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.  

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As you probably know, Friday night is when we try to have our Q&A session. The questions are submitted only by our Locals members. We try to do it every Friday night, but when news events are developing, major news events that we have to discuss – and preparations for a huge war, a huge, dangerous, destructive war, are the kind of thing that we're going to cover and often everything is very fast-moving so, oftentimes, we end up having to cover something on Friday and not being able to do the Q&A we wanted. 

The list of questions is always eclectic. We try to choose a variety of topics, people who haven't asked questions and who have, people who are critical and people who aren't, we always look for good-faith, critical comments and we have a couple of those tonight. So, let me just dive into this. You don't need all the prefacing and the explanations. Most of you are probably very familiar with this arrangement and it's not particularly complicated; it doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's just a Q&A. 

The first question comes from @wineverett:

All right. I could not agree more with all of that. I think a major reason for Donald Trump's victories and, by victory I mean starting in 2016 when he was never even remotely considered a candidate or politician and he's gunned down the field of all those professional, highly funded Republican politicians starting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all through them, got the nomination and then crushed the Clinton political machine, obviously filled with nothing but political animals, long-term professional career politicians, is precisely for this reason. People understand that both political parties speak a language, live in a world, spend money on things, talk about things, vote on things completely detached from their concerns and their lives and that's why they've lost faith and trust in most institutes of authority because they perceive correctly that people in power who are there to essentially represent them care about everything other than what they care about. It's so incredibly obvious from how these people speak to what they say, and Donald Trump was the first to come along and sort of break all those rules that people have come to hate about how they speak, how they talk, what they talk about, the things you're allowed to say and he was basically a weapon to smash that glass, to smash the system that they were so eager to smash. 

Obviously, Donald Trump is now a politician. There's no denying that. It doesn't mean it's bad, it doesn't mean it’s good, he's been president for four years, spent four more years running for president and is now president again. So, the last 10 years of our political lives have been dominated by the political figure of Donald Trump. It's clearly the Trump era of politics. He's not really an outsider force anymore. He can't be president twice, having run a third time and almost won, just constantly running for president for 10 years, and be a political outsider anymore. 

He's still an outsider in a lot of different ways, compartmentally and the like, but it's not as appealing, I think, as it once was and especially now that we're watching in the first five months of this first term, that was consumed by things like tariffs which was a major promise of the Trump campaign, no doubt but I think people ended up feeling like economically they had been beaten upon and crushed for so long, including by the Biden years, that there was, even Trump admitted, short-term pain, the stock market became unstable, it went down, people's investments and retirements funds became less valuable, small businesses struggled. So, that was already kind of a feeling that, wow, we have Trump again, who promised to help us in the working-class, but instead, we seem to be suffering with this tariff policy that we're being told will have long-term benefits, but for the moment, we don't seem to have them. 

And now, political discourse is being dominated by a potential war with Iran that I just don't think most people have spent the last two years caring about. I used to always say about Russia when Democrats are spending all that time on the evils of Putin and the threats posed by Russia, it's just so obvious there's a huge gap between what Democrats spend all their time talking and warning about and what Americans wake up thinking about. I just know that Americans are not waking up worried about Vladimir Putin and the threat posed by Russia. That's not something they're scared about. They were during the Cold War, when nuclear war was very possible, people were taught to go to shelters, which was very much part of the culture, and there was an existential war between communism and capitalism. There was a lot at stake. But people don't worry about Russia anymore. They don't consider Vladimir Putin one of the leading threats to their well-being, unless you are an MSNBC viewer. And so, there was this gigantic gap between what Democrats were talking about and what people care about. I think that's the reason they ended up losing. 

But now you look at what Republicans have talked about. What has Trump done aside from tariffs? He's gotten in and he resumed a bombing campaign in Yemen against Houthis and unleashed the Israelis again to continue their destruction of Gaza, which the United States is paying for. Started deporting, not people in the United States illegally or who have committed crimes, but people who were guilty of the crime of protesting Israel or speaking out against Israel. I think that's what people were worried about: people in the country legally, PhD students, Fulbright scholars, biologists, chemists, with nothing but a record of achievement, being booted out with a new precedent because they spoke out against Israel. I mean, people were definitely worried about illegal immigration, especially people who are dangerous to their children or their communities. You think they're worried about Harvard and Yale biologists who wrote up ads about Israel? So, a lot of that as well. 

And now we have this war with Iran, which, if you ask, you can get polling answers or polling data about anything the way you want, based on how you ask the question. So, if you say, “Look, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, should the United States do nothing, or should it try to do what it can, even if it means military force, to stop Iran from getting a new weapon?” Yeah, we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But if you say, “Israel has launched a war against Iran, do you think the United States should involve itself militarily in a new foreign war in the Middle East? Overwhelmingly, people say no, and polls are showing both. 

I don't care what the polling data is, if you ask somebody, “Do you want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Yes, or no?” I do not believe that Americans are waking up saying in the morning, “Wow, I couldn't sleep last night because I'm really worried about the prospect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.” 

By every account, they don't even have the missile capability to send one to the United States. Even if they could, why would they? North Korea doesn’t. Everyone understands that it's going to be immediate mutual suicide. I just don't think that's what people care about in their lives and polls constantly should have shown that. I don't think people elected Donald Trump to go to war with Iran or to restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis. And that's all they're hearing about now. That's what the Trump administration is focused on, which is not what the American people are focused on. I know this from polling data; I cover politics and we've all seen over time what Americans care about and what they don't care about and when they feel like their interests are ignored and when their interests are not. 

I want to just answer this with a story about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not really a story so much as kind of my thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, I want to be very honest and say that I really like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have always liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think she's a good person. I think that she's sincere and earnest about the things she says and believes. Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said things over the last many years that I don't agree with, that you can describe as whatever, outside of the realm of what reality is. I think most politicians do. I think Donald Trump running around talking about how Iran's about to get a nuclear weapon and use it or whatever, that's way outside the realm of reality, to say nothing of what was said about the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. But the reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is what a lot of people wanted and were so fond of, so attracted to Trump. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene was never a politician. She didn't run for office, she wasn't like on the city council and then in the state legislature in Georgia and then worked her way up to the Georgia state Senate and was being groomed by the Republican Party to one day run for Congress, like kind of a career politician. That was not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has a business, the business is prosperous, she's not incredibly rich, but probably upper middle class; she lives on a good upscale Georgia suburb. And she became very politically active with the MAGA movement and America First. It resonated with her just as a citizen and then she got politically involved and probably had some connections and money that helped. 

However, she wasn't part of a political dynasty, nor was her father the governor or anything. She really just did the kind of classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type of political trajectory, where a citizen wakes up and says, I'm starting to get angry and concerned by what my government is doing. I think it's totally on the wrong track, the things they're saying make no sense, and I don't think they're representing our interests. 

She got very inspired by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and took it seriously and she suddenly became a member of Congress. And, yeah, because she's somebody who was not a trained politician, she often was not on script. She's charismatic and she says things that get people riled up and that bring a lot of media attention. That's why there's so much attention on Jasmine Crockett as well, not because she is some important figure in the House Democratic caucus, but because she says that gets people angry and cable news loves that and builds those people with a big platform. That's what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene was ever doing or saying things on purpose to make people angry. I think she was doing and saying things that she really believed in that if you go to her district, I guarantee you, people like her, people who live near her, people who lived in her district, which is why they voted for her and keep re-electing her, despite how much the media hates her and says she's so evil and bad. 

I've talked to her before. I found her to be exactly the same when talking personally to her and when I listened to her in public. I've had her on the show before, and one of the things that really I found so interesting and eye-opening about Marjorie Taylor Green is that she's been reluctant to criticize Donald Trump too much previously. 

I remember I had her in the show. She was one of those people very much against the Ukraine war, making all those good arguments that I agree with about how we have women who can't get baby formula and our communities are falling apart. Why are we sending billions to finance a war that has nothing to do with us? I remember I asked her, like, does that apply to Israel, that rationale? It seems like it should, does it? And she wasn't enough confidence to say like, yeah, also Israel. That's a very sensitive topic, she knows that. But sometimes you get to Washington, and you have to find your way, you've got to understand how things work, especially if you're not a career politician. 

I remember when I started journalism, there were a lot of things I didn't understand. I hadn't done it full-time, I thought I knew about things, but once I really started looking, I started learning things and realizing how much I didn't know. And so, it took me a while to kind of feel like, okay, I have a good, secure sense of where things are. And I think that's where she is.

 When Donald Trump announced this new bombing campaign in Yemen, she was very outspoken against it and the way she made the argument really struck me. She said, “You know what, I've been a Congresswoman now for six years, or whatever it is, representing my district, but I've lived in my district forever. Nobody in my District even knows what a Houthi is. Nobody talks about Houthis, nobody has met Houthis, nobody is threatened by Houthis, nobody fears Houthis and nobody understands why we are spending all this money to bomb the Houthis. What does this have to do with us?” 

I thought about it. I was like, that's the benefit of having people who are not professional politicians. One of the things that makes Kamala Harris such a terrible candidate is that she worked her way up that ladder from her mid-20s. She's basically been a politician her whole life. She got elected to the San Francisco District Attorney, very ambitious. You can go find national interviews with her because she was doing things like imprisoning parents for truancy if their kids didn't go to school. “Good Morning, America” and those types of shows loved her. She parlayed that into a run for Attorney General of California, won that, worked her way up to the California Senate, and then became Vice President. And she never had a moment where she was off script, where she was saying things that people in Washington would be like, “What? What is that?” She clung to those scripts like her life depended on it. She was petrified of saying anything that official Washington would find odd or strange to disapprove of. And as a result, she was totally vacant. She never spoke naturally, she never spoken like a human being because that's all she knows is she's been clicked into the political system and she speaks about the things that her donors care about, that other politicians care about, that the media she consumes talks about and she has no ability to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, no courage to say it, even if she understood it. 

You can take that too far, before 9/11, and nobody in America, for the most part, understood what al-Qaeda was, thought much about al-Qaeda, didn't mean the government should not do anything about al-Qaeda. Of course, sometimes the government has to work on things that are real threats or problems that most people don't know about or think about or understand, but I think there's a basic wisdom to the idea of asking, especially when we're going to war, why are we bombing and killing these people on Yemen? What do they have to do with us? And at the time, they were not attacking American ships, we've gone through that timeline before, and the only reason they had been previously was because they knew we were arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza, so even that was because we were financing and fighting a war for a foreign country, and the way Marjorie Taylor Green said it was like, “a Houthi, well, who knows even, in my district, what a Houthi is? I'm not going to cheerlead a war against the Houthis that have nothing to do with the lives of the people who sent me to Washington.” 

And then, when it came to this war in Iran, she lost all fear or concern about recognizing the relationship between the United States and Israel, and in whose benefit that relationship is, and who's really pushing and shaping the decisions of the United States Congress and the executive branch when it comes to war. 

I think she has enough confidence now, she's seen enough, she’s learned enough, she's read enough, and she understands enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not dumb. I'm sure Democrats will say she is. She's not dumb, she is smart. She just doesn't speak like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden because she's not from that. She doesn't emerge from that; she's a citizen. 

That was the idea, by the way, of the Congress, we weren't going to have a professional class of politicians, we're going to have people who represented their constituents, get sent to Congress for a few years and then go back to their lives and do what they were doing previously. And that's the kind of person she still is. She's very much still a resident of her Georgia district, much more so than a creature of Washington and so, she can think about things and say them in a way most Americans are still thinking and saying them. 

And when it came time for the war in Iran, too, she was like, “I am just sick” of having all of our money and all of her service members be put in harm's way for these wars that have nothing to do with our country. “Ukraine is not our country and Ukraine's wars are not our wars. Israel is not out country and Israel's wars are not out wars.” And I think she's able to speak so plainly about these things and insist that we focus on the things that her constituents and people in America really care about because she's not subservient to or taking orders from a political party or a kind of system. 

There are other people like her in Congress, too. I'm not suggesting she's the only one. I'm just saying she's been very noticeable over the last three, four months, because, especially when it comes to foreign policy, that's where politicians typically step most delicately and she's not stepping delicately at all. To me, she's become a voice of great clarity and confidence, and I think she's earnest about everything she's saying. I'm talking about these things the way most people talk about them. 

I've told stories before, and I hate to romanticize them. I'm not going to even tell the stories because I've told them too many times. Probably you've already heard them. But if you go to the United States and you get anonymous and you just go to some, like, again, it sounds so cliche, but like a diner, where you talk to drivers of Ubers or taxis or whatever, it is enlightening. You hear things that are actual wisdom, just common-sense wisdom, that no people who work on politics and are paid to work in politics in D.C. and New York ever say that is that chasm, it's a huge chasm.

Now, all of official Washington is worried about a war with Iran that I do not believe most people in the United States view as a threat or something that ought to be subsuming their lives. I don't think they want Donald Trump, whom they elected to benefit their lives as working-class people, to be focused on yet another new war in the Middle East. 

I think that's why he's hesitating too, that he has a sense for that. A good sense for that. He's a good politician in that way. It's like instinctive and I think the more Trump goes in those directions that are basically the Bush, Obama, Biden direction, the more people are going to start to see him as like every other politician in that attachment that people had to him, similar to the attachment they had to Obama, who people also viewed as a transformative figure of change but quickly became a just a mouthpiece for the establishment of the perpetuation of the status quo in Washington. They lost that inspirational connection to him. I think that's going to happen to Trump as well if he continues down this path. 

All right, next question. @Commissar69 asks:

It is amazing to me that you go study the Constitution, you go to law school, not even law school, our civics class, and the design of the Constitution, in some cases, is kind of ambiguous. They constructed that on purpose, that was part of how they obtained the votes they needed to ratify it: leaving some things purposely left ambiguous that would be interpreted in the future. So, you could tell people whose votes you needed, it could mean this: you tell other people you needed who thought differently, it could mean that. 

So, some of it is ambiguous, but some of it is not. It's not ambiguous because of the language, it's not ambiguous because of what the Federalist Papers say, it's not ambiguous because of the debates that were had. 

One of the things that was not ambiguous is that if the United States is going to go to war, it can do so only if Congress declares war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The rationale for this is very clear: it was assumed, based on experience at the time, that if we go to a war, people are going to be drafted and it's the ordinary citizen who's going to go and die in these wars and the only way the United States should go to war is if the people consent, through their representatives in the House and the Senate. And I can read you so much from the Federalist Papers talking about this. 

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. By the way, the armed forces were not intended to be a standing army. The founders really feared standing armies, meaning like armed agents of the federal government, like the ATF or the FBI. They're basically like armed permanent agents or armies, but also the army itself. That's why they talked about well-regulated militias. You compile an army when you want to go fight a war, but you don't have a permanent standing army. They thought that was dangerous. 

So, when they said the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, what that meant is Congress approves a war and we go to war, and the person responsible for executing that war – because you cannot have Congress managing the war, you need a leader, a military leader, and we wanted civilian rule, it's not a top general – it is an elected president, he becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that makes the decision about how that war will be fought. 

For a lot of reasons, over the last decades, we've completely forgotten about, ignored, the congressional power to declare war. I believe the last war we declared was the Korean War.

Now, the idea there is if Congress really was serious about this, they could have cut off funds for the war, but mostly it's been a desire by Congress not to have to take the hard vote of voting yes or no on a war. I mean, it destroyed political careers. Hillary Clinton lost because she was forced to vote on the Iraq War and voted yes. It got tied to John Kerry when he tried to run against Bush in 2004, against the Iraq War, when he had voted yes on it 18 months earlier. Joe Biden voted for it as well. It definitely was a huge reason why Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and even why Hillary Clinton was weaker than she could have been when running against Bernie Sanders in 2016, because of that Iraq War vote. They don't want to vote on war. They're happy to leave it to the president. So, they purposely kind of gave up the power that the Constitution assigned to them. It's really an abdication of their responsibility. But politicians don't want to take hard votes. 

And now the view of the executive, I remember very well that Bush and, I mean, of course, if our country is attacked, it's like this sudden invasion, the way Iran had with Israel, suddenly attacking it out of nowhere, of course, the president has the responsibility to order the country defended without first going to Congress and waiting for a vote. That's the one exception. 

That didn't apply to the war in Iraq, but Bush-Cheney said we have the right to go invade Iraq even without congressional support. And now that's the view of the Trump administration: we don't need to go to Congress to start the war in Iran. Why? Why don't you? If you want to enter a war with Iran, that's not an emergency war. Iran is not attacking the United States. Why don't you need a vote in Congress? But most people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They'd rather let Trump take the blame for it if things go wrong. 

And so, we basically have a president who single-handedly runs foreign policy, runs the intelligence community. We barely have a functional Congress at all. 

I mean, I'll just give you one example that's kind of amazing. Most of you who watch this show for a while know that I was vehemently opposed to the ban of TikTok or the forced sale of it, talked about a lot of reasons about why it’s a major act of censorship to just ban a social media app that a third of Americans – a third – and a majority of young people are voluntarily choosing to use, just saying, “No, you can't use it. We don't like that one anymore; we don't like the content there.” 

It was originally justified because Chinese ownership and influence were nefarious. That wasn't enough to get the votes, what finally got the votes was the view that there was too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech being allowed on TikTok and that was what was turning the nation's youth against Israel. And that's the reason why Democrats finally joined, and the Biden administration advocated the banning of TikTok. 

I was vehemently opposed to that, but Congress did pass it. The House passed it, the Senate passed it with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Their argument was that it's vital to our national security to ban TikTok. Joe Biden signed it into law and it had a deadline in the law that it had to be banned or sold the day after the election. They didn't want TikTok being shut down during the election so that Biden would get blamed, so they cynically made it the day after, and then Trump had 90 days to extend it if he wanted one time. 

Trump extended it, that 90 days came and went; he extended it again, for another 90 days that came and went, he just extended it again. In other words, he's just refusing to implement the law that Congress passed. And nobody cares! Do you hear anyone in Congress saying, “President Trump, we passed this law because we said it was vital to national security, what right do you have to ignore the law?” 

We basically are a country now that has centralized so much power in the presidency that Congress barely exists, except as a sort of symbolic body of pretense of democracy. George Bush and the Democrats under Obama and Biden, and especially now against Trump, of course, the whole idea: each branch is going to want to grab more power for itself. In that fight, the Congress is trying to take this from the executive, the executive says “No, that's ours,” the court says, “No, that's ours,” Congress says, “No, that's ours,” and you get a balance of power. But when one of the branches, Congress, just says, “We're content not to fight for any of our power. You can have it all, we just want to get reelected, enjoy the perks of our office, travel around the world, get the title, be perpetually re-elected, have these nice offices in the Capitol building, go on TV, get special privileges and perks,” then you don't have balance of power anymore. You have the centralization of power in a president and an executive that the founders were really here to avoid. That has completely twisted and distorted what our political system is supposed to be. It by no means started with Trump. 

The Trump administration came in as one of its major plans to eliminate anything that could oppose it, including Congress. Trump uses threats against the Republicans and all sorts of other means. But he's just continuing a trend that started, I would say, that ideas were formed by the Dick Cheney in the 1980s, but really implemented with 9/11 as the pretext by Bush-Cheney. It's just all grown as powers do from there, and we have a model of the government that is very unlike what the founders envisioned. Of course, it affects all the discourses as well. 

All right, @Readalot. That's a very good name. I hope it's accurate. 

All right, so that's a critique, a pretty strongly expressed one. So, let me just clarify, because I do think it's good sometimes to just talk to, especially, our members, about how we think of the show, how we try to put the show together. 

When I say that we don't want to be captive of the news cycle, what I mean by that is that 24-hour cable networks are forced to talk about things every day. And even if nothing significant is happening, they'll make something trivial or insignificant the centerpiece of what they talk about so there'll be some offhand comment by Trump, or there'll be some rumor about somebody resigning or somebody being in trouble, or there will be some bickering in the Congress, or there'll be some law that might get passed, that they're speculating about, or some scandal. 

When I say we don't want to be caught at the news cycle, what I mean is, I don't want to come here every night and feel obligated to talk about things that I don't think are interesting or important just because every other media outlet, newspaper, podcast or other show is discussing them. 

In part, I don't want to talk about things I find trivial. That's what I mean by I don't want to be captive by the news cycle. But it also means sometimes there are important things that are going on that I don't feel competent to talk about or I don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I try to be very mindful that when I was writing a lot and I hit publish, and I hope to get back to writing a little more soon, we'll talk about that sometime in the near future, that when you press publish, you're making a claim to your readers that they need to rely on, that when you hit publish, you're saying to them, “Look, I'm promising you that I've written something that I think is worthwhile for you to take your time and read, that I have something to say that is unique or interesting or that sheds light on something important.” I was always very mindful of that. I would rather not write something on a given day than write something that was just I'm writing just to write or because everyone else is talking about it. 

And that also means that I try not to write about things I have no specialized knowledge of and that's why we don't cover economic policy or economic debates very often, almost at all. And if we do, we'll have a guest who's an expert. Every time I covered tariffs, I had a guest on to talk about it. So that's what I mean by not being captive to the news cycle.

Now, having said that, there are obvious topics, major topics, that I do cover, that I've covered for a long time, that I have a specialized knowledge in, a lot of expertise built up over the years, a lot of knowledge about, a lot of passion about, things like foreign policy, things like war, the intelligence community, civil liberties, free speech and when there's major debates like there were with the deportations of students who were here legally because of the speech that they made, or taking immigrants out based on allegations that they were in gangs without any due process, or when there is a new war or foreign policy, obviously I'm going to not just talk about it, I'm going to cover it in depth. 

And so, I don't necessarily want to talk about Israel every night, but the reality is it has been the center of our politics since October 7. We have fought a massive, dangerous war, one of the worst wars, and it's not really even a war, it's just sort of an attack on a population that the United States has paid for. We've supported Israel taking land from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – bombing, not taking land from Syria and Lebanon, bombing them and bombing Iraq. And now we're on the verge of a major war with Iran. Of course, I'm going to talk about that a lot. I'm going to talk about it in the lead up to it, I'm not going to talk about it while the war is occurring, which is now, I'm talking about everything related to it, that's not being counted in the news cycle. That's right at the heart of what we do. 

And I think we talk about it and I hope we talk about it in a way that's not being talked about in many other places. They're getting a different kind of perspective on it, a different way to understand it, different types of information, different voices. And when war broke out in Ukraine and the Biden administration decided to be heavily involved in that, we did endless numbers of shows on Ukraine and Russia because that was a proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. It had all kinds of things to do with the alignment of each party. We do a lot of political talk that way about what it means to be left and right. What is Democrat and Republican? How has that changed? Is that meaningful? 

So, when we talk about major events like the war in Ukraine, like the destruction of Gaza, like the imminent war in Iran, the ongoing war and our relationship to Israel, as we talked about with Tuck Carlson and Ted Cruz, the attacks on free speech on the Biden administration, the ones from the Trump administration, we don't just repeat over and over whatever the headline is. I think we try and delve deeply into it and talk about everything ancillary because it often sheds light on other parts of it that aren't directly related to it. That's what I mean by not being captive to the news. 

I don't feel obligated to follow the cable news framework of doing a movement, I don't think you have short intelligence span where you can only talk about a topic for four minutes and every four minutes we have to move or talk about something for two minutes, bring on a guest for five minutes, seven minutes maximum, and then move to another topic. We don’t do nine topics a night like a cable show does for an hour. We do one or two topics at the most. We want to dive deeply into them. We respect our audience enough to believe that the people here want to pay close attention, want detailed analysis and want to dive deep into things. And then, when we can and when we have something to do, we will do a show completely detached from the news cycle. 

Last week, we did a very deep dive into Palantir, what that company is, how it started, what its history has been, what it was built for, who runs it, what their ideology is, and what function they're now playing in the government. We do a lot of those. We've done deep dives into the anthrax and things like that, even though that had nothing to do with the topic. We spent a lot of time on COVID and related policies like that. So, I think our range is pretty broad, but yes, if there's a major war that Washington is heavily debating, getting more involved in, that's going to be something we're going to talk about, maybe not every night, but certainly close to it. The consequences of that make it impossible to ignore. 

And it's the sort of thing that, as I said, I think we naturally cover and it would be very odd if people came here, and I spent maybe one night a week, two nights a week, talking about the war with Iran and then just talking about a bunch of other stuff on the other three nights and didn't mention it, especially given how fast moving it is, how much of a debate there is, how much other topics that it implicates. 

We make our own decisions about what's important, what we think we have something unique to offer, provocative, interesting, informative to say, and just say it in a way that other places are not saying it, and we try and take our time to delve in, even though we know that maybe we would have more viewers, potentially, if we just constantly, can get members of Congress to come on the show every night, people want to come on the shows all the time but I want to do one or two topics that I find extremely interesting that give you a kind of an analytical perspective, a depth of information that other platforms don't allow you to. That's the reason I like this platform so much, and I think we try to use it for that end. So that's how we think about putting the show together. 

All right, last question is a tennis question, which I'm always happy to take. It's from @Alan _Smithee, who I recognize as somebody who submits tennis questions, who says this:

Okay. First of all, that is slander, that last part. I don't pick the slam owners after the event is played. No, I do pick them after, say, the first round. So, I don't like to pick somebody who then gets eliminated in the first run; I like to see how they're kind of playing. It's still not easy to pick the slam winners just after the first round, and I have done a great job on that. 

I did actually watch the Onyx Center match today. He played a player who's one of my favorite players, Alexander Bublik, who has an extremely exotic and idiosyncratic game. He's very funny as a person, but he's extremely talented and inventive, especially on grass, so I like seeing him toy with Center. I don't think it happens a lot that when you move from clay to grass, you lose your first match. Corey Gauff won the French Open, but she lost her first match on grass as well. It just takes some transition. I don't think it means that he's in trouble or he's going to have a bad Wimbledon or anything. 

But anyway, I'll probably pick the winners of Wimbledon when we get a little bit closer to the tournament, as you say sardonically, maybe once we start the tournament, right at the beginning, then you can go and take those to the bank. But if you do and you lose, do not blame me, don't leave me rude and abusive messages, because I do have a lot of knowledge about it. My predictions have been weirdly good for the last year, but that could stop at any time. So, although I'm telling you can rely on me, that doesn't mean that you actually should or can, especially when it comes to betting money that you can't afford to lose. 

All right. Those are all the questions we have for tonight.

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.  

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What will become of Tulsi Gabbard? That was the question we posed last night and didn't have time to get to, but we will tonight. She spent years mocking and attacking Donald Trump when he was running for president for wanting to go to war with Iran instead of doing something like reinstating the Iran deal or something similar to it. Her statement to the Senate last March, when she was already confirmed as his director of National Intelligence, where she said the consensus of the intelligence community is that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, was not only ignored by Donald Trump but mocked by him. Tulsi has also been excluded from key war planning meetings. Is there any way for her to cling to this position, and should she? We're going to take a look at that. 

Western media outlets today are awash in outrage that one of the ballistic missiles launched by Iran against Israel fell in a hospital that was used, among other things, to treat IDF soldiers injured in Gaza, to send them back to the battlefield. Israeli officials used every single media outlet and social media platform available to demand that the world stop doing what it's doing to honor their unique victimhood and condemn the unique Persian evil of bombing hospitals. I mean, what kind of evil, wretched, immoral country would bomb a hospital? In this case, there were no reported deaths at the hospital that was bombed in Israel. 

It should go without saying that this is the same country, Israel, and the same people, its supporters, who have spent the last 20 months not lobbing ballistic missiles 1,000 miles away, but using precision weapons to shell and destroy the vast majority of functioning hospitals in Gaza, one after the next. 

So, how should we react to Israeli cries of victimhood over this singular landing of a missile on one of their hospitals, given that they have invented endless justifications for almost two years now for why it is not just morally permissible, but imperative for them to bomb not one or two hospitals in Gaza but all of them, to say nothing about their far worse atrocities still? Is it justified to bomb a hospital or not? Or have brand new rules of war and morality been invented over the last two years to justify what Israel, and Israel alone, is permitted to do? We'll take a look at that question as well as some of the most recent updates and news about this still-unfolding war. 

Most of you know the political history of Tulsi Gabbard. She was elected to Congress in 2016 as a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, representing the state of Hawaii. At the time, I remember all the cable networks that aligned with the Democratic Party, people like Rachel Maddow, were incredibly excited about her election and the political future they believe she represented because she was a young, charismatic, telegenic soldier in the U.S. army who volunteered to go fight in Iraq, fought and saw combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and returned as somebody who turned against those wars, who felt she was betrayed in what she was told about those wars and this is the kind of thing Democrats salivate over former soldiers or CIA officials, they've been recruiting people like those for a long time. 

So, when Tulsi Gabbard got elected to the Congress, representing Hawaii as a new member of Congress, again, someone very young, a woman of color, all the things that Democrats get giddy over, they really thought she was going to be the future of the party so much so that they made her very quickly the vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. She held that position into the 2016 primary, which, although nobody expected it, ended up being this very protracted and contentious war between the Hillary Clinton campaign on the one hand and the Bernie Sanders campaign on the other. Tulsi Gabbard was one of the first to perceive and then to publicly note that the DNC seemed to be cheating to ensure that Hillary Clinton won, even though the DNC's role is to be neutral among the candidates. 

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.  

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We have a great show for you, courtesy of Republican Senator Ted Cruz. The core value of an adversarial press – arguably its only real value – is to force political leaders to account to the public for the decisions they make, especially the most consequential ones. The lack of such an adversarial media, conversely, which is what we have, means that the population never really hears any real explanations for or challenges to their policies. 

Few things illustrate that contrast or illustrates the rot at the heart of America's decades-long bipartisan foreign policy failures quite like the two-hour interview that Tucker Carlson, notably now an independent journalist, conducted this week of GOP Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, who among other revealing statements in that interview, told Tucker that "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States, and I've worked very hard every day to do that." That's what Ted Cruz admitted to Tucker Carlson for some reason. 

Many of the clips from that interview, published in full just earlier today, quickly went viral all over the internet. That's because it is so rare to watch a U.S. Senator – especially one advocating a brand-new war of regime change in yet another country when usually the media becomes even more subservient than normal, watching a senator be confronted with all the questions every politician ought to be asked in that case, but almost never is. 

In our second segment, what will become of Tulsi Gabbard? She spent years mocking and attacking Donald Trump in his first term for wanting to go to war with Iran instead of reinstating the Iran deal that he withdrew from or renegotiating something similar to it. Her statement as Trump's director of National Intelligence to the Senate just three months ago in March, where she said that the consensus of the intelligence community is that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons, was not only ignored by Trump, but mocked by him. He said he "didn't care" what Tulsi Gabbard says. She has also been excluded from key war planning meetings leading up to the decision to join or support Israel's war in Iran. Is there any way for Tulsi Gabbard, someone whom I know personally to be a person of integrity and especially personal pride, to cling to this position in light of all of this? 

I've long been a vociferous critic of the corporate part of the U.S. media, which long was its mainstream faction. It is increasingly no longer the mainstream part, but it's still corporatized and still yields a lot of influence. People often argue whether the media has a liberal or a conservative bias, something I never found helpful as a metric for understanding the real role of the corporate media, the real failure of the corporate media. Being people who graduate from East Coast colleges, especially the national media, located in metropolitan cities on the East Coast, like New York and Washington, of course, most of the people who work in major media outlets are Democrats or even liberals on things like social issues but when it comes to economic policy or especially foreign policy, there is no real left-right ideology that defines most major news outlets. 

They were, after all, despite how liberal you think they might be, the leading institutions that helped sell the war in Iraq. They've long been crucial to propaganda about the Cold War, working together with the CIA and the U.S. government – they continue to do that – they're really servants of the U.S. intelligence community, of the U.S. security state. They help sell wars. As a result, whenever it's time to advocate for a new war, the U.S. corporate media becomes even more compliant, even more subservient in the face of national politicians who are advocating for wars. 

They're treated like purveyors of great wisdom, who are there to be treated with respect and deference because they're advocating war, and it's time to get solemn and united. That's what the media thinks its job is, not to become extra skeptical and extra scrutinizing as they should whenever something as consequential as a war is about to be foisted yet again on the American people. 

That's what made Tucker Carlson's interview of Republican Senator Ted Cruz this week, which is practically two hours long, so notable, so revealing: Tucker not only went in with an extremely adversarial interview. He's been very clear about the fact that he opposes Ted Cruz's foreign policy. Ted Cruz has been a major vocal supporter of financing the war in Ukraine. Obviously, Tucker Carlson was so vocal in opposition to that. That's what got him fired from Fox News, despite being the most watched program in the crucial eight o'clock prime time hour. 

I'm sure Ted Cruz knew Tucker was going to be adversarial in his questioning. After all, Tucker has also become a leading opponent of having the U.S. and Donald Trump get the United States involved in Israel's war with Iran, whereas Ted Cruz is not only a proponent of having U.S. help Israel destroy its nuclear facilities, but also Ted Cruz wants to be a regime change war. He wants the ultimate goal of this war to be changing the regime of Iran, like we did in 1953 when the CIA engineered a coup of their democratically elected leader and installed a “monarch” who became a repressive, brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran, who ruled over that country for 26 years. He was so hated that that's what provoked the Iranian revolution, the Islamic revolution of 1979. Of course, those people who overthrew that dictator knew the United States was the one who engineered the imposition of the dictatorship, who propped it up, who financed it, who supported it with intelligence and military weapons, that the jails for dissidents were built with American money, the weapons used by their secret police came from the United States. 

Of course, the revolution was ushered in with a lot of animosity toward the United States. That's when they took hostages at the U.S. embassy because they saw the United States, rightfully so, as their enemy, who had imposed this dictatorship for 26 years and then spawned decades of anger and animosity and hatred emanating from Iran, for the same reason that the CIA calls blowback if you go into another country interfering in that country and impose dictatorships on them, bomb them, invade them, you're going to produce a lot of anti-American rage for good reason that would come back at you in the form of terrorist attacks or other things like that. It's very basic human nature. If you attack another country, they're going to dislike you and want to attack back. 

So, the idea of once again doing regime change in Iran, as Ted Cruz wants to, as Lindsey Graham wants to, as Tom Cotton wants to, as Netanyahu wants to – they actually want to install the Shah of Iran's idiot son, who basically has made himself into a loyalist to Israel and the United States, knowing that's how his father kept power as well. He has no connection to Iran, he hasn't lived there for decades, he's been educated in the West, he's being enriched by the West, there are pictures of him in a yamaka at the Western Wall in Israel, constantly making defenses of Israel in the United States. That's who ultimately the Ted Cruzes, Lindsey Grahams and Netanyahus of the world want to reinstall as the leader of this very important country, very important in terms of oil resources, geopolitics, its proximity to the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, all sorts of vital geopolitical and economic resources that currently Iran controls but that the United States wants to control through Israel. 

So it's a massively consequential and an extremely risky proposal, to put that very mildly, to advocate as Ted Cruz is, another regime change war after all the ones we fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Vietnam, which have all been utterly disastrous on every level, not just for the countries where we fought them, but especially for the United States and American citizens as well. 

Carlson went to this interview to really get questions about Ted Cruz's view about why it's in America's interest to go and fight for Iran or whether really fighting for Israel. But he also wanted to understand how much Ted Cruz knew and knows about this country, whose government he wants to change, this country that he wants to bomb, have the United States start a new war with and change their government. If you feel competent to say, “We're going to go in and we're going to change that government and good things are going to happen,” you should know a pretty good amount about that country, like who lives there, what the composition of the people are, what their views are, what the factions are, how many people live there, what the size of it is – you know very basic things that you probably would learn from a geography class in 10th grade or like a freshman class on Middle East history in college. You would think a United States senator proposing a major war, especially a regime change war, would know that. 

So, Tucker Carlson wanted to see how much Ted Cruz understood. What was his understanding about this country, Iran, a very complex country with a very long and rich history, from the Persian Empire, how much he actually knows about Iran and how that knowledge integrates into his desire to have the U.S. fight a regime change war. 

Here is the outcome of Tucker Carlson seeking that understanding. 

Video. Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, TCN. June 18, 2025.