” It's not just some of it is at the NSA, some of it at the IRS, some of it at the CDC and some of it at Homeland Security. We're now centralizing all those agencies in one private company, Palantir. And we're being asked to believe that Palantir's goals are benevolent. The people running Palantir are going to handle this information responsibly and without abuse and, somehow, this information will be kept safe so that others with more malevolent intentions are incapable of using it. 

I think it's very important to note that Palantir was founded in 2002 because obviously that was at the height of the War on Terror, when people began to see not just the potential for government empowerment through a Surveillance State, but also privatized surveillance, which was and became a massive booming industry. And even for 2002, when people were almost accepting every kind of authoritarian measure offered because they were justified by, “Oh, don't worry. We're just using this to protect terrorists. We're not going to use it against you; your rights aren't endangered by creating an office of Total Information Awareness, as the name suggests, led by Dr. John Poindexter under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld, that was a bridge too far, even for 2002. 

It was very revealing, however, of the limitless aspirations that the U.S. government had and knew that they could exploit 9/11 to create, essentially telling the American people, “we can’t have any more limits on our ability to collect information about you.” Out of that grew this office called Total Information Awareness that although the office was named in just too much of an Orwellian and creepy way for the American population and the American media to accept, became the ambition of the U.S. government that is what ultimately led to the NSA programs that were designed to collect all information on American citizens without warrants, to file it, to store it, and to be able to analyze it. That became the mindset of not just the U.S. government, but of corporations seeking to become the providers of the technology that would enable it and the vastly lucrative contracts that would come from that. 

It was in that ethos, in that period, seeking to exploit that opportunity that Peter Thiel and Alex Karp created Palantir to become this newly agile, highly sophisticated version of a company that had unprecedented power to collect and store and data mine information about hundreds of millions of people. That is the impetus that gave rise to Palantir, and it continues to this very day to be their primary mission. That primary mission is now being fulfilled, I think, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, given that the Trump administration is empowering them to be the company, the Deep State Surveillance State company, through which all information that the U.S. government maintains about American citizens is run through and stored through and is managed by one company, essentially overseeing the entire information collecting apparatus of the U.S. government. 

I do want to say that Alex Karp, though, in 2020, was depicted as this sort of unlikely, almost apolitical, cryptic figure. Over time, his politics have become remarkably clearer. 

 I just want to comment, too, as well, on this situation that I was personally involved in with Palantir's abuse, because this was quite a long time ago. This was 2012, I believe. But I do think it sheds a lot of light on what Palantir is, what it was even back then, when it still had a fairly good reputation. There were a lot of rumors that WikiLeaks was on the verge of releasing a huge and incriminating file about the Bank of America. One of America's largest banks, I think, maybe its largest commercial bank. The Bank of America was understandably quite alarmed by what was rumored to be an imminent, extremely incriminating release of a secret Bank of America file, the kind that WikiLeaks back then was doing regularly, not just to governments, but to other corporations. In response, Bank of America hired several firms to help it strategize what it should do in response to WikiLeaks' release of it. 

One of the groups hired to help strategize was Palantir, but a group of hackers was able to hack a company called HBGary, also hired, and the documents that were created by Palantir to help Bank of America against this WikiLeaks release were discovered and disclosed. One of the documents that was created with Palantir's cooperation was dated September 3, 2010, which is part of the strategy to help Bank of America against WikiLeaks. 

Here's part of what they said:

AD_4nXd8OWNiu3bnHuys9XYsWA3JJcMCsNH5s3rHqH8qWNKiduSpf5FIx6NF06-C81CgM5SV4s5jJE6UZVj4-Nyeg3Fqcyjk2R36WlDjIcWDCM645Scaf2v8oLU7MDvmb3Ie-O_S5Uvfy5Hdd7dY0NlsRm4?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

So, think about what they were actually saying there. You could choose to continue to pursue the cause you believed in, which was defending WikiLeaks, or you could choose preservation of your professional reputation and professional standing, but you couldn't choose both. They wanted to put people like me in that position, saying, “If you want to keep defending WikiLeaks, we're going to destroy your professional reputation, we're going to find things about you, we're going to leak things about you.” In case any of you think this is sort of the stuff that is the byproduct of paranoia or science fiction scripts about how these kinds of people work, here it is in black and white. 

This was 2010, just about five years after I began writing about politics. I was a little bit surprised, I will admit, by how sinister this is, kind of expressed in corporatist jargon, but it shows what Palantir is. They were saying, “We'll either force him to stop defending WikiLeaks or we'll destroy his career and his professional reputation” by finding out things about him, by leaking things, by launching coordinated campaigns. That was their strategy for discrediting WikiLeaks, for weakening WikiLeaks in defense of and in service to their corporate client that had hired them, which is the Bank of America. 

And then here's a reply from a Palantir person in the reply that says:

AD_4nXdS7PrpbOSq3N1KdoFgMP5BI00ddMtIUtfVex-92nPB3109vXmQxxO9ckkIyOmZVW6EaEaFEv83sl0nPP-40iLhQZFkeiCL9CeBjA_qLUAYdj9L9gHyesWUJAOPiRcbmF9RFtHumx4xOS0aPLmkKSU?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

Now, this did become public. At the time, Palantir was trying to build this branding of its new corporation, a relatively new corporation still, as sort of a, “Yes, we are contractors to the intelligence agencies. Yes, we work with the CIA and we serve the NSA and the Pentagon. But we're the new version of military and intelligence contractors. We're the ones who care about civil liberties.” And they were trying to recruit the top students from places like Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago by pitching themselves as, yes, we work with these agencies you think are bad, but we're the kind who do it but insist on civil liberties protections. 

Once that document got revealed, and at the time it was very much associated with civil liberties and probably the left, it was embarrassing to them; it was very contradictory to the image they had spent a lot of time building. And so, yes, Alex Karp at the time did call me personally and said, “We deeply apologize for what this document was planning on, it never got to the execution stage, this is contrary to our values. We hope you'll accept our apology.” 

They made the apology public because that was the whole point of it, but I remember, of course, thinking Palantir seems like a very sinister company. How would I not think that? How would anyone not think that when you read that document? And they've only gotten more and more and more embedded into the intelligence apparatus, into the national security state, into the Deep State, to the point where as a result of these executive orders and this attempt to make Palantir essentially omnipresent in our government, they have reached the peak of their power, the kind of fulfillment of that Total Information Awareness program that even back in 2002 was considered too extreme, even though it was just a few months after 9/11. 

Peter Thiel, most of you know him, obviously supported Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. He decided he wouldn't, though he has become, he's very, very close to JD Vance. JD Vance's personal wealth is due to his work with Peter Thiel and Thiel played a major role in financing JD Vance's Senate run in Ohio and also in securing Donald Trump's endorsement for JD Vance and what was a very contested Republican primary, obviously Trump's endorsement in the Republican primary, is essentially dispositive. So, JD Vance owes a lot of his career to his very close allies, to Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Palantir. 

But at this point, Peter Thiel's involvement in Palantir is quite minimal. The person who really runs Palantir is Alex Karp. Despite the fact that he has many billions of dollars and runs this extremely influential and increasingly menacing Deep State entity that is becoming particularly powerful within the Trump administration, very little attention has been paid to him in terms of who he is and what he thinks. But I think with the growing influence of Palantir, the kind of realization of the apex of its aspirations to become the omnipotent provider of government surveillance and the technology that runs it and the data that collects it, he's become very emboldened. He's been speaking a lot more publicly about his belief system, the agenda that he believes in, the ideology he pursues, he's far from some sort of neutral or apolitical technologist. Very much the opposite. He is a hardcore neocon, as devoted a loyalist to Israel as it gets. He very much believes in the virtues and necessity of American war and American power and makes very clear that the goal of Palantir is to serve that and maximize it. 

So, I just want to show you a little bit about Alex Karp, the person who really is the sole controller and manager of Palantir, the company that as we just showed you is now playing such a central role, almost unprecedentedly powerful role in America's Deep State and in its intelligence apparatus and security state. 

Here, from last month, is Alex Karp, who was doing an event at the Ash Carter Exchange. And here's part of what he said: 

Video. Alex Karp, The Ash Carter Exchange. May 7, 2025.

All right, here is Alex Karp speaking on CNBC. I just want to show you what he speaks about, what he prioritizes. Here he is proclaiming antisemitism in the United States, particularly the college protests against Israel, to be one of the greatest problems. And here's a decree that he issued about all of that. 

Video. Alex Karp, CNBC. June 20, 2024.

It would be, I think, sinister enough if somebody just completely apolitical was at the helm of a privatized Surveillance State as expansive and powerful and virtually limitless as Palantir now is. But to have somebody who views protest movements against a foreign government to which he's loyal, Israel, harbor so much contempt and so much hatred for the people who are those protesters. Does it seem like he's inclined to use this surveillance power or this data in very neutral and apolitical ways? Or do you think he's someone who feels so passionately about things like Israel that that information in his hands would almost certainly be weaponized against those who he thinks are advocating an ideology that he regards as evil or dangerous? 

Here from the New York Post, more on Alex Karp:

AD_4nXerOYk_rOP7wX_GS-XInsRK7m5MJ-LoAWI_MyWTN20T5uTU_kkPDj2V_YrZq--_zt95lzPKfxQd3Pg4aGJ1sTpd3mP8r8ImtCDSKVRYvsblSI4Rm9N3PeATnS53AHahWflcwalIWEoU0bi0LhNG7jI?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

Peter Thiel, in November 2024 – as I said, he doesn't run the company, but he still is influential within Palantir – he spoke with – you'll never guess who – Bari Weiss, and she asked him about – you will never guess what – Israel. 

Here's what Peter Thiel said about his view of the U.S. and Israel:

Video. Peter Thiel, Bari Weiss, The Free Press. November 14, 2024.

So that's it. We just need to defer to Israel. “Look, we're not always going to be on the same page, but the best thing to do, defer to Israel, have Israel tell us what they want and give it to them. Have Israel tell us what they want us to do and do it. Let's just defer to Israel, and we'll be much better off.”

In late 2023, Palantir announced a policy which you would think would have created a lot of anger and opposition among the American right because it was as pure of an example of what is now called DEI, or job set-asides, as you could possibly imagine and yet people like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss, both instantly cheered it as soon as it was announced because it's the kind of DEI that they really like. But it also shows you how Palantir thinks as well, which, again, is an important thing to understand, given the power that they've now amassed. Ben Shapiro ultimately kind of backtracked a little bit when his own followers began saying, “What do you mean? How are you cheering for the DEI and job set-asides for specific minority groups when you've been claiming to oppose that your whole life?” 

But here is Palantir's announcement:

AD_4nXdNykEckOC8exsEkUw-Zk3Vcg7tR-N9r2yvplNdFup14c2viEGYkLXCCsqxy9fgxAOZaiaWfTWwMvaiv-t238jJhJtAsnPy4W37dlsbLbG7axzGRWQM_xvGg-rMv0c0ZrQ3qzDslP98-diV5CAuTA?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

AD_4nXfh8HimfpJFLQe_4EsuujnTVgMDudYgKZMHoeowfQYpdxFD2ZLxP5pG90vW-dC_2SpyRvey6_dNbMMAgSXBJwjGGs6e3C-ijk3mxdOILWthrkggp8Zttg7ESo3d0smhf5V5_tGJxJNfKWjpPdC3_eE?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

AD_4nXcqkfHkOLv6FnOPK_4ige7TFX3aVA1NVFlImzAfcpXcervG3E0QHD0LVb6qKVK29lHj3KpOALWWvSi62aAMWzMYInGsZFc7SJjrDDrQ8zK2A4228T6Xp47GvBc-iX5ZB6Q3C8AYIRgb8H01_RcVso0?key=iofTBB_zIt9dMNI5unDTKw

They created 180 jobs available, not based on merit, not open to everybody who competes based on merit in the United States, they created 180 jobs available exclusively to Jewish students who claim that they are endangered, exactly the kind of DEI programs where you say Black people have been historically oppressed and feel endangered in society or untreated fairly, therefore we're going to create 80 jobs only for Black people and everyone in the conservative movement or anything adjacent to it goes absolutely crazy, sues over it, says it's illegal, says it is immoral, says its racist. 

And here is Palantir doing exactly the same thing but only for Jewish students, I think indicating the ideology of the people, including Alex Karp, who run this now extremely powerful, centralized corporation that collects and maintains and does whatever it wants with all your personal data from the IRS to HHS to Homeland Security and everything in between. 

Here was Alex Karp quoted in The Hill and Valley Forum, where he was speaking about Israel and the role that Palantir plays in the Israeli attack on Gaza, which is significant. And he was asked basically, what about the role you're playing and the number of civilians being killed? Here's what he said. This was in April 2025. 

Video. Alex Karp, The Hill & Valley Forum. April 30, 2025.

I want to emphasize that, although we've been focused on Palantir's intelligence collection, one of the things they do is they are developing AI products designed to be used on the battlefield. This is actually a story we reported on previously at The Intercept as part of the Stone documents, I worked on it with my colleague Jeremy Scahill, that artificial intelligence or algorithmic analysis was being increasingly used to decide in the Obama administration who would live and who would die with the drone program. So, they would have signed this program would point to people based on who they talked to or in what proximity they were to other people, considered by the program to be bad and if you got enough points, you were deemed eligible for the kill list. These were not human intelligence assets giving information; these were purely algorithmic assessments that ultimately have now become more sophisticated with artificial intelligence, one of the things Palantir is working on. 

And one of the things we were able to discover was that Al Jazeera journalists who interviewed terrorists were not differentiated under this program. A lot of them had very high point totals that made them eligible to be killed, even though they weren't plotting with terrorists; they were interviewing people deemed to be adversaries by the U.S. government. 

That's why I say a lot of this technology is extremely dangerous. Doesn't mean we should ban it, probably other people are developing it, but you need serious safeguards on it to make sure that it's not being abused or pursued for political ends. And here you see somebody who's as loyal to a foreign country and therefore antagonistic to those who criticize that foreign country in the United States as you could possibly imagine, and he's the person amassing this massive power, not just of information but also increasingly of military weaponry. 

Here, he spoke at the Reagan Presidential Foundation in December 2024 and shared some of his philosophy about how the West needs to maintain dominance. 

Video. Alex Karp, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. December 7, 2024.

So, people like Alex Karp are very benevolent, very kind, very loving, very considerate, very fair, but the people who think differently, those are monstrous people; they live without ethics. As a result, we need to make sure that we develop the intel programs and the weaponization programs to keep the people whom we regard as adversaries in fear of us. And it's pure James Bond villain talk, sociopathic talk, which you could dismiss if not for the fact that he really is in a position where he's able to oversee the programs that will actually do that. 

Here's a little bit more of him talking about how he thinks social change of the kind that he wants in the United States should be effected. He's speaking at the Economic Club on May 22, just a little bit ago. And as I said, he's becoming more emboldened in speaking out publicly about just how extremist his ideology is, just how politicized he is after years of kind of hiding and remaining a mysterious figure. Here he is talking about how he wants to effectuate the social change he believes in. 

Video. Alex Karp, The Economic Club of Chicago. May 22, 2025.

So, the way social change happens is that you take the people you disagree with, your enemies, and you humiliate them, and you make them poorer. He was talking before about how if you're against him, if you believe in a cause he doesn't believe in, he thinks that not only you, but your family, and your mistress, all should be revealed and should be punished. They should have their bank accounts taken away. I mean, isn't this the kind of authoritarianism that we have been concerned about, have been objecting to, have been denouncing for so many years, the idea that if you have beliefs that people in power dislike, that you can have private information about you disclosed to humiliate you, that you could have your bank account stripped from you? But dissent can be crushed, and that's what he's saying: we need to make sure that people who dissent live in fear of what we can do to them. This is who Alex Karp is. 

There are people right now in the MAGA movement, people like Laura Loomer and others who are now thinking Palantir is a weapon available to Trump supporters calling on Palantir to be weaponized against the protesters in Los Angeles or other protesters against the Trump administration not surprising that that's the faction that also is very loyal to Israel who sees in Palantir not just an ally, but a weapon. 

But as I said before, one of the dangers always is when a movement comes in and says, we want to curb these abuses that have been used against us, we want to clean out the way these powers are being politicized. The big danger often is that those who get the power will seek instead to seize those powers for themselves and further fortify them. I do believe there are people inside the Trump administration whose vision is very antithetical to that, including people like Tulsi Gabbard, but this has a momentum. This is very powerful people behind it that want Palantir to ascend to this position for all sorts of reasons that they believe serve their agenda and we're well on our way to that happening. 


Watch this show on Rumble.

 

community logo
Join the Glenn Greenwald Community
To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today
10
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
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
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Discusses Mahmoud Khalil on Fox News
00:08:35
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
September 02, 2025

@ggreenwald Glenn, can you please look into the 6 deaths of AfD party members in the German region of Westphalia?
What's going on? The German authorities are claiming that 3 of them died of natural causes, one died by suicide, one by heart attack and the other by something else. They've all died within the last 2 weeks, there is an election in that area on September 14th and 4 of the deceased were on the ballot standing for election that day.
Can you please comment on this? I have a sick feeling something really sinister is happening over there.

How does this make any sense? (Alleged) US service member for 20 years reports being pulled into a meeting over social media posts condemning Israel. Posts allegedly posed "a threat to national security."
https://substack.com/@democraticwarrior/note/c-148525194?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1ngpds

I gotta agree Glenn it's time to iron out the Tracey/Webb Epstein stuff more directly on the show.

I will admit being no expert on the subject, but from where I stand Webb seems... a little suspect. She's circumstantial, tangential and debate-avoidant. But at the same time, Tracey seems hellbent on ignoring a whole lot of intelligence-related (i.e. Mossad) smoke because there's no 100% irrefutable photographic proof of that fire. Sure, Michael, we're all just being hysterical for smelling something very foul there with the math teacher who became a billionaire with all the right friends, surrounded by young girls, cameras, and powerful connected zionists. Right.

In other words, Glenn, maybe both sides are arguing in good faith-- or maybe, as it sometimes seems, both are full of shit here, and maybe your viewers need you to help us sort all of it out.

(And then there's the spectre of the noxious Thiel looming around you and Tracey, justifiably or not. What's up, if anything, with all of ...

post photo preview
Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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 not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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!

AD_4nXfDSZARKhyRtwv4IOhm4vEhB_45LlyrR14zgYXB4RdZh1VCzXCYR0BW_bENlZpphILS4wOfQn6aVmsQkTTaFPWCZd6fjiRb8ig8KYsaqemBCPv_4BmfvYxV7HYI8_aFkXwJKqXOtDZieOggmeiObQ?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

AD_4nXfDSZARKhyRtwv4IOhm4vEhB_45LlyrR14zgYXB4RdZh1VCzXCYR0BW_bENlZpphILS4wOfQn6aVmsQkTTaFPWCZd6fjiRb8ig8KYsaqemBCPv_4BmfvYxV7HYI8_aFkXwJKqXOtDZieOggmeiObQ?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

AD_4nXd5pXbBfXm8lpMAw04DzgTete3vaWyXWnKJyDRQOD-EKRWNoUKI31edkd8_KKcl1C4ULZqRBUGHhSFkLvSUdBn3d8LVKAp2JAXHx2Fl2LLxKae3F_FjR0fCU0TDyB_IvOLJnrpZ6hhn-fsn6IMe8Ic?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

AD_4nXcpAGbQPU_k9FnVNygyK9DVBb8xaViYY3U2kkdZYdYMWZouuiS2-z4api7cE0-TeZotbDnL3RHoHtGsS4_TSKmO8BRAui-ywlmXA_rPZo8b0Tx8jpgvi0bML7cKs-hBmTNMS6Nx3HPETwYj1VGXnao?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

AD_4nXfGTA63c8WHlPEICFjtpp_1dGeRKFn8y-pFPv0NzIThNW7eeR4G1QNQ1q_7QGqHaDVCKCiKppI_T67BhaZrOmQZ8L8oY_YYy0Ap2AHmQKbiRvXuiDPkTjfy6_hbmtekSmlcMXdr0SXPlMvhJcJM7Q?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Israeli Official Caught in Pedophile Sting Operation Allowed to Flee; Israeli Data: 83% of the Dead in Gaza are Civilians; Ukrainian Man Arrested over Nord Stream Explosions
System Update #503

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!

AD_4nXdaGf-OUt5rx2OlijwoDptT2KOdBDC2-rvOLI2E9v_QXsv1kqWdHPRG9vJZlXUyxHF6xG_Y672b6ozMNqom3EFUZIHiCekCe9-4nNOlzJgrPNbQMt__EjrQiPIgZpphDnU1f-D3i9zeQb95dlqi-40?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

A top official of Israel's cyberwarfare unit was arrested in Nevada on Monday night after police say he tried to lure what he thought was an underage child to have sex with him. The Israeli, Tom Alexandrovich, was let out of jail on bail and then – rather strangely – had no measures imposed on him to ensure that he did not simply flee the country and go back to Israel. As a result, the accused pedophile did exactly that – after telling the FBI that he intended to get on a plane to go back to Israel, that is what he predictably did. 

Why were no measures undertaken to prevent that, whether it be the seizure of his passport or wearing an ankle bracelet, or monitoring? We'll examine the latest about this increasingly strange case, as well as one of the officials, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who has her own background. 

Then: a harrowing report from Israel's own intelligence units’ documents that an astonishing 83% of the people the IDF has killed in Gaza are civilians, all this revealed today, as Bari Weiss' Free Press continues to engage in some of the most brazen atrocity and genocide denialism imaginable in service of the foreign government to which they are loyal. We'll examine these latest revelations and what they mean for U.S. policy. 

AD_4nXdaGf-OUt5rx2OlijwoDptT2KOdBDC2-rvOLI2E9v_QXsv1kqWdHPRG9vJZlXUyxHF6xG_Y672b6ozMNqom3EFUZIHiCekCe9-4nNOlzJgrPNbQMt__EjrQiPIgZpphDnU1f-D3i9zeQb95dlqi-40?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

AD_4nXfYbsB_pACPYJiv_DKAFAI-FRzJ27qVc_luLNVZNqAklGZq4Onz7xz8QgYi1ClvmahCIYv4zEmaF8C8fEZSCpn8yDulvnrGxuyCtqaGxMN68GkZbR_MhIEcCPg4G0ndHnyiCvqaClsbHHxYkbOtO04?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals