Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Separating Fact From Fiction on Fox News/Dominion Lawsuit. PLUS: 50th Episode Reflections on Rumble & Our Show
Video Transcript: System Update #50
March 08, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Friday March 3, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

Virtually the entirety of the corporate media has spent the last two weeks gleefully writing the obituary of Fox News and its primetime hosts, especially the nation's most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson. They have constructed a narrative that, if true, would be indisputably crippling, if not permanently destructive, to their journalistic credibility. Namely, they claim these Fox hosts in the weeks following the 2020 election were promoting and endorsing Trump's accusation that he lost due to widespread voting machine fraud, all while the same hosts in private were ridiculing these same claims and admitting they found them baseless and ridiculous. But is there a truth to this narrative, one which, incidentally, is based entirely on a legal brief filed by the lawyers for the voting machine company Dominion that is suing Fox News, a legal brief that Fox News is yet to answer? 

That this narrative has been proven is virtually gospel among American liberals. As usual, these corporate media outlets, along with Democratic Party leaders, are marching in total lockstep, and none has aired any skepticism or questioning of this accusatory framework, let alone give airtime to anyone challenging it. So we will examine these accusations in depth, evaluate the evidence offered for them, and assess whether they have indeed been proven true. 

As I just indicated, tonight is the 50th episode of System Update and we will use this solemn and commemorative occasion to engage in a bit of self-reflection to assess what we are trying to achieve with this program, how the platform provided by Rumble is so vital to allowing independent media to thrive, and why the growing success of independent media is, in our view, of the greatest priority and a major cause of optimism. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 


Monologue

 

If it were your goal to destroy a journalist’s reputation, it's hard to imagine anything more effective than being able to prove that they publicly affirmed facts, which in private they admitted they did not actually believe. If you could show that - that a journalist was privately mocking a theory that on their own shows they were pretending to believe - then it's almost impossible to imagine how that journalist could retain any credibility. 

The part of the corporate media that hates Fox News and has long craved its destruction – meaning almost all of the corporate media except Fox News – believes with great excitement that this is what they have now proven. They believe they have now proven this about Fox's most-watched host, Tucker Carlson, as well as the other Fox primetime hosts such as Laura Ingraham. To listen to them tell it they have a smoking gun proof that, at the end of the 2020 election, both Carlson and Ingraham were privately mocking as frivolous and deranged Trump's allegations of widespread election fraud, while then going on their own shows and – in order to please the right-wing audience – were pretending to support and affirm the very theories of election fraud that they were privately mocking. 

Similar to how CNN and MSNBC spent years bringing on various CIA, FBI and NSA operatives to promise bloodthirsty liberals that the walls really were closing in on Trump this time, that it was just a matter of time before he would be frogmarched out of the White House to finally receive his just desserts, liberal corporate outlets are celebrating the full-scale destruction of Tucker Carlson's journalistic credibility. That is because they insist they caught him red-handed publicly endorsing election fraud theories that, in private, he was mocking as fictitious and deranged.

 The CNN media critic whose life appears to center around the only cable show that anyone watches, Oliver Darcy, published this obituary of Fox News, on February 24, under the headline “It's a major blow. Dominion has uncovered “smoking gun” evidence in a case against Fox News, legal experts say”. this whole article uses one of the favorite corrupt tactics of corporate media. They hand-picked so-called experts whom they know share their political worldview and ideology and then quote them – and only them – saying what they themselves really believe, all so that they can maintain the pretense that they're really just nonpartisan, objective reporters who, in a great stroke of luck, randomly chose experts “who all happen to agree with them”. That way, they get to launder their own opinions as just what “the experts say”. This article illustrating the narrative that almost every American liberal has embraced begins, 

 

Fox News is in serious hot water. That’s what several legal experts told CNN this week following Dominion Voting Systems explosive legal filing against the right-wing talk channel, revealing the network's executives and hosts privately blasted the election fraud claims being peddled by Donald Trump's team, despite allowing lies about the 2020 contest to be promoted on its air. Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion's evidence as a very strong filing ‘that clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting”. 

 

A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump's claims “really crazy stuff” and the cable network’s stars – including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham – brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president's camp asserting that the election was rigged. It also showed attempts to crack down on fact-checking election lies.

 

On one occasion, Carlson demanded that Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing the election fraud claims. Tushnet said that in all of her years practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit. “I really don't recall anything comparable to this”, Tushnet said. “Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations” (CNN. Feb.24, 2023).  

 

I'm sure that this First Amendment law professor at Harvard Law School who is saying all of that and holding that Donald Trump is very, very good at creating unprecedented situations is just a very nonpartisan and ideologically free First Amendment expert who just so happens to be telling CNN what they most want to hear, namely, that this is the most devastating defamation case she's ever seen in her very long life as being a First Amendment expert. 

Congress's most brazen pathological liar, California Democrat Adam Schiff, removed from his seat on the House Intelligence Committee for exactly that attribute, explicitly accused Tucker Carlson of endorsing the voting fraud claims while privately repudiating them. 

Weak men peddle false election lies while privately dismissing them as absurd. Weak men use fear and hate to motivate their followers. Weak men value money and notoriety over truth and decency. Tucker Carlson is a weak, weak man (March 3, 2023). 

 

On Wednesday, the two leading Democrats in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did something infinitely worse and more dangerous than anything they're accusing Fox of doing. Namely, they wrote a letter to Fox executives full of demands about what Fox News must now say and do. That senior political leaders in Washington are now issuing orders to media outlets of this kind did not, needless to say, bother many employees of media corporations. After all, if they're not bothered by the FBI and the CIA dictating to Big Tech what should and should not be permitted on the Internet, then, of course, they're not going to be bothered by decrees from political officials about what media outlets must say. But the letter from these Democratic leaders also repeated the same central allegation, namely that Fox primetime host endorsed the election fraud claims of Trump despite admitting they were false. 

 

Dear Mr. Rupert Murdoch et all. As noted in your deposition released yesterday, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and other Fox News personalities knowingly, repeatedly, and dangerously endorsed and promoted the big lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior.

 

As evidenced by the January 6 insurrection, spreading this false propaganda can not only embolden supporters of the big lie to engage in further acts of political violence but also deeply and broadly weakens faith in our democracy and hurts our country in countless ways (Letter to Fox from Dem. Leadership.  March 1, 2023).  

 

Meanwhile, The Intercept, a media outlet I founded back in 2013 to serve as an adversary against the intelligence community – partisan talking points in the corporate media – but which has instead become the exact opposite of that – namely, a carbon copy of CNN and MSNBC in its service to the Democratic Party – echoed, as it now always does, the CNN narrative, along with the Democratic talking points under this headline “Tucker Carlson Deserves A Raise For His Shameless Lies.” This entire article rests on the assumption that is implicitly assumed but never proven, namely, that Tucker Carlson told his audience that Trump's claims of election fraud were valid at the same time he was privately ridiculing those same claims.

 

Carlson's concern was that Fox viewers simply wouldn't accept the facts and, if presented with them, would flock to competitors who would tell them the comforting lies for which they yearned. At about the same time, Carlson texted his producer that, “We're playing with fire for real… an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating for us.”

 

It's easy and fun to jeer at Carlson for his hilarious deceit, and I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from doing so. It's especially enjoyable to find out Carlson believes Trump is a “demonic force” (p.43 of the filing) yet has never told his audience this. In fact, Carlson still enjoys sharing a hearty guffaw with the demonic force at Saudi golf tournaments. 

But once we're done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about […]

 

This person, by the way, who has no audience, whom nobody knows, who has never published a single thing that has made any impact, he's pointing and laughing at Carlson, the most watched and influential host on television. And he says, 

 

[…] once we're done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about this if we'd like to have a society that's based – at least a little bit – on rationality and evidence. Because in the society we have now, Carlson should logically be rewarded for everything he's done… 

 

In fact, seen from this perspective, the only thing Carlson did wrong was foolishly expressing his views in forms that were discoverable in a lawsuit. On Wall Street, the smarter executives are sophisticated enough not to do this and message each other “f2f” – i.e.,  face-to-face – to indicate to their co-workers when they need to discuss something that wouldn't look good if written out and cited in court… 

 

For-profit news outlets can do great investigative reporting, but that reporting is itself generally not profitable and is subsidized by their cooking apps or sports coverage that actually do make money. By itself, telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it's also actively anti-profit. The lesson of the Dominion lawsuit isn't that Fox is extremely bad, although it is.  It’s that to have a news system that works, we have to take profit out of the equation (The Intercept. Feb. 26, 2023). 

 

Leave aside the nauseating irony that all of these lectures about truth are coming from people who work at media outlets, including The Intercept, that spread lies on a daily basis – they're all the same outlets, for example, that told Americans (because the CIA told them to) that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation so that everybody would ignore the reporting about Joe Biden before the election and vote for Joe Biden instead. – leaving that aside, it's always amusing when employees of billionaire-funded nonprofits like The Intercept lecture everyone else on how journalism can only succeed if the profit component of the equation is removed. 

It is true that dependence on corporate advertisers can place pressure on journalists not to alienate their audience but it certainly is equally true that people who work at nonprofits funded by a single billionaire are likely to feel great pressure to avoid angering that billionaire funder. Lest the funding disappears and their inflated salaries – meaning people like this with no audience or accomplishments and nonetheless receive very large salaries – will disappear along with that funding. 

One of the key points in all of this is that all news organizations need a funding model unless one is from one of the nation's wealthiest families, which happens to be the case for at least several of the journalists who have worked over the years at The Intercept, then one needs a way to pay a livable wage to the journalists, editors, studio technicians, lawyers, technologists, camera crews, and the rest of the team necessary to produce high-quality journalism. And each of those funding models, including ones that depend on audience donations, does have the potential to carry with it various pressures to stay within certain lines or avoid alienating one's audience. All of that is true. The claim now is that Fox's primetime hosts endorse Trump's voting fraud claims, even though they privately admitted did not believe them because they were afraid that they would lose their audience to OAN or Newsmax if they did not do so. 

Beyond the fact that as we're about to show you, nobody can point to a single Tucker Carlson segment or Laura Ingraham segment, from late 2020 or early 2021, where they endorse this election fraud theory, namely, the entire allegation central to this claim can't be proven. In fact, Tucker Carlson vehemently condemned those who are making the claim of election fraud without evidence, as we're about to show you. Liberal outlets such as CNN back then in late 2020 and 2021, were making the exact opposite claim about Fox. Namely, they were gloating about the fact that Fox was losing their audience due to their refusal of late-night hosts to endorse Trump's election fraud claims. 

Here was CNN back then, saying exactly the opposite of what they're saying now, namely that Fox's integrity was starting to destroy their ratings. 

 

Fox News is taking action to stave off newfound competition from Newsmax TV. Producers on some Fox programs have been told to monitor Newsmax’s guest bookings and throw some sand in Newsmax’s gears by encouraging guests who appear on both channels to stop saying yes to the upstart.

 

Up until Election Day, Newsmax barely had a pulse on Nielsen's TV ratings reports, which showed that the channel only averaged 34,000 viewers at any given time in August and September. A slight uptick in October became a groundswell of viewership after November 3. One of the obvious causes was Fox's projection that President Trump would lose the state of Arizona, drastically narrowing his path to reelection. Newsmax criticized Fox and gave viewers false hope about Trump's chances. 

 

This tactic continued when Fox and all the other major networks called the election for President-elect Biden on November seven. Newsmax insisted that the race wasn't over and that the major networks were acting irresponsibly, when, in fact, Newsmax was the irrational actor. A subset of the Fox audience flock to Newsmax for shows that hyped voter fraud allegations and harangued the rest of the media (CNN. Dec. 8, 2020). 

 

In other words, at the time they were mocking Fox for losing their audience to Newsmax and OAN as a result of the refusal of Fox hosts to tell many of their viewers what they wanted to hear – namely that the real winner of the 2020 election was Donald Trump, and that the only reason why it appeared that Joe Biden won was due to election fraud. Everybody knows – who watched Fox during this period – that the prime-time hosts of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity were not endorsing – were not endorsing – Donald Trump's claims of election fraud. There were hosts on Fox News like Lou Dobbs, who got fired for it, and Judge Jeanine and Maria Bartiromo, who did endorse those claims, but the Fox primetime hosts did not. And that's why every single one of these news reports – that I just read you – that is implicitly asserting or even explicitly claiming that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham endorsed and supported and told their viewers valid Trump's election fraud claims, cannot point to a single instance in which they did that, because at the heart of this theory is a fabrication, the fabrication being that these Fox hosts were endorsing a theory of voter fraud that they secretly repudiated. In the case of Tucker Carlson, he didn't just secretly repudiate the election fraud claims, he went on the air and publicly did so in a particular episode that I remember because it caused enormous amounts of rage against Tucker Carlson from the Fox audience. 

In other words, Tucker Carlson went on the air and did a segment that he knew would anger his own audience, and he did it anyway, something which not a single host of CNN or MSNBC can ever point to themselves doing, namely going on the air and scolding their audience for believing things that were untrue or for buying into the conspiracy theories of the Democratic Party, even though there was no evidence for it. All of these journalists are demanding of Fox hosts that they do something that those journalists themselves never have the courage to do, which is tell their viewers something they don't want to hear. But that is something that Tucker Carlson did. So, while nobody can point to him going on the air at this time and endorsing the idea that this election was won by Joe Biden due to fraud, we can watch this segment as I'm about to show you, in which he did exactly the opposite. 

 

(Video 00:19:52) 

 

Tucker Carlson: Which brings us to the bombshell at the center of today's press conference that was delivered by former prosecutor Sidney Powell, who also served as General Mike Flynn’s lawyer. For more than a week, Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story: this election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software on to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The other day on television, Powell said of Trump that when the fraud is finally uncovered, “I think we'll find he had at least 80 million votes”. In other words, the rigged software stole about 7 million votes in this election. Here's some of what Powell said today about the software. 

 

Sidney Powell: One of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system. And that's what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in. 

 

Tucker Carlson: That was a few hours ago but Sidney Powell has been saying similar things for days. On Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments. What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history – millions of votes stolen in a day, democracy destroyed, the end of our centuries-old system of self-government. Not a small thing. 

 

Let me just stop there. You can see the tenor of this segment, which is that Tucker Carlson says this theory is a theory that Sidney Powell is endorsing. She is all over conservative media making these claims. He then goes on to say, if she's right in what she's saying, this would be the single greatest story, the single most important story, the grievous crime ever committed in American political history. You notice what he is not doing, very clearly not doing, endorsing those claims himself. He continues to distance himself from those claims by saying these are claims that she believes, these are claims that she is asserting. And he then goes on to explain that if this were true, this would be the biggest story in all of American history. Now, let's hear the rest. 

 

(Video 00:22:26) 

Tucker Carlson: Now, to be perfectly clear, we did not dismiss any of it. We don't dismiss anything anymore, particularly when it's related to technology. We've talked to too many Silicon Valley whistleblowers. We've seen too much. After four years, this may be the single most open-minded show on television. We literally do UFO segments, not because we're crazy or even been interested in the subject, but because there is evidence that UFOs are real and everyone lies about it. There's evidence that a lot of things that responsible people use to dismiss out of hand is ridiculous are in fact real. And we don't care who mocks it. The louder the Yale Political Science Department and the staff of The Atlantic Magazine scream “conspiracy theory”, the more interested we tend to be. That's usually a sign you're over the target.

 

A lot of people with impressive sounding credentials in this country are frauds. They have no idea what they're doing, their children posing as authorities and when they're caught, they lie and then they blame you for it. We see that every day. It's the central theme of the show and will continue to be. So, that's a long way of saying we took Sidney Powell seriously. We have no intention of fighting with her. We've always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them? So, we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually. That's a big story. But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell was never given them any evidence either in order to provide any.

 

Today at the press conference, Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous. And she's right. We're with her there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. 

 

Okay. He just got done saying over and over that not only did Sidney Powell refuse to provide evidence in support of her theory – that Donald Trump is the real winner of the election and Biden won only because millions of votes had been switched – he told his audience she has never provided that evidence to anyone. He said, ‘We would love to have her on our show. We would give her the entire night, in fact, the entire week, because if she has evidence, we would want to hear it. But clearly, she doesn't have that evidence because she refuses to show it to anybody when asked’. 

This was at the peak of this controversy – it was November 19, two weeks, two and a half weeks after the election, while Trump was going around every day accusing the Biden campaign of having stolen the election through voting fraud and using Sidney Powell as the primary spokesperson for that theory. I'm asking you to leave aside for the moment your view of whether or not this is true or not. That's not relevant at the current moment. What I am instead interrogating is whether or not the narrative that has been universally adopted by the media that Tucker Carlson has no journalistic credibility because while he was privately expressing skepticism about the voting election theory, the voting fraud theory, he went on his show and endorsed it, I'm asking you to look at what he actually said and ask yourself if that is even viable. If anybody who has an iota of integrity could actually maintain that claim that Tucker Carlson went on the air and told his viewers that the election fraud theory was true. What I just showed you – three minutes of him carefully, though emphatically, doing exactly the opposite – making clear that there's no evidence at all for that claim. Let's watch the rest. 

 

(Video 00:26:30)

Tucker Carlson: Why are we telling you this? We're telling you this because it's true. And in the end, that's all that matters. The truth. It's our only hope. It's our best defense. And it's how we're different from them. We care what's true, and we know you care, too. That's why we told you. Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it. Maybe she will. We are certainly hopeful that she will. What happened with the vote counting this month and at the polling places in Detroit and the polling places in Philadelphia and so much else actually matters. It matters no matter who you voted for. It matters whether or not you think this election is already over. Until we know the answers to those questions conclusively and we can agree on them, this country will not be united. 

 

The whole title of the segment, as you can see on the bottom of the screen, was “Voter fraud: separating fact from fiction.” And what he told his viewers is, look, you may feel real strongly about this. You may want this to be true. You may even believe that it's true. But what separates us from them – meaning the liberal outlets that will lie at the drop of a hat and not apologize when they get caught like it's happened so many times just in the last three weeks alone – what separates us from them is that we will not tell you things that we know you want to hear if we don't believe that they're true because there's no evidence for them. And in this case – meaning the case that Sidney Powell was making – we will not tell you it's true, because we have not seen evidence for it despite repeatedly asking. 

And as I said, before showing you this clip, at the time that all of this was happening, the liberal parts of the corporate media – CNN, ABC News, the networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post – were saying the exact opposite of what they're trying to convince you of now. They were mocking Fox for losing their audience, for not endorsing these theories because it was true that their main hosts were, in fact, not endorsing these theories. To the extent they were opining them at all, they were telling their audience there was no evidence for them, as I just showed you. 

How anybody can look at that four-minute segment with a straight face and claim that Tucker Carlson went on TV and endorsed the voting fraud theory is mystifying to me. That shows exactly what he just said, how willing and casual and frequent those sectors of the media lie. 

Beyond that, I think it's extremely important to note that all of these claims that are being made about what happened here come from a single source, just one source. They come from a legal brief that was filed by the lawyers for Dominion. It's a request for summary judgment. 

I just want to explain the legal standard that is at play here, because it's so relevant to how this document should be understood versus what the media is treating it as being. I don't think I have ever seen in my life the media take a legal brief in litigation, filed by one side, the lawyers for one side, and pretend that it is designed to – let alone that it actually does – reveal the objective truth. I've never seen any journalist take as gospel what is in a legal brief filed by one side in the lawsuit, which is exactly what they're doing. 

The reason why this document in particular is so meriting of extreme skepticism is because it is extremely difficult when you're suing a news outlet, like Fox, about a matter obviously in the public interest – such as whether or not the voting machines are secure or whether or not there was fraud in an election – it is an extremely difficult task not just to win a lawsuit against a media outlet for defamation, but even to allow the judge, even to convince the judge to let you get to trial. 

So, what happens is when you want to sue a media outlet for defamation about a public matter, you file the lawsuit, the other party responds, the media outlet, and then you have discovery, meaning the discovery of the facts. Discovery is where the lawyers for each side are allowed to ask each side for documents. So, the Fox lawyers asked Dominion for various documents in their possession, the Dominion lawyers asked for documents in their possession. That's how they got all these emails and group chats among all the Fox hosts and everything else that they're citing. During this process, they take depositions of each witness. So, they sit down with Rupert Murdoch, they sit down with the Fox CEO, Suzanne Scott, the Fox lawyers get to ask questions of Dominion and you produce a transcript with everybody's answers. And then what happens is the plaintiff in the lawsuit - the person or the company suing the media outlet - has to convince the judge that there is evidence that could allow a jury. If you looked at all of the evidence in the way most favorable to the plaintiff, if everything that was looked at by the jury was looked at in the most favorable way, then it's possible for a jury to rule in favor of the plaintiff, and only then will the judge allow there to even be a trial. The vast majority of lawsuits, the overwhelming majority of lawsuits brought by people claiming they were defamed by media organizations are dismissed before there's even a trial because the judge says that under the very stringent legal standards that you need to meet in order to win a case against a news organization, the evidence simply is not there. Even if the jury read everything in your favor, there still would not be enough of a case to allow a rational jury to rule in your favor. 

What the lawyers in this brief are trying to do is to take every piece of evidence turned out of its context and give it the most biased and favorable interpretation to Dominion. By definition, you cannot have a more biased document than this legal brief. I'm not suggesting at all by saying that the lawyers have done anything wrong. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be distorting, in the favor of their client, the evidence, by giving it it’s most biased and favorable rating possible, which means ignoring evidence that would negate the claims they're making, leaving that out of the brief, oftentimes taking evidence out of context. There are some limits on what a lawyer can do, some ethical limits when doing that, you can't go so far as to explicitly lie. But lawyers have an enormous license in terms of their ability to twist and interpret facts in the most biased way possible.

In a sense, you could really say that a legal brief like this is the exact opposite of what journalism is supposed to do. Journalism is supposed to look at the facts in the least biased way possible, in the most objective way possible. Whereas these lawyers’ job is, is the opposite of a journal. They're not trying to show the truth. They're trying to make the case in the most biased way they can that a jury has the ability to read the evidence in a certain way in order to decide that trial in favor of their client so that the judge will allow there will be a trial in the first place. What is amazing is to watch a journalist take a legal brief like this and treat it as though it's dispositive of the truth. What makes it especially egregious that all of the media is treating this legal brief as though it provides the answers, as though it tells the story in an unbiased way, is that Fox hasn't even responded yet to this legal brief. They haven't even told its side of the story. Imagine if you were a journalist in a very controversial case wanting to report a story, and the only thing you did is go to one side of the story and wrote the entire article by interviewing that person and never even trying to interview the other side to hear the other side's arguments, to hear why certain things were taken out of context, to hear what the answers were. This is exactly what these journalists have done with this legal brief. And as I just showed you in so many ways, what they are actually doing is distorting the evidence, including the central claim that the Fox host, whom they want to destroy most, namely the primetime hosts, endorsed that theory. 

In fact, if you look at the legal document, even if you look at the one that the whole thing is based on, you will find that what's in the document contradicts in the most fundamental way the story the media is telling you. There is no place in this legal brief where the lawyers for Dominion claim that it was Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham who went on television and endorsed the voting fraud theory. To the contrary, they are citing Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham as proof that the voting theory was false and then saying the people were allowed to go on TV and support it weren't the prime time hosts Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and those people. 

Let me just show you a couple of excerpts where the Dominion lawyers are relying on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to make their case that it was the other hosts who supported the voting fraud theory, but not the primetime ones. So, here's one quote where they say, 

 

Indeed, multiple Fox witnesses called the allegations and the people making and repeating them, such as Sidney Powell and Jeanine Pirro – reckless at the time. Tucker Carlson told Sidney Powell on November 17 – this is what he told Sidney Powell directly in those e-mails he referenced: “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. You've convinced them that Trump will win. if you don't have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale. It is a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying ex 177. And on November 21st, Carlson texted that it was shockingly reckless to claim that Dominion rigged the election if there's no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it and “as you know, there isn't” (Dominion Lawsuit Filing. Feb.16, 2023).

 

In other words, Carlson was berating Sidney Powell, exactly as he told his viewers that he was, about the fact that she was making claims for words, that she knew, there was no support. The legal brief also makes clear that Fox executives had confirmed with both, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham that they would not go on air and support the voting fraud claims precisely because they didn't believe them. 

 

On November 6, after Cooper received the forwarded email from Rupert Murdoch stating it was very hard to credibly cry foul and warning of Trump becoming a sore loser, Ex 151, Cooper and Fox Executive Ron Mitchell discussed whether their primetime hosts, Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham would push false claims of election fraud: “I feel really good about Tucker and Laura. I think Sean will see the wisdom of this track eventually but, even this morning, he was still looking for examples of fraud” (Dominion Lawsuit Filing. Feb.16, 2023).

 

All of the evidence, including this legal brief, make clear that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham were refusing to go on air and endorse this voting fraud claim. And, in fact, they were working as hard as they could to ensure that the Fox audience understood that there was no evidence for it. In other words, the legal brief and the videos, all negate the story that the media is telling you, which is why they can't point to anything on Tucker Carlson Show or on Laura Ingraham Show that supports their claim that they were endorsing what Adam Schiff and what these Democratic leaders are calling the big lie because they didn’t. 

Let me address a couple of critiques of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, that I think to deserve some more consideration. What it seems as though the anti-Fox part of the media is saying is that Tucker Carlson basically should have engaged in self-destructive behavior. He should have put on this Superman's cape and he should have gone on the air and done way more than what he did in that segment that I just showed you, which is to tell his audience there was no evidence for this fraud, that he instead basically should have mocked his audience. He should have called them idiots. He should have told them they were stupid, that they were believing a deranged theory, and that essentially he should have destroyed his relationship with his Fox audience by using language that he was using in private instead of using language a bit more respectful of that audience. 

Let me ask again, when is even a single time, just even once, that any member of CNN or of NBC News or CBS or ABC was willing to do what they seemed to be insisting Tucker Carlson should have done – which is go on the air and tell their audience that they're all a bunch of idiots who have been convinced of insane conspiracy theories. I suppose if you really hold up somebody as this kind of Superman figure and demand that they act as such, you can make the claim that what he did in that segment that I showed you wasn't enough. He should have really assaulted his audience. But that is bizarre to demand of Fox hosts if you can't show that you've been willing to do that yourself. 

The reality is that the hardest thing for a journalist to do – sometimes if you have integrity, you have to do it – but I'm speaking from experience, the hardest thing for a journalist to do is to go and tell their audience things that they know their audience doesn't want to hear and does not believe. And when you go and do that – as I've done many times, as I'm about to show you – the effective way to do that is not by telling your audience that they're all a bunch of idiots or deranged maniacs but to show the audience – your viewers, your readers – that you have respect for their views, that you understand why they've reached that conclusion but you, nonetheless, are here to convince them through evidence that what they believe is misguided and wrong. 

One of the times I've done that – I've done this many times on this show, for example, I have, many times, for example, expressed my support for narratives that I knew this audience did not believe. I did a whole segment once on why Lula was not a Communist, and why I didn't think he won due to voting fraud, even though I knew a lot of my audience believed that was true. I've oftentimes criticized the right for essentially using manipulative claims of anti-Semitism to shut down debate over Israel, much like the left uses racism accusations to shut down debate – even though I know a lot of my audience doesn't want to hear that. 

The very first time I’ve ever done that and I had to do it, was way back in 2010 before I was even an established journalist. I was writing at Salon and I had what I knew was largely a left-liberal audience. Not entirely. I've always had support from a lot of independents and libertarians, but by and large because I began by writing against the War on Terror and critiquing the Bush-Cheney administration, most of my audience, back in the early days of my writing, were Democrats, leftists and liberals. And, in 2010, the Supreme Court issued this ruling against Citizens United by a 5 to 4 ruling that held that certain laws of campaign spending finance laws were unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. And when Citizens United was issued, there was an absolute consensus, among everybody from the center all the way to the left, that this is one of the most evil decisions on the planet. And because I was someone who wrote a lot about free speech and the First Amendment, which was the ground on which Citizens United was issued, I was getting all kinds of pressure from my readers to tell them what I thought about Citizens United. People started complaining, “Why haven't you written about Citizens United?” And the reason was that I agreed with the majority. I agreed that these campaign finance laws were a violation of the free speech clause. Remember, the case arose because this advocacy group, Citizens United, spent money to produce a film critical of Hillary Clinton before the 2008 election, and they were told they weren't allowed to spend their own money to produce an anti-Hillary film. And to me, that was a clear violation of free speech. I agreed with the conservative majority. And I was not going to lie to my audience and tell them that I disagreed because I knew, the minute I did that, I would no longer have any integrity at all. I would just be kind of a performing seal for liberals, and I had no interest in doing that. Instead, I had to tell them that, in fact, I agreed with the majority. 

The 2010 article I wrote was entitled “What the Supreme Court got right” and the headline says, “It's best for the government to stay out of the business of restricting political advocacy.” So, I had to tell my audience what I knew they wouldn't want to hear. And believe me, they were enraged with me. I had to spend at least a month going back and writing four or five different articles, answering all their different attacks on my view. You see, I'm going to just show you the first paragraph that I wrote, that the tone of my article was not to say you're all a bunch of tyrannical censors for wanting the government to prohibit people from spending their money on political messaging. I instead showed respect for my audience, look, I understand where you're coming from but, nonetheless, I want to explain to you why you're wrong. And this is the tone I used:

 The Supreme Court yesterday in a 5-4 decision declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds), campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising “judicial restraint” through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints (Salon. Jan. 22, 2010). 

 

That is how you go to your audience and instead of alienating them on purpose by telling them they're all a bunch of idiots or censors, you reason with them and you speak to them in a respectful tone and you say, ‘I understand where you're coming from, but here's why you're wrong.’ That's what Tucker Carlson did. As I said, he could have gone about it in a much more aggressive way and essentially destroyed forever his relationship with his audience. I understand why CNN and MSNBC wanted him to do that. They've been jealous for years of the fact that Fox has a gigantic audience and they have none. They would love for the Fox host to burn down their relationship with their audience. But they're demanding something of him that they never would have done themselves and that wouldn't have been smart to do anyway. 

The one critique that I think people have made of Tucker Carlson in this entire controversy that merits an answer that we don't yet have is an email where he seemed to suggest that the White House correspondent Jackie Heinrich, should be fired for having fact-checked a Donald Trump tweet. And I want to ask you, any of you who believe that there is validity to this criticism, what is Tucker Carlson's answer to that critique? What is Fox News’ explanation for what it is that he's saying in that email? You don't know the answer. You don't know the explanation. Because, again, Fox News hasn't even responded to this legal brief yet – this legal brief where lawyers are not only entitled, but often do take things wildly out of context. And if you really dig deep into that email – and I'm not trying here to be a lawyer for Tucker Carlson – maybe what he said in the heat of the moment deserves a lot of criticism. We’ll find out once we hear all the explanations. I have not talked to anyone at Fox News about any of these issues, nor did I talk to anyone at Fox News before putting this program together. I just used what was in the public domain, knowing that Fox is prohibited from talking about it because of the lawsuit. But if you look deep into those emails, what you will find is that what Fox hosts were concerned about was not that Jackie Heinrich and other Fox reporters were fact-checking Trump's claim of election fraud and lacking evidence, as I just showed you. Tucker Carlson himself was doing the same thing. So, anyone who is going to claim that Tucker Carlson wanted Jackie Heinrich fired because she pointed out that there was no evidence to Trump's election fraud claim would have to reconcile that accusation with the fact that Tucker Carlson went on his own show and did exactly the same thing. What they were concerned about was that. the tweet she chose to fact-check from Trump was a tweet in which Trump implied inaccurately that Fox primetime hosts supported his election fraud theory. And so, what Jackie Heinrich's tweet seemed to be doing was fact-checking not so much Donald Trump, but the primetime hosts on Fox by saying the primetime hosts on Fox were spreading false theories about the election fraud, when, in reality, none of them had been doing that. That's what they seemed angry about. But we should hear from Tucker Carlson, we should hear from Fox News, in response to that accusation, something that we have not yet done to date, which is why it's so irresponsible for media outlets to assume they know the entire story. I'm open to the idea or the possibility that what he did, in that case, was wrong and I'd like to hear his explanation – and once we do, we can discuss it. But until then, if you look at what actually was being said, it is what I just described. 

Obviously, Tucker Carlson has an open invitation to go on his show, to go anywhere else, including my show, to explain that. The reality is that as long as this lawsuit is pending, Fox will only speak through its lawyers. But I presume in this legal brief that they will soon file, they will have an explanation or a response, and we will then be able to adequately judge it. 

The bottom line is this: if there is another case where journalists decided to assert an entirely devastating, accusatory framework based on nothing more than the accusations of a lawyer and a lawsuit, I'd like to know what that is. But they're doing it here for obvious reasons, which is they have always wanted to find a way to destroy Fox – they've never been able to find that way, and they think that they've now found it by concocting this theory. The problem is that the theory, in order for it to work, requires them to prove something that is blatantly untrue, which is that the Fox host themselves, the primetime ones, went on the air and told their viewers that Trump lost only because of voting fraud, when, in fact, none of them ever said that, which is why they can't ever point you to a segment where they did and to the extent they spoke on it at all, it was to warn their audience that there was no evidence for it. 

So, the lying here, as usual, is coming from the part of the media that always holds itself out as the protector of the public against disinformation, when, in fact, as usual, they're the ones who disseminate it most aggressively. 


So, to conclude our show, as I indicated at the top, this is the 50th episode of System Update, which I have to say may not seem like a huge and incredible number to you but – having been the person who was working with my team every day to put it together – it's been really quite a kind of an adventure to have – to figure out from scratch what it is that we want to do this year with this show, what we hope to accomplish and figure out the best way to do it. 

I just wanted to take this moment to reflect a little bit on how this show has grown very rapidly beyond all of our wildest expectations and the way in which Rumble has become so crucial not only to the ability of our show to reach a large audience but the ability of so much in independent media to be able to do so without really any constraints of any kind. 

We on our show have already created an audience size that every single night exceeds 200,000-250,000 people watching in various ways, which is starting to approach what the corporate media shows on primetime at CNN and MSNBC are able to attract for people under 65, despite the fact that we're only two months old, that we have no large corporation behind us supporting us, that we rely entirely on ourselves and on our audience to promote our show. That has become incredibly, incredibly encouraging. 

There are shows, like Russell Brand's program, that air daily as well, that have been around for a few months longer than ours, that have an audience size even larger. I just want to show you some data that I think is incredibly encouraging about the future of independent media and the ability of Rumble to really foster it here. 

Here, for example, from a Pew Research poll in May of 2022, which is now eight months ago, the numbers have almost certainly grown. You see here that 20% of Americans say that they've heard of Rumble, which is incredibly exciting, that we're able to build audience sizes this large when only 20% of Americans have yet to hear of Rumble. And it also means that the potential for growth is so enormous, given that 80% of Americans have yet to hear about this platform. As I said, my guess is that's much higher already since Rumble is spending a lot of money on national campaign ads, but the ability to construct an entirely different part of the media ecosystem – one that answers not to any demands for censorship or corporate advertisers – or the ability for people to demand that Rumble censor things or de-platform is very, very encouraging. 

Rumble has already proven – when they defied the government of France’s demands to depart from RT – that they would rather lose the market than obey censorship demands. They are in lawsuits with Google over Google's manipulation of the algorithms. They have really demonstrated a commitment to not just independent media, but to the core values of free inquiry and free speech that I believe are absolutely vital to building a genuine alternative to Big Tech. 

Equally interesting are some of these demographics about who is watching Rumble. Here you see that despite the media claim that it's just for the far-right, it's just for MAGA – notwithstanding the fact that the two hosts who have been the most promoted here on Rumble with live nightly shows are me and Russell Brand – you see that one of the five viewers of shows on Rumble identifies as Democrats, and the demographics are skewing very young –you see at least 80% of the people under 65 with a fairly sizable number being between 18 and 49. There is a very diverse range of viewers who are watching our show. It's to the point where even mainstream media outlets, very begrudgingly, are starting to acknowledge Rumble’s success. 

Here, in October 2022, there's an article from The Atlantic entitled “What if Rumble is the Future of the Social Web” and it says It's the most serious of the all-tech social media platforms. 

There's another article that actually was very surprising to me, in its honesty, from New York magazine that's headlined “The Only Success Story in Right-Wing Social Media”. And it talks about Rumble’s success and it even acknowledges, despite this headline, that, as I just said, much of the content on this platform is not right-wing at all, nor are many of the viewers. And as Rumble begins to diversify its programming to gain an even better reputation for being a place that guarantees free speech and free inquiry to everybody, not just people of a certain ideology, this will only continue to grow. 

I think one of the things that we've been doing is experimenting with different ways that our show would work. The kind of conventional wisdom is that in the Internet era, people have very short attention spans and as a result, in order to attract viewers and keep viewers, you need to kind of keep this kinetic, frenzied pace where you're constantly changing stories and constantly bringing on new gas that people only can pay attention for five or six or seven minutes at a time. And one of the things we set out to do early on was disproved that view. We respect the attention span of our audience. We sometimes take the entire show, as we did tonight, to delve very deeply into just one topic, which oftentimes is crucial for telling the full story, especially if what you're trying to do is tell a story that is different from the conventional wisdom on the rest of media. If, for example, all I wanted to do was to say, Oh, this legal brief shows that Fox host got caught lying, I would need about 3 minutes. Everybody would understand what I was saying. Everybody would nod their head. But since the narrative I wanted to present to you, since the story that we wanted to show you as true, completely contradicts what virtually every other media outlet is saying, it's necessary to take the time to delve in an in-depth way to show you the evidence that uproots those core assumptions. 

It's very similar to when I began writing about politics in 2005 as blogs were starting to really emerge, the conventional wisdom back then was the only way to attract an audience was if you spoke in one or two sentences. Blog posts had to be this short and you had to constantly post 20 or 25 a day changing topics at all times, or else the people wouldn't want to read them. And I would write every single day 3,000 to 4,000-word very detailed posts about one topic containing all kinds of evidence and hard evidence of documentation and statistics and all that happened is my audience size continued to grow because I really believe, and I've always believed, that there is a real appetite for actual journalism. 

It is true that if you're just feeding people superficial tripe if you're just talking about the news gossip of the day, people don't want to hear much of that. They're willing to give you three or four minutes of a trivial topic but if you're creating a show that has a high enough quality, that is designed to inform people and to illuminate – not based on my assertions, or in my words, but with evidence – people are willing to give you their time because it is something nutritious and provocative and thought-provoking and ultimately real journalism. 

The fact that our audience size continues to grow, the more we continue to follow this format, is something that's very encouraging and we expect, as I said early on, that within a year, we strongly believe that the audience size for our show, for the other shows that Rumble is investing in as a nightly live show will have not just an audience similar to but greater than the standard audience that the largest news corporations in the country have for their nightly shows that have been around for many years, then they have a much greater budget. 

We strongly believe we will soon equal and then surpass that audience size and continue to grow. This is the part of the media that is really thriving, the independent part of the media that operates with no constraints, that is not captive to any dogma and that is not susceptible or vulnerable to censorship of every kind. That continues to be the kind of mentality and driving framework of our show. We're thrilled that it has continued to work for the first 50 episodes, and we look forward to continuing throughout the year in building the show even further. 

 

So that concludes our show for tonight. Thank you so much for watching and staying with us through our first 50 episodes. We really could not have done it without your support. The fact that it continues to grow is what enables us to keep doing what we're doing. 

I hope you have a great evening, everyone. Have a great night, everybody. 

 

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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

Hi Glenn, do you have any thoughts on the recent spontaneous deaths of 4 candidates and 2 reserve candidates from germanys AfD party? Apparently the four main candidates all died within 13 days of each other and they were all set to run in local elections coming up on September 13th. Many mail in ballots had already been cast and now have to be reprinted and distributed. The local authorities say there’s no evidence of foul play but it just seems like bizarre circumstances, especially since 2 of the candidates were only 59 years old. The German government intelligence agency has label the AfD as a “far right extremist organization” which allows them to keep close tabs and surveillance on them. The popularity of the AfD in Germany is undeniable as they came in second in national elections in February, where it doubled its share of the vote. Obviously this is just speculation right now but I wanted to see what you thought about it

September 06, 2025

How is Rumble or Locals different from any other Technocrat owned platform? I would appreciate my fellow System Update supporters to talk me off this ledge. I have been ignoring a strong sense of unease ever since Glenn went on Tucker, talked about the IDF and promptly had that horrific breach of privacy. I am grateful only to have listened as others condemned it and didn’t actually witness it as I am rarely on TwitterX.
I often appreciate Glenn’s acerbic and even bombastic remarks regarding those he is criticizing. However, calling Whitney Webb moronic and unhinged also sat uneasily in my mind.

I went full in with my support of the Rumble platform at Glenn Greenwald’s urging. And now I ask you all - if the same people who own Palantir, Oracle, Neural Link, Pay Pay, Meta, etc are all interconnected and business partners, why is Rumble any different?
Please take time to watch this brief history of the Technocracy. It lays out the current players and the politicians they’ve helped ...

TOMORROW: Submit Your Questions Here and Glenn Will Answer Them!

Fire away—and our team will go through them before the Q&A! Relative brevity will be rewarded.

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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. 

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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. 

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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!

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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. 

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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

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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:

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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:

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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. 

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