Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Israel-Made Famine Crisis Finally Recognized
System Update #493
August 04, 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_4nXfURakqiKPfIBq2E7bRDM05btrMNaybF9dNk_CY2JPfQ-8rE2rA2Su93Ewj2QKOMkRjuCr_OgIin8jP-C1SROK7477c9DlYNk6dLvPq1s9l1Ol8M4vgAM-PgBMfAvmJIgiZdb6vNrlYA1Al3M5G8H4?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

Tonight, we will cover the rapidly growing body of indisputable evidence that mass famine, mass starvation, is sweeping through Gaza in a way we haven't really quite seen in many decades, given how deliberate and planned it is by the Israeli government. 

By evidence I don't just mean the testimony of people in Gaza, or Gaza journalist or World Health organizations, but many Western physicians who are in Gaza, who are coming back from Gaza and reporting on the horrors that they're seeing, as well as official statements from Israeli government officials about exactly what they are carrying out, and what their intentions are with regard to the blockade that they continue to impose to prevent food from getting to Gaza. 

We're seeing babies, young kids and even now adults starving to death, again, as the result of a deliberate starvation policy that, again, is part of a war that the United States is paying for, that the United States under two successive presidents has been arming and continues to support diplomatically. 

One of the ways that you know that the horrors are immense is that many Western politicians, even Western governments, are now, suddenly, after 18 to 20 months of steadfastly supporting everything Israel is doing, starting to try to distance themselves with all sorts of statements and expressions of concern and even occasionally trying to pretend that they're doing something concrete. They know that what is taking place in Gaza is of historic proportions in terms of atrocity and war crimes and they do not want that associated with them, they don't want that on their conscience or especially on their legacy and so they're attempting to pretend all along is that this were something that they had opposed from the very first moment the Israeli destruction of Gaza began.

AD_4nXfURakqiKPfIBq2E7bRDM05btrMNaybF9dNk_CY2JPfQ-8rE2rA2Su93Ewj2QKOMkRjuCr_OgIin8jP-C1SROK7477c9DlYNk6dLvPq1s9l1Ol8M4vgAM-PgBMfAvmJIgiZdb6vNrlYA1Al3M5G8H4?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

AD_4nXfK-xsOrLVXUUAtIFOw0FRYrfWk9eWnhNFYbcM7agRi2PnI4-iT3hvNOdRjBoHABEeoZ_4iPzI3sMcGOnwGP3qpk_i43ZdW6-_TUGKz-rCyHSvnGkj_uuyw2mkMgzq9eGgmMQJ4pDS5ElMBursawVs?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7 attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do is impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. At least that was the population when all this began; half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, under the age of 18. 

This has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part, people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. We've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade – and by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza, I mean that the people, groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy. 

There was a complete and full blockade for three months; at the same time, they imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. They are now killing or at least arresting anybody who tries to just go a little bit out – remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea – to try to fish for food. That is also prohibited. It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies. 

The number of groups, governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities, have now, in their view, no choice but to do so. The evidence is starting to become so overwhelming that only the hardcore Israel loyalists are left to try to deny it or blame somebody else for it.

 ABC News today brings this headline: “More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. Their statement warned of "record rates of acute malnutrition." They are the World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility in having worked with conflicts many times before. 

A leading Israeli newspaper, the daily Haaretz, which has been more critical of the Netanyahu government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7,  had its lead editorial yesterday under this headline: “Israel Is Starving Gaza.” The language they used was so clear, straightforward and direct that it's unimaginable to think of any large corporate Western media outlet saying anything similar.

Last Monday, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life and not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is and because they're unlike famine, say, in Ethiopia, or Sudan or Yemen. There are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources that are just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aids that they want to bring to the people of Gaza and yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF. 

Although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the longstanding Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity, none of this is surprising. None of it is new. Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time. 

Oftentimes, you hear that it's only far-right extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, or people like that. In reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him and he was the one who ordered a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water and electricity. 

In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smotrich, said at a conference:

AD_4nXec2ppDBsnwA4o20cAdTzEonp-VWnE-ALIceEW-1L17dv0JkACW0evzhN-yiYV5R6NZ21FUi_51tE-k8o9yWnRhWkrg4QdOKSgiBJn18qDOob1F4MQ7kqv6iI0zQhCMbJ7kfuEE8ZH7k326zDak?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

 Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took. In his words, to ensure that not even a grain a wheat entered, a place where 2.2 million people, or 2 million people, or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and U.N. refugees and refugees in even their own tents being blown up. From CNN, in May:

AD_4nXcoz1BO5Uy4U3-HpDByJVQDjYbweauiau-fCDt6mrP7IqAjnTtq5asuME9EuegZN844pkO_EdVxOmfNjmeuFLe21yZThITWpseOJ7OlXLslWrqjD41QEZA08ft26jEIt-xtKMCS14yR434jP42Lt5o?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

Just as a reminder, it was in February, after Trump was inaugurated, that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. They didn't hide it. It wasn't in dispute. It wasn't in doubt. It was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. This is exactly sort of the thing that, after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews, were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed. 

So, none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well, to suddenly come out and say, “Oh my God, I can't believe this. What have we been supporting? This has to stop.” 

This is all months in the making, and, as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage, where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. Irreversible physically because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. They need much more extensive medical care than that. Of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see. 

That's why all these attempts to distance themselves that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians are utterly nauseating. They're the ones who enabled it, they're the ones who have been paying for it, they're the ones who have been arming it, they're the ones who've been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza. 

We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children, without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia. Horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it has essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer. 

Here is Nick Maynard. He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program “Good Morning Britain,” just like “Good Morning America” in the United States. And he got back from Gaza. He's a surgeon. And here's what he described in his own words. 

Video. Nick Maynard, “Good Morning Britain.” July 25, 2025.

He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing that every day, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chests. How about their kneecaps? How about their testicles? And they come in in clutches with all the same injury. We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. He's in Gaza. He saw exactly what he's describing. 

Here he is again, talking about something in one way, not quite as brutal, but in another way, almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza. 

Video. NICK MAYNARD, GOOD MORNING BRITAIN. July 25, 2025.

If you are deliberately preventing the entrance in Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones, if that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is. 

Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. Yesterday, she decided to stand up on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories about nutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. She's so moved by it. She had to stand up and make her voice heard. Here's what she said. 

Video. AMY KLOBUCHAR, C-SPAN. July 24, 2025.

I've heard enough of that performance. Very well delivered. The voice cracking was a nice touch. But as you'll see, as you will notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. You would think this is just some country doing this, that the United States has nothing to do with. 

The United States pays for the Israeli military. It pays for their wars. It pays for the munitions they use to carry all of this out and has for decades. Amy Klobuchar is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties. 

AD_4nXdum4-IfS0hO_cVvEsQNsgDMa_EBNE_l-lJLoqBwRi3e3RixlRX_gjglrW_43w7csvWNFmxZNP-_2ZPm9E1XjRJVmE1P2tigqwh0DOTnaQHe6TTPE6iEI_Ktu_eDAedtyGViNhsCQZLUdv_4JVJ9Ls?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

Here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party, the perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. There you see Amy Klobuchar. She's right here smiling. And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Here's Chuck Schumer, here's Ted Cruz, here's Adam Schiff. Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along with anything. There they all are gathered. You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of warrior strut. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court, just like Vladimir Putin is. Just the week before, the IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the U.S., and was visiting relatives in the West Bank. And not only did settlers at the back of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, but they also then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene to pick him up and bring him to get medical care, and the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. None of these people had anything to say about this, because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens.

 So, it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotion about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. Again, this is not anything new. He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things. 

I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. The Netanyahu government has said many times, very explicitly, that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. Their war aim is not to get the hostage back. That's the pretext. Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why they have deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their role. Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government said yesterday, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live. That's the goal of the war. It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. That's a pretext. 

There's an Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide, named Omer Bartov and he served in the IDF. He's an Israeli and he now teaches at Brown University, where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of Genocide. And for quite a long time, until very recently, he rejected the idea that the word genocide applies to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, “The word absolutely applies,” he was insisting it did not. He then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week where he said, “I'm an expert in genocide. I know it when I see it,” and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. Again, this is an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies as a steadfast supporter of Israel, writing in The New York Times op-ed, “I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide.” He laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means and how it's been applied in the past and why it applies today. He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view and here's part of what he said. 

Video. Omer Bartov, Piers Morgan Uncensored. July 24, 2025.

And that's been true for a very long time. The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try to find some way out. That's the goal. It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them, without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. That's the reality. Israel, as a country, obviously has lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. These are less than human beings, which is why there's very little opposition – some have grown, but it’s still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this. 

In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, you might recall, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim:

AD_4nXeT-r8uhmM8Z9zMvN76ROIqars-Rm3w8hcfLsKL58XJnB3U46Xd5N4THy85Xd2IVXEvrHTCtoVIeMCzUjZxRQtQVyn4yyM6WR8zyRdle19iYbtNKpG6GbDt5PPQeabw8gx_wm4EXdwB4iEXFN36e3Q?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

So, have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family – accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libel against Jews, because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent, is a blood libel against Jews.  

Blood libel is now a term that has the same effective definition operationally as antisemitism, which just means criticizing Israel. I have, though, been really amazed. I've noticed this for quite some time now, the way in which non-Jewish supporters of Israel – you can call them Christian Zionists, or Zionists in general – I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity, just think it comes from political expediency. 

He was on my show once, talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. All of that, all of which was true. All of which I agreed with. And then I asked him, Does that same thing apply to Israel? And he immediately rejected it, started saying how Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, although, at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as antisemitic, and he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuley. Ever since, he has been as extreme a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews. 

One of the most repugnant things I've seen is this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, “Oh, no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. There's no famine in Gaza. They have plenty of food.” And then for a while, it became, to the extent people don't have food, “It's Hamas's fault, they're stealing the food.” And then the question is, where are they getting it from to steal it? No food can be allowed in. They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. They shoot and kill, or at best arrest, people who try to fish off the coast. So, that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, “Oh, it's the U.N.'s fault. There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute.” 

The last time the U.N. tried to take food into Gaza, when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in, was July 20, which is four days ago. And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come, as soon as they entered with trucks of food, desperate Gaza civilians whose families are dying of hunger, ran over to the trucks. And when they did, the Israeli military, the IDF, started gunning them down, started massacring them. And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by U.N. trucks, you are also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks. 

Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program, but it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. Her husband was John McCain. Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of antisemitism daily, basically, if you don't support everything Israel is doing, that's the family she comes from. That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. And so, she's often very careful and cautious in her words. And she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. That's her job. And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite an extreme language. She went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the U.N., and also the U.N. aid workers themselves, imposed by the Israeli government. 

Here's what she said. 

Video. CINDY MCCAIN, CNN. July 21, 2025.

The last time the U.N. tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military and now, the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger and famine in Gaza, and instead blame the U.N., a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year. 

The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is; 29 countries issued a letter that we read to you late last week. This is all just symbolic. This is a way of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against this all along. 

Only the West and particularly the United States has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing and instead, the American government, like they did in the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing. 

We're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20, 50, 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books, looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. And we're seeing it unfold, right in front of our faces, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it. 

AD_4nXc2wDU_e7Axqb4ZmwSUkXCNtSaYMM4kJKTAtvnGIXhlEjD4E7epTOIj8F9Tp-RIvtYT02vJMeIcCC-WSTw5gq3V6StgsmjU5KWurDsJQu4Hq9GbO6S7qyGXBG_ub_kYHiNQU1oTFE1zDCSrNZ4MCZs?key=sugro_W6IPITwVmB1CJeWg

community logo
Join the Glenn Greenwald Community
To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today
2
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
SPECIAL AFTERSHOW - SYSTEM UPDATE 500
01:07:46
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

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

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

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

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
September 14, 2025

“Welcome home, Charlie.” Sometimes, in the midst of all the online hate being expressed toward Charlie Kirk, there are surprising moments of grace and beauty, like Jeffree Star praising Charlie's willingness to have a “a conversation with everybody. Why did I respect him? Because he knows reality.”

Or like Chris Martin, of Coldplay, who urged a live audience to send love to Charlie Kirk's family. At one point, during Tommy Robinson's massive free speech march in London yesterday, somebody held up a large photo of Charlie Kirk and a group began chanting his name. Thousands of South Koreans held a march celebrating his life. After woke employees at a Michigan Office Depot refused to print posters of Charlie for a memorial, FedEx stepped up and printed them for free. At a rally for Charlie in Rome, people held signs saying, “Debate Shouldn't Kill.” In Prague, students marched silently in his honor. There were additional vigils held in Sydney, Germany, Spain, & Thailand.

I spotted ...

September 14, 2025

Excellent article by Matt Taibbi about the errors media outlets and people have made in their reporting on Charlie's Kirks' views.

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/an-arrest-corrections-and-pure-horror?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=pyuo0

September 13, 2025

Fascinating/horrifying discussion between Tim Dillon and Max Blumenthal on Israeli influence over US government & Charlie Kirk. Max traces Charlie's slow awakening to the truth about Israel over the past few years.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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


 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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